keeping creative secrets…

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One of the hardest things that I’ve found about being a creative professional is being able to keep quiet about whatever special project I’m working on until it’s actually finished.

The reasoning behind it is pretty simple – as much as I’d love to share every step of the process along the way, the overarching fear is that by the time I actually get the book/website/misc. blah blah done and ready to be unveiled, the audience will no longer feel excited about it. Or I’ll no longer feel as excited about sharing it, and thus won’t be as enticed to do a better job of marketing it afterwards.

Both blogging and Twitter make this a real pain because it’s really hard not to talk about something when it’s been your primary focus for months upon months, not to mention the idea that I’m always actively looking for new things to share via those services anyways. I know that I personally have slipped a couple of times for one project in particular in the last year, namely because it’s pretty much dominated the entire year and all of the little milestones that I made along the way felt like the kinds of things that one should be sharing!

Then again, I probably don’t make it any easier for myself just with the way that I take on work – right now I have some nine projects that I want to get done before the end of the year, which is a huge crunch but at the same time will put me in a really good place for what I want to focus on next year, but on the downside, in addition to being absolutely swamped and working non-stop, it leaves me wanting to blog about my efforts and progress and frustrations with each one all the more!

It does make me wonder – on a much more relaxed schedule (i.e. one thing at a time…), is there wiggle room to share a limited amount of progress publicly while I’m working on a particular project, or is it truly better to save it all for the big reveal? I can think of a couple of instances where webcomics creators shared out samples of their book covers while they were still working out the details, and at least one drove me to look forward to buying the book, so perhaps the answer to this one isn’t as cut and dry as I’ve previously tried to make it.

There might be something more here to explore next year after all… 😉

anniversary afterthoughts…

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Over the weekend, my wife and I celebrated our 4th anniversary, as I had previously mentioned a couple of weeks ago.

Some of our time was spent over at Disney World, but instead of retelling all of those wet and delicious and fun stories all over again, I think it would be easier for me to just link over to another site where I’ve already written a nice post that I think does a great job at summarizing our festivities…

(Please note: That site still isn’t technically done yet … although it’s finally getting really close, so try not to kick the tires too hard if you decide to poke around a bit afterwards! I’ve managed to keep quiet about this thing for as long as I could, but I’m really starting to get antsy and can’t wait until I can finally pull off the cloth and start sharing everything that I’ve been focusing on for the last 10 months a bit more publicly!)

finding inspiration in the wake of tragedy…

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The last couple of days have been sort of surreal with Steve Jobs’ passing and all. Already there have been reports of memorials appearing at Apple stores around the globe, fellow innovators spanning everyone from Bill Gates (Microsoft) to Larry Page (Google), John Lasseter and Ed Catmull (Pixar), and even President Obama have released statements expressing their sympathies and sharing their appreciation for the profound effect that Steve’s work has had on their lives.

One thing I can’t help but take away from all of this is an unexpected sense of inspiration to go out and do amazing things in the wake of this incredible man’s footsteps…

(you can also find a tribute version of the above Apple commercial from 1997 that replaces the imagery with clips of Steve himself over the years…)

It’s kind of funny that earlier today I saw a random comment on Facebook where an older woman was encouraging people to “power down all of their Apple devices tonight in honor of the man who had created them,” and all I could do was snicker at that thought because my best guess is that this would be the last thing that a guy like Steve Jobs would want people to do. This is a man who loved technology and had an intense passion for making our computers personal once again, and so instead of temporarily stepping away from all of that in memory, I’d like to think that his best tribute would be from those who can’t put their devices down in spite of this loss, and of course, those who will be working into the wee hours of the night all weekend and in the months to come in search of the next next big thing.

A couple more quotes to close on – first, I particularly liked how President Obama closed his remarks:
“There may be no greater tribute to Steve’s success than the fact that much of the world learned of his passing on a device he invented.”

And finally, from Steve himself:
“The only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking and don’t settle.”

“Stay hungry, stay foolish.”

Time to get to work…

a community coping with the loss of an icon…

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Wow. Last night was kind of crazy – one minute I’m gearing up for another normal, regularly scheduled evening of writing my humor column, the next I read a tweet saying that Apple founder Steve Jobs has died, and from there everything pretty much came to a screeching halt as I tried to sort through the chaos and just kind of make sense of it all for myself.

Although I don’t necessarily work on a Mac right now, I’ve vowed that my next laptop will be a MacBook Air (due to its amazing size) … and I pretty much go everywhere with my iPhone.

And there’s certainly no denying that Apple computers helped to shape my childhood in an incredible and profound way – the school libraries always had rows upon rows of Apple IIe‘s for us to learn typing and play educational games.

Later in the 4th grade, I had a teacher who had one of the first Mac Classics in her room and she was excited enough about computers to let us play Carmen Sandiego on it during breaks and recess and sometimes even right in the middle of class, just because she wanted to see how it ended!

