Listening to
My Dad Wrote a Porno, book 3. Had a bit of a respite after the last binge, and I’m saving some episodes for later, but managed to get through a few more this week. Once you pop, you can’t stop. Very funny.
Invisibilia S04E03: What Was Not Said. After the really interesting episode last week, this was a huge let down. About a mysterious man that ingratiates himself into a family in Taiwan. Just… not one that caught my interest. At. All. But that’s fine, would be odd if I liked everything. What I did like here though, was a throwaway line in the intro:
I think the barrier to deeper understanding in a lot of our relationships is that we sort of believe that we understand this person already, and so we don’t need to ask these questions. We don’t need to talk deeper. We don’t ask the things that sometimes we even ask of strangers.
Apply that to web design (or web Design) and you’ve got a nice summary of why it’s so important to talk to your audience. Making up personas and building for them is wildly insufficient… has to be real, actual, people.
Reading
Spiders Can Fly Hundreds of Miles Using Electricity. I’ve read this a couple of times and still don’t really understand it. Tiny spiders can use the planetary electric field (which is constant) to propel themselves across oceans and continents. It’s called electrostatic repulsion – presumably because a) it uses electricity and b) the thought of flying spiders is repulsive – and the set of studies that prove it are pretty amazing.
40 Lessons (from a 40 year old). I actually stumbled on this a few months ago but had the tab still open last week, so got around to finishing it. A list of quite specific things that Will Mydellton has learnt in the 40 years he’s been around, it still has plenty of truths for me (though granted, I’m 36 and also ‘white, male, middle class, straight, tall, able-bodied, and young(ish) … and WEIRD – western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic’ so there’s a solid base level of similitude there from the start). I imagine if I went to write a list like this in a few years time, it’d be very similar; in fact, there are similarities from the list I wrote a couple of years ago. Lots in there for people of any age.
#18. Self care isn’t some new age bullshit. Ten years ago I laughed at self-help books. Then someone close to me revealed they had helped him. I read some. They helped me too. I meditate and write morning pages. I work four days a week to balance work with life. Life is a long road and I need all the help I can get.
