In Here Are the 14 Habits of Highly Miserable People, Cloe Madanes gives us some advice at how to succeed at self-sabatage (or, really, how to avoid it).

5. Attribute bad intentions. Whenever you can, attribute the worst possible intentions to your partner, friends, and coworkers. Take any innocent remark and turn it into an insult or attempt to humiliate you. For example, if someone asks, “How did you like such and such movie?” you should immediately think, He’s trying to humiliate me by proving that I didn’t understand the movie, or He’s preparing to tell me that I have poor taste in movies. The idea is to always expect the worst from people. If someone is late to meet you for dinner, while you wait for them, remind yourself of all the other times the person was late, and tell yourself that he or she is doing this deliberately to slight you. Make sure that by the time the person arrives, you’re either seething or so despondent that the evening is ruined. If the person asks what’s wrong, don’t say a word: let him or her suffer.

See also seven helpful tips on how to be miserable.

• Cloe Madanes
• lists

Dan Mancina has lost 95% of his eyesight but that hasn’t kept him from skating. Red Bull has an interview with Mancina, who stopped skating for a couple of years after he went blind, thinking that it wasn’t something a blind person would or could do.

There wasn’t a defining moment that changed my mind as to what a blind person was, but the day I started to build that bench sort of started it, and sparked this passion and stoked this urge to skate again.

Seeing how people responded to that, that’s the shit I was searching for. To see me not as a blind person, but as a normal person, a skater.

Ever since I was seven, that’s who I was. I am a skateboarder, I just lost it for a while. I bought into people’s ideas of me and what a blind person is, and really I should’ve been searching for who I was and what I wanted to do.

People who are really good at something talk about doing it “by feel” or being able to do it “in their sleep”. Mancina’s skating ability is a good reminder that after you pass a certain threshold of expertise, so much of athleticism is just your body’s ability to unconsciously perform.

You can watch more of Mancina’s skating on his Instagram account.

• blind
• Dan Mancina
• skateboarding
• sports
• video

Back in 2014, a lovely short film by Shaun Bloodworth called The Putter went viral. The film shows Cliff Denton making scissors for Ernest Wright & Sons. Denton works for the company as a putter, short for putter togetherer.

Before the film, business at the firm was so slow that staff were only working two days a week. When the video took off online, the company received two years’ worth of orders in a single day. Two years later in June 2016, the company launched a Kickstarter campaign for a throwback pair of kitchen scissors and ended up making four times their goal from more than 3600 backers.

Outwardly, this seemed to be one of those stories about how an old school company found a new audience and a second chance on the internet. But internally the company was struggling, hamstrung by a series of setbacks. Problems with design and machining the new scissors model delayed production for a year and two key employees, including putter Cliff Denton, were off the job due to illness. Shaun Bloodworth, the filmmaker, died waiting for a liver transplant. And then in February 2018, the news broke that Nick Wright, the company’s managing director, had died suddenly.

Under new leadership, the company vowed to carry on and fulfill all of the Kickstarter orders, but a message to Kickstarter backers yesterday revealed the company was deep in debt and would be “going into receivership”. It also revealed that Wright had taken his own life. Here’s the full message from Pam Addy, the current managing director of Ernest Wright & Sons. (Note: this includes a portion of a final letter written by Wright before he died.)

Hello everyone, this is Pam.

Following the death of Nick Wright, who took his own life in February, myself and the rest of the Ernest Wright team have endeavored to honour all you Kickstarter backers who pledged money for the Kutrite design of kitchen scissors. Unfortunately, only now am I aware of the extent of the business debt incurred prior to my taking over as Director on March 22 2018, so it is with great sadness I announce that Ernest Wright & Son Ltd will be going into receivership.

If you have not received your goods, you will be contacted by the Insolvency Practitioner in due course. Following advice from them, if you paid by Credit Card you may wish to contact your card provider, to see whether they will refund you the money paid.

Nick wrote a final letter. In this letter were personal messages including one to Kickstarter people:

“I tried so hard, this was no scam, I just could not make it happen. Too much pressure, not enough resource or time. I am so very genuinely sorry to you all.”

What a sad situation for Wright’s family and the company. It’s tempting to want to draw conclusions between the finances, the campaign, and Wright’s death, but we don’t actually know much about the situation. But I do think this highlights the potential disconnects between mental health & business, publicity & success, and success & happiness. The internet can seem so intimate but ultimately it’s a thin view of an individual’s or company’s reality. (thx, dawn)

• business
• Cliff Denton
• Kickstarter
• Shaun Bloodworth
• video

Elizabeth Kolbert writing for National Geographic: There’s No Scientific Basis for Race — It’s a Made-Up Label.

