I Rent, Thank Goodness

The episode of “This American Life” that finally started my podcast subscription to the show dealt with the mortgage crisis, its roots deep in the international money system, and the fallout with which we’ve all become familiar.

At the time when my wife and I should have been “paying ourselves first,” as everyone advises (to my continued nausea), we were getting into debt. Not smart debt, stupid debt. Credit card debt. From which we are about 3/4 of the way out, knock wood. Another year of pedal-to-the-metal should do it.

But that made it impractical to buy a house. We’d never qualify for a mortgage, considering this load of debt we already had. For the past decade, as renters, we’ve been paying 20% of our income to housing. That old aphorism I once read in a pamphlet in my teens prescribed 28%. That’s a difference of 8% that’s been diverted to hammering away at the principal of my cards. This has been in lieu of saving any more than emergency funds, because the theoretical return of paying off even 8% debt is twice as lucrative as the return of saving at 4% interest.

But I think now, that’s all these were all this time: aphorisms. Words of wisdom from the 20th- (now 21st-)century equivalent of Ben Franklin. Nobody wrote them into law.

I suspect that any day between 1998 and 2007, if we wanted badly enough to get a house, we could have. We would have to throw away the aphorisms, the percentages of comfort. After all, supposedly I’m obese, and my Toyota Echo is a gas-guzzler. Who sets these standards? Don’t they change from time to time?

And how well would I have been able to resist the “reasoning” of a loan officer with a high-back office chair and swiveling computer monitor, under pressure to move NINAs? How obvious would it be that he’d require me to lie about my income? Would I have? Could he have proven to my satisfaction how safe it would be to take the risk?

I like to think I’m a pretty independent thinker and a moral person. That’s now. Ten years ago, well, I’m not so sure. Like the man said, “OMG, 1998 was ten ƒµ©#ing years ago!”

The Baton

Remember the movie Apollo 13? It came out a few years ago, about the ill-fated third moonshot in 1970. I found the story of its making at least as enthralling as the movie itself. Director Ron Howard and stars Tom Hanks and Gary Sinise shared a memory of their childhood, one I shared with them. There was a lot of faking the flu to stay home those years and catch every patch-out and wheelie of the lunar rover as it rounded Taurus-Littrow crater.

Adult visitors had to watch what they said around our house. The slightest passing comment about how marvelous it was that we were going to the moon was my invitation to roll out my 1:96 scale Revell Apollo/Saturn plastic model kit, with all the parts snap-fitted together, so that I could demonstrate staging, Lunar Module acquisition and trans-lunar insertion burns. In today’s parlance, I geeked out on NASA. (I can remember a nun in our Catholic school, who had to be 137 if she was a day, ask me, “So, you like Nassau?” I answered “yes” to be compliant, and I realized what she said much later.)

The summer vacation in the Adirondacks brought three generations of Wolffs together in the rec room of a little resort, in front of an old black-and-white console set as Walter Cronkite (whom my father disliked) led the world in watching Neil Armstrong descend that ladder.

My grandfather had my father when he was 35, and my father had me when he was 33, so those generations represented the twentieth century well. My grandfather fought in World War 1, and could have read about the Wright Brothers’ flight in the newspaper.

He hadn’t said much about the space mission; I suppose I was doing the lion’s share of the talking. At the end of the vacation, though, at night, he took me by the hand and led me out onto our front yard. The waxing moon was just over half. He pointed to it and said to me, “You see that? There were guys walking around up there!”

I knew that he knew he wasn’t breaking the news to me. He was just trying to express the awe that he felt and could see I was missing out on. To his view, our family’s history was a long, majestic relay race. And it was time for him to pass me the baton. I didn’t feel like that at the time, but I do now, and more strongly as I get older.

Today’s “digital natives” have the technology available in their formative years, when they’re not aware of any limitations or ceilings. This is perceived among today’s baby-boomers as an insurmountable head-start for them.

Yet for all their agility, they lack perspective. Their sense of history is the occasional social studies report, fueled by Wikipedia. They didn’t see it pass by their window.

