Elisa Gabbert in The Essay as Realm:

I think of an essay as a realm for both the writer and the reader. When I’m working on an essay, I’m entering a loosely defined space. If we borrow Alexander’s terms again, the essay in progress is “the site”: “It is essential to work on the site,” he writes, in A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction; “Work on the site, stay on the site, let the site tell you its secrets.” Just by beginning to think about an essay as such—by forming the intention to write on an idea or theme—I’m opening a portal, I’m creating a site, a realm. It’s a place where all my best thinking can go for a period of time, a place where the thoughts can be collected and arranged for more density of meaning.

Any art is a portal. A painting, a song.

Wonderfully, any creative space is a portal.

The portal of all portals may just be the World Wide Web, where you can create solitary spaces as well as communal ones.

Clint on LGR gave a deep dive on Jim Sach's work with the famouse Marine Aquarium screensaver. What cought my attention is this beatiful predecessory, a cover art piece for the Amiga Brilliance paint program:

More of Jim Sach's art for the Amiga on the Amiga Graphics Archive.

Robin Sloan makes a case for finished works, even while nurturing a feed:

Sometime I think that, even amidst all these ruptures & renovations, the biggest divide in media exists simply between those who finish things, & those who don’t. The divide exists also, therefore, between the platforms & institutions that support the finishing of things, & those that don’t...

Finishing only means: the work is whole, comprehensible, enjoyable. Its invitation is persistent; permanent. (Again, think of the Green Knight, waiting on the shelf for four hundred years.) Posterity is not guaranteed; it’s not even likely; but with a book, an album, a video game: at least you are TRYING...

Time has the last laugh, as your network performance is washed away by the same flood that produced it.

Finished work remains, stubbornly, because it has edges to defend itself, & a solid, graspable premise with which to recruit its cult.

The ol' Stock & Flow. Can't have one without the other.

In music, it's etudes and jams vs recitals and recordings.

Or perhaps you prefer keeping a sketchbook while working on paintings.

The secret I see working the best for folks is when they can gather up their flow and make stock out of it.

I can't help myself from watching episodes of The Computer Chronicles. These are just tremendous time capsules.

Here's a particularly fun one: Audible has been around longer than you might have though. Below is Stewart Cheifet introducing the service in 1999 (from the Y2K special!):

Amazing to see the sophistication of the player. Not too different from how the iPod handled automatically downloading and clearing your subscribed podcasts.

A great write up by Dave Thomas on how the title "Software Engineer" simply doesn't cut it when it comes to sucinctly describing what the people in these roles provide:

[A] good developer can sometimes manage to deliver that value without actually writing a line of code. Developers occupy a unique position in most companies, sitting at the confluence of many business units and their customers. Developers often have a broader picture of how the company works and how things interact that many of the business’ managers. Many times I’ve seen a manager deliver a requirement to a team, only to have the team respond, “we can do that, but why not just…?”

So, if we’re engineering anything, it’s value, not software...

The people who deliver value by iteratively refining software deserve to have a name for what they do. It isn’t programmer, designer, analyst, front-end developer, or software engineer. It’s bigger than that, and it’s more subtle.

A great reminder at a time where the "programming" part is becoming more and more automated in our work. The contribution expands beyond the specific tools used to provide solutions.

As kids do, I had a niche affinity. Mine was Smooth Jazz. Houston had a great radio station at the time (95.7 — The Wave.) Any wonder why I decided to pick up playing the saxophone?

The Weather Channel, as you can image, only added fuel to the fire of passion. And Trammell Starks was a frequently played artist.

Here's his collection "Music For Local Forecast."

Certainly very of the genre. The Pat Metheny influence is unmistakeable. There are moments where it's not so smooth. "Jumpin'" in particular has the pianist slamming on the keyboard! (I wonder if this is Starks himself?)

For more fun: TWC Classics lists all the songs played on The Weather Channel from 1983-2002. Trammell had a great showing in '97!

From Justin Weiss on how your tests should work in phases:

1. First, you set some stuff up (“Arrange”)
2. Then, you do something (“Act”)
3. Then, you make sure that what you expected to happen, actually happened. (“Assert”)

Lovely. Flexible enough to accomodate multiple levels of complexity, while giving enough of a framework to get you started on the path to testing quickly.

Kyle MacLachlan wrote a beautiful piece in memory of David Lynch for The New York Times:

Though my lifelong friend, collaborator and mentor David Lynch was as eloquent as anyone I’d ever met — and a brilliant writer — he was not necessarily a word person...

How could words possibly do justice to an experience like that?

It’s why David was not just a filmmaker: He was a painter, a musician, a sculptor and a visual artist — languageless mediums.

When you are outside language, you are in the realm of feeling, the unconscious, waves. That was David’s world. Because there’s room for other people — as the listeners, the audience, the other end of the line — to bring some of themselves.

