That’s a quote from A Pattern Language: Towns, Buildings, Construction, a book published in 1977 that I came across a few years ago while thumbing through the Seattle Public Library’s virtual collection on Libby. Something about the unusual title and the minimal, uncommercial cover called to me. I checked it out, perused it, then put it aside. I spent scant time with it, but its basic idea stuck with me.

The book lists two hundred and fiftythree of these, spanning in scope from regions to rooms and graded with the degree of confidence that the authors have in the solution’s immutability. Despite being defined loosely to allow flexible application, the patterns are also defined concretely, often specified numerically and illustrated with pictures and diagrams. The patterns are ordered by scale from big to small, but they also contain references that connect them into subnetworks. Forward references elucidate how larger patterns depend on smaller ones and backreferences contextualize patterns in larger ones.

I find the approach – flexible, deferential, and associative – rather appealing. In fact, the book abides by various principles of my

idea, namely: multimedia, readerdriven, nonlinear, and nonmonolithic. As a big fan of wikis, I’m pleased to read that it inspired the first online wiki. And as a programmer, I’m intrigued to learn that it inspired the idea of software design patterns, which are a core part of the industry vernacular.

The book is, finally, an inspiration for me to create my own pattern language. I love interior design, placemaking, vibesetting, and lately I’ve been thinking about what elements make a homespace great. I’ve loved furnishing, laying out, and decorating my apartments, and I look forward to owning a house someday.

A full for myself, queen or king if I’m sharing with my wife. Two pillows for myself. Fitted sheet and a duvet, no top sheet. The duvet cover made of a high quality, breathable material in a nice color. It must have eight ties inside it to keep the duvet in place and a zipper at the bottom hidden behind a flap. While using the bed, I don’t want to notice a separation between the duvet and its cover.

The frame must be sturdy and stable. No squeaking when getting in and out of bed.

I never take baths. Even when I do, they’re not so much a luxury as a trifle. Showering, on the other hand, is special. It is, first of all, a daily respite, a place to relax and recharge. But what makes it invaluable is that it doubles as an opportunity to

. And for this moment to flourish fully and consistently, I need the right physical space.

Good design, as they say, is invisible. A good shower demands no effort or conscious attention from its user. It lets them get clean while their mind wanders. To achieve this, it must make it extremely easy to do all the basic things: get in, stand, wash, rinse, and get out. It sounds obvious, but the standard tubshower hybrid most of us have at home

.

Bonus points for nice tiles and for a flat entry with no intermediary ledge.

I hate overhead lighting that is bright and direct. The inconvenience of switching off five lamps in a living room is nothing compared to having to withstand the piercing glare of bare bulbs shining down horribly into my eyes. For switch-operated room lights, I much prefer track lighting aimed at the wall or lights diffused by rice paper pendants. The goal is to create a soup of light.

Also, as per pattern #252, pools of light, lights should accentuate or even delineate spaces and subspaces. Don’t just light a whole room, light each space within the room. And, importantly, “spaces” should be defined by human activity and experience: a private corner where you or your loved ones sit to read, an area where a little group may sit to talk or play games, etc.

Recently, while visiting Halifax, Nova Scotia, my wife Z and I sat in the corner of a coffee shop, admiring its beautiful interior. Throughout our trip, I had been pointing out places where patterns were applied or might have been. Suddenly I realized we were sitting in one. #179 alcoves calls for a subspace within a larger space to which a subgroup of the larger group can retreat to socialize in partial privacy without vacating the bigger communal space, thereby conserving the feeling of connection that comes with sharing space with others. (While writing this I notice that coffee shops are a place where it is crucial to create alcoves, and not just once, but many times over.)

The pattern calls for a lowered ceiling, which suggests that the pattern be planned during construction. (In fact, this imperative is codified as a general pattern: #207 structure follows social spaces.) But the coffee shop used a clever alternative to achieve a similar effect: they placed a light fixture directly above our corner seating and brought it down to a low height so that it functioned like a lowered ceiling. This technique merges #179 alcoves and #252 pools of light in the way that the book likens to poetry:

Especially leafy ones. Pothos, monstera, ficus. I’m not a huge fan of aloe veras or succulents. Snake plants are ok.

Whenever I see a home tour on YouTube and it lacks a cushy sofa in the living room, I mourn it. Armchairs and chairs are not enough. For me, couches are fundamental.

I am picky how the couch feels to sit on, too. I think I prefer a slightly low and certainly a deep seat. Its texture and color matter, too.

Also, see pattern #251, different chairs, which provides seating variety to create options for different people or the same people in different moods.

I don’t like to wash dishes by hand. It takes so long. And it feels meaningless, unlike other chores, like plant watering. Plus, I’m prone to excema.

