Zach's PEN #23: 2021, A New Hope

I've got momentum on all fronts heading into this New Year.

Hello PENpals,

Wow, the strategy is working. For 12 days in a row, I have written a Twitter thread on a different subject. Each one was more concise (and usually better) than what I've been writing in the PEN. Here are the coolest things about about this development:

1. It's taking me very little time, and basically no effort, because these are all things I want to write about, and the constraints of 12ish tweets of 280 characters gives me a really simple "form" to fill out.

2. These threads are, each of them, between 250-550 words... Looked at another way, that's a whole blog post! Doing one daily is, dare I say, prolific, even by my stupid standards. And yet... effortless. This is what I'm after.

3. This is clearing a lot of cobwebs out of my head, clarifying my thinking, reducing anxiety, and opening up further possibilities.

In short, this feels 100% sustainable, and there's a lot more to come.

There's a way to look at Twitter as this playground/workshop for sharing anything.

My first impression of Twitter 10 years ago was that the enforced brevity (then 140 characters) made it possible for anyone to communicate with anyone, because there's so little overhead to glancing at or responding to a single tweet. This meant that I could get into a friendly argument with Glenn Greenwald or Matt Taibbi (a couple of my all-time favorite journalists) and discuss product design with John August (the screenwriter of Big Fish and creator of the Fountain screenplay syntax). This was and remains true, but I'm now convinced that an even more important feature of this constraint is that it encourages sharing as much as you want.

Basically, you can't tweet too much (if you have thoughts or ideas that might be worth tweeting). This is a friendly, low bar, complete with feedback from the real world (or "marketplace of ideas" for those who like to orient everything around capitalism). Any idea, thought, question, or experiment you want to run in the wild with real people, you can. Just throw it out there. None of your tweets will take up too much space on anyone's timeline. They can just scroll past if it's not resonating.

And when you write a whole thread (a totally clunky accident of the medium), only a single entrypoint into that thread will appear on anyone's feed. They can choose to expand it to read more, share just one link in the chain or some or all of them. It's basically the perfect place for prototyping thoughts/ideas/pictures/almost anything at all.

My Year Theme Update

Last week, I talked about The Year of PRESS PUBLISH, but then I realized that that was a little too specific to be my year's theme, as it's very career/work-centric, so I've amended it to be The Year of Just Ring The Bell Again. Here's my thread on this theme.

Zach Phillips @zachphillips

My Theme for 2021 (per the Theme System from @imyke and @cgpgrey) is The Year of Just Ring The Bell Again. It's a mouthful, but it doubles as a mantra and an answer to every question, doubt, or jam. It is a simple repudiation of the patterns that have kept me stuck. 👇

And here are the other 6 (!) threads that I've written since the last PEN. I'm going to now add a nerdy <—> accessible rating to these, since I got a lot of feedback that no one knew what the hell I was talking about in all those threads last week. 1 is very narrowly accessible, probably only interesting to a single subculture, while 5 I think is broadly accessible for general audiences:

99 Cents 🤔🤔🤔🤔🤔

Zach Phillips @zachphillips

Pricing everything at $19.99 or $149.95 or $1,999.99 is just one of many blaring markers that our cynical cultural illness is late-stage, but for some reason, it’s particularly egregious in its obvious contempt for human beings. 👇

24 Frames Per Second 🤔🤔🤔🤔

Zach Phillips @zachphillips

Here's a thread on why 24 is the best number of frames per second for everything but sports and gaming. It has to do with a fundamentally broken default assumption about the motion picture medium. 👇

“Content” 🤔🤔🤔

(this one was adapted from a recent PEN, which I’m also trying)

Zach Phillips @zachphillips

Here's a thread in which I will attempt to destroy the word "content." First, I acknowledge that this war has already been lost. Most of us who write, filmmake, shoot photos, teach courses, make radio, or do anything creative have already surrendered. I will not.

Volunteer Creative Work 🤔🤔🤔

Zach Phillips @zachphillips

Creative workers are, for some reason, the one class of workers that lots of people think it's totally cool to solicit volunteer work from. Here's a thread about when and how to offer volunteer work as a creative person. First Rule: If anyone but you initiates, immediate NO. 👇

What I Learned at My First 3 Silent Retreats 🤔🤔

Zach Phillips @zachphillips

One of the (relatively) minor things that I'm losing to COVID is my annual silent meditation retreat (I'd usually leave tomorrow). It's a serious privilege to do it, 💵/🕓wise and that my wife (hates it but) lets me go. Here's a taste of what I learned at the first three. 👇

A Complete Photography Course in 5 Tweets 🤔🤔🤔

Zach Phillips @zachphillips

I'm going to attempt to deliver a complete photography course in 5 tweets. I originally made this on 5 index cards for my wife, corresponding to the 5 concepts you need to know. In short: There isn't much to it, and everyone should understand photography, particularly today. 👇

At some point, I will probably choose some of these threads to post to my blog (I think of them as a sort of prototype-but-published stage on Twitter) and so they'll be a bit friendlier to read there, maybe with some accompanying artwork, but for now, I'm just going to keep doing what I'm doing.

Very cool and exciting things coming up next week (I think). I have a lot of hope that my own personal dam is breaking. Hope it doesn't read as insufferable self-indulgence. I promise it comes from a good place. I just want to contribute.

Thanks for being my PENpal. I can't tell you how much this helps.

Much love,

Zach

P. S. 2020 can go straight to helllllllllllllllllllllllllll, but I’ve loved all the memories with these babies.