When I think about the responsibility we have to each other, this is where I start: Every kind of user information relates to privacy. You never know where a trail leads. We are connected in unbelievable ways. People have the right to know how information is used. If you ask someone to share information about themselves, help them understand where it’s going and how it benefits other people. Pain is hard to express.

Product people want you to touch the site, to do things, the right things.

At a Web company there is code everywhere. […] Code that you control and code that comes from other places and modifies your code. There is code to make code, code to test code, code in many computer languages. As a result, the engineers and product people try to do small things, make sure they work, then release them. Big things are dangerous.

This hot soup of technologies is a gigantic, automated collaboration. And it moves forward — never the same page twice — guided partly by the desires and will of the people who run Web companies but just as much from the findings of analytics, from the research into user behavior and the upshot of all that A/B testing, which invariably leads to yet more A/B tests. The ultimate answer to ‘who made that Web page’ is [today]: You made that, with your browser, in five seconds, downloading around 260 files.

[T]he principles behind the effective use of color to represent data are straightforward. They were developed over the course of more than a century of work by cartographers, and refined by researchers in perception, design, and visualization from the 1960s on.

Although our eyes see color through retinal cells that detect red, green, and blue light, we don’t think in RGB. Rather, we think about color in terms of lightness (black to white), hue (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo, violet), and saturation (dull to brilliant). These three variables (originally defined by Albert H. Munsell) are the foundation of any color system based on human perception.

Computer screens display colors that are a combination of very narrow frequency bands, while each type of cone in our eyes detect a relatively broad spectrum. Complicating things further, computers calculate light linearly, while humans perceive exponentially (we are more sensitive to changes at low light levels than high light levels), and we’re more sensitive to green light than red light, and even less sensitive to blue light.

Look for tools and color palettes that describe colors in a perceptual color space, like CIE L*C*h or Munsell.

The annual cycle carries little charge in a place where the winter has no killing frost and the summer sun withers as well as it nourishes.

[T]he glyph functions not as a definitional noun but as an adjective allowing an inference.

Light finds ways to be loved, and among the Classical Maya it was often in reflection – twinkles and glosses, gleams and caustics.

This is half-diagetic writing. More than any number of pictures of scribes, more than anything I can put in words, it tells me that I’m looking at a practical literacy more subtle and supple than I can really understand. [revisit]

The paper rots away, and what’s left is a water-welded brick of pigment and ashy lime. These corpses of books are kept in hope that the archaeologists of the future might have the tomography and algorithms to recall the red and black as it was.

I have more of a chip on my shoulder than usual about a particularly resilient and unacknowledged racism in America: the idea that the indigenous peoples are gone.

Something is hidden, and this is blamed not on distance or meaning but on the strongest power of all: time.

It works kind of like chivalry does in sexism, I think. It’s an exaggerated regard for what something mostly isn’t – carried on loud[ly] enough to hide disregard for what it mostly is.

This fall I wanted to write something about time, and how people use it to say things that don’t have to do with literal time, and how it consumes everything, and some ways of dealing with this.

[F]or everywhere I’ve lived, I can tell you something about how people there were displaced and whatever was distinctive about their way of happening was tied, broken, and bundled into the past. I was playing a mind game the other day, figuring out how close to myself I could find these traces. Eventually I got to the cultural artifact closest to me: my name.

To use something composed of real people, especially politically marginalized and persistently abused people, as a sock-puppet for ignorance, and especially to entrain the most uselessly sublimated sense of cultural guilt, as if something will be improved, as if we are helping, by granting dead people the power of soothsaying and doombringing – this is deeply grotesque. To exploit it for profit is worse. It is a face of racism.

I’m not trying to score victimhood points for someone else here. I’m saying that we’re seeing, in our time, people who should know better – presumably unconsciously – promoting complicity with oppressive politics by spinning something contemporary as obsolete.

There’s a mixedness here that I think we have to be able to hold in our heads at once if we want to call ourselves cosmopolitan grown-ups. At one time, the loss of so many Maya people and so much of Maya cultures, the intractable suffering of twenty generations of oppression, and the culpability of the people and ways of thinking that committed that crime and continue in complicity with it – and at the same time the identity, integrity, and self-determinative rights of Maya cultures and peoples as they are.

