4 Blank notecards. There are even greater possibilities from a deck of blank cards. You can make your own custom Top Trumps deck (Top Trumps is known in the US as “What is that card game school boys play in England again?”). Or create an entire new game using a framework like Dvorak.5 Overflowing handfuls of dice is a powerful feeling. Like being an ancient deity that can roll the fate of an entire civilization! That is why there are so many dice here. They put a firm stamp on the tool box as made for games. But dice are useful beyond randomizers. All these different colored dice can be used as game markers, and the pips as indicators to the strength or health of the die unit. Like DiceWars in the real world.6 Play money and coins. Nothing abstract about this faux moolah. It feels great to have a stack of cash in hand as a meter of game success. And, more than chips or play money, plastic gold coins are the gold standard of game currency. Gold coins can spin a theme towards pirates or fantasy. They have a presence and heft beyond their plastic patina.7 Poker chips. These need not be proxies for money in a game. They make great counters, turn markers, or modifiers for other board pieces.
...BONUS INGREDIENT: D20 Something that was not at the Dollar Store that I would add to the ideal game design box is a set of polyhedral D&D dice. There is something magical about the shapes and colors. When first encountered they are understood, yet completely from another world. Consider putting a full set of D20 type polyhedra in your gift kit.Via Boingboing
The Kingdom of Dreams and Madness is a documentary which presents a year in the life of Studio Ghibli and its famed director, Hayao Miyazaki. The year in question was a particularly interesting one during which Miyazaki announced his retirement.The trailer for this documentary is available at the link above
According to evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller,creative displays in humans are analogous to the peacock’s tail: they serve the function of attracting mates by serving as indicators of mental fitness (cognitive functioning and personality).---
Extending this argument, personality psychologist Gregory Feist made a key distinction between applied/technologicaldisplays of creativity (seen in modern domains of technology, science, and engineering), andornamental/aesthetic displays of creativity (seen in modern domains of art, music, and other aesthetic domains). According to Feist, ornamental/aesthetic forms of creativity– which play on our evolved perceptual functions and evoke strong emotions in the perceiver– were shaped primarily by sexual selection pressures and are therefore more likely to receive a sexual response than applied/technological forms of creativity.
Sometimes, too, he shows himself adept at the why-oh-why column now a Daily Mail staple. Why is handwriting so awful these days? Why are so many foreign words supplanting perfectly good English terms?
He had a gift for the arresting opening line. To wit: “Rudyard Kipling was the only popular English writer of this century who was not at the same time a thoroughly bad writer.” Or this: “There is one way of avoiding thoughts, and that is to think too deeply.”
Responsibilities:Find stories that make people who don’t care about science sit up and take notice---
Always be reporting: Strive to get exclusives, from places where no one else is looking
Pitch early and often -- and be willing to regularly spitball the other reporters’ ideas
Work quickly
Work on more than one story at a time
Methodically fact-check every draft
Understand basic statistics (or have a statistician on speed-dial)
Requirements:A proven track record and great clips of science reporting
Proven ability to turn complicated/subtle/contentious ideas into clear and lively prose
Must have specific beats that you’re not only interested in, but have a track record of covering well
Genuine enthusiasm for reporting, even when it’s annoying
A critical, skeptical eye for hype / baloney
Love for and excitement about the internet
When is the Hour of Code?---
Anybody can host an Hour of Code anytime, but the grassroots campaign goal is for tens of millions of students to try an Hour of Code during December 8-14, 2014, in celebration of Computer Science Education Week. Is it one specific hour? No. You can do the Hour of Code anytime during this week. (And if you can't do it during that week, do it the week before or after).
Why computer science?
Every student should have the opportunity to learn computer science. It helps nurture problem-solving skills, logic and creativity. By starting early, students will have a foundation for success in any 21st-century career path. See more stats on Code.org.
How do I participate in the Hour of Code?
Sign up to host an Hour of Code event here and start planning. You can organize an Hour of Code event at your school or in your community — like in an extracurricular club, non-profit or at work. Or, just try it yourself when Dec. 8 arrives.
