Andy Oliver

Within just a few years of the end of world war two, with our newfound wealth and joie de vivre at having survived that shit, we built scores of movable bridges from the mainland to the beaches of Sunny Florida™️. Now we can't really afford to replace or even maintain the the ones we have. We homo sapiens are always trying to fight nature. Even the most basic, primitive human activity takes what nature placed in one spot and moves it around—digs it up here, cuts it down there, piles it up s...

Even though I won't really be able to claim to have been married to you for 18 years anymore, at least not until I'm 60 years old or so... nonetheless the traditional gift for the eighteenth anniversary is porcelain. Kintsugi is, it's kind of corny to say, the JaPaNeSe ArT oF repairing broken pottery with bright, metallic glue. But, like all this "Japanese art of xyz" stuff, it has a philosophical component. The breakage of the object, and the repair, is part of its history and is interesting...

In a previous post I noted that, as I’ve grown up, I’ve become more comfortable in the understanding that art is usually more than pretty pictures—the implication being that, to date, I’ve focused on just the pretty pictures in my own work. But as I’ve been writing something around a series of pictures I took at a bridge some time ago, I realized that often I would indeed have these bigger-picture thoughts in mind as I snapped my pretty pictures. It’s just that I would discount those thoughts, ...

I used to wonder why someone can't just make pretty pictures and be an appreciated artist. It does happen, but it seems that more often one needs to have a body of work with clear themes. (Clarity of theme can be pretty questionable given some artsy doublespeak I’ve read rivaling in nonsense much of the corporate doublespeak I’ve been subjected to in the business world.) But anyway, these themes are often not technical like studies of composition or color, but rather they have to explore somethi...

In which the photographer purposefully limits himself to minimal equipment while hunting the Aurora Borealis in Tromsø, Norway. In January 2015 I took a trip to the city of Tromsø, above the Arctic Circle in Norway. It is known as an excellent place to score an Aurora sighting and caters to quite a few tourists year round. (I totally recommend it, by the way.) I had just bought myself a Fuji X100T, she and I were still in the honeymoon phase, and I was feeling a little nervous about packing t...

Or am I just another whiny Peter Gibbons from Office Space? I am notably not in touch with my emotions, deep motivations, and similarly abstract parts of my mental and spiritual being, so this is an unsurprisingly difficult question for me to answer. As I try to figure out what the actual heck my deal is and why I often feel so uncomfortable in my own skin, my latest thought, which has been brewing for some time now, is that perhaps I'm simply not suited to my lifestyle of regular, daily work d...

Donald Hoffman used the Australian jewel beetle as an example of how our senses and even our whole perceptual apparatus are really just a user interface over a universe that we can have no understanding of. I mean, clearly. Look how confused those beetles are as they nearly go extinct making love to beautiful, shiny glass bottles instead of other beetles. But that got me thinking. What about oral sex? Or pornography? Or simply wearing a condom? People do all sorts of things for fun that are n...

Famous economist the Right Honourable John Maynard Keynes predicted that we would all be working three days a week by now. He did not predict the top-turd-in-the-toilet mentality that the human mind finds so effortlessly natural and which causes many of us to race, or push, our fellow humans to the bottom in an attempt to win some employer's fleeting favor. Some day I'll write up a whole thing on my theories on why this is. And hopefully someone will tell me where this has already been studied...

I've only fairly recently become aware of the work of Cuban-American artist and printmaker Emilio Sánchez through the stamps the USPS put out last year. But I'm all-in. If you know my work, you'll know why. And that's where I want to go with this. My mother was a big fan of Georgia O'Keefe—to the extent that she painted a replica of one of her skull paintings on a homemade cabinet—and while researching this post I was reminded that, as a child, my favorite works of hers were the New York Cit...

Here's why I think NFTs won't last more than maybe fifteen years. NFTs use the all-the-rage blockchain concept as a way of ensuring scarcity in a digital world. Just like how one bitcoin belongs to one person, even if you copy the code to your own flash drive and carry it around with you, one digital—or digitized—work of art belongs to one person, even if you download it and make it the wallpaper on your Dell Inspiron at work. But all this really presupposes that scarcity truly is what makes a...

