October Favourites 2020
Table of Contents
- October Favourites 2020
- 🍿 My Favourite Movies of the Month
- 📺 My Favourite Show of the Month
- 🛠 My Favourite Digital Tools of the Month
- 🖥 My Favourite Websites of the Month
- 📚 My Favourite Reads of the Month
- 🎨 My Favourite Arts & Crafts of the Month
- 🎥 My Favourite YouTubers & Playlists of the Month
- 🎬 My Favourite Videos of the Month
- 🎸 My Favourite Music of the Month
🍿 My Favourite Movies of the Month
This was a fruitful Halloween month of introducing myself to some well-known horror movies I've been neglecting for years.
Clue
I feel like this movie would be really fun to watch on stage as a play.
Final Destination 3
Oculus
The Last House on the Left
Final Destination
Ghost Ship
Ghost Ship had one of my favourite openings to any horror movie I've ever seen 😱
The Aeronauts
Walking Tall
Final Destination 2
House of Wax
I can't believe I'm only just getting the reference to this movie from that Supernatural episode featuring Paris Hilton in the wax museum 🤦🏽♂️ - Supernatural Season 5, Episode 5: Fallen Idols | IMDb
The Conjuring
📺 My Favourite Show of the Month
Ratched
🛠 My Favourite Digital Tools of the Month
Time Tracking App
This website was really helpful when working towards implementing my version of a time blocking habit this month.
Website Builder
This month was my first time playing with and creating my personal website in Webflow. Also, it's worth noting how much I admire the tutorial videos that they produce. They're so easy to understand and even fun to watch!
Webflow Rich Text Styling
Found this gem while trying to gain more control over the design of my rich text elements in Webflow. Such a helpful tool!
🖥 My Favourite Websites of the Month
- Such a cool website design! 😍
- Shout out to my own personal website which I created this month!
📚 My Favourite Reads of the Month
- I discovered this article about laziness in a video titled "Capitalism is bad 101", which I review below under my favourite videos section. I really like the idea that labelling others as lazy is a dismissive and reductive explanation for the complicated realities of people's lives. This article makes a persuasive case for replacing your mindset around the idea of laziness to concept more compassionate and considered.
- The most impactful mindset that I've adopted from Ali Abdaal's YouTube channel is the benefit of maximising one's surface area for random opportunity. It's a topic I've been thinking a lot about, particularly in terms of potential strategies I can use to broaden my own surface area. Thanks to Ali's Deep Dives I was introduced to Nat Eliason, who successfully convinced me that starting a blog is an accessible strategy to use.
- Perhaps my favourite takeaway from Nat's post is that you neither have to have a niche, nor be a brand. In order to get started with blogging, it's enough to just be a person with interests.
- Where Nat's interview was successful in getting me to start blogging, David Perell's interview was successful in reinforcing my rationale and confidence in starting. My favourite takeaway from his interview was that "people shouldn’t worry about wasting time by writing online. Worst comes to worst – you’ve spent hours thinking and writing about something that you are interested in and writing IS thinking and so when you put words on a page you raise the quality of your thoughts."
🎨 My Favourite Arts & Crafts of the Month
Paper Cutout Art
Paper cutout art was definitely my art obsession of the month. I've seen it before, but I never knew a name for it, so I was never able to deep dive into it until now!
I was particularly inspired by these gorgeous portraits by Shelley Castillo Garcia:
🎥 My Favourite YouTubers & Playlists of the Month
- Some of my favourite types of interviews are deep dives into a person's career from past to present. This month I learned that Naomi Campbell has been doing just that with some of her interviews with fellow celebs. Of the interviews that I've seen so far, I've found them all to be interesting 🙌🏽
- I've enjoyed Great Big Story for a while, but it makes my list of favourite YouTube channels for this month, because they're closing production after 5 years of videos and they 100% deserve the recognition for having some of my favourite videos on the Internet.
- Just like a lot of others out there, hopeful about their future prosperity, I'm a fan of Graham Stephan's videos. I've also been subscribed to his and Jack's Iced Coffee Hour channel for a while, but I lost track of them until this month when I decided to do some binging and catch up. Lots of interesting conversations around personal finance to explore!
