Category: Personal

Writing about personal matters.

Instagram (finally) introduces web embed code

Like this:

This is what I’ve been doing today. Grant’s cousin Caroline (who, as you can see, is significantly more bendy and stable than I am) has been staying with us this week, and we’ve been exploring Sydney a little. Today we did the walk from Coogee beach to Bondi, finishing up with an impromptu yoga session on the sand as the sun went down. Yesterday we went to Taronga Zoo, and saw this particularly ridiculous bird:

The one above is embedded with Embed.ly, which generates embed code – it uses img tags rather than an iframe, and therefore has the benefit of letting you muck about a bit with the source, correct typos, and so on. It also has the bonus of being visible in WordPress previews. Right now while typing I have no idea what the top photo’s going to look like, whether it’s sized sensibly for my blog template, etc. I don’t know if it includes comments or like counts or captions. [edit: counts yes; captions no.] It also means the bird photo will be the one pulled in elsewhere on this site attached to this post, unless I upload the others separately; my related post plugin won’t look for images inside frames.

It’s a sensible, if belated, move from Instagram to make their content more easily spreadable, in the way that Vine and Twitter are; it’s hard to see it as anything but a way to encourage people to make more use of its video features, by making those videos are more broadly available. Of course, because some laws of the internet are immutable, there are already people writing SEO-friendly posts of advice for brands about how to leverage it. It makes Instagram a more viable option for live coverage of events, because it’s more easy to pull it all together afterwards into a single page. But right now, for me, it just makes it a little easier to show family back home who don’t know what Instagram is the beauty of Australia in midwinter.

Procrastiworking and the joy of side projects

A team of explorers fighting a zombie
The sort of thing that happens when side projects get seriously out of hand.

Between Zombie, games like The Trial, random charity projects, writing and other miscellaneous activities, on average I get a great deal done, outside of work, despite having the sort of work life that normally means it consumes everything else you do.

Side projects are some of my favourite things. I like to have as many as possible on the go at once, ideally some complicated ones with multiple moving parts as well as a few really simple ones that I can get sorted quickly. Some of the latter expand into the former. Most of them never get finished at all. They’re great.

Part of the reason I do this, when I’m really honest, is about mental health. I’ve dealt with crippling depression for my whole life; sometimes successfully, sometimes not. It was worst when I was in my late teens, but it still fluctuates periodically, and in the late autumn and winter when the nights draw in so do my energy levels and capacity to do things. Any things. At all. In the summer, when energy is boundless and I have relatively few fears of over-stretching myself, I do as much as I can in the time available. Sometimes in overcompensating I push extremely hard. When I am well I want to do everything, as hard as I can, because I am terrified that next time the depression claims that part of me it will be permanent and I will not get it back. It lends great joy to simply doing.

But there are plenty of other factors too. Like everyone in the world, I am not just one set of interests or hobbies; I contain multitudes. I like to explore and to create. I am lucky that work gives me space and money to do so in some areas, but – again, like most of the world – there are plenty of impulses that work can’t satisfy. So I get stuff done around the edges, through the application of a slightly unusual technique.

The system here is to get so busy that literally everything you are doing is procrastinating from something else. I jokingly called it “procrastiworking” once, and the name has sort of stuck. It consists of having a list of tasks that are interesting and engaging on their own merits, but also sorta kinda count as work. Productive tasks, rather than consumptive ones. Things that are sort of working towards something else. Examples: write a short short story every day for two weeks. Organise a live game. Blog for ten days straight. Make a Twine game that teaches you how to use Twine. Learn HTML. Make a website. Clear your Steam unplayed list before the next sale.

Once you have slightly too many of these, many of them interlinked, most of them satisfying to complete even if they’re tricky or annoying to actually do (partnership tax return, I am looking at you here) you can successfully procrastiwork by doing one of them, in the knowledge you are not doing any of the others. This is a blatant psychological trick, but for me it works rather well. It’s amazing how much you can get done when you’re not doing something else even more pressing.

The down side – and there is definitely a down side – is that you start to feel guilty for doing things that aren’t productive. You have to be able to put everything aside and focus on your friends, on activities that relax you and do not carry expectations of a finished product. If you’re not careful you begin over-emphasising the results, rather than the process. But really, the vast majority of side projects aren’t about what you end up with. They’re about broadening you out, exploring things you can’t do at work, learning new skills, discovering things you’re good (and bad!) at, creating for the sake of the joy of being creative. They’re about failing, not finishing and being half-assed without fear. They let you play. And being able to play well, as an adult, is a skill no one should be without.

