Robin Sloan

I think the whostyle makes a few arguments. Among them:

• Text is more than a string of character codes. Its design matters, typography and layout alike; these things support (or subvert!) its affect, argument, and more.
• The web should be more colorful and chaotic, along nearly every dimension. The past five years have brought a flood of new capabilities, hugely expressive — let’s use them!
• Quoting is touchy, and anything you can do to cushion it with respect and hospitality is a plus.

The Nintendo way of adapting technology is not to look for the state of the art but to utilize mature technology that can be mass-produced cheaply.

This is the reason a Nintendo console never has the fastest chips or the beefiest specs of its generation; instead, its remixes components in an interesting and generative way. Think of the Gameboy’s monochrome screen, the Wii’s motion controller, the Switch’s smartphone form.

[Gunpei Yokoi] is talking about reliability and predictability, in performance and supply alike. He wants the components to be boring, so their application can be daring.

This is a kind of manifesto about the difference between liking something on the internet and loving something on the internet.

It’s also an experiment in a new format: a “tap essay,” presenting its argument tap by tap, making its case with typography, color, and a few surprises.

I loved the 2014 movie The Guest for (1) its central perfor­mance by Dan Stevens and (2) its synth-soaked sound­track.

Here is The Guest II, sound­track to a sequel that doesn’t exist, assembled by the same people who made the original!

There should probably be more sound­tracks to films that don’t exist, right? I am recalling Wes Anderson’s method, in his early years, of assem­bling a sound­track first, then imagining the movie that could contain all those tunes …

You must lower your acti­va­tion energy.

What do I mean? Well, you know, there are a lot of people out there, reading ridicu­lous bullshit, forwarding it to a dozen others without a thought.

Meanwhile, the really thoughtful readers — I suspect you are one of them — they read … and that’s it. They wouldn’t burden anyone with a link. Never that.

You see the mismatch. Different stances, each with a different network potential. One grows exponentially, while the other recedes, politely.

“Activation energy” is the minimum energy required to start a chemical reaction (including nuclear fission and nuclear fusion). Why should the bad reactions occur more easily than the good ones? Why should ridiculous bullshit propagate faster than ironic points of light?

It is my hypoth­esis that, back in the 2000s, everybody’s acti­va­tion energy was a bit lower. More of us were bloggers, back then. Linking felt more natural, somehow. Now, in the 2020s, the algo­rithms do most of that work.

You must lower your acti­va­tion energy again.

I recognize this is a very niche endeavor, but the art and craft of maintaining a homepage, with some of your writing and a page that's about you and whatever else over time, of course always includes addition and deletion, just like a garden — you're snipping the dead blooms. I do this a lot. I'll see something really old on my site, and I go, “you know what, I don't like this anymore,” and I will delete it. 

But that's care. Both adding things and deleting things. Basically the sense of looking at something and saying, “is this good? Is this right? Can I make it better? What does this need right now?” Those are all expressions of care. And I think both the relentless abandonment of stuff that doesn't have a billion users by tech companies, and the relentless accretion of garbage on the blockchain, I think they're both kind of the antithesis, honestly, of care.

This visualization takes the current New York Times Best Sellers list for combined print and e-book fiction and scales each title according to the demand for its e-book edition at a collection of U.S. public libraries, selected for their size and geographic diversity.

For a long time, I’ve culti­vated a personal theory of naming. It goes like this:

When you name something, you label the thing; frame it. This is an important job, before anyone has actually encoun­tered that thing! But, very quickly, the flow of meaning reverses. The thing’s specific char­ac­ter­is­tics and its performance — its great success, we hope — fill the vessel of its name, which was pretty empty all along. Instead of the name defining the thing, the thing (re)defines the name. This happens with companies, with works of art, with people themselves.

So, when naming something, while it’s important to choose an appealing label, it’s probably more important to choose a vessel of sufficient capacity.