Rebecca Thomas Designs

Who should be gatekeeping?

2010-07-30T18:17:41Z

Not that I’m anywhere near being ready to have to make this decision, but I’ve often debated between querying my writing or just self-publishing it. Part of it is just the nerves that come with putting something very dear to you out where people can judge it. Part of it is listening to agents, editors, publishers, and writers who’ve already faced and made the decision. Part of it is listening to, “The sky is falling,” rhetoric from people both inside and outside the publishing industry.

Self-publishing has made small waves, with authors occasionally winning traditional contracts for successful self-publishing efforts. e-Books are making larger waves, in part because both traditional and self-publishers can create e-Books. It’s sort of fascinating to watch things play out.

But it does have me wondering: Who really should have the say on what’s going to be worth reading? We’ve always assumed it’s the publishing houses, because they’re supposedly trained or experienced enough to serve as the “best choice”. And agents, editors, and writers often share their thoughts on the published books they’ve been reading, so it’s safe to assume they’re probably in the larger group of us who read.

But they’re a section of it, and publishing houses have a history of passing on manuscripts that have later turned out to be The Next Big Deal. It’s a hazard of calculated risk-taking, I guess. It’s more that they’re making the decision of what they’d be willing to take on the production cost for. Self-publishers make the decision that they’re willing to take on the production cost for their own manuscripts. To me, that’s the real difference between the two.

But when it comes down to what’s going to be read, it seems like it’s the readers themselves who ultimately make that choice. Regardless of the publishing source. Regardless of the format. Readers will read what they want to read how they want to read it.

So, who really should be deciding what’s publishable?

Accidental Learning in Media

2010-07-28T15:28:24Z

Over the weekend, I read that romantic comedies are ruining relationships. People expect their relationships to be exactly like these movies, and they leave when it isn’t. For years, people have been either accusing cartoons and video games of increasing violent tendencies in children or studying the potential relationship between violence in children’s media and violent acts committed by children. I have to wonder how many of the love-scorned adults out there were children who learned their violent ways from cartoons and video games.

We teach young children about reality and fantasy. Somehow, if these studies are all to be believed, they lose that understanding somewhere in elementary school, and it only gets worse as they get older. I’d be willing to bet those (heavily-edited) reality shows don’t help much, either. I’ve known people who couldn’t miss an episode of their favorite reality show, and then couldn’t function if their own life wasn’t full of drama. While it was interesting to see what lengths they would go to just to add more drama to their life, I don’t really miss any of them.

The question here becomes: How do we keep reinforcing the difference between reality and fantasy? How do we make it strong enough that people can understand the difference between being inspired by media and expecting these stories to be how the real world functions? And how do we tuck the intentional moments of instruction in and have them sink in over everything else?

Playing MySims Kingdom

2010-07-26T16:27:35Z

A friend gave me MySims Kingdom (DS) for my birthday a couple of weeks ago, so that’s taken over the bulk of my gaming time. At first, it seemed fine. I created my Sim and sent her off on errand after errand for the people on her island, playing any mini-game I came across. I sort of followed the storyline, which I think was meant to explain why the island was so sparse. The King was constantly lecturing the mayor and me for not rebuilding the island.

Over the weekend, it finally occurred to me that I wasn’t really playing a Sims game. I was ignoring the player-controlled design for just trying to get through the game. I was trying to play an RPG. I started using the tools and mini-games to acquire things. I ran myself silly trying to collect things, without using them. Again, I still wasn’t playing a Sims game. By that time, I had finished enough of the tasks that the storyline had effectively vanished, leaving me with nothing but the design aspect of the game. Realizing that, I slowly started actually trying to design each of my little houses. I even started building in some of the areas.

And then, in trying to plan out the design for the area where the game started, it finally occurred to me why I wasn’t paying the game as it was intended: I was waiting for the game to begin.

I know it sounds odd, especially since I’d seen Sims games before, but I kind of expected a game with “Kingdom” in the title and castles, dragons, and magic wands in the commercials and trailers to actually exhibit more fantasy tropes than an angry king and a rumored Star Prince. And there I was with a modern kitchen in one of my houses and a helicopter to fly me between the lowest and highest levels of the island.

Yep, that’s fantasy!

A little research soon revealed that MySims Kingdom for the DS was pretty much just like the MySims game, just with a King, and that all of the Kingdom theming went to the Wii version of the game. I’m so disappointed. I had specifically picked this game as my formal introduction to the Sims games because I love fantasy. I thought it would be an easy way to get involved and have fun. But it turns out it was too hard to theme everything in the DS game to match the title.

