WOW! Thrilled to hear that Kindle now has a real screen reader shipped to everyone!
SOURDOUGH!
Great minds think alike, I was just copying out something uplifting from Robin Sloan's monthly newsletter. --- begin quote --- I don’t like the “breathless creative exhortation” genre any more than you do, but, I have spared you for enough years that I think I’ve stored up some credit: which I will now spend.
We’re entering a stretch during which no subject, no task, other than this pandemic and its prevention will seem to “matter,” and I am here to insist, as you contemplate the next level of the video game you were building, the next stitch in the fanny pack you were designing, the next edition of the newsletter you just started:
It matters.
The diagnostic tool is straightforward: Do you want every glorious weirdo you’ve ever followed to morph into the same obsessive faux public health expert? YOU DO NOT!
I’m writing this as much to myself as to you.
Every calamity fractures the world, opens new seams: many economic, some political, still others aesthetic.
In 1816, the gloomy “Year Without a Summer,” Mary Shelley stayed indoors at a lakeside hotel; not quarantine, but maybe quarantine-adjacent. There, bored and haunted, she conceived the story that would grow into her novel Frankenstein, the foundation stone of the genre we now call science fiction.
It’s moderately annoying when people invoke work like that, because it feels like the implication is, if you’re not writing Frankenstein what are you even DOING? That’s not what I mean. It’s just that the big, bright examples help us see it clearly: toil in the shadow of calamity will have its day.
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Glad that Alexx continues to heal
Date: 2020-03-20 07:42 pm (UTC)SOURDOUGH!
Great minds think alike, I was just copying out something uplifting from Robin Sloan's monthly newsletter.
--- begin quote ---
I don’t like the “breathless creative exhortation” genre any more than you do, but, I have spared you for enough years that I think I’ve stored up some credit: which I will now spend.
We’re entering a stretch during which no subject, no task, other than this pandemic and its prevention will seem to “matter,” and I am here to insist, as you contemplate the next level of the video game you were building, the next stitch in the fanny pack you were designing, the next edition of the newsletter you just started:
It matters.
The diagnostic tool is straightforward: Do you want every glorious weirdo you’ve ever followed to morph into the same obsessive faux public health expert? YOU DO NOT!
I’m writing this as much to myself as to you.
Every calamity fractures the world, opens new seams: many economic, some political, still others aesthetic.
In 1816, the gloomy “Year Without a Summer,” Mary Shelley stayed indoors at a lakeside hotel; not quarantine, but maybe quarantine-adjacent. There, bored and haunted, she conceived the story that would grow into her novel Frankenstein, the foundation stone of the genre we now call science fiction.
It’s moderately annoying when people invoke work like that, because it feels like the implication is, if you’re not writing Frankenstein what are you even DOING? That’s not what I mean. It’s just that the big, bright examples help us see it clearly: toil in the shadow of calamity will have its day.
Toil in the shadow of calamity WILL have its day.
A crack in everything; that’s how the art gets in.
--- quote ends ---
full post
https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletter/march-2020/