Decision Fatigue

Decision fatigue is real talk when it comes to the web.

— Joshua Blankenship, Some Thoughts on Web Content Strategy]

Through my life, I have been fairly good at making choices. I don’t spend a lot of time doing price comparisons, looking up reviews of products, sorting out what to order off a menu, and so forth. I tend to enter an environment either knowing roughly or exactly what I am wanting, or it simply does not matter to me. For example, if I need a power bar, I tend to scan the options for something that isn’t incredibly bulky and go for it. Read More

New Year, New Approach

New Year’s Eve is meant to be a time to connect with friends and family. Not so for me. I have been at home cleaning up my office, doing dishes, and settling down on my couch to catch up on some reading that has been collecting. Reading about what people are up to on Facebook/Twitter, and starting to see some of the drunken shenanigans on Instagram makes me wish I was out enjoying myself like in years past. Read More

Renewal

Every now and then, I feel the need to expand on my level of knowledge or experiences to create a change in myself, whether major or minor. The easiest way for me to do this is by reading an article, blog, or book that I normally wouldn’t find myself reading, but I also enjoy going somewhere that I haven’t been yet. When I do this, I set off a mind bomb and become more aware of myself and my surroundings. Read More

Skyfall- A Play with Shadows

Let the sky fall, when it crumbles

We will stand tall

And face it all together

At Skyfall

When Adele’s smokey voice starts singing the title song for Skyfall, I felt chills run down my spine. It is such a perfect song to introduce the Bond story we were all about to witness, both in terms of its lyrics and its melody. The way her voice rises and then falls to disappear echoes the mood of the movie: a play with shadows. Read More

Bad Memories

But what’s a memory worth if it only breaks your heart? If it doesn’t make you smile or give you butterflies, if it doesn’t give you a reason to think positively, what’s the point of keeping it around. Someone who associates me with the idea of being a mistake doesn’t deserve my time; I was obviously a waste of theirs, so … it only makes sense right? Read More

A Case of Mistaken Identity

Material from earlier theatre can be brought into a production in the same way as personal material is brought in. Just as the performer refines, distorts, condenses, and selects from his life experiences, so fragments from earlier dramas can be worked into the play at hand. Only since the intrusion of stupid laws and notions regarding originality has this rich vein of creativity been stopped. Shakespeare and Moliere without their plagiarisms would be much poorer playwrights. An art that is in essence transformational and transmutational should not surrender any of its sources, its deep springs. The modern idea of originality is a lawyer-capitalist construction geared to protecting private property and promoting money-making. It is anti-creative, and inhibits the reworking of old themes in the light of new experience. It is the constant reworking and elaboration of old material- call it plagiarism if you like- that is the strongest sinew of tradition. Read More

Paul Carr’s ‘We Will Always Have the Flamingo’

The biggest draw of hotels, though, is the people you meet in them. In the past three years, by virtue of having no fixed abode (and very little shame), I’ve partied with Hollywood actresses and Icelandic reality show stars; I’ve talked my way into toga parties with eight hundred bedsheet-clad female hairdressing students (and then been invited to lecture at their college on “the business of hair”); I’ve been thrown in jail; narrowly escaped being stabbed by Spanish drug dealers and I’ve learned first hand the difficulties of having sex with a girl while there’s a dead woman in my wardrobe. Actually, that all happened in the first six months, before things got really crazy. Read More

A Canadian in Vegas Where Culture Goes to Die

I had a short trip to Las Vegas, which was my first time there and the first time I’ve been in a major US city in the past 7 years. It was a bit jarring for me coming here and I thought it would make an interesting story. ¹

Quick warning, as if you didn’t know this was coming: an epic city like Las Vegas deserves an epic post/story to go along with it. Read More

My Problems with Online Reading

There was too much noise. Even with the relatively small number of feeds to which I was subscribed, almost none of it was interesting to me. I realized that, for some reason I couldn’t quite recall, I felt obligated to stay abreast of new developments in technology and such. Read More

iPad for Work

It is not a sacrifice to use the iPad as a primary device.

— Shawn Blanc, Why the iPad is My New Laptop

Shawn writes about how he’s using his iPad more for regular tasks without missing a beat without using his laptop. I wrote about this earlier when I talked about how I am Changing My Workflow. After I wrote that, I started to explore more ways to push my work onto the iPad and migrate away from my MacBook. The iPad has essentially become my main device for many of the same reasons Shawn outlines in his post. Read More