#is he working on other creative projects with his hands? or secret production stuff - maybe with CMP?

[found--family]

he's so bored. i love him.

[blossom-hwa]

fashion major!kevin

ANYWAY THERE WAS LIKE ONE PERSON WHO CALLED FOR A FASHION MAJOR KEVIN SPINOFF OF THE COLLEGE MODEL JUYEON AU I JUST POSTED (linked below) anyway! hope you enjoy, please reblog if you did, and check out my other dumb overly long blurbs in the stream of idiocy tag on my blog <3

pairing: kevin x gender neutral!reader

wc: 2.5k

genre: fluff, university!au

triggers: cursing

college model!juyeon

TBZ Scenarios Masterlist | TBZ Drabbles Masterlist

kevin moon is known on campus for two things: 1. his bright personality literally everyone loves him and if you don’t you’re jealous of him like sorry not sorry i don’t make the rules you know i’m right and 2. his.... unorthodox fashion sense. like eric thought his snake patterned shit was weird as hell?? but there are weirder things in kevin’s closet i swear to you. anyway this unorthodox style is what got him accepted into the fashion program at the university and even though there are a few assholes who stick their noses up at kevin’s work the vast majority of people are cool w his outfits even if they personally wouldn’t wear them and kevin is v well-liked in his major and on campus in general bc he knows everyone and is nice and polite and really a v cool person to be around when he’s not being a fucking idiot

and on campus there are fashion shows a few times every semester to show off the fashion majors’ work, and let’s just say that this university if p well know for its fashion major so some famous people sometimes come along to these events so EVERY TIME a fashion show rolls around the fashion majors get nervous as FUCK and there’s a lot of speculation on who will get noticed and whatever and everyone is secretive about what they’re working on and just. everyone goes fucking haywire and kevin is always v happy when the stress winds down after a show

(no one knows it but kevin has gotten offers from several companies to work with them after he graduates. he hasn’t told anyone except a few friends like juyeon/jacob and his family)

anyway you are also a fashion major who secretly really admires kevin’s stuff?? like you just think he’s so daring and creative and all of his work is absolutely amazing even if it’s a little weird and honestly you don’t even feel overshadowed by his talent and hard work you just feel in awe that you can be in his presence at all. you’re p sure kevin has no idea who you are bc even though you have a lot of the same classes you’re always too shy to sit or work near him bc even though he seems so nice and approachable he’s also just.... god he’s so good

BUT THEN. one of your professors announces that for the next fashion show they’ll be modeling projects that he’s assigning right now. which is weird asf bc usually you’ll all take your best clothing and like fix it or tweak it for the next show, like sometimes people will make something completely from scratch but that’s nerve-wracking and not many people do it unless they’re in a real pinch but it gets even WEIRDER bc this is not a regularly scheduled fashion event?? it’s like a smaller event apparently that they’ve organized just for this project AND THE WEIRDNESS TAKES THE CAKE when your professor says that YOU ARE GOING TO BE THE MODELS. YOU ALL ARE GOING TO PICK SOMEONE IN THE CLASS TO MAKE CLOTHES FOR AND THEY WILL MODEL YOUR OUTFIT

and this SENDS EVERYONE FREAKING THE FUCK OUT??? bc oh god you can’t rely on the models you’ve been using all semester now??? and you have to make flattering clothes for someone you might not even know v well and it’s just. holy fuck holy fuck holy FUCK

meanwhile you already know who you want to create for (/ahem kevin moon/) but you’re also chicken so like??? you’re just sitting in your seat looking over at him but not saying anything until your friend chanhee just pushes you out of your seat in kevin’s direction and is like GO ASK HIM BEFORE YOU LOSE THIS CHANCE and you’re like JESUS FUCKING CHRIST CHANHEE but kevin’s noticed your movement and he’s looking over with a smile on his face and you’re like jfc i can’t do this but chanhee shoves you again and so you kinda smile (you really hope it looks like a smile) and your voice is LITERALLY shaking when you go over and ask if it would be ok to use him as a model for this assignment and he’s like.... oh my god yes

because what YOU don’t know is that kevin has been ogling your designs all year?? like he enjoys his own style and is comfortable in it but he loves your work as in LOVES IT. he thinks your designs are absolutely flawless and original and you combine styles so effortlessly that he just wants to look into your brain when you come up with ideas bc what the fuck?? you may have different styles but kevin knows how to admire art AND YOUR DESIGNS ARE ART. 

so you’re reeling a day later bc now you have kevin moon’s number and he has yours and he’s now texting you on when you think you’ll have the first preliminary designs ready and when you can meet up so you can get each other’s measurements and all that and when you eventually meet up your hands are shaking so much that you can barely take his measurements and kevin is screeching in his mind as well bc oh my god you’re going to model his clothes YOU’RE GOING TO MODEL HIS CLOTHES

most people are again being secretive about their designs and even though someone in their class is modeling for them this time so there’s a bit less secrecy they’re still working alone so you get a shock when kevin asks if you want to coordinate your outfits. like work on designs together and maybe make something that matches a little though ofc retaining your own styles and you just shriek when you get the text and poor childhood best friend younghoon spills his coffee (you have been friends since basically birth and there are no romantic feelings whatsoever ok it’s strictly platonic like you watched younghoon vomit after eating too much bread when you were like 10 and he watched you get tangled up in a soccer net when you were 13 there are no romantic feelings stemming from any of that)

needless to say you reply yes yes ye sYES and kevin is grinning so wide on the other end that juyeon wonders if he’s gone slightly insane (which he has but we’re not gonna dwell on that) and both of you show up to the work rooms nervous as all hell (i’m not a fashion major i have no fashion sense i still think t-shirts/leggings are the way to go so idk how any of this works do not sue me) but kevin has a natural ability to defuse any tension in the room so within minutes you’re comfortable and laughing with him and wondering why you were so scared to approach him before and THEN YOU’RE REMINDED WHY when he shows you his design for you because... oh god.... it’s unbelievable. like it has a distinctly kevin feel to it but he’s clearly been paying attention to what you wear and what you design because it’s something you would like to wear and something you even think you could look good in. holy shit

