Obliquity • 25 March 2008

● The old scorpio archetype is one I don’t mind measuring up against my personality as a kind of interpretive tool. There’s a freaky lot of resonance in that collection of traits. I’m less excited about the things said about the Aries moon, but the alpha debate geek in me lives on despite my fantasies that she’s just some adolescent growing pain.

● Nothing brings her out like sparring with the Daily Miltonian, which I did a little bit yesterday out of public view. Phew.

● Turns out one thing we can agree on is the way that boy-clubby creative communities—a piece of Americana all the way back beyond the Beats—make us both want to run for the fringes even as we recognize they have a kind of special creative greenhousiness.

● Which reminds me that one boy-centric orbit I romanticize and draw on is the whole decades-old Whole Earth Catalog / TED / Long Now Foundation Bay Area sensibility. Stewart Brand, Brian Eno, Kevin Kelly, those guys. Can’t help it. Brian and his friends (other groups of them too, I guess) knock me out.

● All of which reminds me of the two suggestions that seem to be shaping my thoughts about blogging recently.

● One a blog post from Kelly: short is in. Nice! [via Rex.]

● The other Eno and Peter Schmidt’s Oblique Strategies cards. A kind of chance-embracing, post-divinatory pack of trump cards meant for drawing on when you feel like making a fast creative change of tempo.

● Drew a card the other day, and it said:

● Ok. And then today the card said:

LOOK CLOSELY AT THE MOST EMBARRASSING DETAILS AND AMPLIFY THEM.