Week notes #5
I’m feeling pretty guilty about what I’ve accomplished over the past seven days; right now I’m at that troubling stage of freelance work (which I assume everyone passes through at one stage or another) where I’ve promised far too much to people. Setting high expectations of myself and my work is important, yet over-promising and under-delivering now ensures that I’m starting to let people down in small but unforgivable ways. In short, I’ve been letting things slip through my fingers; deadlines, bills, promises unkept.
So I’ll be taking the whole of next week to reorganise my approach and to ensure that there are healthy gaps between jobs. I shouldn’t feel exhausted all the time and I shouldn’t feel as if, to impress one person, I have to let another down — this small-stakes emotional Ponzi scheme has to end one way or another.
This week Tim recorded his talk from AEA called Typesetting Body Text Like a Pirate Jedi with a DeLorean and there is some spectacular advice in here about how to train your eye and set the page. But not only does Tim give great advice about typesetting, he also takes a calm and soothing approach in general, entirely absent of hubris or confrontation and because of this I’m pretty sure I could listen to him talk about type all day long.
Listening to this talk encourages me to tackle my own idea which I’ve been playing with for a while.
Robinson Meyer wrote a post about what blogging has become — but no, wait! Don’t go, I’m serious. It’s really, very good and you should read it. Rob describes the ‘New Medium’ and how writing has changed on the web over the past couple of years:
It’s impossible to pretend, in 2015, in a culture that understands what #BlackLivesMatter means, that corporate-owned social media have not shaped social movements and as a consequence changed U.S. mass politics. Assumptions built into blogging, assumptions once worth marvelling at, have become part of the firmament of the U.S. cultural sphere.
I’m not sure I entirely agree with his outlook about personal websites towards the end though, as I think personal websites/blogs/whatever are still the raddest part of the internet.
The team at Trello wrote some interesting notes about their approach to CSS. Lots of little things in here are bugs that I’ve replicated again and again, but hopefully I’ll know better now.
After the finale of Parks and Recreation yesterday I felt a great well of sadness bubble up because I loved that TV show to bits — it was so optimistic and quick-witted and anti-snark.
Consequently Jen Myers wrote a lovely piece about the protagonist Leslie Knope, played by the amazing Amy Poehler, and why her character was an inspiration.