I need big and many windows. In the living room, at least, artificial lighting should be optional in the daytime. Northfacing windowsills (in the northern hemisphere) are fantastic for plants. Direct sunlight is nice, even if just a little bit.

Preferrably an espresso machine with a grinder with a portafilter holder. At least, a pourover setup: a gooseneck kettle, a cone dripper, a scale, and a burr grinder.

Makes me sad to watch movies on TV speakers.

On the walls. Nothing fancy. Nicelooking stuff and stuff with personal significance (see pattern #253, things from your life). Not generic or massproduced prints. Trendy interior design brands have ruined Matisse figure prints, at least for a few years.

I say worktable instead of desk because my current worktable is actually our dinner table. It’s a great setup because we don’t use it much otherwise.

Preferrably with a big table surface. Bonus points for a mounted monitor that doesn’t take up any deskspace and can be swiveled out of the way.

I like an assortment of glasses and mugs. Nice shapes, materials, and weight. Uniform cutlery. Matching set of dishes, bowls, and bowl plates.

I don’t care for the massproduced mugs, regardless of what image or words are imprinted on them. I like large handles so that it is easy to hold the mug with one hand without touching or bumping into the hot mug’s sidesurface.

It’s annoying to fish for my keys or a fob to unlock doors. For that reason, I sometimes prefer parking on the street than in a garage. In general, I love being able to walk out of my home and virtually straight onto the street. I like views but they’re not worth long elevator waits. A view of a nice neighborhood street or leafy trees is enough for me.

I’m a strong believer in having a designated place at the entrance for placing house keys upon entry. (Also, see (c) cultivate meaning in objects and places.) And I recently noticed that there’s a similar satisfaction in having places throughout the house for settings things down. A surface next to each seat for setting down a drink. A convenient place to put items that you use regularly like spatulas, toothbrushes, towels, bathrobes, kitchen trays, and so on. A loading deck of sorts at the bottom and top of staircases, where one can set down things than need to be brought up or down at a nonurgent time. A common case for this kind of inbetween surface is to set down glasses, mugs, and other bits that need to be brought to the kitchen.

A key aspect of these places is that they are convenient (see (a) avoid causes of mental clutter & friction). It shouldn’t be necessary, for example, to activate your core to pick up or set down when sitting anywhere in the living room. There should be a spot right there, within reach from a natural sitting position.

After writing the above, I revisited the book. Thanks to its relative obscurity, the ebook version was available to borrow immediately from the library. I’m pleased to find out the authors encourage readers to come up with their own pattern languages. It occurs to me that some of the my patterns might have some tacit principles in common. I want to deduce them and make them explicit so I can reference them from relevant patterns and thereby uncover principles that underpin my whole pattern language.

I’m trying to articulate the common principle, assuming there is one, between my preference for (i) a sole duvet and for (ii) a walk-in shower. In the same way I resent having to think about stepping into a bathtub and about where I step while I shower, I resent having to keep track of a top sheet while in bed. I much prefer to interact exclusively with the duvet. I am aware that it sounds contrived or even slightly insane, but these things cause me minor mental friction that I wish I could eliminate in totality. I love to relax my mind, and it’s hard to do so when distracted by little frills and imperfections.

I think there are many little bits in my patterns that can be traced to my intolerance for mental friction. My distaste for (xiii) having to unlock doors on my way out of my home or having to wait an indeterminate amount of time for an elevator. My preference for (xii) big mug handles, so I don’t have worry about holding the mug a certain way to avoid burning my knuckles.

Nowadays it’s easy for me to take for granted the convenience of bluetooth headphones, but, years ago, wired headphones caused me constant psychological chafe. It irked me to have to supervise that pesky dangling cord and it momentarily ruined my calm when it got yanked out of my ears unexpectedly. To minimize the probability of it catching on protruding bits, like the jagged knobs of our kitchen cabinets, I used to run the cord up my shirt along my back, out through the neckhole, and into my ears like I was in the secret service. (This was my variant of the common practice of running headphones under the shirt on the front side, which had the issue that, when not in use, the cord would dangle and swing down in front of you.) I bought my first pair of cordless headphones in 2018 and they were a revelation. The freedom was exquisite.

I realized how much I love walk-in showers because my current Seattle apartment has one. In fact, I love it so much that, when we got a roommate, I requested continued access to the bathroom where it is.

Living in different places and in different arranagements is a great way to learn what you like best and what you can’t do without. (This is one of the perks of renting, I think.) I learned, for example, how important it is for my wife Z to have a room to be alone in by sharing with her a one bedroom apartment that had minimal architectural division or sound insulation between bedroom and living room. We covered the french doors with curtains to create visual separation, but that didn’t do much to muffle sound. The important fact was not whether she was alone or not, it what whether she felt like she was in a private place to unwind and recharge.

