The Little Rebellion

  • Fans Are Not Players, Voters Are Not The Opposition

    There is nothing interesting or helpful that I, a Blue team voter, can say that shames, insults, or belittles a Red team voter.

    Not because I need to somehow cater to the Red team voter, but because Red team voters are 100% irrelevant, and so am I.

    Whether I like it or not (I don’t), in this ineptly designed two-party plutocracy,

    I vote for the Blue team.

    Even though I hate 88% of what they do, they can rely on my vote no matter what… because I hate 99% of what the Red team does.

    Also, culture and stuff. Good Reasons.

    The problem on both sides (but especially mine) is that the people who VOTE for the team think they are ON the team.

    I have news: That’s not how representative democracy works. If you aren’t running, elected, appointed, or working on it, you’re not on the team…

    You’re a fan.

    As a reliable voter for the Blue team, I am nothing more than a fan watching the game. I have no power other than to cheer, boo, and yell at the GM to fire the coach or draft a new star player.

    I will reliably root (vote) for my team and so I am irrelevant to the game’s outcome.

    Representatives are the players. Their job is to WIN. Winning means getting elected NO MATTER THE CONDITIONS, advancing popular and effective policy, and then getting reelected.

    Representatives are 100% responsible for all of this because they are the ones with or seeking power.

    The Red team’s reliable voters are in the stands too. If I punch one of them in the face, I get taken out by security and the game goes on.

    Almost the entire discourse from my fellow Blue team fans is the equivalent of dumping a beer on a Red team fan. Useless. At best.

    The only thing that matters is WINNING THE VOTES of the people who could go either way or who may not vote at all.

    There are tens of millions of these people. Winning their votes is The Game. There is no other game.

    When you understand that winning votes is The Game and that you don’t matter, Trump fans don’t matter, that you’re all irrelevant, everything becomes about having the right players, running the right strategy, winning the votes, and enacting policies that make sure you win again.

    When you hear someone yelling about the other team’s voters, the absurdity becomes crystal clear: “If they weren’t cheering so loudly, we would have won! If you cheer for the other team, you are a BAD person and NOT MY FRIEND ANYMORE.”

    What are we doing?

    And then things get really crazy: People blame VOTERS for their team losing (something Democrats do to voters they think are “theirs”) 🤦‍♂️.

    This is exactly equivalent to “We would have scored more points if the ball wasn’t so STUPID. The other team ran so FAST! It’s not FAIR!”

    Any cowardly politician or apparatchik who blames a single thing on voters should never be allowed to participate in politics again.

    Win the votes, make things better, and then win again. That’s your job, and if you don’t even understand your job, you shouldn’t have the job.

    One question, reacting to the current clusterfuck: How might we repair trust in our institutions and even basic facts after decades of relentless lying and grifting by our leaders?

    One answer: Maybe try being honest 🤷‍♂️.

    That’s a play I’d run. But I’m just a fan.

  • Airtable's Missed Opportunity

    One of the things that bothers me most (I often can’t sleep at night thinking about it) is a missed opportunity. Not my missed opportunity, but someone else’s.

    The one I’m thinking about right now is the missed opportunity of one of my favorite products of all time: @Airtable 👇

    Before I go into what I think Airtable has missed, let me start by saying that I was/remain one of its earliest/biggest fans. At a 2015 hackathon (when I used to go to hackathons), I built a CMS backed by Airtable that I called Airguitar which I went on to build many things with.

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    (side note on Airguitar: it never became a commercial product or left my own company’s use, and surely it would have had some trademark issues 😃, but also, Airtable’s colors were so much cooler back then… that’s not the missed opportunity, sorry for the digression.)

    I legitimately believe that @Airtable belongs in the Hall of Fame of user interface design. Using its database for the first time was like watching Michael Jordan play basketball. The only other experience I’ve had in the same league is using @figmadesign. Both web apps. Bananas.

    I’ve created hundreds of workflows (and fully-functioning applications) hacked on top of Airtable, not because Airtable made them easier, but because Airtable made them POSSIBLE.

    But, in my opinion, Airtable went on to repeatedly make decisions contrary to their mission.

    Airtable’s stated mission is “to democratize software creation by enabling anyone to build the tools that meet their needs.”

    Airtable, right now, COULD enable this, but over and over, they have needlessly blocked toolmaking functionality in the most frustrating ways imaginable.

    To be fair, Airtable is now a unicorn “worth” billions of dollars and I’m just a toolmaking-obsessed chump who sees a tool for toolmaking that is intentionally impaired by its own toolmaker, shaking my fist at the void.

    There are too many examples of Airtable’s anti-toolmaker decisions to name here, but I will go over a few:

    This first one may in fact be an honest oversight, but it doesn’t make sense because the Airtable team is Michael Jordan:

    My God, the Zapier hacks we have had to build to get around this, yet Airtable Sync somehow manages to be worse.

    2. After building a regular-person-readable alternative database view, perfect for a Normy Dashboard, they released it as a marketing tool called Airtable Universe and didn’t give it’s far-more-usable interface to the toolmakers and the users of the tools themselves. 🤦‍♂️

    3. User/API pricing remain a kaleidoscopic nightmare for actual toolmaker use.

    To be clear, I love paying for software. It’s kind of a hobby of mine. But pricing should MAKE SENSE. Our team can do everything for $25/month but add a user field and it’s $400/month… What?

    I’ve moved on now to build my own tool which I hope will achieve Airtable’s mission. Who knows, maybe I’ll run into the same problems they had that forced them to torture and rip the guts out of their most fervent believers and fans.

