Things I Like
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The systems on which design operates are fundamentally and hypnotically flawed. They don’t just need improvement. They don’t just need resistance. They need complete change. Systemic change normally happens as an ultimatum, democracy in its multiple variations, protests and demonstrations, a directive from a global or continental institution. It usually takes place when there seems to be no other option. Designers, and the systems they sustain and validate, are in the business of future-making. They love to shine and also like to churn out stunningly attractive visions of the future on a daily basis, as if they were just another entry in their portfolio. The time for manifestos is out, and for just good intentions, too. If designers don’t think about and practice design at the level of systems and put politics at the core of what they do—with climate crisis, fascism, racism, xenophobia—when we realise that we don’t have any other option, there will be no future at all.
So many systems feel like they're flawed right now, but I really liked how this article pointed to people thinking about the flaws but also skewered the flaws in the graphic design education world as well.
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I’d maybe simplify this people problem a bit: the codebase is easy to change, but the incentives within a company are not. And yet it’s the incentives that drive what kind of code gets written — what is acceptable, what needs to get fixed, how people work together. In short, we cannot be expected to fix the code without fixing the organization, too.
In all the places I've worked I've had a hard time getting other folks to care or prioritize the things I think are important. And Rendle hits the nail on the head here as to why. He uses performance as his example, but in my world it would be accessibility. And it's true every single place I've worked, there is no incentive, until a lawsuit pops up, to do the work. And it makes me sad and I'll admit I'm so tired of pushing for doing the right thing in environments where it will never happen.
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The existential dread of a global pandemic is pervasive. I find myself often caught in a state of hopelessness and helplessness, unable to celebrate newborn babies, birthdays, graduations, and marriages. Unable to properly grieve losses or sit with a close friend undergoing chemo. Worried about the chefs and restaurant workers who rely on our collective ability to go out to eat. News is bleak and we are all feeling physically and socially isolated. But every day, there is also Thelonious, a chipmunk who sits down to eat in a world without a doomful election and a deadly virus. This is how I am coping, laying out a picnic, watching tiny hands hold my tiny food. It’s silly, yes, but sometimes silliness is needed.
I love everything about this article, so fantastic and silly and needed in these times.
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This is Robinson’s entire cosmology: the world is self-evidently miraculous, but only rarely do we pay it the attention it deserves. Robinson calls her style of writing cosmic realism, a patient chronicling of the astonishing nature of existence. Her attentiveness to creation at every level is what makes her fiction so convincing: she sees everything, including us.
It was hard to figure out what to quote from this long profile, I love Robinson's writing so much. Her attention to detail and her characters are so detailed, is amazing. And she is quietly firm in her convictions, showing us so much about the world with the perfect words.
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Resentment displaces hope and purpose the way carbon monoxide displaces air. This fact has been reflected in the policies of any number of tyrants and demagogues. Resentment is insatiable. It thrives on deprivation, sustaining itself by magnifying grievances it will, by its nature, never resolve.
A bit more Robinson, but this time her own words. And the way in which she describes our situation was helpful for me. I have a hard time with so much that is happening right now, but these words were a balm in this moment.
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What this means for people, for us, is that we can’t just plan to take care of ourselves later. We shouldn’t expect to catch up on sleep when we really crash, or to reach out to loved ones after we’re struck by loneliness. We should ask for support before we need it. We should support others before they ask. Because if you don’t know how far you’re going, you need to act like you’re going forever.
Learning to front load rest, what a great concept.
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Rereading packs your brain with thoughts to think with. It also makes other thoughts—like those that might flit by you in the form of various newsfeeds—less likely to be thought with. It gives you something to hold on to, something to draw back to, when everything else is in flux.
I'll admit it, I'm not much of a rereader. I rarely do it; mostly because there is so much I want to read that I've never read. But during this year of everything on fire, I've been rethinking that stance. I'm reading a lot of good things this year, but I've also been thinking about past reads. Right now I have a few books I read as library books on the way from Bookshop and I can't wait to read them for a second time.
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The good news, however, is that there is a way back. We can stop destroying and start restoring. We can work with nature so that, in essence, the land heals itself. It is simply a matter of grasping certain principles that must be respected. For us, coming to terms with these key principles was a journey. But we now know there are logical steps to follow.
This article is from last year, but wow, the results and photos in it show a way out of the ways in which we've been living on this planet and destroying it and how we can bring it back. It gives me hope to see people trying, I wish more would do the same.
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Before the pandemic, I was thinking a lot about how jobs with vocational awe — from librarians to teachers, from pastors to zookeepers — ironically expose the workers with those jobs to exploitation. Complain about pay? You don’t love the job enough. Attempt to unionize to advocate for a better safety net? You don’t love the job enough. Complain about systemic sexism, racism, or other exclusionary practices at your institution? You don’t love the job enough.
