flâneur

Claire Rapuano

4 followers · 12 following · 432 views

on the atlas — 86

highlights — 211

  • “For you to sleep well at night, the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through.”
    Aim for "best in the world, bar none." - by Patrick Morgan
  • Spend a week or two making an effort to attend to nuance — things you perceive or notice that most people miss. Make a nuance list. Appreciate it.
    Neophilia and Its Discontents - by Rob Walker
  • Larry Tesler likes simplicity. But his principle was this specific nugget of insight: No person should be trapped in a mode. And that is a powerful principle because it gave him a new way of seeing the world.
    "Inventing on Principle" by Bret Victor speech transcript
  • But expansion can be dangerously grandiose. If you take expansion too far you crash and burn.
    Reversing the Flow of Internet Expansion
  • Reversing the flow means not relaying or reflecting information but absorbing and retaining it, turning outflow into inflow.
    Reversing the Flow of Internet Expansion
  • I found that I was losing too much energy out onto the external internet to do effective internal work
    Reversing the Flow of Internet Expansion
  • When Gmail first came out Google promised such vast space available on their internet that old emails no longer needed to be deleted. Users could just chuck more data on top of the pile, stacking the tower ever higher. Other websites followed suit, encouraging users to avoid letting go by archiving instead. This would be like a human body growing new cells without any old cells dying. Such growth cannot be sustained. It is an example of expansion run wild. Since the internet is about growth, the culture of the internet does not value loss. This is why I feel there is such a strong sense of dif…
    Reversing the Flow of Internet Expansion
  • paywalled digital social space for ongoing user interaction. Here the community is not a passive audience, but one that generates its own discussion, and for users comprises much of the value in and of itself. This community often comes to re-shape the brand or content development process.
    Come for the Network, Pay for the Tool
  • To me “community” implies users regularly engaging with each other, a criterion which indicates that the “regular crowd” at neighborhood joints or local skate shops are much truer communities than most online brands
    Come for the Network, Pay for the Tool
  • , long sentences stretch out time and build tension through the words. Composers, who think deeply about the importance of variety in phrasing, know the importance of this variation intimately.
    "Write short sentences" is bad advice | thesephist.com
  • long sentences stretch out time and build tension through the words. Composers, who think deeply about the importance of variety in phrasing, know the importance of this variation intimately.
    "Write short sentences" is bad advice | thesephist.com
  • I really like this model of software interfaces as users interacting with well-defined materials. Software constructed this way feels more open and creative, because they don’t prescribe a finite set of tasks you can accomplish with them.
    Design with materials, not features | thesephist.com
  • The most successful people I know are primarily internally driven; they do what they do to impress themselves and because they feel compelled to make something happen in the world.
    How To Be Successful
  • The line between goals and projects can be blurry. The difference is that goals emphasize outputs while projects emphasize inputs. A well-designed goal may be easy or impossible depending on circumstances outside of your control. A well-planned project, however, can nearly always be achieved because it depends mostly on your own commitment and effort.
    The Project-Driven Life - Scott H Young
  • The daily-task format promises a limited sphere of intervention, unlocking more “free time” away from the internet. This is misleading: in confining itself to a randomized two-minute window, apps like BeReal also extend their reach over the entire 24-hour cycle, creating a daily event which is preceded by anticipation, and succeeded by reflection (looking over other’s posts, watching the reactions roll in).
    Temporal Belonging — Real Life
  • often the experience of using traditional social media — which involves “navigating aimlessly and pointlessly through an apparent unceasing waterfall of content” — is associated with impressions of deadness or lifelessness. We can step into the content waterfall at any point in the day, and it will still be there: endlessly, lifelessly flowing.
    Temporal Belonging — Real Life
  • In moments when the internet feels truly timeless — when it begins to feel repetitive, predictable, and divorced from external shifts — it begins to feel dead.
    Temporal Belonging — Real Life
  • The reign of the clockface — and of the astronomical rhythms it approximates — has ostensibly ended, giving way to a soup of digital time in which timecodes persist as a way of organizing an endless flow of information, rather than referring us back to a world outside of the screen.
