109 - Playing with forms ✍️
Hey there, !
Something different - playing with forms! I'm shit at poetry - good luck to me.
If you hate poetry, feel free to go here to read other short fiction I am writing once again! Exercise #13 has been my favourite to write about so far :)
Would it be easier if this was war?
Would it be easier if this was war?
Enemies, human, mortal
Able to bleed, scream, and fight
Buffeted by life's aimless winds
Casualties of Fate's cruelty
Brawls for the god's entertainment
Invisible, miniscule
A plague of wild proportions
With nothing to blame
We turn against each other
Thrown to the tides of anger
Washed up in a drowning world
Would it be easier if this was war?
A magnet for hate and sorrow
Iron wills and steely nerves
The brevity of impermanence
Conviction of mortality
The clang of Death's door
Instead, chaos.
Knots of emotion twisting into labyrinths
Following twisted threads
Choking, confining, constricting
Leaching vitality, accelerating lethargy
Lost ships on a calm sea
Wouldn't it be easier if this was war?
Desperate pleas for a negotiated peace
Crash upon the shores of indifferent ears
Ice-cold decisions in blistering rooms
Lives lost and torn asunder
A generation cast to the tides
Making up for lost time and
what we took for granted
Maybe it's not that different after all
Chat soon :)
Let me know if you have any feedback for the newsletter!
✔️Real Life Recommendations
-
Squid Game - if you haven't watched this yet - please do! It's a Korean thriller tv series that's just been beamed out to literally everyone on Netflix to make it an instant bestseller (more to write about insta-hits on Netflix some time). The short form is 'poor people play children's games to win a fortune' but has a lot of really good characterisation, world-building and acting across the board. Watch with subtitles - the only way to understand the original way the acting was intended!
-
Recipe Club - David Chang and co-host Chris Ying bring a guest chef each episode to discuss 3 hand-picked recipes related to a particular ingredient: e.g. roast pork, instant ramen, spaghetti, rice - and try to work out which one of them is best. It's a really easy listen, and I like it because it cares about home cooks more than chefs; since the pandemic, the chefs have grown more empathy for non-restaurant quality dishes, and are looking at the easiest, simplest ways for people at home to cook things (though, this does mean using the microwave a whole hell of a lot more than I expected!). Strong recommendation - have a listen!
🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway
-
David Chang's Unified Theory of Deliciousness - I really need to watch 'Ugly Delicious' because the way he writes about these dishes is phenomenal. He has some really deep thinking about where flavour comes from and how he can replace it in a dish - the exact kind of thinking I was looking for when writing about cookbooks!
Different cultures may use different media to express those base patterns—with different ingredients, for instance, depending on what’s available. But they are, at heart, doing the exact same thing. They are fundamentally playing the same music. And if you can recognize that music, you’ll blow people’s minds with a paradox they can taste: the new and the familiar woven together in a strange loop.
-
How one programmer broke the internet by deleting a tiny piece of code - off the back of the Facebook/Instagram/WhatsApp outage yesterday, I was reminded of this piece; our internet infrastructure built on top of a number of key points of failure (which sounds unintuitive) - when one simple tool goes down, things can collapse. It's all smoke and mirrors 'til someone gets annoyed and breaks something really important.
-
Overnight Pizza and the Consistent Unreliability of Expert Guidelines - very random article about eating overnight pizza - do you eat it if it's been at room temperature overnight? Do you use common sense and previous experience to take a risk? Or do you believe in the science of expert guidelines that lead to a waste in food? What do statistics actually mean for you in real life?