I couldn’t believe classes like this even existed. In the last forty-eight hours, I’d learned to hotwire a car, pick locks, conceal my identity, and escape from handcuffs, flexi-cuffs, ducttape, rope, and nearly every other type of restraint.
The course was Urban Escape and Evasion, which offered the type of instruction I’d been looking for to balance my wilderness knowledge. The objective of the class was to learn to survive in a city as a fugitive. Most of the students were soldiers and contractors who’d either been in Iraq or were about to go, and wanted to know how to safely get back to the Green Zone if trapped behind enemy lines.
Like Ferris’ Four Hour Work Week, Emergency sounds both exhilarating and preposterous. I wonder if these folks might have been helped by such a book.
A Primer for Kicking Ass
Being the Result of One Man’s Fed-upped-ness With ‘How to Write’ Books Not Actually Showing You How to Write
By James Tanner. Reprinted with permission.
0. Begin with an idea, a string of ideas.
Ex: Mario had help with his movie. He did a lot of the work himself.
1. Use them in a compound sentence:
It’s obvious someone helped with the script, But…Mario did the puppet work, And…It was his shoes on the pedal.
2. Add rhythm with a dependent clause:
It’s obvious someone helped with the script, but Mario did the puppet work, and it was, without question, his shoes on the pedal.
3. Elaborate using a complete sentence as interrupting modifier:
It’s obvious someone helped with the script, but Mario did the puppet work — his arms are perfect for the puppets — and it was, without question, his shoes on the pedal.
4. Append an absolute construction or two:
It’s obvious someone helped with the script, but Mario did the puppet work — his arms are perfect for the puppets — and it was, without question, his shoes on the pedal, the camera mounted on a tripod, mops moved out of frame.
5. Paralell-o-rize your structure (turn one noun into two):
It’s obvious someone helped with the script, but Mario did the choreography and the puppet work — his arms and fingers are perfect for the puppets — and it was, without question, his shoes on the pedal, the camera mounted on a tripod, mops and buckets moved out of frame.
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STOP HERE IF YOU ARE A MINIMALIST, WRITING COACH, OR JAMES WOOD
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6. Adjectival phrases: lots of them. (Note: apprx. 50% will include the word ‘little’):
It’s obvious someone helped with the script, but Mario did the choreography and most of the puppet work — his little S-shaped arms and curved fingers are perfect for the standard big-headed political puppets — and it was, without question, his little square shoes on the pedal, the camera mounted on a tripod, mops and dull-gray janitorial buckets moved out of frame.
7. Throw in an adverb or two (never more than one third the number of adjectives):
It’s obvious someone helped with the script, but Mario did the choreography and most of the puppet work personally — his little S-shaped arms and curved fingers are perfect for the standard big-headed political puppets — and it was, without question, his little square shoes on the pedal, the camera mounted on a tripod, mops and dull-gray janitorial buckets carefully moved out of frame.
8. Elaboration — mostly unnecessary. Here you’ll turn nouns phrases into longer noun phrases; verbs phrases into longer verb phrases. This is largely a matter of synonyms and prepositions. Don’t be afraid to be vague! Ideally, these elaborations will contribute to voice — for example, ‘had a hand in’ is longer than ‘helped’, but still kinda voice-y — but that’s just gravy. The goal here is word count.
It’s obvious someone else had a hand in the screenplay, but Mario did the choreography and most of the puppet-work personally — his little S-shaped arms and curved fingers are perfect for the forward curve from body to snout of a standard big-headed political puppet — and it was, without question, Mario’s little square shoes on the pedal, the camera mounted on a tripod across the over lit closet, mops and dull-gray janitorial buckets carefully moved out past the frame’s borders on either side of the little velvet stage.
