Self Distraction

Self Distraction

War is heel

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High heels make you stand up straighter, they push your shoulders back and you look more confident, they somehow do nice things to how your calves look. What’s not to like? Apart from the way they destroy your feet, hurt like the devil and if men like them so much, let them bloody well wear ’em for a bit and see what it’s like.

Men did wear high heels. We wore them first. We came back to our senses. This is one of myriad tiny moments of information I relished in this week’s edition of the 99% Invisible podcast. It’s a really well-made series about design and it appeals to the part of me that thinks of the details in how we do things, why we do them, and whether they help us or not.

Usually, I just have a good time listening to this show but this week’s one about the engineering and the history of high heels is particularly fascinating. There is something just riveting to me about its detail on how engineering and design solved certain problems in making heels and how that contrasts with how they are the devils’ torture tools.

You’ll wince a lot but you’ll also laugh. There’s a moment when the regular presenter Roman Mars recommends Googling a particular topic but deeply strongly advises that you don’t use the image search. “There are some things you just can’t un-see.”

Do have a listen to this episode of 99% Invisible.

Boredom is vital

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Seriously, the last time I was bored was in 1979. But I should take the time to get bored again, according to psychoanalyst Adam Phillips:

“Boredom … protects the individual, makes tolerable for him the impossible experience of waiting for something without knowing what it could be.”

Legendary Psychoanalyst Adam Phillips on Why the Capacity for Boredom Is Essential for a Full Life – Maria Popova, Brainpickings (19 June 2014)

Brainpickings writer Popova expands on this in her full feature:

When was the last time you were bored — truly bored — and didn’t instantly spring to fill your psychic emptiness by checking Facebook or Twitter or Instagram? The last time you stood in line at the store or the boarding gate or the theater and didn’t reach for your smartphone seeking deliverance from the dreary prospect of forced idleness? A century and a half ago, Kierkegaard argued that this impulse to escape the present by keeping ourselves busy is our greatest source of unhappiness. A century later, Susan Sontag wrote in her diary about the creative purpose of boredom. And yet ours is a culture that equates boredom with the opposite of creativity and goes to great lengths to offer us escape routes.

Learn more from Popova and follow her links through to Phillips’ book On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored (UK Edition, US Edition).

Find a partner who looks like your ex

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What do you mean, that’s creepy?

I loathe the idea that any of us have a type, that there is certain physical type that we are attracted to. But I know it’s true. And dating firm Match.com is using this to help us. In partnership with the best-not-to-ask-why-it’s-called-this company Three Day Rule, the dating business is asking for photos that it will then use to pattern match.

Look, I’m just telling you, I’m not commenting on this. And I can’t seem to direct you to the US version of Match.com where this happening because my browser auto-routes to the UK one where I am and where my wife Angela is now going to wonder about my browsing history. Ah, I’ve searched for worse. I once looked for football news. It wasn’t for me, it was for a friend.

Before I give you Three Day Rule’s link and wish you well, let me point out that the service costs. It costs good. In the US it’s $5,000 which works out to around £2,937.89. But if that’s the cost of true love and a little creepiness over that whole type thing, there you go.

Match.com is here, though if you’re in the States you’d be better off typing it directly and skipping my local rerouting. And Three Day Rule is here.

Via On the Media

I have no clue what to say. Star Wars: Scene Maker

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Disney has released a new iPad app that, wait, take this from the mouth of a horse:

MAKE STAR WARS YOUR OWN!

Become the master of your own Star Wars video universe! Create your own scenes, choose your favorite characters, control their actions and dialogue, record your masterpiece, and share your Star Wars story! The Force of your imagination is with you!

FEATURES:

· Create your own Star Wars universe and bring it to life with imaginative play and countless options.

· Select from 3D environments with 3D models of your favorite characters, weapons, and ships.

· Use dialogue straight from the Star Wars films, or record your voice and apply a Darth Vader, Rebel Pilot, or Storm Trooper filter to put your words into any character’s mouth!

· Switch between three cameras, each of which can track or follow the action, to record your scene from multiple angles!