Adding to my frustration, the gameplay seems so pointless at times. For example, there’s no real sense of scarcity. Acquiring money and essences are both fairly simple and abundant, so you never really have to strategize how you’re going to save up enough to do what you want. Navigating across the island takes a while, too, even once you set up the heliports, and that can keep you from getting where you want to go during the time that spot is open for play. If I really want to be somewhere, I often have to kill time in that area or the adjacent area to make sure I can get where I need to be when I need to be.

Some of the Sims also have bizarre reactions to things. One of your errands is cheering up one of the shop owners. You encourage him and encourage him and encourage him…and he berates you for not being angry alongside him. I have no idea how that cheers him up, but… Another Sim blames you for the fact the pizza shop (that doesn’t actually seem to exist on the island, despite the fact the chef keeps appearing and demanding you give him vegetables) keeps screwing up his order. Once you get angry, he calms down. So, the indirect lesson here is if you get angry, things will be better.

Despite this major disappointment, I have had some fun exploring the island. I’m slowly designing each section (and it’s been quite a process to decide how to use each area). I enjoy playing the mini-games, too. I like how they make sense with their objective and their location. Now that I’m actually trying to rebuild the island, I’m finding that I enjoy trying to theme an area (despite the fact the themes I’ve selected for most of the areas are very difficult to find items for).

As a game, MySims Kingdom is fun. As a Kingdom, the game could use a definite redesign.

Curating the Dashboard

2010-07-23T16:33:22Z

All right, this is the last post exploring my productivity tools. If you’re still reading this, thanks. The project to organize and beat all my data into submission is still trudging along slowly, but I’m pretty sure I’ve covered all of the tools involved after today.

Oddly enough, my dashboard is the one tool that hasn’t spiraled out of control. What is a dashboard? It’s an all-in-one place to keep an eye on things important to you (not entirely unlike the dashboard of your car). As you’ve no doubt noticed by now, I use several tools on a daily or near-daily basis. A couple of them (not counting the dashboard) remain open at all times in their own tabs because I use them so often it’s just pointless to close them. The majority of the others have buttons on my Bookmark bar so I can open them quickly.

All of the tools, however, are represented on my dashboard. I use iGoogle to keep an eye on everything, going into a tool to do something only when I really need to. I have a tab to keep an eye on my calendar, my email (I often just respond to my email in iGoogle.), my to-do list, Google Reader, Google Bookmarks, and the weather. I have a tab that can effectively serve as a workspace. It contains Google Bookmarks and delicious (which I can search from iGoogle), GoogleDocs, and feeds from everywhere I post. I like to think of it as an input column of gadgets, the machine that changes the input, and an output column of gadgets. I suppose if I could add an image editor and a video editor to the machine column, I really would have quite the powerhouse. Other tabs let me follow my social networking sites, relax with a fun game or two, and keep up with personal-interest sites.

Despite having five tabs housing a total of twenty-four gadgets, it’s stayed pretty well managed. I’m in most of the tabs frequently enough that I can see when something goes wrong with a gadget and either fix it or replace it. (I just had to do that yesterday, actually.) I’m pretty ruthless when I realize a gadget is just sitting there collecting cyberdust. I work very hard to keep the majority of any tab visible without scrolling. Keeping iGoogle well maintained really has allowed me to keep working, to keep an eye on things, to keep me up to date, and to keep thinking about what’s important to me in my daily or near-daily life.

Keeping a dashboard that can connect to everything I use on a daily or near-daily basis has made it possible for me to manage what would otherwise seem to be an overwhelming number of tools, and I’m lost when it refuses to load.

Curating Calendars

2010-07-21T15:38:54Z

I was looking over the to-do list that’s directing the clean-up of my various productivity tools the other day and realized there are only three things left: the notes (the work-in-progress), the dashboard (which is best left for last, anyway), and the calendar. The funny thing is: I thought I gave my calendar an overhaul earlier this year.

I can already hear you asking the inevitable question: Why would anyone need to overhaul their calendar, especially someone with no life? Quite simply, because I don’t just use a calendar to schedule my life. I do have calendars to keep track of my ever-changing work schedule, appointments, and upcoming library due dates. I have other calendars that help me manage my life, too.

I have calendars that let me track what work I got done and how long it took me. This has actually proven helpful more than once. I’m more easily distracted by rabbit holes than I give myself credit for. I’ve also had projects stalled out for some reason, and re-reading those earlier calendar entries helps me get back on track quickly.

I’ve tracked what I read and any thoughts I might have on it. And someday, I’m going to get back to using that information to review books on goodreads. I’ve also tracked my exercise, and sometimes what I’ve eaten, in an attempt to develop healthier habits. I’ve had to-do tools (Google Tasks, which still does, and Gqueues, which now offers that feature as part of their subscription features) that sent my planned tasks to my calendar so I could see everything in one place. I’ve heard rumors that the event feature on Srpringpad connects with my calendar, but I haven’t explored it yet.