I’ve had a few requests for details about how I paginate my print books, so here goes. Below you’ll find a 50-minute video of me walking through my pagination routine. It’s not quite everything, but I show 95% of what’s involved for a few sample chapters. From there, it’s just a matter of repeating the steps throughout the book. Once you do a few of these, it comes very naturally. You’ll also find that the process speeds up with practice.---
I brought the same Nicole to every project, and every time I started a new project I was prepared to become a professional children’s theater director or project manager or indie musician or whatever it was.Dungeons and Dragons can protect your creativity and imagination.
And I’d say I was reasonably successful at many of these potential life paths. Hard work, persistence, and natural ability does get you pretty far.
But it was only when I ended up on the writing path—and I did “end up” there as a fluke, when I started looking for ways to make extra money between indie musician gigs—that I realized my work felt different than all of my previous jobs.
The French Situationist author Annie Le Brun, in her 2008 book The Reality Overload: The Modern World's Assault on the Imaginal Realm, suggests that information technology is causing blight and desertification in the world of the imagination just as surely as pollution and global warming are causing blight and desertification in the physical world. We are gaining the ability to communicate and hoard information, but losing the ability to imagine.I think the fear of electronics killing unstructured play and imagination is overblown, the newest form of "kids these days". But maybe there's something to the value of collaborative imagination, where a group works together to visualize and understand the bizarre.
I literally cannot get my head around what it must be like to be a child or teenager now, raised in a completely digitized world -- where fantasy and long reverie have given way to the instant gratification of electronic media. There can be no innocence or imagination or wonderment in the world of Reddit, Pornhub and 4Chan
The bad films have taught me most about filmmaking. Seek out the negative definition. Sit in front of a film and ask yourself, “Given the chance, is this how I would do it?” It’s a never-ending educational experience, a way of discovering in which direction you need to take your own work and ideas.---
So this is way cool: @MaryRobinette is going to Ferguson to teach a free workshop on writing short stories: http://t.co/QeNYrAnGwG
— Jingle Patels (@ghostwritingcow) December 7, 2014
I don't embed Tweets often. This one was retweeted by @ChuckWendig .Short Stories ExplainedMary Robinette KowalSaturday, January 24, 2015 from 12:00 PM to 4:00 PM (CST)---
Ferguson, MO
Class requirementsAn interest in writing and a willingness to learn are all you need to participate in this class. Bring your preferred writing tools, whether that's a laptop computer, notepad and pen, or a typewriter. If you don't have anything handy, paper and pens will be available.
FAQWhy do I need to register if it's free?It tells us how many chairs to set up. But if you don't know until the last minute, that's okay.We can do fiction or non-fiction stories? Really? Yes, with one caveat. This workshop is focused on stories, not journalism or articles. So if you want to tell a story that is based on real life, (narrative non-fiction) the tools are the same as those for things that are made up.
“And you need to remember that first draft work is supposed to be pedestrian and lifeless and stupid, and so if you write thirty or forty pages of first draft and you read it and find that it is in fact pedestrian and lifeless and stupid, you’ve got to tell yourself, good, we’re right on track, this is how it’s supposed to be. This leads to a finished book, which will ideally be good. This is one of the necessary steps. Rewriting and revision will make it, we hope, lively and interesting and suspenseful.
“I’ve always thought people who claim to have writers’ block are snagged at that point when they see that it’s stupid and tepid and lifeless. And obviously a person who has writer’s block isn’t claiming that they’re incapable of writing a sentence or a paragraph. They’re lamenting that when they do write a paragraph it’s dumb. And I would want to tell them, keep going, good, it’s supposed to be dumb. You’ll touch it up, you’ll fix it, you’ll polish it.
... ending that features lightsaber-wielding penguins in the catacombs beneath the Vatican.Since then, I've always wanted some unlikely foes to do battle 'in the catacombs beneath the Vatican.' This year, I might have a story line fits - if any does. My story could have proto-Nazis fighting steampunk-powered Victorians and Yetis, in the catacombs, beneath the Vatican.
