Category Archives: thoughts

Tropes: Everything is Done Did

Take it on down to Troperville.

No really. Take it down.

Oh man, don’t do the Tropes! Except, do the tropes, because not doing them is such a trope. And make sure you don’t do any subverting of tropes, because that’s getting old and I’m so tired and bored that I’m yawning already just thinking about it. But dang. Tropes! What the heck are they? Don’t write them, but do. Keep them in mind so you can understand the reasons they were used! Write them in a new way! Go to TVTropes and die from starvation and dehydration as you click the next rabbit-hole link.

But yeah. Tropes are a thing. Like, they are a noun that means something. The ol’ online dictionary describes them as literary or rhetorical devices, and yeah, that’s what they are. But I guess they mean more now, or at least they have connotations surrounding them with the gravitas of dark and stormy nights.

And really, that makes sense because culture is ever evolving. And in our global society of sharing everything its easier to transmit ideas in condensed form. Its like powdered milk in a box that needs a little added water. Or Ikea furniture where you see the display model and then you go find the boxes that make the thing you want. Some of those parts are interchangeable and can be used for multiple final forms. It’s an adult form of Lego except there’s a lot more screwing involved.

The greatest part of assemble-it-yourself furniture is that you could make it however you want. Do you want to paint all the stuff before you put it together? Sure, go ahead! Maybe you don’t like that headboard that the assembly guide suggested. Get another one instead and somehow make it work. Customize and reshape, reimagine and carefully build. The end product becomes something special and you’ve also got something to sit on. Yet, you don’t have to do any of that if you don’t want. Maybe you really do just need a decent chair. Get the parts, align the holes, and tighten the nuts and bolts. That’s perfectly fine. It’s functional. It’s nothing pretty or unique, but it works.

Weirdly enough, there’s an odd shifting perspective on what’s cool to customize. Cars are well-known art projects, and custom woodworking is pretty nicely received. Yet, some hobbies are seen as somewhat useless or maybe only for the highly trained. Like, model rocketry is fun. Plenty of people try it once or twice. They go to a store and buy a box and put together some kind of kit. Then sometimes people feel a hook sink deep into their skin. Then the kit isn’t enough. There are modifications that must be made.

At some point any hobby can become a sometimes negatively-associated word: obsession. Except, often enough, for those that are highly accepted like sports or cars or money. Isn’t that strange? Why is it so easy to point and laugh at someone’s drive? Why do we get to pick and choose what gives joy to someone’s life? Shouldn’t we just let people find their niche? Well, except murder and sexual assault and other types of violence. Those are bad and I don’t care if it gives someone a surge of excitement.

Seriously though to find a niche is a meaning of life itself. We all want to find the place we specifically fit. No general purpose user cares what computer they use. But, the gamers and the coders and the developers want a special machine at their fingertips. And to them there’s a purpose to that selection. There’s a reason for the choices they make. A hammer is a hammer if you just need something heavy to swing. But delicate taps to shape metal need a ball pein’s specific hit.

Speaking of smashing and hitting. Now’a’days tropes have started colliding and combining with memes. Ideas are fun to exploit and explore. It’s a pleasure to express that ideal version of a repeated dream. To me that raises the question of whether or not that will dull the senses. Will people get so used to blunt concentrated thought that subtlety will be a novelty?

Nah. We’re too adaptable. And instead of adaptable it’d probably be okay to say forgetful. The things we find popular today and tomorrow will be the next generations cool new thing. That’s the way of history. Cyclical thinking is… well. It keeps coming around.

So, certainly, everything’s been done before, but that’s probably just fine. Because, really, the creation of something new shouldn’t be the goal. The creation of something that speaks to you or to a reader is more important. Remember that book you read as a child? Or that movie or cartoon? Whatever it was, at whatever the age, it affected you deeply. It changed your life.

Someone out there hates your favorite thing. It doesn’t matter if it’s a show, a story, a comic book, or a cake. Your tastes are not the same. The stuff you think is dumb or pointless? Someone else loves that too.

I guess, then? Do the tropes. Do whatever you want. But do it well.

-J.A.

Cliques: The Importance of a Writing Circle

Clique to Continue

Double-Clique to ???

The Lost Generation found each other to create their own popularity.

Aw but that’s a bit of an over-simplification isn’t it? Alright. Accepted. Generalizing anything into one distinct statement is Bad. Capital B. Intricacies are lost in simplicity. But then again, maybe that’s Good? Capital G. Are intricacies really all that important?

Yes! Yes we shout? We must understand the details. Get into the nitty gritty specifics on even the little bitty. Oh. But who has the time? How can you possibly get into the weeds about everything that exists? There’s simply too much, and not enough of me, nor you, to know everything. But of course not. There’s not enough time for anything, so let’s do nothing instead. Anyway, you’re a nerd if you’re really into something. I mean, nerds are cool now, so maybe that’s alright. So go ahead. Get good at something in particular. But not too good, because that’s also bad? Specialize just enough in something that you aren’t a Mary Sue. Except Batman?