They have the geeky adeptness. But my generation and older, they have the baton. And it’s not doing us any good where it is. Time we passed it on.

Give Me a Mic, and I Might Say This

I’ve been listening to a treasure-trove of podcasts from South by Southwest Interactive, recordings of many of the sessions. They get my brain working, sometimes straying off the topic, and I find myself stopping the playback in the car and addressing an imaginary audience. At first, in my mind’s eye, they all look like me, but eventually they start to look like typical people of my generation and above, active people who like to upset expectations and grab the present-day by the horns. They’ve been called Baby-Boomers, but the Internet Generation doesn’t know what to do with them. Since the media pieces from the younger people deal with interests that have little to do with age, the Boomer generation represents an untapped resource for at first an audience, and eventually new participants. Simultaneously, these Boomers are thought of as “grumpy old men” who will reject newness ad hoc, and are a path of more resistance than there’s time for in a day.

Seems it’s time for one or more people who find one foot in each world to get the two worlds to talk to each other, in a common language, with wise-ass lingo kept to a minimum and the Golden Rule practiced in every exchange. I know Len Edgerly does this with arts groups in Colorado and wherever else he’s invited.

I can picture me doing this, too. I’d do a great job. Let’s discuss this at PodCamp NYC at the end of this week.

Meditation Over Bacon and Eggs

I can see the appeal of ritual in society. I always felt self-conscious when taking up a passed-on ritual whose invention I didn’t witness, because the meaning wouldn’t pass on efficiently down the generations. (A big reason I’m no longer practicing a religion.) But some tasks that are better practiced exactly the same way every day for efficiency’s sake can transmute to a ritual, especially if so little of your brain is used in the task that you devote the rest of your brain to meditation.

A recent morning found me making a discovery, and being glad that I was in just the right mood to get the significance.

We’ve had a number of little annoyances, you might even call them adversities, in the kitchen. The switch I replaced is now shorting out somewhere, and the light comes on by itself, so we’ve had to unscrew the bulb and do without our main overhead light until I can fix it again. The sink and dishwasher don’t properly drain, leaving a standing water problem which just gets worse when we use the faucet too much.

This particular morning, I found myself, without a whole lot of calculation, filling the dirty frying pans with a quarter-inch of water and a drop of dish soap and setting them to the burners on the stove to heat. It was then that I realized what a good habit this would prove to be, and that I’d keep it up even after the draining issue is solved, since in the warm months we keep the oil burner off 23 out of 24 hours to save oil, and only turn them on in the morning to heat water for showers. This way I can wash the pans immediately, rather than run the water, and shave minutes off last summer’s breakfast time. And the pans and burners will already be heated to cook sooner.

It hit me: that’s the function of adversity. It’s the necessary ingredient of resourcefulness. It’s when you discover shortcuts and “lifehacks” that make sense even after the adversity. And the bigger the adversity, the more clever the resourcefulness. Providing you can keep your wits about you.

By you, I mean me.

Experimenting with GarageBand

Look, ma, I’m a composer! Cheesy

Widening the Doorway

As soon as I “picked” animation as the one thing I wanted to do, I had this familiar sense of paralysis. Now, no matter what I do, I reasoned, it’s got to advance the timeline of a pursuit in animation, or it’s piddling away my productivity. So I bought a scanner on eBay, with the idea that I’d be more comfortable making actual sketches of my characters on paper with a pencil rather than on the computer with my little underpowered Wacom tablet. While it shipped, I twiddled my thumbs. It got here, and it turns out I chintzed out and got one that is no longer compatible with anything, in spite of being USB. That I paid $20 for it, including shipping, should have tipped me off. No problem. But another delay.

But then I started to toodle around with another idea. And I discovered I’m my happiest when I’m doing a little of this, a little of that. I’m not kidding.