Peter Brown grinds up plastic jugs and bottle caps in a blender, then melts them into bricks. He uses the bricks as stock to turn on his lathe. I want to make one just to admire it.--
At least with stories, you know that if you tell a scary story, and it works, the audience will experience fear. But the emotional oomph of non-narrative art is much more mysterious, more of an art, really, and though it may be harder to systematize, when it gets in the groove, look out.---
Of course, whether this is a positive thing or a negative thing depends on the context. The ability to control your attention is most certainly a valuable asset; difficulty inhibiting your inner mind can get in the way of paying attention to a boring classroom lecture or concentrating on a challenging problem. But the ability to keep your inner stream of fantasies, imagination, and daydreams on call can be immensely conducive to creativity. By automatically treating ADHD characteristics as a disability– as we so often do in an educational context– we are unnecessarily letting too many competent and creative kids fall through the cracks.
But anyway, we’ve finally reached the end of the Escape From the Jews subplot. That means we’re now just idling until the next big set piece begins. That’s the pattern in these books — a disconnected series of such set pieces, interspersed with long stretches of nothing in between. Jerry Jenkins usually fills that nothingness with airports, phone calls, prayer sessions and lots of unnatural conversation in which various characters, including Buck and Rayford, talk about how awesomely cool Buck and Rayford are.Perhaps they need Elmore Leonard's advice:
I try to leave out the parts readers skip.---
Hemingway, Da Vinci, Currie, just a few among many, recorded their thoughts, arts and day-to-day musings in notebooks providing insight into their creative minds. The 100 Notebook Project explores the power and potential of the notebook as a medium for capturing creativity. Our local community is full of inspiring and imaginative people who have their own unique perspectives to share. 100 creative people will be selected and given a notebook to fill with their own thoughts, art and day-to-day explorations. Each of the completed notebooks forms the basis of the 100 Notebook Project Exhibition, a community event to celebrate these unique, creative works. Afterwards, the collection will become a circulating library further sharing the power of the notebook with the public.
“You want to write, you need to keep an honest, unpublishable journal that nobody reads, nobody but you,” Madeleine L’Engle counseled in her advice to aspiring writers. W.H. Auden once described hisjournal as “a discipline for [his] laziness and lack of observation.”
The answer is to step back, reverse the whole process, and start with the character arc. Jot down notes about those cool settings and scenes on a set of cards. What is the appeal of that setting to you – the emotional pull? This could give insights into the kind of character that would inhabit it. Then start working on the characters. Focus on one character only to begin with. This is your lead character. Forget the setting. What does the character NEED to develop, to grow? What is their journey?...Want proof? Go check out that show about the guy with the blue box. The stories aren’t really about his TARDIS or the neat places you can go in it. Are they?
Of course, every great story needs a great beginning, and that’s where we need your help! You’ll tell the authors how the story should begin, whether it’s with the classic “Once upon a time…” or something completely random like “Before he came to Tuberville, Roger Pickens had never seen a chicken.”---
To participate, send us your opening line ideas until November 12th. Then, on November 18, you can tune in to view the winning prompt, and watch as the writers transform that sentence into a one-of-a-kind story, right in front of your eyes.
As I struggled through my most recent bout of writer's block, a friend recommended I read THE ARTIST'S WAY by Julia Cameron.
In THE ARTIST'S WAY, Julia Cameron suggested writing "Morning Pages" every day before doing anything else. This applies to everyone, not just writers. Your morning pages can be anything you want. They can be profound, or crappy. It doesn't matter. The point is to use them as a focal point before starting your day.
I can't begin to tell you how helpful my Morning Pages have been for me! Since I write from home, it's very easy to get distracted. When I write in my Morning Pages, my entire day becomes much more focused and productive. It's something you have to see to believe, so rather than try and convince you, I highly suggest you give it a try and see how it can effect your life.
A British expeditionary group, mostly in the area for research, excavates a proto-Buddhist temple whose origins go back much further than expected.
