Active Recall!

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Info Diet: 10/6/2024

I heard something somewhere about how facts can be the best cure for writer’s block. If you get stuck on something, back up and start writing facts down.

Similarly, I think reviewing my content diet and sharing some of it each week could be a good way to (1) get past writer’s block and (2) create a base to generate ideas for the upcoming week. It seems like a sustainable thing and something I can time box.

I need to accept that this list won’t be comprehensive. If I don’t share a link to everything I found interesting that week, that’s okay! Alright I better just get to this list.

Books I’m currently reading

  • “I am Pilgrim” by Terry Hayes: Great so far, but also I’m only like 50 pages in of 600-ish. A friend recommended it to me after I told him I started reading “The Terminal List” series. This year I’ve read a lot more fiction than usual—Jack Carr and Don Winslow making up a bunch of it. And my only wish is that I had been reading way more fiction in the past.
  • “The Jaws Log” by Carl Gottlieb: I love these books. Production diaries? I think there are a few different terms. Sometimes they’re director memoirs. Or some memoirs are more about the things the person worked on rather than their personal goings-on. Anyway, the main takeaway so far is that filming a shark and having an animatronic shark were pretty new so that was a huge part of the puzzle when making the movie. And the genius of not showing the shark through most of the movie was driven by constraint of how hard it would have been to show the shark throughout the movie.
  • “Hits, Flops, and Other Illusions: My Fortysomething Years in Hollywood” by Ed Zwick: I started this and skipped and read the chapter on “The Last Samurai” because it’s one of my favorite movies. But I’m back to where I was and will read the entire book. What I learned: if Tom Cruise says yes to your movie, you now have an unlimited budget. Need to do a research trip in Japan? Sure. Need to house and transport 100s of extras for the battle scene in New Zealand? No problem.

Alright that’s it for now

I had a shorter time to write today. I want to time box this to an hour but today I had 20 minutes. And I’ll accept that as god enough for now.

Notes on picking what to work on

The comfort of writing into the void of a blog.

I won’t worry too much about overhtinking things. I’ve been in a rut with making things online. I got a couple Shorts out last week and that felt good but then it didn’t seem quite as sustainable.

I’m writing this at Philz.

While I was packing my bag with way too many books I was starting to think, “Okay what output would make the time worthwhile?”

I was starting to think about, okay, I can write scripts for some Shorts, that would make it worthwhile.

But then if the output is Shorts, I’m probably better off just staying home and filming some Shorts. The bottleneck is usually visuals, either filming or making a slideshow.

So if it’s strictly about the output, I would’ve stayed home.

But I then I remembered, wait, I love being at a coffee shop and writing. My hall of fame for coffee shops where I’ve spent a lot of great time messing around on my laptop:

  • The Bean on 1st Ave & 9th St (NYC): Sadly, it’s closed. I didn’t see it listed ont he website so I clicked around on Street View to figure out where it was and now it’s a corner store. 10 years ago I had aspirations (and a daily affirmation lol) to work in tech. So I’d bring the 15-inch MacBook (Retina baby!) to The Bean and would tinker around in Framer and Sketch. 
  • Whatever that coffee shop was on Avenue A & 4th St (NYC): This was the closest coffee shop but it didn’t have a ton of seating. One summer I decided to actually read (but not actually understand) Infinite Jest and took it here a few times to bang out like 0.5% of the book with each go. 
  • The common area at Chelsea Piers Fitness (NYC): Okay not a coffee shop but I’d spend many mornings here around the time I was starting all things Active Recall. Lots of ideas that only 10% panned out. Love it. Tried to replicate it at an Equinox when we moved to the Upper West Side. Couldn’t. Then we moved to SF.

And I haven’t quite gotten back to doing that in the bay area.

Alright that was a lot about how I like writing at coffee shops. I should find some quotes about doing things for the intrinsic joy of doing those things in the moment.

Oliver Burkeman: The problem with the content diet analogy

When I hit some kind of block, I often return to something like, “Okay let’s just review my content diet.” What have I read, watched, or listened to lately?

What you might not want to do is turn everything you’re read into some kind of meal where you need to scrape everything off the bone. There’s value in the activity of reading itself even if you aren’t processing everything through a system that then ends up in your second brain.

(I do like all the second brain, externalized brain, etc. stuff but my 15,000+ notes in Evernote probably indicate a swing too far far in that direction.)

Here’s what Oliver Burkeman says

Oh, this, you know there’s this whole world, I’m sure you’re aware of the world in general, right? Of people sort of using different note taking apps, obsidian, external brain type thing,

That’s a great thing, and I try to do it myself. But there’s a way of doing that becomes this kind of attempt to kind of like eat all the knowledge that you’re exposed to.

