T.N. Tobias

The End

Tue, 06 Dec 2011 22:19:55 -0500

I’ve not been posting. And it’s not because I don’t have anything to say but more that I’ve been feeling more and more that this isn’t the place to say it.

I started this site as a way to open new doors in my life. I started with enthusiasm and naive gusto and kept that energy going for the better part of a year before I a) became overwhelmed in the meatspace and b) found that it was a chore to think of things that served the continuity here. I am still struggling with this and rather than let this space become disjointed and uneven, I’m electing to stop and re-evaluate.

I’m going to start over. Not now but soon. And when I do what’s here won’t be any longer. I’m starting with a redesign and when I’m through I hope to relaunch with renewed vigor.

Until then, this is not so much a good-bye, just a so long for now.

Ready, Set, Write: Doing NaNoWriMo with Storybox

Tue, 01 Nov 2011 09:30:00 -0400

It’s November 1st and right now hundreds of thousands are stretching out their keyboard fingers in preparation for their daily 1667. And the variety of ways these words will be captured are as numerous as the participants. Some stick to good old pen and paper, others to antique typewriters with their aesthetically pleasing clicks and whirrs, others are using sophisticated novel writing software like Liquid Story Binder or Scrivener.

Last year I used LSB and found several quirks that hampered my particular writing style. The sheer number of clicks necessary to get simple project information and uncover my documents became wearing and I never invested the time to setup work spaces to manage screen real estate. The end result was frustration and a lack of spontaneity. I’m not going to go so far as to blame the software for bad storytelling but it definitely didn’t help.

This year I’m pleased to have found a little known package that combines some of the free flowing structure of LSB with the simplicity of Scrivener (whose Windows version still hasn’t hit 1.0) with the editing ease of a full blown word processor. That software is Storybox.

Storybox has a couple of great features going for it that I haven’t seen with other writing packages. The first thing you’ll probably notice is the complete lack of a save button. This is because the software is constantly saving your work in the background which means even a devastating computer crash can’t rob you of your word count.

[caption id=”attachment_3076” align=”alignleft” width=”150” caption=”The main Storybox Screen”][/caption]

I especially appreciate how Storybox pushes all content to the center. That means notes, outlines, research material, and story contents all get pushed to center screen in a tabbed section that makes it easy to move back and forth without having to dig through menus and back again. Each of the sidebar panels are configurable so you can turn them off or allow them to tile themselves as push buttons on the side of the screen for easy access.

The fullscreen mode shines as well. The zooming feature allows you to keep the text big and bright and the configurable information bar can show you your session time, document word count, daily word count, or, depending on your preference, nothing at all.

[caption id=”attachment_3078” align=”alignright” width=”150” caption=”Outline Builder”][/caption]

The included outline builder is a godsend for spontaneous writers. It allows you to store ideas for a manuscript and then insert them as they become applicable. For example, if you know at some point you want your character to perform some action but you don’t know exactly when or where it might happen, you can create an entry in the outline builder. That entry will stay with your project as you write and when you come up with the perfect moment for the event to occur, a click in the outline builder will insert a chapter or scene with you’re builder text as the synopsis. The builder entry is then marked as used. This is a great compromise between the so-called outliner and “pantser” methods of plotting.

Each document, be it scene or chapter, has an individual notes panel which I’ve found handy for recording thoughts about revision, links to research material I used for the scene, and other sundry items. It’s often the case that the ideas I have for a scene and the time I have to write the scene are not in harmony. In that situation there is also a handy To Do panel for each document, allowing me to jot down what additional goals I have to complete the scene before they escape my memory for the next session.

Storybox’s spell check mode is nicely inconspicuous, only appearing when summoned and contains a project level dictionary which is a nice touch when you have weird names but don’t want to add them to the global dictionary.

One of the nifty things about Liquid Story Binder was that it’s interface was fully configurable and, if you put the time into it, you could create a very visually appealing environment. The problem was it was just as easy to create a monstrosity that could rival the garishness of a MySpace profile. The options weren’t always obvious in their results and you’d often find yourself looking at black text on a black background and asking yourself what went wrong. Storybox solves this by having a number of preset color schemes, one of which is sure to meet your needs.

To top it all off, Storybox includes a number of useful export formats including epub and has options for preparing your manuscript for Kindle formatting.

