Things I Like
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What about knitting I hear you wonder? It is a uniquely soothing and meditative pastime, but I had nothing but a sock on my needles and starting anything new seemed unusually daunting. With low making mojo, I turned to my mending basket to find things I could potentially finish in one sitting. Darning holes provided the crafting fix I needed to refocus my eyes and spend time away from the news. By using bright bits of leftover yarn, I can smile down at the colorful addition to my socks when I put them on.
I recently discovered Sonya Philip via her sewing patterns, but I really liked the sentiment in this post as well as the way she views sewing and making. Excited to sew some of her patterns and think about making and clothes and such more in the coming months.
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To labor under capitalism is to enter negotiations between the arbitrary constructions of money and time. It is to be asked: How much is 60 minutes of survival worth to you? And to answer, For how long must I labor to earn the right to survive?
I'll be thinking about this one for a long while.
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Why now do we expect our whole selves to be mitigated through a screen—no, through one app? Friends with far fewer followers than I have tell me they feel hesitation about posting because they don’t know if they’ve ticked all the boxes, if the comments will be hostile or demand further information (even simply “Recipe?” can cause anxiety). There seems to be an informal decree to no longer let people exist on social media as they want to exist: Instead, constant explanation and information is demanded.
Related to my post about how I view posting on here, I've gotta say I'm so much more hesitant to put anything on social media these days. I think, probably too much, before I do it.
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The thrill of heist stories has always come from both a willing suspension of morality and an internal reorientation of what it means to be a hero or a villain. Crime dramas are escapist; few Netflix viewers are going to be plundering the Louvre anytime soon. But Lupin’s trick is that the confrontation it forces isn’t just between cops and robbers. It’s between an orphan and a social hierarchy built on dirty money and immaculate manners, in which a diamond necklace can be a work of art but also a symbol of European aristocratic corruption through the ages.
I really enjoyed Lupin on Netflix, we devoured the first season and I was upset at how much I was left hanging at the end. This piece is a great thinking through of the themes of the show and I find that added depth makes it even better.
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Given this, perhaps the rare and strange idle time that some of us have found during the pandemic is an opportunity not to “get your life back on track,” as Redditor Polartm put it, but to experiment with nothingness, with a failure of productivity. We might instead use the time to try and find this humanity that Kierkegaard talks of, to tell and listen to stories, to “raise ourselves” in this other, nebulous way. Rather than eradicate this idle time, why not embrace it and expand its boundaries so that others, the workers excluded from this moment of relative stillness, might know it, too?
A bit of a theme in the things I've been thinking about lately and I will be revisiting Jenny Odell's book soon, but I'm moving into a phase in life where I will be very much no busy. And it's honestly hard, in this culture, to admit that to people because of the judgement that comes. But that's OK, I'm gonna quietly do my thing and see how I go.
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But I don’t think about other people when I’m adding something to my website. My audience is myself.
I've always thought of the blog section of my site this way. Right now it's the only real section as I've stripped the site back to the bare bones, but when I post links and book round ups or reviews and other things on here, many times it's because I want to remember it. Many people use a service like Pinboard for this, but for some reason I prefer doing so here. And it's been really helpful to me in recent years to think of the site this way, rather than as being for any specific audience.
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Picking up details, thinking about the lives being lived — about how much regret or happiness lives inside the owner of a rag on a fence or a rusted old Honda Cub. About who owns that cat sunning itself in the middle of the road, the cat itself, the road. And about who I am as I pass the cat and who I’ll be remembering it months and years from now. All without judgment, simply observing, wondering, noticing, jostling for a peek inside the clockworks of the world passing by.
I'm woefully behind on reading the articles I've save, but this one spoke to me about how we live, how we notice what's around us, and how we live life. I know that for many this isn't possible as they struggle to survive, but I'm trying to figure out how to slow down and notice more in my own life.
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It bothers me that writers can’t create audiences on their own websites, with their own archives, and their own formats. And they certainly can’t get paid in the process. (Although yes, there are exceptions).
A wonderful rant from Robin that also brings up some very good points about the web, how hard it is to do on your own and make money from and make it all work. I too love newsletters (see my end of 2020 post for some recommendations) but I also wonder what happens when someone writing for something like Substack closes up shop? Where does all that content go? Will it disappear? Also: this is beautifully done, such a wonderful piece of customized design.
