Sawyer Paul's Blog, page 35
September 17, 2018
Cura, September 18, 2018
Note: The playlist embedded above will always be the most recent playlist and might not match the list below.
Cura is my Spotify mixtape. You can listen to it and subscribe here. I keep it as one playlist so it’s easy to subscribe to. I update it fairly frequently, but I also keep an archive playlist so you don’t have to miss a thing.
I hope you like it. I made it for you.
Here’s the track listing for this week. It’s a 10-song tape of covers.
Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow? - 2011 By Amy Winehouse
Pursuit of Happiness By Lissie
Mona Lisas And Mad Hatters By The Killers
Jealous Guy By Hurray For The Riff Raff
Stand By Me By Florence + The Machine
Kids - Live Sessions Version By Matt Hires
Don’t You Want Me By Bahamas, The Weather Station
The Only Living Boy in New York - Recorded at Spotify Studios NYC By Kishi Bashi
September 16, 2018
Morning Pages, September 17, 2018
I always noticed its heft. Heavy and tank-like, loud and hot. Steamy. Indolent. Lit by the sun. Low-handing pull chords, some stripped loose from disrepair. The ads are old except for a few. Come and learn this over here. Four rows of two seats in the back, leading to a round set of 7 seats at the back. We sat two rows from the back, as a trio took up every seat. All of them with their feet up, comfortably stretched out for exclusivity. My left hand hung over the seat in front of me. Both hands, actually. My head nearly banged against the steel between my wrists. I was bent over, looking down at my shoes, and the steel beneath, discolored from years of spills. I was hung the fuck over, and we were headed to another party.
KSP Handwriting, Sep 2018 custom typeface
The new Microsoft Font Maker is so delightfully simple, it reminds me of Mac apps from the mid-aughts. You type the alphabet, type three sentences, and in less than ten minutes you have a typeface that fairly accurately replicates your handwriting.
I write on my computer screen a lot. I write in little notebooks with a regular pen a lot. And I like to design visual information using a mix of analogue and digital effects. So this kind of app is catnip.
I plan on making several of these, so I’m naming them after the month of their creation. Use it however you like.
September 15, 2018
Morning Pages, September 16, 2018
“Will I even know anyone there?” I asked.
“Of course,” Fourth said. “You’ll know everyone. You get along with everybody. I leave you alone in a room with strangers, and you’re friends with them in ten minutes. You guys have swapped phone numbers and phone number organization methods. It’s annoying.”
“You’re saying I’m annoying,” I said.
“I’m always saying you’re annoying, Hall,” she said. “I say it 24 times a daylike a clock.”
“I’m a good listener,” I said.
“You’re a conman,” she said.
“Con men have to be good listeners,” I said.
September 9, 2018
Cura, September 10, 2018
Note: The playlist embedded above will always be the most recent playlist and might not match the list below.
Cura is my Spotify mixtape. You can listen to it and subscribe here. I keep it as one playlist so it’s easy to subscribe to. I update it fairly frequently, but I also keep an archive playlist so you don’t have to miss a thing.
I hope you like it. I made it for you.
Here’s the track listing for this week. It’s a mixtape of Belle and Sebastian songs.
Women’s Realm By Belle & Sebastian
God Help The Girl By God Help The Girl
Your Cover’s Blown By Belle & Sebastian
I Don’t Love Anyone By Belle & Sebastian
She’s Losing It By Belle & Sebastian
Dress Up in You By Belle & Sebastian
Get Me Away From Here, I’m Dying By Belle & Sebastian
Nobody’s Empire By Belle & Sebastian
Down And Dusky Blonde By God Help The Girl
Like Dylan in the Movies By Belle & Sebastian
September 7, 2018
More Things, September 08, 2018
With the help of an IFTTT recipe that turns what I save to Pocket into a Markdown link, I can easily make a linked list blog post again. Hence, the return of More Things.
Articles are ordered from oldest to newest.
The car century was a mistake. It’s time to move on.
How to Control a Conversation, According to a Dominatrix
Apple Destroyed My Will to Collect Music
Shenmue’s World Is Full Of Wonderful Junk
Signs Your New Friend Is A Literary Grifter
Talking ’80s Wrestling, Sexism, and Stereotypes With GLOW’s Cast and Creators
What We Still Love About Cowboy Bebop, 20 Years Later
The Pointlessness of Unplugging
The Economic Lessons of Star Trek’s Money-Free Society
How To Read More Books — A Lot More
Put your phone in Do Not Disturb mode forever
Fortnite isn’t addicting your kids — it’s just giving them what society won’t
A Good Place: Mr. Carlson’s electronics YouTube makes every problem seem manageable
September 6, 2018
Habitica
I’ll write more, but so far I’m digging this nerdy AF routine RPG thing. Most tracking and task apps give you check marks. Habitica is about giving you more for completing your tasks and being good to yourself than just check marks.
