Week 07

February 16, 2020

Bit late this week but who cares. I wish it would stop raining.

Creativity as Home Cooking

Couple of good posts on creativity this week from Ade and Robin Sloan.

I have a lot of empathy with Ade’s position. I need a thing too but I think it’s too easy to fall into the trap of thinking the thing must have some big outcome. I’ve been fiddling with music for 30+ years and I can play the guitar fairly well I guess, but I never really finish anything or play it to anyone. Is that a problem?

In some ways it could be. Pushing yourself to create ‘better’ stuff is probably important to keep interested in the thing. On the other hand, I think there’s a real danger in trying to make the output of a hobby into some kind of commercial artifact - the thing I love about my music noodling is it has precisely zero pressure, I can just do whatever I want without any consequences. The same can't be said of my actual career.

In Robin’s post he describes building an app for his family, then goes on to describe himself as the programmer equivalent of a home cook. This is an excellent lens to look at creative endeavours through. The home cook is doing something creative for friends and family, if everyone eats the meal, has a good time and you get a couple of ‘that was great!’s and the mission’s accomplished. It seem like a good place to aim for in general.

Agency

I finished William Gibson’s new book, Agency, this week. I enjoyed it, but felt it didn’t really amount to much in the end. But maybe that’s the point? The evergreen quote is that sci-fi is about the period it’s written in, not the future, and he captures the vacuousness of the tech scene perfectly, but doesn’t really do any more than that.

Maybe it’s me though. I’m sure the ‘present day as the future’ thing he’s been doing for the last few years is an eye opener to a lot of people, but I already know what Dyneema is and how far along Boston Dynamics are with robots. My brother is basically a professional Maker and 3D prints parts for his racing drones as a hobby. It’s Gibson’s fault I’m like this anyway, reading Neuromancer as a teenager helped put me on this path so I guess he’s the architect of his own downfall.

Still, the deification of Gibson has intensified this time round. I don’t think he’s to blame for it, unless being too interesting is a crime, but his books seem to have become fetishised rather than read as a novel which also seems very apt. What real use is a new Gibson book in a 100% Gibson world?

The Newsroom

Also finished the last, abbreviated, season of The Newsroom. In the end it was an enjoyable but flawed program. The mix of patriotism and polemics was pretty hard to take a lot of the time, especially from such fantasyland characters. Probably one for the

Fin

That’s it for this week, really need to start jotting down thoughts in the week - there’s so many of them and then I’ve forgotten everything by the weekend.