As I searched the web and libraries, this became a touchstone of scholarship: I learned something about storytellers and historians from how they did or didn’t say that they did or didn’t know who wrote them.

Levi’s wants you in a state of reinvention cusping into infatuation because that moment of choice and freedom is when you’re most likely to try a new brand of jeans.

I lost traction. Everything I floated would flounder and loll in the tide. It got worse in 2010. I had every advantage in the world. People who saw my situation from a distance would tell me how much potential I had, and when I asked them not to they smiled knowingly and told me again louder. With everything I had I couldn’t get anything done, so the problem was with me. I lost trust in myself. Anxiety broke the seal between me and the world. Every day I woke up exhausted.

I was filled with gratitude the whole time I felt bad.

I think that those of us profoundly lucky enough not to be refugees have a lot to learn from those who are.

It’s a massive issue because the business I’m in is the same business that politicians and corporations are in.

I think craft is a dangerous thing.

Motherfuck them all and do it your way, if that’s what feels right to you.

To archive is to postpone judgment, to procrastinate determining an image’s fate. What was once a deliberate act is now thoughtless and unchallenging, the default setting of a culture increasingly dematerializing.

Every variation is like an accidental parallel world.

The digital age demands fluency in rapid cycles of emotions.

We don’t often think of pop songs as having histories, Since U Been Gone captures not just the span of influence, but a specific moment in time.

They ask for ideas for the same reason they upload videos requesting ideas, it’s a way to stake some claim to the digital world and flesh out an online presence.

The web has changed the way we think of time. We see examples of contemporary culture remixing the past, present, and future in celebrity holograms, instagram filters, WW2 in real time tweets.

The sound of wind had become, for me, silence.

Overcoming this obstacle requires a bit of good faith on the part of the beginner; to cross quickly over the chasm between beginner and expert, they must recognize and respect this aspect of the conversations they will invariably become a part of. When faced with a term that is used in a strange way, beginners should ask for clarification, and not start arguments over semantics they don't yet even understand.

Philosophy writing is generally a great example of text that is very much usable, and not at all learnable. Some writers can still be learnable, but most are not, in my experience. One of the reasons this happens is that they introduce concepts early in a text and then utilize them later without referring back to the earlier definition. This isn't a problem for anyone who's thinking about taking off the training wheels or anyone who reads the entire text. The danger comes in when someone not versed in the entire text attempts to take portions of it out of its context.

I think cinema should come from cinema. I never adapted anything. Beautiful books are beautiful books, that’s it.

We feel time differently when we are suffering or are in pain or we are waiting for something. So subjective time became the subject for me—plus the duration of the time of the film that the spectator perceives.

We all have inside ourselves a woman who walks alone on the road.

I’m interested in people who are not exactly the middle way, or who are trying something else because they cannot prevent themselves from being different, or they wish to be different, or they are different because society pushed them away.

I want to be shown, I want to be hidden.

It’s a way of living, sharing things with people who work with me, and they seem to enjoy it.

I call them real people, because they have in themselves an incredible treasure—stories, a way of speaking, a way of sharing, an innocence and a perversity which I find very interesting to discover little by little.

I think we need to have a nest of something which is family.

I was—that’s the way I was—autodidact.

It’s yet another error in perception of the affluent that those with social protection can look at those who have, at times, lacked it, and imagine that weakness is in the bleeder, not those who have never bled.

It was like being lost in the dark and then an arrow appears. A pointing arrow; placed there by your future self, that says, “Follow me.”

Get comfortable with the idea that you won’t know what’s good until it’s already happened.

We decide on an experiment, try not to overthink it, then do it. Quickly. Then we tear it apart. What worked? What didn’t?

Most things don’t work. Better to ask, what can I carry forward?

We’ve decided that the best way to reimagine yourself is to collaborate promiscuously.

I want a wild disorganized chaotic brainstorming space that spans the world, open to everyone.

I started my career writing about travel, but very early on I had an opportunity to participate in an online world and I began to write about that as a foreign country. That’s where I got involved in the future by actually experiencing it online.

The mystery of the player not having a clue what the hell is going on is the initial incentive to learn.

Success is not measured with points, timers, or headcrabs. Success is measured by the satisfaction you receive when you use the mechanics you’ve incrementally learned to solve the puzzle and exit the chamber in a not-dead state.

