Sawyer Paul's Blog, page 61

Services that are inspiring Sprites, Jets, and Elves

There are a few services out there that make me thing the weird technological nightmare future I'm writing about is going to actually happen in three months. I'll update this as I find more.

Invisible Boyfriend, which lets you send them money to have an anonymous person pretend to be the long-distance boyfriend you didn't know you needed.

PPLKPR lets you know how you (supposedly actually) feel when you interact with the people in your life.

Lives On: "When your heart stops beating, you'll keep tweeting." (Thanks Natalie!)

Comments turned on

I've been writing about my novel, Sprites, Jets, and Elves, on here for the last few months, but I never had comments turned on. I actually would like feedback on my writing, so having them off was dumb.

Naming E

My three main characters have been named S, J, and E so far. I've done this for two reasons. Those are the first letters of the three words in the title (Sprites, Jets, and Elves), but mainly because I didn't want a name to get in the way of the writing. Because this is a first draft, I'm consciously dodging aspects of the work that can bog me down as I figure out the overal structure. I've been meaning to come back to the names and fill them out, and I'm ready to do that with my main character, E.

In .2 releases of part 1's chapters (1.1.2, for example), E's name will be replaced with her full first name, Elumina. However, her name will shrink throughout the book to just E. I've chosen Elumina as a name because it drops letters and retains a "name" in almost each case. Elumin. Elumi. Elum. Elu. El. E. They're sci-fi flavoured, but they work.

This dropping of letters in her name will be emblamatic of the loss of her quantifiable identity. Her name is a structure that will get chipped away by the antagonist of the book, the already-named "Better" and the effects on her world that it produces.

Thoughts on Sprites 1.6.1

I'm fairly happy with parts 1-5 so far, but 1.6.1 isn't what I was hoping to have as a first draft release. It's short and doesn't explain either of its parts very well.

The first part, where E effectively hacks her mother out of her life, needs further explanation and perhaps an actual scene where she explains it to someone else. This is foreshadowing for an argument later on in the book, but it's also a way to write out the mom character until I need her. In a .2 release I'll likely place this later in the story, and perhaps write something here that might lead to the script.

This scene is also here to show that E might be an unprofessional slacker, but she has enough computer skills to do something like this without sweating. This means two things: she has skills most people today still don't, but that these skills aren't necessarily advantageous. It's another way that I'm hinting at the fact that this story takes place in the future, where somewhat impressive computer skills have become rudimentary and dull.

I'm happier with the second part, where E is fired yet again. It echoes the beginning of the story, and is another moment where E fails at something. The boss' speech is important and will be one of three things that leads to the first-third climax (1.10). The next two crises will happen in .8 and .9. Still, two things I want to improve in the new version is her reaction and describing the scene around them. Unlike the first firing, I'd prefer to have this happen in a busy moment, where the restaurant is buzzing with activity around them.

This chapter also doesn't end with anything beyond a quick text, which is something I'll fix in a .2 release. Carly is be an important character (and she exists in A Record Year for Rainfall, for people making graphs at home), and I know I want to use her for something cool in part 2. But I'm not sure how best to utilize her as someone who helps the plot progress in part 1.

Sprites 1.6.1

E hadn't heard from her mom in four days. There hadn't been a single call, text, feed post, or yo. E had run an experiment. It had worked, and she was disappointed in the results. She had a hunch a few weeks back that her mom didn't obsessively follow her on every new feed thread in order to actually keep tabs on E. Whenever they were on the phone, she noticed her mom would routinely steer the conversation in the direction of her own contributions. She would chastise E for party photos, then ask her what she thought of her cocktail party close-ups. Her mom would judge and demean and belittle nearly every move E made, but then instead of actually bringing the judgement to any sort of teachable parenting, before it might be a lesson or morale from on high from a generation who might know some things, from back before everyone knew where everyone was all the time, and where all the information was, and where all the parenting knowledge was, where she might actually look around for it and hand it off to E, instead of doing that just saying, "But do I look all right? I rented this new car and we're going to the cottage with our friends."