And so another point that I’m making in keeping with the sort of rivers and buckets ideas there…, is that’s not the primary point of reading. I’m all for people taking notes about really interesting things that leap out at them.

But the benefit of reading, say, a really good book is not to sort of squirrel it all away for some later moment of use. Which is the same old problem of postponing everything to the future.

It’s because if it’s a good book, it will change you a little bit in the activity of reading it.

Okay I thought I was going to do a bunch of different quotes about picking what to work on and how important it is to pick the joy of the activity itself. 

(On the other hand… I do buy into the idea that for a specific output we can work on stuff that is so far removed from the actual output itself. Anyway. Accepting two ideas at the same time and all that…)

But coffee shop time has to end and I have to head out. This one highlight will do for now.

Check out Chris Williamson’s full interview with Oliver Burkeman: The Savage Irony of Trying to be Productive

Oliver Burkeman’s book comes out in a couple weeks and I can’t wait to read it and overhighlight it.

Building a tiny creation habit

I was thinking it’d be good to write notes for 3 book highlights daily. I’ve been re-reading (okay, listening to) “Tiny Habits” by BJ Fogg. 

The essence of Tiny Habits is this: Take a behavior you want, make it tiny, find where it fits naturally in your life, and nurture its growth. If you want to create long-term change, it’s best to start small. 

It was a reminder that it’s probably good enough to start with 1 book highlight daily. And even that is a little bit too big for the framing of a tiny habit. It’s the whole “floss one tooth” thing.

What if it were even smaller than writing notes for one book highlight? I made it smaller by reducing the number of highlights. I can now separate into the two activities.

1. Picking a book highlight

2. Writing a note about the book highlight

So I could just start celebrating by picking a highlight to write about in the first place.

That might still be too big to be “tiny”. First I should just build the habit of going through some book highlights every day. Luckily I have an old system set up for that. I have a few different book highlight digests from Readwise.

Gaming, Creativity, Fitness, and the uncategorized digest.

Unfortunately I’ve tended to ignore these. So it might just be a matter of picking a good prompt for when to read through one of these and picking one highlight to write about then moving that to WordPress.

More to think about here. Anyway here’s a second highlight from the book. Which highlights that you can practice getting better at looking at habits and thinking up solutions. BJ Fogg does a behavior swarm with index cards:

When I first started researching and experimenting with Behavior Matching, I bought a lot of index cards. With practice, I learned to Magic Wand a Swarm of Behaviors very quickly. I’d set a timer for five minutes and see if I could write down twenty-five behaviors on the cards. (Easier than you think.) Then I’d sort the behavior cards and plot them on a Focus Map on the kitchen counter. It was like solving puzzles.

25’s a lot so here are 5 behaviors I can have to publish one small thing daily.

1. Go through my Readwise emails

2. Open MarsEdit on my laptop

3. Have a template in Obsidian

4. Set Obsidian up to post a draft to WordPress

5. Put one single highlight in Drafts every day

All of these would make it easier to get into an editor that can publish to this blog.

Find the fun (even if you’re not making DOOM)

John Romero, in “DOOM Guy”:

As a game designer, playing the game is essential, not just to test out the features you’ve created, but to find the fun. Sometimes, that fun isn’t in the things you thought were features, as was the case with the early Wolfenstein, or worse, the features are getting in the way of the fun. This is why completing an early “first playable” of a game is so important. “First playable” is an industry term and defines the point at which the core loop of the game is completely playable. For a first-person shooter, that core loop is often something like this: Players and enemies can move, shoot at one another, take damage, and die.

I set a timer for 10 minutes and the goal is to grab a book highlight and share some thoughts on it. That makes it a little bit of a game. It makes it a little bit more fun.

I haven’t written on here in a bit. I want to find the fun in it though. I’ve continued writing daily, though more back to private writing. I was writing in Google Docs for a few months and have recently given Obsidian a second try and have been really liking it this time around. It’s gotten to where it does increase the fun of writing.

Or maybe it’s the engagement of writing? In any case, I’m enjoying pulling up a weekly note and filling in daily prompts. While not Morning Pages as prescribed by Julia Cameron, my daily writing in Obsidian does seem to accomplish the idea of being windshield wipers for the brain.

One of the prompts I fill in daily is around my information diet. So I just try to write down 1 thing I read, 1 thing I listened to, and 1 thing I watched lately. Over a few days repeating this, I realized that it’s the section that’s the most publish-able of my private notes.

And I have a place to publish them. So I may as well post here.

Different blogs through my life have been a place where I’ve been able to find the fun in writing.

(Though not as fun as playing or making DOOM. Oh on that note, check out this video I made where I loaded DOOM textures into the world with the Vision Pro.)

How I listen to audiobooks (with Kindle and Audible)

I started listening to”The Terminal List” during runs and… it’s awesome.