Detritus: a Twine game

A couple of months ago, mid-move, I started a new project – a Twine game/interactive fiction thing called Detritus. I think it’s finished enough to share with the world.

It was meant to be quite a small experiment to see if I could teach myself the medium as well as using it to express something that’s almost impossible to express through non-interactive media. It got a bit more ambitious than that, I think mostly because I had no idea what I was doing or how tricky some of it was technically. At some point soon, when I’m a little bit less close to it and it’s had some air, I’ll blog about making it.

Any bug reports or feedback, please let me know. You can play it by clicking here: it should have sound running in some parts.

Welcome to Australia, there are rainbow birds

A close-up of a rainbow lorikeet.

Here is a picture of the rather magnificent bird that crash-landed on our balcony yesterday evening. It’s a rainbow lorikeet.

It was stunned, so we put out a little water (which it ignored) and a little diced banana (which it ate in a hilariously messy fashion, getting banana mush all over its beak and then slowly licking it off and blinking).

Here it is being confused by my finger: Confused rainbow lorikeet through a window After a short while it fell asleep with its head tucked under its wing, and an hour or so later awoke in much higher spirits. It shimmied up and down the window ledge a little, and started making squawking noises at me when I went out to check on it. When we went to bed it was asleep again, and when we woke today it had flown away.

I found out about rainbow lorikeets when I was in I guess second year of uni. I loved the way they looked in pictures but I thought I’d never get to see one in the wild, not really. They fly in groups of three and four through Hyde Park, making sounds like squeaking hinges, and they flock in berry-laden trees in the botanic gardens.

I am impossibly lucky.

Smoke me a kipper, I’ll be back for breakfast

London’s doing its absolute best to make me happy to leave right now – it’s raining sideways. We’ve consolidated our lives into five suitcases (plus a lot of boxes in storage), and the taxi gets here in an hour and a half. This time tomorrow – well, for me it won’t be this time tomorrow, for one thing, and for another we’ll still be flying – but pretty soon after that we’ll be in Sydney.

There should be a new word – I bet there’s one in German – for this mixture of sadness, excitement, fear and joy that comes with this kind of move. I’m astonishingly lucky to be going to such an exciting job in such an exciting place. I’m astonishingly lucky to have so much to leave behind. I’m astonishingly lucky to be living in a time when I can still live in the internet, and keep track of where all my friends are and what’s happening in their worlds, while being as far away as it’s really possible to be without actually being in space.

We’ve come a long way. We’re off a bit further. We’ll be back soon.

Accretion, collation, decumulation

Accretion

In astrophysics, the growth of a massive object by gravitationally attracting more matter.

I picked up pebbles when I was young. Entranced by tales of fossil hunters and gemstones discovered on beaches, I trekked back and forth amid the summer holiday shells in Cornwall and the rocky rubble on the north coast of France. I picked them over and came back each time with double handfuls of pointed mussel shells or curled snails showing iridescent patches, smooth stones worn by tides and marked with interesting lines and patterns. Always I had to pick just one or two to take home. Once I found a lump of quartz crystals as big as four fists. That one is with me still.

For a while, because I was a teenager, I collected pictures of the Manic Street Preachers on an early Geocities site. I printed them out and stuck them to my wall with tiny pieces of Blu-Tack. Later on, as I moved between homes in my late teens and early 20s, I took with me a mutating collage of words and phrases painstakingly clipped from magazines, newspapers, posters. It was a cut-up work-in-progress, the words clumping together to form new meanings by association every time I moved. They grew organically on doors and walls in tiny flats painted in scrupulously cheap neutral tones, until they took up more space than there were walls.

Collation

The act of collecting, comparing carefully, and often integrating or arranging in order.

My bookshelves, since I was old enough to own bookshelves, have always been overflowing. I used to buy one a week at charity shops, until I discovered student loans and bought dozens at a time and stayed up late in bed reading. Some I’ve read until they fell apart, and kept the husks. Some I’ve never read from cover to cover, but they have memories attached; they are physical, and come with inscriptions or associations or the fact that they have existed since 1786. Some I read and gave away, passed on, decided not to keep on shelves waiting for the right mood to strike.

