Category: Opinion (page 8 of 18)

Grains of Salt

March 17, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Courtesy laryn.kragtbakker.com
Courtesy Jared Fein & laryn.kragtbakker.com

Sooner or later, the work you do is going to come under fire. Mistakes are going to be made. Guess what? You’re a human being. Mistakes are inevitable. How those mistakes are handled, corrected and prevented from repeating themselves matter more than the mistakes themselves, with the experience informing the better construction of future works. Hence, “constructive criticism.”

It tends to work best, however, if the criticism begins with you. And as a critic, you suck.

At least when it comes to your own work, that is. Your opinions, your creations, your procedures have all be formed by you (or, in the case of opinions, possibly snatched from more prominent critics for rapid regurgitation – we’ll get to that) and you’re going to be as defensive of them as any creator is of their created. I’m as guilty of this as anyone, and I know how that sort of behavior can circle right around and kick you square in the ass just when you don’t need it to.

It’s like bruises in martial arts, loose teeth in hockey, a face covered in egg on a televised debate. It’s going to happen. Beyond a couple of opinions of yourself and your creations that I can tell you are patently untrue, how to get back up when one of these events flattens you is a matter for the moment and circumstance. Communicate, discern, be patient and communicate more. Nobody will get anywhere while blood is up and words are lost in the volume, so step back, breathe, look at the situation and act in the interest of everybody involved, not just you.

Okay, enough hand-holding and team-building, here are two big fat lies we tell ourselves when it comes to stuff we do.

This Is The Best Thing In The History Of Ever!

No. No, it isn’t.

Criticism
The following might feel something like the above.

The things we consider great only got that way through long, grueling processes, the input of several people and the viability of whatever environment into which they were released. There’s a factor of luck involved as well, but that’s not something we can control, so we’ll leave it out of this deconstruction.

Basically, to keep ourselves going, we may at times tell ourselves that what we’re doing is good. That’s fine, and it probably either is good or will become good. What it isn’t is the best thing ever. Not on its own, and especially not in its first iteration. No author I know of hit the bestseller list with their first draft or even their first book. No director makes an Oscar-winner the first time they point a camera at something, unless they got their hands on the super-secret list of critera the folks in the Academy check off when they watch movies that might be worthy of the golden statues they give to rich people. Then again I’ve grown somewhat jaded with the whole Oscar thing and it’s colored my opinion somewhat.

That’s another thing. Opinions. Now I’m as guilty of the following as another special snowflake individual on the planet, and it bears saying & repeating to myself as much as anybody else. I’m fully aware of the glass house in which I live, but dammit, sometimes you just gotta toss a rock.

Your opinion is unlikely to be entirely your own. It might be right or wrong, but to defend it like it’s gospel is not going to win you any friends no matter from where or whom it originally derived. Our tastes, viewpoints and leanings are a combination of our life experiences, the things others say and do around us and the environment in which we live. Other people have had similar experiences, heard or seen the same things we have and/or live in similar environments. That means your opinion is highly likely to be not entirely your own and should be taken with a grain of salt, even if you’re telling it to yourself.

Back to your work. I’m sure it began with a good idea. Ideas can persist through edits, revisions and future iterations. The idea might still be good even if the implementation sucks ass. That doesn’t mean the overall product is good. A good idea badly implemented makes for a bad product. Look at what happened to Star Wars. What’s important to keep in mind is that you might not be able to find all of the flaws in your own work, and in order to make it the best it can be before it ships, you might need to take some knocks to the ego. If you can remember that your idea and work are not the Best Things Ever, if you can maintain the ability to take your own creations with a grain of salt from an objective viewpoint, the overall product will be much shinier for it.

TL,DR: Don’t act like your shit don’t stink.

This Absolutely Sucks & Will Never Amount To Anything, I Should Quit Now

Courtesy Disney
Cheer up, emo donkey.

Ah, the other extreme. I hate this one just as much.

Let me pause a moment before I rant in the other direction from where I just came from. If you truly feel your time will be better spent doing somthing other than the thing that you’re considering the absolute worst that humanity has to offer, I can understand that. Go and do the other thing you want to do. I and others might still consider what you’ve done worthwhile or even worth sharing, but you are the best arbiter of how to spend your time and energy. Just remember others are entitled to their opinions as much as you are.

Okay? Okay.

