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“Emily in Paris” begins and ends in an avalanche of desiccated digital-marketing language that seems to have subsumed Emily’s soul. She cares about nothing more than “social,” impressions, R.O.I. Many episodes climax in the successful taking of a photo for Instagram.

If you want more drama, you can open Twitter, to augment the experience. Or just leave the show on while cleaning the inevitable domestic messes of quarantine. Eventually, sensing that you’ve played two episodes straight without pausing or skipping, Netflix will ask if you’re still really watching. Shamed, I clicked the Yes button, and Emily continued being in Paris.

Ambient denotes something that you don’t have to pay attention to in order to enjoy but which is still seductive enough to be compelling if you choose to do so momentarily. Like gentle New Age soundscapes, “Emily in Paris” is soothing, slow, and relatively monotonous, the dramatic moments too predetermined to really be dramatic.

As with soaps and chores, the current flow of ambient television provides a numbing backdrop to the rest of our digital consumption: feeds of fragmented text, imagery, and video algorithmically sorted to be as provocative as possible. Ambience offers the increasingly rare possibility of disengagement while still staring at a screen.

the hypnotic quality of ambient content creates a false sense that whatever it presents is a neutral condition, a common denominator, though it is decidedly not.

Streaming companies once pitched themselves as innovators for offering the possibility to watch anything at any time, but do we really want to choose? The prevalence of ambient media suggests that we don’t

It’s more atmosphere than content, the motion, the music, and the backdrop coalescing into a single moment of bittersweet freedom that loops over and over again.

“Street Food” focusses on the casual cuisine of different regions, a mood board of inebriated snacking. “Taco Chronicles” eliminates the need for a human subject altogether, by offering narrations from the personified voice of the food itself: “Soy el taco de carnitas.” Chef biography or historical education come second to the hindbrain visual pleasure of meat bouncing on a grill. The shows are functionally screen savers, never demanding your attention; they do draw it, but only as much as a tabletop bouquet of flowers.

TikTok’s For You tab serves an endless stream of short videos that algorithmically adapt to your interests, sorting the content most likely to engage you. Using it feels like having your mind read, because all you do is watch or skip, focus or ignore, a decision made too fast to be fully conscious. Individual videos or accounts matter less than categories or memes; at the moment, my feed is mostly clips of skateboarding, cooking, and carpentry, not unlike the mundanity of the Netflix shows but also accelerated into media gavage. TikTok is an app for ambience.

The passive engagement of ambient television is a boon for streaming services, which just want you to keep binging so that you feel your subscription is justified.

No one is ahead or behind. No one is best or better. Every day you’re alive, you have a new opportunity to enjoy existence on this strange planet.Unfortunately, right now you’re tripping. You’re confused about reality and time and it’s panicking you. And nothing will make you more special than learning to appreciate the perfect ragged textures of this moment, right now.

I’m still catching up on my teen years where most of my opportunities at experimentation faltered in the face of my strict and demanding father, and the depression that resulted from that upbringing. I know that time is relative and doing something at 20 or 30 is not less impressive than doing it at 40 or 50. But my brain decided these rules don’t apply to me.

Take a sledgehammer to your tiny little anxious window on the world and let some air and some light in. There’s no race and no finish line. You’ve escaped the depressions and oppressions of the past and it slowed you down, sure, but now you’re here, free from those burdens, and you can sing and dance and learn guitar. There’s no hourglass running out. No alarm will go off if you don’t learn everything in time or win all of the awards quickly. No one is watching and measuring. No one holds a secret key to happiness. Success doesn’t make everything perfect in every way.

You need to smash that replica of your father’s exacting standards that lives inside your mind and start living on your own terms. Reinvent you expectations of yourself from the ground up. Don’t recreate the oppressive world you grew up in. Invent a new universe where you can breathe freely and explore and treat every new year as a blank slate, a new era to explore and play and learn.