Just looking at how I’ve used my calendar, you can probably imagine how many different calendars I had running. My calendar was quite the rainbow! It was visually overwhelming. I had to go through and ask myself if I really needed so many calendars, if I really needed to keep up with so much.

After a lot of thought, I combined the calendars that were tracking what I was getting done into projects and chores. The reading calendar got to remain just as it was. The calendar that was intended to help me live better went away in favor of using a website dedicated to helping you develop a healthier lifestyle (that has its own army of trackers, and keeps adding new ways to track and plan your habit-building activities). When GQueues locked up their calendar integration, that automatically took it out of my calendar, but a widget allows me to keep a list beside my calendar. Amazingly, it lets me see my to-do list without feeling like it’s adding to the noise.

Calendars can be very useful tools if managed carefully. It’s easy to manage, plan, and direct your life using them. But if you don’t stop and take a look at them sometimes, you can find yourself serving your calendars instead of having them serve you.

Curating To-Do Lists

2010-07-19T16:47:24Z

My love for to-do lists has been well-documented over the years. I have to-do lists for pretty much every area of my life. There isn’t a thing I do that isn’t defined by a structured list. At one point this past weekend (two points, actually), I had four separate to-do lists open because each one had a task similar to one on another list, and I was hoping to kill four birds with one stone.

The task turned out to be much larger than anticipated, and I’m still working on it! You get the point, though. I have a lot of to-do lists.

Knowing that I keep up with at least a dozen lists at any given point in time often causes people to ask me how (and more importantly, why) I do it. Part of it is that I’ve quested ceaselessly after the perfect to-do manager, and then I’ve figured out how to make it show my tasks the way I want them. The other part is that not everything on those lists is what they call an actionable task. Some of them are “someday” tasks. They relate to the project they’re listed under, but for whatever reason I don’t expect to be in a position to get it done any time soon. It’s listed so I won’t forget it.

What I liked about Todoist originally was that I could create these hierarchical lists of tasks. One list could be each step of a project, neatly indented to show what task went with what step. I could even put notes and links as separate items to keep them with their tasks. When the time came to leave Todoist, newly-released GQueues allowed me to do the same thing, in technicolor, and with my notes and links attached directly to their tasks. Both allowed me to set deadlines. Both allowed for routine and “someday” tasks.

Tasks have three ways off their list. Most leave because I complete them. Some migrate to different lists because they fit better with another activity. Some become obsolete because of other work completed and are deleted. (It’s actually funny how often that happens.) Some merge into other tasks by becoming sub-tasks or notes. I realize it sounds like a lot of work, but I really do accomplish quite a bit in any given week. I also spend a few minutes on Sunday and Thursday nights going over each list, looking for mergable and obsolete tasks to keep my lists lean and moving.

Keeping a maintainable to-do list, regardless of how many you are actually managing, requires you to think about what you really want to accomplish (actions), what you might want to accomplish (“someday”s), and the resources needed to accomplish those tasks. It requires you to be willing to see connections and to be willing to let things go. When it’s done correctly, maintaining to-do lists can be very relaxing.

Curating Bookmarks

2010-07-16T15:28:58Z

Bookmarks are wonderful, aren’t they? A little bit of code that allows your browser to remember so your brain doesn’t have to. It such a simple concept. I used to create nested folders of bookmarks so I could find what I was looking for quickly. I almost never deleted one unless the site vanished. I didn’t even realize how many sites I’d bookmarked until someone turned me on to delicious (back when it was del.icio.us). I thought it was a great idea- I could move over my bookmarks from my browser, search them, and have them when I was at other computers.

Except when I finished moving them all over (clearing out all the broken links, of course), I had well over 600 bookmarks in delicious. Even better, I couldn’t figure out why I had bookmarked some of them to begin with, but I held on to them in case I figured it out. I didn’t want to find that I really had needed that bookmark after all.

When I started cleaning up all of my productivity tools, I had nearly 1500 bookmarks in delicious. I was to the point where I was trying to add bookmarks to pages I’d bookmarked two or three years ago. So, when it was delicious’ turn to be dealt with, I went through every single link. On the one hand, it reacquainted me with some great information I forgot I even had (those were promptly moved to Springpad). It also reminded me that some of my activities have changed, and I was able to delete nearly 300 links on that alone (seven whole tags- gone in the click of a mouse).

By the time I was done poring over each and every link, I had the list down to right around 900 links. Something tells me if I were to go back through it in December, I could probably get it down ever farther.

