Just watch the video – and then read all the details of how this most startling effect is pulled off.
News
Elders react to Oculus Rift
It makes a change from all those stories about teenagers reacting sarcastically to old technology: this is a video about older people reacting confusedly to new technology.
Notice that I said older, not old. And ‘elder’ is in the title of the video.
This has nothing to do with how I happen to be old enough that I have only just about got the faintest notion what Oculus Rift is and not quite as much interest:
Elmore Leonard’s other rules for writing
So here’s the thing. Elmore Leonard wrote a lot of seemingly very visual novels but he’s somehow been really poorly served by the film and TV dramatisations of his work. Consequently I think he’s underrated but one thing that has made him a star with writers is his famous list of 10 Rules for us.
Here’s that list in the New York Times and if you don’t know it, it’s more interesting that what I’ve got for you now.
But if you do know it, take a look at this. This is a video of actor Timothy Olyphant – star of perhaps the best Leonard dramatisation, the series Justified – reading from the novel Swag. It’s a section about two criminals and includes Elmore Leonard’s rules for being criminals. I think it’s equal parts fascinating and revealing that there is so much crossover in his two lists of rules;
Sticks work better than carrots – official
I do this all the time: unless I work enough to earn these things, I constantly deny myself gardening, vegetables, milk chocolate, football, all sorts of things. I may help me cope with the loss of these with periodic dark chocolate, tea and good books but that’s private, that’s my business.
We do often hear that we can reward ourselves when we do something and I’ve done that. But there is an argument that the masochists amongst us are right to punish themselves into action. Plus, we’re writers, that’s practically a synonym for masochists.
Fast Company suggests what I think is a halfway house between punishment and reward. Risk. Specifically, do something to trigger our loss aversion, which is a technical term to describe our aversion to losing things.
Self-motivation comes in a numbers of forms but masochism, on its face, seems like a dubious strategy. But what if various boundaries aren’t enough?
In those cases, when something absolutely has to get done, we have another, albeit extreme suggestion: Waste large sums of money.
“The science of loss aversion says that we hate losing $100 about twice as much as we like winning $100,” said Nick Crocker, behavior change expert and founder of the fitness app Sessions, which MyFitnessPal acquired in 2013.
What Results? Try Punishing Yourself – Rebecca Greenfield, Fast Company (28 August 2014)
Greenfield’s full piece makes this case but uses a New York Times article about loss aversion and that article is more akin to the sunk cost theory I’ve covered before. This is off the point of punishing yourself to get results but I think it does tie in to how we hang on to things we should ditch but just can’t because we fear losing anything.
New York Times:
The psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky showed that even something as simple as a coin toss demonstrates our aversion to loss. In a recent interviews, Mr. Kahneman shared the usual response he gets to his offer of a coin toss:
“In my classes, I say: ‘I’m going to toss a coin, and if it’s tails, you lose $10. How much would you have to gain on winning in order for this gamble to be acceptable to you?’
“People want more than $20 before it is acceptable. And now I’ve been doing the same thing with executives or very rich people, asking about tossing a coin and losing $10,000 if it’s tails. And they want $20,000 before they’ll take the gamble.”
In other words, we’re willing to leave a lot of money on the table to avoid the possibility of losing.
The Sketch Guy: Overcoming an Aversion to Loss – Carl Richards, New York Times (9 Decemeber 2013)
Sometimes you just have to let things go. Because they’re already gone.
Write for free and you take us all down
There is a catch in your voice when someone asks you what you do and you answer that you’re a writer. And the catch is that everybody thinks they can write. Most can’t but that’s okay, I’ll never score a goal at football or successfully tie my shoelace, I don’t beat myself up about it. I also don’t go selling my services as a shoelace advisor. But enough of the not-we advertise themselves as writers that they damage what we do. And because they cannot, literally cannot, distinguish themselves in any way but price, they go hell for leather in distinguishing themselves on price. You want a 5,000 word article for 20 cents? I’ll do you 10,000 for free.
You will never find a shortage of people foolish enough to hire people for free – it’s a core tenet of how the UK government believes everyone but themselves should be volunteers – but you could ignore that. It’s harder to ignore the line you get that writing for free will be great exposure.
The Freelancer by Contently argues this week that this could be true. The full piece is centred on Lisa Earle McLeod who writes for Huffington Post for free and says that her articles there are responsible for “nearly every major sale” her company has made. But:
McLeod recognized lawyers and physicians don’t give their work away for free. But she said her business model isn’t based on writing. Writing is a means to an end, a strategy for generating more work in other areas.
“My business model is speaking and consulting. Why wouldn’t I write for free?” she said. “Now when people call me, I don’t have to establish credibility.”
Let’s see her speak and consult for free, then.
New book: Filling the Blank Screen
Thanks to your recommendations, the one hundred best articles from The Blank Screen news site have been extended, updated, revised, given a polish – and are now the new book, Filling the Blank Screen.
I tell you, it is as if the book itself insisted on being written. There is going to be a series of Blank Screen books and I am deep into writing the first one at this very moment yet Filling the Blank Screen just demanded to be done. Maybe if I could work out a better way for you to find all the best articles on this site then the book would’ve shut up a bit. But I haven’t yet, so it went on and on at me about how it was time.
Behind the thousand articles and the quarter of a million words on this site there are hundreds of conversations with people online and at the now many Blank Screen workshops. New writers at literary festivals, very experienced ones at Writers’ Guild events, I love that this stuff helps them – and I love even more that every one of them has something useful for me to steal. I mean, use. I mean, um.
Anyway.
