Don’t overthink it.

Have I said it before? I am learning to see. Yes, I am beginning. It's still going badly. But I intend to make the most of my time. —Rilke— My name is Beth Wernet. I'm an Interaction Designer in New York City. Collecting quotes, stray thoughts, and photographs.  Instagram | Twitter | Work

[birdonahotdog]

How does it feel to be an adult?

exhausting and everything is expensive

[dontoverthink]

Hey Tumblr, it's been a while. But I've joined a shuffleboard league and made one of my favorite puns ever so life's pretty good over here! 

 (@markruffalo you can come hang out any time if you feel like pushin some biscuits around!)

[dontoverthink]

“I know these projects are totally irrational, totally useless,” he added. “The world can live without them, nobody needs them, only me and Jeanne-Claude. She always made the point that they exist because we like to have them, and if others like them, it’s only a bonus.”

(via Christo’s Newest Project: Walking on Water - The New York Times)

[dontoverthink]

But there’s some sort of revealing lesson here in the beyond-short-term viability-curve of advances in consumer technology. The career of videophony conforms neatly to this curve’s classically annular shape: First there’s some sort of terrific, sci-fi-like advance in consumer tech — like from aural to video phoning — which advance always, however, has certain un- foreseen disadvantages for the consumer; and then but the market-niches created by those disadvantages — like people’s stressfully vain repulsion at their own videophonic appearance — are ingeniously filled via sheer entrepreneurial verve; and yet the very advantages of these ingenious disadvantage-compensations seem all too often to undercut the original high-tech advance, resulting in consumer-recidivism and curve-closure and massive shirt-loss for precipitant investors. In the present case, the stress- and-vanity-compensations’ own evolution saw video-callers rejecting first their own faces and then even their own heavily masked and enhanced physical likenesses and finally covering the video-cameras altogether and transmitting attractively stylized static Tableaux to one another’s TPs. And, behind these lens-cap dioramas and transmitted Tableaux, callers of course found that they were once again stresslessly invisible, unvainly makeup- and toupeeless and baggy-eyed behind their celebrity-dioramas, once again free — since once again unseen — to doodle, blemish-scan, manicure, crease-check — while on their screen, the attractive, intensely attentive face of the well-appointed celebrity on the other end’s Tableau reassured them that they were the objects of a concentrated attention they themselves didn’t have to exert.

David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest

(I’ve been playing with Snapchat a lot recently) 

[staff]

The Secret Lives of Tumblr Teens

How Tumblr's most popular teen comedy geniuses struck it rich—then lost it all.

”And in sucking, he succeeded.”

This is a great read!

[dontoverthink]

Ads, all the way down

[dontoverthink]

Sometimes, Silicon Valley seems like the most fantastic place that has ever existed and I kick myself for not moving out there when I was younger. What is better than going out to the Bay, buying sunglasses at the airport, walking past the ads for enterprise whatevers, then past the airport yoga room? (Has anyone ever entered the SFO yoga room? I wonder if it’s filled with alligators.) The sun is so bright and some days the only clouds are sequestered away in server farms; the air smells of microservices. Plus the freshness of the avocados—the way the pit pops right out with a tap instead of needing to be pulled from the goop with a knife—for me, it’s impossible to walk out of SFO without thinking, “this would be nice. I could do this.” Other times (for example when I'm reading Hacker News comments for the second hour or I've fallen too far down the Medium entrepreneurship hole), the Valley feels like one of those vast farms where all the pigs are bred in such proximity, and to such exacting genetic tolerances, that the barns must be kept at a constant temperature and a steady drip of antibiotics must be fed into the pigs by the industrial farmers because otherwise they’ll all get viruses and die in days. Are the farmers venture capital investors? Are the pigs in this metaphor the programmers or the product? The answer is yes! Also you need more microservices.

Postlight Newsletter Volume 1, Number 6

Have I mentioned I ♥ Paul Ford

[mollycrabapple]

No one reminds me more that trying again is the really heroic move.

Sarah Nicole Prickett on Bowie (via mollycrabapple)

[dontoverthink]

Mosque panoramas, and my new “panorama backbends” yoga practice

[dontoverthink]

Instead of building tools for “silly human mammals” who are “easily trained by positive reinforcement,” she argues, technologists should embrace the messiness of human life and put it into the core of the products they build.

Facebook’s Mental Health Problem — Medium

[dontoverthink]

[dontoverthink]

The American West (at Red Rock Canyons Las Vegas)

[dontoverthink]

Look at this strange American tardis

[dontoverthink]

Well hey, this new gif feature is pretty fun.

[deeeepsteep]

Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who was officially sworn in on November 4th, 2015, gives a very simple answer as to why he decided to have 15 men and 15 women on his cabinet.

[dontoverthink]

Instruments to choose for busking, ranked

1. String instruments 2. Acoustic guitars 3. African drums or Steel drums 4. Voice only 5. Saxophones, but only if they are playing Have Yourself A Merry Little Christmas, softly, from a distance, at a seasonably appropriate time .

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199. Car alarm 200. Bagpipes

[dontoverthink]

Airbnb’s purpose, it seems, is to bring us back to some imagined past where strangers felt welcome in each other’s home, but in the placeless future of the internet. Airbnb emerges as a unifier, restoring trust between strangers, between everyone on earth, in fact. A friend is just someone you haven’t met yet. We can all belong anywhere. Anywhere can be home. It is wishful thinking that Airbnb can scale up “what makes this global community so special” rather than have its community become co-opted by the values of the global marketplace — presumably efficiency, the maximization of profit, and personal interest (as opposed to “trust and safety”). It seems like Airbnb would like to wish away the complexities of what community really means: shared interests that hold people together, a set of agreed-upon rules to keep people in check, and transparency.

Living and Dying on Airbnb — Matter — Medium

This story is important, thoughtful, and heartbreaking. 

[dontoverthink]

Because nothing has made my life richer than coming down off my pedestal and, instead of spinning in neurotic circles, working hard to enjoy the pleasures of everyday life. I can finally see that my best moments are not those when I'm being celebrated or adored. In my finest moments, I'm working hard at something that feels very difficult, or I'm taking in the grace and humor of the people around me, or I'm just staring out the window, watching the wind whipping through the trees on a late October afternoon. To feel fully alive and calm and in the zone is to also be, in some ways, in the background, borderline invisible, a vessel for something bigger than yourself. That's also, not coincidentally, practically the definition of relaxation and peace. It's not a lobotomy. It's using your brain to focus outward, until the whirring machinery in your head is silenced. Some part of you believes that it's too late to fulfill your incredible, extra-special potential, so why even try? But there's no such thing as too late and there's no such thing as extra special. Grand accomplishments are nothing and process is everything. Right now, you have no process. Dare to consider what kind of work might engage you fully. Dare to join us here in the real world, where we do things that are difficult and sometimes feel arbitrary, where we chip away at something outside of ourselves (sometimes just so we don't chip away at ourselves instead), where we get to know each other and take great satisfaction in slowly but surely revealing JUST HOW FUCKED UP WE REALLY ARE. You are not a crazy genius or an irredeemable asshole or a misfit who's damned for all time. You are just a person. We are all damned in our own little ways. We are all uniquely blessed and uniquely fucked. Welcome to the world.

Ask Polly: Am I Too Smart for My Own Good? -- The Cut