Posts
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The Blogging Gauntlet: May 31 - Conclusion
CommentsThis is part of The Blogging Gauntlet of May 2016, where I try to write 500 words every day. See the May 1st post for full details.
I’ll be honest, I expected to feel a lot different after this month than I actually do.
Perhaps that’s my bias from stories about One Big Revelation That Changes Everything. The kind of turning point that people use when writing memoirs.
It doesn’t feel like I changed that much. Maybe there was a big change, but it’s only something I can recognize after the fact. In the now, the me of yesterday is too familiar, and the me of two days ago is still fresh in my mind, and both of these “me”s are too similar to the current me. It’s too hard to see the accumulation of subtle shifts, if there were any.
What went well, and what didn’t? For starters, writing 500 words every day was both less and more time consuming than expected. Some of my posts were written under an hour, which is stupidly fast for me. That happened because on some days I only had an hour…
If you do it at the last minute, it only takes a minute.
(Anonymous Berkeley professor)
However, some posts took over four hours. Hopefully, this is just because of work ballooning to fill my free time, of which I had a lot of this month, and it won’t take me that long to write once I start working full-time.
For something that went poorly, writing about a new topic every day was and is too much for me. There are quite a few posts that I genuinely regret writing. The ideas backing them are either ill-formed or nonexistent, but I was forced to use them in the name of daily posts. I have blog-worthy ideas more often than once every two weeks, but less often than every day.
I could have avoided this by dedicating more than one post to a given topic, and in fact was expecting to do so, but that ended up falling apart. I’m simply not familiar with the serial mindset of posting part after part of a whole. When I write, I like to rearrange paragraphs and ideas all over the place, until I get an ordering I like. This stops working in serial writing. Publishing the beginning of a post fixes the ideas I start with and the order they are presented in, and trying to continue from a bad start is awful. I have on occasion scrapped entire drafts when I realized I wasn’t writing about what I actually wanted to write about, and if I had published the start of those drafts, I would have been forced to continue topics I disliked. I know serial writing is doable, it’s just that I can’t do it yet.
On to what went well. I managed to write a post every day, only missing the deadline once. The money cost worked as planned, because it gave me impetus to write posts even when I could have justified skipping a day. After enough writing, I learned blogging was something I wanted as a regular part of my life, and the potential penalty of losing twenty dollars diminished in importance. It still mattered, but it wasn’t the only thing that mattered.
I flushed most of my blogging idea queue. The only ideas left are ideas that require tons of introspection (meaning they had to take more than a day) and ideas that require tons of planning. I hope to get the planning ones out soon, or at least start the introspection/planning process.
I have a better appreciation for doing a little bit each day. I may try to incorporate similar thinking into tasks that are inherently long term, like learning a new language.
I successfully beta-tested posts I’ve always wanted to write, and although not all of them worked out, some were very well received, more than I expected them to be. Getting to write in a context where people knew they shouldn’t expect something perfect was a big help.
On that note, this is where you, the reader, come in. This has been a journey for me, and I could use more detailed feedback. If you could fill this quick survey, I’d appreciate it - it’ll directly contributes to making this blog better.
Next steps: going to stop blogging for about a week because I’m technically on vacation, then I’ll start working on longer posts and/or rewriting posts from this month that I liked. I’m thinking about adding an update schedule, but need time to think about the details. In either case - stay tuned.
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The Blogging Gauntlet: May 30 - Welcome to the Medium
CommentsThis is part of The Blogging Gauntlet of May 2016, where I try to write 500 words every day. See the May 1st post for full details.
If you don’t know who Alan Moore is, let me tell a story.
Alan Moore is one of the most influential comic writers of all time. Among his works is Watchmen, which I consider to be a masterpiece. It’s visually rich, thick with plot and symbolism, and has an all around engrossing narrative.
Alan Moore is also known for having very strong opinions about adaptations of his work. Moore has without fail hated adaptations of his work, so much so that he refuses to be listed in the credits of those adaptations. The one exception is the Justice League Unlimited adaptation for “The Man Who Has Everything”.
So, when a Watchmen movie was announced, his response was typical - he refused to see it and did not want to be credited. However, his reasoning was interesting.
There are things we did with Watchmen that could only work in a comic, and were indeed designed to show off things that other media can’t.
(Entertainment Weekly)
I haven’t found a quote by Moore where he explains this, but here’s a fan explanation I quite liked. Watchmen uses tons of visual callbacks, and lots of visual motifs. An entire chapter is palindromic for pete’s sake. It’s rich enough that sometimes you want to pause and take in all the detail.
A comic lets you do this, but a film doesn’t. A film pushes images at you frame after frame. It dictates the pace of each scene. In contrast, when reading a comic, the reader chooses how long they spend on each page. Comic time can be stretched or contracted or made to run backwards if the reader wishes it to be. When Dr. Manhattan talks about determinism and seeing all times at once, it can be interpreted as a commentary on comic readers themselves. It doesn’t work as well in a movie because the subtext disappears.
