An online commonplace book
It all begins with the line.
Different lines have different purposes. But remember – begin and end your line with emphasis.
Be bold!
Have the lines overlap where they meet.
Be bold!
Don’t “Feather and Fuzz”.
Be bold!
Start and end your line in one stroke. To build confidence, Matthew Frederick suggests drawing a light guide line before drawing the final line.
Master questioner (is that a word?) Tim Ferris brings all the good stuff out of Kevin:
When you think of the word or hear the word successful, who’s the first person who comes to mind?
Kevin Kelly: Jesus.
Tim Ferriss: Why would you say that?
Kevin Kelly: There aren’t that many people who’ve left their mark on as many people in the world as he has. I think what hewas up to, what he was doing is vastly been twisted, misunderstood, whatever word you want, but nonetheless, what’s remarkable is … and here’s a guy who didn’t write anything. I think success is also overrated.
Tim Ferriss: I’d love for you to elaborate on that.
Kevin Kelly: Greatness is overrated. I mentioned big numbers, but it’s more of the impact that they had on people’s lives. I think we tend to have an image of success that’s so much been skewed by our current media, just like our sense of beauty of women. In terms of all possibilities, it’s in a very small, narrow, define … ritualistic in a certain sense. I think our idea of success is often today it means you’re somebody who has a lot of money, or who has a lot of fame, or who has some of these other trappings, which we had assigned, but I think can be successful by being true to, and being the most ‘you’ that you could possibly be. I think that what’s I think of as when you think of Jesus, whether you take him as a historical character or anything beyond, was about … He certainly wasn’t imitating anybody, let me put it that way. I think that’s the great temptation that people have is they want to be someone else, which is basically they want to be in someone else’s movie. They want to be the best rock star, and there’s so many of those already that you can only wind up imitating somebody in that slot. I think to me the success is like you make your own slot. You have a new slot that didn’t exist before. I think that’s of course what Jesus and many others were doing, but they were making a new slot. That’s really hard to do, but I think that’s what I chalk up as success is you made a new slot.
Tim Ferriss: What is your new slot? You knew that was coming.
Kevin Kelly: Who says I’m successful?
Tim Ferriss: I’m not. I’m trying to not make any assumptions here. Or what would be your slot?
Kevin Kelly: My slot would be Kevin Kelly. That’s the whole thing. It’s not going to be a career or you would really ideally be something that would … you had no imitators. You would be who you are, and that is success actually in some sense is you didn’t imitate anybody, no one else imitated you afterwards. In a certain sense you have, if you become an adjective, that’s a good sign, right?
Tim Ferriss: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Kevin Kelly: I think success is actually you make your own path. If they’re calling you a successful entrepreneur, then to me that’s not the best kind of success
Whenever I need an encouraging kick in the ass I listen to this interview.
Kevin isn’t saying that one shouldn’t have ambition. He’s saying that our idea of success – money, possessions, lifestyle, is narrow.
That attempting to live someone else’s life is narrow, foolish even.
Listen to the 3-Part interview below:
Feature reels unspool.
Super 8 millimeters
tell the whole story.
Close all tabs. Restart.
Reboot. Click undo. Power
down for lost causes.
Davide Bart Salvemini is an Italian cartoonist based in Bologna. He describes his style as Psicheledelico.
The clouds shifting positions and changing shapes between panels helps indicate time passing.
With only four panels, each line needs to move the story forward.
From: Comics: Easy as ABC! The Essential Guide to Comics for Kids
By: Ivan Brunetti
Darkness. I reach for
cinnamon squares, splashed milk. Crunch
away in secret.
Up this week is cartoonist Alex Schubert. Alex’s strips were regularly featured in Vice.
Here Alex demonstrates how simple shapes, spread across four panels, can tell a story.
From: Comics: Easy as ABC! The Essential Guide to Comics for Kids
By: Ivan Brunetti
The entire conversation will expand your mind, but I wanted to capture Adam’s suggestions for being a productive writer:
COWEN: You’ve written an enormous amount. Just this last week you had a major piece come out in the Guardian, one in London Review of Books. Your books are very long. What is your most unusual writing habit?
TOOZE: I’m not sure it’s unusual, but I think it’s the writing habit that many people have who do write a lot. I write every day, basically. I haven’t always found writing easy at all. I’ve been to a lot of therapy of various types to stabilize myself emotionally and psychologically. I still do. It’s very important for me in handling the stresses that arise in writing.
And one of the things I realized in the course of that is that, actually, rather than thinking it was something terrifying that I had to steel myself to do, the best way to think about it was as something I do every day, so it’s like exercise. If I have the chance, I like to exercise. It’s a puzzling activity. I just treat it almost as a game, rearranging the words, trying to fix things.
I’ll say to all of my grad students, you can do that for 10 minutes every single day, regardless of what else is going on in your life. You can always find that 10-minute slot. So that is the thing that I make sure I do. And that means even big projects slowly move along because then, when you get the big slice of time, the three or four hours at the weekend or something, it’s actually top of stack. You know where to go because you’ve been puzzling away at it and chewing on it every day, even if it’s only for 10 minutes.
COWEN: I give the exact same answer, by the way.
Not ground breaking advice by any means. But it applies well, specifically to editing.
10 minutes of edits a day and eventually you’ll have a finished piece.
Also, Adam’s suggestion for the best way to travel through Germany:
I would say travel. Get on the train. Unless you’re a car nut, and you want to experience the freedom of driving a Porsche at 200 miles an hour, which you can do if you do it at 2:00 am. The roads are clean enough, and they’re smooth enough.
But other than that, ride the train. Sit in an ICE going at, absolutely no kidding, 200 miles an hour, powered by solar power, and watch your coffee not even vibrate. It’s absolutely stunning. They have to put speedometers into the trains to make people aware of how fast they’re going.
Enjoyable. Watch in its entirety here:
You keep my secrets.
Failed French exams. Love letters
laced with Blue cologne.
Balding head. Stubble
silver. Don’t fear. Lather up.
Blade to skin. Live. Live.
Floodlights and Goalposts 