There’s some crazy weirdness surrounding Elon Musk. He’s the darling child of what seems like all the internet, but most of his followers are paid for. Unfortunately for someone held in such high regard by tech bros everywhere as some kind of god, his phone records have revealed his ideas actually kind of suck, and he’s surround by sycophantic suck ups.
I won’t go into the ins and outs of what is contained in his texts and emails, there are more intelligent people than I to do that.
The best advice I give anyone who wants to become good at something, is to do it. Constantly and consistently, become obsessed and love the practice. This goes double for photography. Unfortunately, I think social media has ruined the expectation of taking photos and that really sucks.
I was at one time worried about only taking photos that everyone likes. Studying the settings people used and trying to recreate shots that others had taken.
Since Matter chose to remove all of their social sharing features, I’ve lacked things to read. As much as they claim to have improved things in getting recommendations direct from Twitter, they really suck. There is nothing better than learning what the people around you are reading to let you know what to take a peek at, and I wish more services understood that.
I have a particular hatred of American politics and its ability to worm its way into everything.
The idea of Stoptober is, at least in the UK, to stop drinking or smoking. It’s used as a marketing gimmick by so many companies that have a vested interest in selling you things, but the premise is great.
Considering myself and my wife don’t smoke, nor drink very much, we have decided to instead stop our negative thoughts. After both suffering with our mental health for a few months, it is the ideal opportunity to try to get back to feeling like ourselves again.
Russell Brandom for The Verge:
I call it the Bootleg Ratio: the delicate balance between A) content created by users specifically for the platform and B) semi-anonymous clout-chasing accounts drafting off the audience. Any platform will have both, but as B starts to overtake A, users will have less and less reason to visit and creators will have less and less reason to post. In short, it’s a sign that the interesting stuff about the platform is starting to die out.
Not very often I post what I am randomly up to but my wife took me to Cinco Lounge for dinner the other night and it was fantastic. The right mix of weirdness (I think they call I chic) and excellent food - I had Wan Chai Fried Rice Bowl with Miso Chicken.
I love the way they use old gym floor boards, may be fake I don’t know, but it brings back loads of school memories.
It was only fairly recently I came to the realisation that I was chronically lonely. Granted, there are a few of you out there that I do consider friends that I have met online, but I’ve never had many real life friends. Those that I organically picked up through school or college now have lives of their own and drifted away.
As a defence mechanism for more than a decade I convinced myself I didn’t need people anyway.
The importance of having something that you can fully focus on and forget the world for a bit is becoming more and more obvious to me. Perhaps it is because the world sucks and the moment, and there is always some kind of bad news just around the corner. Or maybe it’s just that I am struggling more than I ever thought possible, but I just need to switch off for a while and not feel bad about it.
Starting this post took longer to work out than almost any post I have written. Where do you start when the subject you want to talk about is so devastating, but still important to think about. I guess fair warning, this post could upset some people as it discusses children passing away.
I can’t even imagine the feelings that our friends feel every year their little boy’s birthday comes around. They have suffered the worst thing to happen to any parent and had two of their children pass away.
Seth Godin writing about things being good:
Not that good for who? If you mean to say, “I don’t like it, it doesn’t appeal to me,” then that’s what you should say.
If, on the other hand, you have enough expertise and domain knowledge to say, “I understand what has appealed to the audience you’re trying to serve, and this isn’t going to work.”
Weird that this post should come up when I am consuming more tech reviews than I think I have ever done.