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aion-rsa · 4 years ago

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The Walking Dead: World Beyond Episode 5 Review – Madman Across the Water

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This The Walking Dead: World Beyond review contains spoilers.

The Walking Dead: World Beyond Episode 5

When the Endlings left Campus Colony, they were four kids who didn’t really know each other. Even Hope and Iris, the two sisters, had secrets from one another. Silas kept the secret of why he ended up at Campus. And Elton, the quirky little fellow in the corduroy suit, had secrets of his own. On a show littered with traumatic stories, perhaps none is quite as traumatic as Elton’s, and The Walking Dead: World Beyond puts that trauma, as well as his mother’s manuscript, to great use in explaining Elton’s current character.

One of the things Dan Liu does with his direction, particularly the montage towards the middle of the episode of everyone coming together to build a boat, is get over the importance of pulling together as a team. The kids have been mostly divided, but slowly pulling together as they journey, with Huck and Felix already an established team. The adults working to separate the kids out and break up their developing unity is a bit underhanded, and during the episode, it seems the Huck is slowly starting to feel this out as she watches the kids work together to solve problems that would be insurmountable to an individual working alone. The montage, and the many scenes of the kids coming to one another’s assistance, help put that theme over fairly strongly, even before the alt-country song kicks in while building a raft out of pallets and barrels.

Another credit to Liu is for the ability he has with younger actors, particularly Roger Dale Floyd, who plays Elton in his flashback sequences. It’s something that could easily go too big or too wide. It’s a child, scared, hiding in a box while clutching a dinosaur fossil as a talisman of safety. However, it’s pretty restrained, all things considered, and young Roger Dale Floyd puts in a solid performance, bolstered by the returning Amelia (Christina Brucato) and debuting Isaac (Reese Rios) as his bookish, educator parents. No wonder Elton is a precocious child; his mother is a university professor and his father is a paleontologist working at the local natural history museum, and Elton himself is shown to be precocious from the jump, his attitude towards life inspired by his mother’s fatalistic manuscript and the bravery his father shows in the final moments the two spend together. (Since my father passed away and my own child has been born, things like this hit me harder than they should, especially when performed and shot competently, as this is. Also, like Elton, I’m claustrophobic.)

“Madman Across the Water” is peppered liberally with voice overs via Rohit Kumar’s script, with Elton’s mother’s voice reading the words in her book in her son’s head. His goal has been to finish his mother’s magnum opus in her memory, and it’s an interesting plot device to explain the character’s fatalistic bent. Her book seems to be all about the inability of humans to overcome nature, so naturally, he’d feel that earth will eventually belong to the force of nature known in their world as the empties. At least, at first; however, after the successful launch of the ship and the ability of both himself and the others to rise above their fears and do great things, to look a force of nature like fear in the face and conquer it, to act in the face of certain death because of no other option.

As such, her book changes directions when it goes from typewritten to Elton’s hand-written additions. After all, he’s been living his life to attempt to finish someone else’s story, not write his own, but he seems to be moving in a different direction after his bonding experience with the rest of his group. By being forced to confront his biggest fear to save his friends, and by doing it successfully, Elton goes through significant personal growth, the sort of growth that Huck talks about going through during her time on her own rafting adventure, growth that none of them would be able to achieve in the safety of Campus Colony. If nothing else, Nicolas Cantu remains the most interesting performer on the show, at least of the younger folks, and Elton remains the most interesting character, even more so when he’s given an opportunity to emote and be something other than quirky for the sake of being amusing.

The Walking Dead: World Beyond Episode 4 Post-Credits Scene Explained

By Ron Hogan

The Walking Dead: World Beyond Episode 4 Review – The Wrong End of a Telescope

By Ron Hogan

Elton feels like he’s forging a pretty decent budding friendship with Felix (Nico Tortorella) in spite of Felix’s attempts to manipulate him into turning against the others. There are a couple of make-nice moments throughout the episode, but I kind of doubt a group of teens would be so quick to forgive someone for turning against them, and they would definitely not be forgiving of an adult who tried to split their group apart in what is literally a life or death situation. Most likely, that’d be enough to break up the group, but apparently, the existential threat caused by dissent and deception pales in comparison to the actual threat of a group of walkers freed from a bargain-basement Margaritaville by a lightning storm.

The group can do more when they work together, as shown by the montage in the episode, splitting up to get more done, and the final cheer-baiting moment in which the group all pull together to launch the boat into the river and escape the pursuing zombies. However, after the group spends most of the episode arguing with one another, or yelling at Felix for his attempt to smash their togetherness, it doesn’t feel quite like the heroic moment it’s supposed to. Yes, they overcame their differences and were able to come together after the group politics were dealt with, but anyone should be able to work together to drag a boat into the water to escape being eaten alive.