I’ve written about Productive and Streaks, and Habitica is more or less another one in this line. But it also functions as a reminders app. And it gives you gold and XP and there’s eggs and potions and tigers and hats.
Okay, so it’s a little bit wacky. Basically, there are four little areas in the app: Habits, Dailies, Tasks, and Rewards. Habits are things you can notch over and over, either on the positive or negative side. Trying to eat healthy? Give yourself a positive notch every time you do well, and a negative notch for every cheat. The positive notches gives you experience points and gold (more on these later), and the negative notches take away your health. Lose enough health, and your character dies. You can give yourself little boosts whenever you want, but if you give yourself too many in a row, it begins to drain your health and gold. This is probably to stop people from trying to “game” this totally-gameable system too much. It’s a bit like Wii Fit: there were ways to “win” it by not doing every sit-up, but who are you hurting by doing that? You’re supposed to be doing the sit-ups.
Dailies work similarly, except they’re like a recurring task you do once per unit (every day, week, etc). You lose health automatically if you don’t complete a daily. If this sounds stressful, the point of this is to give you just a little boost. You determine the difficulty of a habit/daily/task, and you have to put everything in anyway. The app won’t ever make you do something you haven’t told it you want to do.
So far, the app is just a combination of a task and habit app. That’d be nice enough, actually, but where it really ties in the experience is with rewards. This is the fourth column in the app, and it’s where you answer the question “What am I doing all this for?” We set up tasks and habits for ourselves because this stuff has to get done, sure, but it’s also nice to give yourself a treat for completing a bunch of stuff. Habitica helps you keep track of it. For instance, one of my rewards is “Video Game session.” If I get enough points from completing habits, I can “spend” them on playing some video games. You can also spend your points on in-game pixel art to adorn your little avatar. The stuff is cute, but I like the idea of creating my own rewards.
One thing I didn’t love: there’s no rewards history, so once you’ve “purchased” something, it’s just gone from the list. Your completed tasks only stay in the app’s history for a month (three months if you’re a paying subscriber), so if you really care about seeing your history of tasks, you may still want to use a regular reminders app.
Once you’ve got a good number of items in your Habits/Dailies/Tasks/Rewards list, it may be overwhelming. Thankfully, Habitica uses Tags in order to let you determine the scope of what you’re working on right now. I use GTD-style context tags, such as “Work,” “Morning,” and “Phone.” When I click on one of these tags, it only shows me what’s applicable for that context.
The absolute best part of the app may be the community areas, which give you suggestions for habits, and groups to join in order to get pushed along by other users. This is where the RPG stuff hits hardest, so you may be put off by “Quests” and the like. But you also may really love that. There are also in-app purchases in the form of Gems, which give you extra stuff. If you’re really into this, you can give it money. But you also don’t have to.
This task app still doesn’t do everything. You can’t really use the app offline, so if you have something to add to it, you’ve got to wait until you’re out of the subway. And you can’t add in everything from your regular task app if you have a lot of tasks (it doesn’t do folders, for instance).
Still, it’s the closest thing I’ve found to the perfect execution of a habit-forming/breaking app. Now to just figure out if I can actually break some bad habits and form some good ones. That’s ultimately up to me. No cute little fox can actually do it for me.
September 5, 2018
Weather in my writing
I often neglect weather in my stories. I usually say something like “It’s nice out” and maybe talk about the sun for a sentence of two (if it’s disappearing), but in general weather doesn’t actually exist. It’s strange, because “No Chinook,” “A Record Year for Rainfall,” and “Skypunch” are titles of my books, all weather-based titles, and all have some kind of weather-related incident, but outside of the phenomena, weather doesn’t really factor into my description. This is introspection, caused by looking out the window and seeing a cool cloud formation while thinking about what to write this morning.
My dad always likes talking about the weather. And early suggestions about what to write about often focused on it. I remember him telling me to try writing a story about some frozen hellscape that happened to an otherwise dry part of the planet, and people have to figure it out. He basically predicted “The Day After Tomorrow.” Maybe that did inspire me to write a part of No Chinook, where a weird bit of weather that only happens in Alberta changes the moods of the characters for two chapters. But I remember bristling at the suggestion at the time, thinking, I like to write about relationships, not events. And I still mostly think that, which is why Skypunch probably didn’t work too well. There’s too much plot that isn’t informed by relationships, but by mysterious outside forces I kept vague on purpose. Not everyone can pull of a “mystery box” plot, and I don’t think I can. But I can have people kiss and make that complicated. That’s my wheelhouse. Maybe I should just also remember to have it hail when it happens.
September 2, 2018
Habitica Part 1
I’ll write more, but so far I’m digging this nerdy AF routine RPG.
