wrote a twitter thread summarizing a bunch of substack drafts I got going on, and here they are:
"the dynamism problem" – change is the only constant, but we are conditioned in our social environments to presume that reality is more static than it is. we periodically encounter painful shocks when reality pulls the comforting rug of assumptions from under our feet
the beauty of continuity — what makes something beautiful? how are elements arranged harmoniously? how can continuity introduce harmony? (Miles Davis: "It's not the note you play that's the wrong note – it's the note you play afterwards that makes it right or wrong.")
high voltage living — what does it look and feel like to live gloriously, even if only for a year? what's stopping us? how do those blockages arise? how do we address them? how do we focus on maximizing positive variance instead of minimizing negative variance?
sparring with the ego — how do you remain cheerful and upbeat when confronting a repeated pattern of failure? "Dormammu, I've come to bargain!" "I'm not trapped in here with you..." What assumptions about failure have we inherited? What if we decided it was fine, actually?
Nora Ephron, Media Theorist — an overview of Sleepless in Seattle, Julie & Julia, You've Got Mail, and how each of those movies capture a particular snapshot of a particular media environment, each of which no longer quite exists anymore. cf Ephron's backstory as a journalist
untitled post about Inception — many parts to this, might expand into a series. comparisons to alice in wonderland and the matrix. principles of storytelling, structures, heists, dreams, subconscious. how/why I think this movie is somehow actually improperly appreciated
flow garden(?) — meandering essay reflecting on what it's like to really just allow words to flow, like food coloring in water, in patterns that you cannot precisely anticipate in advance. cascades of minimal-exertion, "Doing Easy", allow the waves to carry you, be surprised
escape — on finding the way out of puzzles, labyrinths, a frustrating life-situation, circumstances, one's psychology, etc. "there is always a move", eno's oblique strategies, cohen's "there's a crack in everything", nothing is unhackable, hamilton's "write my way out"
i am a hypertext library — self-intro post, surfing vs scrolling, reading as a creative act, sensemaking as a creative act, choosing your own adventure, being library-educated (bradbury), web1 is still underutilized, writing-as-a-wingman, worldbuilding for others to inhabit
CRTs (?) – mainly a nerding-out post about how the things are made with the assumption of a particular context (medium), and the context is always collapsing. (internet is the big context-collapser) bunch of egs, but the point is to think more clearly about shifting contexts
Follow The White Rabbit — references Alice in Wonderland and The Matrix, but isn't particularly about either– it's really a post about references, and how to use them artfully. shibboleths. ribbonfarm's rhetoric of the hyperlink. oblique communications. 'you can look it up'
Who is a tattoo for? — explores questions about target audiences, expectations, framing devices, comms styles and norms, how artists get to experiment with different personas, how that's seeped into mainstream parlance ("in my brat era"), do it for the plot, 'main character',
constraints2: animating spirit – on bottlenecks, unfoldings, static vs dynamic again, the map is not the territory, the representation is not the thing but an artful representation can evoke feelings of the thing, even enrich our experience of the thing, the artist's vocation
the market on temple street — catb posting, a sweet spot between the tavern and the temple, different tempos for the exchanging of information and ideas, having wares for sale, interacting with customers, contributing to the atmosphere, being a net positive, unfolding again
finding the right angles — fire dept nimbleness, knowing the landscape, traversal, moving into position, broad vs narrow scope, reorienting, OODA loops etc — mostly in the realm of conversations, ideas, ties back to escaping reality tunnels
managing notesprawl — dealing with information overload, excess noise, unclear structure, imprecise goals, general fuzziness and disorientation. finding new ways of conceptualizing the puzzle. a philosophy of unmuddling via feeling, crackle-boom desire-path landscaping
actually that's about it, most of the rest of the drafts on-site are snippets and sketches i can merge/consolidate. there's more on my Roam, wretchedness being the BIG one, but otherwise this was actually a really useful exercise bc i can see connections across posts more clearly
if u would like to see these posts published sooner rather than later u can encourage me by signing up for my slopstack! thx