Sawyer Paul's Blog, page 80

Streets ahead

More Things, December 3, 2012

A message that is worth spreading in the design community.

In many ways, Rob Ford is a study in absences. He came into office looking like a man who would galvanize the city. He promised to stage a winner-takes-all battle between city and suburb, between pedestrian and driver, between city builder and city manager, a grand contest of ideas between socialists and conservatives. As it turned out, he wasn’t so much with the ideas. That battle ended as soon as it began. Having been resoundingly elected, Ford turned out to be splendiferously bad at the brass tacks of running a council. He seems forever stuck at half-a-Dale Carnegie: he can make friends, but not influence people.

Korean designer Yu Hun Kim created ‘Aid for Multi-tasking’, a series of products that are designed to help us with doing several things at once. Often we do not even recognise having much difficulty performing different activities at the same time, unless the tasks are physically mismatched. Thus Kim created ‘Reading Tray’, ‘Lining Mug’ and ‘Knork’.

It takes a certain amount of courage, thinking out loud. And is best done in a safe and nurturing environment. Creative Departments and design studios used to be such places, where you could say and do just about anything creatively speaking, without fear of ridicule or judgement. It has to be this way, or you will just close up like a clamshell. It’s like trying to have sex, with your mum listening outside the bedroom door. Can’t be done. Then some bright spark had the idea of setting everyone up in competition. It became a contest. A race. Winner gets to keep his job.

But something seems to make peoples' brains drop right out of their heads when it comes to streaming media, causing them to issue pompous lectures to folks in other businesses about how their revenue model ought to work. The idea seems to be that if you like to watch television, you probably have a pretty good idea of how to make and market it to consumers, particularly if you have some actual experience in a completely unrelated digital content market.

Well, I guess I looked out of place. Red lips, long blonde hair, innocent looking freckles. I shrugged and picked up my knife, carefully folding it and stuffing it into my bra. “Just lookin’ for trouble, I guess.” A phlegmy laugh wheezed out of his lung bags as he held onto his suspenders, doing a cold lean on the table. “You are trouble.”

Barbara's Gun

Matt & Kim

The Lite-Rock Station I've always wanted

It's been a while since I've made an Rdio playlist, but I like this one and I think you will too. I listen to plenty of softer stuff, but generally abhore lite-rock as an idea. I hope this fixes that in more people's heads than mine.

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Big Quote

Our brains respond better to difficulty than we imagine. In schools, teachers and pupils alike often assume that if a concept has been easy to learn, then the lesson has been successful. But numerous studies have now found that when classroom material is made harder to absorb, pupils retain more of it over the long term, and understand it on a deeper level. Robert Bjork, of the University of California, coined the phrase “desirable difficulties” to describe the counter-intuitive notion that learning should be made harder by, for instance, spacing sessions further apart so that students have to make more effort to recall what they learnt last time. Psychologists at Princeton found that students remembered reading material better when it was printed in an ugly font.

 

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Girls with Birds

Sony Reader PRS-T2 Evernote's integration

When you setup Evernote with a Sony Reader, it asks you if you want to sync things automatically. If there was one thing I'd change about this device, it would be to sync all notes this way. Instead, "Sync Automatically" refers to content going from Evernote to the Sony Reader. It's great. Everything added to Evernote using Evernote Clearly shows up as formatted, ad-free text articles. But it would be stellar if it synced the other way as well.

As it stands, the Sony Reader syncs highlights on an a la carte basis. You can select a highlight by holding your finger down on the screen for a second, and expanding the selection to fill the area of text you want to save. Then, you get four options: highlight, note, send to, and search. Clicking "send to" gives you the option of sending to Facebook or Evernote. Clicking on Evernote creates a new note, which looks like this:

There's a word limit of just over a hundred characters for books with digital restrictions, but books without restrictions don't have that problem. Find a page-long passage in an old, free library book you want to save? Sony has no issue with it. Once again, they've put in everything they can get away with, and the 7 other people who own one will surely take advantage of this cool feature.

As for me, this idea of saving notes is what's going to make me a more voracious ebook reader. Until now, I've found the highlighting and note-taking aspects of ebook readers to be tired and lazy implementations. This is a breath of fresh air.