Since 2006 I’ve collected oil-based perfumes from obscure perfume houses, pouring hours of time into swapping packages of tiny 1-dram vials internationally with people I know only by their forum names and avatars. I’ve tested perhaps six hundred, and still owned perhaps a third of of those, choosing to wear one a day on instinct or at random, until four weeks ago. Now the collection is full of small holes. Moth-eaten.

Decumulation

The disposal of something accumulated.

Three skirts in bubble-wrap mailers, to Yorkshire, Berkshire and Liverpool. A disco ball inexpertly wrapped, that rolled off the post office counter and luckily bounced. Books hand-delivered, posted, gifted, sold, taken box by box to charity shops. More than a dozen packages, each one themed, to friends in cities I will not visit before we leave. Fourteen parcels of perfume, each vial taped closed, accompanied by a couple of tea bags and perhaps a lollipop. My first car, bought in Norwich and delivered one snowy evening by three men, driven six weeks later to Ambleside for our honeymoon, driven away by a couple with a young son in the back. A camera. A pair of boots. Eventually, our bed.

Upping sticks: moving to Sydney with Guardian Australia

I’m moving: not away from the Guardian, but with it. I’m going to be moving to Sydney for a secondment with the Guardian’s new Australian team. My role is editorial audience development, and will encompass SEO, analytics, community coordination, social media, and probably a whole bunch of other stuff I don’t know about yet. It’s a small, brilliant team full of interesting folks, with lots of exciting opportunities ahead; I can’t wait to get started.

It’s also literally half a world away. I’m lucky – we’re lucky – to be in a position where Grant can come with me, and can hopefully work and live alongside me, rather than having to be apart for what’s likely to be at least 9 months. We’re at a time in both our lives where upping sticks to somewhere with wombats and wallabies is not just possible but sounds like it could be bloody good fun. It will be hugely sad to be so far away from friends and families, but it will also be a very big adventure.

It turns out I own an awful lot of things I don’t need. And an astounding number of Nerf guns, which I clearly need to keep somewhere till we get back, along with the fire axes and the smoke machine and all of the books. If I owe you a coffee, a beer, an email or a chat, now’s a very good time to cash it in, while I’m still hunting for paperwork and trying to get our lives stowed away before we leave. Also if you’ve seen my birth certificate, I need that back.

And, in unrelated news, I’m hosting The Story conference next Friday. Hopefully I’ll see some of you there.

The most important thing I’ve ever written

Three years ago today I got married. We had a secular ceremony at the registry office in Norwich, and each wrote words for the moment when we exchanged rings. Both being writer types, it all got a bit competitive. This is what I ended up with.

Grant,

I love you. Those three words have my whole life in them.

My eyes see through those words, and the world is changed and made wider and more beautiful, more precious, because everything is touched with that love.

My arms are full of those words and waiting to give them to you every morning, every evening, every day that I am lucky enough hold you, for ever.

My heart sings those words every morning as it thumps in my chest, a triple beat greeting the morning with joy because you are in it.

My legs run home every night to those words. My feet pound the streets to those words.

Those three small words are a shield for my back and a shelter from the rain in hard times.

Those three small words are the snow falling on my upturned joyous face and the sun shining to wake my sleeping skin.

My tongue tastes those words, shapes my speech through those words. Every word I speak to you has those three words in it too.

My hands are shaped around those words. There is no gift greater than those words that I can give to you.

So I give you this ring which is not a circle but those three words made solid, those three words with my whole life in them.

I love you.

What I’m playing: Super Hexagon

Super HexagonCan’t remember who it was that suggested I buy Super Hexagon for my iPhone, but I hate them forever.

Super Hexagon is the sort of game that seems simple and obvious once it’s made. You control a small triangle rotating around a pulsing hexagon, which is also rotating, and your job is to avoid the oncoming brightly-coloured walls by dodging through the gaps for as long as possible.

Which is not very long. It is fast. It is almost impossibly fast. Here’s a review that starts to get into what happens when you play, the sense that you just have to keep playing and soon you’ll work it out, soon you’ll be able to get your eyes to see fast enough and your fingers to respond, and you’ll get beyond 10 seconds of play. Then 15. Then 26. Then more.

