while helping my ~1yo son go to sleep I was clicking around on YouTube and I ended up watching a rick beato interview with Victor Wooten and they talked about improvisation

I think there are broadly two kinds of improvisation, and they rhyme with finite and infinite games- improvising within a frame and improvising with frames entirely

one of the reasons I post so infrequently on here (by my own measure) is that I’m thinking about how to improvise with the frame itself of the essay. that’s half the story. Theoretically speaking, there’s no reason why messing with frames is something that should take more time than messing within a frame. In practice, I think it’s because I’ve been emotionally flinching from the idea of getting bad or mediocre results. I’m sure I’ve written about this on here several times already in a few different ways. There’s a predictable cycle that happens, where I ruminate in my mind, or in sketches that I don’t publish, and then eventually I write something that’s sort of an apology for not having anything good to show yet. I feel like this is me apologizing to myself more than anybody else in particular. But as I lay it out like this now, I can see quite clearly that this premature judgement is an impediment to the experimentation I want to be doing.

I’m writing this particular piece of writing in my notes app on my phone. I don’t know where it’s going. I’m holding an intention of, “it’s the feeling that really matters. It’s feeling that should guide the process,” thanks to Wooten.

well, what am I feeling? some excitement, some frustration, some intimidation. I feel like I’ve figured out what I want to write about, but as always, I’m nervous that it’s not going to be good. Well what if I wrote it badly on purpose? I don’t really want to do that… but maybe that’s what I should do? My feeling is that I should try something that approaches it, something in the vicinity of the thing I want to be doing

Here I’m tempted to go check Instagram or twitter to distract myself from this, but I caught myself and returned. What would be something that approaches the thing I want to do? Well, I could write about Back To The Future, or Rick and Morty. Or I could continue that hypertext thing I started yesterday. Let’s go with that since I have my baby on me

Before I learned about Google, I used to set yahoo.com as my homepage on my browser

When I got my own personal website, one of the things I was excited to do was to link to other sites that I liked to visit- typically video game forums and “shrines”. I was reminded of this when watching Inception recently – in cobb and mal’s shared dreamworld, they’d assemble all of their past homes in the same “neighborhood”, such that you could walk past several of your childhood homes on the same street. I was struck by hypertext allows us to do something similar online. We can link to all of our favorite things. We can also effortlessly make and share copies of pretty much any media. This is a kind of magic I was inspired by as a child and continue to be inspired by even now as an adult. How amazing is it that you can just look anything at anytime, and actually find it near instantly, and play it instantly too? This is particularly striking to me in the domain of music. Suppose you wanted to listen to a song from each genre for the past 50 years. This might’ve taken weeks of effort 20 years ago, it might’ve been literally impossible at some point in time. But now it takes seconds, and it’s basically free.

Which brings us I suppose to questions about information overload. I think some of us who grew up as Netscape navigators and Internet Explorers maybe have an easier time with it, because maybe we cultivated some skills that we didn’t particularly do consciously. The Internet is not a “natural” place. Bruce Sterling described it as a funhouse mirror…