I gave up on listening to fiction audiobooks a few years ago. I’ve always wanted to (and still want to) read a bunch of sci-fi books. I thought I’d start by listening to a bunch of Neal Stephenson’s books. I tried to listen to “The Diamond Age” while walking around New York. I’d stop paying attention for a few minutes then need to back it up a few chapters. Then at some point I’d stop paying attention for longer than that to the point that it was hard to even figure out what part to back it up to.

But I gave fiction audiobooks another shot when I started running a few months ago.

One thing that helped: switching genres from sci-fi to thrillers. I started with Don Winslow’s “The Power of the Dog” trilogy

A second thing that’s helped: being able to play audiobooks in the Kindle app with the reading indicator. Now I’ll often drop the combined $20-$30 to have a book on Kindle and Audible. You used to be able to add the Audible book for $7.50 for a lot of books. But it seems like there’s probably some sort of change in publishing deals that’s made that far less common with newer releases. Anyway, when I get lost it’s a lot easier to back things up to a place that I remember using the Kindle app because it’s easier to skim through text than it is with a combination of skip forward/skip backward buttons. 

Third, sort of along with the above change, the Kindle app allows you to do an infinite vertical scroll with most books. The audio syncs so that if you scroll enough to where the current word is off screen, the audio will start back at the top of the screen. You can also highlight a word and start the audio at that word.

I listen at 1.5X when running.

I listen at 2-3X when reading the text version on Kindle. I play the audiobook to get the word indicator at the same time. At 3X, I’ll have to backtrack sometimes but listening at the same time helps keep me moving forward in the book. If I’m on my phone, it’s also a nudge to not switch to other apps.

I’m reading more and I’d bet I’m retaining more. Though in my head I’ve also pared back the importance of retention or trying to understand every last detail of things. The man wants revenge. Sometimes I’ll look up who he’s currently brutalizing and remember, oh yeah, that’s why this person is a scumbag.

“The Power of the Dog” by Don Winslow – 5 Reactions

I want to write more about books as I’m reading them and I should always take the time to write about books I finished. I’ll just try to get 5 points down or something like that.

1. I need to finish this trilogy (along with a few other series): I remember seeing the subway takeovers for “The Force” a few years ago when I lived in New York. I didn’t buy the book then but now I want to read all of his books. But I’ll definitely start with the rest of the Cartel trilogy. I’ve read the first book of a few series in the past few months: ”Fourth Wing”, ”Hyperion”, ”Red Rising”, and now “The Power of the Dog”. I’ll likely jump right into ”The Cartel” (Book 2).

2. Now that’s how you weave stories together: I don’t read a ton of fiction, but it’s been a while since I’ve read something with the stories of multiple characters coming together so well. It’s been over a decade since I first read “Hyperion” and I remember it coming together in “The Fall of Hyperion” but it doesn’t quite happen in book 1. “The Power of the Dog” is tied up nicely on its own. I actually sort of don’t want to read book 2 because I worry about what might happen to characters I’ve grown attached to.

3. Always cool to know places in books (so having both New York and San Diego in it is a treat): Major cities I’ve lived in: Seattle, San Diego, New York, and San Francisco. Most of the time it’s New York I’ll get a kick out of seeing in media. (Top of the list for me is from Succession: My wife and I met at the “You are not serious people” karaoke bar on 32nd street in New York.) This one had a lot about San Diego. Though it’s a different time from when I lived there, I enjoyed mentions of Horton Plaza, Fashion Valley, Chula Vista La Jolla, etc.

4. No character is black and white (well except one): Cops with twisted motives. Honor amongst thieves. Governments and churches in cahoots. Multiple times through the book, Winslow’s able to quickly make you care about what happens to characters. He goes through their upbringing and you see the paths taken that eventually justify decisions that would otherwise seem crazy. Then there is one character who is pretty much evil. Gives other characters the creeps. Gives me the creeps.

5. If you love Narcos and Sicario, “The Power of the Dog” is a no brainer: My path to this: Dune 2 came out and I watched with my wife then we decided to go through all the [[Denis Villeneuve]]’s movies we hadn’t seen. Started with ”Prisoners” (chilling), then “Blade Runner 2049” (awesome), and then “Sicario” (loved it). Each one got me into Reddit and YouTube explainer rabbit holes. ”Sicario” got me of course reading about the CIA—beginner level stuff like I only learned from the movie that they don’t operate domestically. At some point a comment said something like “Read ‘The Power of the Dog’ to learn more about how the cartels rose to power.” I’m glad I did.

Other current books I’m reading: Finishing up Andrew Huang’s “Make Your Own Rules”, started Junji Ito’s “Uzumaki” and don’t know if I’ll finish it because it’s creeping me out at night already, and I also started Ryan Higa’s “How to Write Good” because I want to read more books by YouTubers since I’m enjoying Andrew Huang’s book so much.