Maybe I’ll just be ancient
Five fragments for the week of March 24, 2025
Hello from the start of spring. I’m looking forward to celebrating my birthday with sushi this week—not once, but twice.
I mentioned Christian Löffler’s album Parallels last week, but I need to mention it again because I can’t get enough of it. It’s somehow dramatic and peaceful at the same time. Another recommendation, this one for those in San Francisco: visit Shoji and get a hot chocolate to stay.
Here are five fragments that stuck with me last week…
In the predigital world, the means for transmitting information, in the form of paper, had become ridiculous. The flood of paper was a sign of a deeper problem: moving things took too long, when the idea of those things could move so quickly via telephone. This reality began to shape West Oakland. Goods movement had to happen somewhere, and it wasn’t going to be in downtown San Francisco.
– Alexis Madrigal, The Pacific Circuit: A Globalized Account of the Battle for the Soul of an American City, March 18, 2025. I’ve long admired Alexis’s work; I’ll never forget sitting in my living room with him for a book club discussion of his last book, Powering the Dream, back in 2011. His latest hits on so many of my interests at once, not least ~how information flows~ and how that changes over time.
I started working with a book packager and they had just lost a paper engineer who had left the company and had been working on pop-up books and they needed someone to unpick a lot of his work. So I learnt very quickly by taking apart the work, working out what this paper engineer had done and making them all work again. After that I was able to develop my own ideas.
– David Hawcock in an interview with Emma Clegg, The Bath Magazine, March 13, 2023. I rewatched Wicked with my four-year-old daughter over the weekend and the pop-up book in a scene from Elphaba’s childhood jumped out at me, so I decided to go looking for its provenance. Turns out David Hawcock is a pop-up book artist who does production runs as well as props for film, including the book in the Paddington 2 movie poster. Learning through disassembly isn’t only for electronics.
I find I don’t like long arc plot lines on shows because they pile up like bad technical debt based on poor architectural premises. As a show ages, they’re forced to work harder to wrap up the long arc so the monster-of-the-week type episodes start to get interrupted more often by long-arc debt payments.
– Venkatesh Rao on Substack Notes, March 22, 2025. I always get a kick of seeing technical metaphors borrowed for other fields, and this one caught my eye because the monster-of-the-week format has been on my mind.
Production has a ton of rules about contestant output during the airing. You can’t tag your castmate, you can’t explain why you voted X instead of Z, you can’t go on a podcast, and on and on. There’s no part of the fine print that says you can’t clown on yourself, and I’ve found that to be the most endearing, real, and funny posting from other reality alumni. It was also the most cathartic for me, especially during a moment of catching heat.
– Teeny Chirichillo, “Survivor and the internet: The most online/offline experience of my life,” The Confessional, March 24, 2025. Caught this through a post from Jess Chong and found it to be good advice in general: there is no part of the fine print of life that says you can’t clown on yourself.
They gather themselves. “I often get referred to as an old soul, which I like,” Ramsey tells me, draining the last of their tea. So what happens when an old soul turns 25, then 30, I ask? “Maybe I’ll just be ancient,” they shoot back.
– Bella Ramsey in an interview with Zing Tsjeng for British Vogue, March 19, 2025. Maybe I will, too.
Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com
p.s. Don’t miss Stella’s new site—fill your cart and see what happens next. Poems & Fortunes are Rationed Like Eggs…
Parallels - this album wow wow wow. thank you for suggestion and very excited to try that hot chocolate! Love your weekly notes!!