That’s less of a heroic moment and more of an obvious thing, and it’s clear that the tension won’t be done with until Hope shatters Elton’s last bit of optimism somewhere along the way. What the audience has known since the second episode, that Hope is the person who killed Elton’s mother and sister, is finally, officially revealed to Hope in ham-fisted fashion as she gawks at a photo of his mother. I had assumed, based off of the way Elton has been triggering flashbacks for her, that she’d already put the clues together, but it certainly doesn’t seem like it based off of her reaction. It might be a needle drop for the character, but it’s not for the audience, and it’s pushed too hard here in the closing moments of “Madman Across the Water.” It’d be a good punch if the audience hadn’t been clued into it for so long, and for so obviously, that it makes Hope look silly for not knowing it. I’m all for dramatic irony, but it’s been too heavily applied

One of the issues with a show like this is that drama needs to be created amongst the group. Felix’s deceit seem to be resolved a little too easily, but the big secret—Hope’s big secret—is going to hang over the remaining episodes of the season until she blurts it out, probably at the worst possible time given how these things typically unfold on teen dramas. With as long as it’s been stretched out thus far, will audiences have any patience for this to continue very much longer?

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The Walking Dead: World Beyond hasn’t exactly been a ratings smash, even if it’s still the fourth most popular show on AMC at the moment. It’s a limited series with limited appeal, in a nontraditional genre for AMC. And, more unfortunately for the show, it’s been done better elsewhere. I’m not quite ready to write the show off, but the shine has started to flake off a bit.

The post The Walking Dead: World Beyond Episode 5 Review – Madman Across the Water appeared first on Den of Geek.

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onett199x · 7 years ago

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Yes, video games are art, but are they artistic?

This is another essay I wrote - I don’t do this super often, but I was feeling particularly inspired on this topic tonight, so here it is.

A question I often see asked, usually by someone with an obvious bias or conflict of interest, is this: Are video games art? These days, the prevailing attitude towards that idea seems to be that they are, although that could easily just seem to be the prevailing attitude from my perspective because most people I know have a generally favorable attitude towards video games. At least from where I'm sitting, it seems like a tired, silly question - I imagine a college freshman pointedly answering "VIDEO GAMES!" when his Introduction to Art teacher asks about different mediums of art, and then being slightly disappointed when that professor doesn't try to argue with him about it. Of course, there are different definitions of what 'art' is and isn't, so I'll start by defining my own terms. To me, personally, there is no threshold of quality in art. In other words, anything made by anybody can be art, whether that person has a talented bone in their body or not - macaroni glued to construction paper by kindergartners is art, and Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling frescoes are art. By my definition, then, of course video games are art - they have design and controls, they have images designed by visual artists, and they have music composed by musicians. Any and all video games are art - it didn't just happen when presenters at E3 started trying to target the Self-Important College Freshmen demographic. So Asteroids is art, Custer's Revenge is art, those battery-operated Game And Watch handhelds are art, and Flappy Bird, Neko Atsume, and Pokemon Go are art. Some of those are art in the same way that Tijuana Bibles or 'Spot the Difference' games in the funny papers are art, but by my definition, they're still art. In my mind, at least, that much is simple.

Where this discussion gets instantly a thousand times more complicated is whether they are artistic. This is what I think many people mean when they have conversations about whether video games are art - the implied question is not 'Is this something humans made to express themselves', but 'What is the value of this expression?' and, underneath that, 'Can we say it is as valuable as, for example, books, film, or visual art?' And THAT is a hairy, complicated question with a lot of different arguments to unpack and address.

I think, to take the previous thought just a little further, many people really want to discuss whether video games can teach us something about the human condition the way that literature or some movies or television can. This is what makes it a fun debate for people, because when video games were first invented and popularized, that answer was almost universally a resounding 'No'. At their inception, video games largely served the societal purpose of relieving children and older nerds of their pocket change - Jumpman's plight to rescue Paulina from Donkey Kong had no metaphor, allegory, or social/political commentary. Everything about its premise, down to Jumpan's mustache and large nose, was the direct result of working within the limitations of primitive hardware. As video games moved into the home market, they were still primarily targeted towards children (and nerds), with mostly bright, colorful mascots and cartoony aesthetics. So while they still met my (admittedly generous) standards for the definition of 'art' listed above, they did not pretend to probe the depths of the human soul. I imagine that changed sometime in the decade that saw the advent of text-heavy role playing games and the transition from two dimensions to three within the game space. In Search Of Lost Time these games were not, however - the closest analogue I could provide would be a Saturday morning cartoon show with action figure marketing tie-ins. It's only been in the last ten years or so that it seems like some people have really started to push that particular envelope, and, in my eyes, a lot of these efforts are pretentious or heavy-handed. I'm sure somewhere, someone has written a Thinkpiece on how those games with ~serious moral choices~ (see: Bioshock's decidedly unsubtle 'Will you rescue this innocent child or harvest their organs?') are advancing the artistic merit of the medium, and I hate that thinkpiece. Attempts to be more subtle with these ideas have certainly surfaced since the whole 'Would you kindly...?' thing, and some of those have, admittedly, presented much more interesting questions for debate. Much of these more interesting ideas in the 'commentary on the human condition' wheelhouse of video game design comes from indie developers who are setting out specifically to make us ask those questions. Just to name a few, Papers, Please puts us in the role of a government official in a bureaucratic dystopia and encodes its morality-based commentary in the actual gameplay; Undertale takes Bioshock's simple 'this or that' morality and flips it 180 degrees to be about how we consume video games. In fact, many of these games ask us what we can learn about ourselves based on the choices we make when we play video games, which makes for fun conversations but, in my mind, they lose a lot of their academic merit as soon as you try to apply those lessons to just about any other scenario. As much as I loved and bought into Undertale's unique take on video game morality, it has almost no real-world application. Outside of these examples, the bigger, more mainstream games have certainly become more cinematic, or, to perhaps narrow it down a bit, more like blockbuster films. Naughty Dog's Uncharted series has all of the genre hallmarks, snarky witticisms, and epic symphonic soundtracks of Marvel's Cinematic Universe, while their critically-acclaimed The Last Of Us puts us in approximately the same head space as AMC's The Walking Dead television adaptation. It's work that engages us mentally, in other words - we don't simply sit and absorb it, because it isn't so much statements as questions. Something that engages us, though, isn’t necessarily high art just for that fact. The works that are the most discussed and revered among narrative-driven mediums frequently have stories that affect many people on a deep, personal level, perhaps even altering their world view. To contextualize it, I’d put the artistic merit of most video game storylines/premises/scenarios somewhere in the middle of the scale that ranges from Antonio Banderas's performance as the Nasonex bee to Brian Cranston's performance as Walter White on the scale of 'what does this teach me about myself' - they're fun to think about and talk about, but I'm not expecting many academic texts on the intricate socio-political subtexts of Mass Effect 2.