As with any software, Storybox isn’t flawless. I’ve had occasional issues with right click menus being unresponsive. The auto indent has failed on several occasions which, while not necessarily a huge problem, offends my sense of order while writing, creating an unwanted distraction. Storybox is a bit slow to load though the time saved by not having to worry about saving my progress probably balances this out. The outline view is very basic and doesn’t allow for customization so neat frills like color coding for perspective or a quick review of chapter word counts are not possible without opening each document. There’s also a lack of revision tools such as text mark-up or inline notes but there is a great versioning system that allows you to see how the text has changed over time or restore an earlier version of the document.

Even these minor qualms are not enough to tarnish the full package however and the designer of the software, Mark Fassett, is open to suggestions regarding features in future versions and takes a direct hand in support issues. If you haven’t already found you’re writing tool of choice for this years NaNoWriMo or are struggling with organizing a myriad of Word documents, I’d highly recommend you take a look at Storybox. You can run it for free throughout November by downloading at www.storyboxsoftware.com.

NaNoWriMo Comes Again

Tue, 11 Oct 2011 10:00:00 -0400

November approaches and with it comes another iteration of NaNoWriMo, that 30 day sprint that acts as a kick in the pants to the procrastinators among us (ahem, me). The NaNo team has launched the new portal and sign-ups for the 2011 event are now live.

I’ll be participating this year once again but I don’t think I’ll be adding anything to my NaNoWriMo Prep series. Instead here are a few curated links to inspire you:

Success Stories

Help & Encouragement

Extras

Free For all Friday for October 7th, 2011

Fri, 07 Oct 2011 10:00:00 -0400

Videos

Going West
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wBec95Mv8G8[/youtube]

From the creators of Adventure Time, Pikapew Poop Chu
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vJjeesteTEg[/youtube]

Books & Writing

Neil Stephenson talks about SF and innovation. @ World Policy

Steve Jobs and the trouble with investing in junk. @ Kameron Hurley

Version your writing with Git. @ Fuel Your Writing

Kindle formatting tips. @ The Creative Penn

Keeping an idea notebook. @ QueryTracker

Eugenides on a billboard? @ Wall Street Journal

Blueprints for Building Better Girls. @ Jacket Copy

Around the Web

MIT offers 2000 free courses.

Over 600 LucasArts game backgrounds.

How Do You Come Up with Character Names? An Exhaustive List

Wed, 05 Oct 2011 10:00:00 -0400

Among the most frequently asked questions by new writers everywhere is: How do you come up with character names? The answer is, by any means necessary. Here is an exhaustive list of means:

Meatspace Resources

A phonebook
A baby name book
Cemetery headstones
Newspaper articles/classifieds/announcements
Imagination

Online Resources

Generators

Free For all Friday for September 30th, 2011

Fri, 30 Sep 2011 10:00:00 -0400

Videos

Two floppy drives perform the Imperial March
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yHJOz_y9rZE[/youtube]

Guy on a Buffalo - Episode 2
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5Lmkm5EF5E[/youtube]

Books & Writing

Literary references from The Simpsons. @ The Atlantic

How to write 300,000 words a year. @ Art of Non-Conformity

Late bloomers. Post-40 writers. @ The Millions

Amazon introduces the Kindle Fire. @ Gizmodo

5 tips for creating a children’s book. @ The Creative Penn

Killing self-doubt. @ Terrible Minds

Male librarians release naughty calendar. @ The Guardian

Around the Web

Shackleton’s biscuit sells for $1700.

Twitter tracks global mood patterns.

SF Signal: Parsing NPR's Top 100 SF/F Books

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 10:00:00 -0400

Over at SF Signal, I’ve created a flowchart to deal with the untidy list NPR dropped a month or so ago. If you’re a fan of scrolling around massive infographics, head over and take a look.

Free For all Friday for September 23rd, 2011

Fri, 23 Sep 2011 10:00:00 -0400

Videos

Dear Americans…
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om7O0MFkmpw[/youtube]

DIY Book Binding
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBSUHbyf7Ss[/youtube]

Books & Writing

Being smart about your writing. @ Jay Lake

Children’s authors who broke the rules. @ NY Times

The fine print at PUBSLUSH. @ Writer Beware Blogs!

The life and afterlife of literary theory. @ The Millions

Write yourself into your characters. @ Fuel Your Writing

The myth of the $.99 ebook. @ Baekdal

The effect of writing the future. @ SF Signal

Around the Web.

Today is the fall equinox.

