a little gecko blog

A little jaunt around the curve of hyper space called the internet coughed up this wonderful little Nuzizo wildbit from MP Daily Fix .

100 ways to jump start an idea:

In our travels and travails of internet exploring, we waste alot of time looking for the really AweSome, Fabulous, Interesting, Useful websites and blogs than can be found.

As it always happens, walking across a completely flat plowed field, one usually stumbles, and trips over the only thing in the field that could have tripped you. In our case today, we tripped over Suite 101 Googley-Moogley! Forget your blog aggregators and favorites lists, your granny’s advice and your pastors profundities. Even your favorite teacher never affected you like this place. You will get so lost that you may not find your way back to us here at Jing Jok!

Enjoy. Take a tour of this marvelous tome of internet wisdom. You might even learn a thing or three.

We hunt and we hunt. The journey is fierce and the rewards are “treasure!” This item may save your bacon today.

The Oblique Strategies evolved from me being in a number of working situations when the panic of the situation - particularly in studios - tended to make me quickly forget that there were others ways of working and that there were tangential ways of attacking problems that were in many senses more interesting than the direct head-on approach. If you’re in a panic, you tend to take the head-on approach because it seems to be the one that’s going to yield the best results Of course, that often isn’t the case - it’s just the most obvious and - apparently - reliable method. The function of the Oblique Strategy was, initially, to serve as a series of prompts which said, “Don’t forget that you could adopt *this* attitude,” or “Don’t forget you could adopt *that* attitude.”

The first Oblique Strategy said “Honour thy error as a hidden intention.” And, in fact, Peter’s first Oblique Strategy - done quite independently and before either of us had become conscious that the other was doing that - was …I think it was “Was it really a mistake?” which was,of course, much the same kind of message. Well, I collected about fifteen or twenty of these and then I put them onto cards. At the same time, Peter had been keeping a little book of messages to himself as regards painting, and he’d kept those in a notebook. We were both very surprised to find the other not only using a similar system but also many of the messages being absolutely overlapping, you know…there was a complete correspondence between the messages. So subsequently we decided to try to work out a way of making that available to other people, which we did; we published them as a pack of cards, and they’re now used by quite a lot of different people, I think.
Brian Eno,
interview with Charles Amirkhanian,
KPFA-FM Berkeley, 2/1/80