Broad sweeping brush strokes are a stylistic choice that some artists use to evoke much through abstraction. Abstraction is an interesting thing to think about. We abstract to understand. And then? Once we understand the abstraction, we abstract the abstraction so that we can understand even more. Programming is great at abstraction. It’s all about taking something and encapsulating that something into something else until you have to do less to get more while hiding the fact that you did anything at all. Ask a programmer what took four hours and watch them cry. I like to think of it like the gas pedal of a car. You press on a pedal and the car moves forward. That is a lie. So is the following: All humans are murderers.

We accept some abstractions, but not others, because some are offensive.

But back on subject, which is that the Lost Generation were a group of creators that interacted to some extent and made beautiful things. How’s the saying go? “Surround yourself with greatness, and you’ll get jealous quickly?” But it’s inspiring. Sure. But it pushes you further. Farther. Sure. One of the best pieces of advice I’ve heard in a while is that you should find someone’s work that you can’t help but imitate, and then try to be better than that. Try to be better than someone else. Yet. We are all equal, and be humble.

Balance. Is boring.

If you have a clique you will be more successful. Active social interaction helps things, and people, do better. Unfortunately, that better may worsen something for someone else. Give here, take there. Either way, you gotta group together to survive. That’s a basic thing. Cavemen did it and so do we. Not that they all really lived in caves, right? But don’t hang out with more than 150 of those people at once. We gotta have meaningful relationships or you’re just being promiscuous. Speaking of meaningful, the articles with meaningful data, meaningful research, and great information are all behind paywalls that require hefty sums. That sucks.

So. What a predicament we’re in as people that all want to be successful. That’s impossible. We can’t all be successful. Plus. In order to be successful you’d need to pool your resources together with a bunch of other people that want to be successful in the same way. And you all probably have to agree on some of the directions you’ll take at the same exact time! At least for a little while.

What’s the tipping point? It’s a myth. There is no tipping point. There is no breaking point where things begin to cascade. Have you ever played one of those quarter machines? Coin pushers? Wait. That’s wrong. There is a tipping point. Things do cascade. Once they’re already cascading? Luck can be made though.

Get enough people together, in one spot, to do one thing, and you will change something. We want to believe that this is a truth. But it is a lie as well. It is an abstraction of what actually happens. It grossly ignores the work and effort that goes into actual change. Unfortunately, we can’t all just spontaneously change.

I remember the day I stopped believing in prayer. I remember lying in bed and wondering about what I wanted to pray for. We should pray for good things to happen to other people, right? Pray for world peace. Pray for that dude over there to get his leg healed. Pray for that lady to get a better job or at least a raise. Give here, take there. Someone else prayed for another dude to get that same job. We can’t all be successful. But prayer is a great placebo. And more.

Certainties are helpful. They help us get along in the world so that we can keep on walking. Doubt is crippling. But, be skeptical. How much so? Should we believe in anything? Absolutely. Just believe in yourself. Be certain that you exist and that you can Do. After all, you’re breathing. But… There’s always a butt.

Join up with a bunch of people and do your damned best to follow a dream. Find a community that’s online, or next door, or down the street, or maybe it’s made up of four houses and a mythical boy with a lightning-bolt scar. Being part of something is crucial to facing loneliness and accepting that maybe loneliness isn’t always bad. Try everything at least once?

Eventually your dream will change, or someone else’s dream will change that you used to depend on to help carry your dream. But that’s not bad. Losing a friend, or a family member, or a dream, is good. It means you are progressing. It hurts. It makes me want to curl up under a blanket and stare at the hidden nothing behind my eyelids. Eventually I’ll start to think again. Perchance to dream.

Dreaming is good. Changing your dream is good as long as you keep dreaming. I want to dream of great things and magnificent achievements and wondrous  journeys that are impossible to ever achieve. And that impossibility is fine.

 

-J.A.

Inspiration to Ramble

Let Your Mind Wander

Or at least pretend you have a choice…

Inspiration is kind of like watching the dust motes in your vision. You know the ones I’m talking about? Those little shadows of nothingness that pass by like ghosts?

They’re a kind of entoptic phenomena called floaters, or muscae volitantes. Wikipedia tells me this, and then I click on another link.

We all know the rabbit holes of the internet, don’t we? There’s Wikipedia, TV Tropes, YouTube, and occasionally Urban Dictionary. These are the places you go for one bit of information, but then you see something else interesting. Then you follow a path that only you can see. It’s a bit like trailblazing through a virgin forest. Every step you take is new and unbroken by previous travelers. No two internet users take the same route.