“What the genetics shows is that mixture and displacement have happened again and again and that our pictures of past ‘racial structures’ are almost always wrong,” says David Reich, a Harvard University paleogeneticist whose new book on the subject is called Who We Are and How We Got Here. There are no fixed traits associated with specific geographic locations, Reich says, because as often as isolation has created differences among populations, migration and mixing have blurred or erased them.

She also observes that there’s more diversity in Africa than all the other continents combined (which is what happens when the rest of the world’s population is based on a relatively small population that left Africa 60,000 years ago).

• Elizabeth Kolbert
• genetics
• racism
• science

Harkening back to when visual effects teams used colorful liquids & chemicals to simulate space travel for films like 2001, Helios uses those same techniques to visualize “what the uncharted territories of outer space might look like”.

Helios considers what the uncharted territories of outer space might look like. It was created as a passion project in my basement studio using various liquids and chemicals. It is staged as an audiovisual stimulus inspired by the aesthetics of vintage NASA space travel.

Having spent my entire childhood in an area lacking both basic infrastructure and light pollution, I developed an escapist obsession for watching the night sky and contemplating. I would constantly get on people’s nerves asking: “What do the limits of the universe look like? And what’s behind that?”

Here’s a look at the process behind the video, along with some high-resolution screencaps.

• space
• video

Russian writer Varlam Shalamov spent 15 years, from 1937 to 1951, in a Soviet gulag (forced labor camp) for engaging in “counter-revolutionary Trotskyist activities”. He wrote a book of short fiction about his experience called Kolyma Stories. He also wrote down 45 things he learned while in the gulag.

1. The extreme fragility of human culture, civilization. A man becomes a beast in three weeks, given heavy labor, cold, hunger, and beatings.

15. I realized that one can live on anger.

17. I understood why people do not live on hope — there isn’t any hope. Nor can they survive by means of free will — what free will is there? They live by instinct, a feeling of self-preservation, on the same basis as a tree, a stone, an animal.

26. I realized that you can achieve a great deal-time in the hospital, a transfer-but only by risking your life, taking beatings, enduring solitary confinement in ice.

30. I discovered that the world should be divided not into good and bad people but into cowards and non-cowards. Ninety-five percent of cowards are capable of the vilest things, lethal things, at the mildest threat.

44. I understood that moving from the condition of a prisoner to the condition of a free man is very difficult, almost impossible without a long period of amortization.

• lists
• prison
• Soviet Union
• Varlam Shalamov

With an eye on the current political situations in the US, Turkey, Russia, and China, Cass Sunstein reviews three books that shed light on how the Nazis came to power in Germany in the 1930s: They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933-45 by Milton Mayer, Broken Lives: How Ordinary Germans Experienced the Twentieth Century by Konrad Jarausch, and Defying Hitler by Sebastian Haffner.

Mayer’s book was published in 1955 and consisted of post-war interviews with normal German people (janitor, baker, teacher) who had been Nazi party members. Their recollection of what had happened differed somewhat from the rest of the world’s.

When Mayer returned home, he was afraid for his own country. He felt “that it was not German Man that I had met, but Man,” and that under the right conditions, he could well have turned out as his German friends did. He learned that Nazism took over Germany not “by subversion from within, but with a whoop and a holler.” Many Germans “wanted it; they got it; and they liked it.”

Mayer’s most stunning conclusion is that with one partial exception (the teacher), none of his subjects “saw Nazism as we — you and I — saw it in any respect.” Where most of us understand Nazism as a form of tyranny, Mayer’s subjects “did not know before 1933 that Nazism was evil. They did not know between 1933 and 1945 that it was evil. And they do not know it now.” Seven years after the war, they looked back on the period from 1933 to 1939 as the best time of their lives.

They also denied the Holocaust had happened. They didn’t see it because their lives were just fine (up until the war started).

Mayer suggests that even when tyrannical governments do horrific things, outsiders tend to exaggerate their effects on the actual experiences of most citizens, who focus on their own lives and “the sights which meet them in their daily rounds.” Nazism made things better for the people Mayer interviewed, not (as many think) because it restored some lost national pride but because it improved daily life. Germans had jobs and better housing. They were able to vacation in Norway or Spain through the “Strength Through Joy” program. Fewer people were hungry or cold, and the sick were more likely to receive treatment. The blessings of the New Order, as it was called, seemed to be enjoyed by “everybody.”

This reminded me of how ISIS improved the lives of many in Iraq & Syria by fixing electrical problems, regularly collecting garbage, and focusing on law & order. The quotes around “everybody” in the last line of that paragraph also reminded me of the criticism¹ directed at people like Steven Pinker, Bill Gates, or Hans Rosling who insist the world is getting better. Better for whom? Everybody?

See also the Sunstein-edited Can It Happen Here?: Authoritarianism in America.

