quote of the day
By alice on September 4, 2008
Alain de Botton on the benefits of travelling, via Ben Casnocha:
Thinking improves when parts of the mind are given other tasks — charged with listening to music, for example, or following a line of trees. The music or the view distracts for a time that nervous, censorious, practical part of the mind which is inclined to shut down when it notices something difficult emerging in consciousness, and which runs scared of memories, longings and introspective or original ideas, preferring instead the administrative and the impersonal.
I’m looking forward to doing lots of that over the next few days, travelling to England. Back middle of next week.
Tags: travellessons from role-playing games
By alice on September 2, 2008
So, I found it really really hard not to be even a little bit upset when my Son, who is a computer games genius, accidentally lost all his fifty thousand raw titanium boulders, or whatever the currency is on the game he was playing, the other week. Apparently his avatar died, which is fairly normal, but then he followed this up with the far worse mistake of abandoning his own corpse, which was then plundered for precious metals and valuable weaponry by some bunch of evil corpse-plundering goblins or whatever. Sick, isn’t it? No wonder people think these games are so evil! Etcetc.
But anyway:
lesson #1: death is an accident, but the real mistake is forgetting about your afterlife. Or for atheists, pessimists lose out sometimes. Or for optimistic atheists, think before you give up all hope.
Then we had a few days of not playing this game at all. It was not worth it, he would never ever play it ever again, the tragedy was simply insurmountable, etc, which I can understand really. It’s how people feel when their business fails. Because role-playing games are all about wealth creation and enterprisingness.
lesson #2 sometimes we just need to do nothing and wallow in our sense of loss for a while.
But then another young businessperson offered him a job cutting wood and splitting the profits. You would think this sounds like a waste of time, but apparently:
lesson #3 mundane work for someone else can get you off the ground mentally/ emotionally, sometimes.
From then on, things gradually improved. Woodcutting led to tin-mining lead to jewel-marketing led to platinum boulder rediscovery, and in a few more days perhaps a fifth of the original lost fortune had actually been recovered. And the whole process was much faster than the first time around.
lesson #4: you may lose all your investment, but your skills and learning will remain.
And now, the future looks rosy. We are all very confident that wealth will be restored, better and stronger than before:
lesson #5: recovering from disaster teaches the depth of your own courage and resources.
Only a fraction of the way through the journey back to riches, Son voiced this next one from the back seat of the car:
lesson #6: I’m just going to get my money back one step at a time.
Sometimes money is sought in greed, employed for evil and enjoyed as an ego-enhancing drug. Other times it does a lot of good. The same thing applies to computer games, and drugs. If you’re ignoring responsibilities to get kicks as a hobbit or mainlining aspirin, that’s bad. But I just took a dayquil for my cold, and it helped with my day. So please, year zero-ing everything that can be abused is never a good idea: think about the sensible people who can learn and benefit from this new resource, whatever it may be. Maybe it’s doing good somewhere you haven’t noticed yet.
Here’s why I was especially moved by the above process: I’ve been re-organising the family finances to figure out how we can maintain the unusual international needs of all our members while not starving to death and one day moving someplace capable of accommodating everyone in the family simultaneously. And a lot of the new miracleplan is about one step at a time. One penny at a time, even.
It’s truly wonderful to see something like that being learned through safe, virtual experience, so young. Thank you, role-playing game. Even though I still have no desire to play you myself (sorry).
curioser and curioser #24
By alice on September 1, 2008
I go around thinking I’ve had a fairly interesting life and done a few things, and then I read stuff like this:
On stage in Ohio, the Palin family looked every bit as photogenic as the Obamas on their big night in Denver. Todd, her rugged husband, is part Yupik Eskimo and is four-time champion of the 2,000-mile Iron Dog snowmobile race. If that is not macho enough, he is a member of the steelworkers’ union and a seasonal oil production operator for BP, from which he earned $93,000 last year. He also helps to run the family’s commercial fishing business. They eloped in 1988 to avoid the cost of a wedding. “We had a bad fishing year so we didn’t have any money,” he said.
OK, giving up now. Some folks just have special stuff-doing powers that are not granted to the rest of us.
Honestly, you couldn’t make up stories like these. Palin even smoked pot- legally! And I think her camp (Mc whowasthatagain?) is winning now on minority representation too- doesn’t Eskimo trump both African-American and female? (Although I thought that was supposed to be “Inuit” these days?)
