Celebrating Inbox Zero by lying on the couch listening to Curtain Call by haruka nakamura, I imagined a video documentary series about historical figures. Do it completely straight-faced, with no explanation of why Caravaggio is unperturbed by a camera crew watching him work on and interviewing him in between painting sessions. (Especially because now that I think of it, .) Get an actor to completely the subject — an impeccable, historically defensible portrayal. Do everything at half the pace people expect from TV, kind of like , “Walking the World with Cats”. Editing that makes you calmer and calmer with each cut. Actually, make it as much like that show as possible — except we’re following historical artists, scholars, and divines around instead of cats. I’d like to watch that.

Do you meditate? I used to associate the practice with certain spiritual traditions or worldviews, and I got some moderately useful advice from books like The Zen Commandments and Waking Up. But I didn’t really develop a successful practice of my own until I read a certain theoretical cosmology book. Yeah!

How important do you think it is to be consistent? I think I assumed for a long time that of course a person should remain more or less the same person all of the time.

But! Walt Whitman:

Do I contradict myself?

What are your values? Yours individually, and those of your organizations and projects? I think identifying values works best if you can phrase both the value and its opposite as positives.

Stated values should help you make decisions. Saying that you value "€œmaking great stuff"€ is meaningless, because it'll never help you choose one course of action over another. Nobody would ever wonder, "hmm, should I make this thing great? or "

Routine and habit are, I believe, the only reliable tools for improving yourself and your situation. I think they tried to convince me of this in grade school, but it didn'€™t work. Someone recognized the power of this idea and thought, we need to make sure kids get this! If we equip them with the power of good habits, we'€™ll empower an entire generation to reach their true potential! (I spent a long time at war with the word potential, urgh.) So they put on some video or something, saying that if we develop good habits then we can'€¦ eat healthy and get good grades, or some other message that I immediately forgot because it was irrelevant to my juvenile psyche. It really meant nothing to me. What they should have said to get that crucial lesson across was something like, '€œevery single person you think is cool got that way by regularly doing things that made them a better person, whether they felt like it in the moment or not. INCLUDING GEDDY LEE.'€

In February I had an evening that made me think, as long as I can experience something like this at least once per year, then life is going well. It's been hard to write about, for fear of disenchanting the preternatural memory. But I did it.

Here's The Story About The Evening I Had

Tokyo; Daikanyama. A shmancier area than I am used to, where I stumble across the impossibly hip bookstore complex.

This was written for Dramatickers, my fan-site for the band Clammbon. I thought that newsletterfriends might like to read it, too. If you’re in a hurry you can skip to the part at the end where I meet my favorite band and they’re just lovely.

Sketching is the cental activity of design, but it doesn'€™t always have to be sketching pictures. I really like roughing out text outlines to make sense of a complicated problem. In this approach, once you understand what you want to make possible, then you can worry about drawing a picture of it.

How often do you consciously evaluate the direction of your life? For some folks it’s today, once a year. For a good while my answer was “never”. If I was forced to by some major event, I’d think about where I was headed just long enough to reach a reasonable answer, then get back to fulfilling my active projects.

The project was the coarsest unit of aspiration on my mind — Write a chapter. Ship an app. Give a talk. Learn to play a song. Design a poster. Translate a section of a video game. When I thought of something that seemed worth doing, I’d make a project in OmniFocus. Like maybe if I finished enough projects, good things would happen to me on a bigger scale? Sometimes they did. Sometimes not.

I’m working through my music library in chronological order, which has been a thrilling rediscovery of my favorite music in its original context. When 1975 came around, I asked Siri to cue up a Soft Machine album and the resulting failure was another fascinating lesson in interaction design, in the spirit of my original Siri Teaches Interaction Design post. Let’s dissect it!

Jon, My partner in UX Launchpad, put his prodigious design insight and experience into a post about why undo has been demoted in mobile interfaces. I tend to agree that for designers, just complaining is not going far enough — we should try to understand why smart people designed the system the way it is, and whether there really is a better way. All while being realistic about all of the pressures and compromises that shipping design teams need to balance.

I hate shake to undo Here’s a sidebar from my book about it:

Hello, friends. Remember me? I’ve been in a weird place lately. Some of it is that I’ve been busy, sure. But I’ve also just been a quieter person for a while. My personality changes in waves. Sometimes I think that of course people want to read weird emails from me. Other times I think that’s utterly absurd.

I recently finished the book Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies by Nick Bostrom. It’s a history of the quest to create superhuman artificial intelligence and a survey of how things may go when we finally manage it. The whole thing is surreally hilarious in that it takes a lot of absurd science-fiction scenarios very, very seriously. Like, what if we set up an AI at a factory to maximize paper-clip production and it ends up converting the entirety of the observable universe to paper clips? Whoooops. This is a real concern. The uncanny atmosphere is magnified in the the audio version, narrated by Napoleon Ryan, whose posh British supervillain performance makes you wonder if he might actually relish describing, say, the destruction, enslavement, or torture of quadrillions of simulated human minds per second. (Seriously, go ahead and check out the audio sample!)

The ideas, the scale, and the moral puzzles involved in this topic are boggling. AI seems to me to be the most significant philosophical concern humans have yet encountered. In some sections of the book, nearly every paragraph offers a possible near-future scenario involving the pointless doom or fundamental transcendence of the human race. It just tosses them out there one after another, each one a free premise for a whole series of apocalyptic or dystopian science fiction novels. Here are a bunch of scenarios that my own brain came up with while reading it.