So E ran an experiment. She wrote a simple "if this then that" script that would notice her mom's posting activity. It would automatically send a heart to her mom for every post. She thought that might look suspect, however, so she added in a random comment depending on post length, with a wildcard search for certain key phrases. If a post contained the word "I'm loving," the comment would read "So proud of you!" If a post contained the word "thinking" it would post either "go with your heart," or "you're so brave." The majority of the time spent on the script was adding extra banal phrases one might find all over the #blessed comment streams. Finally, she wrote in a variable that would take the most popular comment from the hash and add it to the random selection of comment contributions. She wanted to see if her mom would notice. She wanted to see what would happen if she replaced her real, sarcastic, breathing, frustrating, broke self with a robot that spewed milquetoast embers of automated support.

Her mom had never gone four days without calling her before she'd moved out. E's theory was that all her mom wanted was this type of attention anyway. Giving it to her might get her to chill a little about her own decisions. An imaginary yet supportive daughter might be a little less of a target.

E then took a well-lit shot of herself in her purple plush panties and wrote "All of our dads came from Instagram childhoods" in the text field. She waited for her mom to call and give her shit.

She showed up to work and the manager asked her to come to the back office. He handed her a cheque with her last three shifts and told her why she couldn't work there anymore.

"The fact is you aren't suited to this job. You tell me you've worked in hospitality before, but I just don't see the evidence. You have trouble remembering details. You're not detail-oriented. This is a very detail-oriented line of work. Do you understand?"

E stood with both feet planted, and refused to be demure. E unconsciously chipped away at her middle nail with her thumbnail, and in the course of her dressing-down, had managed to chip away at it until there was a coarse slice, and if she continued to pick away at the nail the trajectory of the split would land directly in the middle of the flesh underneath. It would open up the underside of her nail to the open air, and it would be a pain so unbelievably distressing that she'd temporarily go colour blind, and the imaginary white flash noise of a lens flare in a movie would pierce her skull and hang there for hours, and while the scorching red pang would eventually dull down it would never completely go away, and for years she'd find herself pushing down on the spot where it had opened, and she'd receive an echo of the original sear, and she would feel 22 again. She would not remember getting fired twice in a month, or the names of the men who thought so little of her. She would remember J. And S. Boy would she remember S.

She told the manager that she understood completely.

"I don't think you do," he continued. "I want you to do a favour to the industry. Okay? Can you do that? Go home. Go back to your parents. You have parents, right?"

E nodded, and wished violently for a drink to throw in his face.

"Okay, go back an live with your parents. Lots of people do it. They go back and live with them and just, like, take care of them. They don't have real jobs or responsibilities and it's kind of nice. I think you'd really like it. It's stress-free, so long as you like your parents a lot. But even if you don't, well, they're not going to kick you out. Unless they kicked you out already. Oh, god, did they kick you out already? I'm so sorry if that is the case."

E found a place in her sternum where the hate lived. She rediscovered it on occasion, but it has been a while since she'd been so ruthlessly patronized that it blinked on her map. "Here I am", the hate spot announced. Her parents had given E the exact same speech. E had her mother's Oprah advice on the tip of her burned tongue.

"Kids these days don't get jobs like your father and I did. That's just not how the world is anymore. Everyone just stays together and makes it work. If you really work at it you'll get a good job by the time you're thirty five. Then you can get a place of your own, get married and have kids when you're fifty. Oh I know I was young when I had you, but it was different then. Having a child at 38 was considered normal when I was young. But you can't expect to have it as well as the previous generation. God knows my generation learned that. So, I don't know what you're doing going off on your own. You're just going to waste time and end up right back here."

Everyone who yelled at her sounded like the same person. She could picture the group chat that led to their agreed upon terminology. "for your own good. "it's just the way things are." "I'm not sure who told you that you were special." "things just don't work like that anymore."

E shook her head, and stopped picking away at her nail. The tear would remain until she got home, which would be in the dark after a lot of drinking. But first she slapped him, first in the face and then in the shoulder, and when it looked like he wasn't going to cower from the light abuse she balled up her hands and felt the cold of her rings and socked him on the side of his nose, not quite center but good enough to make him recoil and regret.