and you just blurt out like kevin what the fuck this is so good did you like stalk my designs or some shit?? and you mean it as a joke ofc but kevin just goes beet red and mumbles something about how he really likes your work and how it’s so sharply elegant but also insanely creative and you’re just. open-mouthed like. dude i’m in love with your work too oh my god i’m gonna cry my fashion idol just said he likes my designs i’m gonna screaM

kevin stops you from screaming though even though he also feels like he’s gonna scream and this is the start of a very productive partnership between the two of you like most of the fashion majors are friendly despite the competition but you and kevin are on a whole other level?? and you start hanging out more and more often even when you’ve finished designing and are actually sewing (you ask him if this part can be secret bc you want to add a few things as a surprise - he ofc says yes and winks and tells you he has things he wants to add too which just makes you want to scream out of excitement)

and it’s a week before fashion show day and you and kevin are finished with putting together the designs and you’re excited as all hell and kevin is literally about to burst from his own skin and you insist that he goes first and when he pulls the outfit from the bag you’re just. in absolute awe. the colors match the design you made, it looks like it’ll fit, and even though it screams kevin moon it also has a distinct vibe from your own fashion style and you just yell KEVIN MOON YOU GENIUS as you snatch it from him and go change

(you don’t know obviously but kevin is blushing like a tomato while waiting for you to finish changing)

it fits almost perfectly, kevin marks a few places to fix and is debating whether or not to compliment you bc??? that sounds like he’s complimenting his own work and that’s egocentric as hell but then you say something like does it look fine and he just blurts out more than fine. you look great

AND YOU’RE SO FLUSTERED THAT YOU ALL BUT THROW YOUR OWN BAG AT KEVIN and are like GO CHANGE 

so he takes out the clothes and goes silent and you’re like.... oh my god does he hate it i mean we worked on the designs together and he said he liked it then but what if he changed his mind but then he looks at you and his eyes are sparkling and he’s like y/n this is perfect. literally perfect and he rushes to go get changed and when he comes out your eyes are bugging out of your head bc holy hell you pictured kevin in these clothes obviously since they were made for him but he looks so much better than you ever imagined

and then you blurt out something like holy shit you look beautiful

and kevin blushes again

anyway you both take your measurements and run out and then the day of the fashion show rolls around and both of you are freaking out backstage but the instant you two go on it’s like you both are literal gods bc you feel so confident in each other’s clothing and the crowd can feel it THEY CAN FUCKING FEEL IT and they go nuts when you two walk out!!! and even though it isn’t like a huge major fashion show, it’s just for this one project that your professors cooked up, you and kevin are both beaming like the sun when it’s over despite the fact that it wasn’t an important event bc holy shit you two had fun and everyone’s complimenting your clothing and it’s great it’s just great

finally all the chaos is over and the clothes have been put away and the makeup removed and you and kevin are now standing outside the venue in a kind of stunned silence that all of it’s over. it’s all over. and then you suddenly thrust out the clothes you made that kevin wore and tell him to keep it. it’s a present. and kevin takes it but he also forces you to take the outfit he made for you. and then there’s silence again

but if there’s anything you’ve gained over the past few weeks it’s a bit of courage. courage that let you talk to kevin, courage that let you design clothes for him, courage that let you become friends (and maybe something more) with him. you’ve also learned that kevin is a massive dork and a lovely human being and you’d really love to at least stay in contact so in that the moment you smile and say ‘if i asked you on a date, would you wear that outfit?’

poor kevin looks like he’s about to have a fucking aneurysm and you start to lose confidence but then he’s nodding like there’s no tomorrow like yes ye sYE S OH MY GOD YE S and omg you now have a boyfriend whom you like very very much and kevin has a partner whom he likes very very much

you two may not be a pda couple but you ARE that couple that matches every outfit they wear, you make jewelry and accessories for each other and also make each other clothes every so often. everyone is jealous of your combined fashion sense bc even though the outfits might look outrageous, you two both manage to pull them off and look fabulous at it, but also they can’t even be that jealous bc you two are the sweetest couple and are absolutely lovely 

both of you do wear the outfits you made for that show on your first date which is to like a musical or smth bc theatre kid kevin is something you can pry out of my cold dead hands and everyone’s staring but you two are in your own little world and it’s amazing

kevin admits at one point that he was afraid to ask you out bc he thought younghoon was your boyfriend and you just snort and tell him everything stupid younghoon’s done and by the end younghoon is done with you, kevin is about to vomit he’s laughing so hard, and you are smirking like no tomorrow

for the end of year fashion show you and kevin fix up and accessorize the outfits you two made for the show that brought you two together and there is absolutely no surprise that several different fashion companies scout both of you (and a couple modeling agencies too since you and kevin decided to model your own clothing again - younghoon whines that you’ve replaced him but you shut him up with chocolate bread)

kevin’s a sucker for romance (you CANNOT tell me this isn't true) so your first kiss is on the roof of the fashion building at sunset when kevin does the cheesy thing where he says you look more beautiful the view and you almost slap him but you’re laughing so hard and kevin’s cackling and somehow it turns into a kiss

you are a dork and kevin is even more of a dork and it just works out beautifully bc you’re so absolutely in love that it makes people fake vomit from the sides (looking at chanhee right here) but it’s also really sweet in that you two trust each other completely and would do absolutely anything for the other except murder. kevin made that v clear but really only bc blood would stain his clothing and he doesn’t need that. you agree wholeheartedly (younghoon/juyeon are looking from the sides like what the fuck is this couple do they need help and you two are like just go away and let us be the weird couple we are ok). the conversation ends in a v soft v sweet kiss and just. ik i said it with juyeon but kevin moon is also best bf ever ok you cannot convince me otherwise. 

and that’s how it goes :)

If you enjoyed, please don’t forget to reblog and leave a comment to tell me what you thought! Thank you for reading and have a lovely day <3

(1 reblog = 1 prayer for this weird-ass couple)

[redandfranticfeelings]

can i hear some phineas and ferb autistic headcanons? would make my day :)

