I spoke about cards at Papercamp 3 a little over a week ago. And I saw Tom Abba for the first time in person, since, perhaps, he and Duncan talked at the first card-based meetup I hosted in 2013. Which was nice.
Then I repeated the talk at Friday’s monthly Cardstock online meetup. As usual, we recorded it, and you can watch it here:
It was a talk about the talk, in a way. I realised in bringing the slides together that I hadn’t really given a talk about cards in about nine years. There are not that many conferences that would call for a talk about cards, of course.
Indeed (and this was some of the pub-discussion afterwards) there are many fewer conferences around in the UK today which aren’t highly specialised in some way.
Part of the delight of conferences back in the last noughts/early teens was that there was scope to take an oblique path through a theme or topic, and invite a wide spectrum of different speakers to play with it in a way that made for a fully enlightening experience for everyone involved; attendees, speakers and the hosts themselves. You would find more meaning in the gaps in between, as you made sense of a wider world together. The cracks were where the light got in.
Anyway, whilst I was full of new knowledge about cards, finding a way to bring it together in something that wasn’t a listicle was my key aim (and I should have thought about it before submitting the talk title, perhaps…). As always, I’m happy with it to a certain extent, but can spot better ways to tell the story already.
The key thing for me, I think, is that working external with lots of continual moving, reordered information allows us to discover new ideas for ourselves, or in conversation with others. Much like the conferences above, this is where the light gets in. The more of that this kind of work disappears behind screens, and indeed into the background supporting services of LLMs and the like, the more distance there is between the brain and the material it is best at working with.
…and now it sounds like I’m writing a different talk already. Let’s see if I can get this one out sooner than nine years from now.
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