A digital fingerprint is left by every individual that traverses the web. Large companies use tracking data to determine who you are without getting you to log on. Spend enough time on any machine and you’ll be paired up with an existing data cache that mostly resembles you. I like to imagine that there’s several versions of me out there. Some are small little glimpses of me on my worst days. Others are very-nearly-me, but they haven’t been merged into one thread because of some minor uncertainty.

It’s really difficult not to argue that those kinds of algorithms, the ones that determine who is who and the ones that make stock choices and the ones that figure out which thing you’ll buy on Amazon, aren’t actual intelligence. The field of AI loves to move the goalpost. A hundred years ago, people (probably, I’m making some leaping connections here) thought things that wiggled a little too much were alive. Fifty years ago, anything that could pass a Turing test might’ve been thought as Alive.

Alive?

What are we, us humans, if not a collection of tricks to get by from one situation to the next? There are plenty of things I do that are a required set of operations rather than willful intent. I don’t really want to go to work. I don’t really want to nod and say “Good Morning” to most people. I’m not good at those things because I don’t quite grasp the need behind them. I understand, but I don’t understand. But, it’s the norm. It is what has been demonstrated as expected. Therefore, I do. Inspiration is just a connection formed when I make enough data points in the line. We’re just fancy learning machines, aren’t we?

Processing a hundred different things together and then coming up with some new and valuable outcome is the definition of creativity. Well, the stark, literal, boring definition is: ‘a phenomenon whereby something new and somehow valuable is formed.‘ I just looked it up as I wrote this. By that definition, robots, physical or digital, are some rather creative individuals.

Yet, I feel like that’s a hard thing for most to accept. Conversations in my head go like this, ‘You can’t call that creativity! It’s just programming!’ and ‘There’s something innate about creating! It takes innovation and great leaps of intuition!’ and ‘Inspiration is a byproduct of conscious thought!’

I disagree.

Most of the things that we find clever and interesting are the product of careful self-made algorithms. Humans are great at training themselves into patterns of thought. We go to school to learn new patterns of thought. Really Successful People study several varied patterns of thought and then mash them together into some Frankenstein’s monster of idea and concept.

Learn a bunch of stuff about solar panels. Now, learn a bunch of stuff about knitting. Maybe you’ll come up with a machine that knits together fibers that make better solar panels for cheaper. I don’t know. I had trouble thinking of two ideas far enough apart that they couldn’t be mashed together into some useful mix. Maybe I didn’t look far enough. Maybe all things are inherently useful to the understanding of all other things.

Some say you have to step back from a problem to find an answer. I don’t know who “they” are. I just did some searching to try and figure that out. There are a lot of articles and webpages out there that describe stepping back to figure things out. They’re named stuff like, “Why stepping back is the best way to move forward.”

Wikipedia has eight different problem solving methods included on their page about problem solving. I don’t feel like I’m going out on a limb to say there’s likely hundreds more than those eight. One of them, from a book titled How to Solve It by George Pólya, has four steps: Understand the Problem. Make a plan. Carry out the plan. Look back on your work and consider how it could be better.

I’m frustrated every time I read about varying methods to do the same thing. This is a silly thing for me to do. Everyone understands life in different ways. Everyone has a past that forms and coerces them into who they will become. As Life progresses forward, the plural All-Encompassing version of that noun, the means to understand changes. That fuzzy repository of “global knowledge” gets larger and wiser with each passing day.

And yet, the myth of the singular genius still exists. We grasp the idea of exceptionalism so readily despite moving further from that capability with each breath. The only genius is in the collective mass that is teamwork and cooperation. Too many cooks spoil the broth. Sure. Sure. Whole sci-fi cultures are formed around the idea that committees are a terrible idea. A thousand movies champion the singular as a lone hero rushes into the war room with the Fantastic Idea, Daring Do, and Gumption to redirect a bickering group of stuffy old men. Anyone without a concrete goal will founder.

New Years resolutions are silly.

Getting somewhere is easy though. Like, let’s say I want to drive to Kansas. Why? I don’t know. The why is so rarely important to the future. I’m in Germany right now, so driving poses some difficulties grounded in physics. I could do this Thing that is suddenly so important that it must be Done. First, I’d sell some stuff. Second, I’d buy some tickets. Third, I’d drive to, and then on, a boat. Fourth, I’d drive off that boat and all the way to Kansas. Isn’t that boring?

A direct path from A to B is usually dull. It’s a way to pass time, or to fulfill an obligation, or to get to what you really want. It fulfills the requirement. There’s nothing wrong with that. In most cases, it’s necessary.

But? When you can? When you have the chance? When there isn’t some ticking bomb with red LED numbers counting away your fate? An indirect route allows you to gather a lot more experiences, good and bad, that can be entertaining.

So, maybe it’s not so bad that I can’t stare directly at the little eye floaters. Since I can never see what they really look like, I spend a lot more time imagining what their shapes could be.

-J.A.