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STOP HERE IF YOU ARE NOT WRITING PARODY
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9. Give it that Wallace shine. Replace common words with their oddly specific, scientific-y counterparts. (Ex: ‘curved fingers’ into ‘falcate digits’). If you can turn a noun into a brand name, do it. (Ex: ‘shoes’ into ‘Hush Puppies,’ ‘camera’ into ‘Bolex’). Finally, go crazy with the possessives. Who wants a tripod when they could have a ‘tunnel’s locked lab’s tripod’? Ahem:
It’s obvious someone else had a hand in the screenplay, but Mario did the choreography and most of the puppet-work personally — his little S-shaped arms and falcate digits are perfect for the forward curve from body to snout of a standard big-headed political puppet — and it was, without question, Mario’s little square Hush Puppies on the H^4’s operant foot-treadle, the Bolex itself mounted on one of the tunnel’s locked lab’s Husky-VI TL tripods across the over lit closet, mops and dull-gray janitorial buckets carefully moved out past the frame’s borders on either side of the little velvet stage.
10. Practice. Take one sentence — any sentence — and Wallacize it. Turn ten boring words into a hundred good ones.
Ex: “John wanted to play ball, but he sat on the couch.”
Or did John _________________________________ ?
[Ed note: I saw this on a mailing list a few weeks ago, really liked it, and asked permission to reprint it here. Thanks for sharing, James.]
Eating Contest: 8. If you are not chewing, you should be swallowing, communicating, and running. Yell “Fire!” Why “Fire”? Cops will come with the Fire Department, sirens often scare off the sea gulls, or at least cause then to lose concentration and will…. and who is going to summon help if you yell “Hot Dog,” “Ketchup” or “Worchestire?”
Bodyguard Carrying Contest: 16. Don’t drop your guard.
Suppose your remote car door opener does not have the range to reach your car across the parking lot. Hold the metal key part of your key fob against your chin, then push the unlock button. The trick turns your head into an antenna, says Tim Pozar, a Silicon Valley radio engineer.
Mr. Pozar explains, “You are capacitively coupling the fob to your head. With all the fluids in your head it ends up being a nice conductor. Not a great one, but it works.” Using your head can extend the key’s wireless range by a few car lengths.
Regarding the solution for too much camera flash (tape a piece of paper over the flash), I’ve also seen people hold a spoon in front of the flash and bounce it off of the ceiling or a nearby wall.
1. Forget about knives, bats and fists. Bring a gun. Preferably, bring at least two guns. Bring all of your friends who have guns. Bring four times the ammunition you think you could ever need.
10. Someday someone may kill you with your own gun, but they should have to beat you to death with it because it is empty.
21. Be polite. Be professional. But, have a plan to kill everyone you meet if necessary, because they may want to kill you.
27. Regardless of whether justified of not, you will feel sad about killing another human being. It is better to be sad than to be room temperature.
This recipe for a basic hard cheese works for any kind of milk. I primarily use my own fresh goats’ milk, but have made it quite successfully with cow’s milk purchased from the grocery as well as raw cow’s milk from a local farmer.
The only interesting way to design a demo is to make it a story. You have a protagonist, and the protagonist has a problem, and they use the software, and they… almost solve the problem, but not quite, and then everybody is in suspense, while you tell them some boring stuff that doesn’t fit anywhere else, but they’re still listening raptly because they’re waiting to hear the resolution to the suspenseful story, and then (ah!) you solve the protagonists last problem, and all is well. There is a reason people have been sitting around telling stories around campfires for the last million years or so: people like stories.
As with all advice, Spolsky’s rules should be tuned to your purposes but the ideas are solid for anyone who talks to groups of people. (via stamen)
If the PLAY-DOH compound has started to dry out or if the colors have become messy and mixed, remember: PLAY-DOH compound is inexpensive and easy to buy. Nothing beats a fresh can!
The language on this one might offend some, but I thoroughly enjoyed this expletive-laden anti-photographer rant: Photography is for Jerkoffs. Here’s how to be a photographer in seven easy steps:
1) Make sure you have a LOT OF FUCKING NATURAL LIGHT.
2) Make sure the natural light SOURCE is behind you
3) Make sure the flash on your camera is OFF. If you need a FLASH, it means you don’t have enough NATURAL LIGHT. (step 1)
4) Look through the viewfinder: Make sure that everything in your shot is symmetrical. If a tiny bit of it isn’t, like a bird or a queer walking down the street, that’s OK because it makes the photo “cool.” Go watch every Stanley Kubrick movie ever made if you don’t understand this. (Study Alex’s fake eyelash as the archetypal stylistic symmetry violator)
5) Take pictures of everyday shit from stupid angles but make sure it’s all SYMMETRICAL and that it isn’t MOVING.