If the big lie seems too hard to address or remedy, I would get a therapist and find a path forward by talking through it. Don’t underestimate what a big piece of your pain and struggle this is. Clearing that piece of deception out of the way will make it easier for you to get the most out of the next few years and make honest, open connections with the people around you. Embrace the challenge of getting out from under that lie permanently.

so much of what you’re struggling with right now is wrapped up in external expectations and timelines and shame. Right now, you’re tripping on this punishing storm outside your door that has nothing to do with you. It’s time to figure out what kind of a space you want to create INSIDE, safe from all of that noise.

When you commit to honesty and commit to slowing down and savoring the luxury of being alive as much as you can, when you commit to drinking in knowledge and embracing beauty and delighting in the unpredictable weirdos around you, you will be misunderstood regularly.

When you’re open, you aren’t constantly glancing at your watch and policing yourself and telling little lies to excuse your behavior. You show up and tell the truth.

This article proposes to explain why education is so difficult and contentious by arguing that educational thinking draws on only three fundamental ideas&emdash;that of socializing the young, shaping the mind by a disciplined academic curriculum, and facilitating the development of students' potential. All educational positions are made up of various mixes of these ideas. The problems we face in education are due to the fact that each of these ideas is significantly flawed and also that each is incompatible in basic ways with the other two. Until we recognize these basic incompatibilities we will be unable adequately to respond to the problems we face.

I’ll take an inventory in a future post, but here’s one as a sample: AIs can be used to generate “deep fakes” while cryptographic techniques can be used to reliably authenticate things against such fakery. Flipping it around, crypto is a target-rich environment for scammers and hackers, and machine learning can be used to audit crypto code for vulnerabilities. I am convinced there is something deeper going on here. This reeks of real yin-yangery that extends to the roots of computing somehow.

Coping with things is the prevailing mood in my corner of the universe. As I write this, America has just completed an election in which many people voted primarily for the idea of voting. The prevailing candidate? Less an individual than an avatar of civility and liberalism.

We are a country founded on an idea and not an identity.

Americans have a way of obscuring reality through grand symbolism and none of the accompanying semiotic rigor. As if the facade of democracy can be upheld by not looking too closely at increasingly undemocratic outcomes — our high tolerance for multiculturalism tenuously predicated on everyone struggling equally. The difference between idea and identity is both our saving grace and our downfall. Democracy: watch the gap.

The idea of the American individual, part of the national optimism that fueled the Space Race, is far less prominent than the citizen-consumer. Attaining a degree of celebrity, still a coveted means to financial stability, thrusts one into the category of “celebrity,” where image overtakes personhood.

Lifestyle, like work, is something we can only see in aggregate. Technological gains don’t relieve the pressure for ownership; they merely reinforce it.

what stretches ahead is a banal ending that refuses to end: the slow violence of capitalism and climate change, a future of could-haves and should-haves void of capital-M meaning.

A core reason behind this genre’s popular success lies in the fact that it lacks the cloying, naïve quality so often associated with positivity. While this partially stems from the aesthetic and language employed—which, thanks to its poetic tenor, internet avant-garde style, and general high-low approach, reads as more online-experimental for those in-the-know and less cheesy iFunny reposts for Boomers—these would matter little if it weren’t for the honest realism that underpins this trend’s optimism

Unlike the deluded optimism espoused by politicians, technologists, and millionaires—which views progress as linear or believes that technology will save us from ourselves or thinks that watching celebrities sing will solve crisis—this trend, like the pessimists it responds to, recognizes that there seems to be no turning back from the precipice.

The genre positions the exercise and resilience of the “Indomitable Human Spirit” at the scale of a single life at the center of its philosophical optimism—not our ability to save the future, but rather our willingness to try and endure with grace.

