Identity & Self
The gutting of our human subjecthood
Focal awareness
The principle of arrangement
Nodal points
Only so much of the mind
Author and architect
Terroir
I am the space where I am
A dialogue between homogeneity and exception
I am I, and wish I wasn’t
My name
It is still a house
Independent fragments of existence
Rearranged
A city in the distance
Process vs. product
Coolness will rise
These loose notes
It flows out and fills
Take your names with you
On the edge of something else
Defining activities
More than just a machine that runs along
We change them and are changed
Pensées
Homes at Night
Idiolect
A DefinitionIdiolect is an individual's unique use of language, including speech. This unique usage encompasses vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation.
An idiolect is the variety of language unique to an individual. This differs from a dialect, a common set of linguistic characteristics shared among a group of people.
When I was 22
A Quote by Nicholas Ashe BatemanWhat's really challenging for me working on something on an idea level for close to 8 years, it's really hard to not look at yourself. The decision-making process includes a conversation with myself: sometimes I'm going to side with 2015 version of Nick, sometimes the 2017 Nick isn't the right guy for this, etc... So much of the process of making the movie has changed the movie. I really just tried to make the movie I wanted to make when I was 22. When I serviced that, it worked really well.
Rethinking Twitter Verification
An Article by Terence EdenThe main problem, I think, is that no one knows what "Verified" means.
If I were in charge (which I'm not) there would be various types of ticks.
🤖 is a bot
🆔 proved their legal identity
🏭 is run by a brand
⚖ is run by a government department
👮 Official law enforcement
😎 CelebrityAnd so on.
The saddest designer
An Essay by Chia AmisolaI am tired of the premise that creation means productivity––especially in the laborious sense...Creation has become mangled with labor in a world that demands man to monetize all of their hobbies and pursuits. In return, it seems empty, almost sad, really––to be the designer spending weekends again on the screen.
To tell you what I like to do in the weekends, I like to do the sad thing...The ‘good’ people tell you to detach your life from your workspace, but this summer, I think I’ve just realized how much I adore what I have the luxury of working on everyday.
In the weekend, I make. I make not because it’s the only thing I have ever known, but because it’s the most certain way forward.
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.
This used to be our playground
An Essay by Simon CollisonThere was a time when owning digital space seemed thrilling, and our personal sites motivated us to express ourselves. There are signs of a resurgence, but too few wish to make their digital house a home.
Ruins, Rub-outs, and Trash
Tracing paper into palimpsest
Kahn's preferred medium was charcoal. He liked to use the side of his hand to rub out the thing he was drawing in order to draw it over, and over again.
Turning the tracing paper into a palimpsest; where some trace of each previous marking is still there, only blurred out and faded back by Kahn's rubbings-out and re-renderings, so that in what he made there is also the record of how it was made.
Charcoal on trash collected over time acting as ersatz animated film recording how Kahn's ideas developed.
So insufficiently palimpsestic
I worry that unlike Kahn's process and tools, the processes and tools we use are aimed at helping us satisfy the demand for moving fast and breaking things, not to be good, or to better ensure the doing of good work.
My son Gerrit told me about a YouTube video from a conference where the presenter asked for a show of hands from video game developers in the audience who could produce or successfully compile their own code from the previous quarter. Or from the previous year. Or from two years ago. And by that time the point had been made: nobody had their hand in the air.
Good for the next man
Lou Kahn said that a house is only good if it's good for "the next man."
He knew that the likelihood of its spaces and places continuing to be loved after "the first man" has come and gone requires the kinds of attention to detail you'd have to be paying if the next man and the next-next man were embraced as stakeholders from the onset.