6) Make sure YOU don’t move or have your fat black fingers in front of the lens when you push the button. (priceless tip: push the button down halfway, wait for a clicky sound, and then push it all the way in - this is the BIG photography secret that professionals don’t want you to know.)
7) Take TONS of photos of the same thing and then only use the good ones where the bird or the queer wasn’t blinking.
You’re done. You’re a fucking photographer. See how easy that is? That’s because it’s for JERKOFFS.
You may have noticed that the video of Burn-E I embedded looked a bit better than a normal YouTube video. YouTube has been quietly offering high-quality versions of some of their videos for quite some time via a “watch in high quality” link just underneath the player. It’s not HD, but it’s definitely an upgrade of YouTube’s legendarily crappy video quality. By default all videos on YouTube and embedded on other sites load at normal quality, but there’s a way to set your default viewing quality to high, link to high quality video, embed HQ video, and even save HQ videos for later viewing.
Set your default viewing quality to high:
When you’re logged in, go to Account / Playback Setup / Video Playback Quality and set the option to “I have a fast connection. Always play higher-quality video when it’s available.”
Linking to YouTube videos in high quality:
If you need to link to a high quality video on your blog, append &fmt=18 onto the end of the YouTube URL, like so:
Upon arriving at the YouTube page, you’ll see the highest quality video that YouTube pushes out. The full technical details are available here…basically it’s a mp4 encoded using H.264 with stereo AAC sound at 480x360.
Embedding high quality YouTube videos:
The &fmt=18 trick doesn’t work here, but a similar trick does. For each of the URLs in the embeddable code that you get from YouTube, add &ap=%2526fmt%3D18 onto the end, like so:
Saving high quality YouTube videos:
When you’re viewing a high quality video on YouTube, you can use the KeepVid bookmarklet to download the mp4 file for later viewing on your computer, iPod, or iPhone. I tested this with the Burn-E video and the resulting mp4 was in letterbox format (480x198, or roughly the standard 2.40:1 aspect ratio).
BTW, here’s a comparison of the low and high quality for the same video.
Update: I switched the example videos and code because YouTube took the Burn-E video down.
Update: I got an email from a YouTube engineer who tells me that format 18 isn’t even the highest quality you can get. Check out Dancing Matt in format 22, aka 720p. Furthermore, some videos don’t have a format 18 version (if the uploaded movie doesn’t have sufficient quality, for instance). (thx, phil)
“Once I worked on an old man with a really bad moustache, like the kind a teenager would grow. It was really crooked and misshapen, so I shaved it off. At the funeral his family kept coming up saying, ‘Oh, where’s his moustache?’ Apparently, it was supposed to look that way.”
The closer to its living self a body looked, the happier a family would be. And keeping families happy, I’d learn as the night went on, was the main objective of Carla’s work, and a task she took very seriously.
Apparently watching every episode of Six Feet Under does not prepare you to be a funeral director.
You usually have a hunch, but the great thing about photography is that it’s so unpredictable, so you never quite understand how and when a good photograph comes about. But when editing, I do contact sheets, then machine prints and then select from that.
And when asked what makes one image stand out more than another, is it emotional or an intellectual reaction he answers: “It must be intuitive. If it were intellectual, I’d be able to explain what happens. That’s why I’m a photographer. I express myself visually, not verbally.
