Oh, The Ennui

FOR SHEER LAUGHS in the morning, the combination of designed-to-within-an-inch-of-their-lives living spaces & existential regrets -- well, Unhappy Hipsters, I salute you. I really do.

Procrastination Tango

THIS WEEK I've got a number of things to do for the WGC and other projects that's going to make for a bear on my time. Originally I thought I'd lay fallow, but I've decided that I'm going to push links at you for the most part instead. Maybe your comments will be so scintillating nobody will notice.

First up is an article in yesterday's Toronto Star that does touch on the dirty little secret of writer procrastination -- that it's actually part of the process.

I read the entire Internet first," admits the Canadian poet Jennica Harper (What it Feels Like for a Girl). "I've discovered this is a problem for a lot of us. People used to start the day by reading an actual newspaper, which, while long, is finite. When your morning news comes via the Endless Tubes, it's harder to know where to stop. When is the news you've read `enough'? (A handy hint: Stop before you click any headline that includes the name Gosselin.)"

As far as avoidance insurance is concerned, more writers mentioned email and the Internet than any other temptations, and several offered strategies for avoiding even these: the cartoonist Seth, creator of George Sprott (1894-1975), packs his old manual typewriter off to a hotel room to write, Canadian novelist Annabel Lyon (The Golden Mean) and American author Joseph Kanon (Stardust) install themselves in a public library.

Some writers walk their dogs – excellent procrastination facilitators because they're so nakedly and urgently needy – while other re-arrange CD collections, play computer games, stare at deliberately unadorned walls or, in the words of the Scottish author Richard Holloway (Between the Monster and the Saint), "generally muck about."

Secondly, I managed to finish a script that I was deadly stalled on last week, while working concurrently on another project. And the way I did it was with little countdown timers based on The Pomodoro Technique. Now, I first read about the Pomodoro on somebody else's site, and lost track of whose. So if it was you, thanks. You kind of saved my butt last week. I don't know how it will continue to work, but for now, this has been a Godsend.

And that's all the time I've got today. Talk amongst yourselves.

I Am Curious, Yellow

IT NEEDS a few more options (like Glasses! And different hats! C'mon!) but at least it's a start. And it's well worth you wasting five minutes.

At the Simpsons Movie site, there is a create your own Simpsons Character game.

Awesome.


At left, Springfield me, "Hey! Does anyone want to quote me in something?"


UPDATE: Okay, what's sadder about this -- that I went back in and changed the character to give it a more realistic receding hairline, or that I actually opened it in Photoshop so I could draw in glasses?

Gobbling Advils Like Tic Tacs

Some very, very intense writing the last couple days boys and girls, so no time for blogging. But of course, even though I've put in two 12+ hour days, that doesn't mean you don't build in the procrasto-time. Since my brain's too fried to actually write anything original, how about this...three of the big things I surfed to today.

You're welcome.

First, if you saw Children of Men, you must have been mesmerised by the rich visual texture of all the screens and moving ads. Way more subtly and interestingly executed than the cynical product placement in Minority Report. Well, now the agency that did them, Foreign Office, is giving you a closer look. Neat. I wonder how much of this was scripted and how much was their own initiative?

Then there was the case of the Oscar sound-mixer smackdown. Boo-yaka, bitch, hear my snark! (Cause it's so crystal clear and well-mixed!)

Finally, it's not that this SNL Digital Short is even that funny. (They're starting to hit the law of diminshing returns.) It's just that I think I'm physically compelled to find anything Rainn Wilson or Will Forte does funny.