Because an outline isn’t really writing. It’s construction, assemblage of elements in order. It’s structural. It’s finding the shape of the story. It’s not writing. Writing happens when you’re telling the story: it’s the human breath inside it, it’s finding the interactions and responses around planned events in the moment of living them in the story, it’s the act of discovering all the nuances and sounds of the story as you fully tell it. MOBY DICK is a straightforward outline but the outline doesn’t prepare you for the qualities of the story as it is told. You cannot predict every second of what the story will tell. And if you try to? You’re just transcribing a technical document. Insert previously machined “emotion button” here. I can show you the frame of a story in advance, but I can’t tell you what colour the wallpapers will be until I’ve started living in the place. You live it in the telling, and you can’t plan it all out in advance without ending up with a lifeless story. Warren Ellis, 2024 Orbital Operation

Edvard Munch (1863–1944)

Bathing Man, 1918

Oil on canvas, 160 × 110 cm

Nasjonalgalleriet, Oslo

Via Howard Oakley, Eclectic Light Co @howardoakley

jeraume ​illustration for promoting a new 3d lightning online designer "luminaire authentik"

"mass media, the mother tongue of the twentieth century"

By Jackson Arn

October 2, 2023

Loopy Doopy Sol LeWitt, 1998

The orange and green version of Loopy Doopy was first displayed alongside the black and white Loopy Doopy in an exhibit of new wall drawings at PaceWildenstein in 1998. For this exhibit it was executed on a 70-foot wall. MASS MoCA

Spirit Walker, 2023

Acrylic on cedar, 24 X 13 X 13” Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun

https://www.instagram.com/yuxweluptun/

Credit: Ilena George / Daniel Reich /National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke / National Institutes of Health

Asbjørg Nesje from Norway trains in front of the Opera House in Oslo on August 25, 2023, one day before the 2023 World Championship in Døds Diving (Death Diving). According to the organizers, Døds is "a form of extreme freestyle diving from heights jumping with stretched arms and belly first, landing in a cannonball or a shrimp position."

Javad Parsa / NTB / AFP / Getty

#dance

Salmon swim near the mouth of the Brooks River on August 11, 2023. 

John Moore / Getty @jbmoorephoto

Edited by Alan Taylor @kokogiak in The Atlantic

Note: The perfect realm of the real world bordering on abstract beauty.

"Our research provides compelling evidence that social interactions and shared environments play a crucial role in the evolution of gut bacteria. Understanding these dynamics sheds new light on the interplay between human or animal health and social interactions."

Molecular Biology and Evolution #dance

"The straightforward, clearly revealed structure of his [Donald Judd's] art, its honest use of materials, its saturated colors, formed a kind of visual morality, a set of principles not only to make art by but to judge art by, to display art by, to build furniture and buildings by and, ultimately, to live by." Roberta Smith, NYT

Dancers Franco Égalité, 2022 Francorama

#dance

Chekhov's gun is a writing principle that states that everything in a story should be there for a reason. Chekhov's famous example is that if we're told a rifle is hanging on the wall in chapter one, then someone needs to fire it in chapter two, otherwise why tell us there's a rifle there?  Chekhov tells us not to waste time with details that aren't important.  Talk about only what is in service to the story, no matter how irrelevant it may seem at the start.

Warren Ellis Orbital Operations

The World’s Most Ridiculous Animals  

By Philip Bunting

how generative machine learning enables the modular design of complex proteins controlled by a high-level programming language for protein design

Brian Hie

via @brucesterling

Chicago Snow Storm (1935)

Woodcut by Chicago artist Charles Turzak (1899-1986)