· Chooose a musical score taken from the Star Wars films, write your own iconic Star Wars “Title Crawl” and end credits, and share your finished scene with your friends!

If you get the free app – it’s a big download but it’s free – you’ll hear all of this again but done in the style of a movie trailer. You’ll also get the Star Wars theme, which I do like, I have bought the soundtrack, repeated so often that you won’t like it, you will throw away that soundtrack.

I do just wonder what I would’ve thought of this when I was a kid and Star Wars first came out. I also wonder how much the in-app purchases would’ve cost then. Now they are £1.99 each for Death Star Attack and Cloud City Something or £2.49 for the pair.

Without those, you get the full game/scene experience, just with only a plot from Return of the Jedi. Do you remember when everybody knew that Return of the Jedi was the worst Star Wars film? We were so young.

Get the app here.

About that flirt-fave thing

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I’ve been utterly unaware of such a thing until just now when I learnt of why people favourite tweets but the flirt-fave is sticking with me.

It’s worrying me, to be frank. I’m trying to remember every tweet I’ve favourited. Only Suzanne Vega has ever favourited me so that’s something for me to glow about later.

That previous story about reasons for favouriting linked out to many resources including this definition of my flirting:

Flirt Fav

Deployed almost exclusively on personal tweets about your undateability or selfies where your hair looks good. Also applies to people who fav any and all things you tweet, even if they are banal/stupid/something you’re going to delete in the next five minutes.

A Simple Guide to Twitter Favs – Jessica Roy, Time (4 February 2014)

I’m not liking the word ‘favs’. But I would more dislike the next entry, the Hate Fav, if I weren’t ignoring it and going la la la.

Read Roy’s full feature.

What does it mean when someone favourites your tweet?

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Bugger-all.

Now, I’m telling you this despite the fact that I got very excited one day as I reached for my iPhone exactly as a notification popped up that Suzanne Vega had favourited a tweet of mine. That’s different. That doesn’t factor into any of the following whatsoever.

What’s in a Twitter fave? It’s a gesture – just the click of a button – that can mean any number of things given the context. We’ve developed an entire ecosystem of Twitter faves over the past few years. There’s the hate-fave. The flirt-fave. The fist-bump fave.

Now, researchers have gone one step further and developed what purports to be a scientific taxonomy of favoriting behavior, based on survey responses from 606 active Twitter users. The biggest surprise? Over a third of Twitter users said they weren’t even aware the favoriting function existed. Among the rest, only 3/4ths of users had ever favorited a tweet.
The researchers asked the remaining 290 users open-ended questions about why they favorited things. They coded the responses into a number of categories, and the taxonomy above was born.

The most popular reason for faving something? People simply liked the tweet. For many people it’s analogous to Facebook’s “like” button. Not surprisingly, bookmarking things for later reading or recall was the second most popular reason.
Others used it as a conversational feature, to let someone else know they had seen their tweet, or to signal agreement. 25 people favorited tweets that made them feel special. Six people favorited tweets but had literally no idea why they did so.

What Does it Mean When Someone Favourites Your Tweet? Here are 25 possible answers – The Washington Post (4 June 2014)

Actually… I like the sound of that ‘flirt-fave’.

Via Katharine D’Souza

Mills & Boon ereader

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20140615-180935-65375074.jpgDon’t we have enough ereaders? Alongside the hardware ones like Kindle, Nook and Kobo, we have the software ones: you can read Kindle books on iPads. And iPads have iBooks.

That’s my personal favourite: iBooks. The range of titles available is clearly much smaller than on Kindle but wherever a book is on both, I’ll buy the iBooks version. Even if it costs a little more. It’s only ever a little bit more and the reading experience is worth it. Kindle feels very clunky-ugly to me, like you’re accepting a substandard product in order to get the convenience of an ebook. Whereas iBooks just feel like books.

So I think we’re well served by iBooks and it’s pretty clear that we are very well served in volume by Kindle. What we aren’t doing is making enough money for publishers. Amazon takes money from the publishers for Kindle, Apple does the same for iBooks. Mills & Boon has decided to circumvent that by selling its own books in its own reader.