- I was a huge fan of America's Next Top Model growing up. Recently people have been revisiting old episodes and critiquing some of the problematic practices and competitions that took place. It's uncomfortable to see how often I agree with the criticisms, even though I never thought twice about them when I was younger. Now that I make an intentional effort to prioritize compassion, even simple things like overly critical judges, which tends to make great tv, is hard to tolerate as an acceptable way to treat others. This playlist of a photographer reacting to old ANTM competitions was not only a great reminder to use compassion as a lens, but to also use it as a voice. A pattern that I noticed when rewatching old ANTM videos is that models would sometimes go along with photoshoots and situations that they didn't feel comfortable with, only because they were being told to by people with higher power and status than them. This reminded me of the Milgram Shock Experiment that studied people's willingness to obey authority, in-spite of their natural instincts. | SimplePsychology Article on the Milgram Shock Experiment
- In theme with revisiting America's Next Top Model, I discovered, this month, that two of the judges on ANTM have an entire playlist of videos where they give a behind-the-scenes perspective on the goings-on of the show. I'm only on the fourth video so far, but I'm hooked!
- I love how easy it is to see how much consideration, effort, and creativity goes into Struthless' videos. This channel is another new discovery for the books and has been especially useful motivation for me now that I'm trying to get more comfortable sharing my thoughts and putting my work out there for the world to see.
🎬 My Favourite Videos of the Month
- Class consciousness
- Definition: Capitalism is a system in which the means of production, that is the things that produce goods and services, like factories, restaurants, hair salons, etc. are owned by individuals.
- Definition: Socialism, by contrast, the system in which the means of production are owned collectively by society
- Each employee is providing more value than they are being paid
- This process of exploitation is called wage labour, and it means that as long as an individual owns the means of production, the employees will not be given the full value of their labour.
- Foundational to capitalism are the ideas that money can be used to measure someone's worth and that some people deserve more money than others.
- By this logic, if you are born rich you are, by default, more valuable to society than someone who is born poor. The very idea that you can quantitatively identify a person's value to society comes with some serious moral consequences. In a worldview that equates value as a human being to some quantifiable economic productivity, the logical endpoint is that someone who is not able to work has no value. As a general rule, when your worldview is telling you that some people have no value, it may be time to take a critical look at it.
- Capitalism doesn't necessarily optimise innovation
- The extent to which capitalism produces innovation is secondary to its primary goal, which is monetization.
- This can be seen in creative content that is forced to iterate on concepts with mass market appeal (consider the constant barrage of movie remakes).
- Capitalism isn't human nature
- The argument that people would just be lazy if all of their basic needs were met doesn't take into account the basic human needs that motivate people to work outside of financial gain.
- "I don't even really believe that laziness exists, only unseen barriers."
- Laziness is a gross oversimplification that fails to account for the complicated realities of people's lives.
- Capitalism is bad for society
- The goal of capitalism is not rooted in the interests of humanity as a whole, but in the interests of individuals within the system.
- Capitalism views the world strictly in terms of economic producers and consumers. It makes the assumption that if something is good for the producer and good for the consumer, then it must be good for society as a whole.
- This argument doesn't hold up to scrutiny because capitalism encourages "externalization of costs", when you jettison as much of the cost of production of a product as possible onto society as a whole, rather than paying it as an individual.
- Example: Part of the cost to society for creating a product like Oreos is an increase in the number of cavities that people are likely to develop. Oreos externalizes this cost onto the healthcare system. They're not paying for an increase in dental procedures that are going to have to happen as a result of the sale of their product. If they had to pay that, then they would be incentivized to figure out a way for Oreos to taste good without being bad for your teeth.
- The most common ways that people generally talk about externalization of costs often have to do with public health outcomes, or environmental concerns.
- Exercise to consider:
- All people's basic needs are met
- Innovation is encouraged as a primary goal rather than a secondary effect
- Our modern understanding of human motivation and emotional needs is accounted for
- Cost externalization isn't present
"For decades, psychological research has been able to explain procrastination as a functioning problem, not a consequence of laziness. When a person fails to begin a project that they care about, it’s typically due to either a) anxiety about their attempts not being “good enough” or b) confusion about what the first steps of the task are. Not laziness. In fact, procrastination is more likely when the task is meaningful and the individual cares about doing it well." - Devon Price
What would a society look like where:
- Grading teaches students that people are unequal and can be objectively and quantitatively ranked, which is the same basic principle that capitalism is built on.