Remember how I said that the things we consider great didn’t start that way? That means they started in a state of not being great. In fact some of the first attempts probably sucked out loud. I’d love to see a first draft of The Stand or an early shooting script of RDM’s from Battlestar Galactica or Michaelangelo’s first painting. These creative minds only became great after the grueling process of editing, revising, being told they suck, editing and revising again, and managing to find the right time, people and environment for introducing their work.

Since soothsaying isn’t exactly a reliable basis for planning, the only way to find the right time is to keep trying. Finding the right people means going out and meeting some. And locating the right environment can be a matter of research. Don’t try to put a work with a narrow genre focus into purveyors with general, broad interests; try instead to locate an venue catering to similar tastes and passions to whom you can relate and communicate, and let them see what you can do. The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is a monumental achievement, but it wouldn’t have gotten painted if Michaelangelo had been approached by the manager of a Starbucks instead of His Holiness.

Notice that this is all stuff you can control. Your work is no different. If you really think your work isn’t good, and you want it to be, you can improve it. Work at it. Practice. Don’t let the nay-sayers and the lowest common denominator and the mediocrity get you down. Nothing excellent ever comes to be out of nowhere and without some work and sacrifice. Give up some time, expend some energy, burn a little midnight oil, and make that thing as powerful and awesome as you can. And believe me, most of us are capable of being pretty damn awesome if we’re willing to pay that price.

TL,DR: Don’t act like your shit is a world-scale biohazard.

I think I’ve said about all I can on this subject. No human being is the be-all end-all of all great things; neither are any of us completely and utterly irredeemable. I think we could all stand to take things said to us, about us and by us with a few more grains of salt.

Eulogy for the PC

March 16, 2011 / / 2 Comments

Courtesy Zedomax

My wife’s corner of the living room is dominated by an anachronism. An aged, clunky CRT monitor squats on top of the bookshelf behind her desk. On that desk, now, is a shiny new Acer laptop with a wider display than that old beast, not to mention much faster & cleaner peformance to the oversized paperweight of a PC to which the old monitor’s connected. I keep meaning to move things around so she has a little more room, but I can’t help but look at that corner and think of Bob’s Big Picture feature on the death of the PC.

I’ve been building my own PCs for years. Ever since I got one sore knuckle and torn finger too many from the confines of a Packard Bell case, I’ve wanted to make the experience of working with computers easier and better. For years it’s also been the case that upgrading a system through the purchase of a pile of parts has been more cost-effective than buying something from a store shelf, to say nothing of the flexibility and lack of bloatware inherent with taking the construction & installation onto oneself.

But technology is moving on. My wife’s laptop cost as much as the upgrade I just put into my desktop case, and while the bleeding edge Sandy Bridge processor will satisfy computing needs for (I hope) quite a few years, her laptop is just as good. If the ancient external drive to which I’d saved our Dragon Age games hadn’t ground that data into powder, it’d have been a completely painless upgrade. That won’t happen again, of course, because not only are the hard drives we have today lightyears ahead of that dinosaur, we can always upload our save data to a cloud.

And it’s not like I need my desktop to write. I do most of these updates in a text editor (gedit, if you’re curious) before taking the content and putting it into the blog, enhanced with pictures dropped into Photobucket and the occasional bit of rambling audio. I can do that with pretty much any device. Within the next year, fingers crossed & the creek don’t rise, I’ll be retiring this old workhorse of mine with some iteration of the Asus Transformer – hell, I’d write blog updates on my Kindle if it had a decent text editor.

My point is that as much as I love my PC, as nostalgic as I’ll wax about StarCraft II marathons and isometric views in games like Dragon Age: Origins and LAN parties and simulators like Wing Commander, there’s no reason not to celebrate the growth of the technologies we as gamers use to enjoy our hobby. The tech emerging on a steady basis is lightyears ahead of what many of us grew up using. From number crunching to heat management, the computing devices we use today are so superior to those old devices it staggers the imagination. If I went back even ten years and told myself that within a decade people would be using tablets in lieu of laptops and there would be laptops that turn into tablets on the horizon, I’d congradulate myself on being such an imaginative science-fiction writer. In my humble opinion, technology changing and evolving is a good thing, and there are a lot more benefits than drawbacks when it comes to embracing that change.

The thing is, as Captain Kirk pointed out once, “people can be very frightened of change.”

