The writer is clumsy

February 12, 2023 /

I lost my debit card today. UGH. Annoying. I hate losing things.

You know how you probably have one thing about yourself you really dislike? Something you say, like “literally” or “I guess” or “it’s funny,” or your posture, or how you always look at the ground when you walk instead of looking in front of you? Clumsiness is mine. There is not a glass of water I’ve drank in the last, I don’t know, five years that I haven’t spilled down the front of my shirt. It’s a miracle my computer still works, since I keep it under my desk just under where I keep a cup of coffee. There have been close calls.

It used to be these really dark circles under my eyes. Picrew saved me from that neuroticism, of all things. Not like it saved me from the circles themselves — I’ve always had them, and I think I always will despite spending a hundred dollars on retinol night cream back in college. No, it’s just that when I would make myself in the little character builder, I could usually toggle on an option for dark circles. Most Picrews are radically inclusive.

So that’s how I got over my dark circles: not by changing them, but by building an image of myself, outside of myself, that included them as a feature and not a flaw.

I don’t think I can do the same thing with clumsiness. After all, I can’t mechanically see my dark circles most of the time. They don’t affect me. And they carry this sleepless air which I’m really drawn to, on account of being a writer and also actually having insomnia. Even me saying, “I have insomnia,” feels a little like peacocking.

Clumsiness doesn’t signal anything. Today I lose my debit card, tomorrow I might blurt out the wrong pronouns or something. I mean, that’s an extreme example. But isn’t the opposite of clumsiness thoughtfulness?

(On second thought, that’s not true.)

Oh well. For what it’s worth, I don’t think I’m supposed to come to a conclusion about all of these things. I froze my card. I also made a clumsiness self-portrait in Ena’s Dreamcore Picrew. It’s a little on the nose, and I think it’s missing something, but I had a lot of fun.

A figure in loose brown clothing with a coffee cup for a head. The cup reads "We're Lost," and the bottom says "Ena's Dreamcore Picrew."

 

Guilt market

February 12, 2023 /

Tuesday is game night, so I hoped to flip through a couple of articles and come back with a snappy readers digest. Maybe some original material.

My chosen topic: Why do we feel guilty when we enjoy narratives through movies, television, video games, but not when we read books? Seems like a pretty universal experience.

I was surprised that no body of literature exists on the subject that was quickly Google searchable. I found an Atlantic article about Americans’ perennial guilt about watching TV. And I remembered some pieces of Steven Johnson’s Everything Bad is Good for You, which argues, among other things, that books would be viewed with suspicion if they were invented after video games somehow. That argument is mostly about how new media is also good, not the reverse: why reading is better. As far as I remember.

In fact, “why reading is better” is mostly how that question got phrased online. People wondered why reading is better than television, like it was a mathematical principle they just didn’t understand. Others were there to answer them. “It engages the imagination.” “It takes longer to read a book than watch a movie.”

Those things are true, but I wonder why they’re considered advantages and not differences. One centerpoint of TV guilt comes from parents feeling the need to “sneak away” from family duties if they want to watch an hour episode of TV. In that case, isn’t it more of an advantage to have a shorter platform than books?

A plausible explanation, in my opinion, would be that reading and writing are just older than those other media. They’ve had time to mature. One note the Atlantic article makes about TV guilt is that marketers discovered shows with a seemingly intellectual center do better in the “guilt market.” Hence the procedural crime drama, which Steven Johnson describes as setting of the explosion in smart TV (so to say).

(Aside) Writing tip: all you need to start developing ideas of your own is to read two things and then smash them together. Flint, meet steel. He-Man action figure, meet Hot Wheel truck.

Early novels, as far as I understand them, weren’t particularly complex. I’ll tell you about Lucian of Samosata’s A True Story some other time, but I think it’s basically unreadable. It took novels a while to sort themselves out.

(Aside) I thought I was onto something: shousetsu, the word for “novel” in Japanese, uses the characters for “small” and “rumor.” I thought I was onto something, like the etymology of this word expresses some suspicion about the novel format. Alas, I don’t think that’s what’s happening here. It did let me stumble into the “cell phone novel,” though, which I am over the moon to explore.

