Reading, reconsidered
Two halves of the same thought about reading. First, a melancholy one: Juan used to walk into a bookstore with a shine in his eyes, hunting the hidden gem, and lately the thrill is gone, because information has become redundant. Any self-help book gives you roughly what all the others do; browsing feels like working a mine already dug out for a hundred years, one small find after a long search. The tool that filters the redundancy is now ChatGPT, which recommends by what you've already read, so what still justifies a book is the timeless one. Second, a hopeful one: a reading mode where each comic panel animates as your eyes pass over it, with sounds in the periphery, delivered as an overlay through AR glasses, the natural evolution of the illustrated book. Its real value is low-barrier revival, cheap on-demand animation could bring back the unread Disney comics of the 1920s and let you live them as the author wrote them, without the filters every adaptation adds.
// trace: where this idea came from
- ↳ video diary @ 19:50 (entraba a la librería con brillo en los ojos, qué gema voy a encontrar)
- ↳ video diary @ 22:45 (como ir a una mina explotada por 100 años, una sola cosita tras mucho buscar)
- ↳ video diary @ 31:35 (un modo de lectura donde cada cuadrito se anima mientras lo lees)
- ↳ Entry 248-1: A mine of ore (la misma imagen de la mina, aquí la librería agotada)
Two halves of one thought about reading. The first is melancholy. Juan used to walk into a bookstore with a shine in his eyes, that quiero-comerme-el-mundo feeling, wondering what hidden gem he’d find today ▸ 19:50. Lately the thrill is thinner: he still believes a book can give you a lot, but suspects it won’t give him as much as he hopes ▸ 20:47. The reason is redundancy. Grab a self-help book and you’ll meet almost exactly what every other self-help book says; browsing has become like working a mine already dug out for a hundred years, where you find one small thing after a long search ▸ 22:45. The filter that cuts the redundancy is now ChatGPT: tell it what you’ve read and want, and it points you past the sameness ▸ 24:35. What still earns a book is being timeless.
la librería dejó de brillar; quizá el cómic que se anima la reviva →
The second half is hopeful, and it’s about his favorite shelf, comics. Imagine a reading mode where each panel animates as your eyes pass over it, a mono screaming in the jungle, a character dying, with little sounds in the periphery, delivered as an overlay through AR glasses ▸ 31:35. Not a movie, he insists, because reading is stimulating in a way watching isn’t; it’s the natural next step of the illustrated book, words to panels to living panels ▸ 33:12. The real prize is low-barrier revival. When on-demand animation gets cheap enough, you could bring back the unread Disney comics of the 1920s and live them as the author actually wrote them, stripped of the interpretation every later adaptation layers on ▸ 36:45. The browse died of redundancy; maybe the page comes back alive…