Now whether this story happens to be a bit dramatized or not remains to be debated … I guess I’d like to think that a multi-billion dollar company like Pixar would have backups of their backups of their backups when it comes to their production movie files, but either way, talk about an absolutely terrifying account nonetheless!
Boy, do I really want to talk about this, but at the same time I know that I really shouldn’t talk about it!!! 
It’s a common adage amongst creative type people that it’s best not to talk publicly about a new project that you’re working on until you’re actually done and ready to unveil it to all of your adoring fans. The reasons are plentiful – you don’t want to waste your promotional enthusiasm now before there’s actually anything to buy, you don’t want your fans to both ramp up and subsequently get over an idea before there’s anything of substance for them to enjoy, and hell – for all you know, it might not even end up getting done!
That’ll sure leave you feeling red in the face, when somebody asks you two years later, “Hey, what ever happened to that Super Awesome Thing-a-ma-jig that you were working on?! I was really looking forward to giving you boatloads of my hard-earned moolah for that!”
That said, at the same time it’s really hard to resist blabbing about a new project that you’re excited about because, well, you’re excited about it and it’s big enough to be worth your time, so why not?!
So anyways, I’m going to do my best not to spill the beans on this new one that I’m undertaking, except for these few tiny morsels that I just have to get out of my system before it bursts … creatively speaking, of course! This new thing that I’m working on is something that I’ve never done before, although I’m sure there was a point where the concept crossed my mind in the past. But it’s definitely a first, and it’s going to be very colorful, and the current goal is to have everything done by the end of the summer.
Also, it’s a collaborative effort that I’m doing with my sister, who you may remember from the comic’s fame.
But that’s it – no more chatter until it’s done!
Whew – believe it or not, I actually do feel a lot better now. 
It actually has been a whole lot of fun with even the little bit that we’ve completed so far, and I hope that five months from now you all find it rather enjoyable to, well, enjoy, too! 
I’ve kind of been in a bit of a rut lately.
If you’re a fan of my creative works, you may have noticed that some of them haven’t been updating lately as they should. Basically, I let myself fall behind on some stuff over the last month or so in order to focus on some other entirely different projects, and now that said projects are officially behind me, I’m just having a really hard time getting back into the swing of things again.
In a way, I am glad that I did it because it was a project that I really needed to get done earlier in the year so that it has time to build momentum on its own, though I wish I hadn’t had to sacrifice my timeliness because now it feels like I’m underwater with my other stuff, which I think sometimes makes it even harder because seeing a dozen columns to work on is a lot more daunting than saying, “I guess I’m a week behind or so…”
I just need to power through it – quarantine off one or two things at a time and just focus on those, then keep going until I get through the entire pile. It’s tough to tune out all of that background work because sometimes it makes it that much harder for me to get into the creative mindset that I need to be funny, but it’s really the only way! I need to get going and I need to plow through the things consistently so that I can actually finish up and move on to other stuff before the next week’s column just adds itself to the pile! A little at a time, but a lot at the end of the day and even more by the end of the week…
In fact, I could probably be working on one of those things right now! 
This is such a neat story – I just can’t share it around enough…
When I first watched it this morning (via BoingBoing), it already had about 68k views and they were approaching $10k for the kid’s college fund. Now when I just refreshed it half a day later, the video has been watched almost 400,000 times and Caine’s college fund has surpassed $44,000!
I chipped in five bucks this morning because the story really made me smile and I feel like an imagination like that needs to be encouraged as much as possible.
And the thing I love about the nature of the Internet is that thousands of other people felt exactly the way that I did and by the end of the week, this bright, little 9 year-old is probably going to be able to go to whatever college he wants in the country.
Just watch the video and I think you’ll agree that it’s a pretty good investment… 
Even though thanks to digital printing my books will probably never be printed this way, it’s still kinda neat to see how it was done in the previous age…
Even though it feels like it flew by way too fast, I feel like I had a pretty productive weekend.
We were going to go over to Disney again, but bailed at the last minute due to concerns about the weather and just ended up staying home. My wife picked up a copy of The Hunger Games and read it pretty much cover-to-cover, so I had loads of time to catch up on various creative projects and clear out some things that have been bogging me down for a while. I ended up finishing off two specific projects that have been on my list since god knows how long, and as I look ahead to what I want to tackle next, something very apparent hit me square in the face – I am absolutely horrible at setting timelines for my creative tasks!
Take the two that I had just finished up this weekend, for instance:
- Task #1 – originally estimated to take “1-2 weeks” … final result: 4 weeks!
