Afterword to Elon Chooses Throughput
That timeline took me a while. The whole Sunday morning going through Musk’s Twitter timeline, checking news, doing screenshots, collaging them into Procreate… worth it 👍.
I couldn’t help using the Elon-Twitter drama as an illustration of the trade-off curve. Last week I had two options: one, dive into the curve; the other, talk about ecosystems and meritocracy. Spent Monday thinking about it and on Tuesday the idea of Twitter came to me—background processing at work 🧠, again.
I don’t like to use very recent examples to illustrate ideas, though. It’s easy to take the post as news commentary, instead of an exposition of a concept. That’s why I took good care of not sharing what I really think about the case exposed 😉.
When I said in the post: “a man that has delivered the accomodations from which others have the luxury to question him today”, I was simply reusing one great piece of writing of the history of cinema 🎬. Find it below in case you didn’t catch it.
One other good example of mission first, isn't it?
My backlog is starting to branch now… next week I can a) talk about shifting the curve, or b) give my actual opinion about how I position myself in the curve and how I see the Twitter case.
Let’s see what happens… I will let my brain do its thing and trust the process.
One silly touch that gave me significant satisfaction this week was the subtle but beautiful grain texture of the inner thinking section of the post. Can you notice it? I certainly can 😍.
I plan on using these interludes more often (or at least that’s what my intuition tells me), so I decided to adapt the styles of the photos: grainy, as if not fully defined… just like my thoughts are.
At the end of the weekend I stumbled upon Jordan B. Peterson’s Essay Writing Guide, which I devoured in minutes. I’m keen to apply the proposed method for next week’s post, let’s see if there’s any improvement.
Several of Peterson’s claims on that paper resonated with me, but I’ll focus on one aspect: the aesthetic aspirations of an essay. The writer must aspire to create engagement through brevity, rhythm, beauty, melody. As I craft these posts, I see myself relying on a palette that goes beyond words, sentences and paragraphs; one that includes typography, diagrams, photos, emojis, gifs, videos… Are these cheap tricks to cover my weaknesses as a writer? Or are they the foundation of a new media?
F#ck! One more to the backlog… this will keep going forever!
Fine by me 😉.
See you guys neex week 👋!