I recently signed up for Netflix. Seems like a cool service but had such an appallingly poor selection I cancelled before my free trial ran out. Also, I couldn’t find a way of getting it working on the PS3 as there seemed to be no app available unlike LoveFilm. Speaking of which, I’m loving. Much better selection and nicely working on the PS3. Cheaper too for the streaming only package. I finally got to see the black and white French film Angel-A, a film I’ve been wanting to see for a long time. It was everything I had hoped for, a really beautiful, quirky film. I’m liking these streaming services, they are actually making me watch films again. CONVENIENCE, PEOPLE! This is what the industry needs to pick up on. People are cheap and lazy, make your damn products to fit instead of sticking your head in the sand and hoping everyone will change to suit.

Work is fun. I’ve been working on a big project for some time now, getting into UX as well as working with some interesting tech, playing with the new-ish HTML5 technologies. Fun stuff.  I still sucks though, just slightly less so.

I generally don’t make resolutions for the New Year, but I am going to try and do some more exercise. Having spent the last 4 years or so essentially sat on my ass the whole time, I was shocked a few days ago when I did some simple exercise to find that pretty much all my strength has gone. Not really shocking, given my activity levels, but it really made the point that I need to do something before I turn into some fatty spherical lump that lift a fork without losing his breath. Taking the typical geek route, I’m focusing on statistics, statistics and more statistics. I’m hoping actually tracking and graphing staff might gave me some immediate visual goals to reach for, since just doing exercise, as a participant with no tracking, never feels like I’m making any progress, which is never encouraging. Hopefully Fitocracy and/or RunKeeper will provide some much needed guidance and motivation.

Since working for Multiplay, games have become a large part of my life again. Having now bought over 300 games in the last 2 years, I have quite a large back catalogue to play though. Typically these are all indie title but for a few more mainstream items, since that tends to be where my interests lie. [Generic FPS] just doesn’t interest me, though I will say that I’m enjoying the independent, single-player only Hard Reset immensely at the moment. I’ve played a lot of Skyrim recently, which has been a lot of fun. I’m always amazed by the things fans will do, and this beautiful track by Malukah Fenix certainly qualifies as amazing:

My writing has taken a bad hit this last year. I’ve barely written anything or read anything for that matter (well, barely read anything means less than 20 or so books in the year for my appetite ). There are many stories I want to finish and that a few people on Protagonize want to see the conclusions of, so I need to get back on the saddle. I had said to myself last year I would try and seriously pursue publication, but that hasn’t happened. I’m hoping this year, now I have more time due to driving to work, things will be different, but if I’m entirely honest with myself, I doubt I’ll put the required time or effort into making a serious attempt. Not only is it a lot of work, it’s quite intimidating. I do want to finish at least one novel though by the end of the year and hopefully get into the meat of editing it with an eye to publish it independently, for kicks, since I’m not sure I’m even interested in mainstream publication or actually making a living from writing.

I’d also like to try and get back into music again and I have a computer game I’ve been meaning to develop for some time. So many projects, so little time.

Lets hope the time thing changes this year. Or, more proactively, let’s actually try to change that this year.

And on the happy note of the commute, I finally passed my driving test. I passed it by the skin of my teeth, more by luck than I’d like, but hell, I’ll take the win after the umpteen failures I’ve already collected. Now I have the fun, fun, fun time of trying to get car insurance that isn’t cripplingly expensive. It’s looking might it actually might be cheaper to buy a brand new car on finance and pay the insurance on that, as the insurance on my current car (which depressingly I realise I’ve owned for almost a year without being able to drive it) is more than double the quotes I’m getting on new cars and the finance costs of new cars over 5 years or so are roughly equal to the insurance premium (which should hopefully drop after the first year) whilst also having better fuel economy. Kinda sad that I buy a used car, only to find almost a year later it’s as if not more expensive for me to own and run than a brand new one.

Money, money, money! Arrrrgh!

Or it will be, if I can actually get it written.