That's my admittedly complicated answer to the question of whether video game storylines/scenarios can pose powerful existential questions - you might unsatisfyingly condense it down to 'sometimes, I guess'. I think even the most artistic video games have a hard time truly transcending the threshold of 'high art' because, at some point in almost any game with a serious message to it, that message is encoded in the game's very gameplay, even if it's not as obvious as 'X to save, Y to harvest'. It is a message that you cannot complete the game without at least hearing, even if you aren't thinking about it as hard as perhaps those game developers wanted you to.

This is my caveat to all of this, though - I don't think all art has to ask us deep, probing questions about humanity, society, politics, or history. Even high art does not need to ask us that. When people frame the debate of The Artistic Merit of Video Games, they often use literature, film, or television as a reference point, all of which are art forms that almost universally present a narrative, the presentation of which provides a message of some kind. It seems, on a surface level, that these mediums are the most relevant comparisons to video games, because a very sizeable chunk of video games also present a narrative, and maybe even a message. To imply that something must have a narrative to it in order to qualify as art, though, is to discount work like J. S. Bach's keyboard music or the paintings of Piet Mondrian from a discussion of what is and isn't art. Obviously, then, that definition is not a functioning definition of art. Even film and books are not solely artistic because of their narrative or because of their underlying message. Many of cinemas great auteurs are considered great not solely because of the stories they told, but because of their innovation with finding new ways to tell those stories through the use of cameras, lenses, lights, sets, props, and actors. Alfred Hitchcock told compelling thriller stories, but he also once presented an entire movie in what appeared to be a single unbroken shot. William Faulkner presented the history of a troubled Louisiana family by telling it through the eyes of a mentally-handicapped character with no concept of the passage of time. These are not just compelling stories, but compelling stories that could not have been told to us any other way. In the 'uniqueness of presentation' discussion, video games certainly have a strong horse. I am surely not the first, second, or hundredth person to point out that video games are special because we must actively participate in them. More so than a stage drama with audience participation or a music performance where the crowd claps and sings along, video games cannot and will not engage us without our input. They even prevent us from experiencing them if we aren't skilled enough, a subject that has come more into debate in recent years with the rise in popularity of extremely challenging games like Dark Souls. In that (admittedly somewhat extreme) circumstance, we must learn the language, dynamics, and flow of the game in order to experience it. Any person can listen to Liszt or Chopin and enjoy themselves without understanding the complex music theory that went into the composition of their music, and anyone can watch Mulholland Drive without grasping its experiments with narrative structure, but to play a video game requires a base level of comprehension. Where the bar of that comprehension is set and the ways the video game works to impress that comprehension upon us is an artistic choice on the part of its creator. I've heard it said that people learn best by teaching themselves, and that great teachers excel because they identify well the methods their students learn by, and are better equipped by that to provide the students with the tools they need to teach themselves. Video games are a potent example of this principle - there are some excellent YouTube videos of people breaking down the ways in which video games allow us to teach ourselves how to interact with them. It's through careful attention to this instruction that even punishingly difficult games like Dark Souls can be enjoyed by a large community of fans - I would contrast it with games whose difficulty is based purely in muscle memory or in trial and error.

