- Recent
- Popular
- Tags (20)
- Subscribers (162)
- The Monthly Pimp: January '09 EditionToday
-
Although it’s been way more than a month, per our little agreement, here’s some recent Merlin-related stuff that may interest you. Really good stuff this time around.
Today/Friday: Macworld PULSE
Like Chairman Gruber, I’m frustrated that it’s crazy-hard to link to our session. But, basically today is one (wow, long) day of TED-ish 20-minute presentations from…
- Dan DiPaola, Co-Founder, HD-encoding.com
- Adam Engst, TidBITS
- John Gruber, Daring Fireball
- Craig Hockenberry, The Iconfactory
- Andy Ihnatko, The Chicago Sun Times
- Vincent LaForet, Photographer
- Merlin Mann, 43 Folders
- Chris Pirillo, Lockergnome
- Rick Smolan, Photographer
- Ge Wang, Center for Computer Rese
- The Problem with “Feeling Creative”January 2
-
If your mall’s bookstores look anything like mine (and it’s probably safe to assume that they do), you’ll find numerous sections devoted to helping writers, painters, musicians, and other aspiring artists to become successful in one way or another. There are books chock full of tips on finding an agent, on painting like the masters, and on composing and selling a hit song.
There are also dozens of books on “creativity” itself. Guides that are meant to help you access and unlock the artist within and to see the world in more creative ways. How to “be” creative, how to generate ideas, and how to learn to think “laterally.”
Some of these books are just terrific, many are atrocious, and, at least in my anecdotal experience, only a handful challenge their readers with a fundamentally unmarketable premise:
Creative work only seems like a magic trick to people who don’t understand that it’s ultimately still work.
Bad for Business
But, let’s be honest. This is a tough idea to sell to folks with “real jobs” who are just looking for a diverting bit of creative tourism or who find themselves yearning for a n
- The High Cost of PretendingDecember 9 2008
-
apophenia: Warning: Email Sabbatical is Imminent .. and other random thoughts
[via trivium]
danah boyd is finishing her dissertation, then going on vacation for a month. While, she’s gone, she’s not accepting email. At all. Got that?
No apology. No “vacation message” to pretend she’ll read it later. And no implied promise that the stuff people send to her will magically be tended to by an invisble army of interns and elves. While she’s away, every message she receives is simply discarded with a friendly response as to why. danah writes:
…I believe that email eradicates any benefits gained from taking a vacation by collecting mold and spitting it back out at you the moment you return. As such, I’ve trained my beloved INBOX to reject all email during vacation. I give it a little help in the form of a .procmail file that sends everything directly to /dev/nu
- Real Advice HurtsDecember 3 2008
-
In the wonderful Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott talks about the incredible, ripping pain she felt after having her tonsils removed. All she wanted to do was chug pain killers and let the stupid thing heal, but, Anne’s doctor gave her some advice that she found as unbelievable as it was painful: he told her to chew some gum.
Turns out that, as with a lot of injuries, the entirely sensible impulse to protect and baby a wounded area was the opposite of what Anne actually needed in order to fix the problem. So, by enduring the excruciating pain of chewing gum for just a few minutes, the muscles in her throat suddenly unclenched, and Anne’s pain went away forever.
The advice Anne wanted wasn’t the advice she needed. And, like we all eventually learn, the best advice you’ll get in life hurts like hell at the time. Because it has to.
And, maybe that’s part of what what bugs me about all the “tips.”
Today, the web is littered with sites pumping out a high volume of advice on every conceivable topic. And a lot of the pathological patrons of these sites will tell you that a daily surfeit of snack-sized information helps them with what they really need in order to be successful and happy in life — to be b
- Photography, and the Tolerance for Courageous SuckingDecember 1 2008
-
As I’ve started shooting photos more often, I’ve picked up on some interesting patterns: habits, if you like. And, as I struggle to absorb the insane physics of capturing light with some glass and a black box, I accept upfront that the improvements to my actual photos will be slow, incremental, and, largely undetectable to anybody but me — a fact that’s never more painfully clear than when I swoon over the work of the more talented friends who inspire me (Heather, Ryan and Chris each come to mind here).
But, being instantly great at this couldn’t be further from the point. Although I started taking photos to become a better photographer, I keep taking them because I’ve learned to love the process. And, luckily, at least as far as I can tell, dedication to the process can’t help but make you a better photographer — or a better whatever, for that matter.
An Urge to Push
I lug this clunky camera around with me every day because I want to, and because turning this hobby into a project that I work on a little bit eve