Time for another one of this series. It seemed appropriate, since I have been thinking about 3D Touch and the Apple Pencil and the other interactions introduced this morning.

I am all in favor of 3D Touch, which at long last adds some nuance to the Pictures Under Glass experience of Multi-Touch devices. To be honest that when we got pressure sensitivity, we would have the restraint to use it to make the interactions we already had more reliable and forgiving, rather than adding a whole new layer of invisible interactions on top of it all. Of course I have not used 3D Touch yet, but I am a bit nervous that like edge-swipes and two-finger taps and long presses and double-taps, it’ll be yet another class of secret inputs that people accidentally do when they didn’t mean to, or have trouble doing when they do mean to.

Do you have a system for managing your time? Since 2005 I’ve used a personal variant of Getting Things Done to manage my work. That changed my life. If you’ve been meaning to read the book (or reread it) you can actually get its core concepts in 15 minutes. But a work management system isn’t the same as a management system. Even if you know which projects are important to do, and even if you’re confident that you’re not forgetting any projects, that doesn’t mean you know to work on each project, and for how long. If you always just do whatever is at the top of your list, you’ll always be on time-sensitive, “high-priority” stuff. You might almost never work on things that are important to you but that don’t have external deadline pressure — creative pursuits, side projects, learning, things that reset and recenter you, things that you consider part of who you are.

How about that technology? Always getting better in miraculous new ways, while somehow remaining frustrating enough that those of us who make it suspect we’re doing it all wrong. Of course all design is made of compromises, and it’s absurd to think that we could be getting it perfectly right all the time. But I do think it’s valuable to pay attention to where we’re putting our efforts, and what our priorities are at bigger scales than individual products and experiences.

I collected a few areas I’d been hoping for years that we would have pretty well nailed down by now, but for whatever reason we haven’t. There are twelve of them at the moment, and here’s my favorite one to start.

Can I just complain for a second? I know that software is hard, but when software messes up my music-listening experience in ways that used to work just fine, I become an irrational customer. Today before leaving the house I told my iPhone to download Presto by RUSH. It responded by putting a little iPhone badge in the corner of the album art, as if “downloaded” were some kind of unusual state that needs labeling. (And even though Apple has always advised against using an image of the hardware in an interface.) Weird, but at least it gave me some feedback that the music was safely on the device and that I was all set to drive away rocking.

In the car, I hit play and sang along to the opening lines of “Show Don’t Tell”. Now, nothing’s worse than being really into a song and having it come to a dead stop, but at the corner of our subdivision, just out of range of the wi-fi, that is what happened. Turns out, the album wasn’t downloaded at all. The little iPhone badge, which I’d thought was a promise that all was well, was gone. What I’d thought was an “I downloaded this” badge turned out to be a “I will try to download this some time soon, maybe” badge. My choices were to go without or to risk data overage charges by streaming it over the cell network. I went without. (At least had successfully downloaded.)

How much do you love emoji? I used to really hate ’em.

In 2002 I lived in Tokyo, and used an AU phone that felt like the future. But it drove me crazy that the cell providers in Japan had abused standards for their own gain by creating a bunch of mutually-incompatible encoding extensions to add these silly images to emails and web pages. It caused all sorts of problems when sending messages between different providers, or to people on computers.

Do you like the band RUSH? I have been super into them since I was like 12. Lately I have been thinking about the documentary that came with the limited edition of their 2007 album Snakes and Arrows. It introduces their producer Nick Raskulinecz, who they liked quite a lot for bringing to the project, and for pushing them to make each into the best possible RUSH were still the creative minds making the music, but Nick was the one who focused on shipping a coherent final product rather than on the fun of getting there.

Creativity Hax

Pretty tired today! I am trying again, and am not quite used to it yet. But I have an old email here that I sent to my dear friend , and I think some more folks might be interested in it. So the main text today is a lightly edited version of that!

Zoom Out

Do you know Bret Victor? He’s a universally well-regarded thinker on the topic of how humans work and learn with technology. A lot of smart people consider his Inventing on Principle to be one of the best talks of all time for people who, like, make things, or… do things. I got to see him speak about at Edward Tufte’s seminar. His newest talk is called , and it is also very good. The subtitle of that talk is “A trail map for the 21st century”. There is a thread through most of Victor’s work, and the way he talks about it, that makes it pretty clear: his thinking and his work are focused at the level. He wants to do work that’s important enough to be remembered in holo-textbooks of the 22nd century. Maybe if he does a good job, he could have a impact.

Exile in Hashtagtinople

Thank you for signing up. I’m not sure yet precisely what this newsletter is going to become, but for a while now I’ve been feeling the need for a Twitter-like way to say stuff to the world that isn’t Twitter. For now I am just gonna type and see what happens.

Nickd’s recent letter , and the links therein, are probably what finally convinced me, but there have been several other nudges. I spent half of last year developing a talk about how creative people interact with the wider world, called ; all the research and thinking that went into it left me with a much-diminished view of the healthiness of social network sites as one’s primary way of connecting to people. And CGP Grey’s reminded me that there is actually a technology out there for putting strings of text in front of people who want them, and isn’t bound to mutate over time in pursuit of some company’s business interests and at the expense of its users — email!