    Temporal Belonging — Real Life
  • Surround yourself with people who look like magicians to you. Then imagine yourself as one, older and wiser, in great detail. Imagine yourself as the person you would be afraid to say you want to be out loud to others (because it seems so ridiculously impossible right now). Write it down in great clarity and detail, then forget it. And let the part of your subconscious mind that still remembers lead you to becoming the things you want, and maybe, years later, check if it did.
    Becoming a magician – Autotranslucence
  • Personally, being able to say "this is a think that I think is true, but I definitely don't think that I've made the case strongly enough here, for you to be convinced" gives me space to express more of my ideas, without skirting close to conflict or affront.
    Public beliefs vs. Private beliefs - LessWrong
  • If we can move the debate to a place where, instead of fighting over the truth, we're collaborating on a search for understanding, then we can recoup a lot of wasted resources.
    Double Crux — A Strategy for Mutual Understanding - LessWrong
  • While industrial designers prioritize longevity, digital designers prioritize elasticity in order to keep up with the internet’s blindingly-fast pace. This constantly evolving pace is the reason timelessness in digital design is so few and far between. But that doesn’t mean it’s not possible.
    Can Digital Products Be “Timeless?” | by Adam Kopec | Startup Grind | Medium
  • Slogans: Better is the enemy of best Relative judgements have no place in art Systems programmers are high priests of a low cult Point of view is worth 80 IQ points Good ideas don't often scale
    Folklore.org: Creative Think
  • The core differentiator between JTBD and these traditional system-analysis techniques is that JTBD is much less prescriptive about what exactly the users’ task is, and how they will accomplish it. Task analysis and use cases aim to understand the best way in which the product can handle the typical activities that users need to do (and often end up being biased by existing solutions); the JTBD approach moves the focus on desired outcomes and questions whether those typical activities are the way of reaching the outcomes that users really seek.
    Personas vs. Jobs-to-Be-Done
  • Playing a one-string guitar came to him in a vision, and he had to make that vision come true. He relies on his voice, one string, and drumming on the guitar to create powerful music.
    Enforcing constraints creates opportunities for creativity
  • “Disinformation” was the liberal Establishment’s traumatic reaction to the psychic wound of 2016. It provided an answer that evaded the question altogether, protecting them from the agony of self-reflection.
    The Liberal Obsession With ‘Disinformation’ Is Not Helping
  • Nothing is invented that hasn’t been experienced already. But they are very vague things. They are clouds and bits of fog that one experiences on meeting people. There are certain foggy moments and then faces peer out of them. So when I use the word invention that’s what I mean. You grab the moment, seize it, and then put it into your work. It’s like sculpting—you start with a kind of armature and then you put handfuls of clay on and pretty soon . . .
    Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 181
  • Is it possible to be critical without being an unthinking provocateur? Is it possible to dissent without having that position flatten into yet another card to be shuffled in the same deck?
    Violent Antagonisms | The Point Magazine
  • “a phrase that designated a particular aspect of work (mostly low-income and often feminized) has shifted to describe the vague feelings of women, especially the wealthy and educated, and no longer has much to do with class or work or the particular burdens of anything except a generalized womanhood.” Today, emotional labor is more often a punchline than a call to action. Feminist talking points get passed around like a wet joint: beauty privilege and abortion rights and fatphobia, but also skincare and Botox and hot girl summer. As if these things have nothing to do with each other. Eventuall…
    #100: New idea trending - by Haley Nahman - Maybe Baby
  • When you’re thinking, it happens as a long sentence of connected things, and you don’t pause and say, This is a new thought. You just think. The length of my sentences probably goes back to my reading of the Bible as a child, too. The Bible is full of conjunctions, not beginnings, middle, and ends. That was the one of the biggest influences on the style of Mr. Potter.
    Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 252
  • No, I can barely reread what I’ve written. With everything I write, there’s a feeling of having finally told the world what I really think, when I’d been hoping never to do that. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons I’m so drawn to Greek mythology—because what I’m describing is like a curse. I don’t want to say this thing, but my curse, my punishment, is that I have to say it. And so once I’ve said it, I can’t bear to see it.
    Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 252
