Thank you David Spinks for sharing this graphic and introducing me to the term “The Cozy Web”. He got it from this article: The Dark Forest and the Cozy Web
The Cozy Web
Slow Learning
Tom Hodgkinson and a group of around 15 authors, artists, and teachers came up with a “Manifesto for Slow Learning,” which includes a “Bill of Rights” for the slow learner. (Start each of these with the phrase, “You have the right to…”)
1. Focus on direction, not destination
Immerse yourself completely in the journey and you will reach your final goal gradually.
2. Raise your hand
Asking questions is a fundamental human right.
3. Learn at your own pace
Find your rhythm, find your flow. Don’t compare yourself to others.
4. Unplug
You have the right to disconnect and move your attention towards what’s essential. Learn unplugged, far away from digital distractions.
5. Change your learning path (and mind)
Don’t get too comfortable in the habit zone and start with changing the aversion to change. Think differently and learn new things.
6. Take a break
Micro-breaks, lunch breaks, and longer breaks will all improve your learning performance. You have the right to rest.
7. Make mistakes
Don’t fall into despair but Fail Forward.
8. Leave it unfinished
We live in a super busy, multi-tasking, results-oriented society. Step away from your long to-do list and enjoy once in a while the beauty of an unstructured day.
9. Unlearn and forget
Harness the power of unlearning. Reboot your mind, abandon old knowledge, actions and behaviours to create space.
10. Slow down
Sometimes slow and steady will win the learning race. Make haste slowly.
(via Austin Kleon)
Kindness Scales
“It scales better than competitiveness, frustration, pettiness, regret, revenge, merit (whatever that means) or apathy. Kindness ratchets up. It leads to more kindness. It can create trust and openness and truth and enthusiasm and patience and possibility.
Kindness, in one word, is a business model, an approach to strangers and a platform for growth.It might take more effort than you were hoping it would, but it’s worth it.”
Resurfacing this quote I posted in 2017. It’s so good.
Disembodied Communication
“The body is everywhere assaulted by all of our new media, a state which has resulted in deep disorientation of intellect and destabilization of culture throughout the world. In the age of disembodied communication, the meaning and significance and experience of the body is utterly transformed and distorted.”
Have I mentioned that I’ve been trying to figure out the Internet?”
– Eric McLuhan
Uranus, Eris, and the Riddle of the Internet, by Eric Francis Coppolino
(Thank you Tim)
I am, because we are
“The African view is that a person is a person through other persons. My humanity is caught up with your humanity, and when your humanity is enhanced — whether I like it or not — mine is enhanced as well. Likewise, when you are dehumanized, I am dehumanized as well.”
– Archbishop Desmond Tutu
The Bantu philosophy of “ubuntu” focuses on the power of community. Be famous within five miles.
The Nine Rules of Wile E. Coyote
“Chuck Jones, the brilliant animator who conceived of this most clever depiction of the banality and inevitability of repeated failure in the modern world, actually had “Rules” for the Coyote.”
Rebuilding Society on Meaning
Thank you Joe Edelman for sharing this thoughtful piece on rebuilding society on meaning! “If we want to make meaningful things, we have to measure meaning.”
Stock and Flow
…There are two kinds of quantities in the world. Stock is a static value: money in the bank or trees in the forest. Flow is a rate of change: fifteen dollars an hour or three thousand toothpicks a day. Easy. Too easy.
But I actually think stock and flow is a useful metaphor for media in the 21st century. Here’s what I mean:
Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that reminds people you exist.
Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time. …
Read the full article titled Stock and Flow
The Black Sheep of the Family
“The so-called black sheep of the family are, in fact, hunters born of paths of liberation into the family tree.
The members of a tree who do not conform to the norms or traditions of the family system, those who since childhood have constantly sought to revolutionise beliefs, going against the paths marked by family traditions, those criticised, judged and even rejected, these are usually called to free the tree of repetitive stories that frustrate entire generations.
The black sheep, those who do not adapt, those who cry rebelliously, play a basic role within each family system, they repair, pick up and create new and unfold branches in the family tree.”
– Bert Hellinger
Full text here.
Critical Introductory Reading to Art + AI
Hi tweeps, I'm prepping for my intro class. Can anyone recommend (deep breath) a good, critical, introductory reading on Art + AI ?
— Golan Levin (@golan) January 17, 2023
Interesting article recommendations in this thread.
22 Nuggets of Wisdom from Cory Muscara
1. Finding your true self is an act of love. Expressing it is an act of rebellion.
2. A sign of growth is having more tolerance for discomfort. But it’s also having less tolerance for bullshit.
3. Who you are is not your fault, but it is your responsibility.
4. Desires that rise in agitation are more aligned with your ego. Desires that arise in stillness are more aligned with your soul.
5. Procrastination is the refusal or inability to be with difficult emotions.
6. The moment before letting to is often when we grip the hardest.
7. You don’t find your ground by looking for stability. You find your ground by relaxing into stability.
8. What you hate most in others is usually what you hate most in yourself.
9. The biggest life hack is becoming your own best friend. Everything is easier when you do.
10. The more comfortable you become in your own skin, the less you need to manufacture the world around you for comfort.
11. An interesting thing happens when you start to like yourself. You no longer need all the things you thought you need to be happy.