To delve into this a little further, a commonly discussed element of game design that is hard to put exactly into words is called the feel. My best definition I can give is how well the game gives the player the impression that they are in direct control of their avatar on the screen - a game with good feel can be as effortless to play as it is to move one's own body, and a game with bad feel can completely ruin the immersion, like bad acting or an out-of-tune musician. To me, game feel is another of the more important facets by which a game's artistic value can be judged. Video games are, like I said, unique for their symbiotic relationship with their audience/consumer, and the games that do the best job of immersing their audience do it by feeling the most natural. I think perhaps the ur-example of this connection is with that omnipresent man, Super Mario (who I mentioned above in his previous identity as Jumpman). As his original moniker implies, Mario is a guy who jumps, and he jumps in many different ways (exponentially more since his transition to 3D). This concept is so simple it can be reduced to two words. It works so powerfully and connects to so many people, though, for two reasons: first, that it feels very natural and responsive to do, and second, that it can be done however the individual consumer wants to do it. Mario can jump everywhere all the time, or only as often as he needs to. He can do a regular jump, or a long jump, or a backflip, or kick off of walls. Game Maker's Toolkit's Mark Brown describes this as 'player expression' - I don't know whether he came up with that term or if it was someone else, but it perfectly illustrates that element of video gaming. The ability to bring such a versatile array of experiences from so simple an action demonstrates the technique of video game design that is there just as surely as there is film technique, writing technique, or music technique. Regardless of the message of what is on the screen, we can tell a well-shot film from a poorly-shot one, even if we don't necessarily know the terminology to explain to someone else what the difference is between the two. We can also instantly tell the difference between trying to control Mario and trying to control Superman in Superman 64. While it might seem strange out of context to say that, in this sense, Mario games are an example of an exceedingly technical, artistic accomplishment in video games, that is absolutely a point I will stand by, much the same as Dark Souls or Half-Life 2.

There are other common points of comparison between video games and other mediums in the debate about artistic merit, but I think what my general argument is boils down simply to the fact that video games can do the most for us artistically when they do for us what nothing else can. I think using interactivity in an artistic medium to push the boundaries of narrative is one powerful way that artists can do that, but the very most basic idea of what a video game is - a world you can interact with - presents the widest possibility for artistic expression, narrative be damned. Almost all of the truest artists in video games - whether they are Shigeru Miyamoto creating games that any preschooler or retiree can pick up and play, or whether they're Hideo Kojima crafting an experience that demands a comprehensive understanding of a detailed game world - exceed at what they do not because they ask themselves how they can tell a great story. They exceed at it because they ask themselves what can be done in a video game, and the artistic merit of the medium grows and expands best with the exploration of new ideas. Like blockbuster film franchises and copycat musicians, there's certainly money to be made and entertainment to be had from presenting another angle on something familiar and comfortable, and like those mediums, innovation isn't always world-changing or popular. Any form of art succeeds by connecting in some way with its audience, and it's so exciting to think about the ways we still haven't yet discovered to connect with art - when a good book or film truly engages us, it's nothing short of a revelation, and to me, the surest sign of artistic merit in video games is that I can feel that revelation from them, too.

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theconservativebrief · 6 years ago

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Does Aisha Tyler sleep? That’s a question you might reasonably ask after looking at her IMDb page for a moment or two. She’s a regular on two TV shows — FXX’s Archer and CBS’s Criminal Minds — while also hosting Unapologetic, a new talk show for AMC. And that’s in addition to all the other one-off hosting gigs she takes on. And yet she’s always fresh, funny, and on point.

Tyler got her start as a standup comic in the late ’90s, at a time when, she says, black women were often pigeonholed into a certain style of comedy while she was much more comfortable making jokes about her love of all things geeky. She followed that up with a hosting gig on Talk Soup, and from there, her career took off and continues to fly high.

But when she joined me for the latest episode of my podcast, I Think You’re Interesting, I wanted to talk to her about those early days in standup and what she’s learned from them as she’s gone forward to a career that’s included performing in front of many different kinds of audiences, from hosting presentations at the annual E3 video game show to performing live with her Archer castmates.

Tyler’s answer about what she learned from the very start of her career was incredibly smart about both what it takes to make something that reaches other people, and about how hard it can find those people in the first place.

So I’ve excerpted it here, lightly edited for length and clarity.

Aisha Tyler

I wasn’t one of those kids who collected comedy albums and dreamt of being a comic. I was a very bookish kid and very nerdy and a social pariah for a fair part of my childhood.

I had Seth Green on my podcast years ago, and he said it’s great that nerd culture’s being celebrated, but you can’t claim to be a nerd unless you played alone for a significant portion of your childhood, which I did. I would say until I was in high school or the end of middle school, I was just a total loner.

It made me a good observer of other people and a lover of movies and comic books and video games, which were all things I could do alone to amuse myself. But I think the observational part was what played into me becoming a comedian. Chris Rock has said that if you’re an outsider, you try to get funny or tell stories, to either a) ingratiate yourself or b) prevent an ass-kicking.

I was going to be a lawyer or something, but I was unhappy in my day job and felt like I wanted to do something creative. Standup was the only thing where you didn’t need to know anybody or have an agent or get booked for. You could just go do it. And I thought I would just try it and see if I liked it.

I fell in love in one [time]. It was not … I wasn’t funny. That’s not important! [Laughs.] I just liked being up there. Every comic will tell you your first set is your best set for like the next 10 years, because you have no expectations and every laugh is like this magical gift. And then I spent a long time after that just being adequate and serviceable and panicked and nervous and tic-y. But I was passionate about it.

And look, I look the way I look and talk the way I talk, and when I started doing standup, it was right at the heyday of Def Comedy Jam and later The Kings of Comedy. I was not doing or sounding like any of the stuff that people expected an African-American woman to be doing or saying onstage, and it really took me a very long time to find my tribe.

