No Unifying Theme

Paul Graham, in Fierce Nerds:

To be a nerd is to be socially awkward, and there are two distinct ways to do that: to be playing the same game as everyone else, but badly, and to be playing a different game. The smart nerds are the latter type.

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One long afternoon in my mid-20s I got into a debate with my friend Stephen about the two sentences:

Cynicism has to do with exercising innocence.

Cynicism has to do with exorcising innocence.

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In my final year of high school I received a failing grade for turning in an assignment in comic book form. 

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In the coffee shop this afternoon I spotted a fetching person sitting across the room with a Hudson Records sticker on their laptop. This struck me as odd, as Hudson Records is a small three-person record label in England. I’d assumed I was the only person on my block to have heard of it.

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On the bottom of Stewart Brand’s website is the following:

Anything written by me here is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License.  (Please don’t ask permission to borrow my stuff: just do it.)

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Working from Home, by Aurynn Shaw, is a rich early-pandemic guide to doing just that. I especially like:

You take lots of breaks at the office. You get up. You wander around, you talk to co-workers, go to the kitchen for water, etcetera. This is normal. So do it.

You don’t have to do any work-from-home presenteeism, so, don’t. Really, really, really don’t.

You need to step away, have normal lunch hours, sit on your couch and recharge while watching some TV, the things that help you disconnect and refocus.

Doing those things is stepping out of the made space. You leave the work space, you do the not-work things, you re-enter the work space, and can do work things again.

Having my house across the street from my office has been a terrific lever in this regard: I only realized last week that if I went out to pick up lunch there was no earthly reason I needed to eat at my desk in the office when there’s a perfectly wonderful place to relax just across the street.