TWIC: procrastination, writing, music, desks, sewing, emotions and language

On fighting procrastination.

1. The dream to have a great body, but never being motivated to go workout.
2. The dream to succeed in college, but not having the willpower to study.
3. The dream to be wealthy, but not having the discipline to build it.
4. The dream to get married, but never being brave enough to commit.
5. The dream to have a loving family, but never taking time off work.

Numbering is different in the original.

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An interview with PC Hodgell (Youtube link but interview is exclusively audio).
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Harsh truths from famous writers.

16. Get through a draft as quickly as possible. Hard to know the shape of the thing until you have a draft. Literally, when I wrote the last page of my first draft of Lincoln’s Melancholy I thought, Oh, shit, now I get the shape of this. But I had wasted years, literally years, writing and re-writing the first third to first half. The old writer’s rule applies: Have the courage to write badly. – Joshua Wolf Shenk
17. Substitute ‘damn’ every time you’re inclined to write ‘very;’ your editor will delete it and the writing will be just as it should be. – Mark Twain

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Thousands of out of print sewing patterns.
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Crib Sheet for journalists (ESL edition).
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Tiny Desk Contest (maybe for hedgehogs but also for American musicians)
From the rules:

Videos must:

• feature a desk (there must be a desk—any desk—in the Video);
• contain a song that is the Entrant’s original work (covers will not be accepted);
• be created specifically for the Contest (videos that were submitted to previous NPR Music Tiny Desk contests or to any other contest or competition will not be accepted);
• be a maximum of ten (10) minutes in length;
• be uploaded to YouTube in any format acceptable to YouTube; and

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Maggie Stiefvater discusses College or Not?

Nowadays that means that my past novels are paying my mortgage while my current project is paying future bills. But back then, it meant I was happier having another job while I worked out getting published.

And, I mean, biologist sounds like a good job.
This has gotten very long and it’s all saying essentially the same thing: don’t let WRITER be your identity, even if WRITING is your ultimate job. Don’t conflate FOLLOW YOUR DREAMS with IGNORE COMMON SENSE. Don’t believe that somehow putting aside your writing to get a degree in Zebra Husbandry means you have abandoned your true self. Don’t think about a ticking clock, think only about forward movement. Pursue whatever degree will give you that balance of identity, security, and vivid creative material. Only you can answer which degree fills in that blank.

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The subject for your next book. You use the letters of your name to fill in the blanks:
A/an A B about a/an C D E to F his/her/their G.
A Keenly Observed Trilogy about a Young Man's Quest to Understand his Sexless Marriage.
Seems quite the melodrama - and this subject would be somewhat easy to write in that I am shy about writing about sex.
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Plutchik's wheel of emotions.

Image cropped. Follow the above link for the whole thing. Via eqjosh.
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A young artist on Instagram commented elsewhere asking for comment on his/her artwork. I don't consider myself as having discriminatory taste in artwork but it seems pleasant.
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Music of my youth: Doug and the slugs' Tropical Rainstorm

I didn't have any specific taste in music and so drifted where friends and coaches led. One swim coach, who shared a last name with me but probably wasn't related, was a huge Doug and the Slugs fan and played his music while we swam.
I absorbed it while I swam and only later, when I knew the name of the group realized I'd heard their songs on the radio.
 D & S was the first concert I went to on my own, using a friend's ID to sneak in underage. Although this is not a bar or live favorite, D & S was the best bar band I can think of.



Anyway, this is not a love song but a wreckage-after-love-is-over song.

We're nothing more than friends gone their separate ways, no longer parallel lines.

The song has a bitter edge,

Hearing your master call, you finally turned to home
Back to what you see as real

but is more about the recovery

A bond broken, then repaired.

The imagery fits the song perfectly,

Oh, I heard the small-craft warning long before they came
Ah the gales oo were blowing for days
Clearing the pathway of the branches from the storm
I realized that you had made your place
Swept away by a tropical rainstorm on the lower mainland

Full lyrics here.

Music of my Youth: Vangelis I'll find my way home

Ah, synthesizers.  You were so great, way back when.
I remember the synthed voice more and the first two lines more than anything else. Now looking at the lyrics, it's a neat song that rewards reading.

From Lyrics Freak:

You ask me where to begin
Am I so lost in my sin
You ask me where did I fall
I'll say I can't tell you when
But if my spirit is lost
How will I find what is near
Don't question I'm not alone
Somehow I'll find my way home

My sun shall rise in the east
So shall my heart be at peace
And if you're asking me when
I'll say it starts at the end
You know your will to be free
Is matched with love secretly
And talk will alter your prayer
Somehow you'll find you are there.

