Stairs erase up and down whereas ropes and slides insist on them. Too many ropes and slides in public software today. Don’t try to decide beforehand where users want to be; make it possible for users to get to where they want to get to in plainly reliable ways, then invite them for a climb or a plunge.
And no, I’m not ‘anti-elevator’…ach…this metaphor is deteriorating rapidly in earths' atmosphere…
Do these stairs go up or down?
To get at why stories seem to me fundamental building blocks of reality I have to backpedal and talk about pictures for a bit. ❡ Building blocks of reality? Dude, smoke another bowl… ❡ Pictures. We know what those are. Kind of freeze frames of the light available at some particular moment. Pictures of things, pictures of words. We consume and conceptualize them now as pixel collections, sometimes printed, mostly on screen.
As I was saying, telling a better story is important for me. I feel somewhat compelled to do it, if only in my head, but preferably also to create artifacts for future data waves. And what do I mean by better? More coherently truth congruent with repeatedly identifiable phenomena; the propositions therein match up with consensus reality; the shit rhymes. ‘But why stories?’, I pretend you ask. Because I’m convinced that in strange ways it is actually ‘stories’❡ that are the building blocks of our reality.
I want to emphasize in this post what I mentioned last time: not censoring myself out of economic, or other, anxieties. Anecdotally, in what were always described to me as “professional settings”, but turned out to just be “people in a room”, when I thought they were serious when they said “we want to hear what you think”, and I start with a phrase like “…well, your software kinda sucks…” I found myself plunged into a situation I thought I left in junior high school.
The reason I felt it important to just finish out the photo series mentioned above …or below, if you’re into the whole reverse-chronological thing, which is cool… is because I want to become accustomed to simply saying the things that occur to me to say, rather than just thinking about them. Take work, for example. I’ve self censored my public utterances most of my adult life when even the possibility existed that an employer, past, present, or especially future, might fortune upon it and, digesting it, judge me unworthy.
These folks just keep improving software that has already been quite good for some time. Yay for the cumulative! DEVONTech Blog
I published the last part of a series a few days ago. I’m going to tell you a bit about the genesis of this little impromptu art thing, commenting on the process and ‘the meaning’ of the whole thing.
End of the World – Individual Serving: Death.
My on-body time navigation equipment, in the spirit of @jack ’s double-wristing.
Note: the Jolly Roger wrist band is to remind me of my own mortality, not to frighten the children.