  • A routine would be too much like work, and I don’t really like to work, even though I work a great deal. All the things I do that might be considered work are really a form of play. Even while I’m ironing my sheets—I can’t sleep in sheets that are not ironed, I even iron my pajamas—I’m daydreaming
    Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 252
  • What are your ideal circumstances in which to write? KINCAID The ideal circumstances would be to have no responsibilities to anyone or anything. Just to think, just to read.
    Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 252
  • Ruskin coined the term pathetic fallacy to attack the sentimentality that was common to the poetry of the late 18th century, and which was rampant among poets including Burns, Blake, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Keats.
    Pathetic fallacy
  • Writing daily (notes, text messages, DMs, social media, letters, lists) is part of every life—but becomes an acknowledged and noticed part of a writer’s life.
    50 Ways of Looking at Your Writing Life
  • It is a kind of personification that occurs in poetic descriptions, when, for example, clouds seem sullen, when leaves dance, or when rocks seem indifferent.
    Pathetic fallacy
  • so it’s about going deep into the zoomed-in life you already lead. Your health, your loved ones, your work, your interests, your desire to help others, your values, your existence.
    The Meaning of Life Is Absurd
  • The questions of “What does it all mean?” and “What is my purpose?” are things we ask when we’re not plugged into this very moment. When we’re paying close attention to the project we’re working on, the book we’re enjoying, or the time we’re spending with our loved ones, then we’re not searching for meaning; we already have it.
    The Meaning of Life Is Absurd
  • We have this fleeting chance to participate in an illusion called ‘I love my girlfriend’ [and] ‘I love my dog.’ How is that not better? Knowing the truth, which is that nothing matters, can actually save you in those moments. Once you get through that terrifying threshold of accepting that, then every place is the center of the universe, and every moment is the most important moment, and every thing is the meaning of life.
    The Meaning of Life Is Absurd
  • Ironically, knowing that life doesn’t come with a grander meaning allows us to access the things that really do make life meaningful. This truth helps us realize that the big existential questions of life are not where the answers are; instead, this very moment in our small corner of the world is all we really have.
    The Meaning of Life Is Absurd
  • To Nagel, we humans always find ourselves clashing between these two things: (1) The inevitable seriousness in which we view our lives, and (2) The ability to view that seriousness as being silly and insignificant. What makes the whole thing so absurd is that even after we notice the meaninglessness of things, it doesn’t make them any less significant to us.
    The Meaning of Life Is Absurd
  • I want things to feel hard. How else will I know that I’m making progress? In practice, this sentiment easily leads to self-sabotage
    certainty - by Molly Mielke - Mind Mud
  • Fun can best be achieved through interaction. What better way to appreciate the forces of nature and resist convention than by relinquishing control of your interface to the whim of the user?
    Make it fun: chaos in Product Design | by Gabriel Valdivia | UX Collective
  • In Brutalist design, form takes a lead role but it does so without any attempt at perfection. Instead, it is so raw and accessible that it becomes inviting for anyone to experiment alongside it. This participatory quality to the design introduces an element of exploration, wonder, and…fun!
    Make it fun: chaos in Product Design | by Gabriel Valdivia | UX Collective
  • "The inventive genius of mankind could have made human life carefree and happy had organizing power kept step with his technical advances. As is, the achievements of the machine age are as dangerous as a razor in the hands of a 3-year-old." — Einstein
    incentive design
  • humans are a lot better at solving engineering problems than political problems.
    incentive design
  • Constructivism is a theory in education which posits that individuals or learners do not acquire knowledge and understanding by passively perceiving it within a direct process of knowledge transmission, rather they construct new understandings and knowledge through experience and social discourse, integrating new information with what they already know
    Constructivism (philosophy of education)
  • The Zone of Proximal Development is defined as the space between what a learner can do without assistance and what a learner can do with adult guidance or in collaboration with more capable peers.
    Zone of Proximal Development: A Perspective for Teaching English Learners
  • Maybe it’s the person you ask to be an extra set of eyes on an email or a project brief before you send it out.
    Notes on “Taste” — Are.na
  • It’s probably a permanent state — taste isn’t often outgrown.
    Notes on “Taste” — Are.na