Salman Ansari
@salmanscribbles
embracing my inner polymath — writing, drawing, coding, playing
Salman Ansari
salman.io
Japanese Kissa by Kissa, Norm Maclean, Toni Morrison, Akiya in Japan, Howtown, Bobby Fingers, and more — Roden newsletter issue 094
craigmod.com
Why is maintaining your own online independent nook important? Because the big companies are all fraught, you just have to choose which level of fraught you are willing to stomach. Yes, terrible things are happening on X, but Meta has also catalyzed arguably far more terrible things on a far larger scale. Email and an Apache or Nginx web server are a couple of the last bastions of (mostly) apolitical online publishing mechanisms. And nobody can take them away from you or go out of business under you.
On being dedicated to art as a daily practice
thecreativeindependent.comI relate to this energy of audience, I used to get it from teaching, and now in a remote world I feel the deep lack of such energy infusion in my life. The days feel more empty and dull, more of a drag.
The reward of that one hour on stage is the highest potency nutrients that you could possibly imagine when it’s good, so you keep going back out because you want to get that. It’s not about adulation. It’s really not. It’s the exchange between yourself and the audience. So, I don’t know how to manage those things, those needs with the practicalities, the desire not to take more than I give. It’s tricky.
Nathan Schneider—whose Governable Spaces I am always recommending—said something that’s been ringing in my ears ever since:
I think of tech as a wildfire—it burns really quickly. And we get a lot of wildfires out here, and there's the front of it, where the blaze is, and then once it's burnt over, that's when cool things start growing up. They grow much slower, and they find their way through…the burned trees and new life happens. I kind of hope we're entering that phase of social media that we're done with the fast burn. And maybe it had to happen.
What’s there after the fire passes over if not that goddamn mushroom at the end of a world?
Needing nothing attracts everything
"Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
— C.S. Lewis
Kafka urges the young man to stay present with his difficult emotions:
Just be quiet and patient. Let evil and unpleasantness pass quietly over you. Do not try to avoid them. On the contrary, observe them carefully. Let active understanding take the place of reflex irritation, and you will grow out of your trouble. Men can achieve greatness only by surmounting their own littleness.