He said "Hey what the fuck" in between the first punch and the second, and before there could be a third he ran away, hobbling and bleeding on the restaurant floor. E thought of Izzy and how they'd never have the chance to make great work friends. They were just two people who didn't like one another very much, and it never got to grow and evolve. It wasn't going to get to be a story. She never even got her feed.

She texted Carly on her way home. The conversation would end up with her in bed under cold blankets, wishing she'd made tea.

E--i got shitcanned!

C--what? That's fucked. You weren't that bad!

E--you thought I was kinda bad?

C--Well, everything thought you were kinda bad. But certainly not the worst. Okay, maybe not great.

E--Shit.

C--Sorry! I wouldn't have fired you though. You were cute. Cute is always good for something.

E--thanks. Maybe i'll just go be a stripper.

C--No way. You'd hurt yourself. You're clumsy. Cute but not dancer material. Be a nurse!

E--What? How would that? Nvmd.

C--Come out tonight! Did he give you some cash?

E--I kinda punched him. Like twice but it was awesome.

C--!!! Cat-Rocky Emoji

E--Aaaah, I love Cat-Rocky!

C--Are you coming out tonight?

E--Yeah, of course.

E had no idea what tonight's plans were. But after a few texts, her evening became clear. She was headed to a rooftop patio with a pool.

You've got that couch issue covered

Continuing my work of writing down my thoughts about Back to Work, my favourite podcast. This week, episode 201, Never Enough Bathrooms. 

Yeah, it does appear that I'm going backwards, but Back to Work isn't necessarily a show you need to listen to in order, and the holidays were busy and I had a backlog. I'm also not at all interested in making a complete catalogue of posts about B2W episodes. There was a blog not that tried to do that (cleverly called "Back to Back to Work") that put up a few episode breakdowns and then disappeared, and I'm not at all promising I won't do the same. Mostly, this is for me to remember what I found interesting about the episode at hand. I have no idea if this kind of thing would be valuable to other people. 

Christmas is a quarter of the year now. And this is fatiguing.

Kids know the difference between the affordable version and the fancy version.

Used Lego is gross, even in theory. Like used headphones.

From "cyber-terrorism" to "cyber-bullying", the suffix is only ever placed there by people who really have no idea how the internet work. Whenever I hear "cyber" I picture an issue of Wired from 1995 that somehow found its way to your grandma's house in 2013.

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic." - is the third of Clarke's Three Laws. The first two seem like TV Tropes. But anyways, networked technology advancements actually breaks the rule. An iPhone wouldn't look like magic so much as a piece of glass with most of the stuff not working in the middle ages. Where it would look great is in the 80s, when we could conceivably picture such a device, but just weren't there yet. 

USPS sounds bad.

That things that used to work fine sometimes don't now is incredibly infuriating, even if it's entirely a first world problem.

This made me think of two things. First, Fight Club, and the idea of never having to buy another couch "once that couch issue is covered." It's such a twenty-something guy idea that something like that is just settled forever after you've considered it once for like a minute. Secondly, Louis, and the scene where Pamela and Louis' kids just get rid of all his stuff out of nowhere (including his couch). 

A couch isn't a technology. But its still a thing that can, at any moment, become more complicated than you'd ever like by outside factors that love you and only want what's best for your life. 

I guess what I mean is that it would suck if my couch starting being something I had to worry about. And not just in a "my evil personality blew it up" and more "it wont let me sit on it if the wifi doesn't work." I'm somewhat afraid of "The Internet of Things," as it has been mutated by the desire to stick connected dingi into things that don't seemingly need it. 

A system that used to work and now doesn't is enough to make you pretty crazy, if not completely veer you into gaslighting territory. It's not even possible to be indifferent about something like that. You've tacitly agreed upon a construct, and it just falls apart and all you can do is be sad and reboot a router. 