Your friend is close by your side
And speaks in far ancient tongue
A seasons wish will come true
All seasons begin with you
One world we all come from
One world we melt into one

Just hold my hand and we're there
Somehow we're going somewhere
Somehow we're going somewhere

Somehow I'll find my way home X4

One of the commenters on the Youtube pages asks an important question about this video:

This blogger feels the song is strongly Christian in origin. It does mention soul and sin but I find it more generic.

I think I'll be digging into Yes: Youtube, Wikipedia

Music at my first job: Windy by The Association

Windy on Youtube. Ah heck, here is the video:



I am certain I heard this song playing on the radio at home. Hmm, I cannot recall the station; the DJ for the show was Don Dainer (sp?) and the show was "Looking Back". We listened to it Saturday nights in the late '70's so this song would have been ten years old.

I most recall it on 590 AM in Muskoka on my way to or from work in the summer. I was a carpenter's helper in the summer, swinging a hammer or carrying stuff.

I really thought this song had a whistling section as I definitely thought I was whistling along with it. That is to say, I was whistling although I am not sure a listener would have recognised it.

Who's peeking out from under a stairway

Calling a name that's lighter than air?

Who's bending down to give me a rainbow?

Everyone knows it's Windy

Who's tripping down the streets of the city

Smiling at everybody she sees?

Who's reaching out to capture a moment?

Everyone knows it's Windy

And Windy has stormy eyes

That flash at the sound of lies

And Windy has wings to fly

Above the clouds (Above the clouds)

Above the clouds (Above the clouds)

I also thought there were more words to it. Full lyrics can be found here.

From Wikipedia:

the song reached #1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in July of that year[1967].

Maybe that's why it is a big deal for me: it was big when I was born.

Music of my middle age: Cinderella (trying not to scream)

I grew up on Doug and the Slugs (Doug on Wikipedia). Along with a few other bands and songs that will be featured here, one of my swim coaches loved this band and played their cassette tapes repeatedly while we swam.  I am certain to feature more Doug and the Slugs songs here but this one is interesting because it is relatively recent (he died in 2004) and I think only exists on Youtube.

I have discussed this song before, focusing on the interesting choice of detail; the only concrete detail is green walls. A very quick Google search shows the phrase he used describing schools, maternity hospitals and spas.

We further know she lives alone and she has no place to go. The rest are merely evocative language and cliche. Let me pick out a few cliches:

• Down in flames
• Streets paved with gold
• Half-full glass

Elsewhere are everyday icons, used by everyone and nearly cliches themselves:

• Cinderella
• broken mirror
• broken heart
• heart of stone

Bennett puts them together well and makes his own kind of tragic love song from them. I don't know if Bennett made any other kind of love song. One of my favorites that made it onto an album is Tropical Rainstorm.

Some questions: "Shattered dreams like Napoleon Bonaparte". I have listened to the line a few times and wonder if he uses the ending to a joke, "Blownaparte". Bonaparte's dreams were indeed shattered but not in a love song kind of way. I hope there is more to the choice than a rhyme with 'heart'.

Cinderella Trying not to Scream.

When we first met, there was a sound of music and the streets were all paved with gold.

Then fact and fiction began to collide and the love letters all turned cold.

One of us in denial, the other down in flames.

But who got busted, who gets dusted, it's the same old game.

She sits in the window of a haunted house where the walls are all painted green.

Cinderella, trying not to scream.

When you live a love without any glory, its a love you live in vain.

With so many lies and so many stories we live in a spiral of shame.

One of us a broken mirror, the other a broken heart.

Shattered dreams like Napoleon Bonaparte.

She sits in a window of a haunted house where the walls are all painted green.

Cinderella, trying not to scream.

She lives alone with her own expectations and the spaces in between. Cinderella trying not to scream.

All those lonely days and lonely nights that she slowly walks us home.

No one knows  she has nowhere to go and no one to call. No one to call.

When we first met, there was a sound of music and the streets were all paved with gold.

 Then truth and religion began to collide and the love letters all turned cold.

Some say the glass is half empty.  And others say half-full.  But she thinks the glass is pointless. I guess she always will.

She sits in a window of a haunted house where the walls are all painted green.

Cindrella, trying not to scream.

She lives alone with a heart of stone. Its the saddest thing I've ever seen.

Cinderella trying not to scream. X4

Music of my youth, and a little more recent: Africa by Toto

I suspect it is just nostalgia that drives me but I am becoming more interested in music, and especially lyrics, these days. I hope to write about one song a week a while. I would not describe my musical taste as discriminating and many songs I am thinking about are obvious. Probably the others are banal. But they are my musical choices; make of them what you will.

A still from the video in the first link below.

