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The Answers to Your Questions: Contest Results

May 6, 2020

contest results, home for fiction, writing

No, in case you thought this post contains answers to all your (existential) questions, I’ll disappoint you. It only contains my answers to the questions you asked me for the Home for Fiction contest we recently had; contest results, in other words!

I got quite a few questions – thank you all! – perhaps even a bit more than I expected. In case you missed the whole thing, the contest worked so that you could ask me a question related to my writing, the blog, etc., and then I would pick the five most interesting ones to answer. From these, I’d randomly pick three that would win Amazon gift cards, valued at $10, $20, and $30.

Well, as I said, it’s contest results time! Before we proceed to the answers, a couple of notes:

Since I shared the contest page with friends and acquaintances online, I inevitably got questions from people I already knew. This did not affect my choice of questions…
… and as for the Amazon gift cards, the process was entirely automated. I coded a JavaScript-based name picker to randomly get three names. If you’re interested in its details, the code is available at the end of this post.

With these in mind, let’s take a look at the contest results!

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Book Worming Party: When Literature Meets Drawing

February 20, 2020

Home For Fiction, Programming

art, home for fiction, javascript, literature, programming

For the past couple of months I’ve been working on a rather ambitious project. Ambition is often misunderstood, but the way I choose to approach it, it’s about doing something “just because”. It was in this “fuck it” framework that Book Worming Party, my latest programming project came to being.

Book Worming Party – even the name should tell you how mad this project is – combines three of my interests: literature, visuality, and programming. What can I say, I’m a talented man (and above all, modest).

Book Worming Party is a program (written mostly in JavaScript) that takes a work of fiction and, based on calculations and interpretations it makes about its nature, turns it into semi-random visual art. It translates words into color, plot into shapes, genre into affect. There are no separate “kinds of art”; art is art.

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Why I Lost my Motivation Working with Android Apps

December 14, 2019

Home For Fiction

Android, home for fiction, idiocy, motivation

This is a bit special, unusual post, squeezed in-between the regular flow of Home for Fiction posts. It’s basically an email reply I sent to a Narrative Nods user in regard to my response to a review.

This surely sounds a bit complicated (and perhaps the headline a bit overwhelming), so here’s a very brief background.

Some time ago, I decided to stop working on offering updates for Narrative Nods – for reasons you’ll see below. I also don’t feel motivated to work on the rest of my apps. This became apparent to users after I left the following response to a review on Google Play:

[…]Frankly, I think you might be quite right. This app is rather pointless, certainly not as engaging as a fruit tapping game or a selfie camera app. I’m considering removing it from the Store or, at the very least, never bother with it ever again. There’s more important things out there. Cheers!

This was understandably misinterpreted as sarcastic, so I had to offer another response:

Thanks for the support, but you might’ve (understandably) misunderstood me. I wasn’t being sarcastic in that response. I actually believed—still do—that the app isn’t as useful as I’d initially thought. Its main flaw is that it needs users to put in the work, and not everyone is mature enough for that (that’s what the ‘fruit tapping’ part implied).

This, again inevitably, was misunderstood further. Google Play allows only 350 characters in a given review – or “review” – or response, which makes it impossible to properly express what’s going on. A user emailed me and asked me not to be hostile and feel hurt by negative feedback.

It was, again, understandable. That user couldn’t know that I don’t care about audience reception. I had to finally offer a proper response, unconstrained by spatial limitations – remember my post on why Twitter is a bad idea for writers.

Today’s post is a chance for me to extend my response to a more general audience. The purpose is for other users of my Android apps to have a proper explanation about the situation, as well as for others to catch a glimpse of the dynamics involved. Great teaching material regarding digital misunderstanding, among other things.

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