Multi-tasking is like driving and french-kissing

I've thought about writing my thoughts on Back to Work for a while now. Here's some stuff I gleaned from Back to Work 202. It isn't necessarily what Merlin or Dan said (if it is, it'll be in quotes), just my personal highlights.

"You shouldn't organize anything you don't want or need."
I also really love throwing stuff out. It feels incredibly cathartic, and I rarely miss things I actually toss.
I don't have any shoeboxes of stuff. Is this a thing people have?
I'm definitely cautious about putting stuff in plastic boxes. If I need to use something regularly, that systen puts it enough out of my mind that I don't remember it existing. If I don't want it in my life, it's taking up physical space I could use for other things. (Apartment living helps with this issue)
"You should not have anything in your life that is not contributing to the life you'd like to have." - Merlin quoting "It's All Too Much"
"I'm too sick to go to the doctor"
You're not really throwing away your childhood by throwing away stuff from your childhood
"If a time traveler hasn't come back to stop you, your decisions haven't been all that bad."
I'm fascinated by the idea that the more money people make, the less likely they are to do something that isn't making them more money.
Merlin's breakdown of how people think successful multitasking works is exactly how I work when I'm "multitasking": I'm not so much juggling as allowing things to slowly boil while I do other stuff. This used to be easier back when there were loading times on computers, when a file export could take long enough for a smoke break.
Essentially, multitasking is really just being pretty good about switching between two actions, not doing two things at the same time. The cooking metaphor works here.
High skill + Low Challenge = Relaxation
"Multi-tasking is like driving and french kissing. Before you say you're great at it, ask around."
I loved Dan's point about wanting to have had today's connectivity in the past. He doesn't wax nostalgic about a simpler time, which is something I completely get. Doing the things an iPhone is good at before smart phones just sucked.

Sprites 1.5.1

E's ankles began to bleed. She was on hour 11 of a shift with no end. The first five hours went fine, but she'd been too cheery, burning energy with smiling and idiotic things like remembering orders. She was crushing, Reaganing, Dragonballing; whatever you like to call a roll. She felt like she was on rollerskates until hour 9, when her legs began to cramp up. Now, it was agony, a pure workout hell without a break. Two servers had failed to show up, so even smoke breaks were out of the question. She hadn't eaten. None of this was legal. In her mind, she murdered everyone she'd ever met, just in case they'd led her down this road. Instead of going to college she got a job. She had two letters of acceptance and had physically burned both in the alley behind her parents' garage. She stomped on the ashes. E felt stupid, defeated, dry beaten, and now, of course, bloody. This was a bad job and she had nowhere to go.

In three hours, she'd be asleep. She'd forget about hating the job, and she'd happily go back to work the next day. Her feet would only hurt for another hour. Before she went out to fetch another drink order from a table of 13, Carly approached her.

"You're limping," she said, examining her leg. "Are you bleeding? Is this your blood?"

E shrugged it off. "I'm fine. I'm good bread."

"Here," Carly motioned to her outstretched hand. "They're prescription. They're good. You'll sleep like you're five."

E looked down at the little yellow pills in her hand. "Different," she said, scooping them up and into her mouth in a single motion. She asked, "You take these a lot?"

"I mostly just smoke weed," Carly said, grabbing a new serving tray. "But sometimes, yeah. When it gets to be a lot."

Neither thought to get a band-aid from the kit, because neither knew where the kit was, if there was a kit, if the kit was any good, and if the band-aids were from the previous century. At the last place, where S still toiled in the kitchen presumably, the kit was well stocked because the busboys were constantly running into shit, breaking plates and stepping on glass. E wondered if it was the drugs everyone was on that led to all these minor injuries, but then she thought, wouldn't the absence of drugs empty out all the restaurant staff? Who could do this straight? Wouldn't they all just try harder and get real jobs?

Hour 11 ended with a rancid tip, but E didn't care. She'd been useless as a waitress The meds had kicked in and she was fairly numb from the eyeballs down. She kept up the strength to see through to the end. When her last table finally kicked out at 3 and a half in the morning, she leaned against the coarse brick of the back alley wall and let out a short wail. She had 40 more fucking years of this to go before she could respectably die. Her hands met her thighs and she let her hair fall in front of her face and dangle. It wasn't the long shift that gave her the deep. She could handle the work, and even the long hours weren't too punishing, even though it was difficult to see through that in the moment.

