Add to cart

April 4, 2023 /

 

A shopping cart fitted with a motor and blue LED lights.

Apparently, one method for coping with a shopping addiction is to click “add to cart,” but not actually buy anything. This is because dopamine registers in the brain exactly the same for very short-term rewards as long-term ones. I.e. buying the thing, getting the thing, unpacking the thing, using the thing, gives you the same dopamine hit as just clicking the button.

This came up in a conversation about my quest to watch all 2,100 of my liked TikToks. Liking TikToks — the physical action of liking them — is an “add to cart” for the content of the video you’re liking. You don’t actually need to learn the dance or follow the recipe or work the workout to feel a momentary glow of pride. Clicking the button provides that same feedback. Anything you plan from within the dream of the feed requires additional effort to carry out in the real world, some lucid moment where you make the connection between the video and your daily life.

Memory bears a lot of the load here. Do you even remember that you saw an automated financial planning spreadsheet, let alone that you wanted to try it yourself?

What it reminds me of is a mindfulness practice called “noting.” Instead of ignoring thoughts that pop into your head, you acknowledge the thought (note it) so that you may forget it. Brief, active attention brings closure.

Mindfulness is generally good, and noting assists mindfulness by diffusing the awkward tension of ignoring something you know is there. TikTok, the flow state of total absorption in wick-short content, the dream — these are generally less good. And the app doesn’t want you to wake up. A nagging idea that, maybe, you should get up and take an action, could disturb your absorption. The like button diffuses that tension.

Especially ironic is the prevalence on TikTok of vignettes from picturesque lives. With the click of a button, those lives are as good as yours.

My working theory, that tagging TikToks in a way that you can find them later defeats the self-replacement of the app, only solves half the problem. I can find anything I want. That doesn’t mean that I’ll think to look for it. I still miss some connection between the app and my waking life, and without that connection, bookmarking becomes as add-to-cart as liking.

One argument you could make: If a TikTok is truly worth my waking attention, then it’ll rise to mind naturally. Maybe, but in my experience as a collector I’ve found that memory is unreliable, even for ideas that meaningfully impact projects I’m currently working on. I mean, everyone forgets a birthday or an anniversary, but that’s not because those things are unimportant. It’s because we give them meaning by choise — their sentiment isn’t natural to us.

Another argument, this one in the words of Rayne Fisher-Quann: “when i scroll on tiktok or whatever, i can’t get away from the feeling that almost nothing there is really meant to be loved — it’s just meant to be snorted, basically, and occasionally to get you to buy something.” I agree with this. But for one thing, that “almost” is important and bizarre. Some artists have stared into the vortex of TikTok’s limiting format and effervesence, and have decided to make incredible work there anyway. That’s worth saving. I also think that, in a more plain way, most of the app is made by people who, for whatever reason, thought to share something from their lives. Just like you might wish you could save a scrap of conversation in the real world to refer back to, any given TikTok could make a meaningful impact.

More than that, though, I think loving something is more of an approach than a result. You can choose to find the beauty in the impromptu dance circle, the cat fancam, or whatever.

Pinterest came up as an example of a platform designed for reference. I’m not as familiar with it. Maybe there’s an approach there?

Console cowboys

April 3, 2023 /

A young Julia Stiles in Ghostwriter.

The greatest line ever spoken:

Can you jam with the console cowboys in cyberspace?

Fascinating how the archetypal “wanderer,” the drifter on the American Frontier, is compared to the master of the early Internet, another great frontier.

Puzzling how, spoken as it is in an edutainment sitcom, it probably didn’t sound cool to the console cowboys of the era, and only sounds cool now in an ironic way.

Convenient how, um, I actually don’t have anything to say about it. I jotted it out in my notebook and wanted an excuse to share. Also I think it went viral a couple years ago so I’m way late.

Sweet small clumsy feet of April

April 2, 2023 /

I love a moon aesthetic, but I feel like it’s often paired with a winter/fall/rain/coldweather mood. Can I offer a “full moon” and “new moon” divide?

What I mean is, spring is my favorite season. I think May is my favorite month, but maybe it’s April? I love April. Anyway, by way of ringing in the month, e. e. cummings:

let the world say “his most wise music stole
nothing from death” —
you only will create
(who are so perfectly alive)my shame:
lady through whose profound and fragile lips
the sweet small clumsy feet of April came

I watched Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves

April 1, 2023 /

The cast of Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves stand around a table. On the table is a glowing blue portal.

