I am loving the light phone. I started building the build your own phone – I forget what that is called -at the recurse center. I am not done yet. I should probably get to that. And I also like the website. There is this tension between minimalism and maximalism. I feel it, you may feel it- did the romans feel it? Who knows. We can probably see the jewish christian split as a tension between maximalism (judiasm and all the rules.. as someone raised jewish this is what it feels like), and then minimalism (christianity and love thy brother as thy self … although there are now a lot of rules in christianity it seems).
I also like the sustainability report of the company that makes the light phone. This is fascinating. As someone that works on a bunch of random projects using servers – I dont take into consideration the energy requirements of said projects only my personal time requirements. I like the related idea of a circular economy report – like … and am somewhat obsessed with ITP’s trash club.
I am listening to a bunch of new podcasts this week all around sense making. How many sense-making communities are there? Quite a bit as it turns out. All these communities and podcasts are run by cis white dudes – and I love them all – but I am actively seeking out other voices.
I’m listening to this about the Enneagram.
I am listening to this which does not have a spotify link:
Big take away, we have lost our autonomy (or something) of our mind. This feels true. But we have not lost our bodies (yet -perhaps this will happen with VR or haptic suits or something). So this is perhaps why we have this somatic revolution now. Or perhaps we dont really have a somatic revolution – perhaps I am having a somatic revolution.
I am fascinated by mystical marriages and sexuality and someone in one of my discord chats posted this:
Reading through this I am finally rewarded with a reference to the Sabbatian heresy. For some reason I was fascinated by Sabbatai Zevi since I first heard about him in Hebrew school. At this point all I knew was that he thought he was the messiah and then it turned out he was not and converted to Islam. The story is more complicated and really fascinating in my opinion. One of my many project desires is to make a film about Sabbatai Zevi. But moving on…
Next I have an article on Blake from Aeon – What we can learn from William Blake’s Visionary Imagination
This is actually a great article when you get to the four fold imagination. There are three types of imagination: a single vision, generative vision, emotional vision (or sensitive/relational vision, or ethical vision), , the universal or eternal vision. The article speaks about this much more poetically than I do. BUT this article jailbreaks Blake’s world building for me… If Tolkien uses language to build his world if it is the linguistic turn, then Blake uses these forces as his world’s metaphysics. LOVE LOVE LOVE!
And this from the Aeon article:
I think Virginia Woolf was on to a similar realisation in A Room of One’s Own (1929), when she ponders the genius of William Shakespeare’s mind, how it is ‘resonant and porous’, ‘creative, incandescent and undivided’. That could happen because ‘All desire to protest, to preach, to proclaim an injury, to pay off a score, to make the world the witness of some hardship or grievance was fired out of him and consumed.’
This is sort of my goal. My current path is to completely act from myself from my own conscious desires that come from myself and not society or other people, and from acting completely in alignment with myself to act universally and transcendently.
But visionary creative work inspires me. I had a conversation over the weekend with someone and we discussed “wisdom games” … games that cultivate wisdom. Perhaps we can create a new category … visionary games. There is a relationship between wisdom and the visionary if wisdom is the combination of the effable and ineffable (visionary).
What would visionary games look like?
I have some other things, like this repo from github on animating vector illustrations. I did a deep dive into integrating js with SVG last week and it was rewarding and bloating on the browser.
Thats about it – I now have to take my kids for a COVID test because pandemics will pandemic