Without really meaning to, this week I’ve posted a few related articles around the theme of how to survive the next four years of the new oligarchical, authoritarian regime here in the US. I thought it would be helpful to compile them into one post, with excerpts that are particularly relevant or resonant.
So, there are times when I need to pay attention to the cancer, like, when I have to go to doctor’s appointments, take a medication on time, or make choices regarding self-care to increase my quality of life.
But when I am not doing those things, thinking about the cancer is actively harmful.
There are moments when I feel okay, and my daughter wants to play a video game with me. Or I have the chance to see a cool movie, or the urge to write a story.
I cannot do these things if I am paralyzed with horror and dismay thinking in detail about what’s happening in my body.
Whether there is the chance for a one-day miracle if I live long enough is irrelevant. The point is: I am alive, *today*, and at some point, I will not be. So if in a given moment I can make my or someone else’s life better, that is what I should be doing, rather than obsessing over my illness.
But every minute you focus on that horror when you are *not* actively doing something to evade or improve or ameliorate the situation (receiving chemo, taking Zofran, listening to the doctor, etc.), you are WASTING WHAT’S LEFT OF YOUR WILD PRECIOUS LIFE.
The same goes for all of you. Most of you have more time than I do (and it has taken a lot of work for me not to rage at that, and to feel genuine happiness and hope for you), but none of you have forever.
You have opportunity after opportunity to create something lovely for yourself or others. Every moment you choose to sit and think about horrors beyond your control, every time you make the choice to look for more and more details about just HOW bad… you are turning away from those opportunities.
The first four years of Donald Trump was a continuous panic attack. I’m not going through that again. You don’t have to either. They’re on stage, but you don’t have to be their audience.
Am I telling you to bury your head in the sand? Far from it. I am telling you to moderate your exposure to the bullshit. Your retweet or reskeet or repost is not going to save democracy. Your hot take on some idiot’s confirmation hearing is, at most, freaking out your friends. And if you want to remain on social media, as I will be, do your best to separate the signal from the noise. Follow people who are engaged in your community, follow people who are engaged in helping others, follow people who are posting pictures of their new puppy because puppies are awesome, follow artists making cool weird shit, follow people who are creating new stages. Stages where you are welcome. Stages built on love and kindness and inclusion. Stages where the audience can take a turn getting up there as well and tell their story. And yes, follow some trusted news sources, and double check their shit with a second news source.
But the people spreading panic to generate attention for themselves? Be they elected idiots, or oligarchs, or regular folks like me and you — block at will.
Mike and I are both on Bluesky, where there is a culture of blocking attention-seekers instead of dunking on or arguing with them, which I believe has made it a better place to spend time than other current social networks. I hope that culture endures as the site grows.
Low-quality and misleading information online can hijack people’s attention, often by evoking curiosity, outrage, or anger. Resisting certain types of information and actors online requires people to adopt new mental habits that help them avoid being tempted by attention-grabbing and potentially harmful content. We argue that digital information literacy must include the competence of critical ignoring — choosing what to ignore and where to invest one’s limited attentional capacities. We review three types of cognitive strategies for implementing critical ignoring: self-nudging, in which one ignores temptations by removing them from one’s digital environments; lateral reading, in which one vets information by leaving the source and verifying its credibility elsewhere online; and the do-not-feed-the-trolls heuristic, which advises one to not reward malicious actors with attention. We argue that these strategies implementing critical ignoring should be part of school curricula on digital information literacy. Teaching the competence of critical ignoring requires a paradigm shift in educators’ thinking, from a sole focus on the power and promise of paying close attention to an additional emphasis on the power of ignoring. Encouraging students and other online users to embrace critical ignoring can empower them to shield themselves from the excesses, traps, and information disorders of today’s attention economy.
And:
In sum, digital environments present new challenges to people’s cognition and attention. People must therefore develop new mental habits, or retool those from other domains, to prevent merchants of low-quality information from hijacking their cognitive resources. One key such competence is the ability to deliberately and strategically ignore information.
To make a crucial distinction, mutual aid is not charity; there is no means testing, no judgement, no quid pro quo or paternalistic notions about “saving” people. It’s about giving what you can to someone who needs it, and knowing that, if the roles were reversed, someone else would step in to help you.