- Task #2 – originally estimated to take “a few hours” … final result: 10-12 hours!
I’m just really bad at estimating how long these things take, sometimes even to the point where I think it might be hurting me in the long run because I’ll build out a timeline for the next six months and then find myself increasingly frustrated as I pass deadlines where I’m supposed to be moving on to other things and instead am still only halfway through the first. I’ve thought about just taking my original estimate and doubling it, but that seems a bit drastic when I’ve got some that are expected to take months, though I’d prefer them not to take up my entire year…
Then again, a big part of productivity in general, I think, is really a sanity factor and lately I’ve been thinking a lot about improving the quality of my work by means other than just dumping loads of time into it (i.e. getting more rest and relaxation), and so to an extent I guess part of me wonders if stress could ultimately play a role in that process, too. I remember hearing a story once about an auto repair shop who would always quote its customers as much as double the amount of time that they needed to do the actual job. The reason they cited was expectations – if you call a customer and tell him you need another hour, he’s probably going to be disappointed, however if you call to say that you finished the work early, that’s something to be excited about and ultimately helps to better promote their business because then they’ve got customers walking around saying that this shop always gets their car in and out ahead of schedule!
Granted, it might take a little getting used to – especially if you’ve got other shops to compare the work to, but in something like my case when it’s all just in my head, why not add a little extra padding to my own expectations of time spent? Worst case scenario, I end up needing every bit of that time and just make it at the buzzer, but admittedly it always feels good to finish early!
*Ahem* - almost always…
…perverts…
…I think I’m just going to go ahead and get back to work now… 
So I caught a glimpse of this hubbub about this Retake Mass Effect controversy that sprung to life last night, and I’ve been kind of following it since despite having never even played the game myself. I think it raises some interesting questions both about fan expectations as well as the politics of being involved with a charity, so I thought I’d write out a few of my thoughts about everything here for what it’s worth…
First and foremost, I’m just going to be blunt and say that as a creative person myself, I kind of take umbrage at the audacity of a group of fans demanding that a work of art get changed because they didn’t like it – in this case, the ending to Mass Effect 3. And I should probably tread lightly here because I don’t have all the facts … I’ve never actually played the game myself, and a lot of the comments that I’ve read cite that the games trailers gave them certain expectations that they felt weren’t lived up to when they actually finished the game. Not for nothing, but using that logic, I’d have to protest about 3/4 of the movies I see at the theater because in entertainment, it’s typically the exception that lives up to its hype, not the rule!
And yeah, gamers can claim that they’re more involved in this world because they’ve spent dozens of hours playing the series – to me that’s kind of a hollow excuse because how many people watched through four and a half seasons of Battlestar Galactica before being pissed about the final ending that Ronald Moore ultimately decided on?! 
It’s also been said, and even quoted from the developers, that ”we didn’t write the story – the fans did just as much as we did” … and maybe that’s part of the problem because as much insight that you may allow the fan community at the end of the day, unless they’re sitting down at their PCs pounding out scripts for the game to follow, eventually an actual writing team has to make the official decision of what’s going to go down … I don’t particularly like this as an excuse, but then again, as a writer I’d never open myself up to that kind of problem, either.
Because to me, the roles between writer and reader are related, but still need to have very distinct boundaries – I create the work, you consume the work – and as much as you’re certainly entitled to be disappointed by what I’m able to come up with as the writer, you cross a line when you actually expect me to change my work based on your feedback. It’s a pet peeve that I have with a lot of armchair critics because loads of people love to tell you how they could easily do your job better, but they never actually have to understand just how inappropriate and rude of a thing that is to impose on a creative person. We pour a lot of ourselves out on the page to create what we do – if you aren’t happy with the result, then be disappointed or mad or refuse to ever read again or even go create something better of your own, but it’s just not fair to expect me to change my vision because it didn’t align with your expectations for my imagination!
Granted, bits of that get muddied in this particular situation if the publisher did indeed tote that the fans were intimately involved in the creation process, but still in my mind, you’ve got to draw the line somewhere because otherwise … why aren’t these fans mad at themselves for this piece of art that in theory they all helped to create themselves?!
