Sing for Science

Hello, Journal. Today I’m listening to the Sing for Science Podcast conversation with Wilco’s frontman Jeff Tweedy and Cornell University computational psychologist Dr. Shimon Edelman where they talk Tweedy’s lyrics, the nature of consciousness, and a lot more. It’s wild. And interesting.

Sing for Science is created and hosted by New York musician Matt Whyte. The concept is to “use a song's lyrical content as a launching pad for the musician to have a conversation with a relevant scientist.” These episodes cover a wide variety of topics—Quantum Physics, Cardiology, Aerospace Engineering, Climate Science, and a lot more—within that framing. Though it’s new to me, I’m very interested in listening to more.

In this particular episode, Tweedy talks about the lyrics to “Less Than You Think” and the impetus behind them. I loved that Tweedy stuck up for the idea that he doesn’t need to understand, or stand behind, the meaning of the words he writes and sings. At least, that’s how I took it.

All too often, we expect artists to prove or somehow provide or explain meaning or belief when maybe all that there is to art is beauty and the act of creation. They go on to talk a lot about consciousness, free will, imagination, exercising creativity, spirituality, and a lot of other things.

I particularly enjoyed the end of the conversation around focus and flow and disappearing into your work, or how you might not, depending on how you work and how you experience time and focus. And then the subsequent discussion of shadow selves. Interesting stuff. Note to self: look up Chyros & Chronos.

It’s a fantastic listen, and I plan to check out Tweedy’s book. Maybe it’ll fit my reading challenge? We’ll see.

How to Enjoy Your Life and Your Job by Dale Carnegie

⭐⭐⭐

File under: Work/Life Balance

This Blink wasn’t something I chose, but I figured I’d listen since it was auto-playing. As someone who struggles with work/life balance and who admittedly puts more weight on work—especially regarding my self-worth—I figured it might have something for me. It did, although it’s as corny as it sounds.

Most of what’s in here felt like good reminders:

• Emotional struggle and boredom can exhaust us.

• We want to be challenged.

• Criticism is good for us, assuming we are open to it.

• People are self-centered. Knowing this and using it can relieve personal stress and help you influence others.

I consider myself motivated by challenges and positive reinforcement. I am much more collaborative than I am competitive. So much of this resonated with me. What didn’t was that Carnegie, or Blinkist, paints much of this as manipulative—perhaps unintentionally.

Regardless, I think many of the tips here are effective, and the Blink was a good reminder of strategies I can use to make my work/life balance a bit easier.

Babel by R. F. Kuang

⭐⭐⭐⭐

File under: Alternate History

Wizard-level reading challenge: A book that features two languages

I had planned to read Babel based on all the rave reviews I’d been reading. And luckily, it fits a few of the categories in my 2023 reading challenge. I chose it for “A book that features two languages” because, well.

Babel is a fantastic fantasy epic set—mostly—in 19th-century England. It’s the story of Robin Swift, a Chinese student at Oxford’s School of Translation, or "Babel” as commonly known.

Babel is a complicated work; Kuang stitches a few powerful themes together with skill, creating a tale that’s gripping, if occasionally slow, while also exploring the power of language, the perils of imperialism, and what it means to belong.

Babel is infused—like the silver of the world Kuang has created—with magic, but in a subtle way that supports the tale and adds a layer of mystery that works as a highlight to the political intrigue and the smaller stories of the students as they make their way through the world.

I loved the explorations of language and translation, which Kuang knows a lot about. The plot is a bit slow and somewhat repetitive, but not so much that it creates friction. Reading Babel was a pleasure, engaging the reading on multiple levels.

Responding skillfully

The concept of skillful response resonates well with me. It’s often pitched as a benefit to meditation, and I hear it referenced often in guided sessions. Putting it into practice can be difficult, especially for me, as I’m an impulsive, trust-my-gut type. But as I’ve become more mindful and have put some intention behind the practice, I’ve seen the benefits in all aspects of life.