I had to be really committed to authenticity over laughs. I could have played a character. I could have gone up and pretended to be somebody else. But I knew early on I was never going to be able to do it in an authentic way. I was going to have to stick to my guns and talk about the stuff that was personal and meaningful to me, and then hopefully people who were like me would find me.

I think doing things that way — and I think this applies to any field, especially an artistic field — made me a stronger and a mentally tougher comedian. I would just be, like, “This is who I am, and I’m just going to keep doing this and being as good as it as I can possibly be until the right people connect with it,” versus being a bellwether and trying to swing every which way [to] what was the most popular kind of comedy. Alt comedy was popular. Def Comedy Jam was popular. I was, like, “I’m gonna stick to my guns.”

Lana gets into some trouble on Archer. FXX

It made me, I think, mentally very, very tough. I had a lot of sets where I didn’t get any laughs. I say this all the time, but killing doesn’t make you funny. It’s only bombing that makes you funny. When you kill, you just, like, drop the, “Fuck it! Follow that, bitches! Bam! Shots!” And you walk off, rubbing your stomach and flashing your tits at everybody. [conspiratorially] That’s not what I do, guys. I’ve just seen it. [Laughs.]

But when you bomb, you really have to reexamine every creative choice you’ve made and think about if it was the right one. And slowly, slowly, slowly, my audiences found me. So what you get from those live shows is a true understanding of what’s funny, like a marrow-based understanding of what’s funny. When you do it long enough, you just know, “This is gonna land. This isn’t gonna land.” I’ve been a standup for 25 years, so now I have an intuitive sense of what is going to work.

And then you just get a fearlessness that translates into every other aspect of your work. When you fail enough in front of a group of people who are telling you, right then, I hate you and what you do and everything you stand for, and you don’t die, then nothing can hurt you.

Todd VanDerWerff

Was there a time when you bombed, and it didn’t work, but you were, like, “I know this is funny. I know this material works”? How did you gain that confidence to just find the people who thought it was funny, too?

Aisha Tyler

There was a comic who was working really prevalently when I was in San Francisco, when I started in the ’90s, and he did this bit where he got onstage … and he ate a pack of Hostess powdered donut gems and read from, like, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. It’s funny as a concept, but it kinda didn’t work, but then it kinda did. So he’d get up there, and he’d start, and it was kinda funny.

And then when people realized there was no punchline, they would get really annoyed with him, and then they would get angry, and then they would boo. He just was relentless. He just would not stop. Disgust turned to moderate respect turned into people cheering him on turned into, like, “This guy’s a genius.” So the common denominator is just relentlessness, right? A willingness to commit to your choices.

There are a lot of comedians who have done this. A different kind of example of this is the infamous set Bill Burr did at the Weenie Roast in New Jersey, when he got booed, like a solid wall of boo for, like, 10 minutes. [Tyler is referring to this 2006 performance in Camden, New Jersey.] And he had to stay on stage for 10 minutes, or he wasn’t going to get paid. It wasn’t like people were ignoring him. They were just actively screaming and throwing things and calling him names and cursing his offspring. And he was just, like, “I’m not moving.” And it went from this wall of boo to this standing ovation.

It doesn’t mean that just standing up there and refusing to move is going to get you anything but arrested, but I think what made me continue when it was awful, or at least not particularly fun, was I loved being a standup. I loved it, and I loved it more than I disliked bombing.

There was this one set at this place in San Francisco called the Brain Wash. It was like a laundromat, and they would do standup shows there in a back room a couple nights a week. They were open mics, essentially. And the whole audience was comics. It’s not that they don’t want to laugh. It’s that they don’t care to. They’re looking at their setlists. They’re waiting for you to get off so that they can get on. I remember doing this show and not one laugh. And it was so funny to me. I got off stage and was, like, “Nobody laughed! That was amazing.” It was like a feat. That was when I knew I was a comic. That did nothing to me. It just made me strong.

Interesting art comes from people who are unwavering in their vision. For me — something I know now; I don’t think I knew it then — I just thought, I’m gonna be a comic, and I’m not gonna stop. You start to mine little veins and they feel good to you. You put jokes down because they’re getting laughs, but they’re not right. They don’t say anything important. And you slowly cobble something together.

But you have to be a glutton for punishment. You have to want to be out at 1 o’clock in the morning on a Wednesday night, and you have to want to work for no money and be insulted and ignored. You have to really want it. If you can’t tolerate those things, there’s no point. It’s not a glamorous job. Chris Rock is glamorous, sure, but 30 years later, he’s glamorous. Every comic will tell you they went through a period where it was the least fun it could possibly be.

For more with Tyler, including her thoughts on Lana Kane after nine seasons of Archer and discussion of making her way past cultural gatekeepers in pop culture and nerd culture, listen to the full episode.

To hear more interviews with fascinating people from the world of arts and culture — from powerful showrunners to web series creators to documentary filmmakers — check out the I Think You’re Interesting archives.

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smartworkingpackage · 7 years ago

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5 Surprising Ways Creative Minds Use Evernote

What’s your biggest goal for 2018? Finally writing that book you’ve had inside you for years? Launching a podcast? Performing stand-up comedy in front of an adoring crowd? Whatever your aspiration, this can be the year you take positive steps toward making it a reality.

