Escapism

Escapism should be used as a way to get an external perspective on your problems, rather than trying to leave them behind. All within reason, of course. Nobody will begrudge you a little escape now and then, the same way you're meant to take regular holidays from work. The point is more for creators. Take the time to make your creations relevant to the problems you see in the world, they'll have more depth, even if most people don't realise why. To me, that's a pretty good win.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - And a very tricky thing to do.
PPS - But worth it, I think.

DIY

Although I do it myself in software sometimes, I still find it an odd statement, creatively, to say "I couldn't find anything like what I wanted, so I made it myself". When you're talking about creative work, the appreciation and the construction are two semi-independent skillsets. Appreciating art does not confer the ability to create it, though creating it does strengthen the ability to appreciate it. If, for instance, you're looking for a podcast full of writing tips or insider info, and you can't find one that appeals to you, deciding to make it yourself means you need the same education the podcast would be providing, but from other sources. So you couldn't find the podcast, but to make it, you had to replace it with something else anyway.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Your limitations may come up before you succeed at this endeavour.
PPS - "Nobody had painted a better Mona Lisa yet, so I did," is not an artist statement likely to win friends.

Why I can't be a professional artist

Sometimes I think I would enjoy being an artist of some sort - an actor or a writer - to make my living. It just seems like the work would be more rewarding in and of itself than software tends to be. However, it's the peripheral stuff that would really get to me. In software, you learn someone's business, write or fix their software, move on and repeat (sticking around for anywhere from months to years at a time). Deal with a few people, network a bit, but mostly it's the programming you have to worry about. Making a living as an artist is maybe 10% about the art. The remaining 90% is about networking, politics, publicity, advertising - all the most exhausting and sleazy things I can imagine. I don't think that would suit me. Even if an agent did most of it for me, it's not their job to allow me to avoid any public appearances. Quite the opposite. I don't feel like I would do well.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I know I'm making excuses.
PPS - Mostly that's because risk is terrifying and the potential downfall is catastrophic.

When you're allowed to fail

Always remember: you are allowed to fail. I mean, unless you've failed before at this particular thing. Or someone else is counting on you as part of their job, or you set a budget or a deadline, or it's extremely public, or if someone else gave you money to do what you're doing, or if you're talking on TV, because we'll make fun of you for that, or if you're making art that you're going to show someone. Then it's not okay to fail. But mostly, you know, as a rule, it's totally okay to fail and to learn from it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm a bit bitter about the "fail early, fail often" school of thought.
PPS - Mostly because I've never felt like I actually have permission to fail at anything.

Cooking at the office

Something I would like to see some top creative chefs attempt is cooking at the office. Going beyond reheated leftovers and the occasional toasted sandwich, what can you prepare and eat, in the space of 30 minutes, with the tools available at most offices (microwave, boiling water, toaster at minimum, and perhaps sandwich press and coffee drip, if you're lucky)? I expect you'd be using a fair amount of foil and getting creative with the sandwich press most of the time, but I'm barely a home cook, let alone a real chef, so my impression might not be accurate.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - You could probably bring an electric stove top if you were desperate.
PPS - You wouldn't want to prepare it all from scratch, either, I'm guessing.

What I think of what I make doesn't matter

For some reason just recently, my mind went back to a church service in 2005 when we had some artistic displays. I put together an origami diorama representing the created world: frogs, butterflies, flowers, grass, that type of thing. To me, it looked ugly, hasty and uncreative, especially next to the beautiful things I saw beside it. I was embarrassed by it. You can read my original rant here.

With some distance in time from that service, what actually stands out to me is what my friend Erin said in response. None of that quality-based judgement even crossed her mind at the time. My clumsy creation got her thinking about the world in terms of God's creative act. The way I thanked her for that observation, at least on this blog, was to harp on again about how I didn't want my name on the piece. Well, I'm apologising for that now. I'm sorry, Erin. You went out of your way to tell me that something I made had a positive effect on you, so thank you. I want to spread more of that positivity around.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I'm also sorry it took me 9 years to gain the necessary maturity.
PPS - Also, huh, I've been blogging here for 10 years as of March. I didn't notice.

Pride in your work is not quality

It is possible to be so proud of the effort it took to make your art that you become blinded to the (lack of) quality of the finished product. What you see when you look at it is the culmination of many hours of difficult work, far better than what you could have produced before you started. What everyone else sees is a painting of a two-dimensional dog with weird proportions.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I always worry about this with my own artistic efforts, no matter their type.
PPS - Lately, of course, it's my writing.

