A really great video about how to be creative when you don’t feel very creative.
Category: Creativity
How things are created, mainly dealing with the process and means of creation
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Poetry in our modern world
An MIT professor discovered their students meeting to create poetry. The essay explores what poetry does and how it can function in our modern world.
In work like this, musicians, writers, and engineers all share space. They collaborate in service of human life and the preservation of all we adore. They remind us that poetry has always been a technology of memory and human connection: a way to remind ourselves of who and what we are to one another. Which is something infinitely more than we can say with words, although we must try—and in that striving, be made more lovely, and alive.
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Texting the number on the sign
In every city, there are painted signs on telephone poles. In Portland, Kate Bingaman-Burt texted one of the numbers and conversed with them about the craft of sign making.
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They’re Made of Meat by Tony Bisson
Tony Bisson with a delightful short story, “They Are Made of Meat.”
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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.