When Iron Man and Avengers came out, I wasn’t a comic book person. I liked Batman when Dawn of Justice came out, but that movie was super bad. This is the first movie in a long time that I’m “meant to” love. Stakes are high! And… they were fulfilled! I liked it a lot!

  1. Plenty of reviews praise the film’s refusal to take itself too seriously, keeping its premise light while and its character arcs clean. Even reviewers completely unaffiliated with D&D liked it, which makes me really happy!
  2. As someone very affiliated with D&D (hobbily, not professionally), that this movie honored the spirit of the game completely floored me. In sort of vapid ways — monsters we recognize, magic spells we recognize, situations we recognize — but in profound ways, too. If Honor Among Thieves has a core theme, it’s that failure is a part of progress. If it has a core loop, it’s the heroes formulating a ludicrous plan, that plan failing ludicrously, and the heroes riding that failure upward. Maybe, eventually, to success. This is the heart of D&D. Honor Among Thieves’ plans are more contrived and better produced, but their goofiness is instantly recognizable.
  3. Corrollary to this, I love the idea that this movie could make new players into better Dungeon Masters. Failure moves the story forward rather than stalling it. Each action/reaction puts the characters in a new situation with new decisions to make. Now, this isn’t solely the claim of TTRPGs: Indiana Jones, really any great adventure story, does the same. But it’s cool to see an honest-to-goodness D&D adventuring party go through an honest-to-goodness adventure.
  4. I absolutely did not show up to see a rules-accurate rendition. From what I’ve seen, no one else did either. Knowing the D&D community, that’s really refreshing! Something I thought was interesting, though, is that druids can’t turn into owlbears or wild shape more than twice at a time. The action economy makes one-versus-many brawls basically fruitless. Attunement is automatic. Spells, in general, don’t work that way. That the movie ignores these rules is fine — good, even — but it begs the question: if these rules are unintuitive, un-cinematic… then why are they written that way? I’ll probably introduce some house rules inspried by the movie.
  5. The writing’s actually funny?? And like… kind of restrained? Characters recall previously spoken dialogue without needing a ghostly voice to echo it in their subconscious? That alone knocked me over.
  6. I know I always save this bullet for last, but yay Chris Pine yay Sophia Lillis yay Justice Smith. Whatever your mileage on Hugh Grant, he’s very good at playing a sleazeball.
  7. Oh, one last bullet actually. The names are so silly, in the legendary lineage of high fantasy silliness. I don’t know that I remembered even half of the cast. I know I didn’t know Chris Pines’ character’s — which is Edgin, by the way. Love “Forge” for a conman, though.

What I had fun with this week

March 31, 2023

An old timey photo of a man and boy playing chess.

Still working through Fire Emblem, but I’m almost done! I think. It’s a looong game. Also watching a lot more Psych which thrills me to no end. Otherwise…

  1. Gideon the Ninth, a science fantasy book about necromancer lesbians exploring a haunted palace in space. You gotta love when the concept alone carries all of an artwork’s marketing. It’s hard to make a character effortlessly cool, and it’s harder to make a character effortfully cool, which Gideon is. The writing is both purple and funny. Great read so far.
  2. Civilization 6. I don’t like grand strategy games, but I love a slow, quiet game that lets you gab with your friends for a couple of hours.
  3. Deep Rock Galactic. Sort of the opposite! I mean you’re also talking with friends, but the game is really good at focusing your attention on a common goal. The poet Donald Hall described  love as shared attention on a “third thing.” Cooperation is bonding!
  4. Thinking about chess. I’ve tried playing many times, and every time I thought I was going to become very good. I didn’t become very good. Never stuck with it. Fun to think about being good, though!
  5. Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves. I’m gonna write aboout this tomorrow, because it surprised me as much as it’s been surprising everybody.
  6. Cooking: we got the offical D&D cookbook, which has goofy names for regular food, and it’s been fun! Meatballs with a béchamel and some parsely, hamburg steaks with a dill yogurt spread. Also I’m entering my sandwich era.