Experimentation is possible also within a single home. For example, I’ve been able to relocate my various plants within the apartment many times, especially the ones that sit on individual wooden stools, which are easy to move and fit into small spaces. The same is possible with artwork, especially if you use command strips or some other hanging device that leaves no trace.

A place for keys at the entrance is convenient for arrival and departure, and it effects a pleasant sense of transition. Arriving, it feels nice to unburden oneself of logistical paraphernalia necessary for navigating the world outside, which accentuates the feeling of returning to a place of convenience, comfort, and familiarity. Departing, it feels nice to equip oneself before stepping through the doorway into the world.

Ordinary actions like these can have meaning. This imbuing of meaning into inanimate objects and impersonal surroundings is the part of the process that transforms a house into a home. A building or even a room becomes a place where one is provided for and secure, where one can rest at ease.

A home is sprinkled with meaning throughout. A quiet, comfy place to read and relax. A welcoming common area to be together. A room of one’s own, a private space. All these are ordinary physical spaces that provide precious and intangible nourishment.

It’s obvious that we should avoid and dispel negative meanings from our home. Less obvious is the task of preventing neutrality and meaninglessness. The lack of meaning is more insidious than negative meaning for a few reasons. Firstly, because its presence is not obvious. Every bit and every corner without meaning is like a little leak that create together a void of meaning that can be felt but not easily traced to a source. They silently steal from our home’s potential as a place for rest and renewal.

Negative energy is easier to detect and pinpoint, and its invasiveness is felt more sharply, which spurs us into action. Meaninglessness, on the other hand, is stultifying. It confuses and bores us with its lack of specificity and sedates us by promoting numbness and detachment.

It was a bright day and I was alone in the apartment, working in the spare bedroom, where my desk was. It was late morning, early afternoon. I called the property manager to ask her what day of the week she would send the handyman. Bob was already on his way.

Soon afterwards, the buzzer went. A cheerful voice on the other side confirmed it was Bob, the handyman. Several seconds later I opened the door and in stepped a tall, broad man beaming in his overalls, in his sixties perhaps, like a muscular Santa that didn’t keep a beard because it interfered with his work.

I showed him into the kitchen and immediately we were in conversation.

I told him I worked at Microsoft, but that ever since Covid I had been working remotely. I rarely went into the offices in Redmond.

I went back to my desk to work for a bit but soon I was back in the kitchen talking with Bob.

I told him I was Mexican and that I had met several of the other handymen when I lived in one of the other buildings that belonged to the same family.

I asked him what kind of writer his wife was.

I mean, does she write fiction or non-fiction?

His wife had written a story about him pushing his son around in a stroller.

He told me that his wife had a website where she posted her writing. I tried the URL he gave me, but it didn’t work. He came and stood next to my desk, his brow furrowed and head slouching as I typed what he dictated into the URL bar until we got it right.

It was a bright day and I was alone in the apartment, working in the spare bedroom, where my desk was. It was late morning, early afternoon. I called the property manager to ask her what day of the week she would send the handyman. Bob was already on his way.

Soon afterwards, the buzzer went. A cheerful voice on the other side confirmed it was Bob, the handyman. Several seconds later I opened the door and in stepped a tall, broad man beaming in his overalls, in his sixties perhaps, like a muscular Santa that didn’t keep a beard because it interfered with his work.

I showed him into the kitchen and immediately we were in conversation.

I told him I worked at Microsoft, but that ever since Covid I had been working remotely. I rarely went into the offices in Redmond.

I went back to my desk to work for a bit but soon I was back in the kitchen talking with Bob.

I told him I was Mexican and that I had met several of the other handymen when I lived in one of the other buildings that belonged to the same family.

I asked him what kind of writer his wife was.

I mean, does she write fiction or non-fiction?

His wife had written a story about him pushing his son around in a stroller.

He told me that his wife had a website where she posted her writing. I tried the URL he gave me, but it didn’t work. He came and stood next to my desk, his brow furrowed and head slouching as I typed what he dictated into the URL bar until we got it right.

In his book The End Of Absence, Michael Harris laments the everpresence of digital technology. He writes stylishly and gracefully, but he struggles to get a grip on the argument he wants to make. I feel his yearning for mindfulness and relate to his distrust for apps and devices that leech on our attention for profit, but I balk at his dismay at seeing a toddler attempt to zoom in on the cover of a magazine as if it were an iPad screen.

This observation’s lack of consequence hints at the lack of clarity in the author’s critique of digital technology. Most frustrating is his lack of self-awareness when recounting past technology alarmists. He tells us of Hieronimo Squarciafico, who in the 1400s decried the printing press for making too many books available, and of Socrates before that, who warned that writing was bad for one’s memory.