I’ve been having trouble outlining it, coming up with scenes, etc. The idea just don’t want to form in my head. This is typical of me, I’m not a great planner in any sphere, for example in programming I find it much easier to think through ways to do something by trying the actually code a solution, rather than by planning it all out with flow charts and everything else beforehand. However, I do like having lots of goals to meet, which, without a plan, is quite hard. I think instead I might have to outline as I go and use my notes more as a map to refer back to for consistency, rather than as a guide of where to go.

However, what I have done so far is working out well. I’m using Zim, a desktop wiki application to keep notes, which I save to a dropbox folder so I can access them wherever I go. Mapping out my protagonists is going reasonably well, I’m currently using the Dresden Files RPG character generation sheets to flesh them out a bit (the game uses FATE as a rule system, which is fairly story-focused and works very well). I’ve been doing with using Fiasco or Do as scene generators, but neither really suit the genre I’m writing for, so I’ve not bothered.

The worst thing though is that I’ve been quite busy recently since getting off holiday, so I doubt I’ll have much time to develop my outline further or even get any writing done. Which is why I’m worried about not having an outline, because without clearly defined goals, I’m likely to flounder in the limited time I do have!

But what the hell, lets have a go anyway.

Now, Unity gets a lot of mud thrown at it. The main complaints I’ve seen are it ‘dumbs down’ Linux. I don’t think this is true. However, it does lack some things, things that for me define the Linux experience, and that annoys me.

These things mainly are configurability. This isn’t to say that it isn’t configurable, but rather that a lot of this configuration is hidden behind arcane, invisible methods like the gconf system for example. Linux for me has always been about providing an environment where the user is in control, where everything can be configured and where the configuration of those programs is relatively standardised and easy to do (easy being a relative term here, I doubt anyone would argue that the sendmail config file is easy, as an example of the bad end of the scale). I found Unity to fail at providing this kind of environment. Sure it gets out of your way and lets you ‘just work’, but it does it by hiding a lot of things unnecessarily, rather than being an elegant solution.

Now that the main negative is out of the way, it’s time to move on to the positives.

Generally, I found the workflow in Unity not much different to my usual one. I was annoyed to find my Win key hijacked away from my usual Synapse/Gnome-Do program but I got used to it. The global menu I found fairly easy to get to grips with and it didn’t cause any problems. I quickly learnt to always look up for options. This might be due to having some experience with OSX though for a number of years, so for a new user or one experienced in non-global menu systems, it might be more disconcerting.

Apart from it just ‘getting out of the way’ I didn’t really find it did much for my workflow at all. Since I try to avoid using the mouse, I did basically what I did before – trigger the application search to run an app and use the keyboard to switch workspaces. I didn’t really use the icon bar as I could generally type the name of the app in the search before I could remember what the icons did or what Win+Num shortcut mapped to them.

The notification icons not showing was a massive problem as a lot of apps I used didn’t support the new system and so I had to hack around in the gconf settings, which I would have never discovered if not for others posting solutions. I found on my dual monitor system that the system tray icons would have issues – some would only work on the primary screen and not the other, the ones on the right never triggering or only flashing their menus intermittently only to whisk them away instantly.

I didn’t find it all bad though and I think for the mass market, the new user that only wants to use what’s provided through the ubuntu software centre and has one monitor, it does it’s job. However, I found it to be quite hostile towards customisation, something I’ve never associated with Linux before. It seems to me to be trying too hard to be OSX, providing a single end-to-end software eco-system and user experience. This isn’t a bad thing, after all, OSX is very popular for a reason and it does provide a very tight, well balanced system if you want to do things in the way it provides.

I think there is a place for Unity, but it’s not really for me. I’ve found Ubuntu have developed this OSX style philosophy further in 11.10 and I found myself not liking it at all. On my main desktop machine I’m now trying out GNOME Shell, in the hope that it provides a nice balance between what a Linux system means to me and a productive, uncluttered desktop that gets out of my way and just lets me work. After using it for a while, I’ll write up how I feel about it.

