Michael Dean

Clear topic sentences > insane paragraphs.

When I’m zoned in on an essay, I’m barely thinking or logging. I wonder if tunnel vision is a natural consequence of flow, or if there’s value in taking 2 minutes off every 20 minutes.

Udio (the AI song generator) can seriously penetrate the subconscious. It’s an earworm generator at scale. I find myself quietly yelling, “it’s time to write!” from that meme song I made for the editor team. What if you actually distilled your values and virtues into ear worms?

I’m inspired by Hunter S. Thompson’s (idealized) breakfast routine, but without the drugs; once a day, he’d spend ~2 hours to sync up with all his responsibilities, but the majority of his day was in unpredictable creative divergence.

What if attention influenced art styles in the way impressionism did. Instead of rendering things based on the light and color of a specific moment, you can render objects based on your relative attention to them. Different objects can be in/out of focus, saturation, detail.

Out that window to my left is more than a brick wall; beyond the side of my neighbor’s two-family is the sum of America (besides Maine, Boston, etc.). I face southwest from a perch east of the Manhattan. I’ve failed to consider the geography beyond my own apartment. Cardinal directions matter! Obviously I can’t see more than a few hundred feet, let

Listening to a classical composition from 1957 (The American Scene, by William Grant), and it really brings a beautiful and eerie moo around existence, childhood, society, and nature. It’s a frame-breaker.

AI doesn’t just automate the bullshit work, it risks automating the manual joy of thinking, creating, and basically doing anything.