“They made the game easier to play and dumbed down the mechanics! TO ARMS!”
“This has nothing to do with the previous parts of the narrative because it’s using new characters we don’t know! A PLAGUE ON EVERYONE’S HOUSES!”
“WHAT? Visual changes that make things unfamiliar/derivative/different from before? KILL IT WITH FIRE!”
“PCs are no longer inherently superior to consoles? LIES AND SLANDER, I SAY!”

Start a bandwagon and you’ll be sure to find people happy to jump aboard it without forming opinions of their own.

In fact the lemonade (haterade?) being served on TGO’s bandwagon is rather refreshing, now that you mention it.

Where Camp Belongs

March 15, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Courtesy DEG

There exists a type of stage play that’s so absurdly over the top as to defy belief. I’m speaking of the pantomime. Burlesque is another one that comes to mind. The subject matter of these productions could be anything, from teenage romantic angst to the Holocaust, and goes so completely across the line of good taste that they circumnavigate our imaginations and strive come out the other side where things are so ridiculous they’re awesome again. It can be a very tricky thing to do, and it doesn’t always work.

In a similar vein, we have an unspoken sub-genre of films called ‘camp’. The degree to which a film tends to be considered camp is directly proportional to the degree to which it takes itself seriously. If it tries one time too many to make a legitimate point or be more than camp, it’s going to fail and the campier bits will just seem silly. Let it take the piss, however, and the overall effect is one of a fun if meaningless romp.

MovieBob mentioned camp in his review of Red Riding Hood, and cited two examples that I feel serve as great ‘bookends’ for camp. On the one hand, we have Batman & Robin. Now more than once, this little flick tries to harken back to the campy days of the Adam West television series, but more than one serious story point, complete with straight-faced sincerity and somewhat bland delivery, is tied to the absurdity the way a concrete block is tied to the ankle of someone who disappointed the boss. I’m not saying Batman & Robin would have been saved if you’d taken out the subplots involving Alfred & Mister Freeze’s wife, but it’s definitely one of the movie’s many problems.

On the other end of the scale is Flash Gordon. It in no way takes itself seriously. Horny evil overlords, impromptu football games and breathing in space are all handwaved in the name of having a good time. The color palette is vibrant, the actors larger than life (especially in the case of BRIAN BLESSED) and the whole thing is powered by the music of Queen. I can’t think of a campier movie that still manages to be enough fun to not overstay its welcome and make the audience feel like they spent their time well.

There are a plethora of films in between these two. Some will try to tap the same vein and not quite get it right, like Masters of the Universe. Others will keep the special effects, music and sensibilities modern while keeping the level of seriousness quite low, like Stephen Sommers’ The Mummy. From Independence Day to Moulin Rouge, there’s plenty of camp out there, and it isn’t all bad.

Sometimes you want to crack open that doorstopper and take in some serious long-form fiction, and sometimes you reach for a comic book. Camp is that comic book, and there’s nothing wrong with it. It has its place in our libraries, a space where it belongs, where our need for escapism exceeds our desire to remain in the real world. And it can work very well, unless you try to take it too seriously or otherwise muck it up.

I’m looking at you, Schumaker.

Selah

March 5, 2011 / / 1 Comment

It’s Hebrew for “pause and consider.” In case you haven’t noticed, some of my recent posts here have been concerned with things other than fancies about dragons, review of movies or ruminations on the written word. I’m entering a period of my life that feels transitionary, and rather than simply get shoved around by circumstances, I’ve been trying to find ways to forge my own path through the storm, to wrest some sort of order out of the chaos, even if it’s a matter of “too little too late.”

I haven’t been all that effective as yet, so it’s time to pause and consider.

I’m pausing to consider just who the hell I think I am.

Writer

I’ve been published two and two-half times.

Yes, I know, that makes three, but what’d you expect? I’m an English major, not a mathlete.

My first real short story, the first one that had teeth and weight and actually meant something on its own without relying on being fanfiction or entirely derivative, found a place in a horror anthology. One of the pitches I sent towards the Escapist landed in the editor’s mitt and bam, I got paid for being a nerd. Huzzah!

I’ve contributed as a writer to others’ projects twice so far, and while my part in Maschien Zeit was far less than half since my only contribution to the game’s actual design was in playtesting, the amount to which I put myself into the other collaboration makes up for it.

So, on average, so far I’ve gotten published once a decade.

Considering some poor slobs never get published at all, that’s not too shabby.

Blogger

Bard by BlueInkAlchemist, on Flickr

This blog is about change.

