Recruit “insecure overachievers.”

Need a few people I know to stumble upon this piece, “If You’re So Successful, Why Are You Still Working 70 Hours a Week? by Laura Empson “. Pull quote hell to follow.

“In the old days, if you were a white-collar worker, the deal was that you worked as hard as you could at the start of your career to earn the right to be rewarded later on, with security of tenure and a series of increasingly senior positions. This is no longer true.

…

The 500 interviews I conducted for my book showed a pattern: A professional’s insecurity is rooted in the inherent intangibility of knowledge work. How do you convince your client that you know something worthwhile and justify the high fees you charge? The insecurity caused by this intangibility is exacerbated by the rigorous “up or out” promotion system perpetuated by elite professional organizations, which turns your colleagues into your competitors. How do you convince your boss that you’re worth more than your closest colleague? There is no chance for a professional to rest on their laurels — or even to rest.

Exacerbating this problem, elite professional organizations deliberately set out to identify and recruit “insecure overachievers” — some leading professional organizations explicitly use this terminology, though not in public. Insecure overachievers are exceptionally capable and fiercely ambitious, yet driven by a profound sense of their own inadequacy. This typically stems from childhood, and may result from various factors, such as experience of financial or physical deprivation, or a belief that their parents’ love was contingent upon their behaving and performing well.

...

Your insecurities may have helped to get you where you are today, but are they still working for you? Is it time to acknowledge that you have “made it” and to start enjoying the experience a little bit more? And if your boss is an insecure overachiever, recognize how they are projecting their insecurity onto you — how they make you feel insecure for not being able to keep up with them.

Work exceptionally long hours when you need to or want to, but do so consciously, for specified time periods, and to achieve specific goals. Don’t let it become a habit because you have forgotten how to work or live any other way.”

Quit Taking It Personally

Here is some pretty good advice from Adam Savage when do you creative work for a job / living. I’ve been in these situations in visual art, commercial art and music. It’s all pretty relatable and good advice for the new comers out there.

Thursday updates. Andy Goldsworthy, New work and some live music coming at ya.

For starters, have some meditational (is that a word?) art by Andy Goldsworthy to ring in the fall season that is about to pop here in Portland.

Also, have been pretty damn busy with work so I have not updated the portfolio in a long time but I am starting to gather up some projects to post there soon. Here is some New work in the Wild teasers on that.

Lastly, any Portland people into Americana music out there? If so, head on by to see one of my bands play this Saturday!

Life before cellphones

Little write up where the author talks to people about what they did before cell phones and the internet. One story I have is one of my band was playing with someone in their 20s and they were asking what it was like to play music in the 90s. To them, it was this magical time where you could play a show shitty, get wasted out in public, do all sorts of stupid shit and it was gone the next day. And it was. To them, every show, every time they go out, they have to be ON because everything is recorded. Fuck up one show, and thats all the exists about you. Get drunk and pass out at the bar? That’s the image every saves of you on their damn phones. They were literally getting teary eyed hearing us talk about what hellions we were in bands back then. Anyways, get off my porch.

“Recently, a number of my younger coworkers expressed shock that I was able to complete a master’s degree while I held a full-time job. It was easy: I worked at a literary agency during the day, I got off work at 5 p.m., and I studied at night. The key was that this was just after the turn of the millennium. “But what would you do when you had work emails?” these coworkers asked. “I didn’t get work emails,” I said. “I barely had the internet in my apartment.”

“Sean: We really would just drive to someone’s house and see what they were doing. You and a couple people would be in the car and you’d be like, “Let’s go by Brian and Mike’s.”

Matt: Either we’d made plans or we’d just go to the same few places. During the week it was the Front Page in Dupont and GG Flips, or on Thursdays or Fridays it was Lulu’s on M Street. Someone I knew would be there.

Sean: There were only six places you’d go and someone would be there. Birds and La Poubelle, across from the Scientology Celebrity Centre. And then like four other places.”

Sally: Sometimes you’d do a 30, 45-minute call with someone. That’s a big part of your night.

Dan: You’d tuck the phone under your chin while you wandered the apartment.

Matt: If you couldn’t find the handset, you’d push a button on the base so it beeped.

Nicole: I was definitely a phone person. I could stay on the phone with a friend while we were both doing chores, whatever.

Sally: Now, if someone calls me on the phone, I’m like, “How violent of you to call me.”

If I could go back in time and blow up the internet before it started, I totally would. The movie would paint me as a villian trying to destroy this amazing, world saving technology. But actually I am from the future with the whole, “You know not what you have wrought!” dialog lines. LOL, yeah, too much coffee this morning I guess…

How thinking hard makes the brain tired

After a crazy day of complicated CG work, I can fully understand how this is a thing. I shut down mentally some days after a lot of complicated work. Don’t get me started on “Context Switching” and how the really messes me up.