TikTok day one

March 30, 2023 /

I’m not gonna recount this whole journey here — that’s for the Substack — but I want to get down some numbers and some intention setting.

My plan is to watch all of my liked TikToks. 2114. I counted. I don’t have any kind of average length, but today I clocked in at about a minute a tok. So that’d be 35 hours, end to end. I’m committed though!

Why am I committed though? It’s something I’ve wanted to do for a while now, before any of this Restrict Bill jazz started playing. Mindfulness mediation uses a practice called “noting” to acknowledge a thought, thereby letting it disappear. Like, someone keeps making the same joke over and over and you laugh to get them to stop.

Liking a TikTok does something similar. It says “I’ll watch this later,” or “this is a really good idea,” or “that recipe looks good I’ll make it tomorrow night.” By noting the TikTok, you don’t have to think about it anymore.

Truly world-changing ideas, and spot on recommendations, and lovingly crafted pieces of art disappeared in my thousands of liked TikToks. I want to try and recover some of them.

Something I think about a lot is the unarchivability of internet culture. Stuff just disappears. Some platforms try to keep track of everything, but others — particularly social media — lean into the bubbliness of art and conversation generated on the platform.

It reminds me of “right to repair,” the counterpoint to planned obsolescence. I’ll find links for this stuff as I go forward with the project!

At the end of day one though, without any deep research or drafting… the task is very daunting.

Intrinsically rewarding pursuits

March 29, 2023 /

Henrik Karlson on the childhoods of exceptional people:

Blaise Pascal, too, was homeschooled by his father. His father chose not to teach him math. (The father, Etienne, had a passion for mathematics that he felt was slightly unhealthy. He feared mathematics would distract Pascal from less intrinsically rewarding pursuits, such as literature, much like modern parents fear TikTok.)

From his Substack, Escaping Flatland.

Cycle of confidence

March 28, 2023 /

I have to be kind of delicate here: when I talk about work that I’m dissatisfied with, the people that read this blog are the same people that would try and convince me of that work’s value. My circle is full of cheerleaders. That’s pulled me through a lot of bleaker seasons!

But if I’m not writing for the approval of others, that means I’m sometimes writing in spite of the approval of others. A writer’s relationship to their writing isn’t all that precious. I’ve written plenty I’m proud of, and gotten praise for it. I’ve done plenty of bad writing, and people have told me so. I’ve written things I stand by, but which weren’t well received, and naturally I’m not happy with some pieces despite audience approval. Zero correlation between pride and praise. (Although praise is very nice.)

So this slasher piece. Please go read it if this is the first you’re hearing of it — I don’t want to tip your opinion one way or another! But I’m not 100% happy with it. Why that is isn’t a mystery to me. The tone is too formal, the argument is too big. It took too long. On the other hand, the doing of the piece was fun and I’m proud of what I know now that I didn’t know before.

No, this post is not me noodling on how I can do better next time, and it’s definitely not me kicking myself. It’s that I’m missing a key step in the cycle of writing, and I’d like to suggest a couple links that could finish that cycle. After the legacy of Austin Kleon, I even drew a helpful circular diagram!

A chart showing a circle, with arrows pointing in this order: Confidence, Inspo, Loss of Faith, Process, Product, and then branching arrows. One points back to Confidence, and one points to question marks, which point to "Inspo."

This is my — maybe a lot of writers’ — “cycle of confidence.” That’s what I’m calling it, although as always I’m open to the idea that I’m aping something already in existence.

You start with confidence that your ideas matter. (I say “you start with,” but confidence is hard-fought and hard-won.) From a place of self-esteem, you start generating quality ideas. They’re quality because they’re unique to you. One idea snags your attention.

Inspired, you throw yourself into that idea. For me this looks like a ton of research, scrunched up freewrites in my notebook, lots of chatting and walking around. Inspiration is the most fun an artist can have.

It’s really hard to stay inspired through the entire life cycle of a project, though, and eventually your energy crashes against the realities of production. Sometimes that’s competing responsibilities, or maybe it’s writer’s block. At an industry level, it’s money. You lose faith.

This is where “the process” becomes super important. I’m academically interested in what artists call “the process,” because it’s almost like a religion in creative circles. Something you cultivate and trust unshakeably, even though no one can describe what it is. Like, sure, there’s blogs and coaching plans that outline a holistic “creative process.” They tend to focus on the effects, the outcomes, the states of mind produced in various stages of the process, not the actual actions that go into it.

