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This kind of goes hand in hand with the last one. Brian Eno made Oblique Strategies with Peter Schmidt in the 70s. It’s a deck of cards where each card has a vague phrase or aphorism on it, intended to be used while trying to make a decision creatively. But now it’s online and in an app so I use them any chance I get. Not just in creative situations. Pretty much any decision. I usually draw three.
Related Recs
a card deck of abstract prompts to stir creativity
You can access them online here: https://stoney.sb.org/eno/oblique.html
Jan 25, 2025
not sure who recommended this but it’s so good i look at it every day. it’s a really good creative guide when you’re feeling stuck. one day i got “you can only draw one dot at a time” so i spent a solid hour dotting this. very fun! very interesting prompts! and brian eno yay!
Feb 6, 2025
Here to Rec this again, or The Right to Write also by Julia Cameron. It doesn’t necessarily help with line actual writing tips, but I found it helped my writing and creative practice in general by beginning to consider my entire life as a whole as part of it. What we write comes from how we live, what we see, how we think. And this helped me with that! It comes in from an “Artist’s block“ perspective, and I was worried it wouldn’t work because I wasn’t at all blocked, but I still found it really useful and interesting to discover the ways that maybe I was blocked and hadnt realised. It’s also just a really good tool to ensure commitment to craft, which i think is the hardest and most important thing in creating. If you do it a lot, consistently, you will improve, always.
Apr 27, 2024
Top Recs from @curtis
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If your band name doesn’t have a The in it, I don’t even know what to tell you.
Aug 17, 2023
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Randonautica is an app that generates a “quantumly random” point on a map which you go to. You’re supposed to set an intention, however vague you want, while it generates the point and see what you discover with regards to that intention on the way to the point and then at the point itself. Then you can set another point from the first point and keep this process going as long as you want. I guess it was a thing on TikTok for a while but I swear it isn’t corny. I did it by myself out of curiosity and had a really crazy experience that’s too complicated to explain. No one I told seemed phased by it until I forced my friends to do it when we were in London and we had an equally crazy experience. I know it’s annoying that I’m not giving details but trust me, it’s too complicated to explain. But we found something so related to our intention that kinda freaked out. I love the idea of playing with reality, becoming hyper-aware of your environment, and seeing what’s around you in a different light. Even beyond the eerie metaphysical element, it’s a really interesting way to explore your environment.
Aug 17, 2023
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Especially late at night, but it works during the day too. I think because you’re not on the move but you’re also not at a destination or at home. It’s kind of like the ultimate in-between state. There’s something very romantic about it to me, and I like other “in-between” settings for the same reason, like airports and rest stops. I think it’s because your thoughts appear more naked to you when you don’t have something familiar around you to latch on to. And you also aren’t in a position to take any kind of action at the present moment, so it’s easier to confront your thoughts. There’s a book called Non-Places: An Introduction to Super-Modernity by Marc Augé that kinda speaks on this. So I’ll recommend that too.
Aug 17, 2023