shotgun links

• this might be the only design blog that i actually follow, he finds the coolest weird-ass retro designs that's in the indie/queer/punk-eque scenes that i'm finding a lot of recent inspiration in, and it's clear he's a master designer himself. i need to mine his links for more blogs.

• "system design" (apenwarr) v validating to hear all of my private thoughts about macro-corporate shit from somebody far more senior than I am. it's meant for a programming audience but hooboy do i see this in branding design.  one of the favorite quotes: 
  
  • "...but I guess I still haven't answered the question. What is systems design? It's the thing that will eventually kill your project if you do it wrong, but probably not right away. It's macroeconomics instead of microeconomics. It's fixing which promotion ladders your company even has, rather than trying to climb the ladders. It's knowing when a distributed system is or isn't appropriate, not just knowing how to build one. It's repairing the incentives in a political system, not just getting elected and passing your favourite laws. Most of all, systems design is invisible to people who don't know how to look for it. At least with code, you can measure output by the line or the bug, and you can hire more programmers to get more code. With systems design, the key insight might be a one-sentence explanation given at the right time to the right person, that affects the next 5 years of work, or is the difference between hypergrowth and steady growth."

• extremely digging raiding flickr accounts for not-just-pulp-book-covers and surprisingly good compositions. man this shit's better than the crap on instagram, and it's rss feed enabled too!
• don't write about age play and leatherdyke gender technology are two incredibly dense, thought-provoking essays by the same author that i'm still thinking about. may make a separate post about these, may not. so glad to see this kind of shit on substack.

spoons vs the survival stack

spoons theory: p useful, genuinely glad it's entered mainstream-ish lingo as far as opening up the discussion on limited energy and chronic illnesses, something that's weirdly hard to talk about for various reasons. a bit hand-hold-y and twee but you gotta start from somewhere, you know?  one of the things i don't have issues with on the surface.

that being said it only covers a ... limited? amount of my experience and i strongly suspect for others who ... [chinhands] find themselves in chronically dependent lives. (it's the most truthful way i can describe it)

( i dub this one the 'survival stack'. )