August 2009

Not So Quick Travel Blip

I’m prone to those revelations where something blinks and things suddenly make sense but your excitement for this new understanding is clouded by your annoyance that you didn’t figure it out earlier and save yourself mountains of stress and frustration. And sometimes those revelations aren’t even that clear, you know know that you’ve jumped back on the right track somehow after being off it for some unknown period of time, even if you have no early idea where that track is leading you.

For me the moment of inspiration happened for me about 20 minutes ago while sitting on Green Line train somewhere underneath Washington DC. I’ve been reading ‘On Writing’ by Stephen King which I can’t recommend enough – it’s one of the best books I’ve read about being creative and life in general. I didn’t buy it thinking it was a philosophy book but it’s turned out to be an amazing one. Actually I bought it almost a year ago and it’s been sitting on my shelf most of that time. I’ve taken it with me on two trips and never cracked it open. Recently I realized that I’ve been enjoying reading books on the kindle app on my iphone (nothing else to carry, easy to manage, etc) and bought the kindle version of it before I left LA just in case I found the time.

I’ve found the time and much more. What I know is this, I’ve read almost 6 books on the kindle for iphone app in the last 2 months which is a better pace than I’ve read in hardcopy since I was required to read 10 books over sumer vacation one elementary school year. I also figured out that the more I read the more I write and I find inspiration in how others compose their thoughts and tell stories about their lives and experiences that I would have previously thought trivial. Since Friday I’ve probably written 10 full pages, in addition to reading most of this book and going to a wedding. For some people that is nothing, but for me it’s a massive milestone.

What I’m figuring out is my routines get in my way. At home I go all day long trying to get in the mood to write and by the end of the day still haven’t gotten there or gotten the general life things out of the way either. That’s not to say I need to get away from real life to find this motivation, but more so that I’ve created these blocks in my daily routine that clearly aren’t real if I can shed them simply by sitting on a subway for a few minutes reading a book on my phone.

So now that I know where the walls are I can start to avoid them or better yet break them down. I’m feeling really inspired right now, and very happy with what I’ve put to paper. Maybe it’s the coffee or cupcakes I just ate, and maybe it’ll fade away but it feels really good and I’m hoping I just took a step that I’ve been trying to take for years.

A few Spymaster tips

spymaster-notificationsWhen Spymaster originally launched I instantly hated it because of the default set up to spam the crap out of your friends on twitter. I really hate anything that does that and to get spammed by something that was in private beta so you couldn’t even follow through if you wanted to was extra annoying. I started blocking and banning anyone who was playing it. I guess a lot of people had that problem and they corrected some of the issues and I kind of forgot about it. Recently Joi talked me back into checking it out and it’s actually kind of fun, even though it still rewards you for being a douche by spamming your friends. If you want to check it out, the very first thing you have to do is turn off all the notifications, it’s not worth annoying everyone you know for a small cash bonus in game. This is actually my biggest problem with it and I wish they would just kill that option all together. Other than that, here are a few tips and tricks I’ve figured out:

  • Level from 1-10 doing MED level tasks. This will give you good experience and a little cash to get started and you’ll level pretty quickly.
  • Don’t buy any weapons except what you need for the tasks until you hit lvl 10.
  • At 10 sell everything you have and buy only the top tier item for attack/defense, try to get one for each spymaster you have.
  • Also, ignore the bank. Depositing anything in there is useless because of the fee, a better place to store cash is in safe houses because they don’t depreciate at all and also make you money.
  • At level 10 switch to PVP/assassinations. Focusing solely on MED level opponents will bring you in much more cash than doing tasks can and about the same experience. This will keep your cash level high enough to constantly sell off and upgrade your weapons to the highest level you can buy.
  • Attacking LOW targets is a waste of time and attacking HIGH targets can be fun but it’s risky. MED is fairly safe and pays off.
  • When you get the opportunity to buy cars, DON’T! They are not a good value for the most part and are easily lost in losing battles.
  • Take a second and do the math on equipment upgrades too, just because something new is unlocked doesn’t always mean it’s the best value. To determine how much a given item is worth take the price and divide it by the number of points it gives you and that gives you the price per point. Buy the items that have the lowest point per cost ratio to get the best bang for the buck
  • At around level 35 the cash payoff on attacking MED targets drops to nothing, so if you want cash you need to switch to HIGH targets. That said, the experience payoff for attacking LOW targets multiplies considerably, so if you want to level quickly switch to them. Sorry LOW peeps.
  • If you want to kill a director, buy the suicide attack option with your points.
  • Transfering cash via the bank sucks because they take fees each way and there s a $1MM limit each day. If you want to transfer a bunch of cash to another player, say just before you go elite and all your stats are reset, sell all your weapons so your stats are stupidly low and then attack a high level friend. You’ll loose obviously and they will get a huge chunk of cash from you. You can keep doing this all day, even dying several times. This method will allow you to transfer tons of cash.