Something’s just not adding up there…
That said, the other angle about Child’s Play trying to take a step back from this effort to avoid being associated with a political movement, of sorts … after reading through that Reddit thread, frankly Jamie with Child’s Play has been nothing but thoughtful and considerate, and a good number of the rest are exactly what they claim to be trying to avoid – entitled whiners – which from my outside view, is just exasperated by their involvement with the charity because it reads like they’re trying to use donating to Child’s Play as an excuse for rallying against the makers of the game. They wanted their feedback to be heard by EA as “more than just a bunch of whining,” so someone came up with the idea that they’d all donate to Child’s Play to express their anger … and maybe it was unintentional, but inadvertently it most certainly does pull the charity into the line of fire because now they’re using it as a tool to reinforce their displeasure to the publisher, as if their demands must be taken more seriously because $80,000 for sick kids was raised in its name.
I guess I don’t really know any way to say it without sounding demeaning, but it’s not like that crowd is hearing criticism against them anyways … they simply can’t fathom the idea of how their actions have unintended consequences, and why it makes Child’s Play look bad because they wouldn’t have donated otherwise if not for these demands of theirs. And that’s not even taking issue with the ridiculousness of the demands themselves, as mentioned above – by saying, “Let’s raise money for charity by voicing our displeasure for X,” it’s easy to distort that to mean that X and the charity are now somehow connected. Jame also cited that they’d had questions from donors about “How much was needed to get the game changed?” and even concerns from Paypal over chargebacks, so like it or not, the community needs to realize that the charity they’re trying to support is bigger than any one fundraiser and needs to conduct itself as such.
As a whole, Child’s Play has raised over $12 million for children’s hospitals around the world. It’s an awesome number to brag about, but to continue building on that in the years to come, they have to be conscious about the charity’s image and unfortunately, that’s going to occasionally mean saying, “No thanks – that’s not really something we should be involved with…”
Anyways, I’ve rambled long enough. It’s an interesting explosion, and a lot of vitriol and misunderstanding is being flung almost entirely from the side of the movement … probably not really surprising when you consider their core argument, though. You know, looking back through time, I’ve played a lot of video games and some of the endings sure did suck, but that never drove me to complain to the developers about their suckage, much less demand that they do it over and do it better, so I just can’t put myself in the headspace of someone who genuinely thinks that’s a perfectly justifiable claim to make. At the end of the day, all we as creators can do is make what we think is the best possible content, and then hope that others enjoy it, too.
If you don’t like it, pick up a pencil and do it better by creating your own.
I’m a little behind on the times, so I actually didn’t even get a chance to listen to this until the big retraction hit the news a couple of days ago. I listened to the retraction on This American Life first, and then felt compelled to listen to the original monologue (even though it’s no longer on This American Life’s website, I instead found it here). In hindsight, I’m actually kind of glad that I did it that way because it allowed me to look at the original work in a slightly different light – not allowing it to build up and then later tearing it back down, but instead I guess sort of setting my expectations extremely low and then moving forward from there.
And I don’t necessarily mean that in either a good way or a bad way, but … well…
The problem is – it’s an extremely compelling story to listen to. Mike is clearly an expert on stage, and his delivery just drives the story in a way that you feel every emotion that he wants you to feel as he meticulously paints this picture on the canvas through just his spoken words. I haven’t necessarily heard any of his interim monologues, but I actually was first introduced to him a long time ago when his first book about working at amazon.com sort of hit it big, and I remember that story being a tough one to put down. There’s no denying that he’s an exceptional storyteller, which frankly is what makes my next statement so hard…
It takes away from the strength of his presentation in my eyes if I can’t honestly trust in the words that he’s saying.
If I had just listened to that first podcast, it would be hard to refute the allegations that shit be fucked up over at Foxconn and that us Americans truly need to take a hard look at our dependence on their electronics and the unseen ethical costs that go into their creation, thousands of miles around the world and otherwise completely and unequivocally sheltered from we, the consumers. He says many times that he’s not a journalist, but a theater performer … but his words come across as those of a documentarian, shedding light on this important cultural oversight. When he stands there and tells us that So-and-So told him about the Hexane being used to clean iPad screens that’s actually poisonous to the workers, as an engaged member of the audience I expect that the conversation actually took place and isn’t just a passionate story based on reports in the news about the chemical…
Embellishment by way of dramatic pauses and passionate delivery is one thing, but to literally stand on stage and say that something happened that didn’t actually happen … how are we supposed to trust the rest of his content when it comes to light that select stories may have been embellished to varying degrees to help get his point across???
