Note to Self

The Decline of Deviance Where has all the weirdness gone?

Why do coffeeshops, book covers, and YouTube thumbnails all look the same? "We’re in a crisis of conventionality, an epidemic of the mundane."

Harvey Fierstein Is Now a Full-Time Quilter The seven-time Tony winner is writing a book on his later-in-life career change.

step 1: learn to quilt
step 2: get an invite to a Fierstein bitch & stitch session www.vulture.com/article/harv...

Measured AI | Note to Self The extreme hype surrounding generative AI and technologies like LLMs has been exhausting over the last few years. Coupled with fear-based marketing...

What does it look like to be neither an AI cheerleader nor doomsayer in practice? Here’s what measured AI looks like for me

The Year I Left Design And How I Found My Way Back

Thoughtful guidance for anyone on their way back to their true work

Three ways to make stuff:
1. make things you want by yourself or with people you choose
2. make things you must with people chosen for you on a schedule set by someone else
3. perform all the capitalist ceremonies of #2 without actually making anything yourself

Who’s driving your car? What if your career choices were being made by the wrong part of yourself? In this essay, I share a powerful metaphor from my coach: picturing your inner voices as passengers in a car. By moving my…

When you want to go in a certain direction, ask yourself: Which part of me has the wheel?

🏈 Halftime Game's not over yet, and anything can happen.

Latest issue of the newsletter is out now!

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Halftime | Note to Self A couple of weeks ago I turned 50 years old, which is a sentence my fingers feel strange typing because in my mind I’m still somewhere in my late 20s. Age...

This isn’t practice and there are no do-overs

Mariah Carey Has a Secret, Rebellious Unreleased Album, Talks Here For It All (Extended) Mariah Carey talks about the time she interrupted her son's Twitch livestream, her rebellious secret unreleased album Someone's Ugly Daughter and her latest album Here For It All. The Tonight Show…

Thanks to @anildash.com I will never stop thinking about the fact that Mariah Carey recorded a song called Demented at the same time as Always Be My Baby

Done Detoxing There’s this period of transition between full time employment and being settled in your post-work existence known as detox.

"Completing tasks, no matter how inane, made me feel productive...never you mind the fact that most of those tasks have no real importance and frequently represent phony work."

How to fold socks This is my art studio all packed up. It’s all in storage now. Still looking for a new place. 💰 Join the $2 Lunch Club! 💰 This week’s question comes to us...

Asked @monteiro.bsky.social how he thinks about his creative practice, and he wrote about how life’s big and small, important and trivial, mundane and creative activities are all interconnected. Good answer.

EJAE wrote Golden on her way to the dentist | Note to Self Singer-songwriter EJAE recorded a couple of voice notes on her way to the dentist which became the mega-hit earworm Golden. EJAE was the voice of lead...

Fellow KPop Demon Hunter fans: EJAE - singer-songwriter and voice of Rumi - wrote Golden on her way to the dentist

Experience is the best teacher

Welcome to my blog | Note to Self Hello world. This is my new blog. I’ve been writing it in private for awhile now, so I’m glad you’re here. Check out what it’s all about, then I hope...

It's launch day! 💙 📓 🚀 This is my new blog, an actual ongoing note to myself about joy over productivity buff.ly/Yrt7tYo

Everything Kevin Kelly knows about self-publishing | Note to Self Kevin Kelly’s excellent essay about publishing today is that it’s all about self-publishing. These points jumped out at me: The traditional approach to...

Publishing today is all about self-publishing

How to be unproductive | Note to Self When your self-worth is linked to your productivity, you see every activity in your day as either valuable (productive) or not. I have this disease. At...

At some point, the ability to check items off a todo-list stops moving you forward, and instead holds you back.

⚡️ Not a bolt, but a whisper Epiphanies are rarer than we think.

Issue 2 of the newsletter is out

Epiphanies are rarer than we think. When you ask a big question, the answer arrives not as a lightning bolt, but as a whisper.

Po Bronson: "Confusing intensity and passion is a common mistake. Intensity is external; passion invokes something inside you. Passion is a call-and-response with your soul. It’s not just adrenaline."

Intentional inputs Years ago I was at Disneyland in California with my family, taking a lunch break between rides. As I sipped my drink and watched the crowd passing by, I...

All your ideas are downstream from what you take in. Garbage in, garbage out. You improve your output with higher-quality input.

A line graph where the Y axis is "vibe" and the X axis is "understanding." A line starts at the the top of vibe and comes down diagonally as it goes further on the understanding end.

“Vibe coding is on a spectrum of how much you understand the code. The more you understand, the less you are vibing.”
– Steve Krouse

blog.val.town/vibe-code

I tend to discount AI chatbots as a fawning junior intern trying desperately to impress me but Harsh Claude and I might be able to get somewhere - wonderful piece

Worked hard, got lucky How does anyone achieve notable success? The answer is always, “They worked hard and got lucky.” Most people emphasize how hard they worked to achieve a...

How has anyone achieved notable success? They worked hard and got lucky.

A 4-box matrix called The Disapproval Matrix, where the Y axis top to bottom runs Rational to Irrational. The X axis runs left to right Know You to Don't Know You. Top left corner is Lovers, people who want to see you improve and thrive. Top right corner is Critics, experts in your field. Bottom left corner is Frenemies, people who don't wan to see you improve. Bottom right corner is Haters, jealous ignoramuses.

One way to separate pointless cruelty from productive feedback: The Disapproval Matrix, an oldie-but-goodie from Anne Friedman

www.annfriedman.com/the-disappro...

The Who Cares Era | dansinker.com

"In the Who Cares Era, the most radical thing you can do is care.

In a moment where machines churn out mediocrity, make something yourself. Make it imperfect. Make it rough. Just make it."

One monkey mind's 10-day silent meditation course As someone who works at a keyboard in front of a screen, I live in my head. I rely on facts and logic and narrative and reasoning to form my understanding...

“Observe your respiration.” What I heard him say was, “Observe your desperation.” Yes, my desperation. I am desperate. I am so, so desperate.

🦋 Smash that butterfly Time to take that idea and turn it into something tangible.

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A Short Lesson in Perspective Many years ago, when I first started to work in the advertising industry, we used to have this thing called The Overnight Test. It worked like this: My creative partner Laurence and I would spend t...

Linds Redding: "The trick to being truly creative is to be completely unselfconscious. That’s why children are so good at it. And why people with Volkswagens, and mortgages, Personal Equity Plans and matching Louis Vuitton luggage are not."

Martha Beck: "Your true self is intensely interested in your real life’s work—but it could give a rat’s ass about anything else."

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.