Agalia Tan

I think of this like a personal Overton window (although I know the analogy doesn’t make perfect sense). A kind of private tunnel vision that rearranges our reality so that our highs and lows are defined by only the most immediate wins and losses, with everything else rendered irrelevant—the hard fought habits we’ve kept, the old lessons that stuck... See more

We don’t need to define ourselves by the things we make, but we can still make them. This goes back to the idea of handiness, right? This isn’t a book about becoming an expert in any one thing. It’s about trying lots of things and becoming increasingly capable as a result. It’s about getting comfortable experimenting with something you’ve never don... See more

In a culture whose already classical dilemma is the hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of energy and sensual capability, interpretation is the revenge of the intellect upon art. Even more. It is the revenge of the intellect upon the world. To interpret is to impoverish, to deplete the world—in order to set up a shadow world of “meanings.” ... See more

“If you want a new world, start making it right now, in whatever you are doing.” This is the best advice I ever had, it came from Brian Eno. If you imagine the world you would like to be in and start making objects, systems and collaborations that belong to that world, that world comes into being.

We're in the era of modern software companies as lifestyle brands. We've passed the basic utility phase; now, it's about delivering an experience and forging an identity that resonates with the aspirations and values of your audience. UX has become a fashion statement, and standout products have style. We'll see: - Haute Couture software - Lux... See more

Nintendo Music, on the one hand, is another Nintendo standalone digital product emerging out of the corpses from previous apps including the 2016 social game Miitomo and quirky products like the Power Globe. On the other hand, I fucking love it — and there are four specific reasons why:

1. It creates further reliance on the integrated Nintendo ecosyst

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Quite a lot of people enjoy their commute time. And there’s good behavioral evidence for this because economists have noticed that people live a bit further from work than they optimally should in order to create a chronological buffer between where they work and where they live. We like that decompression time.

A flywheel, based on Walt Disney’s original concept (seen in the infamous diagram below) was to find new opportunities to build upon the love that people have for the set of characters they’re introduced to however they’re introduced. It couldn’t feel like a money grab. Look how that panned out for the comic book industry in the late ‘90s. No, it h... See more