HELL YEAH!!! sorry this is delayed i was rlly tired this weekend for no reason sdgjdhgdfg (this is more analysis than headcanon at points but ill try to work in headcanons too)

phineas, ferb, candace, baljeet, and doof are definitely autistic so i’ll focus on them. i also like irving and maybe isabella being autistic but those five are Definite

phineas and doof also have adhd and candace is comorbid with Something Else but since i project my mental health onto her i need to figure out what im comorbid with first lol

ferb is partially nonverbal which is obvious but he does have strong passions and feelings, he just expresses them sort of clinically and straightforwardly.

even phineas struggles with complex emotions and usually just focuses on positivity, because really dire situations can make him have a legit meltdown if he processes them (summer belongs to you, night of the living pharmacists, etc). some emotions are just easier to work with than others yknow? and you subscribe to a certain outlook and when things dont fit with that outlook you panic.

phineas is also really bad at reading people and thats why he never gets isabellas crush on him or that candace wants to get him in trouble.

phineas and ferb make their own stim toys, and have definitely gone above and beyond. a giant castle made of sparkly slime, the world’s longest tangle toy, a 100-sided fidget cube, infinite chewing rings where your teeth never leave marks so you can chew on them forever...they can share with every neurodivergent kid in the area. honestly i wanna write a fanfic where they make an autism-based theme park with this sort of stuff!

the gelatin episode was basically just them pursuing the sensory goodness of bouncy jelly

candace is very secretive abt her autism even tho she stims a lot and, like, sits in certain ways for optimal comfort and such, and her special interests in busting her bros/her boyfriend/ducky momo/certain bands/etc are Very Obvious. but her friends support and love her even tho shes insecure and they sometimes struggle for a while to adjust to her needs.

her brothers rlly want her to be more confident but its difficult bc theyre the savants and everyone loves them bc they have a productive creative special interest in building and being imaginative but she just gets so easily distracted so she feels less productive :(

(also i like the idea of stacy being autistic too which is why she’s sometimes late to the punch observing things and has a similar inferiority complex as candace and they totally bonded over these issues)

candaces whole ‘busting’ obsession is very much about her obsession with rules and order and keeping thing predictable and under control, though as the show progresses she warms up to her brothers’ behavior because it is, in its own way, predictable

candace rlly struggles with being seen as an Adult because shes been infantilized her whole life due to her emotional issues, and she still doesnt rlly know what being an adult truly entails outside of controlling her younger siblings, she copes a lot with her childhood passions and aesthetics since its easier than changing with the times. but once she has to get to college and everything then she adapts well and as we see turns her passions into a successful law career!

baljeets special interest in math is obvious but also he struggles a lot with expressing his emotions too, he has his own routines both in scheduling and the role-playing nature in his dynamic with buford, and tends to find things funny that nobody else does because of his niche interests

doof isnt diagnosed but perry knows how to accommodate his symptoms bc theyre similar to how candace, phineas, and ferb can behave at times, ie being socially clueless, needing to rehearse things, having narrow interests and passions they can focus on for hours, etc.

also doof does raptor hands a lot to the point its lampshaded

i can see doof having a lot of stims and doing a lot of stimmy things without realizing it, i think he chews on things sometimes for instance. he gets overstimulated easily and it gets him really pissy (theres always so much noise and light outside his building) so he needs something to ground himself which is why the routines with perry help.

everyone on this show is so routine oriented, like, its mostly a meta joke but everybody has a certain way they say things, theres a basic structure for how their day has to go and if it doesnt follow that structure they panic. baljeet has his color coded schedule in the most obvious example, phineas and ferb have their catchphrases and need to create one big new thing every day, candace has busting, doof has his dynamic with perry, etc. any time these routines are disrupted they notice and it feels very Off to everyone.

[justgotham]

Fox’s GOTHAM is now in the midst of its fifth and final season on Thursday nights. The series, developed by Bruno Heller from DC Comics, chronicles the rise of Bruce Wayne (David Mazouz) from troubled, orphaned pre-teen to the adult Batman. It also shows the development of some of his allies, like detective-turned-police-captain (and one day police commissioner) Jim Gordon (Ben McKenzie), frenemies like Selena Kyle/Catwoman (Camren Bicondova), and foes like Penguin (Robin Lord Taylor) and the Riddler (Cory Michael Smith).

Executive producers Danny Cannon and John Stephens have both been with GOTHAM for its entire run. Cannon directed the series pilot and has been supervising the directors ever since; Stephens has been part of the writing staff since the inception and has been show runner, with Cannon, since the beginning of Season 3. The duo have created METROPOLIS for DC’s online streaming network. Cannon will also be working with GOTHAM creator Heller on the new Epix series PENNYWORTH, which examines the adventures of the young Alfred Pennyworth.

Cannon sits down in a quiet area of Pasadena’s Langham Hotel for a discussion of what makes GOTHAM all that it is; Stephens joins the conversation partway through.

ASSIGNMENT X: Did you know at the beginning that you would be with GOTHAM for its entire run, because it’s a little unusual for a directing producer to stay with a series for so long …

DANNY CANNON: It is, yeah. There are so many things that are unusual about producing and directing, but I think I’m the only director writing on shows, which I find very strange sometimes. But I think you stick with something when you know how hard it is to maintain the integrity. That is the only way to protect the integrity, visually and tonally, and casting-wise, on a show, is to stick with it. And sometimes that’s a little hard, but on this occasion, it was just such a fun job that I didn’t want to leave, because if you’re gone for a certain amount of time, you do notice things that wouldn’t have happened if you’d been there. It was such a hard world to maintain, and the standard of the acting was so high, that I just wanted to maintain that by being around. There is only me and John. There was Bruno at the beginning, but there was only me and John, and with him stuck writing, a lot of post-production and production and first-hand contact on set was really down to me.

AX: With the other directors who came in to do episodes, were you instructing them, “This is GOTHAM, that is not GOTHAM”?

CANNON: Constantly. And that’s why you’ll see so many of our directors repeat, because once it is lodged in their mind what world they were in, then we had to keep ahold of them, because you don’t want to reeducate somebody. And they became real fans of the show. What was amazing was how many directors wanted to return, because compared to the other things they were directing, this just visually had a lot more going on. The palette was bigger and the scope was bigger.

AX: What did you find that the biggest thing that the other directors needed to know – don’t be afraid to let the actors get big, or, please shoot the sets in a certain way, or, please use these kinds of shots?