I’m pleased that the election stuff is looking to be so much fun this year! So much going on. As long as you view the whole thing as a sport, it works out fine. Too much nastiness and all my screens will be off, though.
Tags: politics, society, USThe Adventures of Sharkboy and Lavagirl
By alice on August 29, 2008
Every now and then, I see something or read something bizarre, strange, original and wonderful, and then read the critics, and get this rush of something a bit like anger but really more of a sort of frustrated internal energy power-pack that I can’t think what to do with. If I was Sharkboy, it would make my teeth go sharp and cause me to eat the bars of the cage. If I was Lavagirl, I’d be burning the house down. The difficult part is putting that kind of energy into something useful. After Sharkboy gets the cage destroyed, Lavagirl says something like “Nice refocussing of your anger!” which makes that point pretty well. But their special powers of destruction aren’t just a reaction to what’s going on around them. They have problems of their own, which resurface. Everyone in this film has problems of their own which resurface. Does everyone in the world have problems of their own which resurface? We consider this to be a negative thing, in our culture, don’t we? And it can be. Your average psycho axe murderer/ casual teenage thug wouldn’t be acting that way if the negativity wasn’t choking his soul, for sure. But how many people are so chilled out and tranquil they never even feel like smashing up the stalls in their own idea of the temple? Anger directed at the “right” cause is very “in” these days.
Personally I think World Peace will be the end product of people getting along, so anger directed at others does nothing to further the planet. For instance, I happen to be an intelligent, educated person capable of complex rational thought. And I am entirely convinced that there is evidence on both sides of the global warming debate. There is no point being angry with me about this. You’re going to have to come up with stronger evidence than the other side, to a great enough degree to convince me. Pressure, emotional language and abuse will cause me to write you off as an unreliable source.
This refocussing of anger stuff is tricky. Too many times, good ideas are undermined by poor arguments.
Sharkboy and Lavagirl is the kind of film I love and Hollywood and most viewers tend to miss entirely. It doesn’t follow the rules of Western movie construction, which are: character development, pacing, realism, naturalistic acting, novelty and innovation, and aiming everything precisely into the unmoving basketball-net of the brain of the Average Hollywood Viewer. What it does have: symbolic, mythological figures, events and ideas; action-packed ADD Mexican-style plotting and visuals; clear enunciation in a plain style (am I the only person in the world who finds preociously “naturalistic” child-acting increasingly over the top to the point of embarrassing these days?); plenty of wit, and an inventive ear and eye.
When your characters are symbolic, like Roman Gods, they don’t have daily concerns and they don’t relate to one another in precise yet varyingly intimate ways, which is what naturalism means. They just enact big ideas and themes. Going to the toilet isn’t part of that. This is why there is no good modern movie of The Bacchae. The critics would find it shallow and unconvincing. Well, doh.
Look, I don’t expect you to go out and rent this movie and love it. But I found it to be both profound and moving on the subject of various things that are rushing into my mind too fast to write down now (maybe an addendum later). Not perfectly so: but they’re there. And you don’t see them very much. If at all. I would love to talk to Robert Rodriguez about this film one day because it looks to me like the kind of film that costs something personal, and the mere thought of what this sort of writing requires gives me chills. It isn’t superficial, it’s actually deeper than the realism we’re used to.**
Also, it’s the kind of thing I was trying to do when I wrote my novel 15 years ago. In a couple of weeks I’ll be launching on the big job of retyping then editing that for (self) publication. Although I’m wondering right now if it shouldn’t be aimed at children, since they are so much better than adults at comprehending the sort of big ideas we’re all so hopeless at hanging onto past our first pay-packets and sexual encounters.
Which is bad!!
** By the way, even Batman is realistic in the way I’m talking about. Maybe I’ll addendum more on that later too- big subject.
Tags: art, Austin, film, ideas, literatureevening entertainments
By alice on August 28, 2008
This is Santa Barbara beach at dusk. We stayed there the other week, and apparently it’s a bit different now than it used to be when Husband lived there for a while as a young child with his father, after the latter kidnapped him. Much more smart and chi-chi. Daughter and I gazed at the fairy dresses in the window of the Betsey Johnson shop, and we all had a coffee and bought a book in Border’s.
