Adam Keys is Thinking

Spoiler alert: it’s all about organizing what they wrote in the past, finding it later, and remixing it into something they need in the moment. 🧠

Austin Kleon, Indexing, filing systems, and the art of finding what you have: writing is meticulously indexing what you may have jotted down in the past. Come for the bit on classic American authors, stay for Phyllis Diller and Joan River’s massive card catalogs of jokes! 🤯

Cory Doctorow, Writing is accumulation: it’s easy when you accumulate a pile of text files from blogging over twenty years. He searches and surfs tags to find material for whatever he wants to write about today. An external brain.

That’s how blogging is complimentary to other forms of more serious work: when you’ve done enough of it, you can get entire essays, speeches, stories, novels, spontaneously appearing in a state of near-completeness, ready to be written.

Shawn Wang, Mise en Place Writing: writing is like cooking. Separate the preparation/creation and the cooking/editing.

By decoupling writing from pre-writing, I can write more, faster, and better.

Nat Eliason, Tactics to Help You Become a Better Writer: writing is rules. The better your rules, the better (and more) your output.

I’ve got three “virtual” desktops going on my Mac right now. The idea each is its own functional workspace. I don’t have three separate physical workspaces to do my writing/thinking, coding/building, or communicating/collaborating. So a digital approximation is the second closest thing. 🤷‍♂️

Leftmost is where I do the thinking. The background is one of the “scenic” images included in macOS. The idea is, if I had a little writing hut, ala Thoreau in Dickinson for looking off into the distance and plying some kind of writing craft, this is the kind of thing I would see when I look up.

Rightmost is where I communicate with the world and my colleagues. The background is also a built-in macOS dynamic desktop of swoopy, abstract colors. Like John Oliver comes to our living room from a featureless void, so I think of this desktop. Ideas, questions, and data points come to me from the void of the internet, end up in this imagined space, and I respond to them in turn through this medium and back to the void. Heavy, eh?

In the middle is where I do the building and coding. The background here is a flat color. I got it by color picking a photo of the 12-Gauge Garage. I noticed later that it’s close to “go away green” as used in Disney’s theme parks to draw the eye away from backstage areas where the magic may be in-progress or under-repair. The idea is I shouldn’t really see this background. I should focus on whatever I’m coding/testing/making/etc.

I miss tumblelogs. Especially projectionist. Twitter and Tumblr fit the mold, functionally. But the vibe is not the same. That time right before centralized social media achieved critical mass was a great moment. Let a thousand weird flowers bloom in their own meadow.

You can do a lot of fancy stuff with your notes these days. Backlinks, graphs, embedding, “transclusion”, knowledge databases, and digital gardens are all tempting sirens. But building up a collection of ideas over time and ease of search is the most important thing.

Matt Webb, Memexes, mountain lakes, and the serendipity of old ideas:

I’ve noticed that smart people keep notes, and in particular use their notes in a certain way, and it made me think of something I read recently about viruses.

…

And it’s interesting, right, this accretive note-taking and the process of taking core samples through the deep time of your own ideas. I’ve built something similar, not as consistently, but for about two decades too, and I keep all my notes in plain text, and all in the same searchable database. I develop nascent ideas in part by typing in keywords, spelunking my own memex for things I’ve previously spotted, connections I’ve made, turns of phrase… most of which I had forgotten, but there they are. And old ideas come back and get recombined and become fresh again. That database of notes is my greatest asset. It’s how I write here, and it’s also how I pretend to be clever when I’m working.

The endgame of having extensive notes accumulated over a long period of time is not to put them in a grand, unified theory. The point is to play the long-game to think in them, search them for new insights, and to develop ideas over weeks and months. An antidote to thinking in Slack messages and tweet-storm hot-takes.

Daveed Diggs mentioned this awesome wallpaper, Bay Area Toile, in a tour of his house. Amongst the Bay Area celebrities whose likenesses it features is Humpty Hump aka Shock G of Digital Underground. Jorma Taccone of the Lonely Island was involved in designing it.

That’s a hell of a thing right there. And, I never thought I’d think of wallpaper as awesome.

“This is a showtime, but the show hasn’t been written for it”

The Case of the Missing Rewards - Luckily, in my many hours playing Destiny 2 I haven’t been bitten by this bug. Seeing behind the curtains of something I interact with so often is pretty neat though!

It’s fascinating to read the tale of a gnarly bug from a domain I have no practical experience working in. In this case, large-scale, long-term game development. The volume and detail of data they work with to find a strange little bug that only manifests in certain kinds of game activities and involves weird decisions made in sizing networking subsystem buffers is amazing.

See also, How I cut GTA Online loading times by 70%

A good email newsletter is like the conversation you may have had over coffee with an interesting pal. A surprising topic, a novel theory, perhaps an amusing tangent or two.