That’s just a few tips off the top of my head that I wanted to jot down for friends. If you have any others, please post ’em in the comments.

The things you own end up owning you

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while you know I am in constant struggle with myself over super minimalism and owning too much stuff. My progress is slow and while there isn’t much difference between now and the last 6 months, there is a huge difference between now and 5 years ago and more importantly my attitude has completely changed which is really the key first step. And yes I know I sound like a broken record about this sometimes but that’s only because it’s actually incredibly important to me and sometimes gets overwhelming.

Recently I’ve been having fantasies of getting rid of every single thing I own. Not because I would ever actually do it, but just because of how freeing it would feel. Let me make that clear, I could never get rid of everything, even though I really do want to get rid of a lot. I haven’t read All My Life For Sale but that’s kind of the flash fantasies I’ve been having. Of course those come with complete panic as well because the thought of trying to sell every single thing seems like such an impossible task. But mostly, there are a few objects that are incredibly sentimental to me and I don’t think I could ever really part with them. I know people who decide to get rid of things by putting them in storage and then calculating the cost of the storage vs the value of the item, when storage becomes more expensive then replacing it they get rid of it. I think that’s a pretty good method for things aren’t irreplaceable.

I could just throw it all out or donate it but the truth is I have debts I’d like to pay off some day and I’m fairly certain the value of my stuff far exceeds what ever I owe so selling things definitely trumps just walking away from them empty handed. For more background on this I recommend It’s All Too Much which spends a lot of time talking about how stuff doesn’t really enrich your life, and having less of it allows you to live more fully. I know from my own experience that this is definitely based in fact – perhaps it’s the feeling of suddenly not being tied to so much that let’s you do so much more.

My problem is that when I get in this mindset and start looking around at what I can get rid of I start thinking of all the reasons why I can’t get rid of that. I started to think that perhaps I’m approaching things from the wrong side. Rather than looking at everything I have and trying to find places I could reduce, maybe what I should be doing is assume it’s all gone, and then see what I need and miss the most. This is kind of the desert island approach – if you could only take 5 things with you, what would the be?

So 5 things might be too limiting, but categorizing my stuff might end up making things easier to sort through. Or that’s my current thought anyway. Over the next few weeks I’m going to try and break things into a few categories that should help me isolate the expendables a bit easier. This isn’t final, but here’s the 6 piles I’m starting with:

  • Essentials: Things I can’t live with out, this would include things like clothing.
  • Requirements: While my life doesn’t depend on these things, they play a big part in my quality of life and I’d hate to lose them. This would include things like my laptop and my bike.
  • Irreplaceable: These are things that if I get rid of them they are gone for good. They could include a signed high school year book or a piece of artwork.
  • Replaceable: I have it, I like it, but if I got rid of it today and in 2 years decided I missed it I could most likely get it back in one form or another. I might put an Eames chair or my motorcycle in this category.
  • Expendable: Why the hell do I even still have this? Do I need 4 black hooded sweatshirts? Why do I still have this book that I read 5 years ago and never plan to open again?

I think that is a good start and once I get things mostly classified it will be much easier to start reducing. It’s not as simple as working my way backwards either. While the Expendable category is a no brainer, just because something is in the Irreplaceable category doesn’t mean I should keep it, it simply means I should be aware that goodbye is goodbye for good before I part with it. And similarly just because something is Replaceable doesn’t mean it’s out the door – I could replace my couch but I’m not getting rid of it because I sit on it all the time. You get the idea.

Anyway, a lot of this is simply thinking out loud but just processing this for a post makes it seem to make more sense to me.

You should write a book

Those words have been echoing in my head for years and are constantly refreshed by myself and a host of other folks. I’ve begun and talked myself out of countless projects and have folders full of everything from notes to outlines to rough chapters to fully compiled collections of completed work from other sources. They are all gathering dust. I always run into the “no one cares, it’s not worth the effort” monster and let it get the best of me.