I know that I post about some scattershot things at times, it might seem. But the process of alchemy is a process of change. Every day I encounter something that I thought worked but doesn’t, or I find a part of my life isn’t what it was yesterday, or there’s something new to see… it’s all about change.

Even ICFN deals with change. I’ve changed formats, microphones, ways to get the audience involved. And watching a movie can change you, even if it’s just a moment of introspection or dire sorrow or jumping for joy. A good story does that, and a bad story should. I examine the whys and wherefores, and yes, sometimes I parrot some of the ramblings of other critics, but we all had to start somewhere.

If you’re still around after some of my more amateur stabs at being a critic, thank you.

Selah.

Editor

Criticisms are editorials. By looking at works like movies, books and games from the stance of a critic rather than a rank-and-file audience member, I see what changed since the last attempt at that style of story, what could change to make it better, And if I were to go into said story with those changes in mind?

I’d be editing.

I don’t have formal, on-the-job, business-and-resume-friendly training for it. I’m not going to get huge piles of cash shoveled in my direction for it. But it’s a skill I feel I need to cultivate. The better I get at editing, the higher the probability that whatever I end up submitting to a magazine, anthology, agent or Kindle store won’t be an absolute pile of dogshit.

It’s also closer to writing than programming is.

Programmer

code

I may have given the impression in a previous post that I’ve fallen out of love with programming. That isn’t the case. What gets my alchemist’s robes in a knot is reactionary programming. Bug fixes. Code rot. Sudden new demands made by folks who think a swish and flick is all that’s needed while a programmer says ‘pagerankium leviosa!’ to make their business the next smash hit on Google.

And yes, it’s lev-i-OH-sah, not lev-i-oh-SAH.

I know it’s part and parcel of most programming jobs when they’re being handled by a development department or a design shop, but I’ve gotten to a point in my life that I shouldn’t have to shrug my shoulders and accept a situation as given or unchangeable. Remember, this is all about change. Hopefully, most of that change will be for the better. Some things will work, others won’t. And there will be times you don’t know how effective a change is going to be until some time after the change is made. But the important thing is not the mistake in and of itself.

It’s what we learn from the mistake, and how we move forward and past it, that matters.

Selah.

Slacker

Nobody’s perfect.

I’m not going to pretend that there’s anything positive about my lethargy. I’m a sponge for media. I consume books, drink films, inhale the fumes of gaming and exhale a thousand tiny ideas that evaporate before my eyes. I accomplish nothing of value while I do this.

Except for learning about what’s out there already. Who’s already playing in my sandbox? Do I find merit in what’s been done? Do I think I can do better? How would I approach X or portray Y?

It doesn’t even happen, necessarily, as I’m soaking in whatever it is that’s drowning out the doldrums of the day. It can strike me later, in bed or in transit or over a bowl of Shreddies. That experience was awesome. That line sounded forced. That plot point made no sense. Those characters shouldn’t have behaved in that manner based on what we know. That reveal corrects that previous mistake or answers a hanging question, but what about that other thing, and what happens now?

A body at rest remains at rest but the mind might not necessarily be resting.

Ergo Sum

The Thinker

‘Therefore I am.’ I can’t think of a better way to sum up the preceding. I know it’s been ramblier than usual and some of it might not make a whole lot of sense to everybody. The thing is, though, it doesn’t necessarily have to make sense.

We often don’t understand what happens to us and those around us as it happens. We can grasp the basics of the situation, draw from previous experience and education, and act accordingly. It’s only in the aftermath that we piece things together, make connections, really understand those events. And that only happens if we take the time to pause, and consider.

Days may come when you feel overwhelmed. Things seem out of control. The world is simply moving too fast, or maybe it isn’t moving fast enough. Our impulse can be to speed up, to react more quickly, to make snap decisions – to panic. I do it. I’ll probably do it again.

It doesn’t have to be that way, though. If we stop and think, just for a moment, things change. When we pause and consider, the situation clarifies. The storm calms. We regain our grasp of who we are, look across the Shadow to who we want to be, and when the moment is right, we catch a glimpse of the elusive path between the now and the what could be.

Pause, and consider.

Selah.

Raison d’être

March 3, 2011 / / 0 Comments

Red Pen

You see it happening more often than not. People in a situation that isn’t working as intended or isn’t yeilding the results they need or anticipated try repeating the same behavior of failure instead of doing something new. They attempt to capitalize on repetition rather than initiating change. Albert Einstein (reportedly) calls it the definition of insanity, and Gordon Ramsay has admonished more than one flagging resturaunteur to “change, or die.”