"In his Steampunk exploration of Nepal, Dean has written a tour-de-force, a stunning debut novel that will make him the new JK Rowling. He has somehow managed to retain a YA rating while including gritty violence and religiously fueled horror and remarkable sex scenes that made me blush." Predicted review by Cory Doctorow, Dec 12, 2014.
Photography 101 is a photo-a-day challenge combining a daily photo theme with shooting and photo editing tips on composition, lighting, cropping, and more. You’ll publish new posts, make new friends, and hone your photographer’s eye. It’s also a great way for photobloggers to participate in NaBloPoMo this November. Charge your camera batteries and get ready to shoot!---
For three years, I’ve tried to start a blog. Before Blogging 101, I never built enough momentum. Now, thanks to the accountability of regular assignments – and thanks to receiving such wonderful, encouraging feedback – I’ve reached the critical mass I needed.
Practicing My (Gray)ScalesBlogging 101 is a month of bite-size blogging assignments that take you from “Blog?” to “Blog!” Assignments help you publish posts, customize your blog, and engage with the community. You’ll walk away with published posts and a handful of drafts, a theme that reflects your personality, a small (but growing!) audience, a grasp of blogging etiquette — and a bunch of new friends.
" Oldham was still cruising, still relaxing and enjoying it. Soon, he would have to fight the wind and look for signs of direction and strength. Now though, he cruised. This was his last chance to talk and he used it.
"I hope you'll be warm enough", he said and risked another glance at the new guy's, Kasher's cotton robes. There were a lot of them but none were particularly thick.
"So do I", responded the man with a mild accent. "Sir Oldwife's representative stated that appropriate clothing would be provided. "I've spent some time in the Thar Desert and the nights are cold there. These clothes held up then."
Oldham smiled. "You'll wish it were that warm where we are going. I'm more concerned about the wind, I guess." He took a last drink from the German, lidded beer stein and pushed it back into its clip. Another glance at the instruments.
He pulled a wire and Kasher knew a flag was waving behind him. A flag for Canneau to, uh, do something mechanical. The heat in the cabin increased briefly and Kasher knew Canneau was loading the box with more of the strange coal."
The text is barely legible. The drawings are often incomprehensible to anyone but myself. The rhymes are way too obvious (though this probably won’t change before the final published comic).
When I jot ideas in my sketchbook, what’s important is speed. I want to put an idea on paper before I have time to second guess it. Layout, proportions, drawing above a third-grade level - there will be many more hours to address these problems.
Consequently, the person who is most likely to get new ideas is a person of good background in the field of interest and one who is unconventional in his habits. (To be a crackpot is not, however, enough in itself.)
...
My feeling is that as far as creativity is concerned, isolation is required. The creative person is, in any case, continually working at it. His mind is shuffling his information at all times, even when he is not conscious of it. (The famous example of Kekule working out the structure of benzene in his sleep is well-known.)
The presence of others can only inhibit this process, since creation is embarrassing. For every new good idea you have, there are a hundred, ten thousand foolish ones, which you naturally do not care to display.
...
But how to persuade creative people to do so? First and foremost, there must be ease, relaxation, and a general sense of permissiveness. The world in general disapproves of creativity, and to be creative in public is particularly bad. Even to speculate in public is rather worrisome. The individuals must, therefore, have the feeling that the others won’t object.
If a single individual present is unsympathetic to the foolishness that would be bound to go on at such a session, the others would freeze. The unsympathetic individual may be a gold mine of information, but the harm he does will more than compensate for that. It seems necessary to me, then, that all people at a session be willing to sound foolish and listen to others sound foolish.
...
I do not think that cerebration sessions can be left unguided. There must be someone in charge who plays a role equivalent to that of a psychoanalyst. A psychoanalyst, as I understand it, by asking the right questions (and except for that interfering as little as possible), gets the patient himself to discuss his past life in such a way as to elicit new understanding of it in his own eyes.
In the same way, a session-arbiter will have to sit there, stirring up the animals, asking the shrewd question, making the necessary comment, bringing them gently back to the point. Since the arbiter will not know which question is shrewd, which comment necessary, and what the point is, his will not be an easy job.
