Sawyer Paul's Blog, page 86
September 4, 2012
Gaming can make a better world
Naturally I'm skeptical; gamification seems too good to be true. Treat life as a video game? Life gets better. Lifehacks? Obviously you'll be more productive. And this video, starring Jane McGonigal, author of Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, argues that all of this is backed by medical and scientific peer review.
It's a TED talk so it's properly moving, and it has the potential to be something one might grab onto (my favourite is still, inexorably, Elizabeth's Gilbert talk on the elusive creative genius), but as with many of these talks, I'm suspicious of its evergreen ability. TED has come under criticism of this in recent years, and though I still like the series (few critics of it deny its entertaining value and ability to footnote important movements in critical theory), but I also know that after two weeks of having "my life changed" by a fresh idea, I'm back to square one.
Still, I'm going to give this one a shot by joining the Superbetter thing and trying it out, partially because it plays so well into my wheelhouse (I like gaming, and I'd prefer it if all its effects weren't entiraly vampiric to my time, attention, and health), and partially because of this woman's enthusiasm. As MJ Nicholls wrote in her Goodreads review of Reality is Broken: "On the one hand, the author is clearly bonkers and operating on an epic bandwidth of partial megalomania. On the other hand, her enthusiasm and spirit of uncrushable optimism is a reassuring and powerful thing."
September 2, 2012
Big Quote
Whether I can’t sleep or won’t sleep doesn’t matter when I am not sleeping. Whether I’m young or old, whether I should drink water or coffee, whether I’ve paid my bills or filed my essay or whether the essay is any good, doesn’t matter. It gets difficult to remember what does. This is when I read fiction, because I never forget how it matters, and because the rhythm of it calms me like a train ride, until I get to sleep.
And then I read fiction for the ever reasons: to take me out of my self, and to make sense of life.
September 1, 2012
Return "Invert Colours" as a shortcut key in Mountain Lion
Thanks to @bunnyhero for this tip. I'm generally really happy with Mountain Lion, but Apple decided to turn off the CMD+ALT+CRTL+8 shortcut that inverted the colour scheme. This is a feature I use on a regular basis, as I prefer to look at a black background with white text when I'm writing.
Turns out, it's actually pretty easy to turn it back on. Simply find the Keyboard menu in system preferences, click on "keyboard shortcuts", and click the box that says "Invert colours." The keyboard shortcut works again. Phew.
Villains Don't Sleep
This little mashup is from a line CM Punk, WWE Champion said during a radio interview sometime last year. They called him tired. He said this. Below are a bunch of my rough drafts that led to the finished item. You can see it even bigger on Flickr.
August 31, 2012
More things, August 31, 2012
More transgressive things
You pit your faculties against concrete problems. The victories are concrete, definable, touchable. A page of perfect printing. You can touch the page you wrote.
How pathetic it is to die with ten grand in the bank. You should die with $100,000 or more (much more even) in debt. The greater debt you take to the grave, the better.
The disruptive power of information technology may be our best hope for curing the chronic college cost disease that is driving a growing number of students into ruinous debt or out of higher education altogether.
What we are seeing here is a tectonic shift in the ways people – especially those of the Western metropolitan cultural elite – make sense of who and what they are.
If You Thought You Were Going Apeshit Before, It's Nothing Compared to How Apeshit You Go Now
August 30, 2012
Filling up bars
There's a lesson video games can teach you: fill up the bars. Filling up the bars is important. Filling up the bars saves the world. These bars would do well to be filled.
I like filling bars. It takes time. It takes what is known as 'grinding', and it takes a lot of that. My favourite games–those generally found in the Final Fantasy series—give you so many bars to fill up, you feel like you may never get them done. But that's fine. I don't mind the amount of bars. I don't mind the amount of levels. Bring them on. Grinding is something my hands and my brain like to do. Bars, levels, percentages. It's all the same.
[image error]My current stats in Theatrhythm Final Fantasy.
Yes, that photo is of A Record Year for Rainfall's word count. I write concise books, but they don't take any less time.
This is kind of about video games, but it's mostly about the writing process. It's a grind. Everyone will tell you that. Every book is an uphill climb. You grind to finish chapters, to finish narratives, to finish draft after draft after draft. You fill up bars; quite literally little bars if you're using Scrivener. Your page count goes up.
Yes, that photo is of A Record Year for Rainfall's word count. I write concise books, but they don't take any less time.
You feel like you're getting there, but there's always another bar to fill. Are my characters fleshed out enough? Are my settings painted in a way that you'll see what I see? Does everything I want to happen, happen? Did I earn the ending I wrote? I make a bar for these things. I try to make it really high. I hope it turns out that way.
