Tag: patterns

The eerie coincidences of the Internet

Post author By Tracy Durnell
Post date May 14, 2023
No Comments on The eerie coincidences of the Internet

Liked The Internet Thinks We Don’t Know Its Secret. But I Do. by Merritt Tierce (Slate)

What do I mean when I say the internet is reading my mind? I don’t mean simply that it collects my data and observes patterns and interacts with me by reconfiguring that data in ways designed to engage me… I’m also not talking about my awareness that Instagram is listening, that even when my microphone is “off” or my Instagram account disabled, I know other apps are listening, or my phone itself is listening, or such now-standard input-output cross-platform fence-jumping. I’m not even talking about how my phone is “looking” at things I see in the world… At all times, I understand that the internet is using data I somehow gave it, and that those processes and technologies are now too complex for me to track. But it feels aggressive to me, in the way it would feel aggressive if suddenly every kind of advertisement everywhere you went in the world was designed only for you.

On Friday, after my husband got assaulted, we spent hours searching how to wash off pepper spray (and then cleaning up). Finally after he’d taken like five showers we lay down to decompress and watch some TV. I’m bad at working the smart TV so it just randomly turns on on some Samsung channel despite my attempts to leave it on something inoffensive; a billiards tournament came on (something we’ve never watched). He left it going while I got ready, and two ads repeated: for laundry detergent and personal injury lawyers. Logically, we know it was a coincidence, but humans are so good at seeing patterns and causality — and that instinct is reinforced when sometimes it *is* true that the Internet is spying on you.

Tags AI, conspiracy, enough, intelligence, LLM, magic, patterns, reality, self worth, skeptic, spying, surveillance capitalism

Cool Culture History

The origin of knitting

Liked Who invented knitting? The plot thickens (Eukaryote Writes Blog)

The Egyptian knit socks I outlined in the last post sure do seem to be the first known knit garments, like, a piece of clothing that is meant to cover your body. They’re certainly the first known ones that take advantage of knitting’s unique properties: of being stretchy, of being manufacturable in arbitrary shapes. The earliest knitting is… weirder.

This is a delightful dive into the history of knitting.

Those ancient Egyptian socks look like you could have picked them up at REI. Astonishing that our taste in patterns is consistent a thousand years later. (That museum listing is dishearteningly deficient for the curious. How did this sock survive 700-1000 years? Whose was it? Why does it say origin: Egypt/India? What is its story???) Also, how long after inventing knitting does it take to develop patterns? This sock has multiple patterns. Same generation as developing knitting, or multiple? Maybe people want decoration immediately?

Elizabeth Wayland Barber says this isn’t just knitting – she points to the spinning jenny and the power loom, both innovations in yarn production in general, that were invented recently by men despite thousands of previous years of women producing yarn. In Women’s Work: The First 20,000 Years, she writes:

“Women of all but the top social and economic classes were so busy just trying to get through what had to be done each day that they didn’t have excess time or materials to experiment with new ways of doing things.”

This speculates a kind of different mechanism of invention – sure, you need a reason to come up with or at least follow up on a discovery, but you also need the space to play. 90% of everything is crap, you need to be really sure that you can throw away (or unravel, or afford the time to re-make) 900 crappy garments before you hit upon the sock.

Emphasis mine.

Tags Egypt, invention, knitting, patterns, textile design

Art and Design House

Read Modern Americana

Read Modern Americana

Do-it-yourself décor inspired by iconic patterns, classic fabrics, sentimental items, and the Americana style.Designer Max Humphrey celebrates the elements of modern Americana and shows how they can drive personal decorating styles in traditional country settings, contemporary urban lofts, and everything in between. Humphrey gives readers confidence to create their own stylish digs with unique flair using things they collect, buy, inherit, or dumpster-dive for.

Photos and personal anecdotes highlight collectibles and DIY-ables from Max’s design and styling portfolio—such as bandana wallpaper, botanical prints, bunk beds, clocks, old maps, gingham and plaid everything, Pendleton blankets, camp vibes, and vintage signs. The book features casual and thrifted as well as custom and high-end furnishings and includes design elements from a range of Humphrey’s interior design projects from East to West coasts.

This was focused on the pictures, which are what I came for 😉 Brief introductory paragraphs and short captions offered the perfect amount of text to call my attention to the highlighted item in the photo spread. The page design was attractive and varied to complement the style of the photo or design element — my one quibble is that I found it a little confusing when the title for a double-page spread was on the right-hand page instead of the left.

I liked the way this was organized, by material type or design element (e.g. fabrics, collections, tile). It covered a lot of ground so there were only two to four pictures for each specific example (e.g. denim, canvas, within fabrics). That seemed fine since elements were also scattered throughout the designs pictured throughout the rest of the book, so you could see those elements in use in more examples.

The designs broadly felt very complementary, clearly designed and styled by the same person. Just a couple examples that felt slightly more on the modern side than the americana side, but that seems fair given the title 😉

Tags 2021, Americana, book, collection, interior design, patterns, Portland

Art and Design House

Read Absolutely Beautiful Things

Post author By Tracy Durnell
Post date October 6, 2022
2 Comments on Read Absolutely Beautiful Things

Read Absolutely Beautiful Things – A Bright and Colourful Life

Not especially to my taste though I appreciate a maximalist perspective in a world where minimalism reigns. I finished more for the book design — I liked the full spreads with a pullquote accompanying a full page photo.