Two main themes emerge: 1) take some time off from your images in order to evaluate them more fairly, and 2) edit with an outside party, someone you trust to be tough but fair. (via conscientious)
This is probably my all-time favorite childhood TV moment. I loved watching the smiling workers and relentless machinery turn all that formless wax into something that I USED EVERY DAY. My favorite part is the crayons popping up out of their molds. Still gives me chills, it does! BTW, the YouTube page says the video originated from Sesame Street but it was actually from Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. (thx, janelle)
Update: I stand corrected…the above clip is from Sesame Street. But Mr. Rogers did show a similar clip on his show (stills here). I know I’ve seen the one on Mr. Rogers but I don’t know about the Sesame Street one. (thx, everyone)
7. Someone in your audience wearing a Crumpler bag, slinging a fancy digital SLR and/or standing with their arms folded smugly says, “Yeah..yeah, I could’ve done that too..c’mon dude..some Perlin Noise? And Processing/Ruby-on-Rails/AJAX/Blue LEDs/MaxMSP/An Infrared Camera/Lots of Free Time/etc.? Pfft..It’s so easy…”
This all began for me in about 1969, when I started teaching a film class in the University of Chicago’s Fine Arts program. I knew a Chicago film critic, teacher and booker named John West, who lived in a wondrous apartment filled with film prints, projectors, books, posters and stills. “You know how football coaches use a stop-action 16mm projector to study game films?” he asked me. “You can use that approach to study films. Just pause the film and think about what you see. You ought to try it with your film class.”
I did. The results were beyond my imagination. I wasn’t the teacher and my students weren’t the audience, we were all in this together. The ground rules: Anybody could call out “stop!” and discuss what we were looking at, or whatever had just occurred to them.
This article also contains the most information-rich paragraph I’ve ever read online…it’s like an entire film class in 12 lines. Fascinating stuff. One of the points is that, generally, the right side of the screen is more positive. In a later comment, Ebert adds:
In all the years with Siskel and on all the incarnations of the show, I always quietly made sure I was seated on the right. When Roeper came aboard, the producers insisted I “belonged” in “Gene’s seat.” Sentiment won over visual strategy. Did I really think it made a difference? Yes, I really did.
Also, he should do this online…post film stills and let people leave comments, discuss, etc.
“I could sell shit at an anti-scat party,” he says, “you have to figure out someone’s wants and needs and convince them what you have will fill their emotional void.” A con man is essentially a salesman — a remarkably good one — who excels at making people feel special and understood. A con man validates the victim’s desire to believe he has an edge on other people.
It requires avid study of psychology and body language. It’s an amazing paradox—a con man has incredible emotional insight, but without the burden of compassion. He must take an intense interest in other people, complete strangers, and work to understand them, yet remain detached and uninvested. That the plan is to cheat these people and ultimately confirm many of their fears cannot be of concern.
Keep your pen aloof from inspiration, which it will then attract with magnetic power. The more circumspectly you delay writing down an idea, the more maturely developed it will be on surrendering itself. Speech conquers thought, but writing commands it.
I find that when I develop an idea for too long in my head, I forget most of it when I go to write it down. Once again proving that Walter Benjamin is a better man than I am.
How to be a good intern. This list works equally well for advice on how to be a good employee, manager, or CEO. “There are no stupid questions” is good advice no matter what. (via swissmiss)
Recall that when an egg cooks, its proteins first unwind and then link to form a rigidifying mesh. But not all its proteins solidify at the same temperature. Ovotransferrin, the first of the egg-white proteins to uncoil, begins to set at around 61 degrees Celsius, or 142°F. Ovalbumin, the most abundant egg-white protein, coagulates at 184°F. Yolk proteins generally fall in between, with most starting to solidify when they approach 158°F. Thus, cooking an egg at 158°F or so should achieve both a firmed-up yolk and still-tender whites, since at that low temperature only some of the egg-white proteins will have coagulated.
“Cooking eggs is really a question of temperature, not time,” says This. To make the point, he switches on a small oven, sets the thermostat at 65°C, or 149°F, takes four eggs straight from the box, and unceremoniously places them inside. “I use an oven in the lab; it’s easier. But if the oven in your kitchen is not accurate, cook eggs in plenty of water, using a good thermometer.” About an hour later — timing isn’t critical, and the eggs can stay in the oven for hours or even overnight — he retrieves the first egg and carefully shells it. “The 65-degree egg!” he announces. The egg is unlike any I’ve eaten. The white is as delicately set and smooth as custard, and the yolk is still orange and soft.
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