“If cognitive fatigue is not caused by a lack of energy, then what explains it? A team of scientists led by Antonius Wiehler of Pitié-Salpêtrière University Hospital, in Paris, looked at things from what is termed a neurometabolic point of view. They hypothesise that cognitive fatigue results from an accumulation of a certain chemical in the region of the brain underpinning control. That substance, glutamate, is an excitatory neurotransmitter that abounds in the central nervous systems of mammals and plays a role in a multitude of activities, such as learning, memory and the sleep-wake cycle.

In other words, cognitive work results in chemical changes in the brain, which present behaviourally as fatigue. This, therefore, is a signal to stop working in order to restore balance to the brain. In their new paper in Current Biology, the researchers describe an experiment they undertook to explain how all this happens.

...

There may well be ways to reduce the glutamate levels, and no doubt some researchers will now be looking at potions that might hack the brain in a way to artificially speed up its recovery from fatigue. Meanwhile, the best solution is the natural one: sleep.”

Red meat is not a health risk. New study slams years of shoddy research

Shoddy research….. interesting…

In a new, unprecedented effort, scientists at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) scrutinized decades of research on red meat consumption and its links to various health outcomes, formulating a new rating system to communicate health risks in the process. Their findings mostly dispel any concerns about eating red meat.

But the take away line is buried which is important.

“The evidence for a direct vascular or health risk from eating meat regularly is very low, to the point that there is probably no risk,” commented Dr. Steven Novella, a Yale neurologist and president of the New England Skeptical Society. “There is, however, more evidence for a health risk from eating too few vegetables. That is really the risk of a high-meat diet, those meat calories are displacing vegetable calories.”

When Cities Treated Cars as Dangerous Intruders

Cars were not always the rulers of the roads. Just imagine how it would be is the car was not so totally dominant here in the States.

“To many urban Americans in the 1920s, the car and its driver were tyrants that deprived others of their freedom.”

City people saw the car not just as a menace to life and limb, but also as an aggressor upon their time-honored rights to city streets. “The pedestrian,” explained a Brooklyn man, “as an American citizen, naturally resents any intrusion upon his prior constitutional rights.” Custom and the Anglo-American legal tradition confirmed pedestrians’ inalienable right to the street. In Chicago in 1926, as in most cities, “nothing” in the law “prohibits a pedestrian from using any part of the roadway of any street or highway, at any time or at any place as he may desire.” So noted the author of a traffic survey commissioned by the Chicago Association of Commerce. According to Connecticut’s first Motor Vehicle Commissioner, Robbins Stoeckel, the most restrictive interpretation of pedestrians’ rights was that “All travelers have equal rights on the highway.”

I might have posted this before, but it kinda touches on this from another view.

It’s the cars, stupid. Why we must restrict cars to save our cities

“When you next walk around your town or city, look around at the space we dedicate to cars. When you next press what has been nicknamed the ‘beg button’ to allow you the luxury of crossing from one side of the road to another, have a think about why those travelling alone in a metal cocoon belching out poisonous fumes have priority over you.”




The Personal Brand Is Dead. Gen Z would rather be anonymous online.

Good read on how the kids wanna avoid all the social media trappings now-a-days. Good for them. I have really enjoyed getting the hell off of instagram and facebook and all that crap. I’ll just hang out here in my own little backwater of the internet, thank you very much!

Something has shifted online: We’ve arrived at a new era of anonymity, in which it feels natural to be inscrutable and confusing—forget the burden of crafting a coherent, persistent personal brand. There just isn’t any good reason to use your real name anymore. “In the mid 2010s, ambiguity died online—not of natural causes, it was hunted and killed,” the writer and podcast host Biz Sherbert observed recently. Now young people are trying to bring it back. I find this sort of exciting, but also unnerving. What are they going to do with their newfound freedom?

If yer burnt out, work out!

Interesting white paper here.

“Conclusion: In conclusion, this study suggests that a single bout of acute aerobic exercise supports regeneration of cognitive flexibility performance and of subjective well-being. This holds true not just compared to artificial active control treatment but also compared to widespread leisure time activity, namely watching TV.”

So when you are fried from work, get a work out in. Like, you know, when you have to do 20 part colors ups on 25 freaking product shots or something…

Reaper

So I dabble in recording stuff, because, hey, why not? But with COVID, not being able to record new stuff, and all of that I have been pretty burned out. Also, I have been using Pro Tools for the last few years and it has gotten really stale. Just opening the program is depressing somehow. They are like the Maya or Photoshop of DAWs. Don’t like it? Screw you.