CANNON: Right from the beginning of me doing television, even at C.S.I., when [other] directors came in, they would be very complimentary of the pilot and everything, but I would always say, “Well, great, now we’ve seen that. Now kick my ass. That’s your job. I want to watch your episode and come back next week and say, ‘I just got schooled, I have to up my game’.” And I think that friendly competition [was helpful]. We did it with d.p.s [directors of photography], too, we did it with production designers, editors. Everybody was trying to get the best episode, everybody was trying to do that thing that nobody had done before. Sometimes, though, we had to stop people going over the top. Sometimes that was not right for that story. When we brought directors on, we’d always talk about the theme of that [episode], and who to concentrate on, and who not to. But I always find you get the best out of people when you set them free, and you encourage them, and you love them, and you want them to love what you have as much as you do. I don’t think it makes a show better to restrict people and tell them, “We don’t do that, we don’t like that.” It just makes everybody feel a little – it’s the opposite of creativity, isn’t it?

AX: How would you describe GOTHAM’s visual style?

CANNON: I think when we were doing the pilot, nobody really understood what we were doing. I did a visual effect off my own back [on my own] and I did many drawings I did myself, and my designer did some to try and sell the world, but still, that wasn’t getting it across. I was like, “On the pilot, it was Dickensian, circa 1979 New York City, un-gentrified, if the cops were all corrupt, and the gangs had taken over.” There was that, but that felt political. The look of it that I kept going to was that Dickensian thing, that I knew that if I drew, and my production designer helped me with the GCPD [Gotham City Police Department headquarters], if we got that right, that was the [core]. So we took it upon ourselves those first few weeks, before anybody came along, while Bruno is still pitching. He brought me on very early, because he just didn’t want to do a project like this alone. The kind of stuff I do, the kind of stuff he does, are completely different. So he wanted the world being imagined while he wrote, so he could be inspired by what I was doing. It was a nice way to work. And when we got that GCPD right, it straightaway – and it’s funny, I drew one, and Doug Kraner [the initial GOTHAM production designer] drew one, and they were almost identical. But his staircases were better.

[John Stephens laughs.]

CANNON: It was based on St. Pancras Station, a Victorian building, in London. And all of a sudden, that, with the different look of the wardrobe, which was the other thing I was drawing at the same time, was what got us over the edge.

AX: When did you take over entirely from Bruno Heller?

JOHN STEPHENS: Well, I would never say I took over entirely from Bruno Heller. They say the term “show runner,” but really, Danny and I were doing it together these past three years after Bruno kind of took a step back. It’s really at the end of Season 2 that Bruno took a step back, and then Danny and I – it was a great partnership, I felt like, because we complimented each other’s strengths. We were talking about the look of the show, and to me, one of the things I found so appealing about the show is, I think a lot of people can do grim. I think what Danny and Doug, and Richard [Berg] afterwards, were able to do, I mean, everybody, [current GOTHAM production designer] Dan Novotny as well, is to make it look scary and dirty and grim, but also romantic in a way. I still want to be in that world, as downtrodden as it seems. And that’s a very secret little bull’s-eye that’s very hard to hit.

CANNON: As English people, myself and Bruno both wanted to visit New York and see SERPICO New York, THE WARRIORS New York. I wanted to see MEAN STREETS, I wanted to see TAXI DRIVER. It was all gone by the time I got there, but it was the poem of New York, it was the idea of New York. So that’s what GOTHAMbecame, and “romantic” is a good word. We were making this romantic poem to a city where Batman will be necessary one day.

AX: It’s sort of like GOTHAM is a dream of New York that’s on the verge of being a nightmare?

CANNON: Right, right.

STEPHENS: It’s like those opening scenes of TAXI DRIVER, when that Bernard Herrmann score is playing, and those bright, garish lights are moving, and it feels like Hell, but it also feels very suffused with sex and violence, and it’s really exciting.

CANNON: It [TAXI DRIVER] is one of my favorite films of all time, and Bernard Herrmann was such a strange choice for them to make, but Scorsese knew what he was doing, because he aged the film down by putting Bernard Herrmann’s score in. They say he was old-fashioned. That’s exactly why he did it. We wanted old-fashioned music. When we had to put pop music into the show, we went back to the ‘80s, and to the ‘70s, to the Stooges, to Alice Cooper, and to the Sex Pistols, because music now is too polished and refined and wouldn’t work.

AX: You mentioned the word “grim,” but if I may say, GOTHAM doesn’t feel grim. How do you keep it feeling maybe dark but somehow ecstatic …?

STEPHENS: “Gritty” I think is probably a better word than “grim” in many ways. We speak about these things, particularly in terms of metaphor. It’s like when people talk. I just recently saw this documentary about World War I [THEY SHALL NOT GROW OLD] that Peter Jackson made. It was incredible. And at the beginning, they have all these voices of soldiers who were there. And they say, “Four years, it was horrific, I never would have traded it for anything. I felt more alive during those four years than I did in the next fifty years of my life.” And I feel like life in GOTHAM may be cheap in many ways, but it feels very alive to the people who are there. And that was always our point. You want to feel the beating heart of the people who are there, and that they’re living life right on the edge. I always think of that line – I’m [approximating], I apologize – there’s a beat in HEAT, where Al Pacino is talking to his wife, and he says, “I need to be on the edge, it’s where I’ve got to be.” And you always want the characters to be right there on that edge.

CANNON: We watch plays, John more than me, but when you’re doing a Broadway play, and you need to introduce a character, they will always do something with the scenery, they’ll always do something with the lighting. I think what doesn’t happen enough with movies and television right now is, they don’t give characters a good platform. How do we stop it being grim? I think everybody in the show gets a visual introduction. I remember talking about seeing Episode 2, when I had the confidence of the pilot behind me, about the body language, with every cast member. “We should know you’re coming in silhouette.” And I said the same thing to the directors. “Give everybody an intro. Give them that moment where that guy walks in, in CABARET. Give them that moment where you realize the king is entering.” You start to think about things on a grand scale, and all the writers ended up coming around and asking for those little visual tidbits, because they had the story down, and they knew where it needed to go, but everybody just needed a push to show people the cinema of this moment.