E had lacked any ambition in high school. She spent most of it high, and got through it largely on curve grading. She did not want a real job. She did not want to spend four to seven years in school to spend the rest of her life paying off debts. But she didn't want to be a model either, or anything to do with just being pretty and selling things. It's not that she looked down on any of it, but the thought of doing anything like that left her feeling like life just wasn't worth it. She would feel depressed whenever the idea of a career track would come up. But not working at all seemed even worse. What was she going to do? Find a rich husband? She'd never seen any evidence of their existence. There were rich guys out there, but their money seemed to come from working shifts like the one she'd just endured, only wearing a suit, shouting at other assholes, drinking the saddest drinks.

The only real career path that gave E any excitement was building her own thing. Not selling it, whatever it would be. But just building her own little thing and having that take care of her. It was such a lame abstract idea that materializing anything in the name of it was a pained waste of time. E did not want to make doing life decisions while leaning against brick walls in dark alleys, alone, and held up by borrowed pills. But it was often the only time she did.

She'd been fired from half a dozen shitty restaurants since she left high school. She was a failure on her own, but she did not want to be a success because of others. She'd refused money from her judgmental and grey parents. She'd refused loans from friends. When she couldn't make rent, she moved to a shittier place, and found a shittier job to support it. What money she made went to alcohol and weed, video games, and birth control. If she ever wanted more, as she did at this moment, she did not know how to get it. Whatever money she could take from the people she knew wouldn't help her get more. She didn't know what the more was, but she knew it was out there. She did not know if she would ever get it. Her ankles told her she couldn't.

When she eventually found herself breathing the air of home, she found J on her living room floor, punching in Gameshark codes.

"I think I've got the one that gives you unlimited feathers," she said, in a tone that said she'd spent the last hour trying it.

E collapsed on the couch above her, her legs spread on either side of J. "I'd take off my shoes but I'm legitimately scared of everything below the knee ripping straight off."

"It's really only good for the haunted house," J continued. "But I can never get the thing through legitimate channels. I want to make that jump. Also you smell terrible. What peed on you?"

"Everything," E said. "Everything peed on me."

"Yeah, that checks out." J then jumped. "I did it!" Her hands gripped the controller. "This is it. Pay attention. I'm so glad you're home for this, rankness notwithstanding."

"Are you high of course you're high why am I even asking,"

"Shhhh, you're tired," J said. "I'm performing amazing feats."

"You're cheating."

"I still have to hit the jump! That's the important part. Gamesharks got such a bad rap."

"Did they? How old were you in 1993? I'm assuming that's when it came out."

J shushed E again and focused on the screen. She'd picked Koopa, who she thought was the fastest and cutest and never understood why they dropped him in future installments of Mario Kart. An argument about this happened at the beach once which led to them being hit on by guys who thought they were being ironic.

E was barely awake, but mustered the appropriate enthusiasm for her best friend trying to do a somewhat difficult manuever in a 20 year old video game while using a cheat code and a controller with an X button that would only occasionally fire. She sat up, slightly and said, "I believe in you 100%."

J drove half the lap, and made a bee-line for the shortcut. You had to line up the kart perfectly and hit the jump at exactly the right time. If the jump was successful, the koopa would land on a thin strip of surface that would shave upwards of ten seconds off her time, guarantee a first place, and give her something to brag about for two to three weeks, depending on how many individual and separate conversations she might have.

Landing the kart was most of the work, but she would still have to steer the kart straight for a few seconds before turning back on the course. She'd seen other people fail at this, so she considered slowing down when she got to that point. She'd watched videos. She felt like she could handle this.

"I saw my brother do this when I was five and I've wanted to hit it ever since."

"Barely care, hurry up. Sleeping in ten seconds." E murmured.