At home we had an early clone of an Apple IIe, which always kind of sucked because it meant that none of the software from school would work on it, but I still enjoyed it, both in learning to write my first BASIC programs on it when I was about eight and a few years later using it to transcribe my first “novel” using the WordStar word processing program.

It’s kind of weird because even though we all knew that Steve has been fighting pancreatic cancer for a number of years, in no way did it make the shock any easier to deal with. Thankfully, the tech community really came together and it was a great reminder of which friends I had in which circles … whereas on Facebook, which is mostly “real life” friends and family, there were a total of 3 mentions of it throughout the entire night (out of 112 friends), and one of them was negative and kind of crude, whereas over on Twitter my entire feed was nothing put outpourings about grief and his contributions to society and jokes and inspiration from hundreds of fellow geeks … exactly what you would expect and hope for from a group in mourning.

Eventually somebody tweeted that Leo LaPorte and the TWiT crew were doing a live broadcast to talk about things, so I jumped over there and sat with that in the background for a good three hours before they finally went off the air and returned to regular programming. It was kind of amusing even then because at one point the discussion ended so that Leo could do a spot on CNN, although they kept the cameras rolling and we basically got to listen in on Leo waiting to be on the show, and it was a really interesting look into the vast differences between traditional and niche broadcasting. For a long time it didn’t even look like he was going to be on because the way it would work is CNN was just going on the fly, so as they got more and more people “lined up” for interviews, they would constantly reprioritize who they thought had the most to contribute to the show and bump people down the list.

Which I guess is fine for general interest or whatever, but as a fellow tech enthusiast I just got so much more out of TWiT Live because they didn’t have to wait to find people to be on the show who knew about Steve Jobs and his contributions to society because they already knew all about him themselves! So instead, what we got was a real nice, informal gathering of friends sitting around and sharing stories, kind of like a wake would be. At points different people would come and go – some because they were writers who needed to write obituary features for their respective outlets, which I can only imagine must’ve been difficult – but all in all it was just what I needed because at times like this sometimes it’s just nice to be surrounded by people who recognize the same genius that you do when faced with tragedy.

I’m going to write a separate post with some more thoughts about the evening in a different vein, but I guess to cap this one off, I’m just grateful for the tech community and all of my fellow geeks who came together in support of one another as we bid farewell to one of the pioneers of personal computing. Most of us got our start using something that Steve Jobs had a hand in creating, and more likely today can’t go more than a few hours without one of his devices in our hands – he brought the world closer together as a community, and I can’t thank him enough for that.

The Simpsons isn’t DOOMED…

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So a pretty ridiculous article came out today citing that The Simpsons (pretty much my favorite shows of all-time) could very well be cancelled due to salary disputes between the network and the cast. “We believe this brilliant series can and should continue, but we cannot produce future seasons under its current financial model,” Twentieth Century Fox said in a statement.

Right…

This is a show that sells a BILLION dollars worth of merchandise every year, has its own theme park attraction, hundreds of episodes already in syndication, and is approaching their 500th episode and is already the longest running series in primetime history – anyone who believes that The Simpsons are worth more to FOX off the air than on are niave and short-sighted.

You don’t stop the 800-lb gorilla dead in its tracks when there are still more buildings for him to scale, and The Simpsons most definitely still has a lot of life left in the show. Yeah, the viewership ain’t what it used to be … just like every show on TV thanks to new media on the Internet! And yes, it does seem kind of crazy for the voice actors to make $250,000 an episode … that is, until you factor in that during its prime, the stars of Friends were making $1 million an episode (during season 10) and the cast of Seinfeld was making $600,000 an episode (during season 9; also, Jerry made $1 mill/ep).

By the way, The Simpsons is currently on season 23.

The point is that although it seems like stupid money to the rest of us to think that these stars make more per week than most of us will in several years, it’s really a pretty common thing in Hollywood for veteran actors, so all the network is trying to do here is scare up a little fan animosity in hopes of convincing the cast to give up some of their profits so that they don’t have to do the same.

The show has been on for 21 years – FOX may have its faults, but they’re not going to kill their golden goose over $18 million/year in salary disputes with these actors.

eminent domain is bullshit

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I saw this story on Boing Boing and even though I’ve heard similar cases before, it baffles my mind of just how crazy this is and why it doesn’t get more press than this…

The argument with this one is that the place had a bad reputation for crime, even though the article cites that the actual statistics are pretty minimal. But even then, aren’t there other laws already in place to address this kind of thing on a less strict basis than “we’re keeping it!”?!

It never seemed right when I’d read a story about a local government seizing land to build a highway, either, or worse yet … a shopping mall. I think if the owners want to sell, then by all means, or even let the buyers pay 2x or 3x the price for reluctant sellers, but to just declare it a public interest and plunk down a considerably smaller sum that the owner would never settle on by himself?

Something’s not right there.