In years gone by I could blame not having the right connections or publishers “not getting it.” I certainly sent proposals to several editors and publishers many many years ago only to have them reply with any number of things that essentially meant “no.” And surely I could have gone back and forth with them trying to convince them otherwise but for better or for worse I have a massive aversion to trying to convince people that what I’m doing is interesting. I assume people will either get it or they won’t, but I don’t want to be in the position or trying to explain anything to anyone. So I let those connections and often those ideas fall to the wayside. Luckily those people are no longer the gatekeepers and with things like lulu and the amazing success friends like Wil and Glen and Jon have had publishing their own books there is really nothing standing in my way anymore.

Other than actually doing it.

Which, as anyone who has read my blog in the past knows is actually a sizable hill to climb.

But it wasn’t always, and recently I’ve been trying to figure out what changed. This weekend I was showing Tara some of the records I put out and had forgotten a bit how much time and effort went into many of those. And they actually saw the light of day. I started wondering why things I started then actually got finished and why things I start now more often end up filed for later on. There are three major things I think that have an impact on that. Or at least they are the three things that come to mind initially for me:

1. Money. It takes some amount of cash to do things, either in the materials and production required or the time spent doing them which you need to be able to focus on and not be worried about how you are going to pay bills. In the Toybox days I saved up cash from a crappy day job, initially and then relied on sales of previous releases and student loans which I had no intention of ever paying back for the later ones. I don’t have any of those options available to me today so it ends up being something I stress about more than I would like.

2. Faith. Before I did anything I could only assume the outcome would be everything I hoped it would be. Before putting out a record the only result I could foresee was massive success. And that was a pretty powerful driving force. However after putting out almost 20 records over a 10 year span they rarely sold as fast as I wanted or got the reviews I was hoping for and mostly what I recall now is the heartache and debt I was left with. Of course that is my own fucked up perspective because as I learned showing the records to Tara, to the outside person those records don’t have any negative attachments. She didn’t know about the bad blood with that distributor or the nasty break up with this band. All she saw was the cool end result. I should probably try to look at all of this though other eyes every once and a while and remember that most people only see one side of things, and you can choose which side to show them. When I step towards any new project these days my thoughts of how cool it can be are always side by side with how much it might fail. I need to ignore the fail more often.

3. Feedback. When working with bands it was easy to see the need for our work. They would have a show and people would come out and pay money to see them. That’s easy math, anyone who is willing to pay to see the band play live is probably interested in checking out a record if they had one. Plus, it’s easier for me to put that on someone else. I can talk up how cool someone else band is or how fantastic someone elses work is. I can’t do that about myself. At all. I never have been able to. Maybe it’s being too self conscious or maybe it’s not wanting to come off like a self marketing douche, but it’s always much harder for me to determine if anyone would give a shit about something I’m working on myself and the idea of trying to gauge interest in my own stuff is filled with breakdown inducing fear. Which, admittedly, I should just get the fuck over.

Anyway, this is getting pretty far off the initial topic but I’m been running around my own head with this for weeks, months, hell probably years and wanted to just spit it out so I could get on with it.

With my blog I really don’t give a shit if anyone reads it. I know some people live and die by traffic numbers but I really never look because I’m doing this for me. This blog, and in fact posts like this very one I’m writing right now are self therapy. Yes it’s public but that’s because I have this goal of pushing “publish.” Anyone who knows me from highschool or college remembers the rants I used to write and photocopy and pretend they were zines or something so this is an old habit. Anyway, I write this blog for me and if others dig it then cool.

But a book isn’t for me.

If I’m writing a book I need to consider the audience, which is a scary idea. Does anyone actually want to read a book filled with the crap inside my head? Should that book be personal or technical, historical or fictional? If I decide on one is that a mistake and should I have really decided on one of the others? If no one likes the first one will I have the balls to continue with the second one? Do I write about blogging and about the web? Do I write about communities and networks? Do I write about self improvement and personal reflections? Do I write about relationships and interactions with others? I have a lot to say about all of them, and every one of those has been suggested as a topic by someone else, but I know that I’m the one standing in my way.

I also know that making a goal public makes it that much harder to complete, but since I don’t have a clear goal this is all random thoughts anyway. I do know I need to start doing things again. It’s been too long.