Hey friends,

After an unsuccessful harvest, why did the farmer decide to try a career in music?

Because he had a ton of sick beets. 🧑‍🌾🎶

Thinking Too Hard 🤔

I set a goal cough last year cough to get back into producing analog art. But so far... that hasn't really happened yet. Why not?

Well, in part, because I haven't been deliberate about it.

There's a concept/theory called deliberate practice (originally coined by Anders Ericson. James Clear has an explainer post, and Cal Newport wrote about it in his book Deep Work), where you approach practice with a focused and deliberate mindset of improving instead of just going through the motions (like how I practiced piano all those years as a kid).

I have the intention of creating art, but deliberation requires energy. I attempted to tackle this problem in my "Creating While Adulting" talk. I speak about identifying and removing energy parasites and making sure you're connected to a community that feeds energy back into you — but there's also the need to carve out deliberate time. I have my watercolor set prepped. I bought new brushes. I have an idea for a painting... but I don't have any time to dedicate to it.

Or at least that's what I've been telling myself. Time is a funny thing; it reflects your priorities. If things are truly a priority, I always seem to have time for them. Maybe when we're talking about creating new habits, we need to be honest with ourselves on where our priorities truly lie...

Interesting Web Bits 🍜

Web Stuff

• It's nice to see that the rewilding the web idea making the rounds again. There was even a workshop in Edinburgh
• It's ALSO nice to see the time honored traditions of writing a new language from scratch and making highly customized software is also still alive and well!
• Blain reflects on 30 years of programming. Kinda mirrors the link I shared last week that theorized that burnout is, in large part, from lack of purpose.
• The Pope (and Cal) seem to think the AI future is not going to be as predicted by our "tech leaders... cosplaying as solemn x-risk sages".

Other Stuff

• Stephen manages to restore his ancient family computer from his childhood
• Frank talks about eels
• Chad Whitacre 'steps away' from tech to work at Home Depot. Hacker News, as usual, has mixed emotions.

👽 Weird, 📺 Watch, and 🎮 Play

• 👽 I love the hard commitment to the CRT aesthetic.
• 👽 A business-card-sized computer
• 👽 10 Letters but, like, interactive.
• 📺 I'm a sucker for Rube Goldberg machines of all kinds.
• 🎮 How well can you draw a circle or polygon?
• 🎮 While we're tracking accuracy, how well can you eyeball a value?
• 🎮 A daily version of FreeSki: FreeSkeedle