    I wish I could have just used Airtable.

    (also maybe add a simple messy page model (there are already “comments”) to each record so people can write some stuff (humans need messy places to write stuff) and embed table views and Airtable is suddenly a better @NotionHQ for what Notion is used for… easy peasy)

  • Unjustify Your Next Action

    I’ve been using todo lists/task management systems, in every form, for years. I’ve spent so much goddamned time learning methodologies that I could be a professor in them…

    Yesterday, I had a breakthrough talking to @m_ashcroft. The truth is: I hate them all. Here’s why.

    Nothing will take the joy out of a task more than focusing on the success it could be a small part of. Project-based task management asks that we break the things we want to manifest into little bite-sized pieces that we can do in service of that Ultimate State of Completeness.

    The mindset this creates is one of evaluating every activity in terms of its little tickbox that needs to be checked in order to contribute to the checking of a much bigger, badder tickbox.

    In essence, it asks of every activity: Are you serving a Larger Goal? Are you JUSTIFIED?

    Now we’ve successfully taken the experience of the present moment, the exploration of our activity, and all possible fun that might be, and transformed it into a square Unit of Productivity for The Future (a Future in which, presumably, we will be justified ourselves, worthy).

    Obviously, for medium-to-large things to get done, it’s helpful to break them down into smaller steps, but to create a more humane system of project/task management, a missing step is to UNJUSTIFY each broken down action: How could this task be performed for its own sake?

    Of course, we (sickos like me) can make any process into more Work, including this one. To avoid the temptation to go through a project and ▢ UNJUSTIFY EVERY ACTION, simply unjustify the next one. How does my next activity need nothing at all to be “worth it”? No outcome, even.

    Both the simplest and the most difficult part of the trick is contained in the concept of “worth it” itself. There’s a LOT of culture and psychology and cultural psychology tied up in that concept.

    Maybe the concept of “worth it” itself is the problem.

    Anyway, this is actually how I’ve been treating some of my most “important work” for some time now without realizing it.

    It turns out, doing things this way, I’ve never been 1/10th as productiv—THE DOOR TO ALL AWARENESS AND PLAY AND ENJOYMENT SLAMS CLOSED, ETERNALLY, ONCE MORE

  • Bean Dad Defense

    I’ve witnessed people I know get “cancelled” and we’ve all seen celebrities (strangers) get cancelled, but the case of @johnroderick is the first time it’s been someone I “know” (by way of 100s of hours of extremely personal podcasts). Something is very different about this.

    John Roderick is the guy who, both comically and tragically, is now known to most of Twitter as “bean dad” after he posted a thread of a parenting story that made a lot of people extremely angry. Then someone went word-searching through old tweets and, well, there were tweets.

    On the parenting story: If you have kids and you’re trying… you try things and you get some wrong. All kids are different and you literally cannot avoid getting things wrong. Knowing John’s storytelling, I didn’t find controversy in the can opener story, but I see why many did.

    On the old tweets, let’s take them category-by-category:

    First, he used the F-word, clearly playfully because John is bisexual. Of course this is an offensive word, but as a queer person himself, John is afforded some agency over its use.

    Second, there were “Jews rule the world” tweets. Without context, these look really bad. But if you take 11 seconds to look into it, you find out that this is a bit to CALL OUT antisemitism. John has aped conspiracy theorists and their ultimately ubiquitous antisemitism forever.

    Third, he used the N-word in one tweet. He says in the tweet that he’s making a point about the elastic power of words/slurs.

    This was really bad and he should apologize for it, but it’s hard to argue he intended it maliciously. It was a bad and wrong attempt at the opposite.

    Fourth, he made jokes about rape in the form of “I’ll rape you.” This is obviously super offensive and bad and he should apologize.

    Lastly, he used the R-word and said ableist shit. He should apologize and so should a lot of us (we’ve barely scratched the surface on ableism).

    Here I am, seven tweets into a thread and trying to provide context for a guy who is now so radioactively demonic that his trending story almost beat out a recorded phone call where Donald Trump literally tried to shake down Georgia’s election.

    This is a big problem.

    John Roderick may be the best (spoken word) storyteller I’ve ever heard. He may be the most passionate about human capacities for good and evil and how those have created our history. He may also be the most earnestly generous person with his own feelings and experience.

    He’s also a drug addict sober 20+ years. He’s bipolar. He seems to be bad at romantic relationships. Extremely self-loathing, never feels good enough. He seems to spend most of his waking moments thinking about what’s wrong with the world and progressive ways of fixing it.

    On one hand, John did this to himself, which is an assessment that’s (somewhat surprisingly) easy to make with those you are close to.

    On the other hand, there’s the matter of his deserved punishment/backlash, which is a very easy judgment to make about 1-dimensional strangers.

    John Roderick is not someone I know, but he definitely isn’t a stranger either.

    The one thing that’s somehow clearer in this in-between scenario: He is a LOT more than “bean dad.”

  • How To Roll Your Rs

    Are you an English-speaking grown-up who never learned to roll your Rs? Do you avoid speaking beautiful languages like Spanish and Italian?

    Here’s a post on how to achieve luscious Rs as an adult. The key is contained within the blooper reels of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.

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    As a child, I had a great ear for languages. I loved them, and to this day, if I were offered one superpower by a Power Genie, it would be hard not to choose “Understand and speak every language.”

    But at the age of 18, I still could not roll my Rs. And no one could describe how!

