Trans people of all ages deserve a world where their identities are validated and celebrated. A world where healthcare is obtainable, is not surrounded by a bunch of paternalistic, insulting concern and questioning. A world where they are understood to be the experts on their bodies and their identities, and the rest of us are respectfully curious and celebratory. A world where trans joy flourishes everywhere.| Winston Hearn (the third)
| Winston Hearn (the third)
| Winston Hearn (the third)
| Winston Hearn (the third)
Note: Nibi is the Anishinaabe name for what in English is called water. I discovered that nearly every day the snow was slightly different along the trail at Jackson Creek. I became fascinated by sintering. When a snowflake falls from the sky and lands on the earth, it immediately begins, or perhaps continues, a transformation as it forms bonds at temperatures below zero (this is not a melting process) with its neighbouring snowflakes or crystals to create the fabric of a snowpack.| Winston Hearn (the third)
Over the last century, technological acceleration has transformed our planet, our societies, and ourselves, but it has failed to transform our understanding of these things. The reasons for this are complex, and the answers are complex too, not least because we ourselves are utterly enmeshed in technological systems, which shape in turn how we act and how we think. We cannot stand outside them; we cannot think without them. [p2]| Winston Hearn (the third)
In the past week I finished two books that were extremely generative in my ongoing quest to make sense of this fucked up world we live in, and I liked them so much I want to write a quick recommendation post.| Winston Hearn (the third)
| Winston Hearn (the third)
| Winston Hearn (the third)
| Winston Hearn (the third)
A response to Charity Major's post "Thoughts on Motivation and my 40-year career"| Winston Hearn (the third)
| Winston Hearn (the third)
| Winston Hearn (the third)
| Winston Hearn (the third)
what i see that concerns me the most is that in a moment where we need experimentation and to open space for myriad new possibilities, we are instead trying to cement into place the world we have by gathering up all the data we have available and automating things _as they are now._| Winston Hearn (the third)
winston hearn's personal blog| Winston Hearn (the third)
For as long as I have memories, I’ve been an insomniac. Well before I hit puberty I remember long nights laying awake in bed, trying to fall asleep. Just an 8 year old kid struggling to rest. Sometime during that period I found a way to make those hours of insomnia productive, developing a habit that stayed with me well into adulthood: imagining all the tragedies I could fathom, then thinking through my best plan of action for dealing with that tragedy. House fires, home invasions, car wrec...| 2023 on Winston Hearn (the third)
Two centuries ago, Mary Shelley published the most incredible indictment of the tech world mindset when she released her classic novel Frankenstein. The book, just in case you also haven’t read it, is about Victor Frankenstein who, at 19 figures out the key to bringing matter to life, and becomes obsessed with the idea of building the first artificial human. He succeeds. And proceeds to spend the rest of the narrative vacillating between trying to pretend like his project was not a success,...| 2023 on Winston Hearn (the third)
This week, two somewhat unrelated events let me to reflect on my time working at Vox Media, in the Vox Product org. The first event was relatively newsworthy, because Vox Media made the decision to sunset Chorus, its custom CMS. The second event was a friend of mine, who’d been a PM on that product, had a goodbye party before she left for a new job. This party brought a bunch of old coworkers back together to celebrate her move. I’ll start with the job context: Chorus is a custom CMS that...| 2023 on Winston Hearn (the third)
there is a possibility of better, we all can see it. we all are aware of it, it’s right over there, it’s just that well, we need to survive, and that comes first. we’d love to live in that better world, but we can’t make it pay the rent. but we know it when we see it. gosh it makes us happy. look at it, a possibility that’s helpful to have over there so we can dream. not that we dream of it becoming a reality, just that we dream of it to escape the shit we’re dealing with. it’s ...| 2023 on Winston Hearn (the third)
For weeks I’ve been stressed, trying to get ahead of a crisis, possibly of my own making. My office avocado tree has been dropping leaves, and looking so sad, and just generally clearly communicating “I’m dyinggggg,” and I’ve been in active triage mode trying to figure out what the fuck this lovely being is asking me for. I don’t know if it needed a monsoon or what, but in the past 2 weeks I have been watering it nearly daily and finally after only dropping leaves, it is growing n...| 2023 on Winston Hearn (the third)
“For us, meaning depends on understanding. A sentence can’t mean anything to you unless you understand it.” [Metaphors We Live By, p184] --- As I was drawing towards the end of the excellent book Metaphors We Live By, I kept reflecting on this current period of ML tool explosion (I refuse the term AI, this post explains why, and refer to them as ML tools, which encompasses things like ChatGPT for textual output, or Midjourney and DALL•E for image outputs). I am far from the only one t...| 2023 on Winston Hearn (the third)
I love books. Not simply the written word, not only prose, but books. This site exists mostly so I can keep track of the books I read. Adding a completed book is a delightful ritual, and whenever I can’t recall which book I read that thing in, I can scroll through the reading page and find it fairly quickly. I was the 12 year old kid who asked for adult-level non-fictions at Christmas (and got them, and read them). I am now a college dropout who reads multiple academic books a year for fun,...| 2023 on Winston Hearn (the third)
| Winston Hearn (the third)
We are, in this moment, in a battle between the existence of many complex, richly diverse, thriving futures, and the existence of a simple, complicated, fragile future. The people who have siezed power in the US are actively building the latter vision; but the vast majority of people want the former. I will explain my thinking.| winston hearn
| Winston Hearn (the third)
In the past few years I've been reading a great number of authors who are thinking about how we make better worlds. From them I've gathered a collection of ideas that have congealed into something that feels like a workable strategy for fighting the Horrors and resisting burnout. A strategy that does not require anyone to suddenly find superhero strength and endurance, but instead assumes that we already have everything we need, in our current state of being.| winston hearn
Today I turn 40, so here are 40 things that have had a large impact on my life!| Winston Hearn (the third)
The world I grew up in was suffused with god. Specifically, the Christian god that evangelicals describe and worship across the US and in other pockets of the world. It was the air I breathed for my first 25 years. [Note: This post is not about my religious trauma, I promise. I am thinking about capitalism and better futures all the time these days, and that has led me to spend a lot of time trying to understand the current system so that I can potentially identify narratives or ideas that mi...| 2024 on Winston Hearn (the third)
When you practice refusal, you start conjuring up space for different futures. It's a magic trick.| winston hearn
I saw a post this week from Hanif Abdurraqib commemorating your birthday, and when I woke up this morning these words were screaming to get out. So I'm going to write you a letter, because I miss you so much and I had no actual relationship with you except as a fan. But god, you mattered so much to me. Matter so much to me.| winston hearn
I’ve been writing some poetry lately, and while most of I’m writing for me, I felt like sharing this one. --- the god of flowers she had watched for eons as the surface cooled as the water explored the terrain as beings emerged from the sea as cells explored photosynthesis as limbs evolved and some even became wings a tapestry of interdependence and possibility our god is so patient. she had seen other gods introduce new threads their artistry exp...| 2024 on Winston Hearn (the third)
A smol post about how much I love live music, even if I don't get to enjoy it much these days.| Winston Hearn (the third)
This week there are two deaths in the news that stand out against the thousands of deaths that are in the news every week; Nex Benedict's and Aaron Bushnell's.| Winston Hearn (the third)
A theory about how to discuss what systems make easy, and an application of the theory to capitalism, to see if it helps us better imagine futures beyond capitalism.| winston hearn