I was going through my notes and I see that my first post was about being a stationary digital nomad, if that makes any sense. (It doesn't make sense, but you can probably figure out what I mean.) It seems that in this day and age it warrants a closer look. With lots of us working from home, we're doing a lot of the things that digital nomads would do, without having to quit our jobs. I'm not entirely sure yet if, on balance, this is a good or a bad thing. I can say that, in my line of work a...

I was reading an article a few weeks ago -- probably a few months ago at this point -- explaining to the layperson how it might be possible to compare the economic damage due to stay-at-home orders against the loss of life that could occur if people continue their daily routines. Pretty quickly the discussion comes to the fact that this disease disproportionally impacts the elderly and infirm, which then gets us thinking about how to value individual lives as opposed to lifetime lived or lifeti...

This post was inspired by a conversation between a couple people on Facebook beneath this image: Without linking directly to the conversation, essentially the original poster said the usual thing about the mainstream media manipulating reports and presenting them in a way to warp real events. The solution presented was, of course, to "do one's own research." As you may guess, this person leans conservative and the post was made in the context of unrest regarding police brutality and racism in...

Do not attribute to malice what can be attributed to anything else. We've all heard that before. Though many of us have heard it as "... what can be attributed to stupidity," I find anything else to be more accurate and certainly better for my mental health. But as I think about it, there is more to the story. Context is critical to the application of this maxim. This saying is a way for one to interpret the world for oneself: If someone cuts you off in traffic, assume they didn't see you. ...

I guess esolangs, esoteric programming languages, are my thing. Or one of my things. I was particularly delighted by this line about a particular esolang called Whitespace from this article: Whitespace (2003) uses only tab, space, and return. In Whitespace, commands are multicoded as what is normally read as their absence. These characters are treated interchangeably by C and C-derived languages, meaning Whitespace programs can be embedded between words in these programs, creating polyglot pr...

I just like this idea. Give this software an image and it finds a prime number that can represent it in ASCII art. Like so: 77777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777777 77777777777777777777777777777777779888388897777777777777777777777777777777777 77777777777777777777777779111111111111111111111111197777777777777777777777777 77777777777777777777711111111111111111111111111111111111777777777777777777777 777777777777777779111111111111111111111111111111111111111119777...

I'm talking about the boring office park cubicle farm conference room meeting that we all hate. So why do they exist if everyone, at least the rank-and-file, seem to hate them? I have a theory. When you get to a certain point in your career, your job ends up being little more than forwarding emails or firing off incomplete, one-line responses to the well-thought-out emails of your staff. I'm sure you've gotten those. You ask your boss two questions and get something resembling an answer to on...

This Listed platform might also be useful to serve as an idea and project log. In a way, I can pretty much just set some of my personal notes to publish on Listed, with only some minor additional context provided for the reader. So here goes... You may or may not know that there are satellites orbiting the earth carrying amateur radio equipment, allowing people to make contacts across much larger distances than they normally would be able to. Working these satellites is fun because it is a li...

I don't believe I'm the first one to notice this, but the longer the email signature the lower on the totem pole the employee. To wit: My employer's CEO signs most emails with a single letter. ...

So, this is clearly not my actual first post, but I'm starting a new project where I keep the internet informed about my progress toward financial independence and freedom to do with my time what I will. I hope that this project will keep me on track, if at least to not embarrass myself before the entirety of the internet. Entirety is probably a bit of a stretch. I'm not even sure if more than one person will read this. None the less, I hope to explore both the whys and the hows of becoming a ...

At least what you do means something. I had someone tell me that, partly to compare themselves to me (in a purposefully unflattering manner for themselves) and partly to make me feel better -- to make me feel more fulfilled and less stressed, trapped, and stagnant. But it got me thinking. So, what I do does mean something. I design a significant part of major infrastructure projects that will last for many years. People will be driving over them, safely, on their way to vacations or work or...

I thought it would be cute to use FIGlet for some of my notes. So this is just a test. Let's see how it looks exported to Listed... ___ ___ ___ / /\ ___ / /\ / /\ ___ / /:/_ / /\ / /:/_ / /:/_ / /\ / /:/ /\ / /:/ / /:/ /\ ___ ___ / /:/ /\ / /:/ / /:/ /:/ /__/::\ / /:/_/::\ /__/\ / /\...