The Origami Bookshelf

Wed, 21 Sep 2011 10:00:00 -0400

I’m an origami nut. I’m also a book nut. And while books about origami are common, origami about books is rare. So imagine my surprise and delight when I came across this blog post detailing a way to fold a book in such a way as to have a colored cover and white pages. I got to thinking about whether it would be possible to map an image of a book cover onto a pre-printed template and fold an actual book. Turns out it is and here are the results:

[nggallery id=2]

All of this is thanks to David Brill, designer of the model in question. The official diagrams are available in his book Brilliant Origami.

Now, on to how you can make your own origami books. The video’s below will give you a step-by-step tutorial on the folding process for both the book and the bookshelf pictured. I find it’s best in the beginning to watch each step carefully, pause the video, and then do the fold.

Book:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wfcGu3vWGo[/youtube]

Bookshelf:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhVV-IfB80k[/youtube]

And now the templates. A few notes on folding them:

Copy paper is tough stuff to fold. Find a lightweight, glossy paper for best results. Be sure to gather all the layers when folding so you don’t end up with uneven results.
Try not to crease the folds through the covers too sharply. Even though the video shows pressing with a creasing tool, doing so may make your toner or ink flake off or at the very least leave an ugly bulge through your cover. It’s not necessary to crease to firmly on that end of the paper as the folds are undone in the finished model anyway. (In fact, it’s not necessary to crease the cover at all. When you’re good and practiced, try making a sharp mountain fold along the bottom edge of the printed cover. In that way it is possible to shape the paper so that you’re beautiful cover doesn’t get creased before it has to.)
It’s unlikely that you’ll have great results on the first try. Origami is a skill that gets better with practice.
I’ve made guidelines in the places where the video shows ambiguous folds (ie “leave a little gap” or “fold about 1/3 of the way to the center”). For the end, instead of arbitrarily folding above and below the pages, obviously you’ll want to fold along the top and bottom of the cover.
You’ll notice I’ve included a blank template for creating your own covers. Have fun!

[nggallery id=1]

Free For all Friday for September 16th, 2011

Fri, 16 Sep 2011 10:00:00 -0400

Videos

“Reality hits you hard, bro.” Kinetic story-telling.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HHZH_8Ly-u8[/youtube]

Star Wars Blu-Ray, now with more Porkins.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=32itsA81Ouw[/youtube]

Books & Writing

New Goodreads recommendation system. @ Readwriteweb

Asperations. @ Tobias Buckell

Bourdain launches book imprint. @ NY Times

15 things Kurt Vonnegut said best. @ AV Club

The Situation comic nears completion. @ Ecstatic Days

Literary Mixtape: Lyra Belacqua. @ Flavorwire

9 ways of looking at a paragraph. @ The Millions

Around the Web

Pictures of other worlds.

Uncovering ancient reptiles.

Reading List: Autumn of the Day Read

Thu, 15 Sep 2011 10:00:00 -0400

My Summer of the Doorstop was an unqualified success. Of the ten books selected, I read eleven, four of which were not on the original list but reading lists, like road trips, are prone to digressions and in the end they turned out to be enjoyable ones. I’m still working on Levin’s The Instructions, now well into September, and I’m a bit worn out on books too heavy to hold comfortably, to thick to fit on my shelves, and too long to remember the beginning when I’ve reached the end. So to balance the scales, I’m embarking on the Autumn of the Day Read, 21 books under 250 pages.

1. Distant Star by Roberto Bolaño - 2666 was breathtaking in scope and yet its best moments occurred when Bolaño zoomed in and spent some time with a character and let them stretch out across a few pages. I’m interested to see what he is capable of accomplishing in a tighter space.

2. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury - I’ve never actually read any Bradbury. I tried to listen to a library audiobook of this once and simply lost the thread. Given what I know about its history, and misunderstanding of its message, I’m excited to give it another shot.

3. The Stranger by Albert Camus - Although apparently a staple of high school literature classes, I didn’t encountered Camus until I was much older. I’ve cracked open the book to take a peek and I’m already intrigued by the opening line: “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday, I don’t know.”

4. Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad - This controversial classic inspires a great deal of discussion due to its portrayal of race and slavery. Reviews I’ve read make the book seem like a love it or hate it proposition.

5. Point Omega by Don DeLillo - Another repeat author from the doorstop list. DeLillo dazzles at his best. His dialog is snappy and he never fails to paint a vivid picture of his worlds. This is his post-9/11 book about a man tasked with documenting the war on terror.

6. Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis - This first novel from the writer of American Psycho is said to have set the tone quite well for the rest of Ellis’s career.

7. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald - I read this first in high school and I can’t remember a word of it. I know I wasn’t ready to appreciate literature like this at that age and expect great things from this reread.

