Good taste

Good taste, to me, is liking what you see and knowing why you like it.

Seth Godin writes in The Practice:

… the ability to know what your audience or clients are going to want before they do.
… watch what the market does and learn from that.

To me, that is too much of a market-oriented view of taste. The second statement also disagrees somewhat with the first.

I don’t think you learn about good taste by observing the market. You only learn what is out there and what the people with the most enormous mouths say about what they like.

Good taste is about appreciation for the specific. The market is about appreciation for the average.

Seth Godin – The Practice

Encouragement for the creative mind.

Reassurance is futile. Attitude is a skill. Produce with intent. The work is too important to be left to how we feel. Instead, trust the process and do the work.

Change your actions first. We become what we do.

Peculiar means specific. The standard narrative pushes us to fit in, but through specificity and peculiarity, we stand out. Change comes from idiosyncratic voices. Be more specific and less generic.

Attachment to status, outcome, and opinions brings nothing. There is no such thing as a foundation. The process of engaging with the genre, the audience, the change ís the foundation. Become unattached.

The practice is about doing it, more than once, regularly, until it becomes… practice.
Ship on a schedule.

Credentials are just a piece of paper. Instead, create a body of work that shows you have insight, experience, and concern.

The work is an infinite game. No winners, no losers. (The reward for work is more work, said Tom Sachs.)

Determination counts (versus inspiration).

Chop wood, carry water.

Mise en place is preparation. The muse shows up when we do the work.

Seek desirable difficulty to seek improvement. Be uncomfortable.

Genre states your idiosyncratic work. Generic is a trap. Learning a skill is attitude and cohort.

Constraints feed creativity.

Be paranoid about mediocrity.

Many, many quotable sentences. A companion to The War of Art and Do The Work.

No molar picture, two chances left

Last week, my first wisdom tooth was pulled.
It wasn’t that bad—fifteen minutes of prying. And I have two more.

Forgot to ask for the molar. So, no picture.

Days at the Morisaki Bookshop, by Satoshi Yagisawa

Takako, a young woman from Tokyo, quits her office job and comes to live and work in the small second-hand bookstore of her uncle, Satoru, in a small provincial town.

In her life in Tokyo, she was indecisive, reserved, and treated like dirt by her boyfriend. After summoning the courage to confront her boyfriend and tell him the truth, Takako takes a decisive step forward, leaving behind the negativity and moving on with her life.

Her uncle’s wife suddenly reappears with her husband after years of absence. As if nothing had happened. With her aunt Momoko, she heads into the mountains for a weekend. Momoko turns out to have had an abortion years ago and then struggled with life. After the mountain outing, Momolo disappears again as shyly as she has returned. Takako breaks her vow of secrecy and informs her uncle Satoru of the secret his wife is carrying. He searches and finds his wife again, and they become closer than ever.

Secretive as a Murakami. With a fine list of quoted Japanese writers at the back of the book.

The World Don’t Need No More Images

I have my photo-movie, The World Don’t Need No More Images (full of pictures), just about finished. The first episodes are on YouTube. Is it any good? Probably not. Does it raise a ripple? Unlikely. Is it fun to mix images and sound? Absolutely. Besides, it feels like it has to get out. In this form, this had to be tried and done because I have not seen anything similar done before.

And now: bye. Next.

Failure narrative

From Seth Godin’s The Practice, this creator’s failure narrative:

  • There is more supply than demand; therefore, most of the feedback is rejection. From the market, from the gatekeepers.
  • The work is created with generally available tools. The group that believes they can do the same job or better is large.
  • The fanbase is transient, and the churn is significant.
  • Negative criticism spreads easier than positive feedback.
  • We work in novelty. There is always more novelty for our customers to turn to.
  • We and our customers chase creative magic. By that standard, almost all of our efforts fail.

Then, successful creators have in their favor the benefit of the doubt and tribal cognitive dissonance.

EU state of tech and tech legislation

David Heinemeier Hansson writes about the EU law on technology legislation. He is right that the cookie banner laws have led to this awful way where we must wrestle through consent forms while browsing the web. And yes, he is right:

Europe is in desperate need for a radical rethink on how it legislates tech. The amount of squandered potential from smart, capable entrepreneurs on the old continent is tragic. It needn’t be like this. But if you want different outcomes, you have to start doing different things.

He goes on

So little of the core tech innovation that’s driving the future, in AI or otherwise, is happening in Europe. And when it does happen there, it’s usually just incubation, which then heads for America or elsewhere as soon as its ready to make a real impact on the world.

I’m not sure where elsewhere would be. More importantly, there is more nuance to this state of affairs.

America is leading in technology but also in creating technological waste or the enshittification of technology. At least there is a body on this planet that puts boundaries on what monopolistic tech companies can do to citizens. That body is not the US government; it is the EU government. Yes, there is a lot to say about it, but you can state that the EU is protecting its citizens.

Furthermore, DHH could adopt a more critical stance towards the IT industry. While IT became a consumer product, companies like Microsoft, Google, Amazon and Facebook have shown that they do not always act in the best interests of their customers, to say the least. Legislation is not just a socialist or communist necessity, but a fundamental requirement for the proper functioning of capitalism. This is particularly true in the US, where the excessive focus on stockholder value has led to a decline in company ethics.

PS Just this morning, I read that US antitrust laws are working against Google’s anticompetitive behavior.

Left behind

Randy that bastard surprises us nicely after dinner with the flown-in hotshots when we are waiting for the cab in front of the restaurant, with suddenly his jovial “let’s go drive past the ladies over there” proposal. And a nod in the direction of further down the road. It takes a while for the penny to drop, and we understand that he is inviting us to go with him to the whores. That is clearer.

Then, you start to view someone differently. You hear this pathetic comment at the hotel bar. While leaning somewhat lost over the bar stool, with that boyish look of his shorts, the gritty shirt, and the flip-flops on his feet, while gulping in half a glass of whiskey, he says: my wife has left me.