Upstream Color Original Soundtrack Leaves Expanded May Be Prevailing Blue Mixed With Yellow Of The Sand I Used To Wonder At The Halo Of Light Around My Shadow And Would Fancy Myself One Of The Elect Fearing That They Would Be Light-headed For Want Of Food And Also Sleep Stirring Them Up As The Keeper Of A Menagerie His Wild Beasts The Finest Qualities Of Our Nature Like The Bloom On Fruits Can Be Preserved Perhaps The Wildest Sound That Is Ever Heard Here Making The Woods Ring Far And Wide I Love To Be Alone A Young Forest Growing Up Under Your Meadows Their Roots Reaching Quite Under The House The Rays Which Stream Through The Shutter Will Be No Longer Remembered When The Shutter Is Wholly Removed After Soaking Two Years And Then Lying High Six Months It Was Perfectly Sound Though Waterlogged Past Drying The Sun Is But A Morning Star A Low And Distant Sound Gradually Swelling And Increasing As If It Would Have A Universal And Memorable Ending A Sullen Rush And Roar Shane Carruth, Upstream Color www.discogs.com WaldenI love to be alone euphonynaturelonelinessmelancholysoundending
To know the place for the first time We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. T.S. Eliot, Little Gidding The Dark Tower timecyclesendingexploration
She was wanting to break it off One summer morning, the beginning of July, I got this long letter from my girlfriend, and in it she’d written that she wanted to break up with me. I’ve always felt close to you, and I still like you even now, and I’m sure that from here on I’ll continue to…et cetera, et cetera. In short, she was wanting to break it off. She had found herself a new boyfriend. I hung my head and smoked six cigarettes, went outside and drank a can of beer, came back in and smoked another cigarette. Then I took three HB pencils I had on my desk and snapped them in half. It wasn’t that I was angry, really. I just didn’t know what to do. In the end, I merely changed clothes and headed off to work. And for a while there, everyone within shouting distance was commenting on my suddenly “outgoing disposition”. What is it about life? Haruki Murakami, The Last Lawn of the Afternoon ending
Until we leave the gate behind And yet the timeless way is not complete, and will not fully generate the quality without a name, until we leave the gate behind. Indeed this ageless character has nothing, in the end, to do with languages. The language, and the processes which stem from it, merely release the fundamental order which is native to us. They do not teach us, they only remind us of what we know already, and of what we shall discover time and time again, when we give up our ideas and opinions, and do exactly what emerges from ourselves. At this final stage, the patterns are no longer important: the patterns have taught you to be receptive to what is real. It is the gate which leads you to the state of mind, in which you live so close to your own heart that you no longer need a language. This is the final lesson of the timeless way. Christopher Alexander, The Timeless Way of Building The natural thing to do zenending
A circle of beads If you count off a circle of beads, you never reach an end. At what point, and with what feelings, would his fingers cease to move those beads? This may be a silly question, but it haunts me. Natsume Sōseki, Kokoro ending
Now get inside You say the ocean's rising like I give a shit You say the whole world's ending, honey, it already did You're not gonna slow it, Heaven knows you tried Got it? Good, now get inside Bo Burnham, Bo Burnham: Inside genius.com ending
When life is over At the end, which is when life is over, death removes all the clothing that differentiated them, and all are equal in the grave. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote deathstatusending
That funny feeling That unapparent summer air in early fall The quiet comprehending of the ending of it all There it is again That funny feeling Bo Burnham, Bo Burnham: Inside genius.com ending
You can get anywhere from anywhere And if you can get anywhere from anywhere, You can start anywhere And end anywhere. There is no single necessary order. Verlyn Klinkenborg, Several Short Sentences About Writing progressending
Ending is better than mending “We always throw away old clothes. Ending is better than mending, ending is better than mending, ending is better…” Aldous Huxley, Brave New World noveltyrepairtrashwastemelancholyending
Graceful Exits: How Great Beings Die A Book by Sushila Blackman Japanese Death PoemsHe only who has lived with the beautiful exitsdeathending