I’m feeling the trough of newsletter overload, like many folks. I’ve put my own on hiatus because it seems more useful to write broadly on the web than narrowly via email.

I suspect that email newsletters have evolved from interesting conversations to (mostly) yet another medium to build eyeballs to sell to someday. Or, newsletters were the mold that blogging reinvented itself from.

But, I still think good newsletters could still exist. But, they have to feel more like a conversation and less like a monologue.

Paul Ford, The Secret, Essential Geography of the Office:

Offices have their own mental maps. “Oh,” they say, “she’s moving to the 17th floor.” And everyone says: the 17th floor! And you know, being a social primate, exactly where you are in the organization relative to that floor. Offices all have their formal and informal maps, whether inside a bank, statehouse, cathedral, museum, school, or open-plan tech firm. I say “West Wing” and you know what I’m talking about.

I once worked at a company where the hypothesis behind customer acquisition was currently in flux. A couple times a quarter, a new concept would come along. With a new concept almost always came a change in the sequencing of handoffs between teams. This month, outside sales hands off to the onboarding team hands off to customer support. The next month, marketing hands off to outside sales hands off to onboarding.

It so happens this company had a large, somewhat raucous open office layout. All of sales, support, and marketing were in one big room. (With three different Sonos systems playing three different songs at any given time. Madness.)

It also so happened that this was a high-energy sales culture. (Are there kinds of sales culture? Someone tell me there are monk-ish sales people, making one call per day, speaking only a few quiet words, ringing a small bell, and going home for the day. 😆)

Thus, when the current concept of how customers were handed off from the top of the funnel downward, a few people would move the desks around so hand-offs happened across aisles of the office and not from one corner of the office to a remote corner sixty feet away.

The upside of all this apparent chaos was that on any given day, you could walk into the office and see the current hypothesis of customer acquisition. As long as you knew who was in sales, marketing, support, etc. or their typical posture (walking around talking on a headset, answering emails as quickly as possible, looking at marketing campaign mockups), you could tell what’s going on. One could literally walk through the funnel, from marketing to sales to onboarding (assuming that was the hypothesis of the day).

Besides the madness of open offices with multiple songs within speaking distance of each other, I think this is not the worst way to arrange a physical workspace.

I saw this BMW at Radwood in Austin last year.

In hindsight, I would kinda like to know the whole story behind this car and the custom plate.

QuakeWorld by John Carmack - the .plan notes (basically a Unix-local blog) written during the development of internet networking (not just LAN-local) for Quake. It’s amazing to read the notes of a super-sharp person inventing the foundations of the multi-billion dollar gaming industry as we know it today.

Of course there’s great technical details, like this bit that should be familiar to anyone who has mysteriously died in an online gaming match:

I am reining in the client side prediction to a fairly minimal amount. It has too many negative effects in different circumstances. The problem of running away from or in front of your missiles was so bad that I considered simulating the missiles on the client side, but that is the second step on a slippery slope. If just the missiles were simulated, then a missile would fire through an enemy until the server informed you it exploded on them. Then you consider simulating interactions, but then you have to guess at other player inputs (which is hopeless)…

And complaining about Ferrari ownership, which is always a rich-people tragicomedy:

My testarossa snapped another input shaft (the third time).
damn dman damn.

Fabien Sanglard’s website is full of this stuff, if that’s your jam.

The Voices Of Black Women Were Essential To Phil Spector’s Wall Of Sound

Darlene Love began her partnership with Spector in 1962, when she came to the attention of Lester Sill, Spector’s business partner and co-founder of their label Philles Records. In a hurry to record the song “He’s a Rebel,” but unable to cut the song with the vocalists they had under contract, the New York-based group The Crystals, Sill and Spector turned to Love, who lived in Los Angeles. Spector was racing to release his version of the Gene Pitney-penned tune before a version recorded by Vikki Carr could come out and pre-empt his sales. Spector paid Love a flat fee and triple scale to record the song and to allow him to release it under the name The Crystals. The arrangement, made without consulting with The Crystals, was indicative of the power producers had over artists. Describing her experience recording with Spector in her memoir, Love recalled that Spector encouraged what Love calls “the low, growling side of my voice, the righteous indignation and in-your-face testimony that I usually saved for church.” Accentuating vocal Blackness in the early 1960s was a daring move in the segregated U.S., but it paid off.

I saw Darlene Love perform, oddly enough, at EPCOT Center. I wonder if they offer musicians a big vacation package for that, of it was just a price-is-right situation?

Between songs, she alluded to having worked with Phil Spector. She basically called him out for the shady behavior described in the NPR story. I’m guessing it was not for the first time. She concluded the retelling of her history by saying “I don’t care if he hears about me saying this! He’s in jail, can’t do anything about it!” 😆

Wall of Sound is one of my favorite maximalist musical styles and all, but I hope Darlene Love is updating her sick burns on (convicted murderer) Phil Spector to end with “don’t matter because he’s dead now!”