Monster of the week
Five fragments for the week of March 3, 2025
Hello from the start of March. Spring is around the corner!
Here are five fragments that stuck with me last week…
you’re running multiple streams of thought. your sense of awareness changes. the code can become almost abstract and foreign. you’ll knock out working stuff & have too little idea what it is. it’s a lot for a human!
– Ted Nyman on X, February 28, 2025, re: the vibe coding flow state and how different it was. His conclusion rang true for me: “one early hindrance to this mode of development will just be a natural psychological pushback, even if there are personal productivity gains.”
With 22,000 square feet of office space, the Klamath was large enough to hold four design sections, a larger research area for focus groups, an improved supermarket setting, an expanded photo studio, and a slide library to organize their visual records. The renovations required building and installing partitions, drop ceilings, heating, air conditioning, plumbing, electrical connections, telephones, and intercoms, as well as “a good supply of Dramamine anti-sea-sickness pills for the staff.” Windows around all three decks and skylights above provided natural lighting around the boat and from the top deck. The ship’s bell was rung every time a new project had landed.
– Bernard Gallagher, “Walter Landor,” Immigrant Entrepreneurship, June 8, 2011. 2025 marks the 50-year anniversary of San Francisco’s Muni logo, affectionately nicknamed “the Worm,” so I started digging through the internet’s crates for more of its history and wound up here. Landor’s firm designed the logo while headquartered on a renovated ferry boat called the Klamath docked on Pier 5 along the Embarcadero. Also, did you know there’s a Muni gear shop?
Aang and his companions spend much of their time in villages ravaged by the war, and among the refugees displaced by it. As they venture farther into the world, Konietzko and DiMartino marry the more traditional “monster of the week” format with longer-term story arcs and character development. Early episodes are largely self-contained, but the heroes’ relationships and emotional states don’t simply reset at the end of those twenty-two minutes. The protagonists change the course of the war and are changed by it in turn, accruing new abilities, beliefs, and anxieties as they go. They’re allowed to fail—sometimes catastrophically—and to atone in ways that take multiple seasons to come to fruition.
– Alex Barasch, “The Stunning Second Life of ‘Avatar: The Last Airbender,’” The New Yorker, July 5, 2020. My kids have been watching Avatar: The Last Airbender on Netflix and the “Secret Tunnel” song from the series sounded familiar enough to me as I passed through the room that I decided to go in search of more context. “Monster of the week” is such a fun turn of phrase—I might adopt it in my own life. And in general, this kind of slow and intentional build seems like something to aspire to.
I believe that I think like I write, and when I have conceived of a good title I am more stimulated than I would have been by a purely visual idea. I am more conscious of form and color than I used to be, but still prefer ideas that can also be expressed in words. Many times when my backlog of ideas is getting low, I read the dictionary. Quite often one word can evoke images that lead to a painting.
– Carroll Cloar as quoted on his estate’s gallery page. The creative mind is also a multimodal model.
Sometimes I want to take a math class again to simulate the feelings of an orderly world where you can prove everything and there are no lies
– Michelle Qin on X, February 24, 2025. Too real. (Elsewhere in homework nostalgia…)
Until next time,
Diana
https://dianaberlin.com