As scary as it might be to think about what lies ahead, big goals don’t always demand big actions. Often, all you need to achieve your dreams is a series of small, incremental steps, a firm belief that you can do it—and the right tool to capture moments of inspiration.

Henry Ford famously said, “Whether you think you can or whether you think you can’t, you’re right.” One way to ‘fail-proof’ your dreams is by identifying and removing some of the familiar excuses that have held you back for so long. Self-defeating words like “I’m too busy,” or “I can never remember my good ideas” do nothing but rob you of your power and place obstacles in your path. Making Evernote your place to stay on track and keep yourself accountable can help.

Special offer: 40% off Evernote Premium* »

To inspire you to make your 2018 happen, here are some unexpected ways that creative minds use Evernote Premium to help them capture brilliant ideas, no matter where they are in the world.

Superfeel finds inspiration in the everyday

Musicians Androu Boudreau and Jordan Bradley, the two halves of up-and-coming New York-based pop/R&B duo Superfeel, use Evernote as an integral part of their creative process. As Androu says, “Evernote is critical to our creative brainstorming process. It helps us capture ideas at all times, no matter where we are. We capture ideas through voice recordings, notes, pictures, and more, and can come back and bring them all together to make music.”

The magic of Superfeel is the way they can find inspiration in the most unlikely of places. An image, a sound, a thought—any snippet of an idea can later form the basis of a work of art, so being able to capture it all in Evernote is vital to the duo. “Every song we have ever recorded, Evernote has had a hand in the process,” Androu explains. “This app has literally changed the way we make music.”

Pro Tip: Record audio interviews ‘on the street’ for your podcast.

Nisha Harish conquered the desert and captured her journey in Evernote

Author Nisha Harish

In 2015, Nisha Harish completed the grueling six-day, 156-mile (251 km) annual race across the Moroccan desert known as the Marathon des Sables. Competitors must carry everything they need with them, so there’s no room for luxuries. Despite this, Nisha made sure to pack her iPhone so that she could take notes in Evernote at the end of each day. Upon completing the race, she turned those notes into a successful book, Big Steps, Long Strides, about her experience.

Nisha explains, “I wanted to write a book, but it needed to fit into my lifestyle. Evernote gave me that flexibility.” And considering that she had to carry her note-taking device across the burning desert with her, it’s fair to say that, without Evernote in her pack, Nisha might not have realized her goal. “It would be too simplistic to say that Evernote allows people to make notes because it has allowed me to achieve a major life ambition.”

Pro Tip: Jot down story ideas for your novel while you’re commuting to and from work.

Chris Hardwick connects ideas while on the road

Photo Credit: Joe Pugliese/AMC

Chris Hardwick is everywhere at the moment. He has a media empire (The Nerdist), a TV show on AMC (Talking Dead), and a festival-headlining stand-up act. He clearly doesn’t stay in one place for very long.

As a busy, successful performer, one of Chris’s biggest challenges is not coming up with new material, but keeping the inevitable flood of ideas organized. Joan Rivers, the legendary comedian, and mentor to Chris, had a multitude of note cards which she organized in little drawers. “Some people use notebooks; other people use cocktail napkins,” Chris says. “I will mostly write big ideas and work my stuff out in Evernote.”

Chris organizes his ideas into notebooks, adding tags as he goes. This allows him to spot connections between different thoughts that were not apparent before. “I realize there’s a through-line that I didn’t consciously intend, but my subconscious brain was trying to express. All these ideas are actually weirdly connected, as disparate as they might seem.” Sometimes Chris even uses Evernote when he’s performing: “I have gone on stage when I’m trying new stuff, and I just have Evernote open in presentation mode and I have the phone down on the stool.”

As Chris readily admits, though, the key to making it all work is capturing your ideas in the first place. “In the same way that you would organize a closet,” he says, “it allows you to do that emotionally with your life in all the intangible things that you can’t see, but you experience. But you can’t do that unless you really start tracking all that stuff.”

Pro Tip: Scan the business card of a contact you meet at an open-mic night or writing seminar.

Aaron Mahnke turns research into creative inspiration

Lore author and star Aaron Mahnke

Aaron Mahnke is a best-selling author and the host and producer of Lore, the critically-acclaimed series which began as a podcast and has now expanded into television, a book series, and a national live tour. Aaron’s many creative projects take up an enormous amount of his time; that’s why the ability to capture ideas in Evernote is vital to his success.

“Writing is creative, yes, but it’s also work. It’s just a task,” Aaron says. And to complete any task, you need the right tools. For a long time, Evernote was the place where Aaron stored links, images, notes, scraps, and ideas in clearly-labeled notebooks. It was what he called a “someday box.” Now, however, it fuels his ongoing creative process.

To produce Lore, Aaron uses a gamut of Evernote features, from Web Clipper, marking up PDFs, and tagging, to multi-layered, interconnected notebook stacks that tie together all the elements of his research and writing.

