MU Soapbox

Sundown

@Sundown : Indeed! I'm sure you're a capital A1 Choice-grade TSer, though.

Only if you let me tie you all up.

Sundown

Maybe we can arrange something with lots and lots of pregnancy for you. <.<

But you said no histrionic types! You wouldn't want me posing incessantly about all the delicious food I'm eating because the baby needs it. Or babies, because fuck it, if I'm pretendy-pregnant it may as well be twins!

Hahahahha oh god that really came back to bite me in the ass, didn't it? XD

Sundown

No TS, no deal.

Sundown

I disliked Tom Hiddleston after seeing him as Loki in the Avengers. I just thought he looked like a gigantic soppy pussy, pummeled silly by pretty much everyone else. Which might be more of a character design fault, than the actor's. However, even just a look at his facial expressions was a disappointment. He looked weak and I could not buy him as a Norse trickster god in a thousand years.

That whole movie, the Avengers, I really wanted to enjoy it. I was poised for some mindless fun. (Also Whedon did it, and I loved Firefly.) It was a huge letdown, about as boring and pointless as the Transformers movies. I'm not a snob (even though the list of films above is my 'snobbish artsy list'), there's plenty of silly stuff I watch and adore. Just... superhero movies aren't one of them. I can buy Iron Man because of RDJ's charisma, but that's it.

In Only Lovers Left Alive, Hiddleston was perfect. So sexy and attractive, and charismatic, I could barely recognize him from the Loki image. He also had great chemistry with Tilda Swinton. I think it's the kind of movie you can watch in bits and pieces, to draw inspiration from the imagery and atmosphere. You gotta watch it for a different purpose, not as a story but a prolonged painting on a reel or a super long music video. Jarmusch is just a weirdo, most of his movies I can't stomach.

Byzantium was good because it was a slightly more artsy take on vampires, and I loved it for that. Recently I've watched the new season premiere of American Horror Story: Hotel, and I was impressed. It also does vampires well!

Sundown

@Coin said:

Only Lovers Left Alive bored me to death. It was pretty, but it bored me. Byzantium (which I suspect @Sundown loves) was much better in that regard.

Yeah, you really need to manage your expectations with Only Lovers Left Alive. I was a little bored too, but the atmosphere was so cool. I watched it in two parts because of that, so that I'd be in the mood for that kind of movie.

Byzantium was pretty cool, yeah. I initially watched it because of Saoirse Ronan 'cause I was tracking down her work. I almost included it in this list, but it's got a different feel for me. It's a good film but it doesn't inspire me in the same way.

Sundown

Haha, I meant it as a figure of speech. But yeah, you got me.

EDITS!!!!!

Sundown

@Bobotron It's not a movie you watch for the action, but for the atmosphere and imagery. Very little happens, so watch it when you're in the mood for a movie that's like smoking a joint.

Sundown

This ties into the discussion on battling procrastination. When I was talking about building up inspiration, this is a list of movies that does it for me:

Sundown

@Insomnia said:

Not a game but a free (for now) audio drama that you should go and get while it's still free.

Holy shit, I was gonna say thanks for the tip - I love that kind of stuff. But after downloading it, I seriously have to wonder how Audible has any customers at all. Their DRM protection is incredibly annoying! Convoluted and very user-unfriendly. To think they expect people to pay with this kind of user experience. Paying for content is one thing, but screwing me in the ass to access it? Forget it.

Sundown

http://www.haunted-memories.net/wiki/Main_Page There you go. I recall it had an outage at one point, but it came back. I really appreciate it when the old wikis remain in place, it means something to be able to go through old character wikis.

Sundown

The Haunted Memories wiki is still up, unless you're referring to something else?

Sundown

@Three-Eyed-Crow said:

@Sundown said:
I don't know about this. I think the divide exists, at least for me, but I don't think it's "art" versus "work." I think it's in how we approach our "art" versus how we approach out "work." I started my career as a newspaper reporter, then moved into audit investigation (where I had to write 10-page monster narrative reports on financial fraud), and I'm in technical writing now. None of this is strictly narrative (even journalism always felt to me a lot like story assembly) and I could always bang out the actual work pretty quickly (getting the information for it was always the time consuming thing, but I got a charge out of actually writing the stuff, particularly on deadline).

It's much harder for me to sit down and get my shit together to write creatively, at least in terms of narrative fiction (I waste plenty of time MU*ing). Part of this is because, after doing this shit for 8-hours a day, writing even more fun narrative stuff feels like more grind, and I want to do other things. But it's not just that.

Yeah, RP can be both useful and a drain. It can invigorate me creatively, but it can also become a stupid timesink where I feel like I've been doing something creative but I haven't accomplished anything productive. So it's something to be careful about.

I think the primary difference for me is motivation, and I don't just mean monetarily. Having deadlines that will fuck something up if I miss them, helps me. Having a manager yell at me if I'm not turning around something quick enough, helps me. This has to be done, and it has to be done now and fixed with your editor later if it's not perfect, and I can't sit around and polish it and play with it until it's just a thing nobody but me will ever see.

I essentially need to create consequences for myself for not doing shit. Which is how you treat your art like work (I agree this is what you need to do), it's just really, really hard without a yell-y boss supplying the need to get shit done.

This is partly why I'm talking about building inspiration, in the creative sense. In the deadline-driven work sense, for me it's about setting up manageable goals. I'm not going to write a book; instead I'll write this short story with clearly outlined goals for it. I'm not going to create an album of music, instead I'll work on little bits and pieces until a song comes up. Manageable goals will gradually stretch my ability, so I'll be able to plan out a book eventually.

I get you, it's hard to self-motivate when you have no one to answer to but yourself. As a freelancer, it's just something you either work out, or freelancing is not for you.