Today's pick is in the obvious category: Toto's Africa. That site continuously plays that one video. I didn't expect books to play such a large part in the video.  Again, I've been thinking about music more lately, but this post on Salon convinced me to put fingers to keyboard.

[Verse 1]
I hear the drums echoing tonight
But she hears only whispers of some quiet conversation
She's coming in 12:30 flight
The moonlit wings reflect the stars that guide me towards salvation
I stopped an old man along the way
Hoping to find some old forgotten words or ancient melodies
He turned to me as if to say "Hurry boy, It's waiting there for you"
[Chorus]
It's gonna take a lot to drag me away from you
There's nothing that a hundred men or more could ever do
I bless the rains down in Africa
Gonna take some time to do the things we never have
[Verse 2]
The wild dogs cry out in the night
As they grow restless longing for some solitary company
I know that I must do what's right
As sure as Kilimanjaro rises like Olympus above the Serengeti
I seek to cure what's deep inside, frightened of this thing that I've become

 Lyrics from Genius.com

A later lyric changes "It's" to "She's" as in "She's waiting there for you".

Huh. I don't think it is the lyrics that sold me on this song. Most recently, it was this version, which is an acapella and a somewhat novelty take on the song. What do I remember from this song?

• Hurry boy, it's waiting there for you.
• Rain
• Kilimanjaro.

The sense of a quest is entirely absent in my recollection. The drive to make a choice, to correct a wrong or personal demon is new to me as I read the lyrics.

There seems to be 'just enough' detail. A wannabe traveller like myself might want more detail and perhaps a more specific location than the second largest continent. I wonder if the song would do so well as "Tanzania" by Africa? ... Now checking that Kilimanjaro is in Tanzania... Anyway, the Serengeti is more than two hundred kilometers away so it would have to be a very clear day for the mountain to rise over it. Aside from that name, the atmospheric words are rain, wild dogs, drums and ancient.
I am  a socially awkward sort so this song has taught me more about 'wistfulness' than any other source.

So, ah, what is 'solitary company'? Romantic time? Are wild dogs all that romantic?

Time to enjoy this song again after finally paying proper attention to it.
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I plan to look at You're So Vain by Simon, Windy by Association, and The First Cut is the Deepest, probably by Cat Stevens. In less obvious, more personal territory, Cinderella by Doug and the Slugs.  I should add something from the J Geils Band and even the Nylons as well. Maybe a song from Ian Bell....

TWIC: busy,diy coffin, music, motivation, maps

It seems like even easy posts like This Week In Creativiti are shrinking.  I normally start a new TWIC around the same day I post the finished one. Then I add to it all week.

Big news! I have a job! Last year we moved to a new city in South Korea and I took on various short contracts while looking for more full time work. I am fully employed again!

It is a new position and I need to plan new lessons and organize homework and such so posting here has been infrequent.

Indeed, it is now Sunday and TWIC normally goes up on Monday evening or Tuesday. I gotta find some stuff.
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Deep Thinking: Where Machine Intelligence Ends and Human Creativity Begins. The book doesn't come out for another six or seven weeks (May 2) but it looks interesting for a variety of reasons.

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Getting on? Maybe it's time to build your own coffin.

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Theft. A history of music. The link goes to a site to buy the book or download a PDF free.

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shortlist for Sony's world photography awards.
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Unintended consequences  What would you want if you could any one thing, real or imaginary? How difficult would it be to keep it?
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Tremendously wealthy and still working on Sundays. Why? The article is about ambition and motivation. Things I need.

Consider the journalist Ryan Avent, who recently wrote a piece titled Why do we work so hard? He confesses to an internal struggle about the pros and cons of his self-described workaholic life. But he ends up optimistic about his tradeoffs. For his grandparents, he says, work was a means to an end. “Work” was the thing you did during the week to make money in order to enjoy “life” on the weekends. For our grandparents, in a different economy, work was duller and more physically taxing. Today, for the educated among us, work can be intellectually invigorating as never before. It’s easier to love your work, as he says he loves journalism. When his parents worry about his job and its long hours, Avent observes the disconnect: They are asking him about his “work,” he says, but “I am thinking about identity, community, purpose – the things that provide meaning and motivation. I am talking about my life.”