8. The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway - There definitely is a pattern of classics on this list. I have not always been so interested in reading foundational works of literature but, in my aging state, I’m finding that classics are living up to their reputations.

9. Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse - I’ve had this book recommended to me from multiple sources. I’m currently looking for the best translation so if you have an opinion, leave a comment.

10. Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson - Again, this little known short story collection has been recommended by people I trust to know good books.

11. The Trial by Franz Kafka - A little longer than most on the list but Kafka reads quick and easy and his portrayal of existential dread is so spot on that the pages just fly by.

12. The Giver by Lois Lowry - I missed this one as a child and plan to read it with mine.

13. The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli - A frequently misunderstood text dictates with brutal truth how to grasp power and maintain it. It is unfortunately taken at face value by certain economic movers and shakers to disastrous effect.

14. Amsterdam by Ian McEwan - McEwan is an author I’ve always meant to read but never found an opportunity. I look forward to finally delving in.

15. Down and Out in Paris and London by George Orwell - Orwell’s great dystopia 1984, and his parable on communism Animal Farm tend to dominate discussion of his work. But Down and Out is said to be an equally great treatise on poverty.

16. The Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger - I may be arriving at this one a decade too late to really experience Holden Caufield’s angst but I don’t think it will dampen my appreciation of this American classic.

17. The Rum Diary by Hunter S. Thompson - Before he wrote the book (literally) on Gonzo journalism, Thompson had aspirations to be a novelist. This was his first attempt.

18. Candide by Voltaire - Voltaire is considered one of the world’s finest satirists, and Candide his finest work. Sounds like a winner to me.

19. Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - You can’t go wrong with Vonnegut and Cat’s Cradle is among his best.

20. The Island of Dr. Moreau by H.G. Wells - I read War of the Worlds and The Time Machine and considered my time with Wells complete. That is until none other than China Mieville mentioned this book as his greatest accomplishment. I shall see.

21. A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf - Considered the best examination of feminism in literature yet written. Woolf is an unknown to me but her legacy suggests there is plenty to discover.

View this shelf on Goodreads.

Do We Have to Like Characters for Them to be Interesting?

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 10:00:00 -0400

Does anyone like Humbert Humbert? More precisely, does anyone who isn’t a sexual deviant like Humbert Humbert? Show of hands. Nope. I didn’t think so. But there are plenty to call Lolita one of the greatest novels of all time. We can have empathy for Humbert. We can wish for him to be well. To shed his self-destructive impulses and become a better man. But I don’t think we can like him. We can’t root for him. We don’t stand up and cheer for his aspirations.

What Humbert is, instead of likable, is compelling. He’s more interesting than the man sitting next to you on the bus. His depth gauge has an entire new level compared to the pizza delivery boy, or your uncle Fred, or your daughter’s second grade teacher or any of the people in your life that have admirable goals, that satisfy your needs, that constitute the scenery on which your life is set. We root for good people to do good things but that doesn’t always mean we want to hear their story.

A common chorus in the opera of negative book reviews goes something like this: “This book was full of unlikable characters.” So what does this actually tell us? Is it strictly necessary for a character to be “likable” in order to enjoy fiction about them?

I’ve struggled with this question myself. The thoroughly awful Kvothe, star of The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss, actually got me started on this line of thinking. That book was ruined for me by the character in question. I so disliked him that it wouldn’t have mattered what else happened in the novel, I wouldn’t have enjoyed it. So what’s the difference? Why is it that Humbert, though despicable, can fascinate and Kvothe make me want to wretch?

You’ll have to excuse the comparison of Lolita to The Name of the Wind but I think these examples explain very well the dichotomy between unlikable and interesting. And the difference has to do with expectation and author intent. As we’re writing characters, we develop their personas to tell a story. The characters drive whether the story is sympathetic, ironic, heroic, etc. As such, readers have an expectation that if a character is supposed to be heroic, there has to be a likable quality to them that allows us to root for his success. In my reading, Kvothe clearly failed to meet my expectation and the book fell apart for me based on that.

I don’t think you can discount realism as a mitigating factor either. The real world is not cast with heroes and villains but people with individual motivations that may or may not be in opposition to our own. In the case of Humbert, we see a man portrayed as a victim of his perverse desires which is very different from the usual protagonist but he’s believable and allows a story to be told that’s not comfortable but interesting.

All this may sound very basic but in developing fiction I think it’s important to focus on what we’re trying to achieve and the best vehicles for getting us there. A character that doesn’t fit the story, that is made “likable” against our expectation or worse, unlikable when our tale calls for sympathy, undermines the message.

