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Field Notes

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Snippets

Find yourself a bliss station

Posted on Mar 14 2015 in Snippets

You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen

Joseph Campbell on having a ‘bliss station’, in The Power of Myth (via Austin Kleon). I quite like the sound and the idea of this. Not sure how well the bliss station fits into our tiny inner-city apartment though.

The realm of luxury

Posted on Nov 19 2014 in Snippets

In the same way that the automobile allowed the horse to become a creature of leisure rather than of labour, so too has digital publishing moved traditional publishing into the realm of luxury.

Love that analogy by Björn Rust. Part of the editor’s note in the lovely ScragEnd issue No1.

Marks of quality

Posted on Nov 01 2014 in Snippets

The content-first approach to modern publishing may turn out to be a winner, even as the business challenges for journalism remain significant and unresolved… Soon, if it’s not true already, magazine brands will matter more as marks of quality or tone than they do as gatherers and arrangers of content in a unified experience… That is the standard to which magazines of the mobile era must aspire.

A great quote of a quote from a great article about the future of digital publishing.

Have faith in what you make

Posted on Oct 07 2014 in Snippets

Making something new takes patience. But it also takes faith. Faith that everything will work out in the end. During the development of most any product, there are always times when things aren’t quite right. Times when you feel like you may be going backwards a bit. Times where it’s almost there, but you can’t yet figure out why it isn’t. Times when you hate the thing today that you loved yesterday. Times when what you had in your head isn’t quite what you’re seeing in front of you. Yet. That’s when you need to have faith.

Love this short article by Jason Fried on making things.

On technological dependency

Posted on May 06 2014 in Snippets

One of the problems with the prevalence of solutions is it overvalues invention and undervalues behavior. We look for a gizmo, when changing how we act can have the desired effect. It seems like we’ve been hoodwinked into a trap of technological dependency. But, technology is only as good or bad as what we use it to do, and I don’t think anyone who works in tech gets into the field with malice as their intent. In fact, usually the opposite, which is why I like this business. Hell, I’m one of the the folks in technology, so none of this criticism excludes me—I only suggest we stop looking at technology as the primary way to fix problems, and stop turning a blind eye to its negative consequences and to the new problems it produces.

Frank Chimero

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