“It’s a process that sounds simple on paper,” Aaron says. “I pick a topic I find interesting, and then research every aspect of it that I can. I read for hours, taking notes and highlighting pieces of story or information. And when I’ve filled my head with everything, I find a quiet place and think through the outline. A lot of that happens in Evernote.”

Pro Tip: Save a PDF or doc in Evernote, annotate it, and search the text inside it later.

Forrest Dylan Bryant is always ready to write with Evernote

Forrest Dylan Bryant

Full disclosure: Forrest is more than just an Evernote Premium customer, he’s also our Director of Marketing Content. So, if anyone understands the true creative potential of Evernote, it’s Forrest.

In his spare time (what little of it he has), Forrest is an accomplished author and an avid participant in the National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo, held every November. NaNoWriMo challenges participants to write a 50,000-word novel in 30 days—a difficult goal, certainly, but not an impossible one, although it demands a disciplined and highly organized creative approach from writers.

Forrest muses that over the years he has experimented with many different writing tools. “Word, Scrivener, Google Docs, Ulysses…I’ve used them all. Each has its strengths, but I couldn’t find a system that suited me.” So, when he was preparing for NaNoWriMo in 2015 (and again in 2016), Forrest made the decision to create his novel entirely in Evernote.

While you may not want to make it your sole writing tool, you can still take advantage of Evernote’s many templates and shortcuts to make the planning process considerably easier.

The work of preparing to write, including creating character histories and story timelines, can stymie even the most seasoned writer. Templates simplify this process by giving you a convenient home for all the material you collect while researching your story. Then, when the time comes to create your ‘magnum opus’—using whatever tool you choose—you’ll find it easier to stay on track when you refer back to the research you’ve stored handily in Evernote.

If writing a novel is one of your 2018 goals, NaNoWriMo could be the perfect place to start—to ‘dip your toe in the water’ and see if the writer’s life is really for you.

Pro Tip: See Forrest’s advice for using templates to write your novel here.

So, what will you achieve this year? As you can see, there’s no stopping a great idea—at least not when you have the right tools to help you.

Special offer: 40% off Evernote Premium* »

*Evernote Premium offer good only with Evernote Premium purchase. New or Evernote Basic users only; offer expires January 31st, 2018 at 11:59 PM PST. This offer has no cash value and cannot be combined with any other offer. This offer can only be redeemed with Evernote direct payments. Offer not able to be applied to third-party payment services such as iTunes, Google Play, and Amazon or to extend current subscriptions.

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nightcolorz · 1 year ago

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i’m late but for the ask game: armand 6, 8, 25

YIPPIE!! Thank u sm for sending this, I’ve been pretty severely injured lately and I woke up feeling so shit and sad, so getting this notif absolutely made my day. Armand !!! He is my favorite character in anything ever. I have literally never been so insane about a guy before. U picked some great questions so I’m super excited about this.

6. What's something you have in common with this character?

I identify strongly with Armand for a lot of weird little reasons. I think the root of it is transgender and autism stuff if I’m honest 😭 Im going to try not to get tooo personal 👍👍 but I will let’s be honest, I will get personal. I can relate to being fetishized and characterized for my sort of androgynous/pretty/boyish appearance while I feel like how I look doesn’t truly reflect who I am as a person. I definitely get the struggle of being demeaned and treated like a child bcus of the juvenile ish appearance transitioning can give you. I also can relate to being demeaned and treated like a child because of my social awkwardness (due to autism) that causes many ppl to assume I’m unintelligent or immature, need to be treated gently or talked to slowly, etc. I see these parts of myself reflected in Armand ofc in different more vampiric ways, and having a character who is infantilized and talked down to while also fetishized and sexually exploited for a perceived innocence that isn’t reflective of who he really is at all, a guy who is also very strange and awkward and doesn’t act right, who is also simultaneously very bad ass (imo lmao) in his shamelessness and his overtly violent and freak of nature attitude, is weirdly very validating and empowering for me, lmao. He is like the weak shameful parts of myself if the weak shameful parts of myself had teeth. 👍👍👍 Yeah 😁😁😁😁 Armand 🫶🫶🫶🫶🫶🫶🫶🫶

8. What's something the fandom does when it comes to this character that you despise?

lmfaooo, I’m so happy u picked this one bcus I love complaining and being a hater 😍 I am sorry in advance if I say anything that ruffles any bodies feathers, just bcus I don’t like these things ppl do doesn’t mean I don’t like the ppl who do them, y’all do u I’m not stopping u. Anyways.

I don’t enjoy how a handful of amc exclusive fans characterize Armand, because you can tell they rlly only understand him based on Wikipedia reads and his brief appearance in the show so far, which results in this sort of glaring simplification of his character in fan content. This wouldn’t rlly bother me if not for how prevalent it is 😭 like it’s genuinely difficult for me to find interesting and in character fanfic about Armand bcus so much of it is uniformed. The amc fandom sort of dominates the tvc fandom, it’s just so big. I don’t like when Armand is reduced to Louis’s new scary hot boyfriend/Lestat replacement/potential villain. It feels like he’s often perceived through this lens of a role in the story, like “hm this guy seems like a potential villain”, “no I think he’s a new love interest”, which is a conversation I find no appeal in at all considering you can’t fit the Armand I love into any of these narrative boxes. This isn’t rlly smth I have personal beef with bcus there’s no harm in fans of the show characterizing armand based on there limited knowledge while they wait for the next season, but for me it’s a pet peeve you know, as someone who rlly rlly likes armand a lot 😭.

