Sawyer Paul's Blog, page 36
September 1, 2018
Morning Pages, September 2, 2018
The plants draped over the take from the balcony, firing with the cutlery, dangerously close to the extra sauce that arrived unrequested. For another table, perhaps. The hadn’t refilled our waters. The server may have left for another shift at another café, our table taken over by a new man, and he’s forgotten that he now has a table out of section. We’ve been abandoned and the plants are closing in.
Do wethink these parents knew one another or the babies sniffed each other as theypassed and now everybody has to be friends?
My babyis a ten. Yours is less than that. We’re going, charles.
You neversee green cars, especially like green m&m green. This SUV threw me and Ilost my concentration for ten minutes. It was the kind of green they teachchildren in order to know the difference.
And thena man on a scooter passed, being pulled by two large sheepdogs. It was the kindof sight that makes you really question things, like why aren’t more peopleusing their dogs to sled them around town on scooters? Has the mayor beennotified of this practice? We need to have resources for this obvious andamazing new form of transport. Or was this bad? Was he just an asshole formaking his large and furred dogs work on such a warm day for the benefit of hisclever laziness? Should we have this outlawed? Either arrest him or put him incharge of an urban transport committee. Anything in between won’t do.
So yes,people pass by you when you’re drinking expensive coffee. That’s the good part.They pass, you get a brief glimpse into their life, and you fill in the rest.How you fill it in is the cream of this operation. This is how I know I’meither creative or insane: every life I fill in is more interesting than myown.
Just keep writing. This is the part where I’ve run out of ideas but I’ve placed myself in a place with no internet and no way out for a few minutes, so I’ve got to just keep going. I could read but I’m not into what I’m reading right now. I’ll finish it out of obligation but not yet. This is rambling. I’ll delete this later. It doesn’t matter, and I probably won’t even post it on my blog that nobody reads, except that one guy in the Netherlands according to google analytics. How’s it going, Netherlands guy? Anyways, I gave myself until my wife comes back from the grocery store. She let me sit outside with the other men in the food court. This is just how it is. I do feel a little boyfriend benched, but I’ll take it. Sometimes you just take the easy thing because you’re warm and tired. However, it’s best to keep some track of these things so it doesn’t become a pattern. I don’t always want to be boyfriend benched. I want to help. I want to contribute. I want to be there. I want to learn how to write without saying I over and over. Thanks, Pro Writing Aid. You helped me recognize a bad habit. You were worth every penny.
August 30, 2018
Morning Pages, August 31, 2018
I am a man, but I don’t understand men very much. I write mostly about women, because that’s more where I’m comfortable and interested. The men in my books tend to be cyphers and cameras to more interesting characters. But I should try to write from a male perspective more often. Here’s one attempt, while thinking about men “staying within the lines” while also being predatory.
I listen to music and I look at the pretty girls on the subway. Two to three seconds. Any more is awkward for everyone. I want to look. Seeing someone pretty in the morning is uplifting. I don’t want to make anyone uncomfortable, and the old advice of seven seconds is too long today. That’s a metric that’s definitely taken a blow since I learned it. Milk is about the same price as it was when I was a kid, but back then, you were told seven seconds was okay. No harm done under seven seconds. But today it’s three at best. It feels good to look. I don’t mean anything by it. I might remember them forever or they could be forgotten moments after I leave the train. It isn’t up to me. I can’t help what my mind decides to keep. I can’t help what my eyes decide to fix on. But I can control how long. And I’ll follow the rules. If it’s seven, I’ll look for seven. If it’s three, I’ll look for three. I’ll do what I can. I’ll take what I can. What I get is diminished all the time.
August 28, 2018
Cura, August 29, 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:
Dirty Dirty By Charlotte Cardin
Pretty Sexual By Dreamgirl
Hush By Magic City Hippies
Get Closer By Life in Film
I Like You So Much Better When You`re Naked By Ida Maria
Pleaser By Wallows
Wavy Gravy By Okey Dokey
Forget Me By Born Ruffians
afraid of me By gobbinjr
I Love You So By The Walters
August 24, 2018
Packing up the ol’ emulator
Late last year, I decided to try putting together an emulator on my PC. I downloaded the right software (retroarch), and some roms from games I used to own but don’t anymore. Legalities aside, I mostly just wanted to play games I used to have. I looked over my old systems and found roms for most games (TG-16 and PS1 stuff mostly). I got the whole thing working. I was proud of it. Whenever I wanted, I could dip into my personal video game past.
Except I couldn’t.
There are two issues. I’ve played games on consoles my whole life. I’ve always found playing games with a keyboard and mouse strange, so I wanted to be able to hook my surface pro up to a TV when I play. That’s not actually all that difficult. I already owned a dongle that lets me hook up an HDMI cord to the PC. This isn’t difficult, but it is a step. Hardly a big deal.
The actual big deal was in the controller setup. I had an Xbox 360 controller and I’d purchased a dingus that would help me connect it to my surface. It worked…80% of the time? The dingus took up the one USB port on the surface, which was sometimes inconvenient.
Late last year, I also purchased an 8bitdo controller that looks a lot like a SNES controller with analog sticks. It feels great. And it worked! For about a month, anyway. Since then, it’s worked maybe 30% of the time.
I gave myself an hour or two this weekend to try to update its firmware and figure out its flakiness. The process reminded me a lot of this XKCD. After some time, I entered “and let that be a lesson to you” territory and decided to give up.
I’m archiving my emulator stuff on my PC (games take up a lot of space, and if I’m not using them, best to backup and delete) and just hooking my old Xbox 360 up to my second tv (my switch is hooked up in the living room). If I’m feeling the urge to play something old, I have a nice library of Xbox Live Arcade games I’ve downloaded over the years. On top of that, after I booted the thing up again, I found that its broken CD drive had been fixed. It was like a sign. Don’t play PC games, it was telling me. Play console games.