Find the people who are already doing the work, and follow their lead. A common mistake that folks make when they’re newly invested in a cause or movement is feeling as though they need to start up their own brand-new organization in order to really make an impact. Your energy is better spent identifying the people and groups who have already been doing the kind of work you’re interested in, and then finding ways to get involved. Intentionally pooling time, resources, and people-power is far more effective than spreading them thinly and hoping for the best!
Keep showing up. It’s okay if you only have so much time or energy to contribute — we’re all human, and we’ve all got our own struggles — but making a firm commitment to continue participating in a group or an action is how to build up a real, durable network. Mutual aid is not just a disaster response, it’s a way of caring for one another, building stronger communities, and preparing for whatever life may throw at us next. It’s a labor of love — and a way of life.
“Pace yourself” is something I hear all the time from activists…it’s a marathon, not a sprint.
The soft and yielding overcome the strong and powerful.
And some wisdom from The Wire’s Avon Barksdale about weathering long, hard times:
This ain’t no thing, man, you know what I mean? You come in here, man, and get your mind right — get in here and you do two days: that’s the day you come in this motherfucker and the day you get out this motherfucker.
I read Robin Wall Kimmerer’s The Serviceberry on my vacation and I wish I could share a few relevant passages from it, but in keeping with the theme of the book, I left it at my hotel’s communal library for someone else to read.
I don’t know where this fits, but I found this heartening from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (more of this energy from our elected officials please):
One thing about me is that I will fight Nazis until I’m six feet in the ground.
Instead I just want to encourage you to join something. Please don’t feel like it has to be a political organization, unless you absolutely love Roberts’ Rules of Order. Find a group of people doing something you like, and join them. Join a bowling league. Find a book group. Join a church, or a mosque, or a synagogue, if that’s the way your heart leans. If the first thing you try doesn’t bring you joy, try something else.
It took me a lot longer than it should have but eventually I realized that I don’t need to feel guilty about not sticking with the DSA. And I realized that search and rescue isn’t frivolous, and it wouldn’t be even if it was a disc golf team, or a neighborhood dinner swap, or a knitting circle, or a biking group. This isn’t a marathon, this is the rest of my life, and what gets me through it isn’t eternal helpless vigilance or angry posting. It’s forming connections with other people around activities that bring me joy. It’s building trust, so that when some goose-stepping fuck tries to make me afraid of my neighbors, I can laugh at him.
I’ve decided that part of what I’m doing to weather the storm is to keep doing what I’m doing here on kottke.org — that is, highlighting the creativity of humanity, telling the truth about what’s going on in the world, sharing dumb stuff that makes us laugh — and continue to develop an online community built around those things via the comments and other means. It feels good and purposeful to me to do this work and to support this fledgling community — you could say that I find it engaging.
Anyway, I hope you have a good weekend and I’ll see you back here on Monday.
As much as I would hate to see su filindeu fade away, I understand why Abraini doesn’t want to teach it to any Canadian or Greek chef who calls her out of the blue. Sure, after several years, she may succeed in passing on the skill, but as she told me, when you take something that is so intertwined with a specific place, a specific event, and a specific pastoral code, and you present it in a different context, “it’s no longer the threads of God; it’s just pulled pasta.”
“There are only three ingredients: semolina wheat, water and salt,” Abraini said, vigorously kneading the dough back and forth. “But since everything is done by hand, the most important ingredient is elbow grease.”
Abraini patiently explained how you work the pasta thoroughly until it reaches a consistency reminiscent of modelling clay, then divide the dough into smaller sections and continue working it into a rolled-cylindrical shape.
Then comes the hardest part, a process she calls, “understanding the dough with your hands.” When she feels that it needs to be more elastic, she dips her fingers into a bowl of salt water. When it needs more moisture, she dips them into a separate bowl of regular water. “It can take years to understand,” she beamed. “It’s like a game with your hands. But once you achieve it, then the magic happens.”
Food historian Max Miller stumbled upon the original recipe for 1980s/90s school cafeteria pizza (you know, with the iconic rectangular slices) and decided to whip up a batch (with “pourable dough”).
