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The NANY 2018 Special Event
The NANY 2018 Special Event image

Check out the new free software and fun stuff released as part of our NANY (New Apps for the New Year) 2018 event on January 1, 2018: here.

Since 2007 we have held an annual event that we call NANY (New Apps for the New Year), where we ask the coders who hang out on DonationCoder to create some new piece of free software and share it with the world on January 1st of the new year. NANY is really the funnest thing we do on this site, and it's one of the few times we can all play together. There are no winners or losers, it's simply a celebration of programming and creating new software and sharing it with the world.

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How to keep going

"How to keep going"

This is a video from the perspective of
a) an artist / a creative person making a living from that work
b) someone who thinks things aren't getting any better (and probably are getting worse)

I dont necessarily share these perspectives, yet I found the video had some very helpful advice. A lot of which (but not all) I relate to, and agree with. When he uses the word 'Art', I substitute 'Life'. Works mostly...

Most important, he made me think, and rethink things a bit, quite a bit at times.

Re Creativity:
I see creativity as being relevant to business, of all kinds; to relationships (of all kinds) -- creativity is really the business of life. Artists forget this, and think it just belongs to them. Keep that in mind when watching the video.

It's a long video, by my standards anyways -- so, below the video, I include notes I made re highlights



  • 1:00 'if the CIA did Haiku...' Black-out poems -- I enjoyed this work
  • 5:40 Groundhog Day: "What would you do if you were stuck in one place, and every day was exactly the same, and nothing that you did mattered?" 'How you answer this question is your art' (as suggested above, substitute 'life' for 'art').
  • 9:17 "Forget about being a writer, follow the impulse to write" [Ann Packer]
  • 10:40 'we're trained to heap praise on our loved ones in market terminology. We used to have hobbies, now they're called side-hustles.' Touches on the dangers of turning what you love into a career.
  • 11:30 leads nicely into inspirational robot drawings by five-year-olds :-)
  • 14:06 'she thought the "uncommon" was a better phrase than "art" ' -- nice example of an artist getting us to look at the 'common' as if with eyes that haven't seen it before.
  • 17:45 'you are allowed change your mind'
  • 19:38 'when in doubt, tidy up' (but not otherwise!)
  • 22:16 looking closer at slogans, e.g. "make your mark on the world!" [I think this from Steve Jobs, but not 100% clear from video]. This especially interesting to me -- there's a lot of what I consider BS being traded on the internet as wisdom, and being simply taken for granted by a huge number of people out there. (FWIW I find the conclusion here a little weak.)
  • 23:00 'Demons hate fresh air' -- walking, getting out there, as opposed to being 'plugged-in'. Might seem a little twee, but true in my experience.

posted by tomos donate to tomos
discovered on http://www.incredibledoom.com/issue01
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