I think the real issue here, if I re-examine it from another angle is that I don’t actually find that much interesting. I’m an incredibly cynical person and take very little joy from many of the things I do. Okay, that’s not really true, it more that what joy I do take doesn’t last very long. I’m not miserable or even unhappy by any means. As I said, I’m content, but I guess that isn’t the same as being happy. Maybe it is. I don’t know. I’m incredibly lazy when I have the freedom to allow it. I don’t go anywhere or do anything, partly down to a lack of means but mostly down to a lack of motivation. I’m just not interested and that comes back to the crux of the matter. It’s not that I don’t live an interesting life but rather that I don’t find anything interesting about it. I could do something about it, but I can’t be bothered and I don’t know where to start. I mean, how do you actually find things that interest you when you aren’t interested in anything? It’s always seemed to be that one interest feeds into the next but starting from zero tends to make that hard.

And, low and behold, this post has become another introspective whine-fest, moping about things in a public forum and for what purpose? Catharsis, perhaps. A cry for help, maybe? Again, too lazy to make a change myself, hoping for an external force to instigate change. My cynicism again, asserting it’s sarcastic, dismissive view on any and all things.

The thing is, I do sort of enjoy my point of view. I get a weird kick out of depression and pain and melancholy, something satisfying and meaty and nourishing. It’s where a lot of my writing comes from – when I can be arsed to write at all – from this hunger for despair, this mining of my own personal vein of nihilism. That’s what it really is, I suppose, at the end of the day. Nihilism. I just don’t see the point in anything because there isn’t one. No purpose, no goal, no meaning. And I’m good with that, but I’l admit, it’s a poor motivator. Maybe that’s the real reason for abandoning reason to things like faith, because without some external motivational force or some goal to work towards, the sentient mind falls into a stupor. To be honest, I’d be happy to spend all day for the rest of my life doing nothing, mindlessly consuming content because I can’t be bothered to imagine, never getting out of bed except to excrete. Eating, excreting, entertainment, the three Es.

So why don’t I? Why not just give up on doing anything and just lay down in the dirt and wait for my next handout? Because I can’t. As I said, I’m content, I like my life as it is, even as I compare it to others and find it lacking. I like routine, my routine. I don’t want the change or, frankly, need it. To be honest, I think if I allowed myself to do that, I’d lose the little motivation I do have, but maybe that’s the point. Embracing that emptiness, motivation becomes meaningless.

I think maybe this isn’t a problem isolated to myself, but rather it’s a spreading epidemic amongst the population. Apathy, a sense of impotence. Those that fall prey to it become as tumours in the meat of society, a cancer that spreads by virtue of showing everyone else that such blissful emptiness is possible, that in can work, the irony that it’s only supported by it’s antithesis often going amiss.

What started as introspection became a commentary on my opinion on society. Seems cheap and I’m not even sure I believe it myself. After all, the mind plays tricks and it’s easy to shift the blame, to stop looking inwards and blame life, blame society, these faceless forces we know are there but refuse to really acknowledge until we don’t want to take responsibility for our own actions.

The funniest thing about all this is that I find it amusing. Going back to an earlier paragraph, I feed off this stuff, this self-doubt, this self-loathing torrent of cynicism and introspection. It actually makes me feel good, it makes me smile, laugh even. This kind of bizarre self-torment and introspection is a source of macabre fascination and again we come back to an earlier topic, the circle is complete.

There is something I’m interested in, and that thing is suffering. Melancholy, sadness, loneliness and that feeling of displacement, of not knowing where you stand in the world. I’m fascinated by them, hungry for them. They make me smile. It’s why I like my dark comedies, my atmospheric progressive rock from the likes of Anathema and horror stories unresolved rather than fairy tales with happy endings. The world is a hedonistic place, full of the pursuits of pleasure, the definition of self-worth in every purchase of another piece of pleasure and maybe that’s why I feel uninterested in so much of it because I don’t want that, I want something different. I think there is a place for sadness and bitterness and hate. I don’t want them to exist, I don’t want to feel them, but I want to acknowledge that they belong, that they are a part of all of us and that we need them, that a world without them would be a world without human beings, without thought or reason.

