LATA 65 is making deviant artists out of the young people over 65 years old of Portugal. If you want to make some public art of your own, I highly recommend picking up some Krink K-60s or K42s for making your own marks. I’ve been crushing on this MTA-inspired box set.
I will endeavor to take joy in having this chance—the chance to be tested in the name of values I hold dear. In the end, Your Honor, the more frightening my future, the broader the smile with which I look at it.
— Yegor Zhukov
A powerful sentiment from a Russian college student on trial for “extremism” from the full translation of his closing statement.
Though Austin is nowhere near the right temperature for snow, I have been thinking about snow, watching videos about snow. Pray for snow.
In one of the newsletters I receive to help fill my collection with internet ephemera, and help me make Bird Mail for y’all, I came across an article about where we focus our curiosity. Why aren’t we curious about the things we want to be curious about? is a question I ask myself a lot. I have explored the rabbit holes of the internet in search of the mundane and the trivial. I fall victim to the idea that though this knowledge is technically useless to me now it might be valuable to me next week or month—so I might as well read these three tabs, and watch a youtube video about it now, right? I explore many things that don’t teach me things of value, I just think I should know them, but I don’t know why.
Instagram is a sinkhole for this kind of junk food information, Tumblr used to be, and way back when I first had reliable access to a browser of my own it was StumbleUpon that stole hours and hours of my nights taking me all over the internet. They all fed my brain an endless supply of novel and mostly trivial information. I would squirrel things away in bookmarks, Pinboard, Pocket, or Instapaper thinking it would be valuable to know or come back to as reference material. Except I rarely comeback. There is too much new.
I seem to always be adding to my collection, but reviewing far less frequently. There are some things that I come back to monthly or yearly, information that becomes knowledge because of its longer term value instead of its short-term dopamine hit from learning something new. I try to include those in Bird Mail when/where they make sense. Though I will not stop looking for more information, more of that internet ephemera, that I so enjoy collection, I am now thinking more about where it comes from and its long-term value. I’m not sure if that means shifting focus to longer-form writing, or somewhere else. I’ll let you know as I figure it out.
I love the idea of Future Fonts. Get in early on some cool typefaces from great designers.
(via swissmiss.)
Bird Mail 015
Alison Pollack’s Fungi In lieu of NaNoWriMo, CJ Chilvers committed to writing about one subject, anxiety, every...
Something to believe in:
Writing things down isn't just about keeping a record; it's about a deeper level of clarity that the finer articulation releases.
Nicholas Bate's Jagged Thoughts for Jagged Times always delivers.
Social networks have amplified this desire, at the same time they simplified the execution. Now you can waste time and dignity instead of money. Who can you tear down? How much time can you waste? What’s it worth to you to have more followers than the others?
It’s a lousy game, because if you lose, you lose, and if you win, you also lose.
The only way to do well is to refuse to play.
Earning trust outperforms earning envy.
— Seth Godin - The never-ending rachet of conspicuous consumption
Emphasis on the last line is my own, and it is what has me thinking the most. Where do you earn trust on the internet? Social media seems like the defacto place to do it, but the benefits seem less and less as time goes on.
With all the noise on the internet, how can you be found, or heard, so that people can start trusting you?