This past weekend, there were numerous celebrations and commemorations of the Apollo 11 moon landing. I was lucky enough to be able to go to the National Mall where they had a special presentation –including a projection onto the Washington Monument itself– celebrating the achievement. I posted on social media then that no video or pictures could do it justice (and for people to try and make it to the later showings that night or…
I recently read an article by Kara Baskin about a 2016 workplace study. The professors (from MIT and the University of Minnesota) were experimenting with elements of the oft-invoked, but not always defined “work-life balance.” The link above is to the article, not the study itself and is worth the quick read, even if the conclusions don’t necessarily come as a shocker. For example, having more control over one’s schedule including to be able to…
Look over a score of “tortured artist” memes and you won’t have trouble seeing ones with writers. Writers are often portrayed as full of angst, indecision, indecision because of angst, angst because of indecision. Basically, the archetypical writer is in need of a good therapist. And what better therapist than a writer who’s become a therapist? That’s what screenwriter Dennis Palumbo decided to do… and he recently talked with screenwriter Ken Levine all about it.…
Lest Monday’s post seem insufficiently motivational, I figured I’d pass along this article by Charles Chu about how Isaac Asimov managed to be such a prolific writer. In case you’re not aware, Isaac Asimov wrote hundreds of books… and not just in science fiction, for which he’s perhaps best remembered. In fact, his books cover most of the categories covered by Dewey Decimal Classification. Not only that, he seemed to love to write. He wrote…
This is for all the Gen Xers out there, irretrievably in their 40s and 50s, facing Monday with Garfield-level malaise. Here’s an article by Jonathan Rauch in The Atlantic which I missed when it first came out in 2014, but seems to have hit me at just the right moment… and it might be just the right moment for you all as well. In feature story fashion, it goes into the anecdote of 40-somethings seemingly…
Coming off my post on Monday about having hobbies as hobbies and nothing more, I stumbled across an article by Derek Thompson in The Atlantic about the reverence that work and “busyness” has in modern American culture. America has long had a paradoxical status as a Calvinistic Babylon, to reference historian Michael Kammen. To follow along that allegorical thought, if all hobbies ought to be hustles, leisure time itself is suspect. Being unproductive is almost…
I had the opportunity over Presidents’ Day weekend (aka Washington’s Birthday weekend for OPM sticklers) to do something I can’t remember doing in a long time, if ever: painting miniatures. Many of my gamer friends have various Warhammer and related armies and I know my efforts are not remotely in their league. They paint minis regularly. In fact, for several, it’s a bona fide hobby. One preditor friend (that’s producer-editor for the uninitiated) has taken…
I thought I had already posted this article by Sean Kane from 2016, but evidently I hadn’t. So go ahead and read up on seven darn good scientifically-backed reasons why you should make art even if you’re not “any good” at it. A perfect example of simply making art is Inktober, an annual event to do an ink drawing every day during October. I did this with my son –and moms and dads reading this,…
For whatever reason, back when I was in school busy with acting training, many instructors felt the need to let me know that I’m not a “leading man” type of actor. My guess is they dealt with many acting students who would feel that was beneath them or represented failure. Little did they know that, having grown up with my Dad giving us Turner Classic Movies before TCM existed, I already enjoyed the work of…
Two of the podcasts I regularly listen to, Scriptnotes and Maltin on Movies, both note how a given actor or other creative artist regularly takes 10-20 years to become an “overnight success.” They note this, in part, because the whole idea of the precocious talent, the creative who does genius work just out of the womb, seems so engrained in our culture, you kind want to stop and say, “Wait? Is that really normal?” Nope.…