This companion piece to this week’s episode. The podcast is the full, unedited, and raw version; this is just the rundown of what we talked about.
You can listen to this episode on Spotify, and Apple Podcasts for audio only.
This one was pre-recorded on a Sunday evening, almost ten at night, tired, with an early train to catch in the morning to a friend’s summer house in Zell am See, which is a lake town south of Salzburg with the Alps standing around it. I had no plan for the episode and it wandered a fair amount before it found the thing I actually wanted to say, so here is the rundown.
The creative day I gave myself. I was supposed to travel today already, and I decided in the morning that I was not feeling it, so I stayed home and made it a creative day instead, mostly working on pixel art for the digital world we are building at Eleven Dunbar, a cozy virtual space where you walk around as an avatar and bump into people, have spontaneous conversations, listen to music together, the kind of accidental encounter that the internet mostly stopped offering. It is a long term project, but the first version is not far off, and I have been doing the art by hand since I started as a thirty-day challenge in April, which has now turned into learning animation, which is genuinely hard because you have to understand how things actually move before it stops looking strange.
Why I still place every pixel by hand. There is AI for pixel art now and it is bad, really bad, and I say that as someone who loves AI and uses it in most of what I do, work and creative alike. The limitation shows up the moment you want something specific, opinionated, yours. Ask for a dwarf, or an elf, or a tree, and you get something, an average pulled out of a statistical collection of how those things tend to look, and what you cannot get is the custom, tailored, handcrafted result where every decision was made by a person on purpose. I notice the same thing with software, having built plenty of it before any of this existed, because you can feel the difference in the whole experience, the usability, the fonts, the colours, not just the code.
The odd thing about who gets angry about this. Substack recently introduced a check that shows how much of a piece was written with AI, and set aside the obvious problem that the tool doing the checking is itself an AI that you can bypass, what interests me is who reaches for the pitchfork. The same writers running the witch hunt over AI text will happily put AI images in their fully human-written articles, without thinking much about the millions of handcrafted images by actual artists those were built on. Meanwhile, software engineers barely blink, and I remember why: as a software engineer, it was completely normal to look up how someone else solved a thing and take it, an open market where everyone was glad to pass code along.
Dwarfs and Elfs. This came to me one day while I was just lying there, wondering what a playful archetype might be for the kind of creativity we are after, and it has become the way we talk about it now. The dwarf is the being who is superb at engineering, problem solving, discipline, working extremely hard and achieving a great deal, and who looks at what he has built and still feels a bit empty. The elf is the one in tune with nature, who listens for what is trying to be created through them, and who works through play, connection, and curiosity. Rick Rubin has written about this from the artist’s side, and Paul McCartney is the obvious example, waking up one morning with the melody of Yesterday already there, not thought through, just present. Both modes matter, and the dwarf is not the villain, but there is a heavy overemphasis on him in how most of us were raised and educated, and remembering the elf takes some deliberate effort.
If you recognised yourself in this piece, you are not the only one. A lot of us get very good at achieving, performing, and solving problems for everyone else, and slowly lose track of our own voice along the way.
Eleven Dunbar is a private community of founders, dreamers, builders and artists who want to find that inner voice again, make real friendships, and bring their ideas into the world without doing it all alone.
Members meet weekly to create alongside each other, and across a season there are visiting artists, shared projects, small group conversations, and people who notice when you go quiet.
The community is capped at 150.
The Dwelf-O-Meter. Justin and I have been building a small quiz around this, eleven questions, and it gives you a score for how much elf and how much dwarf is in you right now, which we are making for the new programme starting mid August where members get paired with each other. You can try the free quiz as well: https://www.elevendunbar.com/dwarf-elf
A matcha latte I did not feel bad about paying for. I live in the seventeenth district in Vienna, which is where I grew up. Twenty years ago there was very little here in the way of good places, so this afternoon I walked five minutes to a corner spot I had only just noticed, four years old, five stars, five hundred reviews. It was magical in a way that reminded me of a tiny coffee place in Kyoto where the owner played vinyl, and every movement he made was slow and deliberate and full of care. Money is something I still have to watch, since we make revenue but not yet enough for a proper salary, and yet I felt nothing but good about paying for that organic matcha with oat milk, because when I can feel the owners in what they have made, when there is almost no separation left between the person and the thing, paying is simply a way of saying thank you for putting yourself out there and letting me be inside your creation for a few minutes.
The bike mechanic who is a Buddha. My bike broke this weekend, and I failed to fix it, and the shop I tried nearby had that atmosphere where you can tell the man wants you out of the store as quickly as possible, which made me think about the one I usually go to in the seventh district, where the owner is a magician, a literal artist with a bicycle. Sometimes you walk in, and he has his headphones on and is completely in the zone, and he will glance at your bike and just fix a small thing for free, and I go there partly to watch him, because seeing a person fully in their own nature is one of the better things available to a person. That is where I finally understood the line about everything being Buddha, not as a phrase but as a fact: that a thing entirely in its own natural way of being already is that, and the work is only remembering it.
Why every logo looks the same now. Most company logos have become so clean and designerish that they have lost all personality, and websites have gone the same way, following the same patterns for perfectly good reasons, because those patterns convert, and the cost is that we have quietly traded away the plurality of human expression, the playfulness, the elfness of things. You can start from what you imagine other people will like, research it, consult your way into it, and end up with something oddly lifeless, or you can start from pure expression and let the difference be the point.
The invitation. Think about the last time you felt properly alive, and be specific about it, what age you were, where you were, what you were doing, the kind of aliveness that is unbound and unfiltered and a bit childish rather than produced or planned. Then ask where in your life you can give yourself fully like that again, because the only real goal in making anything is to give it everything you have, release it, and move on to the next thing.
Thanks for reading - you can support my work by leaving a comment or sharing it.