    One of the cruelest phenomena in nature is that people who intuitively understand how to do a thing are the ABSOLUTE WORST at teaching it. Kids who can understand immediately how to roll their Rs (and make cool machine gun noises, too!) are infuriating to those of us who can’t.

    I discovered the solution to the R-rolling problem completely by chance:

    Watching Fresh Prince bloopers (as one does), I came across a scene in which Carlton, CANNOT get this line out without creating an R roll: “But it’ll cut into my trick-or-treating time.” Over and over… 💡

    So I tried it. I repeated the line slowly, over and over again—

    “But it’ll cut into my trick-or-treating time… But it’ll cut into my trick-or-treating time…”

    You may want to do this alone. You may sound a little crazy.

    Going faster and faster: “But it’ll cut into my trick-or-treating time… But it’ll cut into my trick-or-treating time…” and suddenly(!)—”BUT IT’LL” became buh-rRrRrRr. I was rolling my Rs! I was MAKING THE SOUND.

    I still needed those first two words as a crutch for some time.

    Within a few days I no longer needed the “Buh” sound to start. I could roll my Rs at will.

    This is THE way to learn to roll your Rs no matter what age you are. It will work if you’re willing to put in just a few minutes for a few days, unlocking sound and capability forever.

  • A Complete Photography Course in 5 Tweets

    I’m going to attempt to deliver a complete photography course in 5 tweets.

    I originally made this on 5 index cards for my wife, corresponding to the 5 concepts you need to know.

    In short: There isn’t much to it, and everyone should understand photography, particularly today.

    Concept 1: Aperture

    Aperture is how much you open the lens to let light in. Common apertures run from 1.4 (open) to 22 (closed). Aperture works just like pupils. To see In the dark, open wider. In the sun, close down.

    More open = blurry backgrounds (and harder to nail Focus).

    Concept 2: ISO (or ASA)

    The base light sensitivity of your film or camera. A higher ISO number means it’s more sensitive (needs less light) but also more grainy/“lower quality.” A lower ISO number means it’s less sensitive (needs more light) but is more smooth/“higher quality.”

    Concept 3: Shutter Speed

    How long the shutter is open. Big number (denominator) = faster speed. Small number = lets more light in, but movement blurs.

    Correct Exposure (goldilocks point between totally dark and totally white) is a dance between ISO, Aperture, and Shutter Speed.

    Concept 4: Focus

    The distance from the camera (in feet/meters) that is the most in focus. You can think of this as a flat pane of glass exactly the Focus distance away from you. Everything closer to you, or further away, is less in focus than that pane. See also Aperture 👆.

    Concept 5: Focal Length (and framing)

    How wide (zoomed out) or how narrow your view is. We use 35mm film size as a basis for description. e.g. your iPhone’s lens is 28mm equivalent (slightly wide).

    Basic Framing Tip: The subject should be prominent in the photo… MOVE CLOSER.

    So that’s it: Everything you need to know about photography in 5 tweets. This applies equally to cinematography with one constraint/rule-of-thumb around shutter speed (it should generally be a 48th of a second, or double your frames per second). Here are the original index cards:

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  • My First Three Silent Meditation Retreats

    One of the (relatively) minor things that I’m losing to COVID is my annual silent meditation retreat (I’d usually leave tomorrow). It’s a serious privilege to do it, 💵/🕓wise and that my wife (hates it but) lets me go.

    Here’s a taste of what I learned at the first three.

    The first question most people ask about a silent retreat is “Wait, you can’t talk AT ALL?” That’s what attracted me to it. It sounded extreme, like maybe I could master something.

    While Noble Silence (as it’s called) is really important, it stopped feeling extreme after a day.

    Another attractive feature of Noble Silence is no phones/devices, which I was particularly interested in.

    Inexplicably, this wasn’t enforced heavily where I was. There were people with phones. To me, that’s bananas. Devices are infinitely “noisier” than any voice could ever be.

    My first ever silent retreat was 5 days at Wonderwell in New Hampshire with Lama Willa Miller and Anam Thubten.

    While I had practiced (some seasons more than others) for 15 years prior to the retreat, it’s a wholly different experience practicing 6-10 hours a day for ~a week.

    At my first silent retreat, I confirmed what I had only surmised or theorized in years of practice: That I am not, in fact, my thoughts. The final confirmation was in a moment of deep discomfort and true anger… that I found fascinating, funny, and knew I could watch forever.

    It’s a clichĂŠ that meditation experiences can’t be adequately explained in words, only pointed toward, but I finally understood the truth of this after that retreat with Anam Thubten and Willa Miller. They helped weaken, for the first time, my attachment to intellectual mind.

    At my second silent retreat, this one 7 days with Lopon (now Lama) Liz Monson, Camille Hykes, and Bob Morrison, I learned that there are no bounds to Awareness, nothing to develop, no effort to “get there.” Complete Awareness is our natural state. Practice is just noticing.

    At my third silent retreat, this one with Lama John Makransky, Lama Liz Monson, and Bob Morrison, something broke in me. While I am an atheist (seeing no evidence of any deities), I had an experience equivalent to a sudden belief in God. No practical distinction. I’ll explain…

    What became clear to me is that the source of every feeling, sensation, thought, care, fear, love, worry, and action was 1. not me and, 2. (the kicker) something like pure compassionate energy. With zero effort. The natural state. Nothing to cultivate. Now I see it everywhere.

    I don’t know what I would have learned at this year’s retreat, but I’m trying to do something like it with a few workday-long solo retreats at our church (my wife likes church, I’m warming to it).