When I’m watching a documentary, there’s simply no room for fiction…
And so what sucks is that here we are on the other side of the wave with an incredibly moving story that I don’t even know what to believe because I can’t even guess which parts are embellished and which ones are for real anymore. On one hand, it’s perfectly logical to think that vendors such as Foxconn may very well be acting in an unethical manner by pushing workers too hard under poor conditions for minimal wages at best … but when you can’t really even trust the person telling you the story, what recourse do you have left except to shrug your shoulders and say, “Wow, that really sucks … if it’s actually true.” I can’t get passionate about something that I doubt, and I won’t join others in trying to stand against Apple if I don’t have a reasonable assurance that the facts I’m hearing are, in fact … well, facts!
Talk about a lesson of warning to writers, journalists, and pretty much everyone who tells stories to an audience – not even just in the context of the theater … if you’re trying to sell a documentary-style perspective that will empower your audience to become passionate themselves about an important cause that faces the world today in a big, bad way, for god’s sake make sure what you’re telling people is actually true. Because with attention itself being so tough to grab in today’s modern world, trust is way too fragile of a necessity to your work to risk juggling it on words that don’t exactly represent the reality in the picture that you’re trying to paint.
A funny, little stab from TED about the audacity of the values that the entertainment industry tries to place on losses from piracy…
I came across this interesting article today that really resonated with me regarding productivity and the idea that more time worked doesn’t necessarily translate directly into more work completed on a one-for-one basis.
It’s a problem that no doubt anyone in the professional world has had to face – bosses pushing people to work overtime more and more regularly instead of hiring additional workers to keep up with demand – although I can say without a doubt that I’ve seen it with my own personal creative work just the same. And if you strictly look at the input and refuse to consider the ultimate output, it seems like it should make sense – more time that has already been paid for (i.e. salaried workers don’t get overtime) results in more work for the same cost to me!
Or in my case, I’m only one person, so my own time is the only currency that I have and the more that I pump into creating my work, the better … right???
Up to a point, yes.
The studies cited show that for pretty much any type of work (but even more so for knowledge/creative-type work), one’s productivity steadily decreases after you surpass about 8 hours per day/40 hours a week, so as to say that if each day in a week is worth 20% of your work, adding an extra workday on the weekend doesn’t automatically result in 120% productivity for that week. In addition, if sustained over longer periods of time, the overall productivity in general starts to drop, in that 48 hours of work might only yield 60-80% of what a standard, 40-hour work week once gave you in the past because, well, people are only human and most of us need things other than just work in our lives, be it family time, exercise, recreation, sleep … and if you deprive a person of those other things for long enough, his overall quality of life starts to suffer and as a result, the piece that you as an employer actually care about takes a hit, too…
In particular, the two that I run up against with my writing most often are #1 – sleep, and #2 – family time, because I have a ton of things that I need to get done trying to get my business off the ground and thus it just eats up ridiculous amounts of my time, although after reading this study it almost makes me want to re-evaluate the pacing of my strategy just a bit to see if ultimately I would end up being more productive by spending less time actually working. Re-reading that sentence, it sounds absolutely bonkers, but it actually kind of makes sense – if I spend 4 hours spinning my wheels trying to solve a problem one night that on a clear head I could’ve tackled in half the time, it’s actually a net gain for everybody because my problem still gets solved and my wife and puppy get a few hours with me instead of me staying locked in the office all night by myself running on empty. Of course, it’s tough to quantify those types of gains even in hindsight, but just recently I can think of at least a couple examples where I was fighting a problem literally for hours on end, only to come back later with a fresh look and realize that I had actually solved it long ago and just didn’t realize that my results had actually been correct the whole time!
I should also note that I’ve actively seen this ring true specifically when I’m trying to write things, too – the creative part of my brain doesn’t do well at all on little sleep … until it reaches a state of fuck all and decides to just crap any old thing out for the sake of letting me go to bed, anyways … but as for real quality work, I not only need to be rested to be able to write well, but it also actually helps when I’ve spent some time recently doing other fun things that aren’t work because it actually makes me look forward to writing as a release instead of just seeing it as another tick on my checklist of things to do. Besides, if I stay locked away too long, chances are I start to run out of things to write about altogether, which is really no good, either…
Granted, it’s an unfortunate truth, both for the creative entrepreneur juggling to do everything all by himself and for managers the world over who’ve got budgets to meet and find it easier to tell Johnson he’s working over the weekend than tell his boss that they can’t meet such-and-such arbitrary deadline, but at the end of the day, the proof is in the pudding and if your workers are still face down in said pudding when you come in the next morning, I suppose that’s probably a sign that something somewhere needs to change!
