Like a natural ingredient from another world
Five fragments for the week of November 3, 2025
Hello from the start of November and the other side of the time change. We celebrated my son’s seventh birthday early this past weekend, with a giant inflatable obstacle course.
Here are five fragments that stuck with me last week…
The Live Photo patent has a picture of my daughter as a toddler spinning in a dress in front of our house. As with a Live Photo, the more time passes, the more endearing it’s become.
– Johnnie Manzari on X, October 26, 2025. This is the post that goes along with the image for this edition, and as the parent of two recent toddlers, I find it awfully bittersweet. Johnnie is one of the creators of Live Photos, and posted this in response to an observation from @signüll: “live photos hit this perfect intersection of tech & tenderness. it might be the most quietly brilliant thing apple ever made. it’s a subtle wordless trick that turns stillness into something breathing.”
Are you acquiring a true color sense from Technicolor? Probably you never think of it when you buy a soft shade of blue instead of the shrieking off-tint that inexpensive materials provide through cheap dyes. Perhaps you don’t know you insist on definite, dusty pinks, deep tree greens, true tones of red, purple, yellow and orange because you have learned to look intelligently at the color spectrum through pictures shown in Technicolor.
– Grace Wilcox, “Women Aided by Technicolor in Everyday Life, Declares Writer,” Technicolor News & Views, September 1939. I watched The Wizard of Oz with my five-year-old daughter yesterday and went looking for contemporary accounts of the impact of Technicolor. This was from Technicolor’s in-house newsletter. Although the specific claim is tinged with puffery, I still love the idea that new technology can enable new ways of seeing.
I can send a task to GPT-5-high and it will almost certainly come back with the right answer, but now what? Do I just start scrolling and forget what I was doing? Try to become a manager of a fleet of agents? The flow state that I always had is waning and sometimes I fear that my love of programming since childhood will go with it.
– Jediah Katz on X, October 29, 2025. Flow state again.
Separate stencils were cut, sometimes in thin sheets of copper, zinc, or aluminum, for every color component. Later stencil materials were made of celluloid or plastic and contemporary stencil materials are made of coated paper or acetate. Each successive color layer, using watercolor or gouache, was applied to the stencil with a brush called a pompon. Pigment on the brush could not be thick or runny, as paint could easily slide underneath the stencil and change the shape of the image.
– “Pochoir: History and Techniques,” Fleet Library at RISD, 2011. I’m in the thick of a deep dive on illustration styles and pochoir caught my eye. The image of paint sliding under a stencil is so vivid.
My most controversial belief is that the flavor of Coca-Cola belongs in haute cuisine. It is a superb cocktail ingredient, an excellent addition to a sauce, and is generally quite unlike any other flavor humans have discovered. And it achieves all this without tasting chemical or artificial.
It is like a natural ingredient from another world.
– @nkreu113r on X, October 29, 2025. Something organic from somewhere unfamiliar.
Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com