There are a plethora of reasons why people don’t change. Some are convinced that the failures are flukes and the forumla that’s produced the failures will yeild success sooner or later. I guess they’re right, but as they say a broken clock is right twice a day. Others grow complacent or even lazy, and when something they’re doing fails, they either scramble to restore the status quo or shrug their shoulders and let circumstances fall back into place whichever way the world around them dictates.

It’s an attitude I can no longer tolerate within myself.

I don’t know what it is. Maybe it’s a result of Seth Godin’s excellent Poke the Box. Maybe I’ve seen too many friends succeed where I struggle to ignore the signals. And maybe I’ve been ignoring an essential truth about myself that’s gone unexplored for too long.

You see, I would never define myself as a programmer first and foremost.

It’s not that I consider myself bad at it. I’m not great, but I can get the job done while being easy to work with and puzzling my way through the problems that arise. The value I add to projects on which I work goes beyond my somewhat rarified knowledge of ActionScript and might have more to do with the way I work with people. The person down the row of cubes from you might be great at their job, but if they’re a pain in the ass to deal with you won’t take them work if you can help it. It’s the way we are.

However, it’s only ever been a job for me, never a career. Programming just pays the bills. It’s a rare morning when I wake up thinking of code and functions instead of distant worlds, fictional lives, even blog posts like this one. Excellent eloquence and deftness of syntax are things I’m far more passionate about than any of the programmatic challenges I’ve faced before or will face in the future. And bringing an attitude like that into a workplace where everybody around me does wrestle with code in their sleep, puts their passion on the table and made it their purpose cheapens things for them and makes me feel false, like an outsider looking in. It’s a world I understand, can relate to and appreciate, but it isn’t my world. And I need to face the fact it never has been.

We only have a few short years in this life, and I’ve spent too many going down a blind alley chasing a dead end.

I became convinced, by good people with good intensions, that writing would never pay enough. That I couldn’t make a career of it, that I needed to pursue something else. And I believed it. Instead of sticking to my guns, I hung up my spurs and took up a shovel. I’ve tried to get the spurs back on a few times, but every time I do at least one person with whom I work on a daily basis on this or that job looks at me funny. Why the hell would you wear spurs into a coal mine? It makes no sense, it’s silly is what it is, take them off or find yourself another mine.

And I did. Mine after mine, job after job, one after another for this reason or that circumstance. It isn’t working. When things are this cyclical, this consistently fraught with failure, one can react to it by struggling to maintain the status quo as quickly as possible, or examine the circumstances of the various failures and find a way to end them. If I’m to have any hope of accomplishing in my lifetime what I’ve wanted to accomplish since I was seven years old, when I wrote my first short story in my gifted education class (it was crap, but it was my first), I can no longer in good conscience treat my desire and acumen for the written word as just another hobby. I need to make more time for it, and that means being proactive in my pursuit.

I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t scared by the idea. My lizard brain would rather I fall back into old patterns, maintain the status quo, lower my expectations. For once, I’m disinclined to listen to it. It might be the safer, more responsible thing to do, and I acknowledge the possibility of yet another failure exists, but I can’t shake the feeling that it is long, long past time for me to try something different.

Being where I am now has everything to do with myself. As much as I’ve been given advice from others, it was me that listened, me that bought into certain ideas, me that interpreted signs and portents. I don’t blame my failures on anybody but myself. It’s because of me I went down those blind alleys, and it falls to me to get myself out again.

It isn’t enough simply to be. A reason to be is essential. It’s what changes mere existence to really living. I’ve taken hard roads to get where I am, and I’ve stumbled along the way. I’ve crashed and burned, broken promises, engendered disappointment and shattered hearts. Every mistake has taught me something and I’ve had to find ways to keep moving forward in the bloody aftermath. I’ve come too far to quit now, and I honestly feel I’m closer to being where I truly want to be now than I ever have been before. Listening to the lizard brain, giving into the fear of the unknown and the cold comfort of the status quo, feels more like a step backward. And if I step backward, I can’t move forward.

In other words, as Sun-Tzu put it, “Opportunities multiply as they are seized.”

Yet another way:

Excellence isn’t about working extra hard to do what you’re told. It’s about taking the initiative to do work you decide is worth doing.

Smart guy, that Seth.

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