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I had just turned 40. I was feeling increasingly stagnant at VSCO and recognized the need for a change. I began discussions with leadership about my desire for greater involvement. It was straight-up politicking, with my objective being a title change to formally lead the product design team. Not doing anything meant I’d remain in my influential, but individual contributor role, yet for me, the personal challenges there had ceased. During my series of talks, I had one notable conversation with a leader who named something I knew I was innately doing but hadn’t yet identified by name. She put it simply: “Consider your energy here.” That struck me with an immediate jolt and a moment of clarity, as I understood what I was going to do next. She had managed to verbalize what I had intuitively sensed and had even discussed in three different speaking engagements, but without the sharpness or shape of this term: energy. She framed the question for me: whether I wanted to invest more energy...
a year ago

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More from Naz Hamid — Journal + Links

✏️ Tag, you're it

Tagged by Scott and Luke and in thoughtful return, I’m answering the Blog Questions Challenge here. Some of these answers may overlap with the answers I gave Manu for his People & Blogs series, so I’ll do my best to do something a bit different. Please visit Manu’s P&B site though, and read through many of the excellent interviews there. Much credit to Bear Blog for these questions. Why did you start blogging in the first place? I noted how I appreciated the early bloggers, in particular from the Pyra Labs/Blogger crew, but to go back even further, I was fond of journaling early. Much of that was in the form of drawings as a child, then coupled with text. It wasn’t until I read about how musicians like Eddie Vedder of Pearl Jam would keep copious journals, and in particular, Henry Rollins’ Get In The Van, showed me that documenting your life was important as a record of a lived person. Rollins would later read from these journals early in his transition from full-time musician to spoken word artist, and the storytelling inspired me. Since I was online, and web design had captivated me, it all came together. What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? I’m currently using the lovely static site generator, Eleventy (11ty). It pushes to a GitHub repository, which triggers a deploy to Netlify. After using so many different platforms over the decades, with my posts and data semi-locked in MySQL databases, the idea of a fast, file-first, SSG was the way I absolutely wanted to go when I started blogging at this domain. Steph Ango’s File Over App is a thoughtful read on data portability. Have you blogged on other platforms before? As mentioned just before this, yes. I started with Geocities, Livejournal, tried Greymatter, then Movable Type was the first to make it all click. I got really comfortable and pushed that system far — Gapers Block was the most involved version that I had done with multiple blogs running under one instance with different layouts and sections and includes all over the place. Dean Allen’s (RIP) Textpattern stole my heart away for many years after MT got acquired, and then I stopped blogging when Weightshift became my focus, and social media started to bloom. Weightshift used various CMSs for clients: MT, TXP, ExpressionEngine, CraftCMS, Wordpress, etc. I toyed with Tumblr, and other things, but eventually restarted with Jekyll, but quickly switched to 11ty. How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog? Most everything starts in Bear. I have a master note of ideas, that links out to other notes and I keep adding new ones, revisit others, and check off published ones. When do you feel most inspired to write? Whenever an idea strikes. This can happen at any time and drafts are started anywhere. I generally publish in the evening though. Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft? I used to be more immediate with my publishing decades ago, adhering to a near daily schedule. These days, some thought and care goes into each post, and if possible, I like to add a touch of flavor to a post, like the rotated album covers for the Music in 2024 post. What are you generally interested in writing about? How we as humans live in a world ever-changing because of technological influence and society’s adoption and adaptation to it. I love travel so posts about cultures and countries, as well as overlanding and camping domestically. And personal things that are more feeling the feels. Who are you writing for? Myself first, but through a lens of, “this information or thought could help someone else, and/or I’d love to share a different perspective that’s unique to me.” What’s your favorite post on your blog? 2023 in the Rearview is a big one, and I worked on that for a while. Taken for a Ride is a good one I think about taking a Waymo autonomous vehicle for the first time, but I like the sort of pieces that come from a more emotional and resilient place, like Let This Be a Moment, that allow me to work through things. Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature? I’m very content with 11ty. I’m constantly evolving and refactoring the design and code where I can see improvement. This is a lovely mode to be in: it’s iterative like software development than constantly new like marketing. As for features: a work section (underway), and better ways to showcase my photography, which is a longtime interest and activity for me. Tag ‘em. I’m going to tag Bix, Ethan, Gosha, Grant, Matt, Piper, Rachel, Simon, Susan, Thu, and Winnie. Read on nazhamid.com or Reply via email

6 months ago 53 votes
🔗 Be A Property Owner And Not A Renter On The Internet

We are tenants with landlords who want to make sure that we can’t leave the building or go hang out with friends elsewhere, all while showing us how happy we should be with the limitations imposed on us. — Den Delimarsky A long, weighty one, but very worth the read. Visit original link → or View on nazhamid.com →