Just as there are differences between comics and movies, there are differences between books and movies. William Goldman wrote the book The Princess Bride, then later adapted it into the movie people endlessly quote. What’s striking is how different the plot is between the two. The book has a deeper backstory on Inigo Montoya’s father. It has a more elaborate framing device, where instead of a grandfather telling a story it’s an unhappily married man rewriting a story his father told him in his youth. Goldman didn’t have to change anything since he wrote his own adaptation, but he did. Why?
Let me take a stab at why movies have fundamentally different storytelling standards. A book has a much easier time doing inner monologues. The author is allowed to write each character’s inner thoughts. By contrast, a movie’s goal is to show, don’t tell. The viewer expects the director to make full use of the images and audio, and that expectation places limits on what kinds of dialogue are acceptable. I’ve heard this is very clear in the Hunger Games adaptations, which have to cut out lots of Katniss’s inner monologue.
The choice of medium influences the kind of stories you can tell. In extreme cases you get things like Watchmen, but even in normal cases different mediums have different strengths and weaknesses. Things hosted online like this blog are pressured to be more casual and readable, because it is super easy for the reader to get distracted, meaning you need a very casual flow of information. That’s good for discussion and bad for concentrated learning. Stories in print are given more leeway, while films are pressured to make sure no one gets lost if they miss a single minor detail.
The title is a reference to Homestuck, a webcomic (kind of) that could only work on the Internet. By incorporating text, animated GIFs, Flash animations, and interactive games, it creates what can only be called an experience. If Watchmen is arguably unadaptable, Homestuck is definitively so.
Another example is Undertale. The game simply would not work if the player was not given the choice between Spare or Kill, making it a story that works best as a video game. Any other medium wouldn’t give that choice. (There are spoilery reasons for why a Choose Your Own Adventure book wouldn’t work either.)
Next time you see something interesting, try considering through what means it was presented, and see if it colors your perception. If you find anything interesting, leave me a comment, since I’d like to learn more.
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The Blogging Gauntlet: May 29 - Self-Indulgent Garbage
CommentsThis is part of The Blogging Gauntlet of May 2016, where I try to write 500 words every day. See the May 1st post for full details.
Apologies in advance if I have typos or worse writing than usual. I’m traveling right now and don’t have my laptop with me, meaning I have to use a different writing flow.
Right now, I’m typing on a iPad, using GitHub’s built in text editor. It’s actually not as bad as I thought it would be. The touch keyboard does a decent job of approximating a real keyboard. Of course it’s a lot smaller, but it’s still loads better than a phone keyboard.
However, obviously I’m making do with a non-ideal situation by using the tools I have. Typing is much, much slower than an actual keyboard. Furthermore, I don’t have an easy way to check all the formatting works, besides launching the site and hoping for the best.
It’s funny. I’ve always seen tablets as a little extraneous. I thought you either wanted a phone size thing or a laptop size thing. A tablet size thing felt like a weird middle ground. But, now that I’m using one, I can understand why it feels qualitatively different from both. Still don’t think I’ll buy one though.
Anyways, this is a whole new experience for me. Honestly, I wasn’t expecting to even try to make a blog post today. I was just going to take the $20 hit because of how little time I had. But, when there’s a will there’s a way.
I don’t think I’ve emphasized just how convoluted my process is right now, so let me explain.
- I’m borrowing this iPad from my family, so no downloading apps. That means I have to edit through Github’s interface, which to be fair isn’t that bad.
- To check the word count, I’ve been using vim’s built in word counters. I can’t get vim on this iPad so instead…
- I save my work from Github’s interface, then use an SSH client on my personal smartphone.
- Then I SSH to my school account on the Berkeley servers, which luckily isn’t deactivated yet.
- Then I pull the updated text for my blog.
- Then I open vim, which again - is accessed through SSHing from my freaking phone.
- And I can then check my word count.
At last count I was over 230 words. Now…hey, 380! Not bad.
(I would put the Not Bad Obama meme here, but there’s no way I want to deal with setting up all of that on an iPad. Let your imagination fill in the dank meme.)
This is about the moment where you should realize I just spent about 400 words talking about nothing except the struggles I’m going through to type the post you’re reading. Truly, I have hit rock bottom for material. Or to be more precise, I’ve passed rock bottom, because I already used a similar concept in Shut Up And Write. I’m retreading my shitposting! Do you realize how incredibly disappointing that is, to me, a person trying to write semi-serious things?
Oh who am I kidding, this blog has always indulged in memeing about itself.
Time for a word count…
Hey, it’s over 500! (Not, unfortunately, over 9000.) I’ll stop this self-indulgent bullshit here. I think it’s likely I won’t make more posts, but if I do they’ll be back to whatever counts for normal around these parts.
Until next time.