I knew an old couple that sat many evenings out on their porch. Sometimes both, sometimes one. They’d sit longer into the night than seemed reasonable, as if they were waiting for something that never came. It wasn’t until after the disaster that I believed I understood why.
Every subsequent evening, almost the entire street went, and sat, and talked, and shared, and played, for hours, around THEIR porch. Stubborn habit? Or had they just never forgotten a normal that everyone else briefly remembered?
Source
I Love Me Some Ammo Against Encanto
[C]onsider that the only character in Encanto… who has experienced any significant real-life adventure is the heroine’s grandmother. And Abuela’s adventures, which happened long before the movie takes place, are portrayed as a traumatic backstory that results in her stifling her grandchildren’s self-actualisation. In effect, it’s a Disney princess adventure about the impossibility, under modern conditions, of making Disney princess adventures.
Mary Harrington
Using a Scythe
So great an art can only be learnt by continual practice; but this much is worth writing down, that, as in all good work, to know the thing with which you work is the core of the affair. Good verse is best written on good paper with an easy pen, not with a lump of coal on a whitewashed wall. The pen thinks for you; and so does the scythe mow for you if you treat it honourably and in a manner that makes it recognise its service.
Hilaire Belloc, Hills and the Sea
Iteration in the Classroom
So here’s my one small idea: I’d begin to teach iteration. Iteration as a subject, equivalent to math, science, history, language, art, music, etc. How do you make something better over time? How do you return to something that you’ve done and see it with fresh eyes? How do you apply new perspective to an old problem? Where do you find that new perspective? What trails do you follow and which do you ignore? How do you smash the familiar and reassemble something new from the same pieces?
Once you’re done with school, and cast out into the world, your job is likely to involve iteration. No matter what you’re doing, you’re probably going to have to do something over. And often times again and again. You rarely simply deliver something and move on. You’re asked to refactor, to build on it, to “make it better”.
Jason Fried
I’m not sure about teaching iteration as a subject in itself, but it should definitely be a part of every class. Speaking for myself, the main difficulty in teaching iteration is giving students specific, insightful feedback. In the real world, your work will be evaluated by your boss, your family, your customers, the world at large. If you don’t do a good job, you’re forced to try again and do better. In school, you’re lucky if your teacher looks at your work with anything more than a passing glance.
Boys and Girls and Computers
Among the most consistent and largest of all psychological sex differences is the “people vs. things” dichotomy. On average, boys are more attracted to things, machines, and complex systems that can be manipulated, while girls are more attracted to people; they are more interested in what those people are thinking and feeling.
So, in the early phases of the technological entertainment revolution, boys invested more and more of their time into computers, computer programming, and video games. It was only when social media became popular in the late 2000s that girls flocked over to the virtual world and began spending as much time as boys interacting with computers and smartphones.
Jonathan Haidt
Many issues of Haidt’s newsletter focus on the crisis of female teenage mental health caused (probably) by social media addiction. In this recent one, he takes a look at the boys. His conclusion? The reason boys don’t seem as affected by social media is that boys’ mental health has been suffering since the 1970s.
Like Hotcakes
Ear, Hand, Foot had a good first week. I’ve fulfilled over a hundred orders in the last six days.
Don’t wait to order! We only ordered 500 copies for our first printing and almost half of them are sold. And the Christmas shopping season has only just started. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a big fat “Out of Stock” message on the website soon.
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The animators really explored the studio space in this one.
Before All Things Else
What distinguishes [the artist] here from the man who works to live is, I think, his desire to see the fulfilment of the work. Whether it is possible for a machine-worker to feel creatively about his routine job I do not know; but I suspect that it is, provided and so long as the worker eagerly desires that before all things else the work shall be done. What else causes the armaments worker to labour passionately when he knows that the existence of his country is threatened, but that his heart travels along the endless band with the machine parts and that his imagination beholds the fulfilment of the work in terms, not of money, but of the blazing gun itself, charged with his love and fear. As the author of Ecclesiasticus says, he “watches to finish the work”; for once, that is, he sees the end-product of his toil exactly as the artist always sees it, in a vision of Idea, Energy, and Power. It is unfortunate that so little effort should be made by Church or State to show him the works of peace in the same terms. Is the man, for example, engaged in the mass-production of lavatory cisterns encouraged to bring to his daily monotonous toil the vision splendid of an increasingly hygienic world? I doubt it; yet there is much merit in sanitary plumbing—more, if you come to think of it, than there is in warfare.
Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
Work by the Standard of Eternity
That the eyes of all workers should behold the integrity of the work is the sole means to make that work good in itself and so good for mankind. This is only another way of saying that the work must be measured by the standard of eternity; or that it must be done for God first and foremost; or that the Energy must faithfully manifest forth the Idea; or, theologically, that the Son does the will of the Father.
Dorothy Sayers, The Mind of the Maker
Those With Ears to Hear
A passing hostile comment in the second-century pagan critic Celsus shows that the chants used in Christian worship (which he seems to have heard) were not only unusual to his pagan ears but so beautiful that he actually resented their emotive effect as an instrument for dulling the critical faculty.
Henry Chadwick, The Early Church
Christian Leithart 