re:publica 12, Tag 1
Nett ist’s. Mehr, falls ich Zeit und Lust habe.
I have nothing to say, really.
Fuck off.
musicForProgramming()
A series of mixes intended for listening while programming to aid concentration and increase productivity (also compatible with other activities).
I have complained about random noise at work over and over again, mostly because I have yet really to solve the problem. I am now giving musicForProgramming() a try, so far it is supremely weird and creepy with a lot of droning sounds and random bits of instrumental music thrown in. I am not too sure how well I can concentrate on work while listening to it.
See also: Music for Brogramming
The swell is now about nine feet and coming in every eight seconds.
- Adrian Tan: Don’t work. Be hated. Love someone.
- Oliver Segovia: To Find Happiness, Forget About Passion
- Back to Work 64 – Frozen Poster
E.L. Doctorow said once said that ‘Writing a novel is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.’ You don’t have to see where you’re going, you don’t have to see your destination or everything you will pass along the way. You just have to see two or three feet ahead of you. This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard.
Anne Lamott, Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life
Against all reason.
I have often heard the sentiment “No one is listening to me.” I believe this feeling helps explain why it is so appealing to have a Facebook page or a Twitter feed – each provides so many automatic listeners. And it helps explain why – against all reason – so many of us are willing to talk to machines that seem to care about us.
Drawn out
It was fun while it lasted.
Chair adjustment personnel
Suddenly I felt my chair move. I looked around. Standing there was the Microsoft chair adjustment personnel, this nice woman who comes over once a month, fiddling with my seat settings to make sure it was posturepedically correct.
Intangibility and disaffection
Lately I’ve been thinking about what we, the people of the internet1 are doing.
To be more honest and more precise: I’ve been thinking about what I am doing – both professionally and with my life. My initial plans and ideas, how my life would progress were pretty much spot on for roughly the first 26 to 27 years. That’s not quite the case anymore and for quite a long while now I’ve been circling in a holding pattern.
While this is all nice and relevant to me, it’s not what I want to write about publicly.2
What I’ve been noticing is that we – and by we I mean me – don’t really produce anything tangible. We write code, we write texts, songs, we draw and paint – but in the end it’s all bits and bytes.
I had this epiphany last week when my sister and her boyfriend were visiting me. He’s a printer and of course my actually rather big hill of random stuff I ordered from Moo and MagCloud was something we talked about.
Turns out3 – I like to order some of my stuff printed out because if gives me at least some feeling that I actually created something.
The intangibility of my work and of the stuff I do as hobby projects is growing to be one of the root causes for my constant disaffection. The code I write at work, the code I write at home, my blog posts, my photos, my drawings4, the podcasts – everything basically ceases to exists as soon as I switch off the computer.5
So basically it is nothing. If I die6 and take my passwords with me, nothing will really be left for the world. The stuff I bought over the years and that I want to get rid of, anyway. A couple of printed photos. A bunch of accounts to online services that nobody can close down because nobody knows the passwords. And objectively this is a good thing: the world is already overflowing with crap from the living people, we don’t really need all the stuff from the dead, too. But for a person, it can be pretty disconcerting.
And I am obviously not the only person who feels that way.
Friends of mine who take pictures all the time print them out pretty regularly. When I visit Teymur‘s studio or Jan Manuel‘s home, they have prints of their pictures hanging there. They might have other reasons7 but the effect and the message at least to me is clear: They have their stuff digital, intangible, fleeting, and they’d like to have them in a way that is somehow more substantial.
Other people make real, proper books out of their digital work. Craig Mod compiled the creation of Flipboard for iPhone into a book, Tom Armitage did something similar with his bookmarks a few weeks earlier.
Now where does this leave us? How can we escape the circle of putting work into one endeavor after the other, which might get closed down as soon as it is ready to see the light or sold off or just declared to be done and put somewhere to slowly rot away? How can we create something of actual value that stands the tests of time?8
And if that’s not a possibility, how do we learn to be able to live with it?9
- I know. I’ve cringed, too, while writing it. ↩
- At least not yet. Sooner or later the over-sharing part of me will take over. You know. The one you all know from Twitter. ↩
- Turns out… ↩
- And don’t get me started on Draw Something where everything just lasts a few tiny seconds. ↩
- I know, not really. And yeah, there’s the phone and backups and whatnot. But for the sake of the argument, all of this is basically like Schrödinger’s cat. Or at least the pop culture version of it: as soon as the computer is switched off, I have no way of knowing whether it exists or even ever existed. ↩
- You can see how this post is slowly turning light and happy. ↩
- Maybe they really like their own work, which is something I can’t understand that well. Not in their case, theirs is good, but I never really managed to like what I create. But that’s a whole different topic. ↩
- Doesn’t have to be a lot of time. But it’s good to see stuff that has some solidity to it. ↩
- I know that many people don’t need to learn it. The “Let’s throw stuff at the wall constantly and see what sticks.” mentality is rampant out there. Call it “perpetual beta” or “lean startup pivot” all you like, in the end the result is the same. And sadly enough it’s usually mud or other soil-like substances that are more likely to stick to a wall. Solid stuff tends to fall off. ↩
Twitter personae
On Twitter I am mostly myself – or only a tiny bit more over-sharing and neurotic than the real me. And I guess most of my followers can at least guess that this is the case.1
I still often censor myself. Following many comedians on Twitter or listening to their podcasts started an urge in me to often tweet extremely offensive and/or personal stuff that does not actually represent me, but would be funny. For people with a certain kind of humor, but still funny.
So I am in a bit of a conundrum, really. Some of my followers are potential future bosses and/or2 romantic interests. And I am not too sure how well this kind of humor would go down with these people. Especially when it does not even go down well with me if I’m not in the mood for raunchy humor.
And now I have no idea what to do with my occacional outbursts of really terrible jokes™ – I’m not really willing to start a second3 twitter account for that. The people I do want to read my “funny” tweets are already following me. Which is pretty surprising in itself.
Maybe I should just post them here instead. It’s not like somebody is reading them here.
April 1st.
Ha.
Haha.
Seriously, stop it.
