"Biological determinism is one of psychology’s ugliest evasions, removing the poetic human from any issue."

"As we as a society become desperate financially, and more regulated and conformist, our ideals of competence become more misleading and cruel, making people feel like losers. There might be more to our distractions than we realized we knew. We might need to be irresponsible. But to follow a distraction requires independence and disobedience; there will be anxiety in not completing something, in looking away, or in not looking where others prefer you to. This may be why most art is either collaborative — the cinema, pop, theater, opera — or is made by individual artists supporting one another in various forms of loose arrangement, where people might find the solidarity and backing they need."

"I like what Kelli Anderson says about her work. For every project, she figures out everything that she hates about the conventional approaches, and proceeds to rage and spit at them, and then tries to channel all of that energy into a different approach. This is how many of her projects turn out to be fantastical.

I see a similar rhythm in the way I like to work. Build up a set of frustrations, in public or in private, and then use them as fuel to light a path forward."

"It would be easy to say, that no one *needs* a piece of lemon loaf, and you might be correct, but maybe *this* boy *did*. Maybe he had a very real need for a piece of iced lemon loaf. Maybe he needed it for comfort. Maybe he needed it for power. Maybe he needed it for the Indian in his cupboard that would only eat iced lemon loaf and would starve to death if he didn’t get it for him. Maybe he had a whole wealth of emotional difficulties or mental challenges I didn’t know about. Who knows? Do you? I don’t…

…It was a panic that I remember having experienced sometimes. Perhaps you do too. The panic in realizing that you have no power at all. You are a child and you are powerless. There is nothing you can do.

I understand it may be extremely hard for many to have sympathy for a little white western boy deprived of a sweet as this is precisely what I would say if I had not observed the child in person, but the look  on his face is a universal one: “Life is not fair”."

"Your sensitivity & tolerance improve only with practice. I wish I’d been given toy businesses to play w/ at school, just as playing w/ crayons taught my body how to let me draw.

I’ve written in these weeknotes before how I manage three budgets: cash, attention, risk. This is my attempt to explain how I feel about risk, and to trace the pathways between risk and cash. Attention, & how it connects, can wait until another day…

I said I wouldn’t speak about attention, but here’s a sneak peak of what I would say. Attention is the time of people in the studio, & how effectively it is applied. It is affected by the arts of project & studio management; it can be tracked by time-sheets & capacity plans; it can be leveraged with infrastructure, internal tools, and carefully grown tacit knowledge; and it magically grows when there’s time to play, when there is flow in the work, and when a team aligns into a “sophisticated work group.”
Attention is connected to cash through work."

"Alright, let me find this bad boy. For some reason* I can’t search this app so let me simply swipe my way through every page of every issue until I see the article I mentioned. I appreciate your patience. Ok here it is. Hey also for some reason* I can’t directly email this or select it to send it to you, so let’s do this right. You ready?"

"If the technologies I use and value take steps to jeopardize the important connections and relationships cultivated and facilitated there, I will stop using and valuing those technologies. I'll entreat everyone for their email addresses and then otherwise eliminate my persistent online presence. <br />
<br />
My interest in and patience for being a digital migrant, of moving to a different online oasis every couple years, nears null. I want a measure of reliability and stability in where I am online. No more TOS changes, no more sudden and limiting archives, no more rumors or threats of being shuttered or sold. <br />
<br />
If this is too much to expect, then perhaps I don't belong on the internet."

"Maybe it’s that for the first time, our school didn’t meet AYP…  <br />
<br />
When I heard this, I instantly thought of the 2 ELL in my class who hadn’t passed their reading tests last year & how unfair I thought it was that they even counted on our test scores when they came to our school in January & were absent at least twice a week from that point on. I was wondering how I could possibly have gotten them to benchmark level in 3 days a week for 3 months. I was thinking how if only those two students hadn’t counted on our scores, we would’ve met AYP as a school. When I mentioned it to my principal, she just said there are no excuses. We aren’t allowed to have any excuses… I thought of the little boy I had with an IQ of 87 who could barely read. I thought of the little girl in a wheelchair who’d had 23 operations on tumors on her body in her 11 years, & the girl who moved from Mexico straight into my class & learned to speak English before my eyes, but couldn’t pass the state test…"

