📖 Recent Quotes 📖

• [an example of the commentary on the letters],
  
  Wreek & Co. evidently believe in "personal charm as a commercial asset," and by "personal charm" they appear to understand a fawning sycophancy directed to establish in the charmed one a sense of obligation which shall make it difficult for him to reject their proposal, question their price, or condemn their performance. To experience three hours boxed up in a motor with Mr. Schwarb's unflinching personal charm—sublimed, perhaps, with a touch of scent—will probably settle Spinove's hash, or, on the other hand, perhaps it will not. The needs of personal charm have, we may guess, led Mr. Schwarb to scheme to join Spinlove at lunch and pay for both; and, at a hint, it would probably find him ready to carry the architect upstairs on his back and put him to bed.

  an excerpt from The Honeywood File, written by H.B. Creswell in 1929

• Karla doesn't like my being friends with Ethan. She says it's corrupting, but I told her not to worry, that I spent all of my youth in front of a computer and that I'll never catch up to all the non-nerds who spent their early twenties having a life and being jaded.
  
  Karla says that nerds-gone-bad are the scariest of all, because they turn into "Marvins" and cause problems of planetary dimensions. Marvin was that character from Bugs Bunny cartoons who wanted to blow up Earth because it obscured his view of Venus.

  an excerpt from Microserfs, written by Douglas Coupland in 1993

• "Where does morality enter our lives, Dan? How do we justify what we do to the rest of humanity?…”
  
  Karla came into the room at this point. She turned off the TV set and looked at Todd square in the eyes and said, "Todd: you exist not only as a member of a family or a company or a country, but as a member of a species-you are human. You are part of humanity. Our species currently has major problems and we're trying to dream our way out of these problems and we're using computers to do it. The construction of hardware and software is where the species is investing its very survival, and this construction requires zones of peace, children born of peace, and the absence of code-interfering distractions. We may not achieve transcendence through computation, but we will keep ourselves out of the gutter with them. What you perceive of as a vacuum is an earthly paradise the freedom to, quite literally, line-by-line, prevent humanity from going nonlinear."

  an excerpt from Microserfs, written by Douglas Coupland in 1993

📓 Recent Notes 📓

• And in between all of these painfully, uncannily realistic letters, the editor is writing little commentary on how each party handles this situation. 'This letter should have been more straightforward' or 'we can see now how the architect is worried this will compromise his future work' and sometimes just cheerleading a well-written rebuff. At one point after the client Sir Brash handles a situation well, he writes: 'Bravo! A bag of nuts to Sir Leslie Brash.'

  an note about The Honeywood File, written by H.B. Creswell in 1929

• And I'm not exempt! The whole book is like holding up a mirror to my careers worth of email. I've written every single one of these letters.
  
  I've been the designer, of course, trying convince a client to not make a disastrous late-breaking change (while still knowing I also need to keep that client happy enough to pay their invoice). And giving half-baked instructions to a developer causing them heartache. I've been the client, standing on the sidewalk outside the job site of my own house and asking: is that right? Are you sure? And wondering if (and how) I'm getting screwed by the trades. And I've been the tradesperson executing a project and dealing with contradictory instructions from all parties, while still trying to both do a job I'm proud of at the end, to good standards, while working to a budget and timeline that I didn't set.

  an note about The Honeywood File, written by H.B. Creswell in 1929

• I've been a working professional in the design field for 20+ years now, and I've had this sense that miscommunication and passive-aggressiveness and cover-your-ass wishy-washiness is somehow a product of EMAIL culture. That if we didn't have email, we could write just meet and solve problems together, or send a single letter that meant-what-it-said-and-said-what-it-meant and at LEAST we wouldn't screw up our projects so badly. Here I mean 'we' as in 'Western Civilization'.
  
  But this piece of fiction is from 1929, and it's all letters, and telegrams! And everything you hate about your email job, every little shitty piece corporate speak of 'per my last email' and 'the contract states' and 'this is out of scope' is just already here. We've been doing it this way all along! Maybe the pyramids didn't have this kind of BS when they were built. But I'm starting to think so.

  an note about The Honeywood File, written by H.B. Creswell in 1929

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