In a moment of pure cocainic thrill, J swerved slightly too far to the left, and when she hit the button, the game glitched our for a split-second, the gameshark causing a bug J would look up later and confirm, which caused her little driving turtle teleport to the other end of the lap, dead last, upside down, and unable to move, just sitting there blinking in a way that made it look so sad.

E said, "Do you think we're wasting our lives?"

"You can't say that wasn't an impressive move," J said. "I'll take it. Besides, I was cheating anyway."

"I'm going to sleep on this couch until a prince comes to wake me up," E said, laying down. "Actually, strike that. Anyone from the gentry. I'm not that picky. If he's got a horse he can wake me up."

"Got it," J said, ejecting the cartridge from the slightly yellowed and yet perfectly functional Super Nintendo.

"J?" E asked, just a little bit left in her.

"Yeah?"

"Why isn't there a way to make me better?"

J put a blanket over E and tucked it under her feet. "You're perfect. That's why."

E smiled, and only believed J because she was already asleep.

Sonder

The best blogs build on one another. While stories and links will appear in other articles, I want to set aside a space for those that left a particular impression on me. I'm calling this collection of posts Sonder. 

A Blanket Statement on Pop Culture.
"So let no one think that in order to be defended against censorship of any kind, let alone the terminal horrors of Wednesday 7th January, a work of art or a film or a novel or a cartoon need be ‘first rate’ (whatever that means)."
My favourite new weather report: The Long John Index of Canada
Ship Your Enemies Glitter. Evil! Evil!
There's some great writing Advice in this productivity survey, like: "Sports bars are perfect because I don't care about sports, so it's easy to drown out all the background noise, and most people at sports bars are there to watch sports, so they won't come bug me when I'm trying to write alone in the corner, and also sports bars have the best beer and snacks."
I keep putting Majora's Mask down, then picking it up months later. I've never beaten it, and I can't play it for very long. I've figured out why: it's nearly unbearably sad.
"For virtually every indicator, it’s the same thing: Good news. The numbers are almost tediously positive. This is a Golden Age. For you, your family, everyone you know, and everyone else around the planet, there has never been a better time to be alive."

We All Want To Get Our Hand Close to That Big, Toothy Mouth

The title of this post is a quote from Merlin Mann, an endlessly quotable guy I listen to almost every week. It's a great way of describing how people who make things want to be famous on their own terms, but almost never actually get to be.

I've thought about writing my thoughts on Back to Work for a while now, and while I don't think I'll do this with every episode, I'm at the very least noting my thoughts on this one.

Here's some stuff I gleaned from Back to Work 203. It isn't necessarily what Merlin or Dan said, just what I got out of it.

the fact that people (especially people with blogs) want to get noticed
but want to be noticed for their best things, which is out of their control are often noticed for their most sensationalist things, which isn't terribly surprising
how reading an author regularly gives you a very different perspective on their work than reading them once
it might be nice to think that your blog is something you can fly casual with, but it still counts like any other writing, and it can absolutely blow up regardless of what you do
this can be scary, but it shouldn't be so scary that you don't do it
how even talking about the same thing over and over doesn't make that one thing that makes you famous seem any less sensationalist
writing everything with the fear of heavy scrutinty can be creatively disasterous, but you still want things to count
perhaps blogs shouldn't be treated as immutable, permanent writing, but perhaps something more living and human. But that decision is only determined by the reader and never the writer
the entire concept of celebrity has really changed, to the point that it's both easier and more difficult to know how to treat people you know because of what they've done. On the one hand, celebrities have never been closer to us (and in many cases, are us) but this proximity means that you can actually affect them
it's incredibly easy to take other people's actions and words and twist them in a way they never intended, even if you don't mean to
one of the major ways we twist "celebrity" action is by assuming that there's so much more to it than the action itself
we simply don't believe that someone says something simply because they meant exactly that, and will inevitably dig to find out what it "really" means
but maybe if we took the time to get to know them a little, we might actually believe them
the closer celebrity culture gets to normal human culture, the less chance that there's any sort of agenda whatsoever to what they do (turns out they are just like us).