What does it mean to respond to things skillfully? Essentially, it’s simply being mindful and thoughtful when reacting to things. I can’t help but think about it in a literal way, meaning in terms of responding to communication, news, or another person’s words, but I think it’s much broader than that. It’s about responding to whatever life brings you with thought, mindfulness, and intention.

In practice, this looks like taking a beat before an anger- or frustration-fueled response or taking some time before sending that reactionary Slack message or email. I can’t tell you how often I’ve let myself mindlessly respond to something, only to regret it later. Why bring more chaos into an already chaotic world?

Experiments with AI art workflows

Hello, journal. For the last few days, I’ve been playing around with taking AI-generated images from Midjourney and running them through a bit of workflow using Photoshop and Illustrator, resulting in a full vector image. The goal here is to be able to manipulate better what Midjourney creates.

My biggest hurdle at the moment is my lack of skill with Illustrator. I don’t know how to use it well, let alone optimize things. I can correct colors and simple shapes, but making the paths more efficient and more complicated tweaking is beyond me. Still, I think something is interesting here.

I’ve also tried hand tracing, which works much better. It’s a bit time-consuming, but it’s fun and engaging. The results are much better, as you might expect, but I’ve run up against barriers primarily because of my lack of knowledge of the tools. In this case, I’ve been using Figma because Illustrator feels difficult.

You can see some progress here, the Midjourney image on the right and my vector drawing in Figma on the left. I quite like how it’s shaping up.

I think there might be some workflow that uses a combination of these. Once I finish working on this current conversion, I think I’ll dive back into Midjourney. I think there is a lot I could do to work the prompts to get something cleaner, to begin with. Then I could use a combination of Image Trace in Illustrator and hand tweaks to get something nice. I might even start experimenting with Procreate to add some hand-drawn flourishes. We’ll see.

The Eldritch Arrival

The Eldritch Arrival

I’ve been playing around with vector art lately. Still getting my footing, as it’s been a long time since I’ve done anything like this, but I’m having fun.

On resilience

“Nana korobi, ya oki.”
“Fall down seven times, rise up eight.”

~ Japanese proverb

Hello, journal. Today I’m thinking about resilience, specifically how a person can, through the power of positive thought and perspective, train themselves to be more resilient in the face of adversity, both large and small. In my experience, the small things usually cause the most problems over time. I’m not sure if it’s just me, but it’s always been easier to let go when you have no choice.

My apartment caught fire when I was in my early twenties. It happened when I was at work; one of my roommates had stored some spray paint next to a faulty furnace. The combination turned out to be explosive. While the place didn’t burn completely to the ground, my poor cat, Waffle, died because he was too scared of the firemen and ran into the smoke. Nobody else was hurt, thankfully, but most of my possessions were ruined. By water damage, ironically. Though it was difficult—I had to find a new place for my girlfriend and me quickly, my roommates were devastated, etc.—I could kind of roll with it. I took on the role of the even-headed leader and helped get everyone settled. It was a lot of effort, but I wasn’t particularly stressed about it at any time. I think it was mostly because I felt like I had no choice. There was no going back and fixing it. The stuff was gone. The apartment was unlivable. The only way forward was to let go and move on. I think about that time in my life a lot, and I’ve often wondered what it was that allowed me to move on so quickly, so relatively easily. Especially when so many times after, I would spiral about much smaller problems. I have been much more stressed over smaller problems many times since then. I often think about that and wonder why.

For many years I saw this event as a minor disaster that I survived. Now I reflect on it as a moment of strength and resilience in my young life and something bad that happened that made me stronger.

Why worry about something you have no control over? I think about that a lot as well. It’s…an epidemic problem that, as I’ve grown older, I feel and worry about less and less. I let go of worrying about things I can’t control or influence. If I care about something enough, I will try and involve myself in making a difference. Otherwise, I’ll stick to what I can control: my reactions, feelings, and thoughts about a thing. I refuse to be the old man screaming at the clouds. I can’t do anything about the clouds, so I’ll just come inside and wait.