- Is grading necessary?
- People don't need grades to find the motivation to do something. External rewards are not the only way to motivate students (or workers).
- Grades are rarely an objective measure of a students work, even though they often claim to be. They are highly subjective.
- Grading normalizes unpaid overtime and busywork
- School is full of busywork
- Note to self: A frustrating example of this happened to me in grade 7. One of my many pieces of homework one night was to draw a cover image for my binder for a French class (the epitome of busywork). I wasn't able to do it because I decided to prioritize more difficult homework first and it was the very first time I received detention in school.
- Grading is psychologically damaging
- A 2020 study from the journal Learning and Individual Differences, found a direct relationship between self-esteem and math grades. Students with higher grades in math tended to have a higher self-esteem and vice versa.
- When students get lower grades than others, it signals to them that they are less intelligent, less hard working, and less valuable than their peers.
- "Grading sews the seeds of capitalism within us by teaching us to tie our self worth to an abstract notion of productivity that's defined by an external power."
- Grading, like capitalism, is a system that sells personal responsibility to the solution to every problem. And in doing so, it erases all of the invisible barriers that students face.
- What would the school system look like if we abolished grading?
- Under the current system, students are given very little ability to provide their teachers with feedback.
- Grading lays the groundwork for capitalism by teaching students to:
- Think that the only reason people would ever work is for personal reward
- See a never ending stream of work as healthy and normal
- Believe that people can be sorted into objective hierarchies
- Internalize where they "belong" within those hierarchies
"I've come to the conclusion that the sole purpose of homework is to condition children into accepting that unpaid overtime and ridiculous hours and not even being able to escape work in your own home are normal things to expect in their future." - Erin Ekins @QueerlyAutistic - Twitter
- [Paraphrase] "It Took a while to get used to having adults as fans. When I do book signings there will be seven-year-olds and ten-year-olds, and 25 and 30. And at first I would say what are you doing here? And they would say "we loved you when we were kids". And that's hard to get used to, because I realised that I'm nostalgia to you. How weird is that?"
- Imagine how neat it would be to have such a lingering impact on people that you bring them comfort through your work lasting a lifetime
- It's also interesting that scary works can be perceived as nostalgic, even though nostalgia is predominantly a feeling of comfort (or maybe it's mostly a feeling of comfort for me, whereas for others it's a more general feeling of happiness 🤔)
- [Paraphrase] "I don't try to think of ideas, I only try to think of titles and if I have a really good title then it leads me to the story"
- Note to self: This sounds like a helpful creative constraint for writing
- The show was originally Canadian
- Who knew!? How cool!
- [Paraphrase] Interviewer: "Would you say that Slappy is your favourite villain of goosebumps?" R.L. Stine: "I don't know how to answer that. He is my most popular villain. My problem is I've written about 14 books about him and there's not that much you can do about a dummy that comes to life, but because he is so popular I have to keep writing Slappy books." Interviewer: "That's the curse of Slappy you gotta keep writing him for the rest of your life!"
- [Paraphrase] "I used to write joke books for kids and humour magazines before I went into scary."
- [Paraphrase] "I try to right 2000 words a day, which is about 10 pages."
- [Paraphrase] "For Halloween we give out candy and books."
- Could you imagine going trick or treating at R.L. Stine's house as a kid and have him give you his books as treats. I would have been beyond elated 🤩
- Definition: Carbon offsetting is a program or initiative that implements a measurable avoidance or reduction of carbon or other greenhouse gasses. It's often offered to customers as compensation for a product or service they have purchased or it's used by companies to try to reduce their own emissions.
- Carbon offsetting can generally be divided into four categories:
- Biological Reserves: Where new trees are planted and older trees are cared for. So that the CO2 from those trees, while under protection of the program, are used as the product that is then used for carbon offsetting.
- Example: Air France's campaign to offer carbon offsetting for passenger's flights for an additional price. Customers can fly green and the company would use the extra money to purchase trees or the carbon offset that those trees produce.
- Renewable Energy: Where investments go toward funding energy sources that do not emit carbon. The calculated carbon saved is then used as the product for carbon offsetting.
- Example: A company uses their money for carbon offsetting to fund projects that then deliver solar panels to places that would normally have used fossil fuels for power. Then the carbon emissions that is then saved is used as the products for carbon offsetting.
