A chat between Hank and Ze

Hank Green and Ze Frank talking about creativity (among other things). Some tidbits from the podcast:

This question of where ideas come from, I think it’s central to my life and certainly a lot of other creative people. And I think that the importance often comes from some sort of an urgency that we have to not only have ideas, but to have ideas that feel like you. In addition to that, it’s like there’s one thing to have an idea, but then there’s another thing to decide to make it, you know, birth it.

You know, I don’t know how it plays out in your mind, but I have a lot of thoughts and have a lot of ideas and there’s a lot of possibilities and you do have to kind of like feel them and feel what the possibility space is around them, you know?

That’s something that I think you get better at over a creative life is having an instinct for the shape of an idea and whether or not it has the qualities that you know are going to mature into something or kind of allow you to play around in a way that feels right. Yeah. So, you know, in a lot of cases I’ll sit on stuff for years even because I don’t have the shape of the thing.

Ze Frank

Also:

Ze: For me personally, I actually feel like I want to make things that are uncomfortable.

Hank: Do you want to make things that are uncomfortable for you?

Ze: For me to make, you know, generally that there’s stuff that kind of comes easy to you. And this is, you know, everybody knows this is that, you know, you get frustrated with people for not doing the stuff that they can just do, right? Um, and yours is sort of like, you know, make another funny thing.

Hank: Come on. Like, play the hits.

Ze: Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. I think that making things is about becoming. That’s the joy of it is is that you you see something develop and birth. You feel yourself getting better through the struggle. You feel like some kind of emergence that happened like there’s a journey. And um comfort to me is usually a sign that you’re off from the meat of it.

(The quotes are pulled from Youtube’s auto-transcript mode, so apologies for any grammar errors.)

Getting back to things

This must be Thursday. I never could get the hang of Thursdays.

Douglas Adams

Sorry for the radio silence for the past little bit. Life has been keeping me busy, but in all honestly mostly I’ve just been a little burned out and tired. Not “burnt to ash” levels of burnt out, but enough that most of my energy has been spent just trying to maintain, while a lot of stuff is happening both in life and at work.

Continue reading “Getting back to things”

That time of year again

It’s my birthday. I’ve always felt uneasy about my birthday for a variety of reasons – it feels like a lot of my life’s bigger emotional upheavals have happened within a few weeks of the day. After a while, I actually started planning to take myself on trips around now, both as a treat for myself, and also to put some distance there. It’s worked pretty well, I think. Today’s not much different – I’m actually writing this post the day before and have it scheduled, as I’ll be on the road. Just a day trip this time, but still.

I’ve been feeling a little weird lately anyway, honestly. We’re in the process of preparing the house to sell (planning to list it at the end of the month-ish), and so I’m trying to go through old boxes from the last move that I just hadn’t gotten to (you know how it is), and we’re whittling things down to put stuff in storage while we hit the road again – this time, the plan is to take a few months to trek across Canada. Exactly when and where will depend on when the house sells, but regardless it’s the next plan. (Some of you may be wondering “didn’t you just move in there?” And you’re right – it’ll be not quite 2 years here. Lovely house, no real regrets, but for various reasons I’m not going to bother enumerating, we decided it was time to move on.)

I’ve always had this sort of vision of having a place that acts like a base of operations – a spot to come home to, yes, but also a spot to re-collect yourself before you take off on another wander. I’m pretty sure I’d need to win a small lottery to pull off affording both the home and the travel these days, though. So for now it seems like an either/or, and the scales for both Simone and I have tipped towards the wander.

I’ve been trying to put out a weekly longer, non-life post the past few weeks, and I plan to continue that, but I’m taking an indulgence this week. It’s my birthday, so I’d appreciate it if you could do me a favor: just do your best. Even if it’s small increments, move forward on getting a little bit happier, a little bit safer and more secure, a little bit more in a good headspace than you were yesterday. That’s all I really want for my birthday, just everyone I care about to be alright, or at least moving in that direction. I know that’s a lot to ask these days, but try. It’d mean a lot to me.