So whilst everyone else enjoys the pleasures of the world without, I’ll suffice myself with the things that lurk within. Let outside march the gaudy parade, I’ll watch from my dusty basement window, a dine on my meagre supper.

If I can be bothered, that is.

For the authors that joined in, the deal was simple. This book when finished would be published via a self-publishing service and I would pay for a and send a copy to each one. We’d all get the opportunity to write with each other, work on a real, serious project and work on doing proper editing and revisions.

Things however, did not go to plan.

This is an article about the challenges faced and the lessons learned, both about myself and the running of an ambitious project, from the failure of Ten.

When I started Ten I was excited and passionate about the project. I really wanted to see it succeed and wanted to work with the best of the best on Protagonize so I started by setting up auditions. The purpose of auditioning was two-fold. It demonstrated quality writing and it was a way of measuring interest and enthusiasm on protagonize for the project. The first warning that the project was likely to have issues was the low turn out for the auditions.

The Ten project started with ten predefined characters which at the start consisted of little more than a name, location and the reward offered to them for winning the “game” i.e. killing the others. The auditions were writers of a specific character and were in the form of writing an initial chapter for that character, finishing off with stating what their thoughts were for the character’s story arc and the arc for the story as a whole.

Some characters received only one audition, most received two with just one or two having three or more auditions. From a site whose members number in the thousands, this might have been a little disheartening but I was so full of enthusiasm that I didn’t mind and went ahead anyway. Luckily nearly all the entries were of a high quality and anticipating collaboration, the prospect of more experienced authors helping and supporting less experienced ones was both exciting and comforting.

Before accepting anyone regardless of quality, I made sure to have them confirm they were in for the long haul as this was a project that would require regular and consistent input over the course of two or more years before publication. Everyone confirmed this.

For the first few weeks, things seemed to go reasonably well but when people fell behind, everyone got held up waiting for them to contribute.

This was my first mistake – I should have rallied the troops and kept the momentum going, rather than allowing the project to grind to a halt as various members didn’t meet their posting deadlines. I got slack, not wanting to scare away authors or seem like a bossy, nagging tyrant, so I never put my foot down. I think this was possibly the worst mistake, as the issues happened early on and the project never really recovered.

Afterwards, delays increased. No-one was really collaborating, something I was very keen to focus on. There were little to no group discussion about characters or plot and the authors (including myself to a degree) were treating the story more like a roleplaying game than a collaborative effort. Authors dropped out or were otherwise ejected by myself after prolonged, unexplained absences.

I didn’t know how to fix this, I tried to drum up some discussion and pushed for the other authors to work together more, but it didn’t really seem to have any effect, if anything, it actually seemed to alienate the authors from the story even more. I think the pressure I put on them not only to create a story but to make the time to work together with others directly, rather than passively, was too much and made them want to avoid the story, which they did. Eventually the story ground to a halt.

I tried instituting a forced ‘character swap’ or write/edit pairing but that only caused more fracturing and confusion as many of the authors felt either uncomfortable with that or otherwise didn’t understand what I was asking of them.

I should have talked more about this, invited more discussion but by this point I was really quite disheartened and felt my prior attempts to bring the group together were wasted or were even harmful to the continued writing of the story so I didn’t make much of an effort to correct this.

Later, I changed the style of the story slightly, hoping a more adult angle and the freedom that could bring to the authors might help. It didn’t.

The story basically died after that and never recovered and I was too defeated by the whole ordeal to bother carrying it on myself.

So, what went wrong?

It’s clear I don’t really work well in a leadership position. I lack the natural charisma required to enthuse others and promote morale. Trying to lead a large group of authors from varying backgrounds and age groups was a fool’s errand, without those skills and the whole project suffered for it with the symptoms being a lack of direction, coherence and vision.