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The Components of Happy Ambition: Tweaks to Prioritize Happiness As You Quest for Meaning
Become mindful of status triggers with mindfulness meditation
Set fewer goals. Love the craft itself: be process-driven, not goal-driven
Choose work and set goals where relative status is harder to compare or measure
The people around you shape the nature of your ambition, so pick your peer group carefully
Diversify your identity by operating a portfolio
Operate a dashboard, not a leaderboard. Play against yourself, not an opponent
Physically move and be a big fish in a small pond

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Designing the graphics for Harry Potter movies. I am a 'get the function right and don't worry about the design' guy. I make some useful things but I seldom go the extra mile to work on the presentation.  My PPTs of lesson materials carry the details I want and I value simplicity but they could be better organized. One thing I know I should fix is consistency - A constant style in how I display information so students know where to look. On one slide I might have nouns in blue but on the next slide I have circled the nouns. Ah, enough about me. I like the depth of planning that went into basically all movies and this example shines.
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A fantasy map generator. Kottke does a good job of summarizing how this generator works and why it is special. There are some small scale generators too play with but the completed work is posted to Twitter @unchartedatlas.

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Need to add whale song to your life? Here is a whale synthesizer. It sounds awfully like a theremin to me.
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TWIC:on writing, procrastination, maps, drum beats and titles

Evaluating your teaching of ESL writing.

Choose a short writing activity; something that produces at least 1 or 2 paragraphs of writing. Run this activity at the beginning of the semester and at the end of the semester. In this sample lesson plan I use a short video.
Step 4 Collect Writing
After students have finished writing, collect their work. Keep it in a safe place until the end of the semester.
Step 5 Repeat Assignment
Around week 13 of the semester, I repeat the writing assignment. This gives me a little time to read the new and old student writing and make a few notes that highlight differences before final exams.

At the link, you can find more information, including a suggestion on warning/reminding students what they should think about in their writing.  This is something that took me a long time to learn.  I remember spending an hour of classtime looking at metaphors and similes, having the students make their own examples and then telling them to write a story for me.  None of the stories handed in included metaphors or similes!  "Write a story" is not enough!
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Writing and OCD

In fact, much of what we celebrate as genius has a certain obsessive-compulsive quality, nowhere more discernible than in the lives of writers, who possess the rare gift of being able to articulate these forces of creative compulsion with electrifying clarity.

The article quotes French writer Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette

To write is to pour one’s innermost self passionately upon the tempting paper, at such frantic speed that sometimes one’s hand struggles and rebels, overdriven by the impatient god who guides it — and to find, next day, in place of the golden bough that boomed miraculously in that dazzling hour, a withered bramble and a stunted flower.

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Steve Martin Quotes

“I don’t totally believe in the very specific back-story. It never really helped me as a writer. I don’t think it helps in movies either. They’re always talking about backstory, backstory, backstory and you can’t express it unless it’s completely boring exposition.”
“It’s sort of the author’s right not to reveal how much of a character is him.”
“I don’t really manage my time. I really just wait until I’m inspired to do something. And when I’m inspired to do something, it just happens. I know it seems like a lot, but, you know, a movie takes three months, right? And during that time you’re sitting in your trailer a lot. So I’ll learn a song on the banjo or maybe I’ll write an essay if it comes up. But only if it comes up.”

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What is procrastination and how can I fight it?

"It's so frustrating because even though I know how it works, it's really hard to stop doing it."

The best, but not perfect, answer was meditation, specifically 'mindfulness meditation'. That's inside quotes because I don't know the difference between types of meditations.
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I don't know if sabotage fits with the theme of creativity but creative people are more morally versatile. Whatever the case, the CIA's textbook on Simple Sabotage is available at Amazon. And Holy Shoot, the US version is a third the price of the Canadian version. Ah, the book is devoted to teaching a manager to detect sabotage - people who schedule meetings at inappropriate times, for example, rather than a Phun Philes document on how to make explosives. Ah, apparently Phun Philes are a relic of a simpler time, a time of Commodore 64s and the secret copying and sharing of 3.5 in floppy disks. I cannot find a current link. Briefly, it was a document explaining how to make explosives and such.
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The blank page is a scary sight.  Limits are fun and allow turning activities into games. Play Anything is a book on gamification that I now want.
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The thousand most common words in English are a useful thing for ESL educators to know. 300 of them are in this book with useful drawings explaining them.
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Maps, a twofer.
Jerry Gretzinger has been inventing a map for the past fifty-odd years.

The map is never finished. In the morning, when Gretzinger draws a card out of the deck that sets his task for the day, sometimes that card says "scan". That means a portion of the map is scanned and archived, and the copy is reworked to "upgrade" that part of the map.

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Generate your own random fantasy map.

I wanted to make maps that look like something you'd find at the back of one of the cheap paperback fantasy novels of my youth. I always had a fascination with these imagined worlds, which were often much more interesting than whatever luke-warm sub-Tolkien tale they were attached to.

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Magic Spells inscribed on tiny scrolls of gold and silver.

The fragile, golden and silver scrolls - which once unrolled look like rectangles of foil similar in size to a sweet wrapper - may never be fully understood.