STEPHENS: You did that in the first Alfred [played by Sean Pertwee] appearance, when he’s walking down the alley, and there’s crime tape there, and Sean doesn’t slow down. Because he just knows they’re going to raise it up for him because of the authority that he carries. He tilts his head, just a tiny bit. I was, “Oh, he’s in command.”

AX: Now, what are some of the things that have surprised you about the way the characters have turned out? I think one of them would probably be Barbara Keane, played by Erin Richards. She started out as Jim Gordon’s fiancée and then went to some astonishing places …

STEPHENS: Yeah. Erin as an actress continually surprises us. We took her so dark. [Barbara] killed her parents, she became a gang lord, she was completely psychotic, and it became the question, “Can we bring this person back?” One of the themes of the show is transformation. A person changes into another thing. “Can you take someone that dark and still bring them back again? Is there any hope in them?” She does. She finds that way back, and that was so surprising to us.

AX: And Morena Baccarin’s character, Dr. Lee Thompkins, as well?

CANNON: Oh, my God. Amazing. And when Morena showed up, it’s funny how, from that first show she did, you know you want to do some things with a great actress. That’s it. That’s simply it. She can do the same thing over, or she can keep testing you. GAME OF THRONES is the only other show I can think of that has characters do terrible, awful things and you love them the next time they’re punished. The back and forth – we love to hate everybody in the show.

AX: And what would you most like people to know about the rest of GOTHAM? We know there will be a ten-years-forward time jump episode in the finale …

STEPHENS: I think they need to watch every episode, because I think in every single episode, an enormous bomb drops, both for the characters as they live right there, and also things that are going to play out not just ten years, but twenty years in the future, because we all know where those characters are going to end up, and we plant things that real fans of the material are going to go, “Oh, that’s what they were doing. I thought they weren’t going to do that, but they are going to do that.”

CANNON: Everything we’ve done for five years pays off in the last episode.

[ashdownbloodline]

We Need You For Something...

Part 1: The Knock Of Change

This is my first fanfic, I hope you all like it. I need to thank @dammn-dean for all her help! She has really helped me through all this. If you haven’t, go check her out. Let me know what you guys think of it.

Pairing: Bucky Barnes x Original Character (Yauna), other OC’s and Avengers pairings later.  

Words: It's high

Warnings: Adult Themes, Language, Eventual Smut, PTSD, motions of Torture, Fluff, Death

Summary: Yauna just wants to be normal and Tony recruits her as his head engineer. Her past catches up and shit goes crazy.

(Again gif isn’t mine)

(Age 27) so eight years after prologue

The sun peered through the high windows of the England town house, warming the hard wood floors and helping to reveal the sketches underneath of Yauna’s latest project. 

She walked from the floor to the ceiling to the walls, trying to change her angle of thinking. Every time she found a new position, gravity would betray her, pushing her curly, carrot red hair into her face and hiking up her blue, green, and black long tartan skirt.

Finally, she landed on upside down as being the most productive. Moving her hair into a loose bun and threading her feet through the rafters on the ceiling, she let her weight hang from her legs. 

The tattoo on her back moved under her skin, making it itch. “Stop it! I need to finish this.” Artemis wanted to keep moving, she had been cooped up for too long. 

Her skirt took to gravity and fell into her face, letting out a huff of frustration. She flicked her hand and pinned her skirt to stay at her knees with her magic.

She was working on a project for a client in Brighton, where she lived luckily. Working as a private engineer for tech companies and other facilities was nice, her own hours and she could show up the men of the field that downgraded women. 

That particular benefit made Yauna so happy and gave her the satisfaction she needed to continue. This project was being particularly stubborn though, the power supply requirement was giving her problems.

What felt like moments were actually hours passing, as she tried to figure out a solution. About three hours later, she groaned in frustration and was about ready to give up, just then there was a knock on her door.

After a moment stunned she started to dismount, hoping it wasn’t her neighbor about the late night music. Not going fast enough apparently, there was another aggressive, impatient knock. 

“Hold on, a girl needs a wee feckin’ moment!” Her accent rang out, as she righted herself and walked to the door. Opening it she found three men standing in front of her; Tony Stark, Bruce Banner, and Steve Rogers.

She smoothed her skirt and untied her hair letting it fall to just brush her shoulders, then invited them inside. “Hello, you bies need a bevy?” She asked standing in her entry way, taking in their appearances. 

Tony in formal suit as always, Bruce was in dress pants and a cardigan, and Steve was in jeans, a t-shirt, and a jumper. 

They looked at her in confusion, she mentally kicked herself and a soft pink of embarrassment dusted her cheeks.

“Sorry, a drink. Do you want a drink?” Bruce let out a small chuckle and Steve gave her a reassuring smile. 

“No, we need you for something in New York.” Tony said in a businessy tone. “Hello, I’m Steve Rogers. These are my coworkers-” 

Yauna cut him off, “I know who you are dearie.” She smiled before continuing pointing at them in order, “You are Tony Stark. You are Bruce Banner, love your work by the way. And you are the product of the miracle serum, Steve Rogers. I’d love to pick your brain sometime.” 

They stood for a moment in silence. “So, what are you bies needn’?” Yauna looked at the men standing in front of her, praying they weren’t here on business with her past.

“Um, we are here to ask you to come work in New York with us.” Tony stattered, shifting foot to foot. He hadn’t been nervous very many times, let alone intimidated, yet right now he was both. 

Yauna’s face turned slightly grimmer, causing the entire group to hold their breaths waiting for her response. “What are you needn’ me for?” She said apprehensively, hoping they just meant her brain. 

Bruce perked up, “We need you for-” Tony cut him off, “Can you show me what you’re working on over here?” Talking about anything else right now was preferred by Tony, he could talk tech and science. He needed to let his brain cool off a little bit.

Plus Tony wanted to test her a bit, wanting to see what skills she really had. Tony and Yauna talked about her projects for about an hour and a half, drawing Bruce’s and Steve’s attention every now and then. Solving some of her problems and arising others, Tony was impressed. She knew a lot and was creative, more creative than him. 

