Sawyer Paul's Blog, page 44

A Little Dingus

February 25, 2018

Writers often have a problem describing technology that doesn’t exist yet, especially if that’s not really the point of the story.

One film I’ve had on my mind with the “future” elements of my new novel is Marjorie Prime, a film with an AI (Jon Hamm) that’s holographic and learns through conversation. What I like about it the most is how it treats the explanation of the technology:

There’s very little in Marjorie Prime that explains how the holo-technology works; Tim Robbins’s character admits at one point that he hasn’t read the brochure. But even this works as part of the story. Miraculous inventions have become part of our lives, and have certainly changed us, just as much as people have. The transference of emotion from the real to the programmable—a sort of technology most of us hardly understand—may not be so far off after all.

The third Act of “I Know Your Real Name Now” takes place in the future. Not too far. Maybe 10-15 years? Long enough that I’m not confident what technology will look like, but not so long that I think our attitudes will have changed much. So I think my characters are just going to use my favourite term for gadgets: a little dingus. Unlike Majorie Prime, I’m not writing a serious piece here. It’s supposed to be fun (and a little sad and pathetic, whomp whomp).

I think “Little dingus” is a good shorthand for “future technology” that’s both pithy and a little funny while also letting people imagine whatever it is. It could be a watch or in his glasses or wherever. The technology itself will mostly be invisible in the “future” part of this book, but everyone will still look at it like it’s a bit silly.

Morning Pages

She loved slow sex. It wasn’t boring. It was a bit like yoga, something meditative. Banks felt her own body as much as she felt mine. She was creating electricity. and it lasted a bit longer. She’d finish in this position and I wouldn’t, but she’d get me off afterwards with her hand, her mouth lowering as I got close. This was generosity, practicality. We febreezed after, went out to the balcony for a cigarette, and came back to finish the wine and the movie.

“Why don’t movies have intermissions anymore?” she said. “people have to pee during these three hour slogs. They don’t sell any liquid under a litre, and they expect you to just sit there,” she exhaled, blowing a short puff of smoke out to the stars.

“Uncivilized,” I agreed.

“The toilet is beginning to clog again,” she said.

Her mind worked like this. I didn’t know how to take it other than to think that sex was just another chore to get through, something that had to be done or else, like the toilet, it would begin to malfunction and we’d have to call in a pro. We’d had to do that once or twice in the past. It was expensive, and disappointing, and each time we thought “that’s it? We could have done that ourselves.” But we didn’t, because we couldn’t.

It was also possible that the thought had just randomly come into her head, and I shouldn’t take it so personally.

“Hall,” she said. “You should put that in your little dingus.”

I told my little dingus to remind me.

Life Logging Trials, February 2018

So this podcast I sometimes listen to had two pieces of advice in 2017 that I wanted to try out this year. The first was to set up a year theme, and the other was to try out life logging.

I was curious to see how it would play out. I went in without too many preconceptions, and was curious if any of the data would surprise me.

I used Toggl, which is what I’ve used to track my professional and freelance work for the last several years.

I set up some basic categories, but kept it loose. I knew that not everything I would do would fit into a single category, and not everything would make sense. I didn’t go too hard on myself, but I tried to go back and categorize things by the end of the day.

The basic stuff I was trying to track: how much time it took me to get ready in the morning, commute times, TV time, and writing time. I was also curious if there were things I did during the day I didn’t realize. Was I spending time doing things I didn’t figure? Things like that.

I set up a few automatic things. Toggl doesn’t support Ifttt but it does support Zapier. So I made a few Ifttt applets that added calendar entries when I left home and work. Those calendar entries would then trigger in Zapier, triggering toggl. By doing this, I was able to fairly accurately1 track how long it took to get to and from work. But for the most part I manually started the timer.

I wanted to do it for about a month, but I ended up going about 6 weeks before I felt I’d had enough. What did I learn? Some mornings I take longer to get going than others. My commute is a little faster when it’s earlier. I watch a lot of TV, probably too much, but I’m often doing other things while watching TV (time tracking apps are not built for multitasking.) Most things were pretty much as I’d expected.