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If staying home with a cold still requires a full day of work or you can’t find a seat at your local coffee shop on a Tuesday afternoon, iPhones are not responsible for ruining your life. The novelty and early popularity of smartphones seem to have distracted America from how quickly its laptops were also dissolving much of the boundary between work and home.
A piece from pre covid work from home lock downs that makes a point that I read recently and found myself nodding along to. So many attribute the smart phone to be the problem with being always at work, but I agree with Mull here that it's really the laptop that did this to us. The fact that it all happened at the same time means laptops as problematic often gets overlooked.
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If this tool represented the culmination of our attempts to figure out how to best work together in a digital age, I’d be more concerned, but Slack seems to be more transient. It’s a short-term optimization of our first hasty attempts to make sense of a high-tech professional world that will be followed by more substantial revolutions. The future of office work won’t be found in continuing to reduce the friction involved in messaging but, instead, in figuring out how to avoid the need to send so many messages in the first place.
I feel like I link to Newport a lot, but I find the way he thinks about work really interesting. I also dislike Slack and miss email something fierce at my current job. Slack is the way we communicate and email is a rarity and usually sent as an announcement and then the email is copied into several Slack channels. But I find that email allows for more thoughtful responses and I miss that because not every situation can be done in quickly typed out short fragments.
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We knew we were fortunate to have good jobs—and this was well before our country was facing a pandemic and massive unemployment—but we were facing the existential crisis that comes from spending your days doing something you don’t enjoy and wondering if this is how the next five, ten, 20 years will play out. We were in our thirties, young, but not so young. We’d seen the articles linking sedentary lifestyles to heart disease, diabetes, cancer, and misery. We wanted to get out of our respective offices and try something different.
This piece is delightful in so many ways, not least of which the way in which the writer is so honest about th travails they go through and yet still wanting to do it all again.
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But: I’m dissatisfied with the wringing of hands. It’s not that I expect A.M.C.s to arrive just because one might wish. But I do want the courage to seek first principles, and not just the questions. There must be grounds for the positions we take, axioms to interrogate, ones that beg for an internal alignment among our ideas, our politics, our decisions. And, as a separate matter, I want to be unafraid to seek strategic, conciliatory identification of first principles that share some bedrock with those of others whose politics depart from mine.
This is a thought provoking and great piece, I've been thinking about it since I read it.
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Nobody talks seriously about writing the Great American Novel anymore, but Wiseman belongs to a generation that used to, and his body of work, when considered in the manner he lays out above, represents the nearest contemporary equivalent I can think of. Especially when viewed in Wiseman’s terms — as a single, ongoing project — the scope and ambition become panoramic, a national monument. Norman Mailer used to refer to his desire to write the Great American Novel in tragic-heroic terms, casting himself as an Ahab in doomed pursuit of what he called “the big one.” Wouldn’t it be funny, though, if the Great American Novel actually does exist, only it’s not a novel and has been quietly appearing in serialized form on public television for the past 50 years?
I'd never heard of these films until I read this profile, but wow, I now want to watch them. I'm grateful they're on Kanopy so I can see them for myself.
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But it took me a long time to be comfortable with that. And I guess I’m still figuring it all out. Is this place where I’m super vulnerable about relationships? The drama! Or is it where I publish weird little stories that pop into my head? Is it where I focus solely on writing about typography?
This sums up so well the way I feel about this site of mine. What is it? I'm not really sure, but I keep adding to it, dumping my thoughts, things I like, and what I want to hang on to here for future reference.
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We think the story is about what happens in these interior rooms once we get there, about the objects in the room and how we feel about them, about the arguments we have in these rooms, about our desire to stay in or to leave the rooms and which desires we act on, about the things we eat and the times when we fuck, when we sleep and when we can’t sleep and what we say in the blue of the becalmed hours at night if we are still awake and start talking. We think the story is about what goes in the interior rooms when really most of it has already happened before we get there, because most of the story is about whether we get to go inside at all. I think my story is about the small rooms, and it is, but the meaning of that small room is much more the fact that I get to go inside it at all, and less what happens there.
Beautiful writing about what this year has been.