Tastes just like it. You can like — all of those herbs are exactly the same as they were. I think maybe it tastes a little fresher than I remember, like the flavors are a little heightened…but that’s that’s them. This is the pizza…
As one of the top trials riders in the world, Danny MacAskill can certainly do a wheelie. In this fun video, he does wheelies all over the place, joined by a bunch of friends. The behind-the-scenes video is just as fun. And I watched the “how to do a wheelie” companion video with interest because I’ve never been able to do a wheelie on a bike for more than a couple of seconds and it’s probably time to learn — even though a manual would be more useful for mountain biking. (via the kid should see this)
Somehow, I didn’t know that until quite recently, tennis balls were white instead of yellow (Wimbledon used white balls until 1985). Here’s a British Pathé film from 1961 that shows how tennis balls were made, along with Wimbledon ball boy training:
The change in color happened due to the demands of television transmissions. In 1972 television was already in color all over the world (although in Spain it was not generalized until five or six years later). At the end of the 1960s, the person in charge of the BBC broadcasts (which, of course, was in charge of Wimbledon) was the renowned documentary filmmaker David Attenborough. And he noticed that the visibility of the traditional white ball was not perfect, especially if it approached the lines of the rectangle of play.
In that year of 1972, tennis was in full growth: the professional and amateur circuits had unified and women’s professional tennis was also growing. Tennis was becoming a great world spectacle and in this context television was fundamental. The International Tennis Federation, in charge of the rules, commissioned a study which showed that the yellow ball was more visible and therefore easier for viewers to follow. The courts, moreover, began to be multicolored once the use of synthetic materials in official tournaments was approved.
From Factory Monster (great name), a video of how candles are made in a South Korean candle factory. I like that there’s no music or voiceover, so you can hear the sounds of the production. I also enjoyed the charmingly janky English subtitles:
Blah blah powder for hardness. Yellow powder for pure white color. Irony, huh?!
Can someone who knows something about making candles tell me why that hole is made in each of the candles with the metal rods? It was unclear from the video what its purpose is.
Sophia Bogle is an expert at restoring old books and I was riveted by this video of her taking viewers through the deconstruction and restoration process, including a tour of her workshop and some of the tools she uses (e.g. a repair knife she designed herself to resemble a fingertip).
But reader, I gasped when she signed her work…I don’t think I could do that! (via boing boing)
I thought for sure that I’d previously written about the secret jelly packet & pickle-based system that chefs at the Waffle House use to “store” all of the orders that come in for food during service, but I can’t find it in the archive. But no matter — the Waffle House training video above runs us through their whole system, including a detailed explanation of their Magic Marker System, which involves zero actual Magic Markers and instead is about arranging condiment packets and other items on plates in a code:
Now let’s talk about our breakfast sandwiches. Just like omelettes, these sandwiches have the same four positions: ham, sausage, bacon, and plain. To mark a sandwich, place two pickle slices in the appropriate position. Here you can see I put two pickle slices in the number three position, which tells me this is a bacon sandwich. If I add a slice of cheese to the plate, I know this is a bacon cheese sandwich. To make this a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich, I’ll add this right side up mayo packet to the right side of the plate.
Don’t let this mayo pack confuse you - as long as you see two pickles on the plate you know this is a sandwich. When marking a sandwich, this mayo packet and pickles means a sandwich with eggs. If a customer wanted the eggs on their sandwich to be scrambled instead of the standard over well egg, I’d move this mayo pack down to the bottom of the plate to show that the egg is scrambled.
That sounds pretty complicated and they’ve likely faced pressure to change the system over the years, but I bet it works really well in practice and cuts down on errors. I love stuff like this…seeing how different organizations manage their core processes, especially in non-conventional ways. See also Nightclub Hand Signals and The Quarryman’s Symphony. (thx, erik)
1) Do not read the whole original post or what it links to, which will dilute the purity of your response and reduce your chances of rebuking the poster for not mentioning anything they might’ve mentioned/written a book on/devoted their life to. Listening/reading delays your reaction time, and as with other sports, speed is of the essence.
7) If you’re a man and that O.P. is a woman, her facts are feelings and your feelings are facts, and those forty-seven increasingly lengthy responses you fired off were clearly a rational reaction. If she reacted negatively to them, do not forget to rebuke her for being emotional.
I hate to say it, but the reason I am not enjoying Mastodon so much these days is because I see stuff like this on there regularly:
9) Which is why the person who said, or rather typed, offhandedly “people should bike more” really means all people need to bike everywhere under all circumstances and is callously indifferent to people who: live in Siberia and can’t bike through -40 blizzards; are physically unable to cycle; can’t afford bikes; and let us not forget those who have bicycle-related trauma. Which is why anyone who could say “people should bike more” is a fascist who needs crushing.