Maybe you just don't have the energy to push yourself hard after you've been pushed hard at work all day. Realistically, you need some rest.

Sundown

@Misadventure said:

I wasn't making a dichotomy, I was describing a spectrum.

What I meant is, the same as you work on building your work habits, the craft, the technical aspects - you have to also work on building up your inspiration, your creative mindset. I'm not saying the latter works without the former. It's just that many people think inspiration is something you wait for, either it blesses you or it doesn't. Wrong! It's something you can build up through constructive, focused exercise.

Sundown

Something bothers me about that divide between writing as art and writing as a craft/profession.

As someone who's gone through the process of breaking into creative work, my experience tells me differently. You can't separate it like that.

If you want to be good, you have to work on developing it for the majority of your waking time. That will not work out as well if your full-time job is completely unrelated to the field in which you'd like to do "art." You will be wasting most of your productive time not advancing your basic skills, and will be too drained and tired to do that after.

So you have to sell out. Some examples:

I wanted to be a painter and do cool graphics work. Instead of goofing off on it as a hobby in my spare time, I got into 3D graphics, found out what pays and built up freelance work. Does it mean I'm not doing art if I'm working on arch viz #349857345? I'm still building aesthetic skills and other abilities while doing that "boring" assignment. This will help when I go on to make something creative.

I wanted to be a musician. So I'm playing gigs at clubs, doing covers of songs I might not have touched otherwise because I have taste. Yet it all advances my musical skills and abilities, so playing those few songs that I hate means I'll eventually be much better when I play the ones I love, or when I work on my own stuff.

You need to work on your craft/profession if you want to do it as an art/vocation, is what I'm saying. You can't separate it, it's like building a house without the foundation. Gotta do the sellout gruntwork without grumbling.

It ties into procrastination because it is all about delayed gratification. We don't want to start working because the payoff is so far away on the finish line. So I don't want to practice playing Jolene, but if I keep that long-term goal in my head, that makes it easier.

Sundown

@Misadventure Well, it certainly depends on what kind of writing you're doing. I don't really see the importance of any such divide, especially as I also stress the importance of work habits.

If you're writing an article for a magazine, then the inspiration-building process is through research and reading related stuff. But you can't jumpstart yourself from a vacuum of some nebulous emotion like "I need to write now." Sure you can if you've already built that habit, but you'll go through the same process in your head anyway. It just might come faster.

Sundown

@Ide said:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-procrastination-equation/201012/procrastination-and-the-perfectionism-myth

As best as we can figure, task anxiety will just as likely get you to start early as to start late. That is, worrying about a deadline will make you procrastinate more if you are impulsive, the sort of person to whom avoiding a dreaded task or blocking it from your awareness makes perfect sense from a short-term perspective. If you aren't impulsive, anxiety is a cue that you should get cracking—and, as a result, you actually start earlier. The real culprit is impulsiveness, not anxiety. (But you can't be expected to discern this effect through personal reflection; relying only on your own experiences, you will never know that anxiety decreases procrastination for many others.)
The myth that perfectionism creates procrastination makes even less sense. What traits do you associate with procrastination? A) Being messy and disorganized or B) Being neat and orderly? If you choose option A, good for you; you are right. Perfectionists best fit description B, being neat and orderly, and unsurprisingly, they don't tend to procrastinate. The research—from Robert Slaney, who developed the Almost Perfect Scale to measure perfectionism, to my own meta-analytical research article, The Nature of Procrastination—shows this clearly.

What a load of bullcrap. I mean, thank you for sharing it, I just think it completely misunderstands the issue.

I identify with the fear of failure that @Hazmat described. I also do housework/chores as a way to prep for work, like @SG.

It's a careful balance for creative work of any kind. I'd say habit is important, work ethics is important, but if you're really not feeling it, you're better off taking a walk or playing a videogame. Of course inspiration isn't something you wait for endlessly, but working without any inspiration is fruitless.

For writing I have to work myself into it. If I've been RPing a lot, I find that my writing gets more fluid and passionate because I get into the groove. Then writing anything else is easier. So it's about habit building, but also inspiration building. If I'm reading something cool on the side while writing, and letting the style of it influence my RP, anything I write after is going to feel pretty good. So I have to actively build up a creative mindset with lots of juice and fluidity, immerse my mind in it, and then inspiration is right there.

So building work habits is important, but building an inspirational mindset matters just as much.

Sundown

Dark Matter makes me think a TV producer looked at Firefly, then tried to rip off everything they thought was appealing about it, and make a mish-mash hoping for similar success. FFS, they have a Jayne and a River-Kaylee hybrid. Even the episodes seem to have similar themes.

That's not necessarily such a bad thing, I just can't unsee it.

Also, the setting is that typical mesh-metal-corridor, ominous and dark, like in the lamest big budget SF movies. I dislike that the most.

I did like the episode with the android.

Edit: As for good TV lately, I gotta recommend Mr Robot and Deutschland 83.

Sundown

@Arkandel said:

I'm struggling to come up with topics out of place in a thread called "random links" as long as they contain a link.

Heh.

Sundown

Also this is cool:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scarfolk

Sundown

Dunno if this is the right thread, but here's a podcast I found very insightful and eye-opening. I've done my own 15-year stint exploring the subject, but here it's presented in a way that's palatable to the mainstream.

http://podbay.fm/show/953290300/e/1422586800?autostart=1
"In Entanglement, you’ll meet a woman with Mirror Touch Synesthesia who can physically feel what she sees others feeling. And an exploration of the ways in which all of us are connected — more literally than you might realize. The hour will start with physics and end with a conversation with comedian Maria Bamford and her mother. They discuss what it’s like to be entangled through impersonation."

Could be especially interesting if you consider the various intense entanglements that happen in mushing.

Posts made by Sundown