I saw a retweet a few weeks ago where this designer who was not getting paid for his work replaced a gym’s website with a disclaimer saying they were deadbeats. One commenter mentioned that he should watch this video called Fuck You Pay Me. I watched that video.

The guy in the video also wrote a short book called Design is a Job. I got the PDF version and read it on my screen. Reading on my screen was not a pleasant experience. I’m tempted to buy a tablet, but I have a big stack of library books to get through … if I do that maybe I’ll spend $300 for a tablet so I can read more books.

The book is easy to read and is very straightforward. The gist is you need to be professional from start to finish. Do the proper research, legwork, present, sell your work, protect yourself, value your work, etc. All stuff we know, but avoid cause it’s not fun. I picked up a few reminders that a lot of the stuff we moan about could be prevented if we approach the relationship properly in the beginning.

Nice refresher. I probably never want to run a traditional design studio.

I am going to go on a reading rampage. Since I rarely remember anything that I’ve read I will use this space to keep notes.

Found All Quiet on the Western Front in the sidewalk book box that appears sporadically in front of different homes with different books.

WWI. From a young German soldier’s perspective. I suppose it was important when it was written because maybe soldiers never said how awful war is, and everyone who didn’t go to war thought it was all fun and games? The narrator tells about the sawtooth lifestyle of the soldier; extreme stress of combat, lulls in fighting and downtime with his pals. There is a funny passage in the very beginning about how important taking a good shit is for them. I think this happens to every person as they get older. Incidentally I read most of this book in the bathroom.

I well remember how embarrassed we were as recruits in barracks when we had to use the general latrine. There were no doors and twenty men sat side by side as in a railway carriage, so that they could be reviewed all at one glance, for soldiers must always be under supervision.

Since then we have learned better than to be shy about such trifling immodesties. In time things far worse than that came easy to us.

Here in the open air though, the business is entirely a pleasure. I no longer understand why we should always have shied at these things before. They are, in fact, just as natural as eating and drinking. We might perhaps have paid no particular attention to them had they not figured so large in our experience, nor been such novelties to our minds—to the old hands they had long been a mere matter of course.

The soldier is on friendlier terms than other men with his stomach and intestines. Three-quarters of his vocabulary is derived from these regions, and they give an intimate flavour to expressions of his greatest joy as well as of his deepest indignation. It is impossible to express oneself in any other way so clearly and pithily. Our families and our teachers will be shocked when we go home, but here it is the universal language.

Enforced publicity has in our eyes restored the character of complete innocence to all these things. More than that, they are so much a matter of course that their comfortable performance is fully as much enjoyed as the playing of a safe top running flush. Not for nothing was the word “latrine-rumour” invented; these places are the regimental gossip-shop and common-rooms.

We feel ourselves for the time being better off than in any palatial white-tiled “convenience.” There it can only be hygienic; here it is beautiful.