I had to lol at her lament that she develops tons of custom concepts and her clients refused when they saw the prices — I mean, I want a beautiful, cozy home but I also can’t afford to spend a fortune and the slightly less cute option from Target is nearly as good most of the time. It seems like half the time I splurge on something it’s a mistake. Also, the hill she dies on is custom lampshades and cushions? 🤣 Stuff like this reminds me that I am not rich, actually 🤑

Tags 2014, Australia, book, home decor, patterns

Writing

Idea-first or word-first writers

Post author By Tracy Durnell
Post date September 23, 2022
No Comments on Idea-first or word-first writers

Replied to What are some tips for advanced writers? How do you push your writing into by Venkatesh Rao (Quora)

You could divide the world of advanced writers into a 2×2, based on whether they are prioritizing developing their thinking or their writing, and whether they are focusing on fiction or non-fiction.

Prioritizing thinking or wordcraft is an intriguing way to divide writers. (I usually find what Venkatesh Rao has to say interesting, though I often disagree with him.)

This mind garden is thinking-focused, often an unrevised braindump (sorry anyone reading 😅). I revise as I write, the writing process being largely a thinking process for me as well, with most of my edits to reflect changes in my thinking as I draft. I try to cut out my pet issues, which are usually asides tangential to, and distracting from, my main path of thought (of course, always after I’ve spent ten minutes writing a rant 😉) — although in casual writing like blogging I do like a more stream of consciousness, conversational style.

In my fiction, too, I’m an idea-focused writer. One of my friends writes lyrical prose that casts mood beautifully — a writing style that serves her well for short stories. I don’t care enough about wordcraft to put in the work to develop gorgeous prose — and fortunately my workman prose is suitable for the commercial genres I write in, romance and science fiction. (I wonder if my indifference to finely crafted prose contributes to my distaste for literature 🤔 Other readers derive a lot of value from beautiful writing, but I’m honed in on the action and skim-read on fast forward to get to the good stuff, so the prose doesn’t really register for me unless it beats me over the head like Raymond Chandler 🤷‍♀️)

What matters to me in both my fiction and nonfiction writing is clarity — a mark I miss more than I’d like in first drafts 😉 In fiction I tend to write in a reverse order from what makes sense to the reader, so revision involves a lot of moving sentences around. In non-fiction, I tend towards overlong, overcomplicated sentences. Em dashes, semicolons, parentheticals, give em to me 😉

Learning to recognize your personal writing patterns and tendencies is a key aspect of getting better at revision; when I worked as a writing tutor we listened for patterns we could point out to a writer, so they could focus on spotting and revising those in future works.

How much, and how quickly, does practicing revision improve your first draft writing? In fiction writing I can focus on improving one aspect of my drafting at a time. Gradually, my initial versions need less attention. I’ve focused this way on dialogue and visual / sensory description (my fiction suffers from white room syndrome 😂) — but also know to put extra emphasis on checking for these in planning and revision. Part of becoming a better writer is adapting your process to suit your style and weaknesses — the quality of your first drafts is less important than the finished work, as long as you’re actually revising 😉

Tags blogging, craft, editing, ideas, patterns, revision, thinking, Venkatesh Rao

Art and Design House

Read Living with Pattern

Read Living with Pattern

If you focus on pattern, from texture and color to furniture and textiles, everything else will fall into place.

Pattern is the strongest element in any room. In Living with Pattern, Rebecca Atwood demystifies how to use that element, a design concept that often confounds and confuses, demonstrating how to seamlessly mix and layer prints throughout a house. She covers pattern usage you probably already have, such as on your duvet cover or in the living room rug, and she also reveals the unexpected places you might not have thought to add it: bathroom tiles, an arrangement of book spines in a reading nook, or windowpane gridding in your entryway. In this stunning book, beautiful photography showcases distinct uses of pattern in homes all over the country to inspire you to realize that an injection of pattern can enliven any space, helping to make it uniquely yours.

Not to my taste visually, and the opening chapters were pretty vague and generic if you know anything about color theory. The type was also unhelpfully small for my bad eyes.

Notes

Use large scale pattern for focal points to draw the eye
Use small scale pattern to recede or hide
Larger spaces can handle larger patterns
Pattern 40-60% of a room: three patterns at 60/30/10 or five patterns at 40/30/20/5/5 (one large hero pattern)
Foundation patterns = stripes, dots, geos, “no print”
Vary finishes and scales
Scale = physical size of pattern
Proportion = how much of a pattern is used
Texture is a monochromatic pattern

Projects

Overdying old napkins or shibori dying them

Tags 2016, book, home decor, patterns, visual inspiration

Art and Design

Read Black Africa Impressions Vol. 2

Post author By Tracy Durnell
Post date February 18, 2022
No Comments on Read Black Africa Impressions Vol. 2

Read Black Africa (Belvedere Designbook, Vol 2) (English, French, German, Italian and Spanish Edition)

Design team: Wolfgang Hageney, Diana Lelli, Luce Delhove, Antonello Martino, Luigi Deleo, Francesca Schiavon, Anna Maria Troiani, Etsuko Kakui

Asked my library for recs on graphic design beyond Western tradition and this 40 year old book was the only offering on African design 🤦‍♀️

After I flipped through the pattern pages, I saw the note that the designs were created by an Italian team (with one African team member based on the names) 🤦‍♀️ So I wish I hadn’t bothered borrowing this!