You find reasons to keep living Life is suffering. It is hard. The world is cursed. But still, you find reasons to keep living. Hayao Miyazaki, Princess Mononoke Prometheus sufferinghopelife
The modern infrastructural ideal The form and possibility of the "modern infrastructural ideal" is increasingly under threat, as cracks (sometimes literal ones) show up in our bridges, our highways, our airports, and the nets of our social welfare systems. For these and other reasons, broken world thinking asserts that breakdown, dissolution, and change, rather than innovation, development, or design as conventionally practices and thought about are the key themes and problems facing new media and technology scholarship today. Attached to this, however, comes a second and more hopeful approach: namely, a deep wonder and appreciation for the ongoing activities by which stability (such as it is) is maintained, the subtle arts of repair by which rich and robust lives are sustained against the weight of centrifugal odds, and how sociotechnical forms and infrastructures, large and small, get not only broken but restored, one not-so-metaphoric brick at a time. Steven J. Jackson, Rethinking Repair How Buildings Learn infrastructurehope
500 Days of Summer A Film by Marc Webb, Scott Neustadter & Michael H. Weber www.imdb.com I think you should look againIt just wasn't me you were right about lovemelancholyhope
Finding nourishment vs. identifying poison An Article by Austin Kleon & Olivia Laing austinkleon.com A useful analogy for what [Sedgwick] calls ‘reparative reading’ is to be fundamentally more invested in finding nourishment than identifying poison. This doesn’t mean being naive or undeceived, unaware of crisis or undamaged by oppression. What it does mean is being driven to find or invent something new and sustaining out of inimical environments. I would like to adopt that line as a mission statement: “To be fundamentally more invested in finding nourishment rather than identify poison.” Because you can identify all the poison you want, but if you don’t find nourishment, you’ll starve to death. Poison sniffers hopereadinggoodness
A little act of hope A Fragment by Jeremy Keith adactio.com As I scroll down my “on this day” page, I come across more and more dead links that have been snapped off from the fabric of the web. If I stop and think about it, it can get quite dispiriting. Why bother making hyperlinks at all? It’s only a matter of time until those links break. In a sense, every hyperlink on the World Wide Web is little act of hope. Even though I know that when I link to something, it probably won’t last, I still harbour that hope. If hyperlinks are built on hope, and the web is made of hyperlinks, then in a way, the World Wide Web is quite literally made out of hope. I like that. And thus the heart will break hypermediahope
Questions to ask on a new job search An Article by Sally Lait sallylait.com The role and expectations What does this job entail? What's driving the hire? What are the biggest challenges? What scope is there to do x, y, z? How/when/why would you consider hiring me to be successful? What does progression from here look like? What's the biggest mistake I could make? The wider business Can you tell me a bit about the company? What about the culture? How does diversity, equity, and inclusion play into this? What's the most exciting thing on the company horizon? What's been the impact of COVID-19 on company finances/strategy? What are the best and worst things about working here? Day to day What's the size/structure of the team I'd be around/have reporting to me? Which other people would I work most closely with? What technologies/tools would I work with? What could I do that would make your life easier? The practical bits What salary are you offering for this role? Additional package/benefits How do you approach distributed working, and is there scope for this? What timescales are you hoping for? Holiday Job title Give yourself an extra shot: Is there anything I've said today that makes you hesitate? work