    I’ll likely write more about meditation in the future and the techniques that have worked for me. I have a lot of opinions about accessible methods to get into practice. But I really can’t recommend a silent retreat enough, to anyone. I mean, why wouldn’t you do it if you could?

  • "Content"

    Here’s a post in which I will attempt to destroy the word “content.” First, I acknowledge that this war has already been lost. Most of us who write, filmmake, shoot photos, teach courses, make radio, or do anything creative have already surrendered.

    I will not.

    I’m not so selfish to demand anyone else die on this hill with me. I judge no one. We all have to do what’s best for ourselves and our loved ones. Our culture makes it hard to treat the work of writers, podcasters, journalists, teachers, etc. with the minimum respect it deserves.

    The first reason this usage of the word “content” is so bad is that it was created by advertisers to refer to “you know, that stuff that’s between our ads?” As a person who crafts advertising for a living, the irony that I’m bringing this complaint is not lost on me, but…

    …it’s particularly devastating because, for 15 years in commercial production, I’ve been trying to spread the gospel to every customer that, actually, their money would be better spent making something good, you know, like the stuff their usual ads run before and after.

    Advertisers, like everyone else in this economic system, have an incentive to commoditize every part of their value chain that isn’t them, so they deployed the most demeaning word they could: “Content.” You know, like “filler” or “noise.”

    The dictionary definition of “content”: n. That which is contained; the thing or things held, included, or comprehended within a limit or limits. You know, THAT WHICH, the THING OR THINGS, GUYS. We may as well just use the word “garbage.”

    The second reason I hate this use of the word “content” is that its actual meaning has great utility in the creation of what the world is calling content 🤦‍♂️. Works of art and media are often discussed in terms of their “form and content.”

    When writing a script, discussing a concept or idea, etc., it’s helpful to be able to refer to the “content” of the thing as separate from the form of that thing. But now the word just means everything created across all forms, all media, and all values of quality and intention.

    The last reason I hate “content”: Creating good stories and artwork requires putting yourself into it. I promise I’m not being precious about this. I don’t think you need work really hard or take things really seriously to make something good. But you do need to give of yourself.

    You, your point of view, your unique mix of interests, experiences, conflicts, talents, skills, DNA, intersections of weird-ass stuff—that cannot be commodified. Ever. When you internalize “content” as the objective, you orient yourself to creative work in the worst possible way.

    We’re entering a golden age for artists, storytellers, and teachers of all kinds. They are inventing new media and genres and the very means of creation and expression. As easy as it is to take that whole rich landscape and call it “content creators,” I’m not going to do that.

  • Volunteer Creative Work

    Creative workers are, for some reason, the one class of workers that lots of people think it’s totally cool to solicit volunteer work from. Here’s a thread about when and how to offer volunteer work as a creative person.

    First Rule: If anyone but you initiates, immediate NO.

    Here are the conditions under which you might consider volunteer creative work:

    1. You dictate the terms of engagement
    2. You control the creative work itself
    3. You believe in the people and/or the cause

    Before I elaborate… more on solicitations of volunteer creative work.

    When was the last time you saw “I’m going to have a competition to see which cleaning company can clean my house the most thoroughly. Winner gets recognized as winning.”

    “Hey, you guys got mops, right?”

    But people do this to creative workers all the time.

    There’s an assumption that creative work isn’t really work, that it’s just fun and you’re lucky to be doing it.

    While it may be fun and we may be lucky to be doing it, it’s work, and as a matter of fact, it’s usually really time- and focus-intensive work.

    Making matters worse, the time and attention needed to complete a creative task is always somewhat unclear (unless you’re a caricature artist at a carnival with a definite start and end time, or comparable).

    This is why the first rule is so important: You dictate the terms.

    “1. You dictate the terms” means you decide exactly how much time you’re going to spend on the volunteer work, when, how, and what you need from them. All of it.

    And because you are the creative person being asked for free work, you MUST absolutely control the creative choices.

    “2. You control the creative work” is NOT OPTIONAL. If they want to tell you how to best do your job, they’re welcome to pay you. A bit of irony here: Keeping creative ownership will get better results for them anyway (you know it). And you want results, because of the last rule—

    “3. You believe in the people and/or the cause.” This is how you start. Find the coolest, most bad-ass nonprofit in town (or in the world) that needs their story told better (this is most of them). Find what inspires YOU and go to them and say “Here’s what I want to do for you.”

    This is what I did 10 years back when I moved to Wilmington, Delaware with no clients, no contacts, no prospects. I sought out the coolest nonprofit in town. I called them. After their initial shock, they said “Well… actually we need a new website, and a video sounds nice too.”

    Now, not only was I suddenly connected to some great, interesting people with whom I’ve made longterm friendships, but it turns out they were already connected to other cool, interesting people.

    I found myself working on a website with the coolest kids in town, House Industries.

    I made videos I was proud of, with full creative control, about a workforce development nonprofit whose model is the most successful in the nation, and now I’m on the board (and yes, the relationships I built there have also led to lots of paid work).

    So, to sum up: Creative volunteer work CAN be a really good thing to do, but make sure 1. You are the one who sets the clear terms of the commitment, 2. You control the creative (COMPLETELY), and 3. You’re helping great people and/or a great cause.

    Anything else is exploitation.

    And giant, unlimitedly-capitalized brands (like Doritos) who hold “contests” to solicit people to make free ads for them are reprehensible scum, and this is not debatable.

