Wat in mijn jeugd – 45 jaar geleden – een wit strand was, lijkt nu een illustratie van een wandelend eiland te worden.
Ik verloor hier ooit een een van de eerste digitale horloges. Een Trafalgar, met rode cijfertjes die alleen oplichtten als je op een knopje drukte. Mijn vader had het gekregen van een collega, die het als relatiegeschenk had gekregen maar het ding te lelijk vond. Zoiets als hieronder. Inderdaad erg lelijk.
How often does it occur that information provided you on morning radio or television, or in the morning newspaper, causes you to alter your plans for the day, or to take some action you would not otherwise have taken, or provides insight into some problem you are required to solve? – Neil Postman
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.
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.
From Seth Godin’s The Practice, this creator’s failure narrative:
Then, successful creators have in their favor the benefit of the doubt and tribal cognitive dissonance.
Dirk Gently is the character created by Douglas Adams, famous for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. I had almost forgotten I had read about the ‘holitic detective’ in Adams’ book Salmon of Doubt. Only recently I discovered Netflix runs a series on this character. The series is pretty awesome.
The transcription feature in Microsoft Teams works perfectly, as my colleague informs me. He has sent me the transcription of the meeting we just concluded.
OK.
OK. OK.
He used the black from the coop. Stick to you Muslim with with our something. OK, for overhead and he is it document.
AFK Girl California phone and doing the blood. Either get it the document over, so yeah, I’ll need the. Is it a lot?
Yeah, 16.
The meeting was in Dutch.
Yesterday, I stumbled upon Trump’s Project 2025. This project is an astonishing fascist agenda of the ultra-right wing of the Republican party that seeks to overthrow the government and install an autocratic government in which the president has all the power.
The language on the website is so amazingly hateful. What is behind this hate between left and right in the US that led to this extreme divide between the people in the US?
The 180-day playbook describes a swift transition of the entire government. For example, under the term “personnel is policy,” thousands of political jobs are planned to be re-staffed with “dedicated conservatives.”
Under the term “religious freedom,” which they claimed to correlate with poverty, economic growth, and peace, an orthodox Christian policy is promised to be instituted that bans abortion rights, LGBTQI+ rights, etcetera.
The next conservative Administration must champion the core American value of religious freedom, which correlates significantly with poverty reduction, economic growth, and peace. It should train all USAID staff on the connection between religious freedom and development; integrate it into all of the agency’s programs, including the five-year Country Development and Coordination Strategies due for updates in 2025; strengthen the missions’ relationships with local faith-based leaders, and build on local programs that are serving the poor.
We have enough evidence of what an orthodox Christian society will bring. What any society based on an orthodox religion produces: intolerance, oppression, government violence, racism, discrimination, and other extreme outgrows.
We can only hope that the people in the US, especially those typically supporting the Republican party, will distance themselves from this autocratic threat. The alternative is probably not their ideal either, but it seems approachable and rational.
Sometimes, you are telling your story so confidently. How elegantly you solved that solution. Then you get that one question that silences you for a couple of seconds, and all you can say is “… o shit”.
We can become so blind to the omissions in our stories that we overlook the most obvious shortcoming, that question that we overlooked and we should have an answer for.
Today was one of these days. We worked on this for a year and a half, and then this person in the audience asked, “And what if this XYZ widget in your thing here fails?”
… Silence … o shit!
From Murakami’s The City and Its Uncertain Walls:
Zijn moeder was van nature meegaand en ze rekende het tot haar voornaamste plicht om geen moeilijkheden te veroorzaken.
His mother was compliant by nature, and she considered it her first duty not to cause trouble.
Such a Murakami sentence.