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A drum beat generator. Ah, actually isolated drum beats from existing music that you can reset the beat on.
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I have a new blog feature creating stories from click bait titles.  It turns out, such titles are of value beyond blog posts.  They work for scientific journal article titles too.

It turned out that articles with positive framing and phrasing arousal in their titles received higher Altmetric scores, meaning that they were shared more widely online. In contrast, having wordplay in the titles actually lead to lower Altmetric Attention Scores, while having a question in the title made no difference. This is independent of the length of the title or how interesting the topic was.

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TWIC: 2 types of writers, the internet for musicians, sci-am art, and Herzog's film-making class,

2 types of writers

Macro Planners:

A Macro Planner makes notes, organizes material, configures a plot and creates a structure — all before he writes the title page. This structural security gives him a great deal of freedom of movement. It’s not uncommon for Macro Planners to start writing their novels in the middle. As they progress, forward or backward, their difficulties multiply with their choices.

Micro-managers

Smith professes to being a Micro Manager herself:

I start at the first sentence of a novel and I finish at the last. It would never occur to me to choose among three different endings because I haven’t the slightest idea of the ending until I get to it, a fact that will surprise no one who has read my novels.

She sounds from this brief excerpt to be, in Nano parlance, a pantser.
She also describes a disorder:

obsessive perspective disorder, or OPD — “a kind of existential drama” that unfolds over the course of the novel’s first twenty pages, possessing the writer to compulsively attempt answering the question of what kind of novel is being written. And yet, Smith marvels, despite how disorienting OPD is, it isn’t paralyzing — the writing continues throughout this straining state. In that regard, OPD appears to be, rather assuringly, mere garden-variety anxiety — the same psychic malady that tormented Darwin as he was producing his most influential work, the very state Kierkegaard believed powers creative work rather than hindering it, which psychologists have also found to be the crux of the link between creativity and mental illness. Smith writes:

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Daryl Hall defends the internet as a creative place.

You have an instantly recognizable name, and millions of people all over the world are familiar with your music. If you want to start an internet show, you have that advantage. A young artist, as you said, is just floundering. What is that you would do if you were in that position? Do you give advice to the young artists you have on your show?
Well, it is hard for me to give them advice, because they don’t have any help. My show is exposure for them, but yes, I have a name. So, I can do it. Now, if I was the head of Atlantic Records, and not to single them out, I would start an internet show, and I would pair my young artists with my older artists for every broadcast. They have a big enough name. They’re as big as me.

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Visualizing the mammals that preyed on dinosaurs. Scientific American Artist, James Gurney offers this video detailing how he painted a badger-like mammal that ate baby dinosaurs.

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Werner Herzog's online film-making class  Runs this summer..

TWIC: Einstein, Jeet Heer and writing help

The link doesn't work for me so if it Rick Rolls, sorry.  Psychology Today (apparently) discusses Einstein, creativity and music. If anyone sees this and it looks valuable, please send me a copy and paste.
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Jeet Heer often attempts longform journalism on Twitter.  Here is a set of 20 Tweets discussing Talese's problematic intrusion into the subjects he studies.

I think Talese faces extra scrutiny after this tale of a motel owner who spied on clients for thirty and shared his 'data' with Talese.
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Need help writing a novel?  This guy claims to be able to help.  I opened the browser window this morning and can't remember its provenance.  Beware if you need to join a mailing list.

How to write pop songs

From the Washington Post:

“Tempo does not appear to matter,” the USC researchers wrote in the April issue of the Journal of Consumer Psychology. “While every artist strives to create a catchy hook, they may also consider striving to write a coherent song in which the chorus is repeated frequently while utilizing a limited vocabulary.”

...

“people are more likely to engage in a given behavior the less effort it requires.” Which basically means this: Human brains get really jazzed about things that are easy to grasp.

Seems pretty simple, really.

Crossposting: Summer plans

I have too many blogs.  Here I write about creativity and writing.  At creationevolutionbusan, I write about evolution and science. And at surprisesaplenty.wordpress.com, I write about other subjects, mostly family life, teaching and travel.

At the Surprisesaplenty site, I wrote this:

This summer I appear to have a lot of free time.  I hope to work an ESL camp in August and have a few other commitments but essentially I have time to work on my own projects.  Most of these projects deal with writing.

Writing Plans and Goals:

• 13 blogposts for 6,500 words.  Why 13?  I can't recall why I chose this number.  Somewhat more than two a week, I guess.
• 3 short stories: Working titles are 1) Ants, 2) Vampire on a boat and 3) Hyperbaric Chamber.  I'm figuring 2,000 words each
• Push forward one or all three of the books I have started and let sit.  30,000 words is the goal and I don't mind jumping from book to book as seems fit. Working titles are 1) Return of the Haloed Hunter, 2) the Distancing Engine and 3) Creationism's worst arguments
• 2 letters per week to friends.  Around ten letters and 2,000 words.
• Perform research and planning for future "Crowded Sky" story. As much as 5,000 words.