12. If you don’t train your mind to appreciate what is good, you’ll continue to look for something better in the future, even when things are great.
13. The belief that there is some future moment more worth our presence than the one we’re in right now is why we miss our lives.
14. There is no set of conditions that leads to lasting happiness. Lasting happiness doesn’t come from conditions, but from learning to flow with conditions.
15. We often need to get out of alignment with the rest of the world to get back into alignment with ourselves.
16. Real confidence looks like humility. You no longer need to advertise your value because it comes from a place that does not require the validation of others.
17. Negative thoughts will not manifest a negative life. But unconscious negative thoughts will.
18. Bullying yourself into enlightenment does not work. You must befriend yourself to transcend yourself.
19. There are 3 layers to a moment: Your experience, your awareness of the experience and your story about the experience. Be mindful of the story.
20. Your mind doesn’t wander. It moves toward what it finds most interesting. To improve focus, become curious about what’s in front of you.
21. Life continues whether you pay attention to it or not. I think it’s why the passage of time is so scary.
22. High pain tolerance is a double-edged sword. It’s key for self-control but can cause us to override the pain of being out of alignment.
Staying soft vs Tightening
“Tightness erodes clarity. Tightness reduces expansion. Tightness broadens fear, scarcity, and the feeling of being powerless. Tightness keeps me wound in my own Small Self, forgetting entirely about everything that exists beyond the tightness. Tightness looks like turning away from reality. It looks like worst-case-scenario, all-or-nothing thinking. It looks like ‘What if this doesn’t go the way I want it to?’ and ‘I don’t think I can handle this’ — like worry embodied. It looks like self-doubt and rumination, catastrophizing and smallness. It looks like forgetting about my body and only listening to my brain.”
– Stay Soft, Lisa Oliver
(via Jocelyn)
Patience
“Patience, I believe, is a core competency of a healthy civilization.”
– Stewart Brand
Connection on A Global Scale
Deeply moved by this thorough and generous article on the magic of CreativeMornings, my biggest labor of love.
In case you’re not familiar with CreativeMornings: It’s the world’s largest face-to-face creative community. You can attend events in 225 cities every month or tune into our free digital FieldTrips (aka workshops) online.
Something Worth Noticing
“The body of work you’re creating adds up over time. The consistency and empathy of your vision will seep through. Drip by drip, you’ll create something worth noticing.”
– Crickets by Seth Godin
Audience Capture
“Audience capture is an irresistible force in the world of influencing, because it’s not just a conscious process but also an unconscious one. While it may ostensibly appear to be a simple case of influencers making a business decision to create more of the content they believe audiences want, and then being incentivized by engagement numbers to remain in this niche forever, it’s actually deeper than that. It involves the gradual and unwitting replacement of a person’s identity with one custom-made for the audience.”
The Perils of Audience Capture, by Gurwinder
(via Bailey)
The American Scam
“Everyone knows how productive you can be when you’re avoiding something. We are currently experiencing the civilizational equivalent of that anxiety you feel when you have something due the next day that you haven’t even started thinking about and yet still you sit there, helplessly watching whole seasons of mediocre TV or compulsively clicking through quintillions of memes even as your brain screams at you — the same way we scream at our politicians about guns and abortion and climate change — to do something.”
It’s Time to Stop Living the American Scam, by Tim Kreider
Color and Coffee
A lovely piece on colors of coffee and Tiramisu.
What Makes People Look Like Their Pets?
Illustration by Mark Alan Stamaty
This article on What Makes People Look Like Their Pets? by Jesse Bering made me chuckle.
CreativeMornings on Oprah
My heart is overflowing with all of the feelings: The story of CreativeMornings is featured in an article on Oprah today.
Thank you Jon Levy for generously writing an entire chapter about us in your book You’re Invited.
You can read the article here.
I will now go and cry and dance in my living room and send oodles of gratitude to our global volunteer community for making this happen.
How to Use ProRAW on Your iPhone 12 Pro
“Serious iPhone photographers have been able to shoot in RAW for some time via third-party apps like Halide. But what makes the new ProRAW feature special is that you don’t need to use another camera app—ProRAW images can be captured in the iPhone’s native camera app. More importantly, it utilizes all of Apple’s advanced computational photography features built into the iPhone.
Close Friendships
This article on how many close friendships one can maintain just made me block out time on my calendar today to map out my friends. What an excellent and thought provoking read.
These two facts made me perk up:
“Falling in love will cost you two friendships.” and “It takes about 200 hours of investment in the space of a few months to move a stranger into being a good friend.”
(via my friend Casper who shares the best stuff on Twitter)
The Zodiac Man
I am wildly fascinated by this graphic, found in an article called The Zodiac Man.
Image credits: A woodcut recreation of an image by A. G. de Brocar, 1495, in Johannes de Ketham’s Libro de medicina (1517).