  • The Year of Just Ring The Bell Again

    My Theme for 2021 (per the Theme System from Myke Hurley and CGP Grey) is The Year of Just Ring The Bell Again. It’s a mouthful, but it doubles as a mantra and an answer to every question, doubt, or jam.

    It is a simple repudiation of the patterns that have kept me stuck.

    I’ve spent my adult life agonizing over making good things. This has caused me to not make lots of things. And since making lots of things is strongly correlated with making good things, this focus on making good things has ironically caused me to not make good things.

    When COVID hit and my production company got sidelined for a few months, I fell into my old systems-obsessed patterns and started searching for the RIGHT WAY to FINALLY put all the stuff into the world that I’ve been holding on to for years.

    Avoiding the vague, sickly feeling that I was treading familiar ground (going all in on systems/tools for doing great work as opposed to just doing it), I stumbled upon @fortelabs’s course via my honeymoon with Roam Research and my rekindled obsession with the Zettelkasten.

    I recoiled from Building a Second Brain as from a hot flame. My answer could not be another course, another system. And I hate this marketing. And I hate Evernote. And I already know all this stuff. I’ve read/thought about it more than anyone, maybe more than Tiago—and yet…

    So I read a bunch of Tiago’s writing. And it gave me pause. There was something undeniably different about his approach. It had all the trappings of the systems I was accustomed to getting buried in but it seemed to very intentionally not include any Cleanly Satisfaction™.

    Cleanly Satisfaction™ is the cocaine drip included with every book/course/system in the Productivity Porn Industrial Complex. It’s a numbing, syrupy tincture that provides temporary satisfaction from the maintenance of a system even when one is getting nothing from that system.

    Tiago’s non-stop focus appeared to be on designing systems that take as little effort as possible to maintain and that work especially well when you do nothing to maintain them. The point is simply to Press Publish as soon and as often as possible. Anything else is a distraction.

    Since taking #BASB (and @david_perell’s sister course), I’ve sent a newsletter for 20 weeks in a row. It isn’t always good, but good isn’t the focus. It’s not that good doesn’t matter. Of course quality matters. But focusing on good produces the only thing worse than bad: nothing

    To paraphrase James Clear, if there’s no regularity, no habit, no routine in place, then there’s nothing to optimize. I’ve been focused on the optimization of optimization for too long. It’s been fun. I’ve learned a lot. But I haven’t honored my innate desire to create and share.

    And to quote someone very prolific (and very cancelled): 90% of life is just showing up.

    Just Ring The Bell Again is a really simple idea. It turns a question like “Is this good enough yet?” into “What will it take to press publish in the next twenty minutes?”

    The Year of Just Ring The Bell Again doesn’t only apply to work (focusing so much on Work is another of my unskillful tendencies). “Shoot, I don’t have an hour to do my full workout” becomes “Hit the bike for 20 minutes.” Just. Ring. The. Bell. Again.

    I’ve already started The Year of Just Ring The Bell Again because waiting for an arbitrary date to Just Ring The Bell Again is not living in the spirit of Just Ring The Bell Again. I’m ringing the bell every day, gaining momentum…..

    Followup: The most pleasant surprise: It’s not hard.

  • 24 Frames Per Second

    Here’s a why 24 is the best number of frames per second for everything but sports and gaming. It has to do with a fundamentally broken default assumption about the motion picture medium.

    Many of us weren’t home for the holidays to help loved ones turn off motion smoothing. SlippySmoothSparkleMotion+ is still on by default (even as Rian Johnson and others keep up the good fight). There’s a debate about why motion smoothing is so offensive. I’m here to settle it.

    Before we get to the answer… No, the “soap opera effect” isn’t a result of historical conditioning. 24 frames per second isn’t better because “that’s just what we’re used to in movies.” It’s not about some arbitrary association.

    A few movies who shall not be named have come out in recent years at 48 frames per second. The crowd response was universal hatred, thank god, but Hollywood will probably keep trying… I mean, it seems like MORE frames per second should be BETTER, right? More REALISTIC… right?

    This is the broken assumption that most people have about movies: That the reproduction quality is supposed to be like reality—that the closer it gets to reality, the better. Under this assumption, 120fps would be best, as it’s close to the resolvable limit of our eyes/brains.

    But when people watch a movie at just 48fps (2x the magical 24) they ask “Why do I hate this? Why do I feel so yucky and uncomfortable. And why is that actor wearing so much weird makeup?” The whole movie viewing experience is broken. Why is this?

    It’s because motion pictures are nothing like reality. The medium is simply not designed that way. You sit in a chair and look at a rectangle cut out of a view through a lens at a focal length different from your eye. Then, every 2-5 seconds, IT CUTS TO A TOTALLY DIFFERENT VIEW.

    Optimally experiencing a movie requires that the viewer be in a dream-like state, able to suspend disbelief with regard to the drama of the characters and the the dangers in the world of the film WHILE rapidly parsing this wildly complex visual language of cutting.

    24 frames per second is the perfect framerate because it’s JUST at the cadence where every kind of motion can be adequately represented while staying as far away as possible from our eyes’ true ability to perceive motion. This allows us to experience the medium as intended.

    The Uncanny Valley doesn’t just apply to a robot. It applies to the experience of a medium as well. The closer a motion picture’s framerate approaches our perceptual capability, the more dominant the subtle details of our visual systems become, taking us OUT of the movie.

    In terms of resolution, there’s a limit to what our eyes can resolve on a rectangle some distance from our face and we more or less reached that limit the moment film was invented (we still haven’t done better than film, an argument for another thread). But not so with motion.