To keep the writing interesting, I have made further goals.

• I want to write over the course of a full day.  That is, at least once in the month write from 12:00 to 1:00 AM, once from 1:00 to 2:00AM ...
• I want to write in a variety of locations.  The local mountaintop has a good table. There are some nice libraries to write in.  I'll talk about coffee shops in a moment.  Eulsookdo Eco Centre might be a nice place to work in for an afternoon.
• Soundtrack: I may use Ommwriter which has its own soundtrack but otherwise it will be autoplayed classical music starting with some Janecek and letting Youtube suggest from there. Away from Internet connections, Doug and the Slugs and other 80's music would work; the tunes are so familiar that they can be white noise or a fun background as needed.

Snacks: I bought snacks for my Nanowrimo writing and I will definitely eat in front of the computer but I need to show restraint here.  My weight is slowly dropping and I want to keep it going in that direction.  Controlling my weight is my greatest concern this summer.

Fitness:

• 18 runs with an average of 7.0 km.  I hope to attempt a solo half-marathon this summer late one evening and have been working out the course and where to place energy drinks along the way.  I am currently at 96 runs over the past six months so only the weather could prevent reaching this goal.
• Run faster than a subway train.  The local subway stations Seo-dae-shin and Dong-dae-shin are about 500 meters apart and the train takes 2:35 seconds from doors open at Seo- to doors closed at Dong-.  Further, this route is slightly downhill.  I can easily run this fast on a level surface but Seo-dae-shin is deep underground. I have no qualms or conscience problems about using the escalators but even with that assistance, there is a big climb at the start of the run.
• Swim 2km at a time. Korean pools are crowded with conversationalists and it is hard to get an unbroken swim in.  I am likely to need to stop a the end of a lane a few times.  Today, I did 1250m, with breaks and could have gone farther.
• Find 3 snorkeling places in and near Busan
• For at least 6 days, eat three meals, plus one snack plus one sweet drink.  I snack a lot and plan to spend a lot of time in front of a computer so this will be a challenge.

Education:  I am enrolled in 3 MOOCS.

• The Bilingual Brain
• Modern Korean History
• Archaeology of Portus

Family

• Teach my son to swim.
• Go on a weekend trip with the family. I would prefer a swimming site but that is negotiable.
• Read two books with my son.  I don't want this to be a purely teaching experience but one we both enjoy.  Tintin is a good contender here.
• Work on the farm.

TWIC: mixed bag

Why creativity in the classroom doesn't matter:

I have never entertained the idea of creativity in my classroom because to do so would mean judging my students as opposed to assessing them. Judging my students would be like saying...

• Mary, you sure are creative.
• Mike, you produced a creative brochure, video, etc.
• Monica, your group worked creatively on that project.

In all cases, I am labeling my students dichotomously as being either "good" or "bad". In formal education, the feedback students receive needs to go beyond good/bad, pass/fail, etc. It needs to be more nuanced. This is where the alternative, assessment, becomes more important than creativity.

Stewart's discussion of creativity in the classroom is more about semantics than discouraging the idea.  I think I see his point; as an ESL educator, I need to judge and critique the grammar not, for example, the truthfulness of my student's responses.  A mundane answer is as valuable as an imaginative one outside of class.
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At age 47 I began to listen to more classical music.  I still don't listen to much but I am paying a little more attention to it than I did in my youth.  I recently watched/listened to a Youtube clip that explained what 'variations' and creativity mean in the performance of classical music first made by men who are long dead.
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David Ogilvy's memo on writing.  Here are five tips from his list:

1. Read the Roman-Raphaelson book on writing. Read it three times.
2. Write the way you talk. Naturally.
3. Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.
4. Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification,attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.
5. Never write more than two pages on any subject.

The Hugos are a group of prizes for science fiction and fantasy writing. There is some controversy about how the candidates for the awards are being chosen this year with two groups following the edge of the rules but still appearing to be gaming the system.  Twitter has been active with possible new awards.

