A Machine for Confidence

The nice thing about having friends in the UK is that sometimes I get to wake up to genuinely lovely dispatches from them on Twitter. In this case: Clarrie (who, I should point out, helps small biz and freelance folks with their bookkeeping, should you need that sort of thing) built a machine that rotates through all the entries from 100 Demon Dialogues on a set schedule. Observe:

I am flummoxed and delighted by this tiny technical marvel. (It is, I just learned, a Raspberry Pi hooked up to a 720×720-pixel LCD screen! TECHNOLOGY!)

Hearing that anyone still reads this book (or builds marvelous automated machines out of it) gets me right in the amygdala. It flies in the face of social media’s decree: that if something isn’t NEW and SHINY and UPDATING DAILY then it might as well not exist. That once we have finished the project and stopped posting to Instagram and run the Kickstarter and published the book and concluded the tour, all of it will fade from memory.

But that’s not how stories work.

To love something, suggests Robin Sloan, is to return to it. I think about this all the time. The longer I am alive and making things, the more I realize that it is (for me) a foundational definition of success.

This is probably why I’m tearing up at my desk on a Friday morning, looking at this tiny box of pixels from across the sea.