Tony Bisson with a delightful short story, “They Are Made of Meat.”
Category: Creativity
How things are created, mainly dealing with the process and means of creation
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Niche Internet forums thriving
Delve deep into a hobby, and you will surely come across websites dedicated to those specific interests. Forums, with old school topic and thread organization still thrive. Here is a great listing of forum communities that are still active.
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Praise for the expert generalist
So over the last year or so we have started to resist this industry-wide push for narrow skills, by calling out this quality, which we call an Expert Generalist. Why did we use the word “expert”? There are two sides to real expertise. The first is the familiar depth: a detailed command of one domain’s inner workings. The second, crucial in our fast-moving field is the ability to learn quickly, spot the fundamentals that run beneath shifting tools and trends, and apply them wherever we land. As an example from software teams, developers who roam across languages, architectures, and problem spaces may seem like “jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none,” yet repeated dives below surface differences help them develop durable, principle-level mastery. Over time these generalists can dissect unfamiliar challenges, spot first-principles patterns, and make confident design decisions with the assurance of a specialist – and faster. Being such a generalist is itself a sophisticated expertise.
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AI and creativity
Two complementary articles about AI’s ability to create art that arrive at the same conclusion: it won’t be able to create new things from unexpected connections.
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Zines, the anti-AI
Zines. Freaking zines. You put a zine in an undergraduate’s hands and say “Someone like you made this. You could make this. All you need is some found images, paper, scissors/glue, and your own imagination. No chatgpt necessary.”
They light up, every single time, without fail. They start to recognize how little Generative AI serves them in the long run. They’ve called zines “Anti-AI” to my face and gleefully showed me their first zines with thought, intention, and inventiveness.
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Portraits of famous New Yorkers in their homes
The New Yorker with a great photo essay with portraits of famous New Yorkers in their homes.
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Infinite Lego domino loop
Fun video of an infinite Lego domino loop.
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HTML Review issue 4
The HTML Review is a literary magazine that exists only on the web and takes advantage of tricks web browsers can do to make text interactive or active.
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Eames Institute Curious 100
Absolutely love this list of talented and creative folks, the Eames Institute Curious 100. Some I’m familiar with and others who are new.