This month Rufus had his first overnight at my parents’ place without us (he did great!). In part, it was so Julia and I could go see poet and essayist Ross Gay, who was in town as part of Oakland University’s annual Maurice Brown Memorial Poetry Reading series.
The reading took place, of all places, on the basketball courts of OU’s campus athletics center, with a casual shootaround beforehand on the unbleachered half of the courts, the first time I’ve dribbled a basketball in years. The host later quipped about sweaty poets, Gay read his basketball-related work, of which there was more than I’d realized, including Be Holding’s appropriately drawn out opening ode to Dr. J’s legendary baseline layup in the 1980 NBA Finals. (Gay played basketball in school and has coached high school players, and is quiet tall.) A good way to spend an evening.
This On Being episode was my first introduction to Ross Gay’s unabashed gratitudes, and since the event I’ve been reading the poems in the so-titled book. A good way to start a morning.
Speaking of good ways to spend an evening: community theater. We saw, last night, a friend act in our local improv theatre’s musical parody of Jurassic Park, which was the first movie I ever saw as a kid in an American movie theater, and which struck me mid-show as a perfect parody target for this moment of nineties nostalgia. The props were perfectly DIY. The audience was mostly millennial. We hummed along, only half ironically, to the cast ironically humming the ending theme. An earlier musical number was sung by Samuel L. Jackson’s cigarette. It was excellent.
My latest piece for Every is on Living Software, and is in some ways a spiritual successor to The Slow Web. It starts:
Lately, I’ve been wishing that more software had a “freeze” button.
When pressed, the product would crystalize in its present state. The feature set would lock, and the interface would solidify, as if dipped in carbonite. There would be no more new updates. No changes whatsoever.
I want this button because companies are loading apps with more and more features, whether AI or the result of AI-accelerated development, making the tools unrecognizable. The additions are even more jarring for apps that I only use occasionally, like Figma. There, a chat box now beckons to describe my idea to make it come to life. A “Recents” toolbar above it has buttons for Figma Sites, Figma Buzz, and Figma Make—all launched last May. A sidebar module encourages me to try an AI image- and video-generation product called Figma Weave—and which I have to log into separately using my Figma account.
And here I am just trying to update the gradient on an app icon.
No shade on Figma (okay, maybe a little shade), but it’s more my gripes with The General State of Things and my distaste for the technical words “deterministic” and “non-deterministic” that the industry uses to talk about traditional software and AI software.
This makes the piece sound pessimistic—it’s not! I just think that better words (I propose, in the piece, the alternatives tool-like and living) can help makers make legible, for ourselves and others, what we’re trying to make.
To end: One of my new work colleagues also runs Flow State, which recommends two hours of ambient/instrumental music each weekday morning. A good way to start the workday.
Jack