This kind of experiment may be more valuable with some kind of social or group component. For instance, if you’re tracking your food, you get a rough idea of caloric intake based on other people’s findings. What I didn’t learn: Am I watching too much TV compared to other people (though I can assume). Can I cut my morning routine down somehow? Simply tracking the time (and checking on graphs) doesn’t necessarily give you action items to work on later.

I have learned one major thing, though. It didn’t feel as good not tracking my time until I spent 6 weeks tracking my time. This was not a fun one.

Morning pages

Arriving at the dance in part 1

We split up immediately. Ram ran into the middle of the room and began high fiving as many people as she could. Rams popularity wasn’t ever in question. Her talents and charisma fueled rooms. She was admired and feared, lionized and exaggerated. She was good at the thing our school valued, so she was the best person in the world.

Fourth was snatched by Jillian, her longtime best friends and most confident secret keeper. Jillian was a tall polish blonde who never got my jokes. She was wearing a puffy green dress and nice shoes and a corsage on her right forearm that clashed with the dress. She was engaged to a guy from the Catholic high school, and I figured if she was wearing a corsage that didn’t match he might have actually shown up.

I found it impossible to track an entire day. Even after a month of tracking daily things, I would still get busy and move from activity to activity without remembering to log it in any way. I was just living my life. There is value in trying, but stopping to notice what you’re actually doing all the time is very difficult and can ruin the magic of living in the moment.↩

MP3 Blogs

Dissatisfaction with music streaming services has given me the itch to go back to 2006 and find music the way God intended: mp3 blogs. Just because a lot of us jerks stopped blogging like the zine fetishists we thought we were and sold out to get spoon fed by the majors doesn’t mean everyone did; these things are still going pretty strong. These blogs come out with a few songs most days and sometimes gigantic playlists to keep you up to date and busy with new hotness. And for extra credit, they often have Spotify/Apple Music links if you don’t want to download hundreds of mp3s at work.

Here’s a short list to get started:

Indie Electro Rock Playlist
Sophie’s Floorboard
Buffalo Tones
Flux Blog
Gorilla vs Bear

Why did we stop doing this? Oh right, Zune Pass…

It’s All Writing

Why am I talking about apps and stuff when I should be talking about Writing?

Well, there’s morning pages at the bottom of this. It might just be a paragraph but it’s there. I don’t get to write for more than a few minutes every day, but those are often some of the best minutes. I’m an introvert, and every moment I spend with another person takes a little out of me. This time, this writing time, puts it back in. I write, and I spend time alone, so that I can handle being out and about. Without it, I just kind of shut down. It’s not an excuse. It’s just what I’ve found about myself.

Was that the writing? I don’t know. I might use that.

There’s a line in “You’re the Worst,” where Jimmy, a novelist and the main character, defends his procrastination by yelling “It’s all writing!” And this is bs, obviously, but there’s a small thread of villainous truth in there. Everything you do can be in service to the writing. Your life is a big ship, and it only gets bigger and harder to steer. But changing course is possible with enough motivation and a lot of little changes. So I want to be more a writer, so I try to consume more things that push me to write. I try to eliminate things that really get me away from writing. What I carry changes (I’m writing this on a small Bluetooth keyboard that fits in my lap on the train, when I’m lucky/ruthless enough to get a seat). You exercise more, because you need to breathe to write.

So sometimes the only thing I can think to write about is the app I’m using, or the podcast I’m listening to, or the weird workflow I have for organizing my music library. It may not be “writing” or “the book” but it is words on a screen, and some days that has to be enough. I’m going to use it as an excuse to put words on a screen.

When I say “You,” I really mean “me.” All of this is advice I’m giving myself. It might not work for you, or “you.” This is a Mr Robot situation. I’m talking to myself, and I’m talking to you, and I’m talking to myself.

Every blog is a Mr Robot situation, isn’t it?

Morning Pages

This is a third act bit.

Hall wasn’t my real name either. They started calling me that in the seventh grade and because everyone I know in high school knew me back then, it hasn’t changed. Every now and then someone will move to our neighbourhood and join the school, and those people may make friends and fit in, but they don’t have the same kind of nickname history. They don’t basically get renamed without getting much of a choice about it, and have that story get so twisted over the years that nobody really remembers why. Why is Hailey Klepper called Lisa Loeb? Did she wear glasses for a week in 1995? Who knows.

