Month: February 2022

Lately I’ve been shooting a lot– and uploading a lot of photos. In this torrent and stream of images, I have been trying to extract deeper meaning, significance, and memory from the photos.

But how does one do this? Some thoughts:

When you go to a party and someone asks you, ‘So what do you do?’ What is the best way to answer? Just tell them what your passion is, not your boring day job.

When reviewing your photos, see them as small thumbnails (contact sheet), and *then* when a certain photo intrigues you from a small thumbnail, *THEN* make it larger and full-screen it.

Just pre-focus your camera (or RICOH GR III/II) to 1 meter, and just shoot all photos from that pre-focused position. In Ricoh camera, it is called ‘snap’ mode.

Perhaps the future of photography is more ‘snap-shotty‘? Consider “SNAP-CHAT” — just called ‘SNAP’.

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PODCAST audio recording

1. Touch
2. Rough surfaces
3. disfluency
4. geometry
5. Intimacy
6. disclarity
7. ‘Horror vacuui’
8. Creative reformatting
9. Liminal
10. Randomness is good
11. Nourish yourself creatively
12. Turn off your LCD screen
13. No creative fascism
14. Kaizen — 3% principle (Virgil abloh)
15. Is it dynamic or not?
16. Your creative vision is always in flux
17. Continuum
18. Minimum viable blog post

All ethics are subjective— make ethics your luxury and experiment with new ethics.

No shirt, minimalist shoes, just shorts.

The best armor is your natural skin.

Take your shirt and top off if the weather is good, and sunny. Get a good tan— the new luxury and sign of elite.

1. Don’t stay indoors
2. Touch things to understand and explore them.
3. Don’t worry too much about hygiene
4. Take lots of naps
5. Be brave and bold
6. Don’t wear shoes
7. Be stubborn
8. Lead
9. Dance, smile, move
10. Prefer to stand and walk and move
11. Pursue your curiosities
12. Touch things, buttons, haptic things and feedback
13. Tanner is better.
14. Love nature, trees

Better to capture the moment and have it blurred or out of focus than to miss it.

If there’s an option to enable or disable something, a good heuristic is to disable it. If it can be “disabled”, it probably isn’t necessary / essential (just nice to have).

Also for mobile iphone. Steve Jobs would be proud.

Start with a black canvas.

Great minimalist black theme— Keynote as superior to making ”books” in terms of making information.

To make more beautiful and “better” photos, shoot more specifically. For example, get insanely close, macro mode, focus on the details.

Why be productive, and towards what ends?

The desire to extract more out of existence and life?

When it is good to vlog, or use voice dictate:

Podcast

The more cholesterol, the better:

Podcast

Limit your Home Screen, delete at least 1 app a day. Minimum viable iphone with apps and features.

Turn off all notifications besides phone call and FaceTime.

Protect your mindspace.

Is our happiness and climate inter-connected? Some thoughts:

NorCal vs SoCal

My thought:

1. NorCal people typically less ‘happy’ than people from SoCal. I would say the average Bay Area person (even successful), would be only a 5.5/10 happiness, and the average SoCal person is more bored-blase (maybe an average 6.5/10 happiness).
2. NorCal folks are focused on production (producing, making, innovating), while people from SoCal are focused on consumption (eating, media, etc).
3. NorCal people have more ‘existential dread‘ and more ‘meaning of life’ stuff, whereas people from SoCal are just more interested in the next trendy fashion thing, new car, or new food trend.

Does weather matter?

How does weather matter?

East Coast winter — you just spend less time outdoors. I think it is less about the sun, perhaps more about being indoors more vs being outdoors. The ideal East Coast or cold weather thing:

Even though it may be cold as shit outside, try to spend as much time outdoors with a great down jacket/GoreTex shoes, or time doing out-of-the-house activities.

Even in hot climates and southern california, people who spend time all day indoors are miserable (they are afraid of the heat).

A general computing and general idea–

The fewer keystrokes you gotta do to achieve your desired result, the better.

Or in other words, make your Mac as simple as possible.

When in doubt, reduce.

Reduce the interface, reduce your things, reduce the size of your home, reduce your possessions, reduce the size of your car, reduce the size of your designs, etc.

For example I find it bizarre — why is it that every new generation of iPhone, they are getting *BIGGER*, *THICKER* and heavier? Totally opposite from the artistic vision that Steve Jobs/Jony Ive had.

Or some things I do:

1. No case. No phone cases. An aesthetic minimalist elite thing.
2. No case for iPad. And certainly no Apple “Pencil” (Steve Jobs hated styluses and was very anti styluses for the iPad, as it takes away the agency of your finger). Also no keyboard for iPad– absolutely bizarre notion (Steve Jobs also hated this). If you want a keyboard just use a MacBook Air.

Creative reformatting — perhaps every once a year (at least), reformat your Mac, iPhone, iPad, devices, life, etc.

Some thoughts:

Or why sunlight is good:

No such thing as “high” quality. Each material and thing simply has different qualities and features/properties. Thus, think about the properties of something instead.

Kill two birds with one stone. I like walking, and being with Seneca, and also working out. Carrying him around the block with my arms—good arm workout and good time spent with Seneca.

When people talk about crypto, they mean to talk about Bitcoin.