Links for November 28, 2021

🪄 Becoming a Magician — Autotranslucence

It's hard to pull a single representative quote from this beautiful essay. The author weaves together personal anecdotes with the idea that magic is a metaphor for personal growth.

Not only is any sufficiently advanced technology indistinguishable from magic; any sufficiently advanced technologist seems like a magician. In order to write the new version of this life description, I need to imagine a version of myself who, by definition, I cannot understand. If I understood her she wouldn’t be magical.

[. . .]

The ‘describe the version of you that seems impossible right now’ trick I described above is largely an attempt to bypass that part of my brain that dismisses the work of magicians as crazy and starts allowing it to make the necessary shifts required to become the kind of magician I am envisioning.

🌐 Weeklypedia

Weeklypedia is "a digest of the most-edited Wikipedia articles and discussions from the last week." It's an interesting snapshot of what's trending on the internet, with fewer of the click-baity topics that tend to take over on other sites. Link

🐦 A Relevant Tweet

Speaking of committing to things enough for them to take off:

Half doing something is an expensive way of not doing it

— Angela Jiang (@angjiang) November 15, 2020