Twentymiglia
There are many philosophers who call out in our digital Agora. Naval Ravikant is probably one worth listening to.
His “Twitterstorm” How to Get Rich (without getting lucky) has been retweeted over 26 thousand times and despite the click-baity title, Naval shares a lot of quality thoughts about the nature of partnerships, creative work, value, and happiness.
He draws on some pretty heady sources to make his point, including the work of Ben Graham, Emerson, and Lao Tzu. He often disparages the conventional wisdom on productivity and favors a much more natural attitude toward workflow.
I am not one to recommend Netflix content, but The Hyper Hardboiled Gourmet Report did something to me that few shows do. I was humbled, frightened, shocked, and seduced by the tragic life stories they profiled, all from the point of view of food.
Food is one of my favorite entry points for aesthetics precisely because it is the lowest common denominator for all species. Here it is framing politics, not in that awful, didactic way I’ve come to really hate, but in a matter of fact way, like a dynamic Dutch still life.
A tale of fake news: this story made the front page of Reddit today and I decided to click the link. I noticed that the source, NPR, was one I generally trusted, but the link was to an image and not the original NPR story. I got suspicious.
A five second google search revealed two things:
1) The story was written in 2011 and 2) there was an editor’s note.
Editor’s note, March 10, 2019: In recent days, this 2011 story has been circulating on social media with an altered Facebook headline that was not created by NPR. The headline and story published here are accurate as originally published in 2011.
I don’t need to tell you; there are a lot of terrible things going on in the world. But looking over my notes on The Hero with A Thousand Faces, I was particularly moved by this passage by Campbell:
The inflated ego of the tyrant is a curse to himself and his world—no matter how his affairs may seem to prosper. Self-terrorized, fear-haunted, alert at every hand to meet and battle back the anticipated aggressions of his environment, which are primarily the reflections of the uncontrollable impulses to acquisition within himself, the giant of self-achieved independence is the world’s messenger of disaster, even though, in his mind, he may entertain himself with humane intentions. Wherever he sets his hand there is a cry (if not from the housetops, then— more miserably—within every heart): a cry for the redeeming hero, the carrier of the shining blade, whose blow, whose touch, whose existence, will liberate the land.
The key to learning, according to Descartes, is to take large problems and separate them into smaller, more easily solved problems.
Not surprisingly, this method is often applied to artistic ventures.
After all, making something new –something that never existed before– is difficult. That’s why people often look for formulas for success. A whole industry of “how-to” books emerged on this basis.
But does any one believe this approach works? I used to. Now, not so much.
On the Internet, age may just be a number, but the bias is usually for the low numbers.
After all, a Pro Publica/ Mother Jones study recently showed rampant ageism at IBM. And 92% of workers report some form of ageism in their workplace.
But these geriatric gamers are looking to break the mold. Are you ready for the future of old age?
Call me superstitious, but one should probably avoid talking too much about the process of writing.
But since I’ve reached 40k words on this “thing” and feel rather good about the progress, I thought I might jot down a few strategies that are working for me. Maybe they’ll work for you.
I took a few minutes today to preview a game called Dys4ia. “It’s a retro arcade-y piece of interactive art by transsexual author Anna Anthropy about her six-month experience with hormonal therapy.”
Kyle Haas, our Game Design teacher, shared it with me and I was mostly looking it over to make sure that it was appropriate for a younger audience. What I came away with was a lovely, subtle deepening of empathy for Anna’s experience.
Try it out!