To David, what you thought mattered, too.

From Jeremy Keith's What the world needs:

If we’re going to be hardnosed about this, then the world doesn’t need any more books. The world doesn’t need any more music. The world doesn’t need art. Heck, the world doesn’t need us at all.

So don’t publish for the world.

When I write something here on my website, I’m not thinking about the world reading it. That would be paralyzing...

I’m writing for myself. I write to figure out what I think. I also publish mostly for myself—a public archive for future me. But if what I publish just happens to connect with one other person, I’m glad.

Just came across this from earlier in March and forgot that I 1.) already read it and 2.) got great inspiration from it. It's an especially hard problem when worrying about being original on the entire internet. But, as Jeremy points out earlier in the post, you don't have to be original.

I've just been introduced to the idea of Pace Layering via Chris Coyier:

...If you feel frustration at how quickly or slowly a particular technology moves, are you considering its place within the layers? Perhaps that speed is because it is part of a system that pressures it to be that way or it being that way is beneficial to the system as a whole.

Amazing to think how transferable it is to other domains. And to have acceptance of the fact that some things are meant to move quickly, others more slowly. The case for government vs commerce in Steward Brand's original case for this feels perpetually timely.

This compliments well with a bit of advice from Derek Sivers to focus on what doesn't change:

Instead, forget predicting, and focus on what doesn’t change. Just like we know there will be gravity, and water will be wet, we know some things stay the same.

People always love a memorable melody. You can’t know what instrumentation or production style will be in fashion. So focus on the craft of making great melodies...

Instead of predicting the future, focus your time and energy on the fundamentals. The unpredictable changes around them are just the details.

Watch on Youtube

Well this is delightful!

"I look for how to make those inner complexities more complex, and have deeper sublayers and things that don't really get you the first time, but the 16th time so it can stand repeated listening."

So much to love here. "They pay me for this!"

A surprisingly technopositive view from Derek Sivers on AI learning from your own public content:

Come and get me. I want my words to improve your future decisions.

I’m trying to thoroughly write my thought processes, values, and worldview, so that you can remember it, re-create it and improve upon it. (Remember me. Re-create me. Improve upon me.)

Another case for how a website can become a life's work. And how that life's work can have impact, even if it's obfuscated. Perhaps that's the ego-less way of viewing it, assuming your words and images will be taken out of context and converted to a single data point in a larger model.

Though, a site unto itself is still more inspiring since it's a portrait of a life. We're wired for that. There's more meaning to derive from an individual than a summarized report.

So I think I'll keep at it.

Why Bother? From Kyle Webster's newsletter:

It’s not that your work, itself, will change the world; no, only a few people in history will create something that resonates so strongly that it forces people to stand up, pay attention, and actually act on the feelings your masterpiece has stirred within them.

Instead, it’s the mini-milestones you achieve while doing your work that matter because each of these little ‘wins’ makes you feel good. Feeling good is the foundation for doing good. Positive emotions facilitate cooperation, unity and understanding in a community.

It's not explicitly said, but I'll add how wonderful it is that skill does not necessarily make a difference. The doing and growing are what gives life and bouyancy. Engagement > Product.

A wonderful read in it's entirety on James Gurney's Substack. From "Should Art Be About Personal Expression?":

Many of the greatest works of art have come from enigmatic individuals like Shakespeare, Vermeer, and Homer, about whom we know very little. And perhaps it doesn’t matter. The miracle of their work is that the range of their emotional expression seems to extend beyond the scope of a single person’s experience.

Each of these creators looked into themselves, but in so doing, they saw beyond themselves.

Ultimately, we end up starting from a place where we're trying to express what feels like is uniquely our's. But, the further and further you go, the more you start to see yourself more as a vessel. What pours out of the brush and pen and piano and terminal are alignments with a greater Truth.

It's one thing to do work in spite of nay-sayers and critics. It's another, greater challenge to continue on in a direction different from where the admirers and allure of "success" draws you.

Tim Kreider exploring the stubborn nature of painters De Chirico and Derain:

What I can’t help but admire about them is their indifference to critics and admirers alike, their untouchable self-assurance in their own idiosyncratic instincts and judgment. I admire their doggedly following their own paths, even if I’m not as interested in where they led. I admire their cussedness. It’s a value-neutral quality in itself, cussedness, amoral and inæsthetic, and not one you can really emulate, anyway—it would be like trying to imitate originality. But such artists’ careers demonstrate that it is at least possible to move through this world unswerved by its capricious granting or withholding of approval. They’re examples, good or bad, to their fellow artists as we all feel our blind, groping way forward—or, sometimes, back—through the dark of creation.

Kreider's closing metaphor on moving through "The dark of creation" is something that the richest creation requires returning to time and time again.

(Found while digging deeper on the always fantastic weekly newsletter by Austin Kleon, this week on writing.)