August 20, 2018Comments are off for this post.

Color Power Rankings Part 1

These are personal, not trending.

1. Orange

Orange is unequivocally the best color. By degree, red and yellow are both colors associated with danger and alarm. Not so with orange. Instead, orange is that whistful twang you feel during autumn. It is unique in being both warm and inviting. Orange is to red what your chill uncle is to your opressive parents.

2. Green

Green has a very wide range of big moods. It's ties to natural splendor alone make it a color of rejuvination, the untamed, health, liberation, authenticity and groundedness. It is also the color of envy, simulation, sickness, inexperience, mold, decay, money and greed. For these reasons I consider green to be the color of psychological complexity and ambiguousness. It tells the story of humanity in its confrontations with death and natural order on the one hand, and the virtual world of currency, status and expertise on the other. Nietzsche liked the color green.

3. Purple

Purple dye was once a very rare commodity because of how difficult and time intensive it was to milk the predatory snails that secreted it. In addition, the "mauve" zone in Twin Peaks was so beautiful I cried. Honestly, purple should probably be higher on the list. Purple contains multitudes...but also contradictions. It is, on the one hand, a color of mystery and magic, the color of that which lies outside the techno-scientific biopower apparatus that glues us all in place. At the same time, it is the color of royalty and the upper crust, the color of supremacy and the reigning order. How do we synthesize these contradictions? Do guillotines come in purple?

4. Blue

In both the US and in Europe, blue is the most beloved overall color amongst both men and women. The color blue is invited to every party and is, ironically, never thirsty (because it's the color of water, see?). Blue is percieved as (but may not actually be) the color of professionalism, harmony, confidence, the infinite and the imagination. The future is so bright for blue that it's quickly becoming turquoise. But there's a light tickle at the back of Blue's throat that he just can't ignore. No matter how popular and well connected blue is, there is always that tinge of sadness, that tinge of isolation, that no social validation will ever cure.

July 30, 2018Comments are off for this post.

Pomodoro + Block Site = ???

I have been using the Pomodoro technique through the app Focus 10, and the results have been good. It allows you to chunk your work in a way that is conducive to finding your flow. I've been using it casually, meaning I'm not strictly adhering to the Pomodoro sequence and rulesets (I have never "abandoned a Pomodoro" because an unexpected distraction has arisen).

Whenever I'm confronted with a loading screen or some other technical hitch that requires waiting, I almost instinctually load Twitter and see what's doing. This is true whether I'm on the Pomodoro clock or not. But when I am on the clock, reading twitter even for a minute completely murders my flow, much more than the technical setback does (I imagine this is primarily because social media is depressing as hell). Which is why I usually pair my Focus 10 with Block Site. This second layer of flow-protection prevents my Twitter muscle memory from taking my focus away from work, even for a minute.

For my SmartPhone I have a similar system using a "Minimalistic Material Timer" and ClearLock. But it's cumbersome to have to sync two apps at the same time.

I think creating an app that integrates these two functions into a single app would be well received. During a Pomodoro "work sequence", user-selected apps will be locked from use. During the "break sequence", they are unlocked. As a web-browser plug-in it would work the same way, but blocking websites instead of apps.

I'm going to start designing this concept and see where it goes.

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Alex lives in the downtown core of Rochester NY alongside his lovely wife Charlotte.
He enjoys playing video games, consuming media, writing, and inner city garden cats.
You can contact him at alex.kleinman@gmail.com.