Do you like to smell paper? If yes, I’m sure you find nothing weird about it. If not, you likely think that people who smell paper are weird, or worse. Perhaps you find it weirder, still, to hear that smelling paper is a strong facilitator of memory and, hence, experiencing.
In other words, smelling paper can help you recall old memories and relive past experiences. As we’ve seen before, this is crucial for a writer.
But even if you’re not a writer, recalling and re-experiencing your memories offers a sense of identity, helping you to reflect on yourself. Ultimately, it helps you better understand who you are.
All this from smelling paper!
Paper doesn’t smell like roses. It smells like paper! And it’s precisely this uniqueness that makes smelling paper special in helping us remember (more…)
“The meaning of novels: What’s so novel about a novel”. If you think the title is a bit insane, that’s what you get when you make a post out of a discussion between me and Igor da Silva Livramento, friend and fellow writer, academic, and creative-writing advisor. We talk about novels, language, and whatever else comes to mind. Igor is also a composer, music theorist, and producer. You can find him on LinkedIn, and also take a look at his blog and his page on Bandcamp.
Chris: This convo kind of started with my suggesting “No news is good news, I suppose”, which you expertly picked up.
Igor: No news is neither good nor bad, because there is no news to be valued or assessed. Yet, a certain literary background allows you to use this sentence the way you did. In a sense, it is a paradox. But it is only a paradox insofar as that paradox is the clearest and most direct way of saying what is condensed in the sentence. But how so? As I always say, but few people listen to me: Logic concerns only a very limited subset of human languages. Everything that really matters to say, that is, everything that is really interesting in the events of language lies beyond the limits of logic.
To jump to a more interesting part of the reasoning: This means that literature carries (with)in itself – encodes, someone will (wrongly) say – a knowledge (of a generative kind). But why all this? The strongest empirical (from the marketplace) evidence of what I am saying is in the growing trend of publishing houses adding “a novel” to the front cover of fiction books!
Usually I would’ve inserted here a stock photo relevant to the topic, the meaning of novels. But one meaning of a novel could be this: Create your own meaning. So, take this photo and create your own meaning on how it’s related to the “meaning of novels”.(more…)
We live in the time of “now, gimme, I want something new”. Everything seems to lose its value immediately – material or not. Long gone are the days of old programs or computer games where the product remained the same. And that’s great, right? Or… is it? Because when there is no need to change something, when you fix something that isn’t broken, then constant updates only lead to mediocrity.
Just ask yourself, how many times one of your Android apps updated itself and the newer iteration proved to be inferior? Perhaps you ended up with a bloated app that did the same thing, only now it took more space on your phone. If you were more unlucky, the app might have even messed up something in your workflow, which made it harder for you to use it.
As someone who has experienced this from both sides of the equation – as a user as well as programmer – I can confirm two things:
Users often want constant updates just for the sake of updating, without necessarily having any specific plan in mind.
Developers, to please their audience, offer such updates without necessarily having a clear picture of what will occur down the road.
As I said, I’ve been there myself. I’ve even made the mistake myself – thankfully only briefly, however. As I’ve mentioned in my post on why I stopped working on my Android apps, at some point I got enough of mediocrity and stupidity, and thought “fuck it, I’m done”.
But let’s take a closer look, to see how this perceived need for constant updates operates, and why it’s so insidious – both in terms of programming and in how it affects us socially.
Apps and scraps. When it comes to constant updates, you tend to focus on the newness itself, rather than its functionality. It’s not unlike being flooded with Christmas gifts. It soon becomes about removing the wrap, rather than enjoying the item.(more…)
