💡Part III of The Edinburgh Cycle: five unlikely and useful things about creativity I learned from performing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Making anything is frightening. If you make something, it’s going to be looked at. And people might say mean things about the thing you made. And about
💡Part II of The Edinburgh Cycle: five unlikely and useful things about creativity and project management I learned from performing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe So last week I talked about how I use (manipulate?) the Dunning-Kruger effect to motivate myself at the beginning of a project, and to then
Part I of The Edinburgh Cycle: five unlikely and useful things about creativity and project management I learned from performing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe So I decided to produce a cabaret show. Which I had never done before. And I decided to sing lounge music in it. Which I
💡SPECIAL BULLETIN I am happy to be writing this newsletter for such an interesting group of people such as yourself. I would like to be writing for an even larger number of interesting people. And I figure interesting people like you know interesting people like you who aren't
When you look at your own life, oh my gosh, so much stuff has happened. Almost every day, you experience something that you carry with you forever. Sometimes it's a boon, sometimes it's a limp. And these incidents often occur in clusters, bunched together by time
Well, it's late January, and the New Year's Resolutions are starting to decay like Julian Glover at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Resolutions can be fragile. They are often big changes, with only one "win" state. Everything else is "
On a recent trip to San Francisco, my brother and I took a Waymo driverless taxi to get to and from a restaurant. I found the experience smooth, seamless...and oddly puzzling. So let's talk about robot cars and whether they truly are automated harbingers of a coming
I’m locked in a beef with Sir Ridley Scott, director of such classics as Gladiator, Thelma and Louise, and Alien. Particularly Alien. He, of course, has no idea we are in conflict. Nor should he care. But aware or not, he and I have a fundamental disagreement. About the
Happy New Year to you. So glad you made it. So far, I've launched over a dozen of these newsletters into your inbox. About a calendar quarter's worth, on a (mostly) regular cadence. And now, as 2024 fades in the rearview mirror, is the last quarter
So much of life seems to creep up on you. Even the stuff you know is coming seems to suddenly jump out of the bushes. You startle, and think "Where did that come from?" In this jenga-tower world stacked of interrobang-flavored blocks of Jell-O, it's rare
I've mentioned before how sound can add depth and heft to an animation. And I just realized that sometimes the animation then needs to respond to the sound. When they work together, it gets so tasty... I'll show you the example that showed me, after the
I have given critiques, I have received critiques. On all sorts of stuff: PowerPoint decks, project docs, industrial videos, scripts for two-act plays, stand-up performances. Even this newsletter. And I've found some simple principles for giving and receiving critiques. These can produce more positive change, with a significant