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For a brief moment in time I was a writer. I was not exceptional at it, but good enough to have columns in magazines and newspapers, alongside my own personal blog which I loved. This phase mostly unfolded during my undergraduate years in architecture, a period that also sparked an enduring obsession with “getting the title of the project right”. Whether it was a design, a news piece, or the column itself, the name had to resonate. 

It’s been several months since "Weekend Gems" (the title of this semideveloped blog) started feeling a bit, well, off. Nowadays I am lucky enough to be reading interesting things every day all day, and not restrict myself to these two sacred days of relaxation and freedom. Plus I don’t think "gems" is really the appropriate word for my small findings anymore. Instead of prepping my readers to come with the expectation they will find something valuable as-is, I want to retain this space for the seemingly useless staff, questions that go forever unanswered, or ideas that I stumble on during my research but are not here to be resolved any time soon. As the Valley would say, things that are born to be “parked”. So, without any further ado, here is the new title of this blog:

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Still Chewing Against All Slop

(or SCAAS)

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The name is, admittedly, horrible. When abbreviated, it sounds nothing like a blog, and its full name is simply too long; one more syllable than Red Hot Chilli Peppers but one short of Keeping Up With The Kardashians. I cannot imagine what the midpoint of these two looks like. Either way, it works and the future is bright for this little corner of the internet with the bad name.

My mom is restless, a hyper energetic mind and body who functions at speeds unbeknownst to humankind (she is also iconic, super smart and loving). When I was young and whenever we would have dinner at home, she wouldn’t wait a second before she started gathering plates and calling the dinner over—so much so that one day she grabbed my plate before I was even done with my food, prompting my dad to say “wait, she is still chewing”. 

You get the point. The speed with which we are called to consume unprecedented volumes of information oftentimes leaves no time for processing. I just recently started valuing the “taking your time to do things properly” notion, mostly because of a new found love for meditation and a decisive decrease of my daily caffeine intake. Most people I look up to as if they are mini gods all exhibit this skill: the ability to stick to their slow-paced processes even if they are in the middle of what feels like a chaotic Formula 1 race. They manage to claim space for their thoughts despite the entire world pulling their plate while yelling “time’s up”. The people I admire claim time against all odds.

During the myspace age—an awful lot moons ago—people were more or less earnest about the things they created and put out there for the world to see. Whether that was the music one recorded in their garage, or the drawings one did during spring break, ideas were vibrating. In fact, some were so full of life that they could make you fall in love with their author (it happened to me and way more times than I’d like to admit). In retrospect, I do not think that that was the case because these people were some sort of ubermensch, but because there was not really an alternative; there was no other way to “do” creativity.

Today we have slop. Now, slop is a long story of, as a friend eloquently said, the result of externalizing the cost of mastering anything. It’s also not a one-sided story, and prompts a lot of questions around what is anything, really. Is the amount of effort what makes art good? Do you need to say something deep in order to make good art? The very history of art is the product of battling with these questions, to which I certainly don’t have the answer. That’s precisely why I sense I will be writing about it here. 

However, I am not interested in pretending I am impartial: I do not like slop. I think it’s junk, and I think we are drowning in it. Whenever its logic breaks, I enjoy watching the downfall (see Willy’s Chocolate Experience). Other times, it makes me super skeptical and offers the chance for beautiful conversations with friends (see the Ghibli apocalypse). In any case, I think it’s not new, and certainly not an ahistorical phenomenon which is why I sense I can name the exact reason I dislike slop.

It’s the speed. 

I have spent a good chunk of my life optimizing things for the digital world and genuinely enjoying doing so. Algorithms have their own sense of justice and structure, and engineering one’s way through it can be highly stimulating. To build things that float better and move faster in the digital is synonymous with trying to listen and cater to what we consider authentic and useful on an intersubjective level (most of the times). So, obviously, there is a decent dose of heterodefinition at play: you build a body of work you (hopefully) believe in, but in order for more people to see it, you need to dress it up in a way that it stands out. The body is yours, but the dress up is dictated by the outside world and how the latter fundamentally works.

All of that is fine and, in certain cases, I think it’s also a catalyst for more creative things to come to the fore. But there comes a point where you need to say things just so they can just exist, unbothered, in the realm of the internet. No polishing, no optimizing, no improving. Just unresolved ideas, hypotheses that go nowhere and bad questions (they exist and they are great)—all in non-optimized wording, with occasional typos and syntax errors. 

So, that leaves me with still chewing against all slop; kind of annoyed someone is taking my plate while I am still eating, but also finding comfort in the fact I am finally able to claim the space I can take my time to wrestle with unresolved ideas, while simultaneously resisting the imposed acceleration of it all. This piece, and the title change, are all just elaborate ways to say the following: Rushing things simply does not take me anywhere exciting anymore.

So I will just stop doing it until it does.

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I will also give substack a chance, so if you’re already there, I’d love to connect!

Image picked randomly but shot by my brilliant friend Ariadne Papanastasiou.

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