It’s gotten very competitive for me. I’m playing the game as relaxation, to get into a flow state in down time, to shed the concerns of the day by occupying my brain with something simple, linear, interesting, with a clear win state. But there’s also a nagging sense that I need to get better at this game, like simply being decent isn’t good enough. Last night I unlocked Hyper Hexagonest, the hardest game mode possible, and I’m at a high score of 16 seconds on it. Maybe when I get to 60 it’ll be enough.

Last Thursday was the Wild Rumpus, which this time included a Super Hexagon tournament, using the shoulder bumpers on an Xbox controller rather than tapping a screen. I fluffed my turn in the first round – too much wine, I suspect. 36 seconds. On Friday, almost as if in protest and guilt, I set new personal bests in four of the six available levels. A part of my brain won’t let go of the desire to be best, no matter how unattainable it is.

Super Hexagon is one of those wonderfully difficult, intricate yet simple games that tricks you into competing against yourself and believing, somehow, that there’s something you can do differently this time to stave off failure. My experience and my ability is far too dependent on mood and tiredness and – to be honest – the whole thing hinges on twitch reflex and pattern recognition, on skills that can’t be trained with ease. It’s hard to get better. That’s why every personal best seems like an achievement, a demonstration of worth. It’s also why most people won’t want to get to the last level, never mind put in the time necessary. It’s not for everyone. It’s just too hard.

But for people like me, who thrive on rhythm and pattern and unlocking complexity, and who have that bit in their brains that says yes more do better must do better must get it Right, it’s horribly addictive yet gloriously relaxing, both at once. It feeds perfectionism while keeping attainment at arm’s length, ever distant. It is a beautiful bastard of a game.

What the water feels like to the fishes

Goldfish Depression sneaks up on me around this time of year. Most years I spend these late months down, though some more so than others. There’s something about the slow dying of the light that brings out the noonday demon, bleaching colour from the day and bringing sharp edges to the night.

Though that’s too poetic, really, for the drab reality. Sleepless nights followed by nights of too much sleep, leaving me drained and exhausted regardless. Headaches that don’t leave, restlessness without cause, and sadness that turns up unexpectedly mid-sentence and refuses to dissipate. Most of all, a thin veil that descends between me and the world, dulling joy and blunting emotions, making it hard to participate through the feeling of awful apart-ness, as though I’m watching life on a screen and not participating. In the summer I take on dozens of projects, safe in the boundless energy the light brings. In winter, I count spoons and mete out activity in careful, measured portions, for fear of failing to cope. Without Grant, I would struggle to eat well or sleep at all.

For some people – I’m one of them – depression is just a fact of life. I don’t remember a time before depression. I guess I was 11 when I had my first full-blown episode; I know I was 12 when I was first diagnosed. I know what it’s like to be happy, but I don’t know what it’s like not to have to hoard it, guard it, trace its contours for as long as I possess it. To not know with certainty that it is fleeting, and must pass.

That is one of the cruellest things about this illness. It perpetuates itself in the knowledge of itself. Depression is itself depressing. And terribly boring, too. So many depressives – myself included – develop other problems in part to cope with the bleakness of the dark mornings, but also because they are at least something that can be controlled, and that brings an upside, a dramatic, vivid illustration of the pain we’re in, and something else to focus on. Perhaps it’s taboo to suggest that anorexia, alcoholism, self-injury and so forth have benefits, but it’s true; otherwise, they wouldn’t be so seductive. I recall vividly a psychiatrist telling me that if they could bottle and prescribe the psychological effects of self-harm without the messy reality, it would be the most effective antidepressant ever – and one of the most addictive.

So in the down times I cope not only with the depression itself but also with the desperate animal-in-trap desire to hurt myself, something counterproductive, self-destructive but also self-preservative, something that – if I could control it and mitigate its down sides – would be the best possible way of dealing with the depression. That, I think, makes it harder – to know, intimately, that there is an easy option, and still not to take it.

But then, this too shall pass. The most powerful knowledge I have is that this will pass. It must pass. The blackness is not permanent; the sun will rise again. What I fear most is forgetting that such sadness is temporary. That way lies madness.

This post was imported from my Tumblr as part of a big reorganisation of my online self in January 2012.