I’d be surprised if they also took the titles off iBooks and Kindle but you would certainly make the publisher happiest if you bought from them and you then read their books in their reader.

It’s not a bad ereader, either. It’s basic and it feels like you’re reading a PDF chopped up into pages but maybe you are.

What’s less clear is how much the books cost compared to other services. It’s a clunky process to sign up: you need both a Mills & Book account and an Adobe ID; I have an Adobe ID but it wasn’t recognised and I got a bit bored schlepping through setting all this up again so I admit I stopped.

I’m reminded of UltraViolet: a bunch of companies decide they don’t like paying Apple a cut so they go their own way but can’t quite pull it off. It’s as if the companies can’t agree with each other so users end up having to log in here and there and elsewhere. The need for both a Mills & Boon ID and an Adobe ID is that kind of thing.

If you’re a fan and you already have a Mills & Boon account, I’d have a go at signing up but then compare prices across all the services. I’m seeing prices vary from free to £3.49 and can’t fathom a pattern to it.

But the Mills & Boon ereader is free: you can get there here now and it comes with a few books.

If strangers talked to everybody like they talk to writers

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I think the video one about If Gay Guys Said the Shit Straight People Say is funnier but I do recognise a lot of this…

There is something unique about the way people talk to writers. Strangers seem very willing to offer career advice — “self-publishing is where the money is!” — literary advice — “People love vampires!” — or to oddly ask you to guess what work they’ve read in their life and if any of yours is among it. It got me thinking about what it would be like it people talked about other professions in this way.

“Ah, a middle school teacher? Have I met any of the students you’ve ever taught?”

“Cool, I always wanted to be a car salesmen. Maybe when I retire I’ll settle down and just work on selling that Buick I’ve had in my head for years.”

“Huh. A chef. Do people still eat food?”

“An accountant? Wow, I haven’t even looked at a number since high school.”

If Strangers Talked to Everybody like They Talk to Writers – Lincoln Michel (6 June 2014)

Do read on.

Lessons from being a director – part 3

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See the serious part 2 about delegation and also the power-mad-crazy part 1 about RULING THE WORLD.

How long do you think I can keep milking my directing career for productivity advice? I’m hoping I can carry on until the exciting day when I get my second-ever job as director.

But when you’re boring everyone about your power and artistic talent, you have to have more specific topics and now I have this one. Now I have realised this one: directing changes how you write.

Actually, it’s more than that: anything you do that is in some new way related to your writing or whatever your specific talent is, it changes.

I did rewrite the play on the fly to adjust for unforeseen problems, I did many, many times tweak to improve things based on the actors’ opinions. It’s common for writers to decry this but I would like to say right now that I am smug: I have always said that directors and actors should not make changes to a scene when it risks buggering up the rest of the script. Actors and directors are prone to concentrating on this scene right now, this scene you’re memorising, this scene you’re filming. And they should. They need to. Except when a brilliant suggestion that truly lifts that scene is an almighty bomb that ruins the entire point of the drama.

Granted, that’s a worst-case scenario.

I loved the whole process of directing but for me the whole process was in bringing that script to the stage. As short as it was, as specific as it was to this group, it had to be directed right and I had every syllable of that script in my head all the way through. Then I’d have multiple versions of the same scene in my head and I would be running them simultaneously.

None of which helps you, I just got carried away.

The action of doing something different in drama is the same, I think, as heading in to your home town from a new direction. There is one road into my home village in Birmingham that, for whatever reason, I rarely used as a kid. So now if I drive down there into the village, I come out into an entirely familiar world but it is entirely unfamiliar. The library is in the wrong spot. So is the school.

I reexamine them, I notice them again when I have become so used to them that I don’t.

So it was looking at this script from a new direction.

The short recommendation here is that you should go direct something. But the longer is that maybe you can find any way of looking at your story and your script that is different. Not better, not worse, just different. And see what it throws up at you, see what you notice.