    SlideySmoothPuddingMotion+ TV-makers and movie studios trying to come up with justifications for the digital theatres (their own coffins) that they designed will persist in their attempts to break the film medium with higher frame rates, but in the end, they will be defeated.

  • 99 cents

    Pricing everything at $19.99 or $149.95 or $1,999.99 is just one of many blaring markers that our cynical cultural illness is late-stage, but for some reason, it’s particularly egregious in its obvious contempt for human beings.

    It’s one thing to use a marketing tactic shown to convince XX% more people to purchase your product. It’s another to put a tactic that exploits one of our dumbest vulnerabilities right in front of our faces.

    Pricing a condo at $299,000 is saying exactly this: “We both know this condo costs $300k but studies have shown that you are a pitifully dumb animal, and that even with this lie right in front of your face, you’ll still think this is a better price.”

    I’m not judging anyone. This tendency is built in to me too. Every time I’m pricing a proposal, I want to round just below the nearest Big Number. But calling someone a dumb animal to their face isn’t the basis for a respectful relationship.

    I’d love it if deceptive pricing and other cynical tactics could be seen for what they are: very uncool, contemptuous, abusive, and not worth the marginal gains that come from their use.

  • Quoteblock: A Spec for the Open Web

    The most exciting implication of Roam Research block references is the design of a protocol for the open web built on the blockification of original sources, allowing clean/easy block attribution, connection, and translation into different formats. We could call it Quoteblock.

    You can think of Quoteblock as “super advanced retweeting, but not for tweets.” No permission is needed to build this. The spec could be as simple as somedomain.org/blog/some-post’’p3-p5 (the ‘’ is actually consecutive apostrophes, allowed in URLs but rare to find in the wild).

    Since Quoteblock is based on document permalinks and the semantic block structure of those documents, somedomain.org/blog/some-post’’p3-p5 is already a unique identifier with its ownership/provenance built in. So how would it render? This is where Quoteblock gets fun…

    Using tweet embeds as reference, Quoteblock renders a blockquote of the specified block or blocks, also pulling basic styles and an attribution logo from the origin, maybe some page context. Quoteblock is about to get crazy powerful with the Quoteblock Graph and Formats.

    The Quoteblock Graph is where the #roamcult comes in, because honestly they are the ones most qualified to design how the Graph should work. You could design it without them, but that would be an unforgivable mistake.

    Quoteblock Formats is where we introduce something that doesn’t exist currently: The ability to translate blocks, not just to other languages but also to other MEDIA. The simplest example, what is an image’s alt-text other than a “translation” of that image into writing?

    What is a transcript of a video but an alternative format of that video? Why shouldn’t I be able to explore available formats/translations at the block level? And if they don’t exist, why shouldn’t I be able to PROVIDE THEM? The value of Quoteblock Formats grows exponentially.

    I first introduced the Quoteblock concept to @Bardia on a call when he reached out to talk about how I was using Roam for screenwriting. The team at Roam Research is THE model toolmaker when it comes to engagement with the people using the tool. There’s a reason for the #roamcult beyond the power of the tool itself.

    The other reason the #roamcult in particular will want Quoteblock to exist is that, when the Great Roam Unification occurs someday in the not-too-distant future, our references won’t need to be based on a million copy-pasted duplicates.

    By the way, there’s no reason that Quoteblock needs to be limited only to the web, it’s just the easiest place to start. You can just as easily imagine referencing scenes from a movie or sections of a podcast by timecode, or a paragraph from a book by chapter and paragraph.

    On the open web with Quoteblock, source material is truly source material, originating at its own permalink/owner, creating a referenceable “shadow graph” for every block/primary source on the web. I can’t build this. I hope someone in the #roamcult can and will. I can help.

    I was inspired to put this out by @malcolmocean’s thinking. I can help design if #roamcult takes it and runs with it, but I’m not the one to actually do it, nor is my company at the moment. I do have the @QuoteblockSpec Twitter and quoteblock.io domain for the community.

  • Obsolete Christmas Gifts

    Since the 80s, the most expensive Christmas gifts are usually the ones that get to the landfill the soonest. Now that Moore’s Law has run its course, it’s time to banish Instant Obsolescence as a feature of all digital tech (software too).

    First, there’s absolutely nothing intrinsic to digital products that they need to have the shelf stability of an avocado, but because tech has moved so quickly and we got in the habit of knowing we’d get the next one soon anyway, we’ve accepted some badly designed products.

    Dieter Rams is one of the chief inspirations to Jony Ive. It’s sort of crazy to think that not one of the products that Ive designed (the most successful commercial products ever made) would pass Rams’s Principles of Good Design (#7: Good design is long-lasting). Can’t blame him.

    Just a few years ago, we could still see the pixels on our screens. Processors struggled enough for us to notice latency. For an ordinary person interacting with technology, practical, noticeable progress stopped around the iPhone X. When did you last think “This phone is slow.”

    Unless you’re a video editor/3D animator/game designer/developer, you’re unlikely to see a noticeable difference on desktop ever again either. Latency is gone. Resolution is beyond our ability to visually resolve it.

    The resolution of the screen in many living rooms is now higher than it is in most movie theatres (and if the people are honest, most of them can’t tell the difference from when it was only 1080HD). (Related note: There’s never been a better time to buy a TV)

    These diminishing digital returns would appear to be bad news for an economy that relies on people buying a new $1,000 phone every two years and throwing the previous one away, but the products that now need to emerge are truly exciting.