Harris seems to recognize these two as cynical luddites, but then refuses to acknowledge them as his forerunners. Instead, he sidesteps into a discussion about how tools reshape the psychologies of their wielders. It’s a real shame, because a serious take on the role of digital technology in our lives cannot ignore either its usefulness or its permanence.

It is clear that this technological revolution like all others cannot be evaded without exit from society and that it will continue to transform us. The question is: how do we incorporate these new technologies into our lives? How do we retain their usefulness while minimizing the harm they might do to us?

There are signs, earlier in the book, that the author won’t really be trying to sort out this knot and will content himself merely with perusing and picking at it. He mourns the “end of absence”, but never makes it clear where his concept of “absence” even begins. His vignettes hint at some possible meanings – time without digital technology, time alone out in nature, time to think. Is that all? These goals seem perfectly achievable with a little time management. Has he tried the Pomodoro Technique? Why ring the alarm bell when a simple kitchen timer will do?

Out of boredom have sprung many of my projects and hobbies. Over the years, patches of evening downtime have served as fertile ground for budding interests like playing chess, playing guitar, singing, beatmaking, programming, and writing. A crucial factor here is lack, space for something to grow. (That, for example, would have been a good point for

to make when discussing the ills of digital distraction).

Writing is one of these projects that erupted out of the seemingly lifeless terrain of boredom. I would be farther behind in my writing output if I hadn’t been so bored with my first full-time software engineering job. Instead, I found in writing a channel of expression for my energy and ambition for craftsmanship. Years later, if I wasn’t stranded in an unfamiliar and uninteresting city while visiting my girlfriend, I wouldn’t have made my website or, more importantly, this site. My main programming projects – Muze Radio, Music Lib Bot, and Song Scrounger – owe their existence to periods of restlessness.

I’ve

about rules in games and the motivations behind their implementation. In the last few months, I’ve come across more examples.

While watching the Netflix docuseries Losers, I learned that there is a rule in the game of curling called the free guard zone that was implemented in the 90s to make illegal the highly effective but boring strategy that Pat Ryan and his team employed to win multiple championships.

While listening to the audiobook Inverting the Pyramid: The History of Football Tactics, I learned that various rules of modern soccer were put in place to prevent certain tactics. Goalies used to be allowed to use their hands anywhere on the field, a fact which a Sunderland keeper exploited to bounce the ball halfway up the field. The offside rule used to require attackers to stay in front of or in line with not just two but three defensive players. In fact, the offside rule used to apply to the whole field, not just the attacking half. Together, these two archaic rules used to make it very difficult for teams in a defensive position to break out into attack.

Can quantifying the attributes of a TV show tell us something about its quality? I reckon some of the flaws in House of the Dragon would be reflected in statistics like amount of dialogue per minute and number of decisions made per character. A non-negligible amount of time is spent on dramatic montages and orchestral music that create a moody atmosphere and remind us of how serious the situation is. This comes at the cost of time that could be spent on actual situations and actual drama, or at least character development that would contribute to future drama.

These two elements – dialogue and decision-making – each give us an independent perspective into a character, but their combination is especially powerful because it gives us a third angle: insight into what a character is thinking, including what they are thinking unconsciously. From this we get what might be the critical ingredient of great story-telling: three-dimensional characters.

My qualm with shows like House of the Dragon is that their plot feels designed and implemented. I sense the presence of writers and their attempts to show me what’s happening and persuade me that it makes sense. I can’t get lost in the fictional world as if it were a real one because I see the pencil marks from when it was sketched out. My suspension of disbelief never takes off. One might say, Well, yeah, all fictional plots are prescribed. But they’re not, and writers like Stephen King and Cormac McCarthy have

.

In great shows like The Sopranos, plot is not implemented, it’s incubated. The show feels to me like it’s happening spontaneously, developing by itself as a sequence of events, reactions, and actions. In every episode there is constant dialogue between characters and a steady supply of situations that require characters to make decisions. And much of the time, these have nothing to do with plot. Every season has at least one major narrative arc, but the dependence is flipped. Episodes don’t depend on an overarching plot for their meaning. Episodes generate the plot. Characters are agents, not passengers. I don’t feel like the writers are leading me to the plot’s predetermined destination. In fact I don’t feel their presence at all. I feel like I’m

.

Absolutely essential read. Mind-bending and mind-expanding. The essential concept is livewiring, which is Eagleman’s term for brain plasticity. Our brains change all the time, throughout our lives, hour by hour, minute by minute.

A fascinating example is sighted people learning braille with blindfolds on: with their sense of sight shut off, their brains reallocate the neural resources that would’ve been used for their sense of sight to be used by their sense of touch. (Is this why music sounds so good at night?) This is also why blind people’s other senses are heightened: those other senses, backed up by more brainpower, are higher resolution.

In fact, according to Eagleman, the struggle for neural real estate is so contentious that your sense of vision can’t take a night off. Eagleman theorizes that

of our visual muscles that exist to strengthen it against invasions from neighboring neural regions.