Also, I was surprised by the seeming inability to completely collaborate. Trying to get people to work together was incredibly hard. Few wanted to do any planning, and those that did only did so minimally and in isolation from the others. The Wiki I had set up was barely edited by anyone other than myself and any collaborative tools I presented lay unused by the group. I think having such a large group made this worse, ironically. Somehow being more crowded made everyone need to be further apart. The fact that the characters were all geographically and culturally separated, something I thought very exciting and challenging, also encouraged this isolation. I felt increasing frustrated as I couldn’t get the group to work in the way I’d envisioned. Maybe I hadn’t explained just what kind of project this was or how I expected authors to contribute properly, but I felt like I was fighting for ever bit of group discussion or collaboration.

What went right?

Overall the writing was good and when we did work together and discuss things, I felt the entire process was very rewarding. It was fun and eye-opening to work with lots of different authors, both young and old, experienced or relatively new to the site. The auditions, while not as successful as I’d hoped, did spawn of some stories of their own, which I was very pleased to see and I hope that maybe they continue on, keeping the idea alive even if the project failed.

How can I fix it next time?

I think a lot of the issues come down to the number of authors, the structure of the auditions and the structure of the actual story idea.

The entire idea encouraged isolation of characters from the start (even if the ultimate goal for all of them was to meet the others). The auditions themselves were also only for a single character. I think in hindsight, audition posts should have instead been mid-story chapters, ones that involved multiple characters and required thought into the back story of each, the plot so far and the plot progression itself from that point. Something meaty and involving multiple story elements would have been a better test for all the factors that I was looking for in potential authors.

I think I should have developed a stronger story idea, a well-defined vision for the whole story beginning to end rather than a character-centric concept. The lack of direction put an awful lot of strain on the authors and with the amount of characters and their natural isolation at the beginning of the story, the cognitive overhead of all that made moving forward confidently with the story too hard.

Reducing the number of authors would force authors to, if they still couldn’t wrap their heads around full collaboration, at least handle multiple characters at once, which would hopefully lead to a fully collaborative experience.

Given the isolation of the characters at the beginning of the plot, it might have been better to start writing in the middle of the story and add in the back story through flashbacks, etc (to potentially be re-ordered in the editing phase).

Get a project manager. Seriously, I suck at leading and while I might be the one with the creative vision driving the inception of the project, something of this scope and size needs proper management and organisation. When it comes down to it, there was a massive lack of discipline in the group and it inevitably tore the project apart.

Final thoughts

While it might seem like I’m blaming everyone involved for everything, many of the faults lie firmly on my own shoulders. A lack of planning, organisation, leadership and adequate evaluation of candidates are all down to me, as are the fundamental problems with the story itself. Protagonize is perhaps not the community to attempt such an undertaking with. I’ve found that the attitude of per-character roleplay-style writing is extremely prevalent there and the sort of pure-collaborative “everyone doing everything” style of collaboration is a rarity. Of course, this might not be the case, but it is to me the apparent status quo, perhaps due to the way roleplay-style stories, ratings, etc work to promote themselves naturally into the main focus areas of the site, pushing other works out of view. I couldn’t say for sure.

All in all, I tried to make something bigger than myself and I failed. Would I try it again? Sure, but smaller, more focused, less ambitious.

The Law is pretty simple. Whenever you say “pew pew” it must be immediately followed by the phrase “green laser”. It only applies when spoken (though doing it when writing is encouraged and I only don’t here, though it pains me, for illustration purposes) and you can’t make up for it by saying “green laser” at any point other than immediately following the saying of “pew pew”. Obviously you have to have meant to have said it as part of the sentence “pew pew green laser” but if you forget and catch yourself quickly enough and haven’t said anything since saying “pew pew” saying “green laser” then is tolerated, but frowned upon as lazy and negligent. If the delay is too long though (more than 2 seconds max, and that’s pushing it) then it’s too late.

The colour of laser is not optional; it is always green.

So what happens if you break “The Law”?

You lose respect, of yourself and your peers and furthermore you make the entire world a little bit sadder. If you spot someone breaking “The Law”, you can say “green laser” for them, but it isn’t the same, they’ve still broken “The Law” though your valiant effort reduces the amount of sadness by some small measure. The only real defence against lawbreakers is education.

Thus is “The Law”.