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Fighting procrastination with software:

Patterson’s report, written last November but released this month, examines the effects of different types of antidistraction software. His study looked at 657 students enrolled in a statistics MOOC offered by Stanford University. The students, all of whom agreed to download software that would track their activity online, were then separated into three groups, plus a control group.
Students in the group that tested a commitment tool set their own daily allotments for time they could spend on distracting websites such as BuzzFeed, ESPN and Facebook. If the students hit the cap during the course of a day, the software blocked them from the distracting sites, forcing students to give a new reason every time they wanted to unblock one.
On average, students allotted 2.7 hours per day to spend on distracting websites and went over that limit four times during the nine-week MOOC. Even though the software sent them a daily email at 6:45 a.m. reminding them of that limit and asking if they wanted to reset it, the average student only did so once.

The whole article is interesting but I particularly like this bit of self-reflection:

“One of the things I noticed with this software is that there were things I thought I was spending a lot of time on that I wasn’t, and other things I thought I was spending a couple of minutes on that was sucking up a lot of time.”

Learning what you are actually doing with your day rather than what you think you are doing is interesting.  It's obvious that one should do so with money to see how much is spent on venti-cappa-frappa-cinos in a week but investigating recreational web surfing clearly has some value too.  And this approach would work on projects away from the computer.  This reminds me that I should get back to carving.

TWIC: the ideal length of a song, science journalism and more

Research showing that Wesley Willis was doing the right thing.
  Dang it, I can't find a quote or link, but around the time of Willis' death, discussions of his music lingered over his stubborn insistence that the ideal song was 2:50 long.  In hearing a few of these songs, you note the instrumental solo -the attached autoplay function on the keyboard - extended the songs to the desired length.  Wikipedia is all I got on the guy.
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Kottke looks at discussions of painter Vermeer.  And also, Song exploder.
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I look at a place like Adam Savage's workspace and think, even I could make cool stuff there.
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Boingboing wants you to caption this image of Rick Perry and Barack Obama.
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Spies need good grammar and consistent referencing styles too.
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How to do good science journalism. Recommended by Ed Yong on Twitter.

The Guardian's @james_randerson has written a beginner's guide to science journalism. Yours as an ebook for £2.99. http://t.co/wroBV2hRDM
— Ed Yong (@edyong209) July 14, 2014

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David Foster Wallace speaking about Infinite Jest.
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D&D jump-started their creative careers.

“It’s been a formative narrative media for all sorts of writers,” Diaz said.
The league of ex-gamer writers also includes poet and fiction writer Sherman Alexie; comedian Stephen Colbert; sci-fi and young-adult author Cory Doctorow; Brent Hartinger (author of Geography Club, a novel about gay and bisexual teenagers); George R.R. Martin, author of the “A Song of Ice and Fire” series (who still enjoys role-playing games); and “weird fiction” author China Mieville ( The City & the City).
Others who have been influenced include TV and film storytellers and entertainers — Matt Groening ( The Simpsons), Dan Harmon (Community) and Chris Weitz ( American Pie) and Robin Williams among them.

Comic book cartography and more

Comic book cartography.

Does this help with world-building?  It sure is fun.
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Susan Messing on Improv
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Uberflip, which appears to be a marketing company, offers 9 (proven) ways to unleash your creative genius.  The ways are shown on a slide show and one of them is to 'dim the lights'. Why?

Another 'way' is to use various apps.  They suggest:
Coda -crowdsourced app for creative writing: Review and app.
Oflow creativity techniques. Review
75 tools for creative thinking. Website.
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I thought I'd written about my friend Gordon Bazsali here before.  In 2013, he wrote a new song everyday and recorded the first take.  His far more ambitious undertaking was similar to my work in InNoWriMo - working on raw creativity but with little filtering.  I spoke to him on Thursday about our respective projects and we agreed on some details.  He had imagined spending a year making new musical ideas that he would mine for the following several years.  Instead, he hasn't looked back at it or referenced it much at all. Well, he told me that, then he told me that he chose sixteen songs, cleaned them up and put them up for sale, so he did find at least some of his work commercially valuable.

In turn, I told him that I had written 52,000 words but hadn't finished the story - that would probably require another 5-10,000 words, nor had I looked back at or revised any of it.  I still plan to, though.

From there, our conversation looked at whether I could be called a writer or another coworker's wife an artist.  I have written and the spouse has produced art but not recently.  The comparison to being a killer came up.  Kill one person and for life people call you a killer.

Anyway, some links for Gord.  A 2012 album, Google+ (on which he and I may be the only two people remaining), a Prezi and Youtube page.

Authors talking about writing and great free art!

A real mixed bag today.  In addition to the usual authors talking about writing I am sharing links to locations where historic artwork is available, and probably some less famous work, too.  Authors first:

Writer's block might be ...

