Filtered for Muybridge and Moorcock
10.19, Thursday 12 Feb 2015 Link to this post
1.
Your microwave just heated a lasagna.
Record: You just stared out of the window for 23 minutes. [Ok] [post your score]
Your couch likes your microwave’s status update.
It’s raining again. [Ok]
Also, not the same, but: Ranjit Bhatnagar says I plugged a little light sensor into an amplifier to hear invisible light modulation. One of my LED candles had a surprise.
Watch the video, it plays a little tune.
Sallie Gardner at a Gallop is a series of photographs consisting of a galloping horse, the result of a photographic experiment by Eadweard Muybridge on June 15, 1878.
Because:
The purpose of the shoot was to determine whether a galloping horse ever lifts all four feet completely off the ground during the gait; at this speed, the human eye cannot break down the action.
Muybridge used his photographic technique like a microscope on time – to see motion previously too quick to catch.
Everything speaks.
2.
Michael Moorcock: How to write an adventure model in three days.
Formula, structure, using what’s on hand: Really, it’s just looking around the room, looking at ordinary objects and turning them into what you need. A mirror: a mirror that absorbs the souls of the damned.
3.
Do Things That Don’t Scale, by Paul Graham.
Actually startups take off because the founders make them take off. There may be a handful that just grew by themselves, but usually it takes some sort of push to get them going. A good metaphor would be the cranks that car engines had before they got electric starters. Once the engine was going, it would keep going, but there was a separate and laborious process to get it going.
Great article.
The startup worldview. I mean: it’s effective at newness, yes, and I am pro progress. The underlying value resonates with me: The world is a do-ocracy and you can make your stamp by doing. That wasn’t always the case, authority-by-history has been dominant for so long.
BUT (a) what can’t be reached by this worldview? A whole bunch, probably. But actually I think it would be productive to point startups at a much wider variety of problems. Case in point, Bethnal Green Ventures and “tech for good.”
BUT (b). The mode of coordination of all these small enterprises is to share a language and share a way of being in the world. It can feel a bit paint-by-numbers sometimes, and that’s fine… except that worldviews are like the Catholic church in medieval Europe, and Silicon Valley is our Rome.
A double-edged sword, if your native culture is not Roman.
Then I remember Moorcock, who painted by numbers, but truly was a fucking legend for all time, who wrote books you can inhale and - by force of will and a community of like-minded geniuses - created a new and truly British science fiction, one that changed everything.
4.
A few weeks ago, I got the “call for talks” email from OpenTech 2015 – it’s in June, it’s the 10th edition.
The email said: The main thing we’re looking for are the things we don’t know to look for.
And then they linked to Phil Gyford’s list, trying to imagine a tech conference that would embody an alternative viewpoint.
Different models for start-ups. Co-operatives. Employee ownership. Normal, slowly-growing, profit-making businesses.
Ruricomp - technology for people who don’t live in cities.
Makes me think: My notes on City Link and a new class of worker.
Makes me think: indie.vc, A program, network and funding mechanism for founders looking to start and scale independent businesses with positive cash flow.
A different kind of deal.
A note
I started writing these “filtered” posts because of Michael Sippey:
I used to blog; I haven’t in a while. I miss it. So this is trying something new, without the daily pressure of a capital B Blog, or the content pressure of a the capital E Essay. Start a new draft post on Monday, dump things in it over the week, rewrite and cull along the way, what’s left gets published on Friday. Let’s see how long I keep this up.
So that’s what got me going, because I was having difficulty finding my voice. Then there’s Nat’s four short links which he does daily.
But let’s be clear… this is all about me: What I get out of this is that somehow, by typing, four unrelated things that have caught my eye sometimes show signs of coherence. I get glimpses of the gestalt. So that’s why I type.