(This is the exception to my no hate to u if u do this disclaimer btw, all the hate to u). on the subject of amc fans, I also often see this hostility towards fans of book Armand, where I’ll see amc fans talking about how perverse he is conceptually in the books and how gross ppl who like him are, which REALLY makes me very mad, because ok. Listen. Show armand is not a character yet, any and all things you enjoy about armand as of now as someone who hasn’t read the books are 1. How he looks. And 2. Things from the books that you apply to him in a new context. Assad’s performance, the people working on the show, the writers, everything that you base your enjoyment of armand in, is from the books 😭 But god forbid someone enjoy the source material over the hypothetical character who barely exists yet? God forbid someone do the same thing u do (take smth arguably morally dubious and interpret it in a way that u find interesting and compelling while acknowledging the morally dubious source material) just not in the context of an adaption. Ok. God forbid I enjoy and identify with an adult character trapped in the body of a child who is misperceived for his youth and sexually abused, it’s not like this is the same concept of beloved amc Claudia anyway. It’s also not like I am capable of enjoying something while criticizing it and disliking it’s flaws, and coming to conclusions based on critical thinking and analysis of concepts that may have been executed poorly, that I still admire and enjoy, bcus I am capable of complex thinking, and I don’t need to blindly enjoy every part of smth and perceive it as flawless to enjoy it. We all know that’s fake ! Anyways sorry for the angry rant 😭😭😭 moving on.

On a separate note, I also sometimes have beef with how fellow book armand fans portray him. This is small and sort of petty but it bothers me when Armand is drawn as like, very small and skinny. Maybe it’s bcus I head canon him as chubby and sort of cherub-built, maybe it’s bcus in TVA armand describes himself as strong in build and “not waif-ish”, but either or it does feel sort of wrong and off putting when I see Armand drawn as like, so small and petite that it’s emphasized. To me this reads as a missing of the point, if you will. An emphasis on physical qualities representative of innocence and youth that aren’t reflective of Armand’s character, only rlly how some other characters see him. I can often tell when an Armand fan enjoys him for the superficial qualities (eternally young, angelic looking, etc) over who he is, and it always encourages me to steer clear. I hope I’m making sense lol. This is also sometime present in fic but it’s more subtle and difficult to describe. Anyways

25. What was your first impression of this character? How about now?

I was thinking about this yesterday! I was first introduced to Armand when I was maybe 11 or 12, my dad put on 94 interview with the vampire for me and my twin sister while he did work around the house etc. he started watching it with us (he loves 94 iwtv) but by the time Armand showed up at the half way point he got up and started doing other things, so my sister and I were alone in front of the screen. For some reason lost to time my sister and I were very excited about seeing Antonio Banderas, maybe because we knew him from Zorro, so in the aftermath of the buffoon scene with Santiago that we found really funny, when Antonio Banderas appeared on screen we were hyped tf up. We were so enthralled in the moment of his cunty ass entrance we started cheering and clapping and screaming 😭 I think shrieking ARMANNNDDD!!!! At the screen (with no knowledge of who armand even was) Till I started laughing to tears is in my top ten formative moments. My first viewing of iwtv was just like that 😭 there was smth in the water that had my sister and I loosing our fucking minds with excitement over that movie. Anyways, I only immersed myself into the fandom and got rlly into tvc just last year, when I read interview with the vampire (smth that’s always been in the back of my mind since my first viewing, I really did love that movie) and then the rest of tvc. When I was reading interview with the vampire I had that subconscious excitement over Armand’s half way point appearance brewing from the get go (every time my sister and I have watched iwtv together since we were 12 we’ve done the same screaming at the screen ritual for armand) so when I was re introduced to him I was instantly attached to him. I very quickly discovered how much I was enthralled by this guy, like by his first appearance and description it went from a weird little nostalgic affection to a “omfg I feel many inexplicably strong feelings for this guy”. He was just so magnetic and weird, I was intrigued by every thing about him, like Louis lol. I started drawing him a bunch b4 I’d even finished the first book, and by the time I was introduced to him in tvl he was my favorite character. Tvl really solidified my armand obsession, and queen of the damned made me the person I am today 😭 insane. I think my impression of him now should be obvious at this point 😔 he is my silliest guy every morning I wake up and he is the first thought in my mind I cry about him daily I worship him like he’s my god sometimes I see a blender and I am so overwhelmed with emotion I want to scream if a professional looked into my brain and saw all the armand in there they’d diagnose me with super mega autism. I like him a lot. 🫶

Thank you sm for sending this ask once again! I’m sorry it’s so long lol, hope my responses were interesting. This is the ask game in question for anyone who may potentially want to send me more asks: https://www.tumblr.com/nightcolorz/734243514562510848?source=share I would cry with joy if so.

#tvc #the vampire chronicles #vampire chronicles #vc #armand #The vampire armand #interview with the vampire #Iwtv #anne rice #Armand iwtv #armand tvc #armand vc #ask game

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