In the researching I do I try to beware of my own biases on the subject and what I bring with me that might cause something to be considered less or more favourably.
Confirmation bias is one that I’m extra cautious about and seems to be one of the easiest to notice once you start looking which isn’t without irony in itself.
We’ve all been there: that meeting where someone mentions some product or service you have known about for quite a while but hasn’t considered in a long time and after the meeting you suddenly start seeing ads for that product or service on social media or elsewhere on the internet thinking that your phone or the meeting software recorded your conversation.
You can easily get a bit paranoid but coming from both a tech and communications/marketing world you know it’s just our brain messing a bit with us. Either the ads were already there and you just weren’t noticing them because they were like elevator muzak to your mind, or in most cases today, you researched (or someone near you) researched something that brings forth that service in a sort-of-speak-of-the-Devil kind of way.
My recent searching has been in several directions as always but two directions that I thought lived on different paths somehow ended up colliding as if they lived on the same spherical planes.
It probably was just a mere coincidence more than it was my brain remembering something very distantly connected.
One of the directions was about some famous artists and great thinkers, like da Vinci and Einstein, and their way of thinking using external tools.
Bonus: I recently was in awe of this quote attributed Einstein but I could not verify it:
“My pencil and I are smarter than I am.”
Writing my first book in December I discovered the value of externalising my thinking and has since been fascinated by different kinds of thought visualisations and mental models.
For some reason all of these fascinations always seems to be rabbit-holes for me where I deep dive into an entirely new universe with their own weirdness and wonders all over that I mostly never looked upon in that light.
This thought probably was a bit struck by my new washing machine sounding like a game-menu-level-selector when you power it on because I got stuck while reading about Leonardo da Vinci and I started pondering who the other “turtles” in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles were named after.
I couldn’t remember what Michaelangelo was known for… But I got distracted as always and ended up reading about Sumerian kings on the list of Sumerian kings which apparently only has one known female monarch on it and that had a reference to [something] Uruk and then I pondered why a name in the earliest known civilisation had a name sounding primitive like Uruk-hai from Lord of the Rings kind of way. It was a “A rose by any other name […]”-moment and my confirmation bias alarm started ringing so I let it go.
The second direction was about cocktails which I really like for both their aesthetics and pocket philosophy. And taste, of course. And any disciple abundant of mechanical gadgets can be certain it’ll catch my attention.
Alcohol in Greenland as well as many places I guess is considered poisonous for you and consumption is portrayed as entirely self-irreverent.
I definitely believe it can be both, especially if you develop bad habits around alcohol during troubling times of your life. It’s deadly if you get to know it as a form of absolutism.
But I also know it can bring good things to life too. Cocktails for me is a way of acknowledging that it can be awesome if respected and cared for. It can show that if you approach it as a process rather than for its result it’ll be very rewarding.
Cocktails don’t even need to have alcohol content in them to be worthwhile. Something I offent get reaffirmed in, and recently by Ivy Mix when she mentioned a friend of hers had published a book called Drink What You Want. Her friend, John deBary, apparently started a brand called Proteau which makes cocktails that are zero-proof, ie. without any alcohol.
Anyway… I started playing with the name/word Mix in a visual way. I wanted to make an animation (which I am not very good at yet but I enjoy trying) with a cocktail getting filled. Researching what MIX in roman letters was I stumbled upon the Sumerian number system and even when searching for the name origin it seemed to be a shorthand of a deity-entity named Michael. Searching further on that I stumbled on a quote that really resonated with me:
“Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.”
Michaelangelo
Either way, I ended up getting consumed by these thoughts and made a logo-like illustration that I might one day use for something.
The tagline is starting to grow on me. It seems to reflect my way of dwelling way too deep into something trivial or nonsensical. 😉
“Snowstorm in a cocktail glass.”
Pierre Minik
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