Kevin Rothermel

My job is one of the most interesting jobs that I can imagine. It’s nominally about brand strategy and communications. Which means that it’s about people, creativity and design.

But it’s also very much about working with students as they figure themselves out and prepare to head off into the world.

Some students arrive here with their future lives already scheduled out. They know the cities that they will or won’t live in. They know the kind of place they want to work. They know the timeline for when they will have kids, even if they haven’t met their future coparent.

What they don’t want to hear, and maybe can’t hear, is that reality isn’t going to cooperate.

The young are continuously warned by the old that the real world is nihilistic and angry. And bad things can happen to good people.

But this isn’t what I mean.

Long-term planners cannot account for the people they will meet along the way. The gravitational-pull of chance encounters is unavoidable and powerful. Even someone following the most carefully calculated trajectory can be nudged off-course by a short conversation with the right person or an unforeseen opportunity that falls out of the sky from the friend of a friend.

This is how people find themselves in careers they never knew existed. Living in cities they never planned on visiting. Surrounding themselves with people they never could have imagined meeting.

It’s not that planning isn’t helpful. It just can’t be counted on.

Anyways.

We know that social media is being used to try to sway elections. There have been arguments about how effective it is. Granted, this is just one study, but I’d like to “clockwork orange” every tech company CEO with the report.

For example, when just a few yellow-party zealots were deployed strategically among a larger number of undecided players in the purple party, these bots were able to sway the majority opinion towards the yellow party. This was true even when the parties had exactly the same number of members, and when each player had the same amount of influence.

Source: How social networks can be used to bias votes

When I was growing up, if we were home, the TV was on. It was like the house wasn’t “on” if the TV was off. We were just passing through or were ready to leave. That was also a time when programming seemed better for all-day TV watching. Before everything was reality or scripted reality, and before news turned into people yelling at each other. Now we have more control, but we still need shows that don’t require unblinking attention for 12 hours.

It seems that, in this time of unprecedented choice and quality, the so-called golden age of prestige television, most of us still want to watch half-hour shows about vaguely likable people in which everything turns out OK. Ideally from the 90s, but maybe the 00s. And preferably something that we have seen many, many times before. Welcome to the age of non-event TV.

Source: The age of comfort TV: why people are secretly watching Friends and The Office on a loop | Television & radio | The Guardian

I’ve been trying to get students to start writing in text files when working on their portfolio sites, rather than writing directly into Squarespace. It’s not easy to do until after they realize they’ve spent more time adjust images than writing a coherant case.

I then recommend that they try writing in plain text, in a txt file, so that they focus on getting the narrative in place before losing 48-hours to cropping jpegs or finding the right combination of font ls for headers and body.

Most of them have no idea what I’m talking about. So I show them Text Edit. They seem appreciative. Then go home and continue writing in their browser. Like an animal.

I’d like to be able to recommend a better app for writing in plain text. Something that feels modern in how it works, but doesn’t let formatting or collaboration features get in the way.

All of which is to give an excuse for why I’m playing with IA Writer over the summer. It’s become a really great app, and it’s available on just about every platform. It’s got great features for a plain text app, and it doesn’t require a recurring subscription.

And it can post to WordPress…

BTW, this post is a test and not meant for human consumption