Spirit of Play and the Implication of Inevitability
Hey friends,
I finally managed to get rid of that nasty electrical charge I’ve been carrying.
I’m ex-static!
(Currently learning a lot about residential electrical wiring... 😵💫)
Thinking Too Hard 🤔
When do you think we lose our 'spirit of play'?
When a child creates, they do it fearlessly and directly from their inner selves. They're not concerned about how it looks; they create for joy from memory. They enjoy the process: the mixing of paint and colors, the smell of those Crayola markers, the sheer tactile nature of it... But at some point, that stops.
Maalvika Bhat thinks it's when we develop the 'taste/skill discrepancy' that Ira Glass famously called 'The Gap'—where you realize your creation isn't as good as you want it to be, as good as you see somewhere else.
There's a crossroads that happens then and there — either you fizzle out or you keep going. But why?
Glass speaks of creative peers who kept going despite the gap, who kept their tastes refined as their work improved, and eventually, this gap lessened. Bhat, however, reveals that in our current era of curated social media, that struggle is largely hidden.
"We begin to believe that learning should be immediately visible, that progress should be consistently upward, that struggle is evidence of inadequacy rather than necessity." (source)
At the age we become aware of the judgment of our peers, we start to shed the social and emotional risk of being seen as 'less than' for struggling.
So we stop.
So, how do we make failure and 'the gap' bearable? 🤔
Interesting Web Bits 🍜
Web Stuff
- Tom Renner puts a name to something that's been bothering me about the AI/LLM narrative: the implication of it's inevitability. So much of what I see is "get onboard or get left behind", but there's always more than 2 options. You can also grab some popcorn and read the tech bro thoughts on this.
- Rachel tells a story about documenting what you will and won't support.
- Chris Coyier takes a stab at the always-tricky custom select element.
- Conditionals in CSS, you say...?
- Lea Verou talks about planning with hovercars, onions, and how we should test instead of argue.
Other Stuff
- Tracking the moon's phase in ASCII art, because... why not? 🌘
- A fascinating look at how screens work. 📺