july

I had a Stone-masoning / stone carving teacher once (one semester) who told me about how he used to go to these stone masoninng conferences, and there were people who had the best tools and they'd parade around the tools they had, but didn't make anything. But they did have the tools and how that was cool for them.

Also this is the OS on the left and the computer on the right that George RR Martin uses to write Game of Thrones. I think he's been using it for years. It's a little bit crazy that he uses a DOS computer and a WordStar 4.0 word processor released in 1987, ~30 years ago. 

I think about this a lot.

creating and destroying; built flying cars & autonomous vehicles, now building /faust, more here: /july, web: july.rocks

"Do what you can with what you have.
Nothing more is needed and there are no excuses."
-Rick Rubin

Important for beginners. 

For example, I once saw a documentary about the photographer Jürgen Teller. He photographed a campaign for Vivian Westwood with disposable cameras. What was important was the composition of the image, the technical details (resolution, color, filter, …) were secondary. 

You don't need expensive tools in the beginning. Most tools and software today are free. 

Use your phone to take pictures, use Figma, use Inkscape, etc. 
There are actually good alternatives for most pro tools.

https://warpcast.com/maurice/0x55cbced1

also resonates with this

I read an interview with him in which he mentioned the he’d tried more modern solutions but IIRC they just got in his way with all their bells and whistles.

Also, I once saw him sitting on a bench outside the Santa Fe convention center during a book festival. I didn’t know what to say, so I said nothing, just drank my coffee and watched as other did double-takes as they passed. 

Later that day I came up with something: I should have complimented his cameo appearance on Portlandia — I think he would have gotten a kick out of that.

Perhaps a sign of mastery is abusing your tools to push them beyond what they were meant to do. The GRRM example fits.

If better tools unlock new directions of abuse you're excited about, then it might be worth it! If it's just going to put you back onto mainstream usage rails, then maybe not.

Reminds me of how Eric Roth wrote Dune on Movie Master, a long since defunct MS-DOS program

Reminds me of how Eric Roth wrote Dune on Movie Master, a long since defunct MS-DOS program

https://www.vice.com/en/article/the-dune-screenplay-was-written-in-ms-dos/