…LACK OF CONFIDENCE IN YOURSELF
Problem: You don’t believe in yourself or your ability to do this work well. Your vision of the work in your head fails to match the execution on the page. I used to watch my aunt paint watercolor and think, “YEAH SHIT BRO I CAN DO THAT,” then I’d try and it would look like I splashed gray garbage water on a once-nice piece of paper. And so I gave up because of the unrealistic expectation that I held for myself. We are frequently holding ourselves to unrealistic expectations and that fucks us up. The pressure builds a wall between us and the work.
Solution: Care less. Calm down. You’re not curing cancer. Enjoy your ability to suck. Realize we all suck when we begin (and often throughout). Recognize that sucking during a first draft means that later you can come up behind your own shitty manuscript like a motherfucking editorial ninja and snap its neck and then use its blood to redline the work to make it better. Very few people are awesome the first time they try something, anything, and yet we’re trained to believe that writing is easy. “Just write,” people offer as their reductive writing advice, which makes this sound as easy as taking your first steps as an infant — and maybe it is, but also remember the infant only managed six first steps before taking a header into the dog’s waterbowl. The way through this block is to write. Write through your lack of confidence and write through your limited ability. Writing through the suck is how you get better at it.

Via this tweet:

The incisive but naughty-wording @ChuckWendig on: Writer's Block Might Be:: http://t.co/SkVhZDFdrL Lo! It's all true!
— Margaret E. Atwood (@MargaretAtwood) May 20, 2014

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Goodreads has started an Ask your favorite author section to their site.
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Five things Paul Acampora learned while writing a novel.

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Zen and the art of fantasy writing.
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Author's Alliance and fair use.

The Authors Alliance has both inward facing and outward facing roles. The inward facing role is to provide authors with information about copyrights, licensing agreements, alternative contract terms, the pros and cons of open access, the reversion of rights, and the termination of transfer. A lot of people who have works from 10 or 15 years ago that they want to make more widely available don’t necessarily know that much about copyright and licensing. In other words, “What are the options, how do you talk to your publisher about them, and what can you try to negotiate for?” We also seek to take advantage of the opportunities of networked digital environments that were not in place 10, 15, or 20 years ago when a lot of the works that authors want to make available were originally published.
An outward facing role is representing the interests of authors who want to make their works more widely available in public policy debates. 

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All of Bach online.
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The Book of Kells.
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400, 000 works of art in high res from the MET.
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North Korean science fiction - I probably am not allowed to read this stuff here.
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NASA and how to communicate with aliens.
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Interstitial art.

The editors of Interfictions Online are happy to announce the birth of the journal's latest issue, the third in the past twelve months of the trailblazing journal of the weird, the interstitial, and the uncategorizable. 

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Imaginary games.

2. "DREAM PARK"
from Dream Park - Larry Niven and Steven Barnes (1981)
What It Is:
In the year 2051, grownups go on multi-day live-action role-playing adventures staged at site-based installations at super-high-end amusement parks. The adventures have hugely elaborate implementations - they build a massive illusory world out of actors, sets, sealed domes with artificial skies and practical weather effects, and tons of animated holograms(!) (only in the 1981 book - in later sequels these are retconned into augmented-reality goggles).
The world building is top-notch. They pay a great deal of attention to the limits of 2051 technology, how all the illusions are managed and where exactly they break down. The authors put in their time with the LARPing community and paid close attention, and it shows - they have a sharp eye for the mechanics and the social conventions, the fun and the awkwardness. How players challenge the rules and narrative expectations and mechanics, and the game masters scramble to keep up.
The plot involves a murder, I think? I barely remember because I truly don't care how many people have to die for this to become a real thing.
What I Learned:
Grownups want to play too. And they show up to play for different reasons. To meet other people, or to beat the opponent, or try to lose themselves in the fantasy, or a hundred other reasons. Just like in online games people mix and match their play experience, role-play when they want to or step of character.
Also that when you play in the world, implementation is complicated. Illusions aren't complete, even with 2051 technology, virtual reality gaming requires a little suspension of disbelief. Site-based augmented reality extravaganzas are big business and big money.

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Monster Skies.  Outre music.  Oops, there is a problem with the link.  Boingboing (at the link on the left) has a sample but their link goes nowhere.

There's probably a lot to be made in creatively writing contracts. For the artist, not so much.

A Grammy nominated artist shares his royalty statements and the numbers are not thrilling.

Here’s a screen capture of my quarterly royalty statement.  14,227 performances of music (almost every track 100% owned by me) generated $4.20.  Notice one performance of “Ceremonies” or “Distant Lands” streaming radio show like Hearts of Space that brings in 26 cents for the full writer’s share compared to 2,088 performances of “Gypsy Rain” on Spotify that brought in a total of 60 cents.
Someone’s making money, and in true fashion with the music industry, it’s not the artists.  Business practices like this are one of the reasons I jumped ship and only write for television now.

See the statements at the link.