- Energy Efficiency: When your money goes toward funding projects within construction, building, or electricity, where they try to optimise the energy output and input in different products.
- Example: A company that manufactures kitchen appliances came up with an oven that only needs a small amount of wood pellets to work. They then donated 1000 of these ovens to people living in the Andes, who normally use wood for heating and for cooking. And the trees that those 1000 ovens saved were then sold by another company as carbon offsets
- Reduction of Non-CO2 Emissions: When brands, organizations, or funds work toward reducing emissions that are not related to CO2, but for other sources like methane.
- The double meaning of being a carbon neutral company:
- Version 1 (Grade = good): A company, like Air France, still has carbon emissions, but supports causes that attempt to reduce as much emissions as they produce.
- Version 2 (Grade = great): A company, like Google, works to reduce their own carbon emissions by making all of their their headquarters operate from renewable energy sources (eg. solar panels on their roof).
- Investing in green energy projects might actually be a more sustainable action than planting trees and it might be something that we can see the effects of much faster.
- The issue is that, tree planting campaigns have been shown to resonate well with consumers.
- There are some companies that use inefficient carbon offsetting strategies as greenwashing campaigns, which can mislead consumers.
- Personifying your inner critics makes the intangible tangible and when something is tangible to the point that we can understand it in terms that we know then it can become more manageable
- Super interesting practice of personfying your inner demons and critics. This is something that I've personally found success with when attempting to overcome negative thoughts, I just didn't know that it was an actual suggested practice 😯
- When you're an artist or creator, maybe the answer isn't to silence your inner critics, but to give them a voice. Once you do that, instead of them using you, you can use them. Because that voice comes from a place of pain and pain is something you can articulate in order to relate to people, which is what art is.
"When things get tough, this is what you should do... make good art." - Neil Gaiman
- Work less to get more done
- Love is a verb, not a state
- "Talent is a pursued interest. In other words, anything that you're willing to practice, you can do." - Bob Ross
- Proper Preparation Prevents Piss Poor Performance
- Invest in a good pair of shoes and a good mattress, because you're going to spend two-thirds of your life on one or the other
- "We are all prisoners of our previous reference points. A person isn't able to imagine something until they know that it's possible, that it even exists. You should always expand your horizons and set new references."
- Nothing improves the world more than wide spread education
- Doing must come before wanting to do
- Support the things you love
- A mask lanyard is a genius idea 🤭
- "I think that when you can identify how you feel, you can process how you feel. And when you can process how you feel, you can ultimately heal" - Timestamp 7:00
- I really like the idea that the more specific we become at being able to name the emotions beyond our core ones, the better equipped we are to process them
- Perspective shift: Rugrats was a story about boomers raising millennial children
- Rugrats debuted in 1991, and while the 80s and 90s are often remembered as times of prosperity, they were also the times of a widening economic inequality and a rapidly shrinking middle class. As a result, many baby boomers entered adulthood and parenthood in a states of economic anxiety.
- These themes and anxiety can be seen in the show, particularly in the early seasons of the Pickles family where money was a recurring topic of concern.
- We can also see how the children developed in response to their parents' relationship with money, work, and the economy
- Boomer's fixation on concerted cultivation: the process of carefully developing your children via cello lessons, expensive summer camps, and ensuring they were trilingual by the age of ten; all in the pursuit of raising children who would preserve their fragile middle class status
- The grand result of concerted cultivation is that boomer's raised mini adults; millennials who quickly grew up and began mimicking the habits of adulthood (ie. excessive anxiety)
- Really interesting mindset about smoothing out your emotional curve - Timestamp: 18:19
- Being able to zoom out and look at the full graph of all of the successes and failures of your life, then smoothing out the fluctuations, in order to see your trajectory clearly.
- Smoothing out your ups and downs
"Life is turbulence and grit is the ability to smooth out the curve."
- In 1998, 12% of total commercials used jingles, by 2011, that number drops down to just 2%
- The use of simple advertising jingles can be traced all the way back to the 15th and 16th centuries, when street vendors would shout out rhymes to sell their products
- Hot cross buns is an example
- Interesting topic about music as a memory aid; there's probably some fun research to look into about it 🤓
- I don't think I've never thought about how advertising differs around the world. It would be fun to see someone do a comparative analysis.
