Love
Love without ownership
Someone in the world awaits you
And thus the heart will break
The productions of time
You are what you love
We need an object for our affections
The people we love
For their own concealed passion
Perhaps one did not want to be loved so much as to be understood.
The significance of love's burden
We outgrow love
I marshmallow you
100% perfect
That delicate and complex instrument
When it goes wrong
Exploiting emotion
Upstream Color
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
Narcissus and Goldmund
The Alchemist
500 Days of Summer
the speed of God
155-217-155
Trust beyond reason
An Article by David R. MacIverIn this sense, trust is a polarizing strategy, and it's one that is important to apply early on in the relationship before someone becomes important to you. If you trust someone excessively and it goes badly, but they don't matter to you, you can just kick them to the curb. In general, trusting someone at a level that seems slightly excessive for their level of importance to you will help you sort people in your life who you want to be more important to you than they are from those who you want to be less important than they are.
And it does need to be excessive. It needs to be trust beyond reason. Not beyond all reason, but somewhat beyond what currently seems reasonable. If it is not, then unless they are prepared to take the first move, you will never find the signs you need to move to a higher level of mutual trust.
Sometimes this will go badly, but you need to be able to try bad things.
The mortifying ordeal of being known
A Fragment by Tim KreiderYears ago a friend of mine had a dream about a strange invention; a staircase you could descend deep underground, in which you heard recordings of all the things anyone had ever said about you, both good and bad. The catch was, you had to pass through all the worst things people had said before you could get to the highest compliments at the very bottom. There is no way I would ever make it more than two and a half steps down such a staircase, but I understand its terrible logic: if we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known.
Which Books You Truly Love
An Essay by Salman RushdieI believe that the books and stories we fall in love with make us who we are, or, not to claim too much, the beloved tale becomes a part of the way in which we understand things and make judgments and choices in our daily lives. A book may cease to speak to us as we grow older, and our feeling for it will fade. Or we may suddenly, as our lives shape and hopefully increase our understanding, be able to appreciate a book we dismissed earlier; we may suddenly be able to hear its music, to be enraptured by its song.
All There Is
A Song by Gregory Alan IsakovAnd I lied to you when I knocked upon your door.
See, I was nowhere near your neighborhood.The life and death of an internet onion
In her piece "A drop of love in the cloud" (2018), artist Fei Liu writes about the like/heart button as a flattening affordance of giving affirmation and love. The text-editor provides a much more expressive input.
But even people who can't communicate well because of language barriers can express love through actions, like cooking food. Can we create other "love inputs" that might allow us to "reach across the chasm of a seamless signal"?
What is expressing "real" love or affirmation about? Is it about effort, thoughtfulness, generosity, something else? What might a thoughtful or generous interface feel or behave like?
Man in the Middle: The Designer
The old unity
The most fundamental splits in contemporary life occur because of the break-up of the old unity of design, production and enjoyment.
Defining craftsmanship
By craftsmanship I refer to a style of work and a way of life having the following characteristics:
- In craftsmanship there is no ulterior motive for work other than the product being made and the processes of its creation.
- In craftsmanship, plan and performance are unified, and in both, the craftsman is master of the activity and of himself in the process. The craftsman is free to begin his working according to his own plan, and during the work he is free to modify its shape and the manner of its shaping.
- Since he works freely, the craftsman is able to learn from his work, to develop as well as use his capacities.
- The craftsman’s way of livelihood determines and infuses his entire mode of living. For him there is no split of work and play, of work and culture. His work is the mainspring of his life; he does not flee from work into a separate sphere of leisure; he brings to his non-working hours the values and qualities developed and employed in his working time.
The central value for which they stand
What I am suggesting to you is that designers ought to take the value of craftsmanship as the central value for which they stand; that in accordance with it they ought to do their work; and that they ought to use its norms in their social and economic and political visions of what society ought to become.
The star system
The distributor is ascendant over many producers who become the rank-and-file workmen of the commercially established cultural apparatus.
The star system of American culture – along with the commercial hacks – tend to kill off the chance of the cultural workman to be a worthy craftsman.
As if it were an advertisement
He designs the product itself as if it were an advertisement, for his aim and his task – acknowledged by the more forthright – is less to make better products than to make products sell better.
The Big Lie
“We only give them what they want.”
This is The Big Lie of mass culture and of debased art, and also it is the weak excuse for the cultural default of many designers.
The Fetish of human life
To understand the case of America today, one must understand the economic trends and the selling mechanics of a capitalist world in which the mass production and the mass sale of goods has become The Fetish of human life, the pivot both of work and of leisure.
Existing commodities must be worn out more quickly for as the market is saturated, the economy becomes increasingly dependent upon what is called replacement. It is then that obsolescence comes to be planned and the economic cycle deliberately shortened.
The big split
The big split among designers and their frequent guilt; the enriched muddle of ideals they variously profess and the insecurity they often feel about the practice of their craft; their often great disgust and their crippling frustration.