But recently one of my friends has started to track stuff at their place and wanted me to lay down drums on it. I think I recommended Reaper to him as an affordable way to record years ago, but not too sure about that. But after working with his files a bit I figured to make sending the project back and forth smoother I would give Reaper a try.

Man, it so far has been way nicer to use than Pro Tools. I took the entire project from Protools to Reaper without even have to google anything. The UI is just that easy to follow and find stuff. If anyone else is looking to escape the Pro Tools nightmare of dongles, license crap, crashes (oh my god the crashes!), I highly suggest giving Reaper a shot.

Folder instead of busses are just so simple and awesome to use. Guitar bus? Just make a blank track and drag them in. Done. Super clean and customizable interface. So far the only real hitch is that the free plug-ins that ship with it are downright ugly, lol! The 7 band EQ is pretty slick and has some nice functionality but it just looks like something from 98. Also, I can’t get my Sound Toys plugs in to load which is a bummer. But FET compressor and pretty much all my other ones load no problem. Get FET now. It’s so worth it.

The next step is to install it on my recording rig and get all the mics configured and try out some tracking with it. In Pro Tools I have been having a lot of crashes that when I am playing and it locks, it just starts screaming in your ear. So bad….

"I want to post my photographs to Instagram, but my ethics are getting in the way."

Interesting Reddit thread here where people are discussing the ethics of using Instagram with all the information that has come to light about Facebook’s data harvesting/manipulation. A good read with a lot of interesting opinions. As I have mentioned here before, I am very anti-social media.

“As I'm sure many of us have been, I have been using my pandemic induced free time to do some intensive organizing and editing of my photography archives.

I now find myself with an ethical dilemma: I want to post my pictures to Instagram, a Facebook CompanyTM

I quit Facebook some 7-8 years ago and Insta some 3-4 years ago due to the many scandals Facebook has been implicated in over the years - from massive data breaches, to major privacy concerns, to anti-trust issues, to willfully illicit use of user data to manipulate elections and public sentiments around the world:

CNET, NBC News, CNBC, NPR / WBUR, Wikipedia Mega List, etc, etc, etc

Sometimes it seems like a silly stand to take / hill to die on-- I am, after all, an infinitesimally small cog in the machine-- but that hasn't stopped my conscience from shouting at me every time I think about giving the 'gram another shot.

What are your thoughts on this? Am I being ridiculous? How ridiculous? How do you navigate the ethical/moral challenges involved with social media platforms?

​I'm curious to see what this community's take is :)”

The Social Dilemma

Watched the Netflix documentary “The Social Dilemma” the other night and while I think all the criticisms in this essay are spot on, I still think it is very much worth watching. It will really give you a clear picture on how much your devices are actually manipulating you. My news blackout now is expanding to keeping devices at bay. Blogging is a bit different as this is a sit down workstation for “doing shit”. Not just that addictive mindless scrolling, searching or playing mobile games like what happened when one uses any portable device.

Flamethrowers and Fire Extinguishers – a review of “The Social Dilemma”

Interesting essay about the Netflix show, The Social Dilemma that gets into some aspects about the current public discourse that is troubling. This paragraph really hit home to me.

“The Social Dilemma clearly wants to avoid taking sides. And in so doing demonstrates the ways in which Silicon Valley has taken sides. After all, to focus so heavily on polarization and the extremism of “both sides” just serves to create a false equivalency where none exists. But, the view that “the Trump administration has mismanaged the pandemic” and the view that “the pandemic is a hoax” – are not equivalent. The view that “climate change is real” and “climate change is a hoax” – are not equivalent. People organizing for racial justice and people organizing because they believe that Democrats are satanic cannibal pedophiles – are not equivalent. The view that “there is too much money in politics” and the view that “the Jews are pulling the strings” – are not equivalent. Of course, to say that these things “are not equivalent” is to make a political judgment, but by refusing to make such a judgment The Social Dilemma presents both sides as being equivalent. There are people online who are organizing for the cause of racial justice, and there are white-supremacists organizing online who are trying to start a race war—those causes may look the same to an algorithm, and they may look the same to the people who created those algorithms, but they are not the same.”

The Attention Economy

interesting short on something I have been spending a lot of time thinking about. We are just in a firehose of information and a major part of the modern economy is built on TAKING that attention from us and our goals.

“When information becomes abundant, attention becomes the scarce resource. “ - Herbert Simon

Another interesting point is that the whole point of the internet was to be decentralized. But now it’s in the hands of very few gate keepers. Facebook and Google do not have peoples best interests in mind.