To keep skinny body and maverick soul together, Iggy’s become a DJ, a car-insurance pitchman and a fashion model. If he had to live off royalties, he said, he’d have to “tend bars between sets.” As I listened to his enthusiastic stoner Midwestern drawl, I thought: If Iggy Pop can’t make it, what message does that send to all the baby Iggys out there? In a society where worth is judged by price, for better or worse, what are you saying to someone when you won’t pay for the thing he’s crafted?The link above references a lecture by Mr Pop. Here is a transcript.
A few days before Iggy’s lecture, Australian novelist Richard Flanagan won the Booker Prize, the most prestigious in the literary world, for his Second World War story The Narrow Road to the Deep North. Just in time, it sounds like: Mr. Flanagan told reporters that he was making so little from his writing that he was thinking about packing it in and becoming a miner. (He comes from a small mining town in Tasmania.) The prize money of about $90,000 and the following sales bump will allow him to continue, but most of his colleagues aren’t so lucky: “Writing is a very hard life for so many writers,” he said.
People who graduate with a degree in the Arts generally have to deal with high debt and low prospects for earning a sustainable living as working artists.
That's the big takeaway from a new report from BFAMFAPhD, Artists Report Back: A National Study on the Lives of Arts Graduates and Working Artists [PDF]. The short version: “the fantasy of future earnings in the arts cannot justify the high cost of degrees.”
Here's two ideas for you to play with - the first one, just draw to copy it; the second one, get a photo of yourself and enlarge it to at least 8x10, and then cover one half of the photo with plain white paper, and then try to draw the opposite side of the face - the examples are below. The first one has guideline in it to show you the proportions and layout of the face and facial features. And in case you are wondering why to do this, it will help you see more clearly how the face appears and is drawn, and will give you good experience. I do suggest a class, it's the best way to learn.The examples are probably at the link above or definitely this one.
Cicada magazine, a cultural arts publication for young adults, is inviting writers to submit stories for a forthcoming issue on Tricksters and Thieves. This issue will include stories of pirates, hustlers, and charlatan gods; scrutinies of bewitchment, enchantment, deception, and other guiles of illusion; and inquests of the trickiness of the real self in a field of performances.---
Sixteen acclaimed, award-winning Canadian authors are bringing their talent to Bracebridge for the NorthWords Muskoka Literary Festival, Oct. 3 to 5. It’s an opportunity to meet the authors, learn about their books and inspiration, do some early Christmas shopping for book-lovers on your list, and get those burning questions about a writer’s life answered – all while savouring delicious meals catered by Bracebridge restaurants....Nipissing University provides the venue for the first two events on Friday, Oct. 3. Authors Michael Wuitchik and Anne Lazurko are joined by three literary agents and a publisher, to present a fiction workshop for aspiring writers. Over the afternoon, writers have the opportunity to book a pitch session with the agents to receive feedback on their current projects. An evening wine/beer and hors d’oeuvres reception follows, featuring Giller-nominated author, Anthony De Sa and best-selling author, Terry Fallis who will entertain with their unique brands of humour. Although Anthony’s newest novel, Kicking the Sky, addresses a dark period in the history of Toronto’s Portuguese community, he exudes warmth and humour. The immense wit of Terry Fallis, author of No Relation, matches De Sa and ensures a great time for all. Fallis’ newest book, No Relation, about the effects of being cursed with the name of a famous person like Ernest Hemingway or Marie Antoinette, is full of chuckles and laugh-out-loud moments.