Unfortunately, I’ll leave it — and the guilt market — for another time. I’m going to go enjoy game night. And I’m going to feel great about it.

Sticky notes

February 12, 2023 /

I’m a WFH drone, meaning I spent a lot of time stressing about how my living space appears in 16:9. My partner tells me I’m awful at decorating — the only thing on my wall when she moved in was an apron.

So, I made two design choices. One: Anna Laura Art’s “The hero,” which has never not made me tear up.

Two: the sticky note wall. I love my sticky note wall. It’s on a door, which feels like a metaphor, but also it makes me look like a creative person. The currency of looking like a creative person is very high when you’re a writer. It’s solitary work.

A white double door covered in sticky notes. They read: "Yes, but... It's going to take more time. You're bareling holding on by your fingernails. Something is hurtling at you." "1,00 true fans = Kansas City Star" A picture of a three-leaf clover "One shots: relate characters to the quest, don't hook players on curiosity with no pay of, worldbuilding is a waste of time, start quickly, build collapsible encounters" "Your life would not be better if you were different" "Kazuo Ishiguro!!! Buried Giant, Remains of the Day" "Hanya Yanagihara" "Steal Like an Artist, Show Your Work, Gideon the 9th, Buried Giant, Bird by Bird" "Thought. Scene. Thought. Scene. Thought. Scene. (Stephanie Foo)" "The invention of spoilers" "Casino Royale vs. Noble Hustle, and the frequency of good hands" "Action movies" "Dimensionality (like actually) + experience" "Humans in sci fi/fantasy" "Supertrue, supernormal, superstar" "Mount Tenpou" "Doomsday Argument" "Guns in Games" "Instagram vs the aggressively unaesthetic life"

Don’t throw any of yourself away

February 12, 2023 /

A snippet of a poem: "Lie still now while I prepare for my future, certain hard days ahead, when I'll need what I know so clearly this moment.

My sixth or seventh blog post talked about my suspicions surrounding blogging, particularly as it pertains to specialization.

To summarize, blogs confuse me because I struggle to imagine an internet where people succeed without scissor-cutting their creative selves to fit niches in the algorithm. I worry I came across as pessimistic. (Because at that time I think I was pessimistic.)

Now, since I’m basically an expert blogger — 29 days into the year means 29 posts as of this one — I think I’ve shifted my perspective. Austin Kleon wrote,

“Don’t throw any of yourself away.”

I go back and forth all the time, should I go into writing or should I go into game design? When I picked writing, I had to decide whether I should write for audio or print? Short form or long form? Maybe a YouTube channel?

To view your creative life in those terms is pretty much begging to carry regret. If you decide to lug around the weight of everything you “could” have been working on, then of what use was the decision?

Today I feel really good about the direction of my creative life, and hopefully tomorrow I feel this way, too. I work in print, but maybe tomorrow I’ll start a big project in game design, or make a video. Even in print, I’ve learned that I love the format of the essay — something compact, 2-10k words, that makes an argument. I have ideas of the things I want to be working on.

And the best part is, I can start right now.

I watched No Country for Old Men

February 27, 2023 /
Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) sitting at the kitchen table with his wife Loretta Bell (Tess Harper) in No Country for Old Men.

So I’m pretty sure No Country for Old Men is like, a film film about which lots has already been said. In which case it would be cliché for me to even start to talk about it.

Except that I haven’t read all of that stuff that’s already been written about it. It might at least be neat if I accidentally find something new to say. It also would be neat to say something that’s already been said, in like an independent invention sort of way.