“You know what I mostly watch people watch on their phones on the subway?” Banks asked me, likely rhetorically. She was eating those fantastic salt and pepper Vick’s chips and I wanted some.

“Porn?”

“It’s like, never porn,” Fourth said. “I’m not saying I’d want there to be porn on the subway all the time, but like, some porn, you know?”

“Some would be good,” I said. “Some would make it seem honest.”

“Friends,” she said. “Everyone is watching Friends.”

“Friends sucked,” I said. “But I get it.”

“Friends sucked,” she agreed. “So what is it you get?”

“People suck?” I asked, likely rhetorically. “Nah, it’s not that simple. Friends is comfort food, easy, and aspirational. I think everyone watches it because they want an apartment that cheap.”

“Are you two drunk already?” Fourth interrupted.

“Absolutely,” Banks said. “And we love you, and are so proud of you.”

Fourth gave us the eye, then walked back to her other friends.

Skate to the thigh

I’ve often wondered how figure skaters stand on their partner’s legs:

If you, like me, spent at least three hours watching the clip of their routine on repeat today, a serious question may have crossed your mind: How are Moir’s thighs not gushing blood onto the ice?

It’s truly one of the most violent-seeming moments in a sport mostly known for elegance, and it always confused me why the male skater never looked like he was in pure agony. But know I know. Now we know.

Morning Pages

Chapter 2, walking into a school dance

We just had our purses and wallets, but we could see that a pile of coats had already gathered on top of the closes table to the entrance. There were four or five tables with chairs out, each with the bare minimum of confetti and streamers. This was not a high budget affair. Across the one clean wall was the DJ setup, which was a set of six floor speakers that fit in a single van, a table, the CD decks, and a doorway silver metal scaffolding that held the various lights. They twisted in 20 degree increments and bounced off the disco balls the party committee had hung an hour earlier. It wasn’t the saddest dance setup I’d ever seen, and I’d grown used to it over the years, since this is pretty much how it always went. But it was hardly the level you’d see on TV. The production values here were way down from a Buffy dance.

All the great task apps

Okay, so I use multiple task apps. My last two blog posts mentioned Productive and Streaks. I also use Wunderlist, and sometimes I use the iOS Reminders app and Cortana reminders on Windows for spur-of-the-moment stuff. It isn’t just that any one task dingus isn’t good enough to cover everything I like (though that’s true), but if I put everything in one basket, the basket seems daunting and I drop all of it. I don’t love any house enough to just live in one of them.

The basic system is that Productive is for daily habit tasks, like filling up the humidifier. If I don’t touch Productive all day because I didn’t need it, that’s fine. There’s nothing actually important in there. Streaks are aspirational goals, like writing in this blog. Wunderlist is for chores and things I share with my partner. Reminders are for when I need to pick something up when I’m near a drug store.

Anyway here’s some morning pages:

This goes in part 2 somewhere, when Hall is high.

“You guys are like, the breakfast club of misfit toys,” she said.

“That doesn’t even make sense. Those are two, like, incompatible references.” I said.

“Look, I’m not here to debate the merits of a clever high school nickname, but that’s what everyone thinks of you guys.”

“Well, both of those movies were super successful.”

“And full of dorks.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Why didn’t you just call us ‘full of dorks’?”

“Because that doesn’t make sense. You’re the dorks. You can’t also be full of dorks. And also, I didn’t come up with the phrase.”

“You totally did. You ruined my life.”

“My name is the chilling sound of your doom.”

“Mr Freeze?”

“Best Batman movie,” she said.

“You’re full of dorks,” I said.

iOS keyboards

I miss the keyboard on windows phone. Maybe it was the glass Nokia used. Maybe it was the way you could swipe across the keys and lift when you’d finish a word. I know that feature was part of a keyboard you could install on android and then later on the iPhone, but on windows phone it was just there in the default keyboard. It worked so well, and typing was a joy.

These days I’m on an iPhone SE, and much like how I use multiple task apps, I also use multiple keyboards. I use Gboard when I’m on the subway and can only type with one hand, as it does the “swype” thing. And I use the default keyboard when I’m half asleep or need perfect slow precision. But most of the time, I use Nintype.