In this case, the impossible ideas have a common thread: rather than try to change traffic, they all seek to remove cars from the traffic congestion equation altogether. This produced an "ah-ha" for all involved and led our principal to favor strategies that would help her remove - rather than attempt to change - traffic.---
It allows you to link passages of text via links, which has led many people to compare games made with Twine to old Choose Your Own Adventure books. But Twine allows you to do things that those books never could. Games can keep track of decisions made and actions taken by players much earlier in the game--what type of weapon they selected, for instance, or whether or not they collected a particular key. With a bit of creativity on the part of the creator, games can have puzzles that players can't quickly "solve" by just trying each of a few options. Games can also include images and videos, and with a bit of extra know-how, you can also employ basic effects, such as flashing text, which can do a good deal to foster a particular mood in your game.---
Lahey: You extol the benefits of writing first drafts with the door closed, but students are often so focused on giving teachers what they want and afraid of making mistakes that they become paralyzed. How can teachers encourage kids to close the door and write without fear?
King: In a class situation, this is very, very hard. That fearlessness always comes when a kid is writing for himself, and almost never when doing directed writing for the grade (unless you get one of those rare fearless kids who’s totally confident). The best thing—maybe the only thing—is to tell the student that telling the truth is the most important thing, much more important than the grammar. I would say, “The truth is always eloquent.” To which they would respond, “Mr. King, what does eloquent mean?”
King: A lot of them didn’t care; they were just hacking out assignments. For those that are sensitive and insecure, you have to combine gentleness with firmness. It’s a tightrope, particularly with teenagers. Did I have students actually bust out crying? I did. I’d say, “This is just a step to get you to the next step.”Lahey: Of course, once they have something down on paper, they are going to have to open the door and invite the world to read what they have written. How did you cope with the editing process early in your writing career, and how did you teach your students to handle feedback?
Lahey: You warn writers not to “come lightly to the blank page.” How can teachers encourage kids to come the blank page with both gravity and enthusiasm?
King: It went best for me when I could communicate my own enthusiasm. I can remember teaching Dracula to sophomores and practically screaming, “Look at all the different voices in this book! Stoker’s a ventriloquist! I love that!” I don’t have much use for teachers who “perform,” like they’re onstage, but kids respond to enthusiasm. You can’t command a kid to have fun, but you can make the classroom a place that feels safe, where interesting things happen. I wanted every 50-minute class to feel like half an hour.
They found that both real-world creative achievement and creative cognition (as rated by four independent judges) were significantly associated with two personality traits:psychoticism and hypomania. These findings remained even after taking into account prior academic achievement test scores.
Psychoticism is characterized by impulsivity, sensation-seeking, and proneness to psychosis. Many of the items on the psychoticism scale measure oddness of thought and behavior, such as “Other people seem to think my behavior is weird”, “My thoughts are strange and unpredictable”, and “My thoughts often don’t make sense to others.” In a clinical setting, extremely high levels of psychoticism may be cause for a diagnosis of mental illness, but this finding suggests that in the normally varying general population, there is an association between these characteristics and real-world creative achievement.
Creativity was also associated with hypomania, a mood state characterized by high energy levels, rapid mood fluctuations, and racing thoughts. Some items on the hypomania scale include “I am frequently in such high spirits that I can’t concentrate on any one thing for too long”, “I have such a wide range of interests that I often don’t know what to do next”, and “Sometimes ideas and insights come to me so fast that I cannot express them all”. Again, in a clinical setting, extreme levels of this trait may require rehabilitation. But this finding (and the findings of prior studies) suggests that in the general population hypomania is associated with creative achievement.
Neither creative cognition nor creative achievement were associated with depression ...
Interestingly, creative cognition was no longer associated with real-world creative achievement, psychoticism or hypomania when scoring the test using the method recommended in the testing manual.----
One reason I used Evernote was because I kept all of my reporting notes and research in Evernote, and I wanted quick access to all that while I was writing.
It felt less clunky switching between screens in the same app than switching between Evernote and a slow-loading memory hog like Microsoft Word or the surprisingly lethargic Google Docs.
Another few reasons:
• Evernote constantly saves what you're working on and backs it up to the cloud.• I have Evernote on my phone and iPad, and it was nice to be able to pull up my draft and review it anytime anywhere.• Evernote note windows are sparse, and I like that for writing.• I've developed a "process" around turning reporting/research into writing in Evernote, and when you're doing work as open-ended as long form writing, it's nice to have some step-by-step tasks to do to ground you.