Anti-*: The Things We Do But Not All The Way
I was reading Chase McCoy’s article “Antibuildings” where he cites Wikipedia’s entry on the term “Antilibrary” which points to another entry about the Japanese concept of Tsundoku, all of which deal with this idea of things we do with intention but that never make it to fruition.
Antilibraries are the books we buy but never read.
Antibuildings the architect’s version of sketches and plans drafted but buildings never made.
It got me thinking about the stuff I’ve started with intention but never brought to fruition — my own anti-*’s.
To name a few:
- Antidomains: the domains I bought and had big plans for, but they never progressed beyond being parked at my registrar. (Zach Leatherman recently made a list kinda like this, if you haven’t seen it.)
- Antiwebsites: the sites I was gonna make, but never shipped.
- Antilayers: the Photoshop, Sketch, or Figma designs I painstakingly crafted to the level of “completeness”, but then never began building with code.
- Anticode: the changes I made that functioned to the level of being usable and shippable, but then I never could pull the trigger on ‘em.
- Antiposts: (also known as “drafts”, lol) all those blog posts I poured time and energy into researching, writing, and editing, but never could take all the way to “published”.
- Antitweets: all the Tweets/Toots/Skeets I meticulously crafted as witty comebacks or sarcastic quips, but then never posted (honestly, probably for the better).
And last, but certainly not least — in fact, probably grandest of them all:
- Antitabs: all the browser tabs of articles, videos, recipes, and other good things I collected and was going to read, watch, bake, etc. but never did.