Right now, I’m working on gaining better control of how I allow bookmarks into my system. Pure links are still going to delicious, and one of my very few complaints with Chrome is that the delicious extension doesn’t handle bookmarks as gracefully as the Firefox one (which I used on a near daily basis). Links to information I need are clipped into Springpad so I can see exactly why I saved the link to begin with. Sites I visit on a daily or near daily basis are neatly organized into Google Bookmarks and live on my iGoogle dashboard for easy access.

Bookmarks are like notes- they shouldn’t be an archive of sites you’ve visited. They should have a purpose. They should relate to projects you’re working on, information you will need to complete something, or serve as reference material until you learn something. They should even bookmark pages that you visit frequently. Bookmarks are a live, ever-changing body of knowledge.

Curating Notes

2010-07-14T16:08:58Z

The other day, I confessed that I’m something of a packrat, a packrat with organizational training no less. I’m probably far worse about it digitally because there’s little room to stop me beyond the data limits of whatever app I’m using. My notetaking app is nearly always the worst, because I’ll collect clips and pictures, and then just dump them in (along with my own notes) and forget about them. So up until last summer, I had this note collection that kept growing and growing, and I had hardly any idea what was in there. What’s worse is if I wanted to look something up, I wouldn’t search those notes. I’d go looking for new information. I had created quite the monster!

Even worse than that is that I like investigating new note-taking apps. I don’t remember where I started, but several years ago I started using EverNote’s desktop app, which was great. I could load in all my notes and organize them. I could have searched them if I’d thought about it. I did actually manage to use them to get some things done, but those moments were few and far between. But then I migrated to Linux, where EverNote has never had a desktop app (and isn’t terribly interested in fixing that), so I started looking for a new app…right as EverNote unveiled their web app. So, I tried to migrate back-up files of my notes to the web app, with comical results. And I started using it to save all these notes that I almost never did anything with. But I couldn’t organize my notes in a way I liked and then I started having other issues, so I ended up leaving EverNote anyway.

It took a few months and a complete redesign on Springpad’s part, but I finally found a notetaking app that lets me just store notes or organize them as necessary. And it doesn’t have the pesky other issues that were plaguing me on EverNote.

More importantly, switching to Springpad switched on something in my head, and now I’m suddenly using my notes. There are still hundreds of notes in Springpad, but I actually search them when I need something. Notes don’t just go there to collect proverbial dust. Some of them end up linked to my to-do list. Some are dealt with fairly quickly as I work on various writing and research projects. I even periodically go through and throw out notes that have become irrelevant to what I’m working on.

A body of notes is supposed to be like a living organism, constantly changing. Notes should serve as launchpads to completed projects, or as inspirations to keep pushing you. They can serve as records, too, but even those need to be carefully organized and tended to remain useful.

Collecting and Curating

2010-07-12T16:25:45Z

First, a little backstory: I’ve collected for most of my life. I collect nutcrackers, dolls from around the world, calendar pages, weird stuff. In fact, I have a digital notetaking app and a bookmarking app that, up until very recently, were both bursting at the seems with all the weird things I’ve collected. It’s a lot like saving interesting calendar pages. I tell myself that I’ll make use of it at a later date as part of a project that isn’t more than two words in my head. And like so many of those calendar pages, a lot of those notes and links have been deleted in the past six months because I realized I couldn’t remember why I’d saved them to begin with.

These are supposed to be both my reference files and my inspiration…and because I haven’t really paid attention, they’ve proven to be just overwhelming and confusing.

I also pretty much grew up in libraries and museums. When I was in high school, I volunteered in my school’s library and quickly earned the task of maintaining both card catalogs. I had to add in new cards, sort misplaced cards to their correct drawer, and remove outdated ones for both the public and the acquisitions drawers. In college, I started working in museums, where I picked up a bit about collections management before being forced to sit through the most in-depth, informative class I’ve ever experienced in my life. (We probably learned five years’ worth of collections management information in fifteen weeks because the professor really knew her stuff and knew how to make full use of fifty minutes. Keeping up with her was a challenge most days.)

Needless to say, I’ve learned a little bit about collections management and curation, mainly through hands-on experience.

When I sat down to clean up both Springpad and delicious, I tried to take a curatorial mindset. What needed to be in the collection? Where did it need to be in the collection? What metadata did it need to be usable within the collection? I’m even trying to develop a plan for the acquisition and maintenance of clips, links, notes, and other materials so I won’t fall into this pack rat trap again. Over the next couple of weeks, I hope to cover here how I’m applying that mindset to different tools I use to keep myself organized, motivated, and inspired.

Theme Jumping

2010-07-11T16:54:49Z

I know. Third theme in two weeks. Kind of obnoxious.

Unfortunately, I broke the awesome theme the site’s been sporting when I tried to upgrade it, which in turn broke the site. Once I figure out what went wrong and fix it, this theme will just have to do.

Thanks for being patient with me.