August 29, 2012
Indiscreet
Photo from the Ex in Toronto, all ground up in Photoshop. Quote from "Indiscreet," 1958.
August 28, 2012
More things, August 28, 2012
Graphic Design by Chiara Dal Maso
More Focused Things
All of this noise is the equivalent of a chainsaw being started in the middle of the New York Philharmonic. It’s ugly, it’s stupid, and it’s making our readers stupid.
For the most part we seem to [deploy our attention] so carelessly, hearkening every call upon our attention with Pavlovian alacrity.
Listener @alexandronov asked for a Back to Work starter set. Here are four. For the Golden, Silver, Bronze, and Modern Ages of our show.
More Awesome Things
They're grinding the edges off, Jerry. Just the same thing that they're doing to us.
No one says "Yeah, maybe I'll mime." You mime because you HAVE TO. It's a fucking drug. Mimes come correct & they don't fuck around.
Finally, Don't forget to be awesome.
August 27, 2012
A Record Year for Rainfall: End of the night
I don't consciously alternate between scenes that move the plot and scenes that grow the characters, but that is generally how it comes out. This scene, involving Tess alone at a bar at 4 in the morning, is one of those grower scenes.
[image error]It was getting near four in the morning. Tess felt the air on her, closed her eyes slowly, breathing in through whatever pore arched feeling, before letting her back go limp and her feet leave the ground. She sat on a plush black stool, girded permanently to the floor with thick enough metal to hold the obese. The cushion was soft, a burnt dark red kiss that let her sink in a little. It made part of her feel good and left the rest to fend.
Tess' shoes, bright-silver bedazzled platforms the club demanded but didn't provide stuck to the bottom of her feet. She'd lost feeling in her heels an hour before, but blood was beginning to recirculate. Her legs, naked and smooth and warm, hugged one another and wrapped around the stool's cold thick single leg.
She wore a tassel-filled white vest, cut low and with the sides opened up. The outfit, meant to synchronize with the team of other girls than impress or titillate the crowd, looked less like clothes than a Halloween costume for a cheerleader. It was cheaply sewn, its half life barely a weekend.
She'd asked for a tall pint, and by the time it arrived she hadn't yet breathed enough to down. After almost every hard shift, Tess unwound in a nearby bar. She didn't always drink, but she always breathed deep. After too many hours of being a prop, she had to reemerge a real person, and that required a few minutes alone. She used to do more yoga. She used to go to a class. She thought, then, about finding a class here, and putting down a deposit and signing a contract. She blinked, her eyes staying closed longer.
Snaked around her index finger was a silver ring, and she liked to clink it against glasses of beer. She loved the sound, how it started high and held longer the emptier the glass. She once had a crush on a bartender simply because he had a silver ring on his finger, and every time he picked up a glass it made that same noise, that same tingggg.
The temperature in every Vegas casino drew inspiration from Disney World, always blowing the same drift of light air conditioning regardless of season or weather. It was a permanence Tess had come to know but never love, as she sometimes missed the surprise climatical turns of British Columbia. That Vegas became cool at night did little for the case that she often?and often in times of slow, post-work reflection like this?felt that she lived in a place without time, without a world surrounding it. Las Vegas reflected the world using various methods, but had nothing to do with it in any way that really mattered. People would miss Paris or Dubai or Melbourne. Tess thought, could the same be said of here?
The drink in her hand was cold, and her hand felt chill holding it, like an ice pack on a sore lower back. It reminded her a little of her old laundromat. It was a block away from her apartment, and she'd learned it was wisest to stay, to make sure nothing was lifted. Even in the warmer months, the laundromat was freezing, which made for a musical chairs of people jumping in and outside to keep balance. Every time her laundry was finished, she'd open the dryer, engulfed in a hot haze. It was so much hotter for having stewed in this freezer of a room, and she would burn her hands on the door. The air would hit her, and her too half would steam as her legs stayed frozen.
Later, when Bret and Tess got serious, she'd bring her laundry to his place, and she didn't feel two opposite climates on her skin anymore. With him, it became one feeling; the coupling helped stave off minor discomforts that come from going it alone. She didn't burn her hands anymore. She didn't drink alone. She didn't feel the elements attack.
Here, in a bar tucked deep in the Aria, she could all but touch the hot laundered air mixed with the frozen reality. She couldn't bring herself to drink, but she held on, letting her hand chill, her body heat up. The bartender sympathetically left her alone. Nobody came up to talk to her. She couldn't have handled company, but being saved wouldn't hurt. She thought about saving herself. It made her feel stronger. She thought about saving Bret. That made her take a drink.
