(2023-07-03) Sloan The Feeling Of Something Waiting There For You

Robin Sloan: The feeling of something waiting there for you. The other night, I pointed my telescope at Venus... is it possible? Does Venus have PHASES? I had never, in fact, thought about it. Galileo did: his obser­va­tions of Venus provided important evidence for, you know, his whole deal.

Here’s the shape of my work life lately:
50% writing, which is, in turn, 90% novel revision and 10% shorter stuff: stand-alone stories and the occasional piece of quasi-journalism
20% exploration, most of which feeds back into writing in some indirect way, at some unpredictable point. In the past, this exploration has tended toward the technical, but lately, I have been renovating my long-abandoned drawing habit. Of course, I also read a lot!

these fractions don’t apply to days or usually even to weeks; rather, it’s the year that gets portioned out. My life has become seasonal in a way I couldn’t have imagined a decade ago.

These days, when I’m inves­ti­gating a subject, I tend to go straight to Low View-Count Scholarly YouTube, which is of course the version of YouTube you get when you append the term “lecture” to your search. When you hit a tranche of videos between forty and ninety minutes long, with between 500 and 5000 views, you know you’re in the right place.

I booted up The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom, the new Nintendo game.

While playing, I jotted this note, which I’m not sure I can improve upon with “newsletter prose”, so I’ll just present it raw:

The generosity of it! It gives and gives.

The sense of capacity and power.

(We have to acknowl­edge the infan­tiliza­tion too. Hard things are easy in this game. Climbing and building and traveling, etc.)

Every single thing, every big infra­struc­tural system, was authored by people. Who are just as anonymous in their way as Zelda’s many creators. We can acknowledge and praise the geniuses at Nintendo … can’t we acknowl­edge and praise these other groups? The infan­tiliza­tion, also, of infrastructure? Hmm, maybe it’s not so bad

Here’s my pitch: “the long 2010s”, which actually begins in 2008, with the financial crisis (great recession) (and the release of the first Iron Man movie, which feels important, somehow) and ends in 2022, with the passage of the IRA and/or the invasion of Ukraine.

Other vari­a­tions are possible. In a note, I wrote: Maybe “the long 2010s” begins in 2007 with the iPhone, ends with Apple’s announce­ment of the Vision Pro. If you put Twitter inside a device like that, you would go insane. Time for something different.