Conway’s Game of Hope
A beautifully Borgesian fable.
Link tags: life
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Against Scale
Claire L. Evans has written a beautiful piece on the difference between growth and scalability:
Life is nonhierarchical, and it shirks top-down control. But scalability relies on hierarchy, on the isolation of elements stripped of history and context. It is predicated on the assumption that nature is little more than a raw material to be processed and commodified until it is spent. This is, of course, unsustainable — at any scale.
Better Living Through Algorithms by Naomi Kritzer : Clarkesworld Magazine – Science Fiction & Fantasy
This short story feels like a prequel to Maneki Neko.
A very simple rule
I have a very simple rule that serves me well: Don’t think too much about your life after dinnertime.
A life of splendid uselessness is a life well lived | Psyche Ideas
But the real project of humanity – of understanding ourselves as human beings, making a good world to live in, and striving together toward mutual flourishing – depends paradoxically upon the continued pursuit of what Hitz calls ‘splendid uselessness’.
This reminds me of that post by Winnie Lim I linked to a while back.
Life Universe
A fractal version of Conway’s Game Of Life: keep zooming out …forever!
Little Rules About Big Things · Collab Fund
Pessimism always sounds smarter than optimism because optimism sounds like a sales pitch while pessimism sounds like someone trying to help you.
I usually hate these kinds of lists of bumper-sticker aphorisms but some of these have me pondering my own work, like this one:
People learn when they’re surprised. Not when they read the right answer, or are told they’re doing it wrong, but when they experience a gap between expectations and reality.
Or this:
There are two types of information: stuff you’ll still care about in the future, and stuff that matters less and less over time. Long-term vs. expiring knowledge.
Fermented Code: Modelling the Microbial Through Miso - Serpentine Galleries
Y’know, I started reading this great piece by Claire L. Evans thinking about its connections to systems thinking, but I ended up thinking more about prototyping. And microbes.
Winnie Lim » on leading a purposeless life
💯
I think it is beautiful if people have a purpose. But it should be valid to lead a purposeless life too. … Maybe it is okay to not pursue potential and just be okay with being.
The Technium: 103 Bits of Advice I Wish I Had Known
I’m not usually that keen on lists of pithy aphorisms but some of these really resonated…
- If you stop to listen to a musician or street performer for more than a minute, you owe them a dollar.
- Efficiency is highly overrated; Goofing off is highly underrated. Regularly scheduled sabbaths, sabbaticals, vacations, breaks, aimless walks and time off are essential for top performance of any kind. The best work ethic requires a good rest ethic.
- The biggest lie we tell ourselves is “I dont need to write this down because I will remember it.”
- Buy used books. They have the same words as the new ones. Also libraries.
- You can be whatever you want, so be the person who ends meetings early.
- It’s thrilling to be extremely polite to rude strangers.
Bones, Bones: How to Articulate a Whale
I found this to be thoroughly engrossing. An articulate composition, you might say.
I couldn’t help thinking of J.G. Ballard’s short story, The Drowned Giant.
Best laid plans by Amy Hupe, content designer.
All of Amy’s writing recently has been absolutely wonderful, some of the best I’ve read in a long while, but I particularly needed this one.
I don’t know where we go from here, with this latest pandemic setback, but I do know that things will keep moving.
And if you feel bad today, feel bad. Feel sad or angry or scared or whatever it is you need to feel. Give yourself to yourself as you are.
Things will keep changing. Life will keep unfolding. We will keep going.
Blunder • Robin Rendle
Get out of my head, Robin!
I wish the structure of my days could be more like this though; more haphazard, more jumping from thing to thing with reckless abandon. There’s a punch-in-the-gut feeling I get when my days have too much structure to them. I require that feeling of jumping around whenever I want to, and I think it’s what gives me the energy to be a functional person.
It. Me.
When shaken to the core, we get priorities right. Can we stick to it? – Dr. Carolina Odman
Carolina’s post reminds me of A Paradise Built In Hell by Rebecca Solnit:
In the face of disaster, survivors get together, make time and help one another regardless of their differences. It is beautiful and inspiring.
Priorities
The quest for more is a kind of prison that we make for ourselves. The idea that if we work ourselves to the bone now we can live a better life later is a convenient lie that we’ve been conditioned to tell ourselves.
An open and honest post from Ben.
I see decentralization as a way to lead to a more equitable society through disassembling existing hierarchies, for example, but I see straight through the people who see these ideas as a way to build a new hierarchy for their own benefit. We used to talk about abolishing gatekeepers in the early days of the web, too, until it became clear that many people just wanted to become a new kind of gatekeeper themselves.
Remote to who? A working letter
The idea that your job should be the primary source of meaning in your life is an elaborately made trap, propped up across industries, designed to make you a loyal worker who uses the bulk of their intellectual and creative capacity to further their own career.
Blackout in the Brain Lab - Issue 98: Mind - Nautilus
Black Mirror meets Henrietta Lacks in this short story by Erik Hoel who I had not heard of until today, when I came across his name here and also in a completely unrelated blog post by Peter Watts about the nature of dreams.
The Digital Jungle
A fascinating look at artificial life …for some definition of “life”.
2021 is when lockdown will stop mattering (Interconnected)
First you cope and then you adapt. The kicker: once you adapt, you may not want to go back.