Girl in a hat

Video Games

Below is a snippet from this book I've been writing

Photo by http://www.alexjowett.com/

Bret sat on Album's couch, high and unhappily distracted. The controller in his hand was proving an unsuitable veil from his guilt. Album was doing a slightly better job with his rambling, a terrible habit he picked up from too many forum posts.

“I'm better with the headset,” he said. “It's just a fact. If I can't control the group, the whole thing falls apart.”

“Winning a fake war is really important to you, huh?” Bret quipped.

Album proclaimed, “Only if I get to mess with it. We're the bad guys.”

"We are? I had no idea. They all look the same to me."

"You want me to explain the whole backstory of the fourth world war to you? I can. I wrote part of the wiki."

"We're not even simulating a real war?" Bret paused for a second. "I guess that explains some of the laser guns."

"There's a whole religion founded on those guns, Bret. Seriously. I can explain it all."

Bret shook his head, his hands working independently, moving his character into a position he thought might be advantageous, though he really had no idea. "Please, never ever tell me what you mean. About anything, ever. I don't want to know you more than I do. Understanding Album Yukes, which can't possibly be our real name, by the way, is not something on my to do list."

"You don't keep a to do list," Album said, missing the point entirely. "But fine, if you want to play without understanding the whole ethos behind it all, you go right ahead."

"Thank you," Bret said. "That's all I've ever wanted to do."

They played in silence for a few minutes. Bret died several times. Album walked over to his fridge and carried a pair of beers back to the couch.

Bret asked, "What do I do about Jenny?"

"Is she still taking your calls?"

"Yeah."

"Good. Stop taking her calls. Tell her the whole thing has been harder on you than you originally thought. It's been too hard. You can't handle it anymore, and you need some time to think. That time will be all the time."

"Album," Bret said, swigging his beer. "I cost her her job. I broke her trust. I am the bad guy here. I need to make it up to her somehow."

"Shit, I didn't realize she was out of a job."

"We outed Fane. He lost his job. So everyone who works for him lost their jobs too. Politics, not unlike futuristic ground warfare that doesn't make any sense, is a team game. We cost like, two dozen people their jobs."

Album thought about it. "Well, that happens Bret. This business has collateral damage. If I had a sackful of laundered money for every publicists' job I've destroyed, I'd definitely have to get that new apartment. There would be no room for the sacs here."

"My point is, I feel guilty. I want to make it right."

Album paused the game. Bret thought it was because Album was about to make some profound point about the human condition and the inevitability of deeply cutting into the muscle of those you love most. But he unpaused a second later. It was long enough that Bret took his eyes off the screen, and was unprepared. Alvin's character snuck up behind him and shot him in the back.

"Aren't we on the same team?" Bret asked.

"I'm not really sure," Album said. He let that linger. Then, he finally came through with the advice.

"There is no making this right," he said. "There is only moving on. This is one of those points in your life when you really do have all the choices in the world. You can stay with Jenny and try to make it work and make yourself miserable. You're going to make all of us miserable in the process too, because being friends with a guy trying to make things work is the goddamn worst. Or, hey, how about you count your losses and move on? Why not try someone new? Or just be on your own for a while? I know you won't listen to this part. I pegged you as a sad serial monogamist the second I met you. When were you last really single?"

"I think I was 17."

"Fuck. You've gone from relationship to relationship for nearly ten years?"

"Not exactly," Bret said. "All of that was with Tess."

Album's mouth hung open, like Bret admitted to never having watched The Shining. Bret knew this, because six months before he'd admitted to never having seen Th Shining to Album, and Album proceeded to freak out, rant for fifteen minutes about how Bret had never lived, then quickly downloaded the movie and forced Bret to watch it twice.

"It's like you haven't lived!" Album spat. "You were in the same relationship through most of your life? What the good fuck is wrong with you?"

Bret smiled. "I loved her, Album. I still love her."

Album started a new game. He slumped back down, his lumpy, oafish body withered into the couch. He said, "It's sounds to me like you know exactly what you should do."

"What's that?" Bret asked, now a little angry.

"Buddy," Album said. "If you don't know that, you don't know anything. No explanation of world war 4 is going to help you."