It is at the cost of this volatility that we gain our brain’s extraordinary adaptability. The fact that our mental capabilities are not genetically pre-programmed means that we rely on the world around us to do the programming. And, as Eagleman illustrates through cases of severely neglected children, there are deadlines for our basic programming. What we are neglected in early life we may be neglected forever.

Another essential concept is the “potato head” model of the brain: plug in any data source and your brain will make sense of it. At first, the data is gibberish, but eventually your brain transforms it into a stream of immediate knowledge. It transforms it into a sense. (Eagleman explores this topic more in another of his books, Incognito.) On this basis, Eagleman’s lab develops skin-stimulating devices that aim to give sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf. And it’s not as far-fetched as you’d think.

I wrote an essay called The Virtual Book but I never defined the term. By virtual book I mean a book unbound by the traditional and physical constraints of printed books. I say ‘virtual’ because the greatest possibilities I see are in the virtual world of computers. Ebooks and audiobooks are just the beginning. The possibilities that excite me challenge not only the physicality of books but also their more subtle attributes.

A virtual book can be multimedia. It can consist of words, images, video, audio. There, we got the obvious one out of the way.

A virtual book can be readerdriven. Instead of forcing readers to follow the author’s thought process, a virtual book can let each reader steer the way. Wikipedia does this already. It lets you search the page for keywords, skip to the section you’re interested in, and even escape into a tangential topic, never to return. This is a natural way to consume Wikipedia because its form affords it.

Books generally have one start and one ending, but a virtual book can be nonlinear. Wikipedia is again the obvious example. But letting the reader drive is only one way to create a nonlinear book. It’s also possible to create multiple entrypoints, or even multiple endings, like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch.

A virtual book can be dynamic. It can change after its initial creation. Printed books, on the other hand, are static snapshots laboriously rendered by a particular author at a particular time. But what if a theory is debunked? Or a hypothesis confirmed? Or a record shattered? Or, in the case of storytelling, what if a loose end can be tied up neatly?

A virtual book can be nonmonolithic. It does not need to be discrete or selfcontained. It can consist of many interconnected parts that make up the whole but can exist without it. It can reference other virtual books, borrow bits from them, and lend bits of its own. For example, if Herbie Hancock’s memoir was a virtual audiobook, it could allow its snippets to be reconstrued into a documentary about jazz. (If Ken Burns’ Jazz documentary series was also ‘virtualized’, it could have been updated 15 years after its release to include bits of Herbie’s narration.) In fact, it could provide material for documentaries about many different topics: jazz, funk, hip hop, Miles Davis, Black Nationalism, Nichiren Buddhism, meditation, and crack addictions, to name some of the obvious ones.

A virtual book can be responsive. What if a reader could expect a book to field spontaneous questions? ChatGPT is an obvious candidate here, but the possibility is broader. What if Herbie Hancock returned to his memoir every now and then to answer questions that readers had left behind while reading it? What if readers could raise flags on issues that factcheckers would then verify or return to the author for amendment?

The possibilities are plenty, and they are thrilling. The difficulty in realizating them is not technological, but legal and political. Powerful companies – and therefore governments – are hugely incentivized to prevent the free exchange of “intellectual property”. To make virtual books possible, we need not only the technological power of software, but also its progressive politics.

I’ve been traveling, furnishing, reading, writing, and more.

An odd perk of splitting my time between Seattle and Vancouver has been furnishing and decorating a second apartment, a task for which I have enough gusto to do twice over. More than twice, actually. I’ve starting telling friends that I would gladly help them lay out their spaces. I told one friend in particular, who finds furnishing and decorating stultifying, that when he buys his house, I will invite myself over and personally hang the artwork and mirror that have been leaning against his apartment walls for years. I routinely watch Never Too Small and Noah Daniel and have been toying with the idea of making TikToks or Instagram reels about my amateur interest in interior design. I already have the topic for the initial video: how to get cheap artwork that you love.

Among the finest decisions I’ve made recently is buying patio furniture for our balcony. I bought it secondhand for $420 USD ($575 CAD), delivery included, and within a week have spent many more minutes (in either currency) lounging, reading, writing, and working on it. I expect to recoup a good deal of the principal when we resell in a year or two.

By furnishing the balcony we’ve added to our apartment a whole new space to be in. It’s like a tree house, perched up among a variety of leafy growth. Beyond the branches, in the evenings, lays the orange pink sunset silhouetting cranes on the port and past them the city skyline. It reminds me of this bit from Gail Sheehy’s memoir:

My alcove is more modest, but magical still. A private little post embedded in the city. A perfect place to read and write.

