a library of thoughts
essays , short stories, and research
a library of thoughts
We vastly underestimate how much depth we actually hold. Give yourself more credit. You’re far more complex than an Instagram post of curated highlights or a Substack essay summarizing a controversial take. Sharing your life online a bit more isn’t going to put a target on your back—people are too caught up in their own lives to scrutinize yours... See more
The Last Question
users.ece.cmu.eduEven with the purest inputs, the mind can only funnel so much. Excess is not only ineffective, but harmful. Spilling oil is a bloody mess4.
Slowness in the grief.
How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.
— Annie Dillard, ’The Writing Life’, 1989
For example, good writing elicits genuine emotional and intellectual investment from the reader, and avoids predictable patterns and cliches.
Dan Shipper • Vibe Check: Claude 4 Opus
who am I outside of my problems? riddle me that. living in crisis forms you in such a way that it is safer than the unknown….but crisis is no longer my resting place. of course I still have problems. just cried on Monday due to grief, stress, overwork…you name it. being a Black man in America will do that quite nicely.
I'm starting to think I enjoy the idea of crisis a bit much, my resting place might be panic
Yancey Strickler’s Nine Creative Meditations
To me or to the mean - Focus on what makes your work strange or unique rather than trying to fit in with what everyone else is doing.
You are your audience - Create work that satisfies your own desires and interests rather than trying to please an imagined mass audience.
Small is more rewarding than big -
Literature is loaded with characters who laboured endlessly in their libraries to become learned, but were ultimately unfunctional and incomplete individuals. Mr. Bennet in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice spent his afternoons locked in his oak office, preferring the company of Walt Whitman to his wife, calm and content, while his household... See more