You should see me cook breakfast. I season the eggs, then stop to wash out a coffee cup, then flip two out of four slices of bacon, then break open but not pour the Splenda. Yet I’m whistling a happy tune, and I’m done in record time, faster every day. So I should just face it: this is the way I do everything. I shouldn’t, but I do. It makes me happy.

Here are these ideas and ambitions, often about four at a time, each one politely beckoning the other to go first through the door. Even when they bum-rush it, they jam the entrance, and nobody gets through at all. And I’m twiddling my thumbs. So what if I never choose? What if I just let them all in at the same time?

This other project, to which I gave some attention this weekend instead of scanning, has had some wonderful things happen in its favor. (And you have to excuse me for keeping the details vague at the moment.) Coincidences, the kind that Paulo Coelho doesn’t believe are coincidences, but omens. I was determined to see whether there was a single, go-to maven on the subject in New York City, and sure enough, there is one. And she seems to verify my suspicions that my idea would have “legs”. Let’s just say that, if negotiations with this New Yorker go well, I’ll leak some news at PodCamp NYC later this month. Although what I learn from the classes therein might steer me clear of the idea — but probably not. The podcast community is nothing if not encouraging. So already you know it’s a possible podcast.

I did a little of this and a little of that. And it was a good weekend. No milestones yet, but that’s only because they don’t make yardstones.

Some Inside Insight

The podcast of WNYC’s RadioLab started its second season with a show about deception. I managed to start and finish it in a complete trip to work. And when I arrived, I knew I had an even more necessary imperative than animation (see last entry, many moons ago). Something I’d have to do before I undertook another project. And that was to come to terms with whatever was happening to me, what had happened in the past, and why I am the way I am.

The podcast explored the story of a young woman named Hope Ballantyne, who during her stay in San Francisco managed to stay one step ahead of a seemingly steady stream of calamities and rotten luck — with a little ($) help from her new friends. Just before vanishing without a trace. She was discovered by a roommate to be a con artist, with notebooks full of Social Security numbers and credit cards. She’d move into a neighborhood where all the natural generosities were extended to her, but when she’d abandon them, many individuals interviewed confessed to a difficulty trusting people thereafter, even old friends and neighbors, to the degree they had.

Inability to trust people. That about sums it up. A confidence that my presence among people is something they’d have to accommodate, tolerate, endure. And that a hand of friendship extended was just some marketing ploy; something in it for them. A preference for solitude. A tendency toward “creepy lurker” status at conferences and meetups, one which I fight pretty successfully, but still continuously.

The show went on to describe brain research among pathological liars. They found that, rather than a deficiency, liars have enhanced connections between thinking centers in the pre-frontal cortex, providing faster (slicker?) facility of thought, for it’s true that liars need to think fast. It takes more effort to lie than to tell the truth to the average person, unless you’ve got these thick pipelines moving things along.

Further research showed that deception, especially self-deception, was prevalent not on the bottom of society’s barrel, but among the most successful — business owners and athletes. Little wonder: they tell themselves (as sound bites proved) that they’re the best, better than their opponents, and that they will win. They have no doubt or fear. In other words, they have a distorted view of the truth. And it works for them — their efforts make it the truth. But their conviction, based on no real evidence, comes before the proof, before that starter’s pistol. They con themselves. They are also statistically happier people, because they are able to delude the harsh realities of life out of their attention.

This means that people who are cursed with an inability to self-delude, who have a more harsh, more accurate view of the world, have a harder time with life, and are usually sadder.

Wow. Folks gotta stop reading my mind as I toss and turn at night. Who do I see about that?

I am reminded of a really well-written episode of Star Trek, where a transporter malfunction (a time-worn plot gimmick) splits Kirk into two people, good and evil — but not really. The “evil” Kirk is violent, wrathful and arrogant, but he’s also decisive, brave and lusty. The “good” Kirk is compassionate, cooperative and self-effacing, but he’s also vapid, timid and malleable. The “evil” Kirk would knock ‘em dead in social media, run his own business, try dangerous things, create great works of art, get into politics, and travel the world. The “good” Kirk would put in his 4o years, gets his pension, and fade into obscurity, having taken no risks, made no friends, and impacted no lives.