    We’re (finally) seeing meaningful increases in battery life (and maybe soon, we’ll even be able to replace a battery, imagine that). How would you build a phone to last 50 years? And how would you build software knowing that devices could last that long?

    What if people working in manufacturing could be building things that would be handed down a generation or two? What would that do to the economy? To culture? What about all mending/repairing that would be needed as hardy devices wear over the years?

    What about single-purpose devices that do one thing (writing, for example) really really well (and last 100 years) instead of trying to jam every single human activity into a one-size-fits-all glass slab?

    And then (I know we’re not here yet) what if we could get computing power needs down so far that devices could be mechanically powered like the watch I’m wearing, powered only by a spring and an escapement? This is the opposite of steampunk, by the way, because there’s no steam.

    One of my Christmas wishes for the world is that designers internalize (and rejoice in) their new freedom from creating throwaway things. These chips and screens are finally ready. We did it. It’s time to make the next generation of digital tools: Talismans that last a lifetime.

  • Two Pomodoro Tweaks

    For people who’ve tried the Pomodoro (decide on task, set timer, work on for length of timer, take break) but haven’t stuck with it because their BorgBrain adapted: I have two tweaks that make it work flawlessly for me, one from Kourosh Dini and one from Complice.

    He doesn’t call it this, but Kourosh Dini’s approach to the Pomodoro is revolutionary in its simplicity, but it makes all the difference, especially if you’re interested in non-coercive methods of encouraging your best work. We’ll call it the Non-Coercive Pomodoro.

    The Non-Coercive Pomodoro goes like this: Rather than “I MUST work on (or worse, finish) this task during this pomodoro” … it’s “I CAN work on this task I’ve decided is important to me during this pomodoro OR I can sit in silence and do nothing.”

    This Non-Coercive/Non-Drill Sergeant approach to the pomodoro opens a secret door to flow. In the traditional method, there’s an internal battle, C’MON DO THE THING, and the part of you that is a good judge of character is like HOW ABOUT YOU SUCK I’M GONNA GO CHECK MY EMAIL.

    In the Non-Coercive Pomodoro, you are allowed, in fact encouraged, to sit in silence. For the full length of the timer. Or do the task. There’s nothing to rebel against, no mean Drill Sergeant to hide from. And the best part is that silence is often exactly what your task needs.

    The Non-Coercive Pomodoro builds an awareness practice into work, because when you’re not busy digging a spur into your ribs or numbing the sting with diminishing dopamine hits, your surroundings and internal voices become really vivid (“turning up the gain” per Michael Ashcroft).

    The other Pomodoro tweak is the Communal Pomodoro: Doing pomodoros with a partner. Both friends and strangers have advantages and disadvantages here, by the way. Best off-the-shelf virtual ways to do this are with Complice or Focusmate.

  • Conversational Compression

    This post is my response to Nat Eliason’s tweet:

    I agree with Nat but want to acknowledge one paradox and one caveat. Paradox: Conversational radio is by far the lowest time/cost medium to produce, yet, for some of us, it’s the densest in value. Caveat: “Some of us” might be the 8%-24% who learn best by listening/arguing.

    Expanding on the radio/podcast paradox: Conversational “compression” (compressing a person’s point of view/expertise into a timebound conversation) takes less creation effort/time than any other summarization technique. We naturally do it when we speak to one another.

    Editing conversational radio/podcasts is nicely constrained: Take out the parts that are redundant or slow things down. You lose almost nothing. Editing writing, on the other hand, can be hours of focused effort, reworking over and over, often losing quite a lot…

    Conversation (with a curious partner) has built-in advantages: followup questions, emphasis, clarity checks, and specific emotional tones that require more talent and intention (time) to convey in writing.

    Expanding on the the radio/podcast caveat: Most people (yes, most) get very little from listening to conversation. They are different from Nat and me. My wife is one of them. On the other hand, my wife can glance at/smell a book for 11 seconds and explain everything it says…

    Books require a lot of effort for me, because my cognitive style is a conversation between warring factions in my head, and they frequently get louder than the voice narrating the book I’m reading to them.

    On the other hand, listening to a conversation is effortless and natural for me. The voices on the radio lead the conversation in my head, which I engage with naturally, reacting/thinking of my own responses and immediately being brought back by the next beat in the conversation.

  • Baby Personal Studio Prototype

    In his newsletter, David Perell asked for “the Sonos for home audio-video setups—without the wires and complexity—with the ease and quality of an iPhone camera,” and offered to help/invest in such a company.

    1. His assumptions are dangerously wrong.
    2. I built a prototype.

    Ep2 KcZWwAgkTmi

    The two biggest problems with virtual conversation, EQUALLY catastrophic to human communication, are Poor Audio Quality and Lack of Eye Contact. Poor Camera Quality and Bad Lighting, while problematic, barely affect communication, so they aren’t problems unless you’re recording.

    Audio is a solved problem (more on that later), but any home a/v product that doesn’t FIRST address Lack of Eye Contact is useless. You may as well buy a garbage Logitech webcam.

    But there’s good news: Eye Contact is also a solved problem. All you need is a teleprompter.

    Ep2 LhQWwAEX5RB

    While Apple tries to solve the Lack of Eye Contact problem with (creepy) software that shifts pixels to move your eyeline, teleprompters already solve this 100% perfectly. Errol Morris, the best talking-head documentary filmmaker ever, used them to build his famous Interrotron.

