The Magnet 053: Five Things to Ponder

and you don’t even need an orb

Dec 21, 2021

In this short issue, I’m sharing five things worth pondering.

Tom Whitwell’s “52 things I learned in 2021”

Since 2014 Tom Whitwell has written a yearly piece on his Medium blog called “52 things I learned in 20XX.” I always look forward to it. Here are five of my favorite things Tom learned in 2021:

“Beauty livestreamer Li Jiaqi sold $1.9 billion worth of products in one twelve-hour show on Taobao. That’s slightly less than the total sales from all four Selfridges stores during 2019. [Jinshan Hong]”
“The world’s second most popular electric car (after the Tesla Model 3) is the Wuling HongGuang Mini, which costs $5,000 and outsells vehicles from Renault, Hyundai, VW and Nissan. [Brad Anderson & José Pontes]”
“In 2020 there was a brief panic about Americans being sent mysterious packages of seeds from China. It turns out (spoiler warning) that they just ordered the seeds, forgot about them, then got swept up in all the excitement. [Chris Heath]”
“We produce 200x more new computers per second than new human beings. [David Holz]”
“The entire global cosmetic Botox industry is supported by an annual production of just a few milligrams of botulism toxin. Pure toxin would cost ~$100 trillion per kilogram. [Anthony Warner]”

Design tip: Never use pure black

Jane’s pixel art for the imaginary game “Moonshield.” The darkest color is #0E1D3C

“Don’t use pure black in your art.” This is advice I’ve been given many times, but every time I hear it, I think it’s a new revelation. The first time I heard it was when I was taking oil painting classes years ago, and the instructor warned me never to use pure black because it looks too harsh. (Most naturalist art paintings use lots of gray with colors mixed in.) A few years later I read an article about the artist Shag that mentioned he never uses pure black in his paintings. Instead, he uses very dark blue or green for the darkest parts of a painting. And then last week my daughter and I were using Piskel to design characters for a make-believe video game called Moonshield. When she was creating the color palette for us to use she told me that it was better not to use pure black for the outlines. And just a couple of days ago I came across a 2012 article by Ian Storm Taylor titled “Design Tip: Never Use Black.” He wrote:

Black overpowers everything else. When you put pure black next to a set of meticulously picked colors, the black overpowers everything else. It stands out because it’s not natural. All of the “black” everyday objects around you have some amount of light bouncing off of them, which means they aren’t black, they’re dark gray. And that light probably has a tint to it, so they’re not even dark gray, they’re colored-dark gray.

How many more times do I have to hear this advice before I remember to follow it?

New creatures shirts

I’ve been filling a notebook with tiny sketches of creatures. (Here’s a video of my progress.) From time to time I’ll sell T-shirts using some of my favorite sketches. Here’s a new one that has 49 creatures on it. It’s available in a bunch of different style shirts.

Good newsletter: Simply Good Life

Every issue of Adam Egger’s weekly newsletter Simply Good Life, offers several nuggets of advice and things to ponder. Issue #260 has a mind-boggling animated explainer about the depth of the ocean, a video with fun facts about blood, and this quote from Anthony De Mello about a “crazy definition of success” — “be nobody”:

This is what it means to live like royalty. Not rubbish like getting your picture in the newspapers or having a lot of money. That’s a lot of rot. You fear no one because you’re perfectly content to be nobody. You don’t give a damn about success or failure. They mean nothing. Honor, disgrace, they mean nothing! If you make a fool of yourself, that means nothing either.

Sounds to help you ponder

I often work in silence, but sometimes I enjoy playing sounds and instrumental music in the background. Here are a couple of sound sources I like:

Defonic is an ambient soundscape mixer that lets you combine the sound of rain, wind, fire, waves, coffee shop murmurings.
Pure Focus (for Apple Music subscribers) is a playlist of frequently updated instrumental soundscapes.
Sleeping Dragon creates an endless stream of procedurally generated music. You can adjust the parameters for different moods. Check out other generative music makers at MyNoise.

The “Veil of Ignorance” thought experiment

Imagine you are given the opportunity to design an ideal society. You can structure it any way you want. Now, repeat the experiment, but this time there are two things to keep in mind: 1) after setting up the system, you will be reborn into the world you designed with no memory of having designed it, and 2) you will be randomly assigned a gender, race, age, wealth, intelligence, and ability level. This thought experiment was created by philosopher John Rawls (1921-2002).

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