I want you to have Filling the Blank Screen and I’d like to suggest that you read it a chapter a day. That way you can tell people it took you one hundred days to read and I either sound like I write a lot or that I’m very heavy going. I’ll take that. Bit of quality, innit? Bit of heft.
The paperback version is scheduled to be published on 12 September and doubtlessly I’ll tell you all about that then. But today the ebook version is out and it’s at a special price of £2.99 on Amazon UK. It’s also at a special price of $4.99 on Amazon US.
One thing, though. If the next 11 months gets us another 1,000 articles and another 250,000 words, you’d hope that there will be enough material in there for a third Blank Screen boo. But what would I call it? Refilling the Blank Screen?
“Michael, I need petrol and a near side front light”
It’s called Fixd and I’d be more likely to back this Kickstarter campaign if it were named KITT, but for someone like me with zero car knowledge, I can see a lot of reasons to fancy this:
Put your phone away and go to sleep
I have very clearly noticed that I sleep better when my iPhone is not displaying a clock face all night. (I do lower the brightness, I’m not daft. I’m not that daft. Okay, I’m not that daft about that one thing.) Even so, I carry right on doing exactly that and apparently so do you.
Okay, most people with smartphones keep their phones near them at night. Okay, 95% of people in a very specific study do:
I asked staff at BuzzFeed, in a survey, if they ever fall asleep with their phones in their beds. Of the 82 people who responded, 70% said they at least sometimes sleep with their phones in their beds, and 41% said they do it almost every night.
Single people were somewhat more likely to sometimes sleep with their phones in their bed — 78% of singles and 61% of people in relationships said they at least sometimes sleep with their phones in their bed. Roughly 95% said they sleep with their phones either in their beds, or on a nightstand or floor right next to it, and only four people said they leave their phones away from the bed, either in another room or on another side of the room.
I’m just not sure it’s a problem. I pop my iPhone onto its stand each night and I have this conversation with Siri:
Wake me at 4:59am
Wake me at 5:01am
Switch on Do Not Disturb
Open Awesome Clock
Awesome Clock is the curiously no longer available app that lets me have that clock face on my phone all night. (Gorgeously, you just swipe down and it dims, swipe up and it brightens. Love it.) And the bit with two alarms is that for some reason my iPhone will occasionally fail to make a sound if I ask for one. I set two and it works.
But the key thing there is probably that Do Not Disturb. The phone is on but unless you’re someone I’ve said is important enough to get to me, you don’t. Mind you, in case you’re reading this and thinking both that you thought you were important to me and yet I didn’t answer last night, your getting through my phone is no guarantee of your getting through to my skull. And I did dream about you last night, so you got to me on some entertaining if not very useful level. Hello again. What did you want to say?
Sorry? You want the link for the full Buzzfeed piece? It’s no trouble.
Germany looking at banning work emails after office hours
That would be similar to the moves in France where workers could carry on getting all the emails they liked but managers should get a rest.
The following quote comes via Google Translate so I’m sorry for its quality but it is at least a thousand times better than I would’ve managed with a dictionary. This is Germany’s labour minister Andrea Nahles responding to a question this week about whether employees could be protected from emails while on holiday:
Yes. That is my goal. I have made sure that the test of an anti-stress regulation comes into the coalition agreement. There is an undeniable relationship between availability and duration of the increase of mental illness, now the have also recognized the employer. We have to also scientific evidence. Nevertheless, it is a challenge to implement this law quite sure. Therefore, we have the Federal Institute for Occupational Safety and Health commissioned work up sound, whether and how it is possible to set load thresholds. We need universal and legally binding criteria before we prescribe the establishments something. 2015 to present first results.
Good luck with that. But if France is going this way and Germany’s looking at it, you can bet it’s going to come up in the UK. I don’t think it’ll be the deciding issue in the next general election, but stranger things have been.
I’ve given you secret and malicious intelligence information. Apparently.
I use this so often. And I’ve mentioned it to you in a piece about searching for specific email addresses. If you type this into Google:
“omnifocus”
You get an awful lot of results. If, instead, you type this:
omnifocus at williamgallagher.com
Well, okay, you still get an awful lot of results. But you’re telling Google to solely and only and specifically and exclusively search my williamgallagher.com site. Now, Google doesn’t exactly do that. First it searches me, then it searches everywhere else like it always does. But those first few entries are on my site.
I do go a little further. I’ll search a site like that and if I’m looking for a screenplay, say, I might specify that I want “filetype:pdf”. That returns only PDF results. Fine. It cuts down a lot of time searching but apparently that’s a problem:
Malicious cyber actors are using advanced search techniques, referred to as “Google dorking,” to locate information that organizations may not have intended to be discoverable by the public or to find website vulnerabilities for use in subsequent cyber attacks. “Google dorking” has become the acknowledged term for this malicious activity, but it applies to any search engine with advanced search capabilities. By searching for specific file types and keywords, malicious cyber actors can locate information such as usernames and passwords, e-mail lists, sensitive documents, bank account details, and website vulnerabilities. For example, a simple “operator:keyword” syntax, such as “filetype:xls intext:username,” in the standard search box would retrieve Excel spreadsheets containing usernames.
You go through a range of reactions to this, don’t you? Like a typical man, I preen a bit at the idea that searches I do every day are ‘advanced’. I don’t fully understand the term ‘cyber actor’ but it sounds exciting. And then you get called a dork. Google Dorking is such a new term that there isn’t a Wikipedia page about it. (There is this and it seems a nice place to visit.)
I think the onus is on the people who put classified or confidential information on their computers. Let them shut out searches like this. Especially as apparently it’s a bit easy for them to do.
But hey, if anyone asks where you learnt how to crack NATO defence secrets or whatever it is, you point them right at… um… anyway, is that the time?