titanium elemental

Fundamentally it stems from an approach to life that does not care about desire but only what desires make you seem cool and hip

Sound on!

Haruka Kawakami

A cat trying its best despite its limitations ↔ A tired cat

かわかみはるか

and for all of yall that are still figuring it out or aren't getting the support you deserve:

It's old-fashioned. It's modern. It's butch. It's femme. It's snazzy. It's practical.

Wikipedia talks about the bloomers and the leg-o-mutton sleeves, but I'm also noticing a lot of these outfits have absolute supervillain lapels, which I also like a lot.

What I've come to realize since shifting toward dark mode at work, though, is that the less-obvious problem is worse: in dark mode the whole concept of drop shadows becomes nonsensical! The original idea was that most of the UI was very light, so subtle darkening was highly visible, but in dark mode, even #000000 may not stand out enough to be useful. The only way to get the functional effect of drop shadows is to invert them, as if the backs of the windows and pointers were casting light on the things underneath them. Of course, no one does this, and so an entire universe of interace affordances is gradually decaying.

DOG

dog dog dog

dog dog dog

It’s like a sort of … feeling that the world is bigger than you, and very complicated, and filled with things you’d never expect.  It’s not exactly “skepticism,” and not exactly “humility.”  It’s compatible with having a high view of oneself or one’s intellect, though not with certain versions of those things.  It’s compatible with strong and numerous opinions, too, though not with certain ways of having strong and numerous opinions.

It’s having your most instinctive response to the world be “this is billions of distinct things; this is jeweled chaos; this is a buzzing, blooming confusion.”  And then you make models and concepts to try to make some sense of it.  Sometimes you become quite attached to them.  Sometimes maybe too attached.  But if you become too attached it’s not because you think your concepts are reality.  It’s because you feel you’ll be so terribly lost without them.

When I try to think of the opposite of this temperament I think of those sorts of political or culture bloggers who are never surprised by anything, who always respond to every news story with “oh, look, more of the thing I know about, doing the things I know it does.”  It’s not that these people are too political, or too certain.  It’s that their politics and certainty doesn’t feel like a lifeboat they’re clinging to in a vast roiling ocean.  They give off the impression of not seeing the ocean.

And lots of things follow from this.  You have to find ways of living with this ever-present sense – sometimes dulled, but never gone – that reality is too large, grotesquely large, that you’ll never find your way in it.  So you learn to revel in it a bit, to become an eclectic, an amateur, collecting and admiring little bits of jeweled chaos.  You collect #quotes.  You learn to laugh when you see something you don’t understand, so that you don’t instead despair.

You feel wary about systems, you feel wary about things that are top-down and a priori.  You like data.  But not in the sense of “the data is in”; not in the sense that we have measured, so now we know, and now no one can ever question again.  But you are always worrying that you are missing the forest for the trees, because there are so many trees, too many, too many.  You distrust the single event, the dramatic example, because you know that reality has room for everything, because you have enough such specimens pinned and mounted in your collection to prove any claim or its negation.  You want the species, not the specimen – but you feel deep down that that has to be hubris, because all you see are specimens, and the great whirling confusion laughs at your taxonomies.