Petersen continues to be one of the best writers about work and jobs and capitalism and burnout today. This piece points out how there are so many professions where you are expected to work until you burn yourself out, because you love the job. And because you love the job, you may be asked to do way more than just that job. This past week during a crisis in my town, we were in the library and it was amazing what people were asking the librarians, it was all information they should've been asking emergency authorities, but the library is where they went.
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One evening during the strange, in-between time when lockdown was over but we were far from back to normal life, I finally sat down to draw. I found an old sketchbook and a box of charcoal sticks, and took them out to the garden. It didn’t go well to begin with. The first thing I chose to sketch, a bough on the apple tree, was dishearteningly flat, and rather that risk giving up, I immediately turned to my left and tried to draw a pillow case flapping crazily on the washing line. Unsurprisingly, this was no better. I went to the kitchen, and picked up the first thing I saw: a cluster of cherry tomatoes still attached to their vine. Back in the garden, I set them down before me on the table and flipped the page. This third drawing was as clumsy as the other two, but as I scuffed the creamy surface of the paper with rich black charcoal marks, I felt something shift.
A good reminder of what drawing is for and why folks do it. It reminds me a lot of Lynda Barry's posts on Instagram right now, she's teaching her Images class remotely and sharing a lot and I love seeing students discover drawing with her.
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Seymour is cautious here. As he points out, we’ve only just set aside prophecies of inevitable, internet-borne emancipation, and we should be careful not to make the same confident mistake in reverse, with moralizing, panicked screeds about inescapable algorithmic radicalization. What is scarier, anyway, than the idea that we’re trapped on a collision course with TikTok totalitarianism is Seymour’s insistence that we’re not “trapped” at all—that, in fact, “we are part of the machine, and we find our satisfactions in it, however destructive they may be.” Whatever dark future we hurtle toward, we are copilots on the journey.
I found this piece super interesting about a book I may or may not read, but I've been thinking about how we contribute to the social media phenomenon and is it just because they've tricked me into it or is it because I'm getting something I need from it? I'll be thinking about this for a while to come.
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If you’re prone to thinking you should be helping more, that’s probably a sign that you could afford to direct more energy to your idiosyncratic ambitions and enthusiasms. As the Buddhist teacher Susan Piver observes, it’s radical, at least for some of us, to ask how we’d enjoy spending an hour or day of discretionary time. And the irony is that you don’t actually serve anyone else by suppressing your true passions anyway. More often than not, by doing your thing – as opposed to what you think you ought to be doing – you kindle a fire that helps keep the rest of us warm.
I'm not very familiar with Bukeman, having read none of his books (although I just added one to my list) but much of this column resonated with me. The above quote, but also the fact that we can't possibly do it all so acknowledging that is freeing. This is a short column packed with so much good thinking.
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Many Americans see work as a thing to deal with, that hopefully gives them enough stability or money to have a shot at being who they really are. Which is a good father, or a good mother, or a Bucs fan, or great golfer, or a rising dirt track racer, or the person who throws the best block parties, or a reliable singer in the church choir, or a competitive BBQ-er, or a good solid friend that will do anything to help out anyone else, or someone ‘keeping their head above water and doing it without losing their cool because it is easy to lose your cool in this crazy world.’
I think about this a lot, how many folks are working and not thinking about a career or where they want to go or how they want to advance. They work to be able to have the life they want and it may or may not be something they enjoy. I especially think about this in relation to my own work, I'll admit it, it's a day job, I do it for the money and because I'm working towards other life goals. But the rub comes when my place of employment insists I need goals, I need to want more, I need to make this a career that maybe I don't want to make it.
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Every time I start a new post, I never know for sure where it’s going to go. This is what writing and making art is all about: not having something to say, but finding out what you have to say. It’s thinking on the page or the screen or in whatever materials you manipulate. Blogging has taught me to embrace this kind of not-knowing in my other art and my writing.
I read this post and it made me look at what my earliest post is and it's from March of 2011, nine years, wow. I don't blog for exactly the same reasons as Kleon, much of my site is for me, memories and triggers that take me back in time, but much of my writing is what Kleon is talking about. I like working things out through writing, and this place seems a good one to share that.
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Extreme love, extreme loneliness. Ever since then, whenever I listen to a Bruckner symphony I ponder that Shinagawa Monkey’s personal life. I picture the elderly monkey in that tiny hot-springs town, in an attic in a rundown inn, asleep on a thin futon. And I think of the snacks—the kakipi and the dried squid—that we enjoyed as we drank beer together, propped up against the wall.
This story is lovely.