How do you know when your paintings are finished? A Quote by Gerhard Richter matthiasott.com When nothing disturbs me and I have no idea what to do more, what I could add or destroy. This is very surprising, often, when I’m painting, again and again, every day and it feels like it is never-ending […] and it will never become a good painting. And suddenly, it’s finished. Oh! Good. Thanks. Painting With the Web perfectionprogressending
Exit pages An Idea by Brad Enslen ramblinggit.com Today I made an Exit page. So many people end their visit by hitting the Back button on their browser. The exit page is a last attempt to get them to explore the Blog Directory to find an entertaining blog. Or failing that to try a search on a search engine they may have never tried before. exitswwwfunwhimsyending
Brilliant Hardware in the Valley of the Software Slump An Article by Craig Mod craigmod.com It begins with craftPenn StationEdgesThe business case for craft
It begins with craft Something strange is happening in the world of software: It’s slowly getting worse. Not all software, but a lot of it. It’s becoming more sluggish, less responsive, and subtly less reliable than it was a few years ago. In some ways this is hyperbole. Objectively, we’ve never been able to do so much, so easily with our smartphones and laptops and tablets. We’ve never pushed more data between more places more readily. But while the insidious “worseness” I mention falls only in part on the engineering side of things, it falls harder on the more subjective, craft side of things, making it all the more worrisome. Why should we care about this? Because the majority of our waking hours take place within the confines of applications. A truth recently amplified by the covid pandemic. And I believe software used by millions (if not billions) has a moral duty to elevate the emotional and intellectual qualities of its users. That elevation begins with craft. Apps Getting Worse performancecraftsoftware
Penn Station In the same way that physical architecture can affect a mind, so too can software. Slower, less reliable software is like Penn Station: Sure, you can catch a transfer from one train to another but the dreary lowness of the place, the lack of sunlight or sensible wayfinding will make you feel like a rat, truculent and worthless, and worse: You’ll acclimate to that feeling and accept it as a norm. softwaretransportation
Edges Hardware has literal and metaphorical edges — it must be fully complete and largely bug free to ship. Software? It’s far more amorphous, like mist. Patches can be endlessly pushed. It never ends. Faulty hardware can destroy a company. Faulty software can be patched. The butterfly keyboard debacle may never be lived down. Even as I type on this improved Magic Keyboard, I can’t help but wonder: Did they really test this thing? I had three butterfly keyboards die on me, twice in the field. Not fun. Hardware failures live long in the mind.
The business case for craft macOS software that adheres to craft — Things or Carbon Copy Cloner or BBEdit or Sublime Text (which, despite not being “native native” feels so solid and so responsive you’re willing to overlook its quirks) or Bear or Alfred or iA Writer or Keynote (arguably one of the best pieces of macOS software of all time) or anything by Panic, heck, even Terminal or Quicken (which, against all rational expectations is just a joy to use)5 — exists in troves, the existence of such proves to the Slacks or Twitters or Adobes of the world that it’s not impossible nor rare to produce craft-oriented software in service to user fluency, and still make a profit. In fact, there’s a business case to be made for being craft- and fluency-focused. We’ve seen entire companies with business models that could be summarized as “Bloat-Free X” emerge in recent years. Affinity is bloat-free Adobe. Install Adobe Creative Cloud on your laptop and marvel at the no fewer than a dozen processes whirling around in the background for unknown purposes. It’s no surprise Affinity Photo and Publisher and Designer have taken off. Sketch’s main feature for many years was simply: Not Adobe. And the web! When you care — when you really give a shit — the web is awe inspiring. I still can’t believe Figma is web-native (also born from the Not Adobe camp). That an application can feel so powerful, so fast, so well-crafted and be fully web-based should be a kind of lighthouse-archetype for all other sites lost in a sea of complexity and muck and unnecessary frameworks. More profitable and a better buy craftbusinesswww