Writing Formats

Last week I talked about technical writing as a role, and I figured I’d run with that theme for a minute. One of the things I mentioned was that we tend to write in other formats, and I wanted to expand on that – if you’re used to a “What You See is What You Get” (WYSIWYG) system like Microsoft Word or a Rich Text Format (RTF), or online editors, you might not think about writing formats much – if you want something bold, you click the bold button. The format is how that bold is represented under the hood. (This is related to, but slightly different from a file type – you can have multiple file types that actually use the same format behind the scenes, but are saved as a different type of file for various reasons.)

Click for an infodump

On Technical Writing

I don’t talk about my day job all that often. What I’m doing currently is software development – specifically, I write tools and create infrastructure for a documentation team. This ranges from writing deployment pipelines and build scripts to writing extensions for the writing software we use, to building out sites and wrangling server configurations. I enjoy it, and I like that the role is broad, where what exactly I’m working on can vary a lot from day to day, depending on what needs to take priority. Prior to my current role, however, I was a technical writer – one of the folks writing the docs, and I wanted to talk about that a bit, as I think it’s a great role that I think a lot of folks might overlook.

Continue reading “On Technical Writing”

Apple and Back to Basics

I have never heard as many people avoiding upgrading to the new macOS, this late into the release cycle (we’re up to 26.2), as I have with this release. Between the new UI being an accessibility nightmare and just actively weird, plus it all seeming to be buggier than normal, it just feels like a bit of a mess. I’m not saying there weren’t some good improvements as well, but let’s just say it wasn’t their best.

What I’d like to see from the next release (macOS 27, since they’ve moved to a year-based versioning) is a “back to basics” bug-fix-focused release. Get your house in order, address technical debt, make everything as smooth and reliable as possible, get things into a good state for future development. Address all of the hate on the new UI, and follow your own UX guidelines. Fix the sorts of UI bugs that make the OS feel regressed and sloppy (for example, when dragging and dropping files from one window to another, it’s no longer clear if you’re copying into that window, or into folder inside that window). That absolutely needs to be the priority, though it’s not like I’m in a position to dictate as such.

Worth noting, the idea isn’t a far-fetched one – they’ve done it before with Snow Leopard, and even marketed it as a “No new features” release. It’s time to do that again.

Kindness, Empathy, and Respect

Adam Savage on enduring today’s uncertain, hostile times (found via Chris Koerner):

It’s some good thoughts, and I agree: the experiences that I think about most fondly, and the work that I’m most proud of, were all approached with a sense of kindness, empathy, and respect. (And as he mentions, the regrets that I do have largely center around occasions where I failed apply or communicate with those principles in mind, and let others down in the process.)

Not worth the argument

Jay Springett has a nice piece over on his site called “Just Like Stuff“, and I appreciated the comment about not arguing with people about anything on the internet:

I’ve had a hard rule for almost twenty years, related to, but separate from, not posting negative things on the internet: I don’t argue with people about anything on the internet.

I grew up in the late 90’s and early 00’s on phpBB forums. At university I was immersed in the blast furnace of 4chan for days at a time. Maybe it’s the Gen-X hangover I carry as a Gen-Y geriatric millennial, but I realised in my early 20’s that I just don’t care enough. I spent whole days, whole summers even when I was younger, lost to endless back-and-forth about whether a band sold out, what sci-fi books were overrated, or particular egregiously on my side, what choice of operating system or KDE vs GNOME proved you were secretly a poser. My mind boggles at it all now, the thought of spending my youth in a permanent trial by forum post. I saw the pattern in my self, how it was making me feel and how permanently warfare online was effecting other people so I opted out. 

The times I have argued about something on the internet as an adult, have all resulted from a lapse in judgement, and without exception left me feeling guilty and full of shame. Not because of what others might have thought about the argument, but because I had wasted my energy and got emotionally involved in something that just… didn’t matter.

Jay Springett, “Just Like Stuff“

Sounds about right to me. I spent enough time in my teens and early twenties getting into arguments on forums and IRC channels and whatnot, and yeah. I just don’t care enough. To borrow a line from War Games, “The only winning move is not to play.”