6 months ago 38 votes
🔗 SEEN, READ 2024

01/05 PREDATORS, AMERICAN GREED — Steven Soderbergh Director Steven Soderbergh's media recap of 2024. It's fascinating to see how many movies he watched multiple times, and the reverse watch of the original Star Wars trilogy. Phantom of the Menace twice too? Visit original link → or View on nazhamid.com →

6 months ago 39 votes
🔗 Media Recap 2024

I’m including the most memorable, impactful, or beloved works of—creative genius, or something, that I’ve encountered this year. I’m not a critic; I am mostly just talking about things I liked. These are tremendous to me. I hope they can be tremendous to you, too. — Anh The list is great, but this one is also visually gorgeous. Best experienced in a browser near you. Visit original link → or View on nazhamid.com →

6 months ago 30 votes
🔗 Future Web

It’s idealistic and very millennial of me to reminiscence the early days of Web innocence, unbound creativity it hosted and wonderful lack of monetisation of virtually every aspect of being online. We can’t turn back time. But, individually and collectively, we can strive for better as the Web evolves as a home for work, knowledge, community, and love. We can resist the ongoing enshittification and corporate capitalism. So I jotted down an non-exhaustive list of what I’d love the future Web to be. — Karolina Szczur A great list. Visit original link → or View on nazhamid.com →

6 months ago 35 votes

More in literature

'A Book That Everybody Can Understand'

A partner at the Houston law firm where my youngest son is working as an intern this summer has loaned him two nineteenth-century law books. Both were compiled by John G. Wells (1821-80) and were bestsellers in their day, long before the practice of law was fully professionalized:  Every Man His Own Lawyer, and Business Form Book: A Complete Guide in All Matters of Law, and Business Negotiations, for Every State in the Union (H.H. Bancroft & Co. of San Francisco, 1867).   Every Man His Own Lawyer; or, the Clerk and Magistrate’s Assistant. This is the “tenth edition, improved,” published by William Wilson of Poughkeepsie in 1844.   Both are the size of mass-market paperbacks and bound in leather, which is scuffed and worn. Both are in delicate condition. The front cover of the former has detached from the spine and the pages in both are foxed but legible. Wells writes in his “Introductory” to the former:   “This work, prepared some years ago, was received with great favor by the public, attaining a larger sale, it is believed, than any work of this kind ever published. Lapse of time has brought material changes in the statutes of many of the States; the war has not only altered the social conditions of some of them, but has introduced the Internal Revenue system, National Banks, modifications of the Tariff, [13th and 14th] amendments to the Constitution of the United States, emancipation of the slaves, and the General Bankrupt law.”   The book is organized by occupation and social role, making it user-friendly. Chapters are devoted to farmers, mechanics, discharged soldiers and sailors (two years after the Civil War), immigrants, and married men and women. Wells includes templates for such documents as “Order of Commissioners to lay out a Highway” and “Deed by a Sheriff of an Equity of Redemption sold at Auction.” The emphasis is not on law in the abstract but on the minutiae of legal documentation. The books are eminently practical, as useful as dictionaries, and are aimed not just at lawyers but at average American citizens. They are early examples of a well-known category of books today: “Self-Help.”   The autodidactic impulse among Americans was once very strong. People seemed to assume they could teach themselves almost anything – a trade or craft, science, engineering, medicine, the Western literary tradition. “Experts” were not automatically deferred to. One could, like Abraham Lincoln, attach himself as an apprentice to an experienced professional. Few Americans attended a college or university or even completed their secondary education.    Lincoln practiced law for twenty-three years before he was elected president. He may have consulted Wells’ guides. He never attended law school – not unusual for the mid-nineteenth century -- and was entirely self-taught. He handled cases ranging from debt to murder at the justice of the peace, county, circuit, appellate and federal levels, and kept an office in Springfield, Ill.   Consider that even in his own day, Lincoln was judged by some a hick, born in 1809 on the frontier in Hodgenville, Kentucky. Now we know he was educated and well-read by the standards of his day, and through strict application became one of the great American writers of prose. In 2007, Robert Bray published “What Abraham Lincoln Read—An Evaluative and Annotated List” in the Journal of the Abraham Lincoln Association. Bray’s research determined which books were read by Lincoln. Among others he confirmed were John Bunyan, Robert Burns, Lord Byron, William Cowper, Daniel Defoe, Euclid, Edward Gibbon, Thomas Gray, Edgar Allan Poe, Alexander Pope and much of Shakespeare. In 2010, Bray published Reading with Lincoln (Southern Illinois University Press), in which he writes:   “From boyhood on, Lincoln’s habit of reading concentrated a naturally powerful mind; and reading provided models of voice and diction to one who had inborn talent as a storyteller and a near-flawless memory and therefore needed only the stimulus of literary greatness, and emulative practice, to emerge as a great writer himself.”   Bray emphasizes that Lincoln as an adult read “deeply rather than broadly.” In his own words, he went to school “by littles” and his reading was full of holes, but he read deliberately and what he read he remembered. He read like a writer – learning, testing, gleaning, absorbing, assimilating. Serious writers, when they read, are always weighing and assessing: “This works. This I can use. Forget that.”   Lincoln’s mind was deeply analytical, coupled with a gift for pithily articulating his thoughts – essential gifts for a successful lawyer and an embodiment of the democratic ideal. In his “Introductory,” Wells describes his guide as “a book that everybody can understand, and that will enable every man or woman to be his or her own lawyer.”