Nintype takes the swipe feature but adds two-thumb combos. it’s actually insane how fast you can type with this keyboard once you get the hang of it. The learning curve is insane and it still produces baffling guesses sometimes, but for the sheer speed (and most importantly, how fast it feels to type with) I can’t work without it, but I also never really recommend it because it’s a bit buggy depending on what app you’re using it with (chat apps with special text bars like Facebook messenger can be wonky). But its also a weird recommendation because it’s a keyboard app, and I haven’t read one article about keyboard apps in about three years. It’s been long enough now that I worry apple might just take them away and not even tell anybody.

Current Streaks Goals

These are my two main daily goals right now. I’m trying not to pick up stuff from bodegas on the way home from work (this is a bad habit I’ve had forever), and I’m trying to write just a little bit every day. The little bit i write will probably end up on the blog. Again, super simple, but super simple is kind of what I need right now. Make the habit too complicated, or make me go to high, and I inevitably push it off to another day. Pushing it a day becomes pushing a week, and then eventually it’s just a habit I tried to start and couldn’t finish.

If you click the link and take a look at the Streaks screenshot, you’ll see that I have an actually picked anything up to snack on in about three weeks. I’ve heard and read in many places than three weeks or 21 days is as long as you need to break a habit, but unfortunately I think I need a lot longer than that. To me, maybe breaking a habit is like getting over a long relationship. You need to do it you need to do some math and figure out the right amount of time. For the snacking thing, I might need to just keep that streak going forever.

Productive habit swipe

Productive habit swipe

I’ve got a little task in Productive called morning pages. It’s a hack but it does work most days. If I don’t write, I don’t swipe the thing as done. It doesn’t display as a guilt trip, just as something to start again the next day. It’s good habit engineering. I want to swipe the thing, even if it’s just a sentence.

(Even if I’m bad at it).

But I do find that putting down one sentence usually means I get at least a paragraph.

Anyways, I wrote this earlier today. I’m writing snippets of character moments for the novel out of context. It’ll either fit in the book proper or it won’t, but it all informs how these characters progress:

Fourth found herself a success. She slept less than the others. She read the books. She signed up for business classes and took the lessons to heart. She tracked her time, at first with a spreadsheet template but eventually with an online service she paid for. It spat out invoices she’d send to every client who didn’t pay automatically. She made her clients happy, pulling old school flattery moves like sending cards and flowers on special occasions. She took ram on vacation to Montreal every few weeks to let off steam and treated her like Ram always had wanted to treat Fourth. “We treat each other,” Fourth would tell her. “You take such good care of me.” It was increasingly untrue.

Reading, hopefully not less of it

I’ve never been the best reader. I never been the best writer, either. But I like doing both a great deal. They are both, unfortunately, easy habits to break. And I guess they’re important, but to me there just kind of what I do or at least what I’ve always done. I don’t even know if any of it’s good for me. But I do know that I don’t want to get worse at it. It seems other people have the same worries.

I have forgotten how to read:

Books have always been time machines, in a sense. Today, their time-machine powers are even more obvious — and even more inspiring. They can transport us to a pre-internet frame of mind. Those solitary journeys are all the more rich for their sudden strangeness.

Why We Forget Most of the Books We Read:

The lesson from his binge-watching study is that if you want to remember the things you watch and read, space them out. I used to get irritated in school when an English-class syllabus would have us read only three chapters a week, but there was a good reason for that. Memories get reinforced the more you recall them, Horvath says. If you read a book all in one stretch—on an airplane, say—you’re just holding the story in your working memory that whole time. “You’re never actually reaccessing it,” he says.

I guess I don’t know maybe this is just a super simple stance, but I really like literacy and I like it when people read and write and make new things and have new opinions. It’s like the absolute most obvious stance to have well I suppose it’s important to put that somewhere. I think the stuff is interesting, so I’m reading it, and sharing it. I hope you share the stuff that you find interesting, But mostly I hope you at least read it. I thought that’s what we were all doing here, but I guess we all ended up getting harangued into doing something else.