Craig Mod
Brilliant Hardware in the Valley of the Software Slump
An Article by Craig ModThanks Doc
An Article by Robin Rendle & Craig ModA couple of months back, Craig mentioned in a video that he has a doc filled to the brim with snippets of text—nice words, compliments, and thanks that had been sent his way for his work. Whenever someone says something nice he just copy/pastes it into that doc.
It sounds silly at first and perhaps a little egotistical. Behold! I have a document that proves how great I am!
But I started doing it just to see what it feels like and…hey…actually? It’s so great! When I’m feeling low (often) or whenever the world feels unstable (extremely often) it’s so very nice to return to a few kind words about my work. It reminds me just how much these words of praise mean, it reminds me that I ought to pass that favor along.
Delight is constraints, joyfully embraced
An Article by Craig ModAnd what is delight? For me, delight is born from a tool’s intuitiveness. Things just working without much thought or fiddling. Delight is a simple menu system you almost never have to use. Delight is a well-balanced weight on the shoulder, in the hand. Delight is the just-right tension on the aperture ring between stops. Delight is a single battery lasting all day. Delight is being able to knock out a 10,000 iso image and know it'll be usable. Delight is extracting gorgeous details from the cloak of shadows. Delight is firing off a number of shots without having to wait for the buffer to catch up. Delight is constraints, joyfully embraced.
Fast Software, the Best Software
An Essay by Craig ModI love fast software. That is, software speedy both in function and interface. Software with minimal to no lag between wanting to activate or manipulate something and the thing happening. Lightness.
Software that’s speedy usually means it’s focused. Like a good tool, it often means that it’s simple, but that’s not necessarily true. Speed in software is probably the most valuable, least valued asset. To me, speedy software is the difference between an application smoothly integrating into your life, and one called upon with great reluctance. Fastness in software is like great margins in a book — makes you smile without necessarily knowing why.
Looking Closely is Everything
An Essay by Craig ModKambara, detail by detail.
I’d say that that huh is the foundational block of curiosity. To get good at the huh is to get good at both paying attention and nurturing compassion; if you don’t notice, you can’t give a shit. But the huh is only half the equation. You gotta go huh, alright — the “alright,” the follow-up, the openness to what comes next is where the cascade lives. It’s the sometimes-sardonic, sometimes-optimistic engine driving the next huh and so on and so forth.
Ri — The Distance Walked in an Hour
An Article by Craig ModA ri is a unit of measure, it’s about how far a person can walk in an hour at a reasonable pace. It clocks out at roughly 3.93 kilometers.
Remnants of the ri system are scattered along the old roads of Japan. During the Edo period, ri were marked recurrently by hulking earthen mounds that flanked the road — ichi-ri zuka, “one-ri mounds.” There are only a handful of “originals” left. When you pass one with an old cypress or oak growing from its center it becomes a tiny moment of celebration.
A Need to Walk
An Essay by Craig ModWalking intrigues the deskbound. We romanticize it, but do we do it justice? Do we walk properly? Can one walk improperly and, if so, what happens when the walk is corrected?
Life as Protest
A Fragment by Craig ModI’ve written this before but I constantly need to remind myself of it, so, once again: A certain kind of work, lifestyle, mode of living — in and of itself — is protest. That is, work that is curious and rigorous is implicitly an antipode to didactic, shallow bombastity. It is inherently an archetype against bullshit. That to be committed to this work or life of rigor (be it rigor focused on “art” or, as they say in Japanese, sakuhin, or family or athleticism or whatever), and to share it with the world is to opt-out of being paralyzed by idiocy, and help others who may be paralyzed find a path back to whatever fecundity of life it is that they deserve.
Koya Bound
A Book by Craig ModKoya-san — home to esoteric Buddhism — is the name of a sacred basin eight hundred meters high and surrounded by eight mountains. It is roughly one hundred kilometers of trails north from the Kumano Hongu Taisha shrine in Wakayama, Japan. Though the name of the basin is often incorrectly translated as Mt. Koya in English, Mt. Koya is only one of the eight peaks, and is remote from the central cluster of temples.
We walked towards Koya-san, but we did not touch Mt. Koya.
Open Transclude for Networked Writing
Not an accumulation of facts
Knowledge is not an accumulation of facts, nor is it even a set of facts and their relations. Facts are only rendered meaningful within narratives, and the single-page document is a format very conducive to narrative structure. The hypertext books that have gained popularity (I’m thinking here of Meaningness.com) have largely conformed to this in two ways: 1) there is an intended reading order, and 2) the longer essays within the project do most of the heavy lifting in terms of imparting the author’s perspective to readers.
On the other hand, the notion of the “document” that is intrinsic to web development today is overdetermined by the legacy of print media. The web document is a static, finished artifact that does not bring in dynamic data. This is strange because it lives on a medium that is alive, networked, and dynamic, a medium which we increasingly understand more as a space than a thing.
More that can be done
The web is still a very young medium, and it has been influenced more than anything else by print media design. There is so much more that can be done with text on a screen than is being done today. Citations, drawing, chat, speech-to-text. There are opportunities everywhere, and the bar is low! If we are serious about unlocking the value of knowledge we should consider how to improve every part of the knowledge production stack, and that includes reading. As Laurel Schwulst says:
Imaginative functionality is important, even if it’s only a trace of what was, as it’s still a sketch for a more ideal world.
Open Transclude
What you are looking at is an scroll-locked iframe that links to a quote I picked out of my blog post “Notes on Comparative Psychology.” You can use Open Transclude anywhere you can drop an
<a>
tag on your own site.Open Transclude:
- Works anywhere on your own domain
- Compatible with most static site generators / templating engines
- 12 lines of HTML, 80 lines of SCSS, 22 lines of JS (4.5 kb total)
- Has 0 dependencies — this is native web technology
Open Transclude is extremely simple, and the heaviest part of the code is the CSS, which you can simplify at your whim. That’s why I am referring to it as a UX pattern. This is not a protocol. The code is really a commodity. What’s interesting about it is the idea and the design, and this is just one viable implementation! Feel free to adapt it however you like.
The principal improvement over a block quotation is sense of context.