Issue 17 - Encouragement
“Almost every child likes to make drawings, and some children are less discouraged by adults than others.”
— Stanley Donwood, There Will Be No Quiet, P.25
Those are the opening words of the first chapter of Stanley Donwood’s new book, a heavy, coffee-table tome containing sketches and reflections on his years as the primary visual artist for one of my favorite bands, Radiohead.
It’s rare that a first sentence is one which grabs at you, the way that sentence grabs at me. In just 17 words, it encapsulates lessons about parenting, and art, and existence. It is, as much as any of his work on OK Computer or the band’s other albums, a work of art.
Being encouraging of children is a topic we tend to get pretty weird about. Born at the very tail-end of Gen X, I grew up during the increasing tendency to “reward participation”, and the nasty, slightly-later backlash tendency to increasingly dismiss younger folk as “requiring a medal for everything”.
And certainly, it’s possible to over-encourage your kids; what else, really, is Affluenza?
I think the key here is to focus, whenever possible, on praising effort, not ability. In most areas, some natural predisposition can be an advantage, but that advantage can almost always be overcome by someone with enough passion and dedication.
I wish I’d been less discouraged by adults. I vow to be as encouraging as I can.
Project Updates
I've been writing code and tinkering with servers -- and enjoying it -- for the first time in a long while. Golang, gRPC, Kubernetes... I'm having surprising amounts of fun!
One thing I've realized as I work through this, though, is how operational tasks have become more and more important over the past couple of decades. It feels significantly harder to just throw some code on a server and tinker in it these days. You need to install more infrastructure (source code repositories, build pipelines, configuration managers... just to prototype. I don't think this is a bad thing (honestly, I think it instills more discipline sooner in many projects). But it is a thing.
Elsewhere, baking continues at a steady pace. I've already used about 30lbs of the 50lb bag of flour I bought in May. Below: two sourdough loaves and two loaves of banana bread, from last weekend.
A Thing of Beauty
Hiroshi Kondo's mesmerizing animation 0107 - b moll sits perfectly in the uncanny valley, stretching and distorting reality. It's a truly beautiful way to spend three minutes.
And I wouldn't have been a 2000s-era MTV2-watching slacker if this didn't immediately, strongly remind me of Michel Gondry's seminal 2002 video for the Chemical Brothers' Star Guitar. They're opposites in many ways -- Europe/Asia, Day/Night, Inside-train/outside-train ... (Star Guitar also reads as far more obviously rendered than I remembered it being).
Ephemera
Last week's newsletter was a bit of a pent-up rush, so we'll keep this relatively brief this week.
Harvard Business School's distillation of the history of African American Ineqaulity is a must-read for white folks. An accessible, powerful read.
NASA's video, "How We Are Going to the Moon" is to the point and extremely accessible.
Find the widest screen you can for this: MILLION -- parts of it strongly remind me of the level-design Meowza did for Glitch, before Glitch became Slack.
Maps-of-trends-over-time are an overdone, often-tedious meme-genre, but this one of Blockbuster locations was entertaining to me since I knew the underlying timeline pretty well, and could anticipate certain trends as they started showing up.
And hey, Youtube's algorithm followed that up with this charming 10-minute documentary about the closing of a video store.
Eggdog is still just on the right side of the line between "befuddling" and "amazing".
Endnote
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