In June 2021 (pre The Bear), New Yorker cartoonist Zoe Si coached Ayo Edebiri through the process of drawing a New Yorker cartoon. The catch: neither of them could see the other’s work in progress. Super entertaining.
I don’t know about you, but Si’s initial description of the cartoon reminded me of an LLM prompt:
So the cartoon is two people in their apartment. One person has dug a hole in the floor, and he is standing in the hole and his head’s poking out. And the other person is kneeling on the floor beside the hole, kind of like looking at him in a concerned manner. There’ll be like a couch in the background just to signify that they’re in a house.
Just for funsies, I asked ChatGPT to generate a New Yorker-style cartoon using that prompt. Here’s what it came up with:
Oh boy. And then I asked it for a funny caption and it hit me with: “I said I wanted more ‘open space’ in the living room, not an ‘open pit’!” Oof. ChatGPT, don’t quit your day job!
This is an absolute delight: a pair of videos of David Byrne teaching us how to do a few dance moves. The first video shows more moves; the second one was recorded for “a social distance dance club” during the pandemic:
The dance club was open for 2 weeks in April 2021 and allowed for people to come together to dance however they wanted while masked and a safe distance from each other. It played a variety of music (including a couple of David Byrne and Talking Heads songs), and people who signed up to attend were encouraged to use this video to learn this routine in advance so that everybody could dance in sync for the final song of each hour session.
In this video from his YouTube channel “about anything”, Posy demonstrates a video filtering technique called motion extraction. A commenter calls this video “a tutorial, a demonstration, and a work of art”, all rolled into one. It’s really lovely and informative. My jaw actually dropped at the “how can you tell which stones were disturbed on the path” part.
At the beginning of the ninth episode of his 13-part series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, Carl Sagan says:
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
Taking a page from Sagan’s book, Zack Scholl made a site called Recursive Recipes, which allows you to drill down into the ingredients of some common foods, replacing them with other recipes.
A recursive recipe is one where ingredients in the recipe can be replaced by another recipe. The more ingredients you replace, the more that the recipe is made truly from scratch.
Here’s what the apple pie recipe looks like when you make everything you can from scratch:
You don’t quite begin at the Big Bang, but if you start with soil, a cow, and some seawater, it’s still going to take you almost 8 years to make that pie. The wheat needed for the flour, for instance:
Plant winter wheat in fall to allow for six to eight weeks of growth before the soil freezes. This allows time for good root development. If the wheat is planted too early, it may smother itself the following spring and it could be vulnerable to some late-summer insects that won’t be an issue in the cooler fall weather. If winter wheat is planted too late, it will not overwinter well.
Thwaites reverse engineered a seven dollar toaster into 400 separate parts and then set about recreating steel from iron ore rocks, plastic from microwaved potatoes and copper from homemade bromide mush.
A quick and breezy introduction to some basic wayfinding techniques from Fran Scott and BBC Earth Kids. Unless you went to camp as a kid or have spent a bunch of time outdoors, at least some of these techniques will be new to you. I’d never heard of trees growing in a check mark shape. From natural navigation expert Tristan Gooley:
Obviously, all green plants need sunlight. So it’s logical that plants will, all things being equal, tend to grow more abundantly on the side the light comes from. In the northern parts of the world, where the sun is due south in the middle of the day, that means plants are growing more abundantly on the south side.
Try noticing this in a tree the next time you take a walk outside. You should see that there’s more tree on the south side, unless there are other factors-for instance there are amazing examples of glass buildings that can make trees grow the wrong way. But generally speaking, there should be more of the tree on the south side.
The first step in a good apology is acknowledging harm. The second is expressing genuine regret, and where possible, acknowledging our shortcoming. Our intentions are not always good. Sometimes we’re selfish. Sometimes we don’t know what we’re doing, and sometimes we fail to consider the consequences. If we can admit these things, it helps repair trust.
Then we vow, in good faith, to not perpetuate the same harm again.
The last step is repair. This means directly addressing the harm done — not via self-flagellation on YouTube nor with any expectation of forgiveness.