August 23, 2018
Habit Built
Last December, I began carrying around an A6 Shinola notebook and did my best to write a little bit every day. Mostly, it’s little bullet journal things that happened, or things I have to do. Sometimes it was my calendar, a mood tracker, and a place to just jot ideas and write without form or direction.
There were weeks I’d go without using it. Especially in the first three months. But sometime around March, I found myself spending at least a few minutes with it every day, and now its second nature. It took most of a year, but I don’t go a few hours without jotting something in my little notebook. It’s almost full. I bought an A6 Moleskine to replace it. I’m looking forward to filling another one.
I also write on my surface. It’s nice to have all that screen real estate, and writing with a surface pen is a joy. A few years ago, it became the norm that a screen without touch support seemed broken. It’s beginning to feel like that for screens without good stylus support. There are rumours of the next iPhone adding some Apple Pencil support. I hope that’s the case. The written word is personal. Our personal computers should let us do that.
August 22, 2018
A Little Bit
Last night, I ate some ice cream. That’s not that unusual. But I ate a little bit less than I normally do. I got a smaller bowl. The other night, I was about to watch a wrestling match. Instead, I turned it off and went to bed. I wrote just a little more this week. I edited just a bit more. I rode my bike once, as soon as it stopped pouring.
None of this is revelatory. None of this should be celebrated, necessarily. But I’m going to do just that, because the little victories matter, especially when you battle against yourself. Cue Scrubs monologue music. Ba da ba ba ba, ba baaaaa.
August 19, 2018
People still play that?
Louise Blain, for The Guardian:
Pokémon Go is a better game now than it was in 2016. The central experience has evolved, just like one of its titular creatures. You still walk around the real world catching Pokémon on your phone, but there’s a lot more to do and hundreds more creatures. You can now leave your Pokémon to guard gyms and battle other players, perform daily research tasks and team up with fellow trainers to go on a raid to catch rare characters; there’s even a single-player quest experience to earn legendary Pokémon, such as Mew.
Pokémon Go is unlikely to be as popular again as it was in 2016, when around 300 million people were playing it. But, ironically, the 60 million who are playing it now are having a better experience, and they are enough to make Pokémon Go a billion-dollar business, as well as a great community of people. (By comparison, Uber has 40 million active users.)
This morning, I walked by my subway stop, where a Pokemon Go Gym resides. Every now and then, there will be tough a raid boss there, which is a feature the game didn’t have until last summer. This morning, it housed a substantially weak Magikarp, begging to be taken out in record time. I thought, sure, I’ve got 30 seconds before the train gets here. Nice way to start a Monday.
August 16, 2018
More Things August 17, 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.
Octopath Traveler’s grinding isn’t that bad
For Facebook and Twitter, reality is hitting hard
Why I Struggle To Say The Word “Husband”
Twitter courted comedians, then the opposition
The Best Albums of 2018 (So Far)
The Story Behind Apple’s Newton
Previously On: How Recaps Changed the Way We Watch Television
The infantilization of Western culture
Spotify’s $30 billion playlist for global domination
Rough games deserve our love and respect
Craft Beer Is the Strangest, Happiest Economic Story in America
Finding new music in the algorithm age
What It Means To Buy A Video Game
In Conversation: Penn Jillette
Octopath Traveler is boring
Last night, I suggested to my partner that we play some games. She replied, “But Octopath is so boring!” She’s right. It is. So we didn’t play it. It’s not a great spectator game. And it’s not a great game when you want something exciting. It is boring. They should put that on the box.
What I’m trying to say is, sometimes a boring game is a good thing. Octopath is a nostalgia bomb, but it’s objectively less exciting than the plots of games its evoking. Final Fantasy VI has a great plot that really moves. Chrono Trigger doesn’t let up. But Octopath is content to just stroll. You can fast travel, but you don’t have to. You can skip stories, but you won’t. You’ll walk. You’ll fight in random battles that all feel pretty samey after a while. You’ll come to a town, talk to people, defeat a baddie, and move on to the next town.
Octopath Traveler might be the closest thing to an old-style sitcom. Everything is familiar. Everything is pretty low stakes. Very little seems in much peril here. If these characters never set out on their journeys, the world might just be fine. But it’s nice enough to spend time with them. You know these characters.
But in 2018, this is a perfectly fine decision for a game to make. Chill. Slow down. The actual world might be on fire. There are already lots of games about dystopia. The world of Octopath isn’t a Star Trek-ian paradise, but it’s fine, and fine is better than what the real world is right now. I’d much rather spend my escapist time in a nice place than a horrible one, even if nice is a little dull.
August 15, 2018
New Spotify Playlists
In response to this lifehacker article, where they suggest a list of playlists everyone should make, I decided to dust off a few of my older playlists, rename and curate them, and show them off.
Lifehackers’ list is practical, but you hardly need your own playlists to cover them. There’s a million “workout” playlists on Spotify already. And sure, have a workout playlist. But also have a playlist for the weirder times.
My Dad is Bigger Than Your Dad
Punk, drunk rock, bad recordings and palpable threats.
Horny on Main
Thirsty modern pop
Indie Rock for Paddleboarders
Relax.
Unicorn Ombré
Hyper pixie dream pop. Sickeningly Twee.
Dreamcast Electronica
Beats and chips, hip hop and cheat codes
Smoking alone
When you gotta dwell on it more than is healthy
The Mod Club in 2007
Rock, blues, soul, dancey guitars. shots. Cover: The Kills
Cocktails and Bossanova
For when Jack Lemmon comes over to Romy Schneider’s place.
Much Video Dance 2018
“You always save one for me.” She said. “It’s our tradition. Even since sixth grade.”