"for some people, work is personal…in the same way that singing or playing the piano or painting is personal.<br />
<br />
As a creative person, you’ve been given ability to build things from nothing by way of hard work over long periods of time. Creation is a deeply personal & rewarding activity, which means your Work should also be deeply personal & rewarding. If it’s not, then something is amiss.<br />
<br />
Creation is entirely dependent on ownership.<br />
<br />
Ownership not as a %age of equity, but as a measure of your ability to change things for the better. To build & grow & fail & learn. This is no small thing. Creativity is the manifestation of lateral thinking, & w/out tangible results, it becomes stunted. We have to see fruits of our labors, good or bad, or there’s no motivation to proceed, nothing to learn from to inform next decision. States of approval & decisions-by-committee & constant compromises are third-party interruptions of an internal dialog that needs to come to its own conclusions."

"At some point in your life, you meet a critical mass of smart, fun, interesting people, and a depressing realization hits: There are too many. You’ll never meet all the people that you ought to meet. You’ll never have all the conversations that you ought to have. There’s simply not enough time."<br />
<br />
"Media lets you clone pieces of yourself and send them out into the world to have conversations on your behalf. Even while you’re sleeping, your media —your books, your blog posts, your tweets—is on the march. It’s out there trying to making connections. Mostly it’s failing, but that’s okay: these days, copies are cheap. We’re all Jamie Madrox now."<br />
<br />
[Pair of tweets from me in response: (1) .@robinsloan's "clone[d] pieces of yourself" + classroom of middle schoolers = @fchimero's "past me just punked present me" = my every day AND (2) Context for previous tweet: "clone[d] pieces of yourself" snarkmarket.com/2010/6262 & "past me just punked present me" http://bit.ly/9afv3q]

"The half-baked R&D Model: Companies who don’t officially have a space for innovation but have one or 2 people who are creative and want to do r&d. So they make them do r&d mostly but brush it aside the second client work comes in. Really dangerous as a model as the level of frustration of those people escalates rather rapidly. You’re either dedicated to the idea that people can do good new and useful things in specific conditions where they are isolated from the everyday, or not. Don’t pretend...

"Football is supposed to be fun to watch. Having a debatable decision go for or against you adds so much to the appeal of the game, and introduces an element of random uncertainty that is as fun as it is frustrating. Just the same as an injury to your team’s star striker as a result of an innocuous collision is frustrating, or a rain-sodden pitch stopping a goal-bound shot from creeping over the line." [Exhibit B demonstrating how Ian Bogost nailed this one: [A] Americans "are obsessed with fairness and transcendental truth," while [B] the rest of world is OK with "the unfairness and randomness in human experience": http://www.bogost.com/blog/there_are_no_blown_calls.shtml ] [Exhibit A, the post this one responds to, is here: http://tumblr.quisby.net/post/753524642 ]

"I'm not saying that the only people capable of describing or critiquing classroom teaching are classroom teachers. There are people who don't work in a classroom who know a lot more about my business than I do. I'm saying it's difficult, as one of public education's foot soldiers, to do much with inspiration. I don't have many places to put inspiration, certainly not as many as the edtechnologists walking away from TEDxNYED minds buzzing, faces aglow, and so it tends to settle and coagulate around my bile duct. It's too hard to forget that tomorrow I and three million others will have to teach too many standards of too little quality to too many students with too few resources. What can you do with this?"

"ASTONISHING discoveries in space, revelations about human nature, frightening news on the environment, medical advances that will banish life-threatening diseases: an inexhaustible stream of wonders runs through the pages of New Scientist. All tell the same tale. Science is exciting. Science is cutting-edge. Science is fun.

"I find myself entirely uninterested in matters ed-tech, ed-policy, or ed-anything related, aside from what’s going on in my own classroom. The Twitterverse (cringe) bores the hell out of me; I’ve nothing to blog about; and too much of my time has bee

"I hope ubicomp really does take a hundred years. That way I'll be spared the indignity of having to use it."

"Research Insight 14: This game is for those who have too much time on their hands."