Her frustration limits were far better than his and she was fun to be around. She was kind, taking time to explain to everyone everything that she was talking about and listening to what idea each person was offering. She was perfect for the position he wanted to fill.

“I want to offer you my position, per say. I want you to be the head of engineering for the team. If you accept, you’ll have your own lab and you can enlist the help of anyone you wish and who accepts, as long as they are approved security wise of course.” Tony watched her expression, unreadable and under debate. 

“Pepper says I need to stop stressing so much. So, I found you. You’re brilliant and I’d trust you with the position.”

Finally she nodded, “I have some conditions.” She stated, at which Tony nodded for her to go on. 

“I will take the job as a trial period, the environment is important to me. I need to make sure that everyone is comfortable before agreeing long term. Also, I want to keep my flat here until I decide that this position is perfect. Lastly, I request that my hours be flexible. My inspiration varies and a tight schedule isn’t a friend of mine.” 

Tony took in the information and gave a small smirk, “Of course, I’m not asking you to sign your life away in one second. A trial period is perfect and you’ll be living at The Compound, so your hours are yours to make. Except meetings, I will work with you and the others to find good times, but you will need to attend those.”

Yauna smiled brightly and laughed, “Well, I’d be happy to work fer ya!” She pushed her hand out waiting for Tony’s. 

In that moment, Tony noticed the thick light pinky-white scar on her neck.  Starting on one side of her neck, disappearing behind her neck and reappearing on the other side, then trailed down her chest disappearing into her sweater. Absentmindedly, he took her hand and shook it lightly. 

Yauna noticed his gaze and knew immediately that he noticed, thinking to herself. Eventually I’m going to make to tell him, he will find out. I want it to be from my gob, not someone else's. For now, she pushed it to the back of her mind, focusing on the deal at hand.

Talking over some other detail with each person, they left with a box of pastries she told them to take or else. Each of them seemed to like her, she was really nice and personable. 

But, they all noticed the subjects that made her eyes grim and they all noticed the scars. That would have to be addressed sometime later, eventually. 

Tony told her to be ready by Thursday, that someone will be here to pick her up and she could pack up her stuff that she needed to ship. The door closed and Yauna took a deep breath and thought, Well, this is going to be an adventure…

On the way back to the Compound, Tony had to ask them to get their opinion. “What did ya think?” He said from the pilots seat, his question pulled Steve and Bruce out of their conversation. 

“She was nice, I really like her.” Bruce said first with a shrug. “Yea, she seems knowledgeable.” Steve said with a nod to agree with Bruce. 

“I’m curious where she got all…” Bruce gestured to his neck, not wanting to say the word, it made him hurt to think about all those he could see. 

Tony ignored his comment, he didn’t know what to think of all those scars. But, for some reason he still trusted her. 

“Okay, then I’m sending you to pick her up Steve.” He declared instead. The rest of the flight was silent, not uncomfortable just silent.

Thursday came sooner than Yauna had expected, she had all her essentials packed in her green suitcase. The file she had made for Tony was in her haversack, all her secrets (well factual secrets) we tucked so close to her. 

Taking one last look in the mirror at her mustard yellow sweater with bows at the wrists and her light blue jean overalls, she paired with a blue and green based rainbow beanie and brown slip ons. Maybe she should have rethought her outfit, she fidgeted with her curly hair, but just made it poofier. Ugh, why did my mother give me this stupid type of hair!

There was a strategic knock on her door, moments later drawing her out of her anxious thoughts. Walking up to the entrance she had to shush Artemis, who was clawing under her skin with anticipation and worry. Then, she flung the door open to the sight of Steve Rogers. 

He was dressed in a baseball cap, gray jumper and gray sweatpants almost matching. She smiled, Steve looked slightly rough today and in need of a smile. “Ready?” He asked returning the smile. 

“Yea, you okay?” Yauna pushed the straps of her haversack over her shoulders and took up her suitcase, proceeding to follow him to the car waiting at the curb.

He waved his hand dismissing your concern, “I’m just tired...Had to deal with a lot of stuff last night.” Yauna gave him a sympathetic smile as she moved to the back of the car to stuff her suitcase in. 

“Here let me get that...Is this all you’re bringing?” Steve pushed the suitcase in and looked at her expecting more. 

“Yea, ‘m mailing the rest. Is all I need for a quick bit.” She didn’t mean for her accent to slip through so much, not that she was ashamed, but most people didn’t ever know what she was talking about. 

Steve chuckled a bit surprised for a moment. “Okay, well shall we?” He motioned for Yauna to get in, then they were off.

The ride to the airport gave time for Steve and Yauna to get to know each other better, and the plane ride to New York allowed even more. Before they landed, Steve started feeling protective over her anticipating what the others would do. Weirdly, he felt like she was like a little sister to him, she had something about her that reminded Steve of home. 

The plane landed and Steve showed Yauna to her quarters, “Well, here we are. Do you need anything?” He sat her suitcase down, that he had insisted on carrying, giving her time to think. 

“No, I don’t think so. Thank you Steve.” She smiled and it was infectious, giving him a twinge of happiness. They waved goodbye and Steve set off down the hallway. 

Yauna pulled out the keycard he had given her, then she remembered something. Whirling around jolting a bit, “Wait, Steve?” He jerked around nodding to her to continue. 

“If you see Mr. Stark, can you tell him to come see me when he gets a moment?” Steve laughed at how formal she was, but nodded, “He actually was going to come see you anyway.” Yauna gave him another infectious smile and yelled thank you, he turned back around and continued down the hallway.

She swiped her card and the door slid open to reveal a living space, including; a couch, end tables, a dining table, a coffee table, and an entertainment center. 

On the other side of the television stand stood a tall bookcase with a note, “I hope this is enough space for all your books and more. You can thank Bruce and Pepper later. -Tony” She laughed and noted to thank them later . 

Next to the living room was the kitchen, fully equipped with appliances, cabinets and a breakfast bar. On the back wall was a glass door leading to a balcony with chairs. 

There were two doors on the left wall, the one closest to the door was the bathroom, the second door was the bedroom; a bed, a walk in closet, an entertainment stand, end tables and a desk. 