I have a knack for picking up new books even while I have already a few on the go. Eschewing reading etiquette in this way amuses me as if it were actual mischief. It also does a lot to maintain and continually rekindle my reading appetite. My main book is The Death and Life of Great American Cities, which I’ve been reading since last fall. I’m about 75% done, but taking my time, letting the ideas marinate and noticing

nowadays.

With Libby and Spotify, it’s easy to try out audiobooks, which are great for listening while doing activities with low mental demand like driving, cooking, and cleaning. Recently I sampled Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, because it is about a topic I’m

in and was recommended in a blog post by Oliver Burkeman, who I admire for his book

. Rest was underwhelming and speculative, but thought-provoking. I

it, but it touched on the concept of the Default Mode Network, which has been, rather aptly, turning over in the back of my mind. It was gratifying and intriguing to find a neuoscientific name for a phenomenon that I and many others have intuited. In fact, I can tell that I am about to fall asleep when I am lying in bed and notice that my imagination has taken a life of its own, and that my conscious mind has left the director’s chair for a seat in the audience.

On the other side of the spectrum of ditchability are David Graeber’s books about debt and bureaucracy, which I’ve been listening to on Spotify and am thrilled to have discovered. I only learned of Graeber last year and my expectations were low when I began listening to his book about Bullshit Jobs, but recently I’ve started thinking he may have been one of the most interesting intellectuals of recent times. I want to get physical copies of his books and re-read them studiously, delving into topics he covers to test his judgment and theories, which I find insightful and very intriguing, if at times radical.

Otherwise, I’ve been picking up books on topics that relate with things going on in my life and in my head. Having recently returned from a

, I finally cracked open my copy of Destinations to read Jan Morris’s lovely piece about Manhattan. Also, I resumed Gloria Steinem’s Revolution From Within, since I’ve been thinking a lot about self-esteem and ego. Steinem’s reference to Alice Miller’s The Drama of the Gifted Child sent me on a reading tangent about Miller’s initial advocacy for Konrad Stettbacher’s version of primal therapy and her eventual denouncement. Out of curiosity, I searched for New Yorker articles mentioning Alice Miller and ended up reading this New Yorker article about Bechdel, whom I only knew in relation to the Bechdel test.

I also started reading remembered rapture, bell hooks’s essays on writing, which is a topic I think about constantly. This in turn led me to Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, which bell hooks cites as one of the literary treasures recovered from obscurity by second wave feminism. In fact, according to Wikipedia, new interest in Hurston’s work was sparked in 1975 by an article published in Ms., Gloria Steinem’s magazine!

Reading

is so much fun and, for me, a much more

use of my reading appetite.

Alfred Adler claimed that all problems were interpersonal relationship problems. Freudian psychoanalysts credit childhood trauma and unconscious drives as fundamental. Lately I’ve been thinking about ego and self-image as a gravitational center that grounds our thoughts and behavior. (Ego is an overloaded term and I’ve written about

of it.)

I think that the ongoing male crisis can be articulated in terms of ego and self-esteem. I suspect the rage many men feel is

in a desperate attempt at self-preservation. These people are struggling for viable ways to exist.

When I first learned of Andrew Tate’s popularity with boys and young men, I was not only dismayed but surprised. Don’t we know better already? But misogyny is not simply a problem of ignorance. It and other expressions of violence are tools for acting out feelings of inadequacy and worthlessness. To get rid of these kinds of abhorrent behavior, we have to address the source of the problem.

Instead of offering gender-agnostic advice for self-actualization, Christine Emba, like psychotherapist Stephen A. Shapiro in the past, is trying to champion positive, overtly masculine roles:

I wonder whether this is an ideal towards which we should strive or whether it is merely a stepping stone aiming to stabilize male self-esteem as it approaches an ultimate destination. No matter where we are on this journey, it needs to be somewhere where the male ego doesn’t feel in danger. Because, if it does, men will return again and again to the familiar coping strategy of domination, which assuages their fear of the deepest inferiority: worthlessness.

Most of what I’ve

has to do with New York, but I also finally wrote a review of

, the first of Cormac McCarthy’s last

novels. I also wrote a

in my series of how to coordinate metaphors.

Z and I went to Tofino with my family for a week to celebrate my mom’s birthday. We spent time together, ate great meals, surfed on beautiful beaches, hung out at a wonderful airbnb near the heart of town, spent a day in an outdoor spa in a private cove lounging in hot tubs filled with seaweed, and even saw the Northern Lights. Z and I want to go back.

A week later, Z and I went to

to affirm our suspicion that we would like to live there before we have kids. I have a bad habit of winging trips, but in the month leading up to this one I dedicated good hours to research and planning. The time spent was well worth it, rendering some of the most memorable experiences of the trip: Comedy Cellar, Village Vanguard,

, Whitney Museum (for free), Tiny Cupboard Comedy Club, Roberta’s, and SEY coffee. Some of these I booked in advance, and the others I was aware of and pounced on when the opportunity arose.

