🎗 My Dad's 9/11 Field Notes
I was surprised to find some 9/11-related emails in my Inbox this morning from my Dad. As a life-time New Yorker, they literally hit home. Weirdly enough, they also re-enforced the answer to a question I've been reflecting on: what is the core purpose of writing? There&
🐾 Searching for Sasquatch
Finding the main point of your essay often feels like searching for a mythological beast in the woods. When we start hunting, the process is long, winding, and stressful. But maybe it doesn't have to be. There are too many parallels between writing essays and chasing Sasquatches. We&
🎭 Integrated Identity
Here's a reply I wrote to the question: Should I create different websites to cover the different things I'm interested? I've made this mistake several times (separate sites, newsletters, and identities). I advocate for starting out with one site, and only forking later on
🔟 Ten Takeaways from The Writing Studio 3
Looping Before we start an idea, we don't know the boundaries of our scope. By looping through brainstorms, throw-away outlines, and short free-writing exercises, we can cover a lot of ground. By quickly discovering dead-ends, we save ourselves time from drafting the wrong ideas. Sometimes a single bullet
🎨 Color-coded CRIBS
What if you could look at your draft and instantly understand how a reader felt about it? Imagine being able to scan your document and get a real-time sense of how each sentence is performing. What if you could see where the pain points and dopamine hits were hidden? Here&
🅰️ Setence Blocks
After completing a few Writing Studios this summer, I've had several students suggest the same thing to me. It was unexpected. Basically, I was breaking down the writing process in such a granular way, they told me that I should develop an AI-powered text editor that has my
🥚 The Block is an Egg
The Latest Sketch I've been working on a visual language to explain blockchain. I'm not there yet, but the sketch below (2 down) shows the farthest I've gotten. In the end, I'd like for it to have descriptive text, and maybe I&
🌀 Procedurally Generated Ads
Advertising Variants on Netflix For the Queens Gambit (and many other series), advertisers will produce over a dozen alternate thumbnails. They often display one to you based on your viewing history. Gone are the days of writing the perfect copy, or the perfect poster. The future is about templates and
⻤ Paranormal AI Beings
AI Short Stories Vivian Li is working on a cool fiction story based on AI. It's about someone who gets into a relationship online, and eventually realizes they've been talking to a leaked artificial intelligence. There were a bunch of ideas and themes around AI that
✞ Christianity's Butterfly Effect
If it wasn’t for Christianity, mankind could have landed on the moon by 1200 AD. This bizarre alternate reality stems from a unique kind of “Butterfly Effect” meditation. We all know the mantra: “every little action we take echoes forever into the future.” But what if the biggest event
🔦 Run-ons & Spotlights
Virginia Woolf knocked out sentences that could stand alone as their own atomic essays. Upwards of 200 words, the sights, and sounds, and things she heard, they burst out from her mind, in between commas and semi-colons, giving you the chance to vacation in her daydreams. Woolf would "sketch&
🏔 The Center of Mount Shasta
It's been a long time since I've read fiction and poetry. It's showing me dimensions of writing that I missed during my non-fiction binge. It's where my curiosity lies, and it's beyond the edge of my ability. I want to
✈️ Late for the Airport
001 The Cross Island Parkway Our flight to San Francisco takes off in under an hour, but here we were, the three of us, bouncing along a foggy Cross Island Parkway with a stuffed trunk on route to John F. Kennedy Airport. Eyes closed, I was half-asleep and sunk into
🧠 Building a Second Brain in Miro
Forte Labs Blog Building a Second Brain in Miro - Forte Labs [https://fortelabs.co/blog/building-a-second-brain-in-miro/] > "I recently hired designer and writer Michael Dean [https://michaeldean.site/] to summarize my Building a Second Brain course [https://www.buildingasecondbrain.com/] in visual form. Michael is the writing coach