Gathering thoughts…
A world of little thoughts.
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I found 105 articles about growing small businesses that I don't remember writing. I know the writing was forgettable because I'm running a business now and suffering from all of the stuff I talked about. Memory has some peculiar characteristics that help explain why so much of my writing feels like I'm shouting in…
So I happened upon marketing by accident. I began my career as a psychological researcher. I was in charge of putting out flyers to attract people with major depressive disorder to a study where they could receive free treatment. One day, I was instructed to put fliers in doctor's office waiting rooms, cars in parking…
I've been thinking about how civilizations of the future would organize their data. What mechanism would a galaxy use to work together and share reliable information accurately and instantly? I started thinking about our own history and how we manage knowledge in our most complex societies. As much as sci-fi movies…
One of the biggest misconceptions is that stories need to be action packed, or they'll be boring. The top 13 movies in 2021 were all action movies. The top four were superhero movies, with number one being, of course, Spider Man. There's this pervasive idea that a big movie means explosions and guns and superpowers.…
“I think you should dream the earth, As it has a heart and breathes.” — Davi Kopenawa, interview with F. Watson. Pitch, but the dark did not impede the vision, the forest brought comfort and not fear, there were many tropical flowers with the most seductive tones, the cyan ones were light and moved slowly with the…
It starts with a door opening. Then you just see a man's feet trudging through the snow on a horrible dark night. He turns over the ignition and the car's headlamp seems to appear in the darkness. We watch the car make its way down the road. It's the only car on this awful kind of deep snow-covered road. And then a…
It's a boy who discovers he's a wizard. A young woman who takes her sister's place in a faraway, dystopian death contest. For our people-obsessed brains, the twists and turns are built around people, not situations or events. None of it works without a compelling character to draw you into the story's world. There are…
An alien spaceship lands on Earth. After several failed attempts to communicate, the first contact team's linguist, Louise Banks, brings a whiteboard to the next encounter. She writes "HUMAN" on the whiteboard. The aliens finally respond by projecting strange circular symbols into the air. Afterwards... COLONEL WEBER:…
Frenchman Jules Allix, in the mid-nineteenth century, popularized a kind of organic Internet made out of snails. Drawing upon the physician Franz Mesmer’s theory of “animal magnetism,” which postulated the existence of a universal magnetic force connecting living things, it was predicated upon the idea that any two…
