I love typewriters. I love digital music. I love taking photos. I love technology. I love cycling. I love history. I love bookbinding. I love e-books. I love walking. I love vintage cameras. I love writing. I love architecture. I love podcasts. I love travelling. I love tea. I love hand tools. I love journalism. I love design. I love plants. I love stained glass. I love teaching. I love art. I love analogue music. I love typography. I love silence. I love coding. I love trains. I love new cameras. I love linguistics. I love oriental carpets. I love bookshops. I love reading. I love fountain pens. I love concerts. I love sewing. I love paper books. I love watches. I love museums. I love coffee. Boy, do i love coffee.

These aren’t passing and somewhat contradictory interests. These are expressions of my personality, and thus, they are my personality. I am who i am because i love what i love and i love what i love because i am who i am. I couldn’t pick my favourite interest if my life depended on it, because my life depends on everything – and more – on that list. I’m not feeling like myself when one facet is expressed too little for too long or, more often than not, when one facet is expressed too much for too long.

I get what Zachary means when he says that “the place where your interests collide are where interesting things happen.” I’ve met friends (and my wife), i’ve got a diploma, i’ve built multiple careers at the intersection of various interests. Even something as simple as this blog, not to mention my other one, are the products of colliding interests. But this is how it’s supposed to be: we humans love nothing more than to compare, contrast, and connect things that have no business in being compared, contrasted, and connected.

The place where your interests don’t collide is where boring, dull, tedious, and ultimately wholly inhuman things happen. Unfortunately, that place is often called “work”. These past few months, i’ve been reminded that job seeking often feels soul-crushing because it requires you to flatten your interests – and ultimately your identity – into an easy-to-digest narrative. It’s been so long since i’ve had to apply for a new job that i played along without thinking of the consequences.

It didn’t take that many interviews before i realized that people who are content with one-dimensional applications don’t make for good employers. Things started to look up from the moment that i refused to make myself smaller. I’ve been fortunate to find a company that believes my ability to draw from different fields is an asset rather than a liability. It looks like the sort of place where my interests could collide… and interesting things could happen.

This is my entry for this month’s IndieWeb Carnival, hosted by Zachary Kai, on the topic of “Intersecting Interests”.

Links

“What They Copied” by Jordan Golson. I don’t miss the mythos of Jony Ive, but i dearly miss experiencing the outcome of his thought process. Apple’s success has less to do with aesthetics than it has to do with processes, even – and maybe more so –  when it comes to design. “What would be lovely would be for the thinking to be talked about”, Ive said during the introduction of the Ferrari Luce’s interior, “not the shapes.” The shapes matter insofar as they embody the thinking:

He made the iPhone, and an entire industry looked at it and learned the wrong thing. Not the wrong lesson — the wrong thing. The lesson was: ask what problem you’re solving, then build the solution that solves it. What they took was: put a touchscreen in the dashboard. And people are dying for it. Now he’s trying again, putting the thinking directly into a car, in a context where you can’t miss it — physical controls, dedicated buttons, a palm rest so your hand knows where it is while your eyes stay on the road. He’d make this car whether anyone in the industry learned from it or not. That’s the job: to make the beautiful thing. And to Ive, beauty and function are the same word. But, in both his words and his design, you can hear him pleading — wistfully, almost to himself — for someone, anyone, to look past the aluminum and the glass and see why.

Jordan Golson gets it. He might be a car guy, but cars are computers now, and his article about the design of Ferrari’s first electric car is the most insightful piece of tech journalism i’ve read in months. This is tech i won’t get to experience for myself, but i’m glad to have learned a bit about the thought process. If only we could talk a bit more about the thinking and a lot less about the shapes!

Music

Oranj by Robohands. I completely forgot about Robohands, even though i loved Violet (and not only for that reason). Oranj is the logical extension of Palms, which was suffused with Brazilian grooves from the 1970s, and Giallo, which paid homage to Italian film soundtracks from the 1980s. More than anything else, Andy Baxter has an impeccable sense of texture. I love travelling to this kind of ambient jazz (or is it jazzy ambient?) because it makes everything infinitely more cinematic.

BelleJazzClub (Vol. 2) by Adrien Soleiman. Even if he became the official saxophonist of the French singer-songwriter scene, Adrien Soleiman came up as a bona fide jazz musician. BelleJazzClub bridges the gap between the two worlds. It doesn’t always work: the first volume was a bit too talkative for my taste, and this second volume is pretty to the point of being over-produced, but that may be because it’s been recorded at the beautiful La Frette studios. Still, i like how airy it all sounds, particularly on the mesmerizing cover of John Coltrane’s Naima. The sense of attack and decay brings you in and makes you want to listen that much closer.

Web

Magic Pages. After a few months on WordPress, i went back to Ghost and my original design. This time, however, i didn’t want to fuss with hosting. I could have gone with Ghost’s own turnkey solution, but as always, i wanted to find a small European provider. Magic Pages fits the bill perfectly: it’s pretty cheap, it’s feature-packed, and the two-person team handles support queries quickly. Even better, Magic Pages runs on Hetzner data centres in Germany, which are powered entirely by renewable energy.