Present Imperfect

I want a "Get hyphy" one.

May 26, 2006

Last month, my boss introduced me to my new favorite Dashboard widget, Oblique, which digitally recreates the Brian Eno/Peter Schmidt Oblique Strategies card deck. Click the widget and the card turns over to reveal a new strategy. You can’t control the random distribution of the strategies, but you can choose which edition you want to pull from and how long each card stays turned over. This comes in handy for taking screenshots of particularly amusing strategies. Case in point: the very first one I turned over today.

If you’re unfamiliar with the original deck, The Oblique Strategies website offers a brief history:

The deck itself had its origins in the discovery by Brian Eno that both he and his friend [painter] Peter Schmidt...tended to keep a set of basic working principles which guided them through the kinds of moments of pressure — either working through a heavy painting session or watching the clock tick while you’re running up a big buck studio bill. Both Schmidt and Eno realized that the pressures of time tended to steer them away from the ways of thinking they found most productive when the pressure was off. The Strategies were, then, a way to remind themselves of those habits of thinking — to jog the mind.

Writer’s block isn’t an option for me at work, thanks both to looming deadlines and basic professional courtesy, but sometimes it can be awfully hard just to get started. I’m a great believer in the power of digression, however, and the Oblique widget works like a charm in that department. Amazing what your brain gets up to when you’re not looking. Sometimes it just needs to be caught in the act.