On the theme of music, I loved this overview of the life and times of Weird Al. > As his name suggested, Weird Al’s comedy operated right at the hot spot of my childhood agonies: weirdness versus normalcy, insider versus outsider. What a Weird Al parody did was enact a tiny revolution. It took the whole glamorous architecture of American mainstream cool — Michael Jackson’s otherworldly moves, Madonna’s sexual taboos — and extracted all of the coolness. Into that void, Weird Al inserted the leas…
All posts in creativity
I loved this piece from Rands in Repose. If you’re familiar with his writing, he often talks about flow and how to get into the zone in order to achieve it. > The Zone is a place, and Flow is an activity that occurs within this precious mental place. Flow is the ability to consider a project or a problem deeply. In Flow, you can keep a superhuman amount of context in your head and can traverse that context with ease. With Flow, you can produce extraordinary value. In this article, he describes…
Creating is messy, no matter what you're working style is like.
It would seem that life consistently affords one opportunities to look back at the path you've walked. I do my best to embrace these opportunities, but I've often found my self slightly discouraged in the past when doing so. I would tend to review the goals I had at a period in time, then measure the progress or lack thereof and feel as if I did not make the most of the time I had. And yet in the big picture, things have gone very well. My family has had its needs met, I've…
Kevin Richardson describes [http://encourageothers.com/2012/11/having-motivation/] the issue of matching your times of creativity with your life's schedule. As a father of many youngsters, this resonates with me — I know exactly what he means. > As a result, this impromptu late night motivation is essentially wasted. If only I could bottle it and save it for the morning… While I occasionally indulge myself by working a late night just to scratch my creative itch, I know it’s not practical to wo…
Marco Arment opines that Curator's Code [http://www.curatorscode.org/] is solving the wrong problem. I'm a fan of Maria Popova and confident that she's put a lot more thought into this subject than I have, so I'm hesitant to add any of my own criticism to Marco's. Giving credit where it's due is a good thing. I applaud those [http://52tiger.net/attribution-on-the-web/] who make an effort to point people to those who are good at finding interesting things to read. And I agree with Popova'…