Travis Briggs - YABIWU

Yet Another Blog I Won't Update

I feel like I could get addicted to writing the way that some people get addicted to video games. Like, “You just wrote for over an hour, why do you still feel the desire to keep writing?”. Of course at this point I'm kind of like a character in an RPG who is max level and doesn't feel like doing the side quests. Not that I've really earned anything close to max level in writing/blogging, besides having done it especially sporadically since 2003. Maybe it's like EVE Online where you earn experience constantly, even when offline, just by checking in on it every once in a while.

Is there a word for that in video games, the side quest thing, when you really want to play a game but can't think of anything fun to do in it? I think that's the essential reason why a game like Rocket League doesn't get stale. Because it's always the same thing, so you don't really expect anything more from it. Whereas, a game like Grand Theft Auto, you get various interesting missions throughout the course of the game, but in the endgame its kind of just the sandbox that it was the whole time.

You know, I tried my hand at professional scissors, but I just couldn't make the cut. (Sorry, it popped into my head and I couldn't help myself.) I actually saw a Karate Studio and was trying to think of a karate pun. I'm sure you would have gotten a kick out of that! (sorry)

I just had an Elon Musk level idea, as I saw a man with a “please help” sign. Like, could you find a way to A/B test signs so that you can find the text with the most earning potential? Oh god, what is wrong with me. I am truly the tech bro elite, paving the forests of our imaginations with Machine Learning and Big Data.

I like this anecdote I heard about Paul McCartney and the song “Hello, Goodbye”. I read it on Quora, but I'll just recall it from memory rather than dig up the link. Someone asked Sir Paul how he writes so many songs, and McCartney answered that anyone could write a song about anything. He then asked if the person who inquired would like to try it with him right now. That person answered that he or she had to go, so didn't have the time at the moment. “You say goodbye, and I say hello!” was McCartney's reply.

Really inspiring stuff. Paul McCartney, there's someone who's at max level.

I generally don't give too much credence to song lyrics. Sometimes they can be spot on, sometimes they are inspiring, sometimes they are evocative and very creative. But I don't think you have to be Dylan to make music with lyrics. Generally any sufficiently interesting phrase can be coerced into a lyric. I saw a YouTube video that talked about this and used the JFK “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country” as an example. Like, think about the relative cadence and pacing of that phrase. It has a musicality all of its own, does it not? I agree with Paul McCartney: any phrase can be similarly massaged into musicality.

One question that always bothered me though is like, Paul McCartney is still here right? So why hasn't he had a hit song in 35 years?

Say Say Say Paul McCartney And Michael Jackson Peaked at #1 on 12.10.1983

Have his song writing skills atrophied? He doesn't have the right people around him? The world of musical fashion/style has passed him by? He can't sing anymore?

There are myriad possible answers, and it's something I wonder about all the time.

I once read that creative people don't create for any other purpose than the fact that there are ideas bursting out of them, viciously, and if they don't put pen to paper or hand to instrument the ideas will cause them to explode.

Another variation of this is that this is what “truly” or “really” creative people do. Which makes it even more insulting if that's not the way this particular amateur feels about his creative pursuits.

But actually, I kind of feel that way about writing. I don't have anything in particular to write about (wait, wait don't go....) but I feel like I need to be smacking those keyboard keys and giving it a go anyways. I actually remember being in a bunch of online MUDs when I was a preteen and teen, and writing elaborate descriptions of my character and the world around him, just because I could. Those descriptions were most likely excessively filled with the most absurdly gratuitous adjectives and adverbs. I recall that as well. Still, it was a magical world that I could enter into and explore and create.

Currently, I'm the DM of a D&D 5th ed campaign with players I've been playing with for almost three years now. It's fun, and I do have to stay on my toes and think up all kinds of essential details for every situation. I have to not only create the entire world, nay universe, that the characters inhabit, but the exquisite details of every room they enter and creature or person they encounter. I'd love to do something similar online, with some kind of collaborative fiction framework or something. If anyone knows of such a thing, please contact me at travis@travisbriggs.com.

For a while, I was the instigator of an online game of Nomic that was going pretty well. You can find the archives here on Github. It kind of fell apart as players lost interest and had other commitments. Which makes me even more in awe of Agora, a nomic which has been in continual operation via mailing lists since 1993.

Maybe I do have an unbounded font of creativity inside me. Maybe it's just a matter of opening the tap.

Every time I get the feeling like I should blog something, I usually realize that it would do just as well to shout into Mastodon (my masto instance). Like that sentence for example. Not so much that last one.

Kind of in the vein of the previous post, I feel like I want to maybe do some kind of blogging exercise where every time I stop typing, I take inspiration from whatever the current song lyric is to write the next line. (That last sentence could have been a self contained masto post).

I think I'm getting carried away feeling sorry for myself. All of my blog posts seem to have this morbid kind of self-deprecation to them. And they're all. about. blogging. Every one of them. Like it makes me curious, what would a painting about painting look like? Is that a self-portrait? I know there are definitely plenty of songs that are about songs or about writing songs.

My head's a balloon, inflating with the altitude. Is that how it works? Now that I think about it, it makes perfect sense. As the balloon rises, the air pressure drops, so it would inflate more. Interesting, when you think about song lyrics that you've heard dozens of times but haven't given enough thought to.

I know people have done this before with random books. Pick a random book off the shelf, flip to a random page, and use the first sentence you see as the first line of your composition, as a writing prompt. I've heard of that exercise.

I actually think I'm a pretty good writer and that most of my writing skill goes to waste a good deal of the time. Like today at work I wrote a design doc, and I thought I wrote it pretty eloquently. But it was a fucking design doc. Like who cares? It's just technical documentation that will be out of date and forgotten for far more total time than it's recent and useful.

The stale taste of recycled air has got me into a frenzy of superstition and longing. Yikes, tried to mash that one up a bit and it didn't come out quite as I'd expect.

Also if you think this post is leading somewhere, ha! Or maybe that's as good a time as any to simply end it.

Okay wait this one: I was waiting for a cross town train in the London Underground when it struck me...

...that I've been waiting blah blah blah. But is it coincidence that the first line makes it sounds like the guy got hit by a train? Is that just awkward writing, or a cleverly buried easter egg? Please please let me remember to ask Ben Gibbard that if I ever meet him. Or actually, if anyone reading this knows how to get in touch with him, could you ask him for me and get back to me?

How about this for an app idea: you listen to music and just type the lyrics into a chat room in real time. Or maybe you type the lyrics to the song and it stops when it gets to the words you haven't typed yet. Like some kind of inverted karaoke.

I love listening to music but always feel compelled to be doing something while I do it, like playing a game or especially coding. I listen to music all day long while coding at my job. It's extremely satisfying, especially when you get into those zone/flow moments.

I am thinking it's a sign that the freckles in our eyes are mirror images and when we kiss they're perfectly aligned.

Wow I don't think I can even keep up with the lyrics on songs that are pretty fast like this one. It's fun to just type words though while music I like is playing. It's kind of evocative of the whole coding-in-the-zone experience and probably releases some of the same endorphins.