We recently also spent a weekend with friends at an airbnb in Lake Cowichan. The weather was a bit disappointing, but we had a great time hanging out in and around the hot tub.

I’ve delivered some good results at work recently. My tasks continue to be interesting and plenty. However, it looks like my next promotion, which I was expecting in September, won’t happen until December. I’m disappointed, but when I reflect on it carefully, I notice it’s not that important. By no means do I need to be promoted. It’s alluring because it’s a quantifiable and salient achievement. But it’s not important one.

Spotify again rejected my request for an extended quota. I emailed them back asking to speak to a real person. No response. It looks like it’s going to be difficult to make my app available to all Spotify premium users, unfortunately. That project will sit on the backburner for a while.

As for my other recent programming project – this site – I have some interesting new ideas. To encourage myself to

, I want to re-order posts by their most recently edited date rather than their original publish date. That way, I could breathe new life into old ideas that I failed to do justice on initial attempt and baptize them again as new pieces. This aligns with the dynamic aspect of my

idea. A related idea I have for this site is to let (hypothetical) readers see past versions of each post, in the spirit of what I wrote in my essay

last year:

One of my core interests, and one of the core passions behind this site, is the process of writing. Interfaces that illuminate and accentuate that process intrigue me.

Peep Show. Second watch. So funny.

Curb Your Enthusiasm. Hilarious. Like Peep Show, soothing with its insanity.

Baby Reindeer, which was haunting, disturbing, and fantastic.

Welcome to Wrexham. S3 is less ambitious, but still good.

House of the Dragon. Good

. Rewatched S1 in preparation for S2, which is currently airing.

Fantasmas. Unsettling in a very effective way, like a hyper-pop Black Mirror. Wonderfully weird and delightfully non-linear. By now I know I am a sucker for tangential and episodic storytelling.

Dream Scenario. Unsettling. I kept oscillating between sympathy and disgust for the main character, an intended effect, I think. However, ultimately, it didn’t seem to have a cogent point to make. Or maybe I missed it.

Challengers. Very entertaining. I loved the toxic triangle between the three main characters: one chooses to be dominated, one needs to dominate, and one dominates himself to preclude others doing it. The codependence and power dynamics rang true until they fell a bit flat towards the end.

Radical Wolfe, documentary about writer Tom Wolfe (and former colleague of Gloria Steinem at New York magazine). Somewhat entertaining but suspiciously uncritical, as biopics and posthumous documentary tributes tend to be.

Enjoying the rare and splendid sunny days of PNW summer. Biking, paddleboarding, playing soccer, volleyball with friends.

I’m curious about playing goalkeeper for a new team. I’ve been an outfield player exclusively for years, but I used to play goalie part-time and fill in when needed. I miss it a bit. And goalies are always in demand, so it should be an easy way to get more playing time. Hopefully I’m not overestimating my skills in net. I think I’ll find out soon.

Cap Hill Block Party. Excited about seeing Chappell Roan, who is apparently great to see live.

Visit PEI, before Z’s mom and stepdad sell the house they have on the beach there.

The standard bathtub-shower design seems like a good idea. Two in one. But the compromise at the heart of its design prevents it from being a good shower. The cost of the compromise is hidden in plain sight, difficult to notice due to its ubiquity. Allow me to shed some light on the ways that the tub compromises the shower.

We begin with the uncomfortable task of having to climb in, over a literal barrier, without any clothes to soften accidental contact. Clearing this hurdle is not merely a matter of stepping high and long because on the other side one must balance onefooted on a skinny, slippery ramp with sloping edges. It’s shockingly inhospitable ground considering its primary aim is to allow a bipedal, softskinned animal to stand barefooted in showering water and contort while applying lubricants that ooze dangerously downwards onto an already slick surface. But we’re used to this design, so we don’t notice its baffling unfriendliness.

If freed from the responsibility of doubling as a tub, a shower can focus on being a good shower. It can be easy to enter and to exit. Its standing ground, unobliged to accommodate the bare backside, can be tiled or otherwise surfaced with material that gives traction to the bare foot, even when covered in soapy water. The dimensions can be square and wide enough to allow a person to turn and easily rinse different parts of their body without having to watch their step or feel unreasonably constricted.

Good design, as they say, is invisible. A good shower demands no effort or conscious attention from its user. It lets them get clean while

. To achieve this, it must make it extremely easy to do all the basic things: get in, stand, wash, rinse, and get out. The tubshower hybrid most of us have at home fails this basic test.

Karl Pilkington sounds foolish, but he’s onto something. He tells an anecdote about a time when he finished his grocery list and moved on only to be interrupted by a thought that entered his mind suddenly: Apple.