Robert Pirsig’s definition of Static and Dynamic Quality:Our language is an imperfect instrument created by ancient and ignorant men. It’s an animistic language that invites us to talk about stability and constants, about similarities and normal and kinds, about magical transformations, quick cures, simple problems, and final solutions. Yet the world we try to symbolize with this language is a world of process, change, differences, dimensions, functions, relationships, growths, interactions, developing, learning, coping, complexity. And the mismatch of our ever-changing world and our relatively static language forms is part of our problem.

Words can only approximate Quality, but never fully encompass it. A static thing can never fully capture a dynamic thing.

We create problems for ourselves by using static language (e.g. judgements) to capture a reality that is dynamic & ever changing — by mixing observations and evaluations.

The caveat to keeping your identity small is when you want to identify as a positive trait – “I’m a kind person” – so that you’re forced to live up to it, especially when this is an unchanging desire.

The Staunton pieces broadly resemble columns with a wide molded base. Knights feature the sculpted head and neck of a horse. Kings, the tallest pieces, top the column with a stylised crown topped with a cross pattée. Queens are slightly smaller than kings, and feature a coronet topped with a tiny ball (a monde). Rooks feature stylised crenellated battlements and bishops a Western-style mitre. Pawns are the smallest and are topped by a plain ball. Pieces representing human characters (the king, queen, bishop, and pawn) have a flat disk separating the body from the head design, which is known as a collar.

This is also a very good reason to avoid viewport units, like vw or vh, when setting font size. Those are also static, and impossible to override by the user. At most, a value like calc(1rem + 1vw) might be acceptable, since that still contains rem as a base. Even then, however, I’d recommend using clamp() or media queries to set minimum and maximum values, as screen sizes often go far beyond what we might expect or test.

To differentiate between the two: 1rem is always equal to the browser’s font size—or, more accurately the font size of the html element. rem stands for “root em,” and the root of a webpage is the <html> tag. So, 1rem = whatever the document font size is. (Which, again, by default, is 16px, but can be overridden by the user.) em, on the other hand, is the font size of the current element.

1px is equal to whatever the browser is treating as a single pixel (even if it’s not literally a pixel on the hardware screen).

We humans are so interconnected to our jobs, admittedly more than we should be. We identify our job with who we are as people. This means that if we are not growing at work or in our business, we feel like we are not growing as people. Growth can, and should be divided. We can both be growing as people and growing as workers or business owners.

Growth at the group level and specifically scaling growth is not good for us as people. The amount of stress and pressure that is undertaken while trying to scale is unhealthy and unsustainable – regardless of what your favorite hustle culture influencer says.We need time, space, and agency to grow at our own paces. We need to be able to get better and worse at things, without being vilified for it.

When content is shorter and maximized for engagement, we often lose track of the origin, history, and context behind it: a new designer is more likely to hear about a UX law from a UX influencer on an Instagram carousel than through the actual research which brought it about.The lack of nuance from algorithm-suggested posts undermines any value we could get from them. For a discipline known for asking "why" and for striving to understand users’ context, it’s time we become more intentional about our own information sources.

Shifts in visual narratives happen every decade or so, so it’s not surprising that the design world is moving away from the corporate flatness of web2. Instead of reminding us of the problems of our current world and the harm that’s been caused by Big Tech, the new, abstract forms of web3 distract us from the crises of the day with the promise of a new virtual world.

In the end, Abrams recognized that "there were certain things I was unsure of [...] Any movie [...] has a fundamental conversation happening during it. And [for Into Darkness,] I didn't have it [...] [The problems with the plot] was not anyone's fault but mine, or, frankly, anyone's problem but mine. [The script] was a little bit of a collection of scenes that were written by my friends [...] And yet, I found myself frustrated by my choices, and unable to hang my hat on an undeniable thread of the main story. So then I found myself on that movie basically tap-dancing as well as I could to try and make the sequences as entertaining as possible [...] I would never say that I don't think that the movie ended up working. But I feel like it didn't work as well as it could have had I made some better decisions before we started shooting."