Anglerfish
Deep Divin'
There’s a fish that makes its own light in total darkness and uses it to lure prey. My son asks me every day to see pictures of it with a big smile on his face; he is nineteen months old.
I painted the above anglerfish for him this week. I’ve seen him frightened before, but this animal brings him some sort of comfort for some reason.
When I showed him this and the Goldbug drawing from last week, he was euphoric and kept shouting, “DUMP IT!”
Worth Your Time
Jim Woodring is one of America’s greatest artists. His primary body of work centers on the character Frank, a vaguely anthropomorphic animal entity who moves through a surreal world called the Unifactor. Words will fail me, so here’s a great example:
Jim recently made card art for Magic: The Gathering’s Secret Lair series, which is such an unexpected yet invigorating collaboration:
Woodring also ran a self-titled zine called JIM. As described on his own site, “Vher-Umst-Pknipfer” was one of the magazine’s most popular images:
A long time ago, I interviewed him in college over email. What sticks out to me is his answer to my closing question:
If you were to advise your younger self, what would you say?
“Aim high, have faith in yourself and don’t take advice that doesn’t sound right. And practice constantly.”
I lost this email for nearly a decade before recently finding it again. I may not be the young artist I was back then, but Jim’s response reminds me how to stay on a reliable path with creative work.
On Work Itself
I’ve been trying to rebuild my creative practice. At the heart of this is the need for deep, uninterrupted space for at least 1-2 hours at a time. The golden days of free time, whether from the open hours of youth or an economy that actually afforded it, feel increasingly out of reach. My focus has been on salvaging that time, and technology is the first place to look.
I remember how stoked I was when I upgraded from an iPhone 5 to the iPhone X. This new monolith would certainly bring me into a new era of prosperous creativity, a sidekick to my creative journey. The slick camera and vibrant, expansive display felt like the fulfillment of Jobs' bicycle-for-the-mind promise. That and you could play Fortnite on it!
But the caveat (maybe an obvious one now) is that social media became the main application for these devices for most people. This fact preceded the iPhone X, of course - but the larger screen was a major jump from its predecessors. Endless scrolling is the inevitable answer to larger screens and faster delivery. We have gone from bicycles of the mind to dopamine cycles that consume the best hours of our days.
The iPhone X dropped in 2017, and it’s 2026 now. While Apple has made real efforts with tools like Screen Time, the problem of endless scrolling apps has yet to be seriously addressed.
We talk a lot about how bad it is for kids (as we should), but what about adults?
What about our aging parents, now on Facebook and addicted to Reels; scrolling pimple videos, cute animals, AI babies that look like the world’s authoritarians?
Looking back, I’ve noticed my average daily screen time has increased over the last three years. I wondered - will it continue to increase?
Will companies like Meta continue to develop ways to make their services demand more of our precious lifespan?
(yes)
Most of us have an addiction we can acknowledge but have a hard time changing.
I’m in awe of creators I consider mentors and the benchmarks they have set. Hayao Miyazaki doesn’t have a smartphone or a laptop. While some computers were used in his later films, the work still starts on paper. His take on AI is well known at this point, but what stays with me is his notion that AI's use is tied to humanity’s lack of faith in itself.
Wait, what was that advice from Uncle Jim from before?
“Aim high, have faith in yourself and don’t take advice that doesn’t sound right. And practice constantly.”
Oh, yeah.
For now, I’m stuck on a phone plan that won’t let me switch to a dumb phone, and I still need authentication tools for the job that support my family. So I’ve leaned on Screen Zen and its accompanying hardware, the Halo, for blocking my access to social media in my workspace. Culling distraction and getting back to the stuff I actually care about, sans algorithmic influence, is at the heart of where I’m heading.
What’s something you’ve had to get ruthless about protecting? Was it time, attention, space, or something else? Curious what that looks like for other people.