One of the things I’ve always worked towards is expressing my thoughts in the clearest way possible. I feel like I’m decent at it in text form, because text doesn’t happen in real time. But verbal communication is a whole other story. Trying to explain an abstract thought during a conversation is like looking at some delicate cobweb you can barely see and trying to lift up the edges, only for them to disintegrate under your fingers.

I think more people should make zines. Here are some good reasons to make a zine:

1. Because you can.
2. Seriously, no one will stop you.
3. It can be as silly or serious or simple or complicated as you want.
4. Books are cool.
5. You can do trades with other zinesters, and trades are fun!!
6. Because it helps you practice and figure out how you may want to curate or present or contextualize your work.
7. You can make a short one in a weekend and feel accomplished.
8. Why not?

So I’ve been thinking a lot about résumés lately and I think one of the reasons why I might have such a vendetta against them is because of something I’m going to call “the shortcut game.”

When I say “shortcut” here, I mean anything someone can at least semi-truthfully claim that will encourage people to make positive assumptions about them. For example, when we say someone went to Harvard, we use it as a shortcut for saying they’re smart and competent and qualified, because those are things we generally believe about Harvard grads.

The idea of AI-assisted writing is absolutely terrifying to me, not because I’m worried about the future of writing as a career – that has been slowly dying for decades anyway - but because writing is the process of figuring out what you actually think, and that is a skill that is slowly dying.

I found 1984 to be an extremely disturbing novel, because the premise involved slowly limiting the types of thoughts the populace was able to have by limiting their language. I can’t help but worry that we’re headed on a different, more insidious path to the same end result.

Is nerdiness a function of what you do? A function of what you know? A function of how you think? A function of what you’d like to know? A function of how you’re perceived? Or is it something like a multivariable function?