Anyway, Radiohead is playing in Santa Barbara tonight at the end of their North American tour, and being champions of internet freedom, webcasting the show live. Which is cool. I will attempt to watch some in between Shark Boy and Lava Girl, which is our family movie of the evening by our favourite local director (and the kids’ all-time favourite favourite director in the world) Robert “Spy Kids” Rodriguez. Having visited California now, it’s much more impressive to me that Rodriguez lives here instead of L.A. Nowhere on the West side of America seemed anything like as horrible as I was expecting. Sometimes it’s a mistake to fall for decades of propaganda, I guess…
Tags: film, fun, music, travel, USdo a scary thing every day
By alice on August 27, 2008
I have spent quite a lot of time pondering the adage “Do one scary thing every day”. Not sure where it first originated (ideas?) but most recently it was in my latest self-help book (yes, I am a self-help addict, there are worse things), Martha Beck’s The Joy Diet. Building your Courage Muscle seems to me a good way of building your getting-stuff-done muscle. Just aiming at the Stuff can cause us to neglect their Achilles’ heels until the spear is firmly embedded. And their Achilles’ wrists, armpits, earlobes and big toes. As I love to say: when you’re young, you do the things you’re good at, and they lead to success; when you’re older, you do the things you’re bad at, and they lead to survival. (The things you’re bad at being strongly correlated with the things you fear and dislike.)
However, I found it really hard to come up with things I am nervous about that are actually worth doing on a daily basis. There were lots of things I would be scared about if I had an opportunity to do them (accept an Oscar, have tea with Elton), but they’re not very likely to happen. There were lots of things worth doing that I am prone to put off because they are tedious or annoying, but which aren’t at all scary (pulling up vinyl floor tiles, typing up recipes for my food business). Apparently, either I was either pretty close to perfect already, or my psychological damage was so deep that it was going to take more than 600 self-help books to put it right by now! Hurrah! But luckily, some ideas and opportunities turned up all on their own, and I’m still figuring it out from there.
Which means thinking about it, which means coming up with more ideas than if it just came naturally. So here are my tips so far on locating and finding the Courage Muscle in order to achieve more goodstuff thereby:
1. Sieze opportunities when they come along. If you pass up one scary worthwhile thing, another might appear for a while.
2. Things you hate, feel reluctant about, feel embarrassed about may be things you fear in disguise. Or they may have some amount of anxiety in them.
3. Excitement is the same thing as fear, but positive. They can change in and out of each other easily.
4. Another way of growing your Courage Muscle is being proactive about fears focussed on the future. What are you scared might happen? Start dealing with it now if possible.
5. It doesn’t matter whether the thing you’re scared of seems big or little: either size can turn out significant later on.
6. The idea is to do things that open you up to new possibilities. But you can’t really tell what those things are in advance. So experiment.
We may not all be able to try more stuff than the other guy, but we can definitely try more stuff than we were trying ourselves yesterday. I’ll let you know more about how this goes as and when. Yesterday I persuaded Jackie to let me post on her and Hillary’s beauty blog, on the subject of “professional” photo portraits and Penelope Trunk. Which was definitely scary and exciting for me. Not that I’ll admit that in public- too embarrassing 
Hollywood
By alice on August 26, 2008
Hollywood was a really nice town to look at, lots of old 30’s buildings and a generally interesting, slightly nutty feel. It’s not very big, and you can buy a map of the stars for $2, which is full of hilarious typos (”mopvie starts”) and I don’t know how totally made-up it is but that has no effect on the fun, my Inner Gay Man had a brilliant time forcing everyone to drive past “Elton John’s House! Probably!!” and imagining what would have happened if he’d been home and noticed us just happening to turn up by coincidence. According to the map, all the best most important 6 or so stars live approximately in Elton’s road, which is handy if you don’t have all day free for wending round Beverly Hills looking like a total fool. The other 547 I have mostly never heard of so they don’t count anyway.
Tags: fun, travel, USLovely Las Vegas
By alice on August 24, 2008
As you know, in Las Vegas the hotels are mostly designed to look like things that aren’t hotels, such as pyramids:
storybook castles:
New York City:
and giant bananas:
OK, I am joking about the giant bananas. But who knows, it could happen! Maybe someone will decide to create a fantasy giant banana landmark destination one day. Donald Trump’s Vegas hotel is a simultaneously unimaginative and rather daring enormous gold bar sticking up into the sky, and I think the giant banana idea would knock that into a cocked hat*, personally**.
