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Making for the micro
People always made art. Now, we just make it and share it in abundance. But all the noise makes it impossible for aspiring creators to stand out. On the flip side, the bell curve is widening from the masses to the niches. We can build an audience around sub-genres at scale for the first time […]
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A brain without a body
Artificial intelligence is like a brain without a body. Instead of billions of neurons, computers contain bits and bytes of varying voltage levels so they can do stuff like provide directions, select and edit our best photos, or beat humans at chess. Deep Blue beat Kasparov not by matching his insight and intuition but by overwhelming […]
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Procrastinators can be finishers
We are told to ship it; release it before it’s finished, get it out of our hands so we can get the feedback we need to iterate and perfect our product. It’s a grueling process that fires up the anxiety. Is this thing going to work or go out to the void? In his latest […]
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Alan Watts on the law of reversed effort
“When you try to stay on the surface of the water, you sink; but when you try to sink, you float’ and that ‘insecurity is the result of trying to be secure.” Alan Watts on the ‘law of reversed effort’, also known as the ‘backwards law’ when doing what’s right make things wrong (as featured […]
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Stem the tide
Automatons are soulless; they operate on voltage levels. However, humans can also be cruel, drugging the thinking out of their mind. Evil is infectious; it spreads like a fungus. The only way to beat a moral coward is to drain their morbid curiosity with a thoughtful mind. The accumulation of progressive effort stems the tide […]
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Why everyone should blog
Everyone should blog. You do not have to publish 500 words a day. You do not even need to post at all. In fact, writing comes easier when you can write for yourself, in private. Use a smartphone journal like the Day One app or the ever-popular Morning Pages Journal where you write by hand. […]
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When will digital art get its due?
Digital art is easier to create. Photoshop, Prisma filters — anyone can be an artist by throwing a filter on an image. People associate handwork with hard work over hardware and software. To quote journalist David Carr: “show me what you’ve made with your own two dirty little hands. I don’t really care what you […]
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How to make up your mind and decide
Decisions are multi-faceted. They can be manifested as desires, little bets about how you want things to go. After all, all believing is betting. However, you can also decide against your best wishes. No one wants to put a sick dog to sleep. Difficult decisions paralyze people’s judgment. “Sometimes it’s not what I want to do […]
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This professor describes the future educated person
Dear digital denizens, please rest easy. That so-called ‘internet addiction’ you have is an evolution of what humans have been doing along — curating, collecting, and sharing. We just do it with more often with the assistance of our screens. According to professor Kenneth Goldsmith at the University of Pennsylvania, “an educated person in the […]