20 hours ago 2 votes
How to Be a Happier Creature

It must be encoded there, in the childhood memories of our synapses and our cells — how we came out of the ocean 35 trillion yesterdays ago, small and slippery, gills trembling with the shock of air, fins budding feet, limbs growing sinewy and furred, then unfurred, spine unfurling beneath the bone cave housing three pounds of pink flesh laced with one hundred trillion synapses that still sing with pleasure and awe when touched by the wildness of the world. Even as the merchants of silicon and code try to render us disembodied intellects caged behind screens, something in our… read article

2 days ago 3 votes
A constellation of lookers

Fragments, vol. 5

2 days ago 7 votes
'Only a Facsimile That Is Called Literature'

I’ve learned with time that my mind has periods of attentiveness followed by drifts into passive, relaxed states of consciousness. I’m awake but almost empty. I might be taking a shower or staring out the window at nothing. That’s when I occasionally find myself in an old song or childhood memory or, more mysteriously, inhabiting a character from fiction, taking on his values. When I become conscious of this channeling, it disappears leaving a faint, lingering impression, like the afterimages left by bright lights.  Recently I found myself in Austin King, the Illinois lawyer, father and put-upon husband at the center of William Maxwell’s 1948 novel, Time Will Darken It. It’s the opening scene. King is in his bedroom getting dressed for a party for relatives visiting from Mississippi. His wife, pregnant with their second child, is not speaking to him. She resents the party and the presence of outsiders.   I wasn’t recalling the words but the setting, emotional and physical, which I had abstracted from the text. I’ve read Maxwell’s novel three or four times, starting in the late seventies. I know it well. Unintentionally, I had projected myself into King because his emotional state was familiar – conflicted, guilty, wanting to satisfy contradictory wishes and please everyone. I didn’t have to go looking for it. I carry it as a latent memory.   There’s a semi-popular theory floating around out there that we read fiction to boost our empathy quotient. In short, we read to learn to be better human beings, to feel the pain of others. That’s silly but also kind of obnoxious. How self-centered. Willa Cather would have snorted. My flashing onto the bedroom of Austin and Martha King lasted seconds. I enjoyed the sensation but made no effort to hang on to it. It was a fairly primitive mental event, not freighted with philosophical baggage. A handful of other fiction writers have done this for me, all in my private pantheon – Chekhov, James, Proust, among others. Part of the reason I value them is that they leave these phantom scenes in my subconscious mind, through no effort of my own.   Time Will Darken It, along with So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980), is Maxwell’s finest novel.  In 1955, Maxwell delivered a speech at Smith College, “The Writer as Illusionist” (collected in the 2024 volume of the same title, published by Godine). He likens a novelist to a dog who dreams of chasing a rabbit. He writes:   “The novelist’s rabbit is the truth—about life, about human character, about himself and therefore by extensionh, it is to be hoped, about other people. He is convinced that this is all knowable, can be described, can be recorded, by a person sufficiently dedicated to describing and recording, can be caught is a net of narration. . . . . But what, seriously, was accomplished by these writers [Maxwell has just mentioned Turgenev, Lawrence, Woolf and Forster] or can the abstract dummy novelist I have been describing hope to accomplish? Not life, of course; not the real thing; not children and roses; but only a facsimile that is called literature.”     The finest writers of fiction, those we treasure most highly, work simultaneously in two mediums – words and human beings. William Maxwell died twenty-five years ago today, on July 31, 2ooo, at age ninety-one.

2 days ago 4 votes
We could return three continents of land to the wild

And create an interspecies future that benefits humans and ecologies alike.

3 days ago 7 votes