Remembering David Foster Wallace

Mon, 12 Sep 2011 10:00:00 -0400

September 12th, for the remainder of several generations of Americans and probably the world, will forever be the day after. A monument to another tragedy better reflected upon by other people in other places.

But it was on this day three years ago that David Foster Wallace took his own life and left behind a bevy of bewildered and mourning literary admirers.

His touch went beyond the books, though, as this touching series of remembrances by literary magazine McSweeney’s clearly shows. His influence was almost a light of sympathy leading the way out of a cold, ironic tunnel. His personality and honesty and humility lie beneath his words, becoming a paragon to those who could see him in the text. And ultimately, with the gift of hindsight, we could also see the seeds of his destruction. Crippling depression and self-doubt run like a river through his fiction and his death and it’s manner has changed the way we read it, now stripped bare.

Consider this ominous excerpt from Wallace’s magnum opus, Infinite Jest:

The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flame yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don‘t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.

Or this revelatory reflection on the dangers of self-consciousness from the story “Good Old Neon”:

The idea was to have the accident and whatever explosion and fire was involved occur someplace isolated enough that no one else would see it, so that there would be as little an aspect of performance to the thing as I could manage and no temptation to spend my last few seconds trying to imagine what impressions the sight and sound of the impact might make on someone watching. I was partly concerned that it might be spectacular and dramatic and might look as if the driver was trying to go out in as dramatic a way as possible. This is the sort of shit we waste our lives thinking about.

And finally this passage from his posthumous novel The Pale King, where Wallace analyzes, with depressing detail, the worth of the single human life:

And not only that, but everybody who knows me or even knows I exist will die, and then everybody who knows those people and might even conceivably have even heard of me will die, and so on, and the gravestones and monuments we spend money to have put in to make sure we’re remembered, these’ll last what—a hundred years? two hundred?—-and they’ll crumble, and the grass and insects my decomposition will go to feed will die, and their offspring, or if I’m cremated the trees that are nourished by my windblown ash will die or get cut down and decay, and my urn will decay, and before maybe three or four generations it will be like I never existed, not only will I have passed away but it will be like I was never here, and people in 2104 or whatever will no more think of Stuart A. Nichols Jr. than you or I think of John T. Smith, 1790 to 1864, of Livingston, Virginia, or some such. That everything is on fire, slow fire, and we’re all less than a million breaths away from an oblivion more total than we can even bring ourselves to even try to imagine, in fact, probably that’s why the manic US obsession with production, produce, produce, impact the world, shape things, to help distract us from how little and totally insignificant and temporary we are.

These are the thoughts of a mind probing for meaning, grappling with hopelessness, and in rearview mirror of history, become epitaphs of tragedy. And heartbreaking though it is, I think we can all feel relieved that Wallace didn’t put up with one more minute of agony than he needed to, than he could. There’s a gripping chapter in Infinite Jest where recovering junkie Don Gately struggles with the pain of an infected gunshot would without the benefit of narcotics. The scene becomes a frame by frame picture of his struggles with the pain, willing himself to endure just one more second and then the next and then the next. I can’t visualize life on these terms. I can’t reconcile it to my mode of being. But when I read DFW, I get the sense that his life was sometimes just that way. That struggling with his depression on that level became a battle of will to tolerate just one more intolerable moment.

It’s a miracle then, for someone so maligned by his own chemistry, that Wallace was so outwardly compassionate, as this quote from his commencement address at Kenyon College illustrates:

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day.

Looking back over those aforementioned remembrances, like the guy with the lucky charms shirt, or the spontaneous correspondences that Wallace kept with basically perfect strangers, or the people who, without ever thinking he’d reply, spilled their guts to the man who’d written just how they felt and gotten a heartfelt response, it’s easy to see that he practiced this advice in his own life.

I wonder how many people hold unread Wallace books on their book shelves, eyeing them hungrily but knowing what’s left is all they’ll get for a lifetime. I haven’t even attempted The Pale King for this very reason. What’s encouraging, though, is sharing his life and work with others, planting that seed of awe, watching his influence continue to blossom these many years after his death. For, in Wallace’s own words:

…here’s this thing where it’s going to sound sappy to you. I have this unbelievably like five-year-old’s belief that art is just absolutely magic. And that good art can do things that nothing else in the solar system can do. And that the good stuff will survive, and get read, and that in the great winnowing process, the shit will sink and the good stuff will rise.

