Creative advice
PUBLIC REGISTER · ARCHIVED LINKS ONLY · 32 RECORDS
Craft, taste, and process advice for creative work.
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Conan O'Brien Delivers the Commencement Address | Harvard Commencement 2026
“So maybe my wish for you is not that Harvard becomes the last thing people know about you, but instead that Harvard becomes the least important thing people know about you.”
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#183 | |
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28 slightly rude notes on writing
“If you want that perfect brush stroke or that exquisite shot, then you have to squeeze your neurons until they scream.”
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#183 | |
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Media artist and researcher Roopa Vasudevan on creative resistance in the digital world
“We put faith in the algorithm the same way we put faith in divinity.”
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#183 | |
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Subway Takes' Kareem Rayma on ignoring the data
“I made it. I watched the edit, I made sure it was great. But the data is not my job. The data trap, in my opinion, can suppress creativity.”
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#182 | |
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AI as a Design Medium
“If you treat AI as a tool, you ask: how do I get the right answer? If you treat it as a medium, you ask: what happens if I push this?”
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#182 | |
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How to Make a Living as an Artist
“Can it not perhaps give you more joy remaining a hobby?”
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#182 | |
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Appearing Productive in The Workplace
“The slowness was not a tax on the real work; the slowness was the real work. It was how the work got good.”
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#181 | |
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"CREATOR" IS A JOB, MOTHERF*CKER
“I did not choose to be a Creator. I got fired and had to pivot. It was a bit of an accident, if I’m honest. But now, it’s all I do. It is my job.”
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#181 |
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Nothing Too Late, Nothing Mistake
“I really think when something is made by friends or lovers or people who consider each other a good hang, it shows up in the fabric of the final product.”
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#181 |
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What happens when identity becomes a subscription service
“Figuring out who you are is an incredibly inefficient, high-friction process.”
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#181 |
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Developing creative identity
“A better question for any creative person is: what activities do you want to pursue? What kinds of understanding will that create?”
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#181 | |
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TASTESLOP
“The biggest thing people are missing about taste across the board is that it is relative, contextual, and social.”
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#181 |
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Accidental Instagram influencer Ida B. on meeting your own standards
“If the only thing you really give a shit about is the thing that you're doing and being able to do it in a way that meets your own standards, weirdly, I guess that's the key to success.”
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#180 |
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Anti-Dystopia
“That is anti-dystopian action at its core: doing what makes the world more human, even when you cannot prove it matters in the grand scheme.”
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#180 |
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An unpersuasive guide for how to resist temptation online
“To cling to the primacy of the word is to reject completely the modern methodology of persuasion.”
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#180 |
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A check-in with a very inspiring creative on creating a creative life
“You need downtime, slow time, and vast nothingness to get yourself back to being creative.”
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#180 |
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"Nothing" is the secret to structuring your work
“This is how many people work: they start with a mess, work terribly hard while adding to the mess, then lose oversight and get frustrated. The harder they work, the worse it gets.”
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#179 |
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How I learned to just fucking write
“That pattern would follow me through my creative life until I found a way to write or make art that allowed me to bypass my inner critic.”
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#178 |
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Crisis Response: Trying the Old Thing Harder
“We're in crisis, i wonder what we could do? Definitely not something new, let's try the old thing harder!”
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#178 | |
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Using AI makes writing more bland, study finds
“The LLMs are pushing the essays away from anything that a human would have ever written”
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#176 |
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Visual artist Daniel Arsham on the possibility of endless failure
“Visual artist Daniel Arsham discusses how the possibility of endless failure drives creative practice and artistic growth”
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#176 |
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Andy Weir on Writing the Hit Book Behind the Movie ‘Project Hail Mary’
“There are two kinds of writers. The ones who admit they read all the reviews and the ones who don’t admit that they read all the reviews.”
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#175 | |
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How Not to Interview (Interesting People)
“You are not the subject. They are. So let them lead.”
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#175 |
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Aesthetics are your problem and mine
“I wanna make beautiful things even if nobody cares”
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#175 | |
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The Long, Hard, Stupid Way
“I think that extra labor is more of a gift; it’s the extra essence behind it.”
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#174 | |
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Letters to a Young Creative
“Seek the unchanging or what should not change.”
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#173 |
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The stranger secret: how to talk to anyone – and why you should
“I realised that there is a sort of unwritten code you learn as you get older, which enables you to assess whether a conversation is a good idea or not.”
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#173 |
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The Long, Hard Stupid Way
“Everything is possible again, and the world isn’t yet done.”
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#173 | |
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BONFIRE OF THE INANITIES: enshallowfication
“I think my problem - perhaps yours too - isn’t just unfinished projects. It’s unfinished thinking.”
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#172 |
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Unstuck Your Creative Self, the Smallest Possible Way
“My advice: do something very, very small that you haven’t done before, something you have no expectations around, no sense of being good or bad at. Do it just to do it.”
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#170 |
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The System That Punishes Beautiful Design
“Objects do reveal what we believe in ... but they reveal systems and power also.”
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#170 | |
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You want to be 'interesting'? Baby stop dabbling
“Late capitalism needs us to be shallow interest-tourists.”
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#170 |