    Okay, so every desk needs a teleprompter. Obviously. But we have a bigness problem: Teleprompters are giant and unwieldy with sharp edges and too many parts and people don’t understand them. There are approximately 12 people in the world who are going to put them on their desks.

    What we need first is a really compact teleprompter. What, you say? That already exists? No it doesn’t. Teleprompters built for phones are useless, because a) phones can’t be second monitors for computers, and b) who wants to set up their phone on a thing for every video call?

    But iPad prompters do exist and iPads can be used as second monitors… This is true! I spoke with Adam Lisagor and Charles Forman about this in the summer, but at the time you couldn’t reverse the image (necessary because mirrors), even with hacky utilities like SwitchResX.

    Of course, Adam Lisagor knows all the nerds, so he was able to get LunaDisplay to make an AstroPad feature for flipping/reversing the iPad-as-a-second-monitor, which is awesome, but… Non-nerds are still never going to do this. Too many components/wires/questions.

    The actual solution to desktop audio/video must have:

    1. A small footprint (less that 6 to 8 inches), or even better, sit on top of an existing monitor or iMac.
    2. A dedicated teleprompter screen.
    3. A dedicated camera (16mm sensor or better) with mic input.
    4. A single cable.

    Ep2 M7WW4AM7OQy

    I built this prototype because I need it for me and colleagues. It solves everything, but your mission (should you choose to accept it) is to:

    1. Get this mess into one beautiful 6-inch box
    2. Get image/audio to and power/monitor from the computer on one USB-C
    3. Make it less than $1,000

    I’ll follow up with a list of parts and a video I shot of building this thing. For the record: I’m not saying I used the best parts for this prototype. I just used what was lying around my office and some extra bits I got from Amazon. A hacksaw was involved. You can do better.

    I didn’t address audio, so here’s the entire secret to unlock all the magic of good audio in your life forever:

    1. Put (pretty much any) microphone—
    2. —close to your mouth and—
    3. —set the level so it sounds good.
    4. If you can’t do 3., Google “adjust audio levels for “

    I also didn’t address lighting. We know this product will have an integrated ringlight but the cool kids will not use it (because it is uncool). There’s no one lighting secret. It’s a nuanced thing. But you can’t go wrong with a large, soft light (window or softbox) 45° off axis.

    I also never really covered the camera. That’s because as long as it has a sensor 16mm or larger, it’s not that important. In my opinion, the optimal camera would have a Super-16 sensor (like the Blackmagic Micro Cinema Camera I’m using) with a fixed, wide open 16mm lens.

    I have little desire to build a company making a baby teleprompter/camera combo (which you could call the Eyeliner™️ if you wanted to). If you’re looking for an idea that needs to exist, I hope this thread correcting for David Perell’s forgivable but grievous errors is helpful.

    Ep2 OUzW4AUf2kw

    There are already companies trying to build solutions in the home audio/video space.

    If there’s no integrated teleprompter, they blew it.

    If the camera sensor is less than 16mm, they blew it (less so, but they still blew it). And this includes any magic inside-the-screen tech.

    Here’s what I actually look like through the prototype (totally dark, quick in OBS, no color, not well-lit, etc.). The things to notice are a) you don’t need a big sensor to have nice lensing (this one is Super-16mm), and b) eye contact is everything, even in a poorly-lit room.

    Here’s a closer look at the prototype minilittlebaby teleprompter. I’m probably not going to post a whole video because it won’t even be helpful because you’ll need to come up with your own versions of some of the parts anyway (or just fashion your own out of wood or something)

  • 94% of trips to HomeGoods are about finding a reasonably priced mirror. They should rebrand as Discount Mirrors & More.

    It’s like how RadioShack survived for decades just being the place to get cord adapter dinguses.

  • Even if my horizons expand to include the whole world, I doubt that “any porch on a rainy day” will ever leave my Top 5 Favorite Places to Be.

  • I’m suspicious of and intimidated by people with emotional certainty, who seem to know exactly how they’re feeling.

  • Ways to address me in order from least to most offensive:

    • #5 Sonofabitch
    • #4 Asshole
    • #3 Chief
    • #2 Boss
    • #1 Big Guy

  • We started these letter generations pretty late in the alphabet so I guess the next generation will be Generation Roman Numeral Lowercase i.

  • Analogies for the Utility of Plain Text Syntaxes like Markdown

    I find it really hard to explain the (life-changing) utility of plain text syntax for writing, so over time I’ll post some different analogies. First Attempt (it’s all downhill from here): Markdown and Fountain allow you to assemble the panini before you put it on the panini press.

    Traditional rich text, paper-page-based writing software like Microsoft Word and Final Draft is like making a sandwich while it’s hot on the press. You’re constantly having to peel apart goopy cheesiness to get in some other ingredient you forgot/decided you wanted to add later.

    Markdown/Fountain is like assembling all the fresh, crisp elements of the panini and working with/reassembling them until you’re happy with the construction, then you pop it on the press and voila! (or in this case “eccola!”)

    Bonus MAGIC: Even if you’ve already popped it in the press, you can pop it back out of the press and it’s refreshingly cold, crisp, and restackable again.

  • The official religion of the establishment ruling class can be summed up in this one central article of Faith: Human beings are essentially lazy, selfish, and no good trash.

    This is, of course, projection.

  • The jury is officially in: America’s leaders would rather shovel most of our citizens and the economy into a furnace than consider for even 4 seconds an exception to 100% of decisions made solely through their core controlling belief that humans are no good, lazy, and selfish.

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