Litany Against Fear I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain. Frank Herbert, Dune dune.fandom.com fearminddeath
Reality exists in the mind But I tell you, Winston, that reality is not external. Reality exists in the human mind, and nowhere else. George Orwell, 1984 realitymind
A mind so in flux A mind so in flux, so sensitive to intuitive insights, could never write an academic textbook. All he could retain on paper were indications, hints, allusions, like the delicate color dots and line plays on his pictures. Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, Pedagogical Sketchbook drawingmind
The brain within its groove The brain within its groove Runs evenly and true; But let a splinter swerve, T'were easier for you To put the water back When floods have slit the hills, And scooped a turnpike for themselves, And blotted out the mills! Emily Dickinson, The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson insanitymind
Background textures of work An Article by Lucy Keer lucykeer.com One thing I've been enjoying about working as a technical writer is that the minute-by-minute texture of the work feels right. Something about formatting text, faffing about with SVGs, trying to rewrite a sentence more clearly... it's just enjoyable in itself, and I feel at home with it. ...Working as a programmer was very much not like that. There's something in the rough vicinity of professional dev work that I do like, which I could probably label as 'iterative hobbyist tinkering with websites'. I like working on something with a strong visual component, and I like to be inside of a fast feedback loop, and I'm mostly interested in just somehow bodging through until it works. I'm not very interested in either the computer-sciencey side of programming — data structures, algorithms — or the software-engineerey side of making things run reliably at scale in a maintainable way. So maybe it's not surprising that the minute-by-minute texture of professional programming was just... kind of bad. Occasional fun bits when I got into something, but the background experience was not fun. workproductivitymaking