This “good” is going to be the death of me.

But I’m not a good person. I’m an atheist; the magic of religion is so much PR to me, and I ponder the abyss between scientific surety and dogma that is the imagination. I’m a Libertarian; the losers of elections can always claim a victory of principles when the winners, after all, are politicians, and they’re all no damn good anyway. Seth Godin didn’t need to tell me that all marketers are liars; in my career as a graphic artist, most of my employers have been deceit factories. I can smell cults a mile away, but I also smell cult-like behavior where no one else can. As I write this, the Twitter community is preparing tomorrow to celebrate something they’re calling “Good People Day“, because their up-and-coming new-media darling suggested it. They’re all fawning over him more and more, but I can’t bring myself to say what’s on my mind about him, or I dare not. Personal branding and reputation-management and all that. The guy is an “evil” Kirk. (That’s a compliment.) If he and I were in the same room together right now, there’d be a nuclear reaction.

And here I sit in front of my self-pitying “emo-blog”, like a 13-year-old. Pathetic, right?

At least, I have an inkling of how to get out of this. I’m calling in the pros.

Drumroll, Please…

In our last episode, we met our hero (well, me) at a three-way fork in the road. My Web start-up, my mail-order DVD, or my animated short? Animation it is. I have once again hung the shingle of aspiring animator.

My reasons are purely psychological, and are inspired by a pleasant Easter Sunday with my wife toodling around Barnes & Noble, where we saw books we like right there on the shelves, gave the lady money, and walked out with them. No postage, no typing or clicking. How long has this been around?

Some of the books were actually expensive magazines from England, with the CD in the back, the kind graphic artists lust after. They were colorful and inviting, and they stimulated an old but familiar feeling in my brain and my fingers. I felt creative again, in a way my job has discouraged of late.

So there you have it. My plan of attack is to continue testing the limits of this software. I’m making a list of experiments. A scanner is my next purchase, since I know I like to draw in pencil on paper.

Should you care to, you can follow my milestones on this project as I go. This personal blog will likely take the form of a production blog, though I reserve the right to put down anything I’m thinking at the time.

Yep, spring is in the air, the coffee’s on, and my fingers itch. In a good way.

Shaking the Snow-Globe, Again

With the coming of spring — the warming, the lengthening days, Daylight Saving Time — comes a lessening of the funk I’ve been in since I turned 50 in October. My social media outreaches are going fairly well, and I can no longer call myself friendless, though for the most part I’ve never really met any of these people.

My mood is elevated more now that I’ve again taken up my project ideas. And I realize I’m back to that cycle. I plan some enterprise or other, with the goal of either joy or accomplishment or cash. I get to a certain point, then I get distracted, or discouraged, or the idea just grates on my brain, and some other shinier idea takes its place, and I get enraptured in that — while the little sane part of my brain realizes that this one will never see the light of day, either.

And so it’s been through much of my adult life. Always planning, always showing off my imagination, never following through. Always for some sensible reason.

So today, a confluence of three ideas — more like a collision — are all vying for next position in the conga line of my attention.

1: Animated short, The Babysitter. A YouTube-style viral video explaining a point of the American Constitution with an allegory of a family that hires a babysitter. It was originally scheduled to help Texas Representative Ron Paul in his bid for the Republican nomination. By the time it occurred to me, the window was so small until the beginning of primary season that I “regretfully” shelved it.

2: PainForecast.com. This idea filled the void left by the movie idea. It’s a web service-with-widget that would detect your arthritis pain sensitivity based on the weather, and give you a five-day forecast when the pain would likely get bad. It got pretty clear I’d need to actuate the idea before I could interest a sponsor, which means bucks. I’m just getting the order of procedure down, and who I need to ask what and in what order, when I buy and read The Four-Hour Work Week. I go into the book with the PainForecast idea and come out with…

3. An information product, to be named later. Author Tim Ferriss recommends I reach into my area of expertise and find something I can teach (which I realized is a certain basic skill critical to every Adobe creative app, that I know well and like to tutor), and produce a DVD for sale via mail order. I realize I can’t just crank out a two-minute tutorial with a screen capture; I would want to be the world’s expert in this particular use of the software. I’d also have to stamp out any reservations I’m having to the thought of charging as much as Ferriss says I should for something that so many people are giving away. I’m not all the way through the book yet.