Cooking is very complex art

Cooking shows always impress upon me how particular a craft it is. You have to produce a meal in a limited amount of time (or else everyone goes hungry) and it has to appeal to your senses of taste, touch (texture), smell and sight. Both of these requirements make cooking far more challenging than any other art form. Painting can take as long as you want and only has to look good. Ice sculpture has to happen in a short time, and it has to look good, but probably doesn't have to feel nice and definitely doesn't have to taste or smell nice. A performance - dance, singing or acting - has to happen in one go, but again only has to appeal to one or two senses.

You get the idea. If anyone can think of another art form or craft as demanding as cooking, I'd be very interested to hear about it.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - My cooking couldn't be described as "art".
PPS - Unless you're being very charitable.

Committees vs good ideas

During a recent sermon, one of my Facebook posts was quoted. The quote was:

"Committees are where good ideas go to die."

Hearing it out of someone else's mouth made me uncomfortable more than proud. It's a very negative saying, and it isn't completely true on its surface. Not every idea gets killed in committees, and not every committee is a death trap for good things. There are plenty of people in the world who serve on committees that do good, or at least do the best they can with the limited resources and information they have.

The problem is what we make of those other committees. The bigger they are, the slower they move. They'll be more likely to include someone who, for whatever reason, needs to have their mark on everything, and sometimes that means saying "no" to every possible idea until they have changed it significantly enough to be a contributor, even if the idea is already in its best possible form.

That's how committees kill ideas. Not through their nature, but through the nature of some of their members and their mass. More people means more potential anchors, which means less activity.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I don't sit on any regular committees.
PPS - Or any irregular ones, come to think of it.

Origami envelope for holding small objects

There's a standard way to fold an envelope out of an A4 sheet of paper. It looks quite neat and stylish, too, with two alternate corners bevelled. The problem, for some purposes, is that you can't use it to hold small objects, because it's wide open from a big slit at the back. If you were hoping to put a key or some coins in there, it just doesn't work. This is more suited to a letter, where all it has to hold in is ink.

To hold small objects, you can follow the same instructions, but with one extra step in advance. Before following the instructions above, fold the paper in half - just like the first step - but then follow the instructions from the beginning with the doubled paper. You'll get a smaller envelope, but you can open it up, put small items in the middle, then re-fold it. Your items will remain in place.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I used this just recently for some coins.
PPS - That's also how I discovered the flaw in the original design.

Microsoft innovation

Microsoft's best "innovation" comes from panicked reactions to industry trends. People started installing Linux on tiny laptops that were too underpowered for Windows Vista, so we got Windows 7 with performance improvements. People started buying tablets instead of "real" computers, so we got Windows 8 and the Surface, designed for touch. Desktop users hated the Windows 8 tiled Start screen and mostly didn't have touch screen hardware, so we got Windows 8.1 Update that brings back a "classic" desktop look for mouse-and-keyboard users.

The lesson is, if you want something better from Microsoft, don't complain, just launch a product that starts to siphon away their revenue.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - There may be more, given that this is a simplification.
PPS - It does feel this way, though.

Criticising art

The only valid way to criticise someone's art is to make better art. You're not allowed to just say "that sucks", and you're definitely not allowed to say "that sucks and you should stop making art forever". If you want to say some artwork is bad, whether painting, drawing, writing, acting, film-making, music, whatever, then your only recourse is to make something better.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - If your retort is "but I can't", then you're making my point.
PPS - The world has enough critics and not enough artists.

Squishy

I like the image of Chuck Wendig's "When Haters Give You Lemons" post, where he finishes his riff on the cliched saying with "Make haterade". It conjures up a little wordless scene where someone hands another person a hateful lemon. The recipient looks at it in his hand, looks up at the hater, with his hateful scowl, and squishes his head with a horrible squishy sound.

If I ever get hated on for making art - even art I know is bad - then I'm going to imagine that squishy sound.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Right now, I'm too obscure to be hated.
PPS - Which is actually kind of depressing.

Modular design

I really do love modular design. Snap in, snap out customisation. It's something between bespoke designs built from scratch and one-size-fits-all, take-it-or-leave-it mass production. I think about it a fair bit, possibly because I played with LEGO as a kid. And as an adult, though less so. Lately I've been wondering about modular housing. You could, perhaps, use shipping containers for the bulk of the structure, and design individual ready-made rooms with power, water and lighting wired up and ready to go. I don't know how well it would work, but I'd love to see someone try.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - People do build the occasional house out of shipping containers.
PPS - I'm thinking more of mass-produced snap-together rooms to make a whole house.