The process looks different for everybody. It’s the motions you go through after you lose faith. For me that’s looking through my collection, writing blog posts, rereading, chatting over a beer with my writer friends. When you can’t trust your brain to spontaneouly produce great ideas, you draw thousands of lines and find the picture that already exists. You can’t usually rely on the process to get you started. It’s meant to carry you past the post.

Finally, you have your finished product. That product replenishes your confidence — the joy of having finished something.

I drew a garden path arrow, though, because that’s the situation I’m in. What do you do when the thing you finished calls your confidence into question, rather than bolstering it? There’s a few candidates:

  1. Rest. I hate the school of thought that writing is suffering and you should only do it if you’ve tried everything else. But I love Charles Bukowki’s words on writing: “unless it comes out of / your soul like a rocket, / unless being still would / drive you to madness or / suicide or murder,  / don’t do it.” I like this poem because he’s not saying you can’t succeed, he’s saying success isn’t the point. I’ve grappled with whether or not I want to be a writer, and I will again. But I know that when I don’t write for 36 hours I start really wanting to. Once I step away, I realize I don’t have any choice but to be confident.
  2. Plan. I don’t need inspiration to come up with new ideas, because when I was inspired I planned ahead. I have a spreadsheet of ideas that excite me. Start having fun, and you can cheat your way into inspiration without remembering you were supposed to doubt yourself. This does mess up the chart though, since you have to plan in the inspiration phase.
  3. Start. Some writers just show up. If that’s you — you have a time, and a place, and maybe even activity that you start at every single day — then you probably don’t need confidence in the first place. Not every day. Developing a routine like this takes time and a certain disposition. It also takes financial security, unless you’re glow-in-the-dark and do your best work at 5 a.m. or 10 p.m.
  4. Survival. The counterpoint to financial security! If your life depends on daily creative work, you probably don’t have margin for self-doubt! Fear can be a paralytic as much as it can be a motivator, so I don’t think this works for everybody, but on the plus side if you’re making a steady living from your art then you’ve cleared unimaginably many hurdles already. That’s worthy of confidence in my book.
  5. Cheer. Something we can forget as artists is that we’re our first audience. Like, you know how you can watch a TV show and have lots of opinions about how it should have gone? Your art is the one creative thing you can control. In other words, write what you want to read. Then, in your dark winter of the soul, read your own writing and remind yourself how good it is. Someone’s therapist said, you get to decide when each day starts and ends. You decide when a bad day is over. Same with writing: if your last piece doesn’t sparkle with you, pick a new last piece. You’re still the you that wrote it.

Slasher movies

March 26, 2023 /

Michael Meyers raises a kitchen knife in Halloween.

It started, god help me, with Cocaine Bear.

Who knew what to expect? If I had been bored at home, with too much of the internet unscrolled — a too-stocked Steam library, a too-ready river of streaming services — this mid-budget meme movie could have come and gone without ever crossing my desk. A guy came to the theater in a big rubber bear costume, spiritual precursor to DJ Jazzy Jeff, and like… Look, we’re all just here to have a good time. But after watching enough haha fun facts get vaccuumed into uber-clickable headlines and regurgitated as Oscars sight gags, you get a good sense of which dead horses arrive pre-beaten.

But in those halcyon pre-Kimmel days, Cocaine Bear made for a great excuse to go out to dinner with some friends. We dragged our barbecue-laden bodies through concessions, passed the time in a packed theater, and sat around till the small hours talking about slashers.

I mean, is Cocaine Bear a slasher? I liked Fear Street a whole lot, caught pieces of Scream at a Halloween party before seeing last year’s reboot in theaters. Otherwise I was clueless. I lacked context for the art form as a whole. Outside of some core set, how far could you twist a genre label until it snapped?

That question chased me through the dark forests and narrow hallways of half a dozen slasher flicks, and a whole dismembered heap of journal articles, book chapters, think pieces on one of the least charmed categories of cinema.

I wanted to prove something about the way we judge movies, and what we lose when we’re set on respectability. Check your locks, cover your mirrors, and don’t sneak off.

Keep reading.