That’s my idea for Vegas, and I think it’s great, which seems to be the spirit of the town- doing what you want and considering it great. I expected the Western capital of gambling, extravagance, materialism and free (while gambling, apparently) alcoholic beverages to be seedy and ikky, if worth gawking at, but my personal superficial impression was actually of an extreme and rather wonderful kind of creativity gone completely wild in the middle of the safe surroundings of the desert. Even the slot machines make a pretty tinkling sound, much more benevolent than the digital peeps and bleeps we have become accustomed to in the C21st.
Anyway, nice place, very charming, and it’s all on one long street. Next time, I’m going to the daftest draggiest show within my means (the idea of watching Elton etc while being served drinks at my table is very nice, but beyond them) and staying in a much posher hotel (even fancy ones have cheap rooms if you trawl right, because there are just so many squillion rooms). And taking cabs instead of the ludicrously overcrowded and slow bus. Not in a hurry: beyond those, it probably will get boring, as I don’t gamble. All games bore me silly, even free/ cheap ones. No idea why.
(* as we Brits bizarrely say)
** now I think about it, a giant gold bar is quite like a straighter, shinier and more angular giant banana. Maybe Mr Trump had that in mind.
affirmation for your creative personality
By alice on August 23, 2008
I utterly adore this article- The Creative Personality: Ten paradoxical traits of the creative personality by Mihaly Csikszentmihaly (the guy who coined the “flow” word).
As a near-insanely creative person myself (yes, near-insanity is what paradoxes can do to a person sometimes), I’m bookmarking it for positive affirmation as needed. How wonderful that These Days we can recognise and value creativity as a human resource, and identify the creative reality as a great way to live. Anti-creative messages feel like wallpaper to me, so this trend towards everybody picking up a bit of the old artistic magic for themselves seems rather amazing. For instance, Hugh Macleod, from whose twittering the above link came, is publishing a book based on his popular page about how to be creative. I’m sure this will be pored over by greatness as well as attemptedly memorised word-for-word by many an overearnest dullard, as good advice books always are. I don’t agree with all Hugh’s tips, but they certainly seem like a good place to start liberating your inner Mozart etc. Or in the case of inner Salieris, well, at least you will be expressing yourself off the streets, so to speak.
There is something quite comical about all this positive psychology creativity stuff, to me. It’s the same thing that’s funny about all those decorating shows where people with no sense of style or common-sense have desperately tried to impose their uniqueness on their environment, resulting in expert designers being called to demolish and replace the whole thing. Too much “creativity” can get you in a mess. And then there’s the reality that not all bosses seek original thinking from their underlings. Creativity can get you sacked! Or make you extremely miserable in the job you were pretending to like before you got all liberated. Just saying…
But paradoxical personality traits are different ballgames than ideas for creative expansion. While getting more of the latter can cause trouble, copying stuff you don’t understand might be worse. Here are some of my favourites from the Csikszentmihalyi article.
1. Creative people have a great deal of physical energy, but they’re also often quiet and at rest. (…) Yet it is surprising how often individuals who in their seventies and eighties exude energy and health remember childhoods plagued by illness. It seems that their energy is internally generated, due more to their focused minds than to the superiority of their genes.
2. Creative people tend to be smart yet naive at the same time. (…) Another way of expressing this dialectic is the contrasting poles of wisdom and childishness. (…) a certain immaturity, both emotional and mental, can go hand in hand with deepest insights. Mozart comes immediately to mind.
3. Creative people combine playfulness and discipline, or responsibility and irresponsibility.
OK, all 10 traits are my favourites, but I’ll stop there rather than going through the whole thing.
I think the article may be about the successfully creative person rather than the hardwired creative personality, which is renowned for going horribly wrong in some individuals, which seems potentially problematic. But alas, no more time to go into that here. Got to go out now.
Tags: creativity psychology happiness ideasholiday snap #2
By alice on August 22, 2008
I took this around dusk, and it makes for a nice pink girly effect:
It’s the Las Vegas CircusCircus hotel’s Adventuredome, which has lots of great rides, games and activities especially for children. The day pass is very reasonably priced, but we only had a short time in there, so just paid for individual rides. The coolest thing is the indoor roller coaster, which goes right over your head and the other rides, and the most popular thing in our family was Marvin the Martian “ride” in the 4D theater. The hotel is both supercheap during the week (we paid something like $25 for a room) and really well served for people with kids, with free circus performances and the best McDonalds in town, as well as lots of child-friendly arcade and fairground-style activities, and a decent pool. Downside: no frills.
Tags: fun, photos, US
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