Standing inside the machine
Wooden cogs in a windmill spinning fast with a staircase in the background
I was in the Netherlands to deliver a keynote at the User Needs First conference. While I was there I visited the Zaanse Schans open air museum. Windmills and other industrial buildings were transported and reconstructed there in the 60’s and 70’s. There’s also a museum of industry, mostly chocolate and biscuits.
Compared to most preserved windmills in the UK, many of the windmills at Zaanse Schans actually work and it was a very windy day. I’ve been in power stations and factories, but I’m not sure I’ve ever had the feeling of being inside a machine. Big, but you can still walk about it at human scale.
It’s just jogged a memory of The Mouse Mill episode of Bagpuss where the mice pretend to make a biscuit factory. The reveal being that there is only one biscuit and it just goes round and around. For some reason that really stuck with me as a kid.
I’ve been going all in on Obsidian the past few months. Normally open-source software that is endlessly configureable is a total mess, but with obsidian it feels less like configuring, more like being inside the machine.