Here are the six components of an apology from Beth Polin:
1. An expression of regret — this, usually, is the actual “I’m sorry.”
2. An explanation (but, importantly, not a justification).
3. An acknowledgment of responsibility.
4. A declaration of repentance.
5. An offer of repair.
6. A request for forgiveness.
I think about these components whenever giving or receiving apologies — it’s a great framework to keep in mind.
A short TED-Ed video on the flow state of creativity and how you might enter it more easily.
Flow is more than just concentrating or paying attention; it’s a unique mental state of effortless engagement. And those who more frequently experience flow report higher levels of positive emotions, creativity, and feelings of accomplishment. But what exactly is flow? And how can we find it in our daily lives? Explore steps you can take to increase your chances of finding flow.
While I am not feeling particularly in the groove today, over the past several weeks I’ve been in the flow state a lot, working on a couple of projects for the site. It’s been a long time since I’ve had that feeling for more than a couple of hours every few months and booooooy does it feel good. There is almost nothing that fills me with as much joy as the “effortless engagement” of being in the flow state. I’m very glad it’s back in my life — I’d been afraid it was gone forever. (via open culture)
I have said previously that “even on my busiest day, I will drop everything to watch a video of pencils being made”. Still true! This video from Process X of a Tokyo pencil factory really hits the spot. My favorite part of watching pencils get made is always the sharpening of the finished pencils by belt sander.
From natural rubber to hundreds of bands in a box, here’s how a Japanese manufacturing firm makes rubber bands.
Fun fact about me: I always have a rubber band or two on my wrist…I’ve been wearing them for no particular reason since I was 17. So this video is right up my alley. (via digg)
If you were left hungry by the food in season two of The Bear, Binging With Babish has got you covered. In this video, he recreates the potato chip omelette that Sydney makes in the second-to-last episode of the season. And then, he makes an adjacent dish, José Andrés’s tortilla española with potato chips. Just to contrast, here’s Andrés making it:
The immense scale of the factory and the intense temperatures involved (along with a musical soundtrack that sounds like Interstellar by way of Philip Glass) makes this video about how rebar is made compelling viewing. There are several scenes from this video that would not be out of place in this collection of Real-Life Infrastructure That Looks Like Sci-Fi. And there’s a color gradient moment near the end that’s really lovely. (thx, alex)
I was totally fascinated by this look at the absurd logistics of concert tours and now have a newfound appreciation for all the people involved who collaborate to make the magic happen (and perhaps also a little bit more forgiving about the high price of tickets (but Ticketmaster can still go to hell)).
Now, to an outsider, the load out process might look chaotic, and the pace of the tour may seem unsustainable or unmanageable. But though grueling and exhaustingly complicated, these massive, nation-wide tours function remarkably smoothly considering the variety of variables.
I’ve always wondered about the process for making pieces of metal that appear to fit together perfectly, so perfectly that you can’t see any sort of cut or seam. In this video, Steve Mould explains how wire EDM works, in part using cheese.
No matter which side you come down on in the debate about using AI tools like Stable Diffusion and Midjourney to create digital art, this video of an experienced digital artist explaining how he uses AI in his workflow is worth a watch. I thought this comment was particularly interesting:
I see the overall process as a joint effort with the AI. I’ve been a traditional artist for 2 decades, painting on canvas. And in the last five years I’ve been doing a lot of digital art. So from that part of myself, I don’t feel threatened at all.
I feel this is an opportunity. An opportunity for many new talented people to jump on a new branch of art that is completely different from the one that we have already in digital art and just open up new way of being creative.
In a video for the Victoria and Albert Museum, sculptor Simon Smith shows us how Renaissance sculptor Donatello might have approached carving a piece from marble, which Smith calls “the Emperor of all stones”.
It’s all about trapping shadows. Carving is all about having deep cuts here and lighter here and the angle here and how the light plays on it. And certainly in relief…because relief carving like this, it’s kind of halfway between sculpture and drawing. If you’re doing a three-dimensional sculpture, if a form runs around the back you just carve it so it goes around the back, but with this you have to give the illusion of it running around the back like a drawing. You’ve got to make something look like it turns around and comes out the other side even though it really is just going into the block. And that’s all about angles and shadow and light.
First up is DJ Shortkut explaining the 15 levels of turntable scratching. DJing is one of those things that I enjoy the output of but don’t know much about, so it was fun to have it broken down like that. Beat juggling is incredibly cool and looks super difficult to master. 🤯
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