There is a Stoic practice around negative framing. Imagine the worst thing that can happen so you can be prepared for it. I wouldn’t say I like doing this, though I can see the value. What I do like doing is reflecting on the little things in life that make me happy. I do this often. What if I lost all my stuff? I’d be ok. What would I need, the bare minimum, to be happy? Turns out it’s not all that much.

This type of thinking helps in other ways as well. It allows for risk-taking—what’s the worst that can happen? Risks, if taken mindfully, can significantly enrich the experience of one’s life. Reflecting on the impermanence of life and embracing change can help reduce those things that aren’t doing us any good. I can make it easier to let go of what’s not serving us.

Time is fleeting. Things and people come and go. The present is all we have, the past is gone, and the future will be based on how we act in the present.

On the enjoyment and creation of beauty

“Enjoying or creating beauty is free and something all human beings have access to.”

~ From Ikigai by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles

While reading Ikigai, I came across the above, which stopped me in my tracks. It’s the perfect encapsulation of something I’ve been thinking about lately. The act of making, of creating, of making good (or bad) art is available to all of us, as is the enjoyment of that art.

AI, for example, is going to change a lot of things. It’s understandably stressful, But while it’s too early to say if they’ll be able to share in this enjoyment, one thing is clear: AI won’t take away our ability to create and enjoy for ourselves. I’ve been using it to explore ideas, help visualize my writing, and play. Simply playing around with it is enjoyable, and I find the random, unpredictable nature more entertaining than frustrating. Though I’ll admit, it can be frustrating when you can’t get the prompts to do what you want.

There’s beauty in the doing, in the sharing, and in the receiving.

On game design

Years ago, in 2009 or so, my little design company took a job to build a mobile version of a fairly popular social game called Spymaster. If you were on Twitter back then, you’d likely remember it as it was extremely popular—both to play and to hate on. For me, this was an interesting new area of design as I was getting into mobile design, and while I was a pretty big gamer, I’d never done anything related to a game.

I learned a lot in the years that followed. About game design, viral loops, marketing, mechanics, content creation, art direction, and more. I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, as I can’t help but wonder what it would have been like to enter that space now. What would that experience have been like with tools like the blockchain and AI?

Before I get too far into it, two things stand out as universal in gaming. Two essential tips:

1. It has to be fun. Fun is job number one for a successful game. No amount of viral trickery, sideways incentives, or guilt-based engagement practices will get you farther than a simple focus on fun.

2. It has to be simple, at least at the start. Complexity can and should come only after the core mechanics have been mastered.

Back to the reflection. When I started working on Spymaster, it was a divisive game. Some people LOVED it; many others HATED it. I think there were some valid reasons for that hate, and I also totally get why people loved it. The core mechanics involved were entertaining, at least at first, and it was relatively simple to play, relying on social engagement via Twitter to work.

But it wasn’t a game for me. I worked on that mobile interface, and that went well. Well enough that I left my company—which I’d founded and grown successfully—to join the company that made Spymaster. The big carrot there was that I’d be able to design and pitch a game of my own design. As a designer, who loves to learn and try new things, this was…well, I feel extremely lucky to have had the opportunity.

I spent quite a while studying game design and thinking about what I liked about games. I concluded that games needed to be, at their core, fun to play. This might seem obvious—but I assure you, it’s not obvious to everyone.

I looked around at the other successful games at the time: Farmville, Mafia Wars, etc., and did not understand them. They weren’t fun. I can’t tell you how many arguments I got into with folks around this over the years. The prevailing attitude was that “gamification” and “viral loops”—and other jargony bullshit—were the things you needed for a successful game.

I went in the opposite direction. I created a game—Shadelight—that was fun first and used some of the social gaming mechanics to enhance that fun instead of trying to paint an unfun experience with pretty colors and characters, which most other games at the time did. I did this largely on my own at first, using stock photos and my meager illustration skills for the assets. I wrote all the content and designed everything from the UI/UX to the mechanics and economics.