Staying up at night is, among other things, an act of communitarianism; an act of love.

I believe I was supposed to outgrow that habit. Instead, I grew into it. Left to my own devices, I write best from ten at night to 4 a.m.

Those who have shared my bed—when I am in it to share it, anyway—have observed my nighttime habits with reactions varying from indulgence to incredulity.

It starts, as I said, around 10 p.m., when something ticks over in my mind, as if someone had walked into a shuttered cabin and flipped all the switches in the fuse box to “on.”

My normal indiscipline, the ADHD-ish inability to keep my head inside my work, finally drops away. For the next few hours, I write steadily, cleanly. If my body is producing a drug during that time, it is a natural methylphenidate—a dose of pure focus, side-effect-free and sweet.

If I put my work away and go to bed, I will fall asleep almost instantly, and can be up and functional again at nine. If, instead, I cross the 3:30 a.m. threshold, I will write all night.

The sun will fill my bedroom, and I will close my laptop and cover my eyes, and sleep maybe two hours, from six to eight or eight to ten—I have lost, alas, my childhood ability to sleep till noon—or sometimes not sleep at all. Either way, I will be awake the rest of the day, and utterly destroyed.

It’s hell on your social life, bad for your body, contraindicated by every piece of emotional and physical health advice you’ll ever see.

I love the quiet and the solitude; love, especially, nighttime’s strange combination of adventure and calm.

Running, you may have noticed, is a terrestrial activity, pretty much one hundred percent about gravity. And yet, when I run at night—or walk at night, or write at night, or do almost anything at night—I sometimes seem to slip its bounds. In darkness I am freer, less weighted down, my perspective wholly altered: a kind of noctonaut.

Very few people ever hold language in their hands.

Writing for format.

[W]e tend to look at static media as if they were fixed, final, and self-evident things. They are not. They are not self-evident. They are provocations for performance. Every act of reading performs a work. It makes the work. It constitutes the work.

Text *is* visual.

The Descriptive Camera only outputs the metadata about the content.

Their eyes will photograph fields rather than, as ours do, or did, follow tracks.

Also figured out a way to manage revisions of writing and projects, which is super exciting.

Had a good discussion about DeconstructionNnNN.

I think the one time he called one me I was like: I hate all these theorists. All of them. Not going to talk about Rosalind Krauss. And he kind of moved on.

I would hate having myself in class a lot of the time. That criticism discussion also reminds me of ways that I want to be a better classmate.

Why should a new aesthetic [be] interested only in the relationship between humans and computers, when so many other relationships exist just as much? Why stop with the computer, like Marinetti foolishly did with the race car?

Being withdraws from access. There is always something left in reserve, in a thing.

This kind of knowledge does not come easily or cheaply.

The books come along when they come along.

Caro is a little like Balzac, who kept fussing over his books even after they were published.

“What makes [Caro] such a genius of research and reliability is that everything is of exactly the same importance to him. The smallest thing is as consequential as the biggest. A semicolon matters as much as, I don’t know, whether Johnson was gay. But unfortunately, when it comes to English, I have those tendencies, too, and we could go to war over a semicolon. That’s as important to me as who voted for what law.”

“There was never a plan,” Caro said to me, explaining how he had become a historian and biographer. “There was just a series of mistakes.”

I’m so far onto the left of the copyright issue. I believe that the natural home of all creation is in the public domain.

Money follows attention. Wherever attention goes, money will follow.

And what a book is, in my kind of formulation, is a coherent, sustained long argument or narrative, with a beginning, middle, and end.

I’m not a born writer. I’m a natural editor.

A website does not want to be a book.

A book was a very powerful device because it did so many different things. We’re taking some of those apart.

There’s no reason in my mind that you can’t make an e-book that’s a sheaf of flexible electronic pages that resemble a book that you turn.

Photograph (or draw) everything.

Listen more than you speak.

Music.

We’ve always lived mediated, fragmented lives.

Power to the people seems to be those powers that the manufacturer decided on.

Why shouldn’t your computer serve you better by getting out of your face more? What if you used computers completely differently?

For goodness’ sake, it’s our culture. If it chafes, let it out. If it drags, take it in.

If you ignore and resent a place, it’s going to be worth ignoring and resenting.