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.

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.

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

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.

At the risk of stating the obvious, if your goal is to get a written idea in front of as many human beings as efficiently as possible, you shouldn't be publishing dead tree books at all. You should be editing a wiki, writing a blog, or creating a website.

Sometimes the medium is part of the message.

Comics have always been a very social thing for me. I read some, talk about them with others, and we share mutual recommendations for other comics.

I’m buying more than I did when I only bought in print (which isn’t bad for the industry), but now I’m less concerned with figuring out where to keep them.

The anger about the financial side of Readability seems to come from the opinion that the company is “keeping publishers’ money” unless they sign up, but I guess I look at it differently: I don’t think it is the publishers’ money. I think it is Readability’s money. Readability invests the time and resources into developing their service and they are the ones who physically get users to pay a subscription fee. It’s hard to get users to pay for content and they are the ones who are actually doing it. They realize that the popularity of their service is a direct result of content creators’ efforts so they are voluntarily redistributing 70% of it back to publishers in the only way it is feasible to: based on pageviews from publishers who register themselves.

Because I use programs like Photoshop, Illustrator and inDesign with a mouse still, I don’t think I could stop using my normal workstation. If I could make everything that I design in pure code with the only graphics being photos shot from my iPhone and iPad, it’s not so far fetched of an idea. Maybe, maybe not.

What I like about the iPad is that there’s no cursor. This opens up the ui in a million new ways. It flattens the need for external production (extraneous tactile buttons) which saves time. Design for gestures and ignore the plastic production and circuitry of buttons. The speed of both the network and ability to navigate faster without worrying about making a mistake.

I want the iPad to be lighter. I want more people to understand the power of saving a web site to the home screen from their iPad. Once this becomes a habit for people things are really going to take off.

Apps provide niche experiences.

We wanted to give people a calm place to read.

I’m interested in the iPad. Native apps. Designing for touch. Because like everything that comes before whatever will come next, they create a bridge.

What strikes me about the iPad, coupled with some native apps, is that this combination presents one of the first compelling examples of what Mark Weiser calls “calm computing.” Native apps can embody certain attributes of experience — calmness, focus, edges, playfulness — that I don’t necessarily expect when I’m viewing a site in a browser.