Shadelight as it looked in 2010 or so

Thankfully I was able to convince my small team this was worth working on, and in about three months, we had an alpha and began to add players. They loved it. The game was fun—the core mechanic was a kind of social choose-your-own-adventure with a heavy focus on story and choices. Imagine one of the original Bioware games in a Facebook social game format, and you’ll have an idea. It had factions, classes, skill-based UI games, and lots of small sinks—mini-games, PVP, equipment stores, and the like. There was a lot to do, and we added new modules and adventures, most free but a few pay-to-play, almost every week.

It was popular enough that we were acquired by IGN and were funded to work on Shadelight for about a year or so, unencumbered and, while on a tight budget, pretty much free to do what we wanted. We doubled down on the creative, hiring another writer and some illustrators, and putting a lot of effort into upping the quality of the content and adding mechanisms that supported that content. The game grew and was doing well. However—of course, it couldn’t last—we reached a point where, while we were doing well, were profitable, etc., we couldn’t scale. We kept adding players, but the costs to create new and engaging content became too expensive.

This wasn’t what killed the game, not exactly. We could have kept it going for a while, and it would have continued to grow slowly. No, what killed it was the business, hungry for growth and not seeing the forest for the trees, bringing in people who wanted to take our ideas and spin them off into other ventures. This might sound ok, but the core game mechanics of these other ventures weren’t fun. We tried this, leaned into it, and tried our best to make it work. The whole time I just wanted to work on Shadelight, the game we knew was fun and could keep going, but the suits involved kept pushing us away from quality content and fun towards something they felt was more scalable.

And, not to throw too much shade on them. Quality content is hard to scale. But here’s the lesson: without quality content—without fun—there is nothing to work with. Scaling shit lands you more shit.

Thankfully, this didn’t last long. Seeing the end of fun and that this road we were on was going nowhere, my team began to quit. I was one of the first out the door, but the core team was gone in a couple of months. I went on to do more in the social gaming space, and that was an adventure—though not a very fun one—but my game was dead. The suits tried to keep it going, but not knowing what fun looked like and hell-bent on viral growth, they drove it to the ground.

I look back on this and can’t help but think we were before our time. Had we access to blockchain technology to help with the economics of the game, I think it would have been better for our players and us. We would have been able to monetize in a much more sustainable way and also likely have devised mechanics that would have been able to add fun and revenue into the mix.

As well, with AI tools, we could have likely kept our content creation costs in check. I think I would still like to have the skills of talented artists, but we could have supplemented that to help realize ideas and storylines much more quickly. As well, wow, that first version of the game would have been so much more polished.

I had so much fun working on Shadelight, and I’ve always longed to do something like that again. I’m not sure now is the right time for me, but I’d love to get back into it someday. This time, I’d keep the focus on fun and quality content but lose the investors and need to grow. I think it could be a sustainable lifestyle business with a great relationship between the creator and the players.

Someday.

Spite by Billy Nomates

I’ve shared less music here than I thought I would. Three weeks into this journal, I’m adding my first Most Important Song. Unexpected! And, if that weren’t enough, it’s a bit of an odd choice for me. I first heard Billy Nomates on the fabulous Sleaford Mods track “Mork n Mindy” (Spotify Link). Digging that, I began to dig through her other music and what I found was not what I expected.

At first blush, Billy Nomates, and “spite” in particular, are not the kind of music I typically like. In this particular case, it’s a little too pop; with some other songs, it’s a little too country or a little to slow or some other “little too.”

Those “little toos” might be why I like her, and I like her quite a bit. She’s just to the left of things I don’t typically like, making her music interesting. Kerri had a listen and also liked her style quite a bit, Chrissie Hynde of The Pretenders, and that works quite well in a few ways.

Her new album CACTI is out now, and it’s quite good.