Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
I wonder if all jokes boil down to the same pattern that eventually gets layered and complexified by veteran comedians. A joke is made by creating a frame with an embedded assumption, and then using a punchline to break the frame and reveal an implied truth. There are two layers of subtext, the assumption (the undertone), and the post-punchline tru
... See moreDr. Seuss’s management masterpiece Yertle the Turtle.
Ben Horowitz • The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
“‘I could carve a better man out of a banana.’”
Kurt Vonnegut • Slaughterhouse-Five
For anything I can tell, Miss Brooke may be happier with him than she would be with any other man.’ ‘Humphrey! I have no patience with you. You know you would rather dine under the hedge than with Casaubon alone. You have nothing to say to each other.’ ‘What has that to do with Miss Brooke’s marrying him? She does not do it for my amusement.’ ‘He h
... See moreGeorge Eliot • Middlemarch
Livingston: What do you think makes a good hacker? Spolsky: I think what makes a good hack is the observation that you can do without something that everybody else thinks you need. To me, the most elegant hack is when somebody says, "These 2,000 lines of code end up doing the same thing as those 2 lines of code would do. I know it seems compli
... See moreJessica Livingston • Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days
and was titled How to Make People Like You: An Instant Recipe for Career Success, and in essence I was ‘reading’ the book only to place certain tart, mordant margin-comments next to each bromide, cliché, or cloying bit of inauthentic pap, which meant just about every ¶.
David Foster Wallace • The Pale King: An Unfinished Novel
The beauty of this method is that it doesn’t really matter what you start with or how the initial idea gets generated. What makes you you, as a writer, is what you do to any old text, by way of this iterative method. This method overturns the tyranny of the first draft. Who cares if the first draft is good? It doesn’t need to be good, it just needs
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