Everything is happening at once. Sometimes people ask – as if it’s remarkable in any way – ‘how do you do it?’ and the truth is it may look very well held together but I’m only ten minutes away from a catastrophic collapse; of everything going out of balance; of dropping the ball on something that slips my mind which has a cascade effect on everything else. I spend time between things pacing back and forth in the living room trying to think of what could go wrong. And these weeks have been particularly frenetic, with a dozen things all running in parallel, all – by their own account – full-time commitments and all gleefully ignorant of each other.
I once described it as like running down hill with plastic bags full of stuff. You’re driven entirely by momentum and if you stop or think, you’ll trip and fall. And, to the plastic bag’s inertial frame, everything seems normal. It’s all teetering on the verge of chaos just awaiting a single misstep.
So yes, I know, it’s been three weeks since I wrote to you and that’s been the longest time for many years. And this is another stupidly quick one. I wrote a whole introspective bit which I deleted because I suspect you don’t read this for the introspection. I’m still coming out of the tunnel at the moment so I haven’t had time to sit down and think about any one thing in particular for a while, besides which I have two or three writing engagements I should be putting writing time into. However, as you might expect, three weeks has spawned a dragon’s trove of notes, tabs and half-considered thoughts so we shall just jump straight into the short stuff. However, I am keeping some in reserve as part of my Content Strategy™️.
Short stuff:
- Alan Warburton’s RGBFAQ is on the Internet now for free. You can just stop reading now and go watch it, it’s amazing. I think I’ve expressed my admiration for it pretty well on all the websites.
- Natalie Kane tells me this blog is broken and the layout is messed up but since she’s the only person who ever tells me that I’m hardly going to engage in a development project on the feedback of a user group of one person so can you tell me if it’s also broken for you?
- Andrew Sempre has a great blog/newsletter that I just discovered out of his Feral Research outfit which this week includes the great line: ‘Social media as a cursed shittiness-amplifier: playing back to us.’ It’s like how I want this to be, and how blogs should be; a range of unconnected stuff that’s interesting.
- Here’s a somewhat disappointing and technical interview with Blitter who I talked about a few weeks back.
- Fred Scharmen found a cool rocket picture. I don’t know what else to say, that guy knows his space stuff. He’s doing this on Saturday and I’m going to be going, if you go you’ll see how much space onions he knows.
- My colleague JP Hartnett wrote this great top-level summary of ontological design taking in the work of Arturo Escobar, Sasha Constanza-Chock and Tony Fry. It’s a really good introduction to contextualising the ‘totality of design as a kind of meta-discipline, better able to encompass the relational complexity of how it operates.’
- Le Tour starts on Saturday. Look forward to that on the socials.
I have a podcast interview coming out soon and I expect I leant to much on the candid side of the brand rather than the pseudo-intellectual but also I’m not particularly interesting so at least I can be disarming in honesty. Anyway, it’s keeping me guessing about the reception, if there is any. I’m led to believe some people hate-read this blog so perhaps there’s some joy to be found in my idiocy for you good folks there. You know what actually there’s quite a few things out there I’ve done recently and coming up (including two, count them two, books) so I will update you on those next week.
Ok, I love you and I’m sorry I haven’t told you recently. Byeee.