1. It’s interesting that this post was deleted from the TED blog. I wonder why?↩

• books
• Cass Sunstein
• Germany
• Nazis
• politics

A supercut montage of dance scenes from over 300 movies (like School of Rock, The Wizard of Oz, Footloose, Dances With Wolves, West Side Story, and Straight Outta Compton). A full list of the movies represented is available here.

• dance
• movies
• video

On Tinker Fridays, industrial designer dina Amin takes apart an item and makes a playful stop motion animation out of its parts.

I spent 2016 taking products that people decided to throw away apart and showing people (not the ones who threw away those products, but others on Instagram) what’s inside and transformed all the pieces to lil creatures by the magical power of stop motion.

You can find more of Amin’s work on her website, YouTube, Vimeo, and Instagram. (thx, samira)

• design
• Dina Amin
• remix
• stop motion
• video

Earlier this year, 30,000 teachers in Oklahoma walked out of their classrooms to protest teacher pay and education budget cuts. The walkout ended after nine days with the teachers’ goals partially met. Vice News talked to 18 Oklahoma teachers about why they’ve decided to quit teaching after this year, essentially making their walkouts permanent.

Eric Weingartner worked two side jobs in addition to his role as a full-time 4th grade teacher to make ends meet. Chemistry teacher Becky Smith’s monthly paycheck rose just $300 in sixteen years. Aimee Elmquist spent her own money to stock her biology classroom. Mary West did the same for high school art.

One of the biggest realizations I’ve had in the past few years is that while Americans talk a lot about the importance of children and education, those things actually are not that important to us. You can see it in how we approach our educational system and you can see it in how we our government uses the abuse of children to attempt to curb immigration with relatively little outcry. You can see it in our governance…the people we elect do what’s best for voters, not for future voters. The enthusiasm of hobbyists and desire of gun companies keep our children attending school in fear. Healthcare costs are soaring and coverage for children isn’t guaranteed. Our parental leave policies, maternity care, and all-around treatment of mothers & women in the workplace lags behind other so-called “developed” countries. Children are a priority for the US? Yeah, no.

• education
• video
• working

TANK is a short animation by Stu Maschwitz that’s based on the look of vector arcade games from the 80s like Battlezone, Tempest, Asteroids, and Star Wars. And a sprinkling of Tron for good measure.

If you’re interested in how the video was made, Maschwitz did a 20-minute making of video that’s actually really interesting. I don’t know why I said “actually” there…I love watching how creative people make things. Maybe because the length is daunting? Anyway, how he reverse engineers this style using a modern visual effects software package is worth watching…the attention to detail is *kisses fingers*.

The way I made TANK is a little crazy. I made it entirely in Adobe After Effects, with equal parts animation elbow grease and nerdy expressions madness. This video is part behind-the-scenes, part After Effects tutorial, and part therapy session.

Maschwitz also shared some of assets & software he used, including an After Effects template you can use to make your own vector animations.

See also recreating the Asteroids arcade game with a laser. (thx, ben)

• Stu Maschwitz
• video
• video games

In this video, 70 people from 70 different countries from all over the world show how they count money in their respective countries. Fascinating and more than a little mesmerizing after a while. I wonder why these different techniques developed the way that they did… (via digg)

• video

In The Death of a Once Great City Kevin Baker argues that the current affluence of NYC has made the city “unremarkable” and “boring”.

New York has been my home for more than forty years, from the year after the city’s supposed nadir in 1975, when it nearly went bankrupt. I have seen all the periods of boom and bust since, almost all of them related to the “paper economy” of finance and real estate speculation that took over the city long before it did the rest of the nation. But I have never seen what is going on now: the systematic, wholesale transformation of New York into a reserve of the obscenely wealthy and the barely here — a place increasingly devoid of the idiosyncrasy, the complexity, the opportunity, and the roiling excitement that make a city great.

As New York enters the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is in imminent danger of becoming something it has never been before: unremarkable. It is approaching a state where it is no longer a significant cultural entity but the world’s largest gated community, with a few cupcake shops here and there. For the first time in its history, New York is, well, boring.

• cities
• Kevin Baker
• NYC

All through the 1980s, a disgruntled Department of Defense analyst adorned his daily desk calendar with all sorts of illustrations and commentary on the news.

The majority of the entries focus on domestic politics and international affairs, providing (with the exception of 1988) a day-by-day view of the Reagan Administration and the waning years of the Cold War. It all seems to be here: the end of the Iran hostage crisis, the invasion of Afghanistan, Poland’s Solidarity movement, supply-side economics, and the Space Shuttle, to name just a few, along with hundreds of lesser-known events all but forgotten today except by scholars.

What a wonderful piece of folk art. (via the paris review)

• art