"High achievers are perhaps the most insecure people among us" - real talk from @berkun.bsky.social

Brian Moore's Busy Simulator makes repeating app sounds that make you seem incredibly busy. Which of these sounds make you cringe the hardest?

Tai Ericson is making beautiful portraits of transgender people who have been murdered using donated Harry Potter books buff.ly/iPY7kiP

The November edition of the newsletter is out now: subscribe to get a healthy serving of warm & tasty links delivered to your inbox once a month

How many ways could you make an animated horse run with your computer? Here's a dozen ways, including with fingerprint smudges on a MacBook screen

You didn't know you wanted to search and read Jeffrey Epstein’s email as if you were logged into his Google account until Jmail

Lily Allen's newest album - a devastating story set to the catchiest beats - just "fell out of her" in a mere 10 days in the studio

The idea that building new things is more valuable than maintenance or care is capitalist BS worth deprogramming.

Why do coffeeshops, book covers, and YouTube thumbnails all look the same? "We’re in a crisis of conventionality, an epidemic of the mundane."

step 1: learn to quilt step 2: get an invite to a Fierstein bitch & stitch session www.vulture.com/article/harv...

What does it look like to be neither an AI cheerleader nor doomsayer in practice? Here’s what measured AI looks like for me

Thoughtful guidance for anyone on their way back to their true work

Three ways to make stuff: 1. make things you want by yourself or with people you choose 2. make things you must with people chosen for you on a schedule set by someone else 3. perform all the capitalist ceremonies of #2 without actually making anything yourself

When you want to go in a certain direction, ask yourself: Which part of me has the wheel?

Latest issue of the newsletter is out now! buff.ly/XANouS2

This isn’t practice and there are no do-overs

Thanks to @anildash.com I will never stop thinking about the fact that Mariah Carey recorded a song called Demented at the same time as Always Be My Baby

"Completing tasks, no matter how inane, made me feel productive...never you mind the fact that most of those tasks have no real importance and frequently represent phony work."

Asked @monteiro.bsky.social how he thinks about his creative practice, and he wrote about how life’s big and small, important and trivial, mundane and creative activities are all interconnected. Good answer.

Fellow KPop Demon Hunter fans: EJAE - singer-songwriter and voice of Rumi - wrote Golden on her way to the dentist

Experience is the best teacher

It's launch day! 💙 📓 🚀 This is my new blog, an actual ongoing note to myself about joy over productivity buff.ly/Yrt7tYo

Publishing today is all about self-publishing

At some point, the ability to check items off a todo-list stops moving you forward, and instead holds you back.

Issue 2 of the newsletter is out

Epiphanies are rarer than we think. When you ask a big question, the answer arrives not as a lightning bolt, but as a whisper.

Po Bronson: "Confusing intensity and passion is a common mistake. Intensity is external; passion invokes something inside you. Passion is a call-and-response with your soul. It’s not just adrenaline."

All your ideas are downstream from what you take in. Garbage in, garbage out. You improve your output with higher-quality input.

“Vibe coding is on a spectrum of how much you understand the code. The more you understand, the less you are vibing.” – Steve Krouse blog.val.town/vibe-code

I tend to discount AI chatbots as a fawning junior intern trying desperately to impress me but Harsh Claude and I might be able to get somewhere - wonderful piece

How has anyone achieved notable success? They worked hard and got lucky.

One way to separate pointless cruelty from productive feedback: The Disapproval Matrix, an oldie-but-goodie from Anne Friedman www.annfriedman.com/the-disappro...

"In the Who Cares Era, the most radical thing you can do is care. In a moment where machines churn out mediocrity, make something yourself. Make it imperfect. Make it rough. Just make it."

“Observe your respiration.” What I heard him say was, “Observe your desperation.” Yes, my desperation. I am desperate. I am so, so desperate.

First issue of the newsletter went out. Deep breath: You can't edit or unsend a sent email.

Linds Redding: "The trick to being truly creative is to be completely unselfconscious. That’s why children are so good at it. And why people with Volkswagens, and mortgages, Personal Equity Plans and matching Louis Vuitton luggage are not."

Martha Beck: "Your true self is intensely interested in your real life’s work—but it could give a rat’s ass about anything else."

Chatbots — LLMs — do not know facts and are not designed to be able to accurately answer factual questions. They are designed to find and mimic patterns of words, probabilistically. When they’re “right” it’s because correct things are often written down, so those patterns are frequent. That’s all.

look for the helpers johayartist.com

Counterintuitive to a cardio type: when it comes to lifting weights, you get stronger after a break.

Ann Patchett describes the idea for her next book as a beautiful butterfly fluttering around her mind. To write it, she has to smash the butterfly onto her desk and pin it down into a flat, broken, poorly-reassembled version of itself. That's how you turn an idea into something tangible.

Productivity is about hustle, urgency, achievement, and winning. Creativity is about presence, noticing, inspiration, and practice.

Blogging is fun, so I’ve started again.

Hello, world. Just setting up my bsky