So this weekend, the perfect storm came. Yesterday I get a Twitter update from Laura Fitton, a.k.a. Pistachio, inviting participants in her interactive media experiment, Mediacasters.tv, the first subject of which is coverage of Boulder, Colorado’s Startup Weekend. Next thing I know, I’m encapsulating my proposal on a Mediacasters wiki Laura put up for the purpose. I didn’t want to disappoint. But what if it gets presented today? I’m almost hoping it’ll fall through the cracks.

Then, last night on Twitter the Ron Paul campaign (I forgot I’m following him) announces he satisfies ballot requirements in all 50 states. What does that mean? Will he announce his candidacy as an independent? If so, the desk is wiped clean and the animation project is back on, with a generous production window closing September or so. I can perform some tests today to to better cobble together a production pipeline using my current apps. This task would give me some pride of artistic accomplishment in a project I can control, in contrast to my day job. I’ve aspired to be an animator since before computers, and now I have the chance. I’m sleuthing the sources to see what they mean by that news. As if I need the excuse of Ron Paul’s campaign to do animation.

But I could really use the bucks that the information product could bring, at least to hear Tim Ferriss tell it. I have no savings, and am in credit card debt up to my eyeballs. I’m working this job only because of the benefits, since my wife has a disease (she exhibits symptoms of arthritis, and is the inspiration of PainForecast) that’s taking all the health care coverage we’ve got.

Which way do I go?

A 3D Question at Easter

This is a letter I wrote to Pixel Corps honcho Alex Lindsay, maybe not the only guy who could get charged up about this, but the only one I know.

Alex,

I’m a regular listener to This Week in Media, and with the arrival of a new computer that can play back large files (finally!), I’m watching, too.

Either this is an old question among 3D artists (sorry) or I’m the first to ask (I’m glad I took the time).

As you may have noticed, the Easter season brings about discussions of the Shroud of Turin, and the pursuit of experts to study it and give an opinion of its origins, all recorded in documentaries. But to me there is a glaring omission, an unasked question, and an unrepresented expert.

The image of the body with the bearded face and long side hair is familiar to us all. But if you wrapped a linen around a face, you wouldn’t get such a photographically flat image, would you? The cheeks would be pulled out to the side, and you’d have more than just a frontal view of the hair covering his ears, if not the ears themselves, spaced about 12 inches apart. You’d also see more top hair. And if you attempted to drape linen over the top and the sides of the head at the same time, wouldn’t there be wrinkles?

I’m visualizing the images I’ve seen of character skins laid out in 2D for painting (for those who don’t have a product like zBrush).

To get such an image as the Shroud, you’d need to support it over the body and stretch it like an artist’s canvas. Then whatever was making the image would have to project perfectly upwards to the canvas, and the effect of the closest body part (I guess the nose) would have to be the same as the farthest body part (the fringe of the hair, or the neck).

There is a guy who ran a photographic experiment using a camera obscura and a silver compound impregnated in the linen. But there was no discussion of the flatness of the canvas. You wrap a body in a shroud, or it’s not a shroud, is it? And when you wrap, you get dimensional skinning, no? Current documentaries (even on PBS) don’t say.

Has anyone ever approached you about this question? Has it ever made any discussion forums that you know of? Why aren’t they coming to you for these documentaries and asking you this question?

Clearly it’s too late for this Easter season. But I wonder if there’s something the Pixel Corps could assemble for next year. Just an idea. And if the question has been hashed around in forums, maybe it needs to break out of the echo chamber and go off on a vision quest.

Helpfully,
Rick Wolff
Putnam Valley, NY