The thought of apple just appeared and Karl doesn’t know how. It fell like a raindrop into his mind. This happens to us all the time, but we don’t notice it because we expect it. We think What’s his name again? and then something inside us slips an answer into our grasp: Mark. It’s like shaking a tree until fruit falls out. We don’t give the tree much credit. But Karl was leaving the orchard when the apple came rolling after him.

We talk about the subconscious as a mysterious engine that runs the dreams we soon forget after we wake up. But it’s also there in the day. It hums along softly in the background, chiming in helpfully when we need to remember someone’s name or what produce to buy.

But it’s more than our assistant. It’s our advisor, our consigliere. It’s the source of our gut feelings. Great ideas come from interaction with this humble inner partner, this invisible thinker.

Despite being teased by his buddies for his story about the apple, Karl echoed something the French polymath Poincaré wrote in his essay, Mathematical Creation:

Like Karl, Poincaré tells stories of answers coming to him when he was no longer considering the question. And he welcomes it. He recognizes his subconscious mind as a vital actor in his work, a shrewd associate that finds a fresh lead while he rests.

Poincaré then concludes something that Karl would’ve been mocked for saying: resting is productive. Not because it reenergizes you for more work, but because it is work. Rest releases the invisible thinker to explore and find what you haven’t noticed yet. You can feel this happening in the shower when novel ideas surface in your mind without prompt. And though we can’t steer our “ambient thought”, we can tell it what to think about. As Don Draper of Mad Men tells his protégé:

Our train of thought springs into existence already in motion and it speeds between ideas connected by tracks in our mind. Though we cannot access the underlying web of knowledge directly, we experience the result of its traversal. And by training and ruminating on new ideas we integrate them into the network. This is why jazz musicians can fling out new melodies every night. A chord change played by the backing band illuminates melodic pathways carved into the musician’s mind during training. At the gig they just get behind their instrument and go for a ride.

We tap into these networks not only for spontaneous improvisation but also for careful design. We draw from a well of memories and impressions, questions and conclusions, recreating and appropriating them for new purposes. A musician composes from real feelings, from their desires and their fears. A fiction writer sketches a character from the outlines of real people, from the beauties they’ve admired and faults they’ve despised.

This personal reservoir is where filmmaker David Lynch fishes for the strange and abstract ideas that appear in his work. In his book Catching the Big Fish: Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity, Lynch describes his process more as catching ideas than creating them. He receives ideas from something inside himself, and consults this inner source to develop and implement them.

Lynch isn’t the only prolific artist with a mysterious inner partner. Novelist Cormac McCarthy is well aware of his own collaborator. He said:

Like Poincaré and Pilkington, McCarthy has talked about the mysterious experience of receiving answers from the ether:

McCarthy often talks about the Night Shift, the period when we sleep and the invisible thinker takes over. Pilkington agrees – from his book The Moaning of Life:

The invisible thinker rules this hidden world where our creativity lives. It collaborates with us to devise and improvise, and it even thinks for itself. When relieved from its duty as our advisor, it roams freely, eager to satisfy its own curiosity. We heighten our creative potential when we deepen understanding with our internal agent. Especially if we don’t just ask but also listen.

Can quantifying the attributes of a TV show tell us something about its quality? I reckon some of the flaws in House of the Dragon would be reflected in statistics like amount of dialogue per minute and number of decisions made per character. A non-negligible amount of time is spent on dramatic montages and orchestral music that create a moody atmosphere and remind us of how serious the situation is. This comes at the cost of time that could be spent on actual situations and actual drama, or at least character development that would contribute to future drama.

These two elements – dialogue and decision-making – each give us an independent perspective into a character, but their combination is especially powerful because it gives us a third angle: insight into what a character is thinking, including what they are thinking unconsciously. From this we get what might be the critical ingredient of great story-telling: three-dimensional characters.

My qualm with shows like House of the Dragon is that their plot feels designed and implemented. I sense the presence of writers and their attempts to show me what’s happening and persuade me that it makes sense. I can’t get lost in the fictional world as if it were a real one because I see the pencil marks from when it was sketched out. My suspension of disbelief never takes off. One might say, Well, yeah, all fictional plots are prescribed. But they’re not, and writers like Stephen King and Cormac McCarthy have

.

In great shows like The Sopranos, plot is not implemented, it’s incubated. The show feels to me like it’s happening spontaneously, developing by itself as a sequence of events, reactions, and actions. In every episode there is constant dialogue between characters and a steady supply of situations that require characters to make decisions. And much of the time, these have nothing to do with plot. Every season has at least one major narrative arc, but the dependence is flipped. Episodes don’t depend on an overarching plot for their meaning. Episodes generate the plot. Characters are agents, not passengers. I don’t feel like the writers are leading me to the plot’s predetermined destination. In fact I don’t feel their presence at all. I feel like I’m

.