Next to the entertainment stand was a door to connect the bathroom to the bedroom. Yauna started to unpack what she had brought with her, not starting putting anything too far away just in case what she talked to Tony about didn’t go over well.

A few hours later, about 8:30 pm, a musical knock came on her door. She steadied her nerves again, opening the door with a smile. “Hey, came by to see how you were doing. And I wanted to show you your lab.” His face looked lighter than it did when he came to see her over a week ago. 

Yauna didn’t move from her place in the door though, her face serious. “I need to talk to you about something first.” She moved beckoning him in before he could say another word. “Yer gonna find out sooner or later. I’d rather it’d a’bea from me.” She turned pulling out the file she made for him about her life, her real life. “This is everyt’ing, well almost everyt’ing.”

She handed it to him, preparing herself for rejection like always. Tony flipped the folder open, he saw a picture of two children and their mother and father. “That’s my mother, father, brother, and I. We are part of a hidden society that protects everyone from the horrors and evil's lurking in the background.”

“My parents died when I was 11, murdered actually. I was kidnapped by a family friend before they died. He killed them while he had me, my brother had to kill his goons.” She explained, then went silent for Tony to read the rest. That file had everything; her parents death, her whole ordeal, the aftermath, and her powers. 

After Tony finished and set the file down, Yauna waited long for his words. Finally they came, “Why did you show me this?” He questioned without any emotion, Yauna took that as a sign for the worst. 

“You needed to know. Work only happens with trust and you can’t trust me with this big of a secret. I wanted to be hired for my brain not my powers, I just wanted to be normal. If you can’t trust me, I understand.” Yauna hung her head slightly, some hope still left.

She figured if she was going to go out better go out with a bang. “I’m a half-breed, that’s what they call me where I come from. I have demon, human, and angelic blood coursing through my veins. The mix allows me to have powers.” She went silent after her admission, hoping that her honesty would help her in some way. It seemed to stay silent for years.

Then his voice broke the silence again, “Of course I trust you, I did even before this.” He gestured to the folder with a laugh, “Yauna, I understand and thank you for telling me. This won’t be a problem with anyone, we all have our pasts.” 

Yauna’s eyes jolted up to his, “No! No, I don’t want anyone else to know yet. I don’t want to be judged because of what happened.” Tony nodded, “Okay, you can tell them in your own time.” 

He laid his hand on her shoulder giving her a soft smile, “Come on, I’m really excited to show you your lab. No one is as passionate about this as I am.” Yauna smiled, following him out the door.

That went better than I expected. Now, hopefully I can keep it together. She thought as Tony showed her around the rest of The Compound, telling her he made a mandatory breakfast for ‘everyone’ tomorrow to meet her. He agreed to make Friday keep her secret as well, she could use her magic when needed and Friday would be her watchman.

She made her way back to her room, after the two said their goodbyes and goodnights. After sliding the door open, she looked around and felt excitement well up inside of her.  Now it’s time for decorating! She thought as she looked around the apartment, nearly jumping up and down. 

Alright! There’s part one of this series. I’m so sorry this is really late. I’m going to try and post the next one in about 5 days. Let me know what you think! I’m always open for questions or suggestions! Till next time. 

[hatingusernamesince99]

Steal like an Artist by Austin Kleon

This is one of the latest books that I have gobbled up, so as gross as it sounds, this is what I really digested.

Okay, so we can start with the fact that this book is against the fact of plagiarism. Not like the-writer-guy is telling you to violate copy rights or something. No, no definitely not. But what he does say is we start learning by copying others; parents, teachers etc. etc���  So, there isn’t really something like ‘original idea’ for someone must have thought of it before you, to which I actually agree.

It has nice glance-to-understand illustrations and also some discarded ones in the end 8). Friendly language and lots of references and recommendations. Loveliest thing that the-writer-guy did is inserting -'Give a copy of this book away’, among his recommendations like- take a nap, start a blog...etc. [We see what you did Here.]

Here are the “10 Things Nobody Told You About Being Creative”, the-writer-guy gives:-

SPOILER ALERT:-THIS BOOK IS FILLED WITH QUOTES THAT PEOPLE HAVE ACTUALLY TOLD (Not to you maybe, though)

1.Steal Like an Artist  2.Don’t Wait Until You Are to Get Started 3.Write the Book You Want to Read 4.Use Your Hands 5.Side projects and Hobbies Are important 6.The Secret: Do Good Work and Share it with People 7.Geography Is No Longer Our Master. 8. Be Nice (The World Is a Small Town)  9.Be Boring. (It’s the Only Way to Get Work Done.) 10. Creativity is Subtraction.

{Instead of expanding all of these and boring ya’ll to death, I’d rather share the ideas that I’d like to steal most from these.}

!->one of my favorite thing is- Climb your own family tree

(Though I prefer-follow your own kind of crumbs, .Hansel and Gretel… No? Okay moving on),

I.e. he says, pick one thinker, whom you really admire, study everything about that thinker, what inspires them and stuff. Find three people he admires and read about them and so on. He also leaves his own kind of trail, by mentioning his own recommendations in the end. (Comment for that list*)

@-> Impostor Syndrome:-

We ALL start doing anything with a feeling that-we are not really “creating” anything.  Well,  NEWSFLASH- No one “creates” without learning, and we learn by copying itself.  So, yeah don’t feel bad for starting by copying others (but with having dignity to give reference :P) It’s that way only that you’ll realize your style ;)

#-> Productive Procrastination:-

He talks about having side projects and interleaving between them, like if you are getting bored in X, Pick up Y, while you procrastinate.

$-> Life of A Project:-

(Also refer to episode 06 (Paula Scher-Graphic Designer) ABSTRACT series.

And Maureen McHugh)*

%-> Praise file, Swipe File and Log file:-

First if you start feeling you’re worthless (Believe me that happens)  second one for 3 am ideas and many to-be stolen ideas, which you might just find lying around. Third for keeping track so you don’t lose yourself…

So…..These are my personal top 5. Kindly tell me, if any of you have read it already or otherwise, about how you find this…umm….thing. Like... what seems out of place, or/and stuff that I missed. Hope you enjoyed!

[pnprpg]

Victoria’s One Man Studio

Local animator lands $100,000 TELUS grant and development deal with Corus

Animation is a complicated business, involving dozens – sometimes hundreds – of people, from the pre-production phase to the final touches of a background.