Blank board game supplies

Just on a whim, I went looking for blank playing cards online, and I was delighted to find a whole range of blank board game equipment for sale: blank playing cards, plain white game boards, blank-faced dice with stickers, plain coloured pawns. This makes me very happy just because it's a kind of midpoint between total DIY and professionally-published games.

If you've got an idea for a board game, obviously you can find some cardboard and do a lot of cut-paste-draw-write yourself, but after some play testing, maybe you want your home-made game to look a little more professional. Something you can bring to family and friends game nights. This is just what you need. If I ever hear of a kid who is into board games and is pretty creative (as kids often are) then I will order a bunch of this stuff for their birthday or Christmas, probably along with some professionally-published game too.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I don't think the world has enough good board games.
PPS - I also don't think there is enough good board game software, but that's another story.

Art of any kind needs practice

I'm starting to think about writing in the same way that people think about music. To get started in music, you take lessons, buy instruments, practice in private, eventually allow your close friends and family to hear what you've painstakingly rehearsed, then, if you're good enough, get some live performance gigs or a recording contract.

People's general view of writing goes more like "pick up pen, if good, get published". There's no notion of practice, let alone tools, and no popular conception that getting good at writing is something that takes time. Of course, there are also people who don't think that getting good at music takes time, either, perhaps because they aren't willing to put in the work themselves.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I practice most days now.
PPS - Not every day, though.

Making a living from art

I feel like I would rather make my living from acting and writing, but that's not a sound economic plan. It's my art, not my trade, and most people can't make a living from their art, for a variety of reasons. It begins with a saturated marketplace: too many artists for the level of demand, therefore the natural price point is negative. If you want people to see your art, you'd better be prepared to pay them, rather than the other way around. It's simply unreasonable to expect to be noticed in that kind of environment. The other consideration is quality. If most artists are amateurs, then most art is going to be amateurish and not worth paying for even if it does get noticed. There's plenty of art of all forms, and there's no rush to see it all. Every cent spent on art is discretionary and non-vital. Nobody *needs* to spend a dollar on your painting, drawing, sculpture, novel, play, interpretive dance performance. They could just as easily spend that dollar on food or clothes or any other basic need. Art is never going to be a need, essential for survival, so convincing people to spend any money on art at all is going to be a bit of an uphill battle from the start.

In addition to all that, it's not even a matter of being good at what you do. Plenty of artists are good at what they do, but they aren't going to get far because they don't have the right connections. Does every single blockbuster movie draw from the same pool of 50 different actors because they're the only ones available and suitable for the roles? Of course not. They do it because they're the ones the top five Hollywood directors have worked with before, and learning to work with new people is really hard, you guys, like seriously. It's easier to stick with the club you know rather than give newbies a shot, so that's what you get.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Well, that plus big names have drawing power.
PPS - Which is another way of saying fame makes money which means more fame.

Practical projects

I was thinking, just as in Julie and Julia, of taking on a big, ongoing project for my blog. I considered using Jamie Oliver's 15-Minute Meals, which is not especially different to Julie and Julia, but now I've got this Reader's Digest book on tools and home handyman skills. I've always wanted to learn that stuff, so maybe that's the way to go. I need something to encourage me to work through the book, and I feel like doing something more practical with the blog, too. Most of my posts stop at the idea stage, and that's not helping anyone, really.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Ideas are easy. Execution is hard.
PPS - Just ask an executioner.

Giving credit

I wish it were easier to give credit to creators rather than curators online (or worse, plagiarisers). The fact is that it's way easier to just credit the person who shows us something cool than to go looking to see if it is being properly attributed.

Perhaps we should be in the habit of watermarking all photos, videos and audio with creator info so that it's easily discovered no matter where it goes. If it's important information about a file, it needs to be inside the file. That doesn't mean plagiarisers won't be able to re-mark a file to claim it as their own, or that someone can't steal the idea behind a piece and produce something similar on their own. It would just make it easier, when someone shares a video or picture online honestly, to track down and inform the creator that their work is being shared.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - Of course a lot of sharing is just linking these days.
PPS - However, linked or copied, marked by the maker is best.

Friday writing update - forcing creativity

This week I've been trying to get an entry together for a PodCastle flash fiction contest, so I've been spending my morning commutes poring over my writing snippets file, trying to find some plots. I've made some false starts and gotten pretty frustrated.

The thing is, I forgot how my creative brain works. I've been trying to push and attack it into creating something, but I'm an introvert. I need quiet and time. I do need a seed of an idea, but mostly I need to let it simmer. So now, that's what I'm going to do. Wish me luck.

Mokalus of Borg

PS - I still have until the end of August.
PPS - I'll get at least one entry done, I'm sure.