Emotional Entropy, A Solution to Your Problems That You Already Have Going for You

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 14:38:48 -0400

Think of a time when an innocuous event had a damaging affect on your psyche. Say, your under-achieving first born has mixed together different colors of Play-Doh^© and is naturally distraught that these rainbowed clumps will no longer cleanly fit into the marked containers of one color or the other and you, as this whelp’s natural outlet for such frustrations, are now tasked with performing a number of highly organized rituals in order to placate the child, clean the mess, and minimize any economic penalties that may arise from the situation, vis-à-vis new containers of Play-Doh^©. Any one of these tasks is a stress trigger and as they mount, you are likely to find yourself in a discomforted and annoyed state of mind. Not to mention you are, by acquiescing to the child’s demands, setting expectations that can only invite more of these unwelcome stressors in the months and years to come.

The organized informational input, let’s say work, necessary to maintain interpersonal relationships is overwhelming when we break it down into its constituent parts. Even minor altercations require expenditures of substantial amounts of emotional energy. In terms of thermodynamics, a physical science with admittedly only metaphoric ties to this article’s subject matter, work is required to allow a physical system to perpetuate action upon itself and other systems. In other words, without work being applied, the system tends toward disorder. This tendency towards disorder is called entropy.

Applied to emotional systems, entropy is a marvelous tool for managing entanglements. It is highly unlikely that any one person has the motivation or energy to maintain the work of keeping up a relationship on their own. Less your involvement, all the burden of relational stress falls on the other party where it disintegrates over time. It allows you to focus what emotional energy you have to expend on pleasurable activities while your burdens fall to pieces in your wake. This, we think, is a new cornerstone for improving mental health and the general happiness of the populace.

Some might say this strategy of avoidance sounds like apathy but those who would are not appreciating the specific nuance that emotional entropy provides, most likely because they are embroiled in stressful relationships of their own. A person applying apathy to an interpersonal relationship has chosen to acknowledge incumbrances and meet them with indifference whereas a person truly seeking emotional entropy will have disbelieved them altogether. A person seeking emotional entropy will selectively apply work to circumstances which benefit his immediate state of mind and eschew all things tedious and bothersome but not in a self-deprecating and depressive manner as an apathetic person might. To allow a situation to succumb to the your lack of input, it must be actively and emphatically disregarded.

So consider the example once more with entropic principles applied. All of the consequences related to the Play-Doh^© incident are ignored and allowed naturally decay, no stress is applied to the parent/child relationship and , perhaps best of all, the child is able to follow the example set and develop a sense of where to apply his own emotional energy as he witnesses you remaining blissfully unaware of his plight. All this at the cost of a few dried bits of multi-colored modeling clay on the carpet. Think of the applications of this theory on some of the less trivial stresses applied by everyday life such as a nagging spouse, parental expectations, and societal constraints that just seem silly in light of how good it feels to be naked in the sun.

Emotional entropy, unlike apathy, and we’re sure much to the chagrin of the organization Apathy Now!, is achievable with very mild psychotropic drugs. None of the sedatives or depressants that makes apathy so devoid of sensory pleasures.

Applied to financial stresses, entropy is revolutionizing economics by means of radical re-valuation, entropic individuals requiring a much higher ceiling of potential reward in order to give thought to payment, shrinking of the consumer pool, and drastic reconfiguration of debt, the entropicly minded not being ones to pay much heed to traditional collection tactics.

For a hundred millenia, homo sapiens and their ancestors have attempted to buck the trend of the universal laws of nature in their relationships, inputting more energy than necessary and reaping tepid results. With Emotional Entropy, people have a reason to feel good again. A reason to ignore mounting email, voicemail, and text messages. A reason to let needy family members know exactly where they stand with regard to your emotional well-being. Try it, you probably already are, and in no time you’ll feel like the bright center of a whole new world, your problems disintegrating around you like so much cosmic dust.

test Post

Tue, 26 Jul 2011 13:50:57 -0400

this is a test

Not Dead

Tue, 19 Jul 2011 16:26:23 -0400

Just busy. Really busy. Consumed, you might say. Regular programming will resume shortly, until then, have this (hint: click to make it bigger):

Free For all Friday for July 1st, 2011

Fri, 01 Jul 2011 10:00:00 -0400

I’ve been on the run for the past few weeks so I have no links for you today. Instead, here’s a short film detailing the development of Amon Tobin’s amazing visual system. Enjoy.

[vimeo]http://vimeo.com/24502224[/vimeo]