  1. I’m familiar with Yeats’ poem, in passing. It’s of the same genre as “Ode to the West Wind,” right? That “I’m old but will live forever through my work” thing? Both poets worried the same way, which isn’t surprising to me, but it does surprise me a little that they came to the same answer. Both decided that enough of themselves exist in their art to stave off fears about mortality. Which is a really specific worldview, a really specific eschatology, when you think about it. Especially when No Country for Old Men seems to come to a really different answer, that when times change anything still tied to that previous time is obliviated.
  2. My favorite genre of movie is “people with interesting accents saying lots of things.” (The Banshees of Inishiren got me head over heels.) Because that describes most westerns, I guess my favorite genre is the western. (I actually love the western for lots of other reasons, too.) Anyway, every scene with Tommy Lee Jones and Gary Dillahunt hooked me. I can’t explain why exactly I get so smitten over that stuff, but for one thing it enforces the reality of the world. No surer sign that the characters are speaking to each other, not to the viewer, than being unable to understand them often. Also, it’s a well-deserved middle finger to accent discrimination. Folks with accents that fall outside of the journalistic or academic subset of “intelligent” accents deserve excellent writing, too.
  3. Another genre I love that describes No Country for Old Men: the slasher. Show me two differences between Anton Chigurh and Ghostface and tell you, “Yes Anton did have much better writing, now please return that mask to the Spirit Halloween you got it from.”
  4. The ending made me punch the air. Tommy Lee Jones deserves more than he got for that performance.
  5. The beginning also confused me — in a good way, like a “made me think about what I was watching” way — and I kept going back to Moss’s decision to return with water for the dying man as the whole theme of the movie in miniature. As in, I think if the movie was just those 10 minutes, you would’ve had a short film with the same basic message as the whole movie. Great setup.

The language of rulers

February 12, 2023 /

Economist Ha-Joon Chang said some really fascinating stuff about the language of economics.

In the last few decades of neoliberalism we have been encouraged — and sometimes even forced — to think everything in economic terms. So when you’re trying to protect a library or a museum, you have to make this economic argument.

 

If you want to get over your fear of the Backrooms, read the wiki

February 12, 2023 / ,
An empty high school hallway.

My friends and I played this multiplayer horror game, Into the Backrooms. It was fine, lots of fun despite not a lot of polish.

Except, wow, I didn’t realize there was so much lore to the Backrooms. Did you know that victims of Cursed Souls could get sent to Level -250, “Pylon Purlieus,” one of the deadliest negative levels of the Backrooms?

For me, approaching your horror property this way makes it the opposite of scary. Some fans created r/TrueBackrooms, a splinter cell of the original forum for posting pictures with the original Backrooms’ eerie simplicity. One of the posts made me chuckle, poking at a greentext that read:

So what if someone “noclipped” in the year 1800 or 40 BC or the year 2200? Would they still go to an early 21st century room? At least make your creepypasta reasonable.

I don’t think fear is exactly the unknown. Lots of properties eke (eek) horror out of clearly defined rules. The Quiet Place. It Follows. The Ring. In properties like these, fear is a matter of timing. You know exactly what’s going to happen and when that thing is going to happen. Inevitability is just as scary as not knowing.

Less information, more information, neither determines whether something is scary. No more than knowing a color’s hexcode will tell you what color it is. The term Michelle Chang uses for this is “data resistance,” and it’s a concept I’ve gotten a lot of use out of and definitely will explore more.

“Scary” describes a feeling, not any kind of narrative flourish. At least for my taste, though, a two-headed robot that wants to stabilize timelines doesn’t have quite the same mystery as damp wallpaper and stale air.

Literally just the Peter principle

February 12, 2023 /
A cat going down a ladder.
Catch me here forever.

I was reading about why poets make bad businesspeople but great CEOs. This is something that’s always vexed me about paths through the publishing industry.

(I’m about to describe a very well-known business idea called the Peter principle, but I’m specifically talking about writing and passion, not general competence.)

I love writing. It feels like the kind of thing I want to do professionally for the rest of my life. If I do well, I get “promoted,” but promoted to what? Manager? Executive? Do these people write?

Won’t go any further into this because, again, it’s very trite and lots of people have observed this before. But it’s a good reminder not to use “upward” and “downward” ladder language when talking about jobs. A writer is not an aspiring media CEO.