It would seem that no one ever told that to Victoria-based animator Denver Jackson.

Jackson, 30, has been working independently in animation since 2013. Since then he has released three animated shorts, signed a TV development deal with Corus Entertainment, won top awards at international Academy Award-qualifying festivals, and received a $100,000 grant from the TELUS Storyhive competition, all while animating almost entirely on his own. So, what’s his secret?

“I never went to animation school,” says Jackson. “I think it’s good because you don’t know how much work it’s really going to be if you don’t go to school for it. No one is going to tell you ‘Oh you’re going to do all this yourself? That’s impossible. Don’t do that.’”

Jackson’s first public foray in solo-animating came in 2013 when he began work on the fantasy action/romance Cloudrise. Tackling an entire 9-minute-long animated short on your own is no small task, with up to 24 individually drawn frames in a single second of film. Jackson says the key is breaking it down into pieces, making each individual stage much less intimidating than the whole.

“Every stage was a project,” says Jackson. “I didn’t think about the whole thing until the very last stage, putting it all together, because I think if you think about the whole thing then it’s going to get overwhelming.”

Cloudrise was quietly released online in 2015, almost one full year after completion. After posting the short on online video platform Vimeo, Jackson thought the animation had run its course. What followed was a crash course in viral popularity.

“It got Vimeo Staff Pick which was really cool,” says Jackson. “When I woke up in the morning I went on this one website that I would frequent for geeky news, and suddenly Cloudrise is there in an article.”

After being shared on blogs and social media accounts around the world, ending with a screening at San Diego Comic-Con, Jackson was inundated with queries from a variety of producers and agencies on what his next big project would be.

“At the time I was working on a live action film, and they were all confused,” Jackson says, laughing. “They were like ‘isn’t Cloudrise animation? Why are you doing live action?’ What I should have said was ‘I have an animated film script, it’ll be done soon.’ That’s what I should have said.”

Following the release of Cloudrise, Jackson primarily focused on freelance work with other studios, but after three years he found that his personal ambitions could only be held in check for so long. While traveling in Thailand to stave off the depression he felt at dedicating all his time to other people’s endeavors, Jackson realized he no longer wanted to work on projects that weren’t his own.

“I remember sitting on a ferry in Thailand, there was this ferry going to one of the islands, and I thought ‘I need to start making my own stuff,’” says Jackson. “I just pulled out my sketchbook on the ferry and started doing sketches for The Wishing Jar.”

Jackson headed home, with a brand new project fresh in his mind, and so began a production schedule that, while self-directed, would take up most – if not all – of Jackson’s waking hours.

“For the last four of five months I was getting maybe four hours of a sleep a night,” Jackson says. “I was waking up and starting to work. I’d make myself breakfast and coffee and then go to my computer and start to work. I wouldn’t each lunch, I’d only eat dinner, and then keep working until 4 am.”

Above: Official Trailer for The Wishing Jar

For the release of The Wishing Jar, Jackson decided to go a different route, and submitted the film to festivals around the world. It showed at events from Spain to Florida, including a win for Best Animated Short at both Indianapolis’ Heartland Film Festival, and San Diego Comic-Con. Jackson’s unbelievable work ethic paid off for him yet again.

On the festival circuit, composer Marc Junker, creator of the film’s soundtrack, joined Jackson. Junker and Jackson first met 10 years ago, and quickly bonded over a love of films and cartoons. What began as a friendship quickly developed into a professional partnership, with Junker having a hand in the scoring of all Jackson’s films to date.

“Denver has always had an incredible work ethic,” says Junker. “He’s always wanting to learn and expand, whether it be the technique [of his work,] or the message. I really don’t know anyone else like him. I don’t know how he does it, but it’s awesome.”

It would be another collaborator of Jackson’s, Vancouver-based writer Alain Williams, who would join Jackson on his next project. The science-fiction martial arts short S.O.S. was funded by a $10,000 grant from TELUS Storyhive, a competition, which sees audience-voted projects across Canada funded for production, and won the competition’s Grand Prize. Taking S.O.S. and creating a series pitch based around it, Jackson and Williams then entered a pitch competition at the Ontario International Animation Festival.

“The pitch [event] was 10 pitches, and it was closed doors so there was a jury… I thought you’d get to see the other 10 pitches but we didn’t get to see them,” says Jackson. “We understood how people did pitches, but we sort of went against the grain and did our own thing.”

Their “own thing” ended up working, with Jackson and Williams being picked from the two remaining finalists for a pitch development deal with Corus Entertainment, as well as Nelvana, producers of kid’s entertainment around the world.

“By the end of it we’ll have an animatic and script, but that doesn’t mean the show is made,” says Jackson. “But we’re getting paid to do what we love. It’s cool.”

Jackson is already on to his next project, and his most ambitious yet. After entering a pitch Storyhive competition open only to previous winners, Jackson was awarded a $100,000 grant. With that grant, Jackson has begun producing a 40-minute animated short as part of larger feature script planned for later on. Thanks to positive buzz on past projects, he might not be so alone for this one.

“A lot of people are interested in volunteering,” he says. “I’ve got an Executive Producer, and a lot of the funding is going to voice actors, music… there’s a budget for background artists and that’s about it.”

So it’s on to the next project, and after that, the next. Jackson never slows down, and by all accounts has no intention of ever doing so. While the hours alone might push other people away, Jackson isn’t entirely sure how even he can keep it up. He does, however, have an idea.

“I know that I haven’t felt depressed since working on The Wishing Jar and making my own projects,” he says. “There hasn’t been a single day that I’ve felt sad. For some reason, doing your own thing, you feel so fulfilled and accomplished. Like you’ve done something. The films I work on, it’s a part of who I am. I’m just being myself in that space.”

As a creator, Jackson knows that things vary between individuals. A lack of “inspiration” does not mean a lack of talent, and he says that working through those periods is key.

“You have to sit down and keep working. It can be really tough. Some creatives get that spark of inspiration and then they just keep working,” he says. “That happens rarely. I just have to sit down and keep working on it. When that spark does happen it’s just the icing on the cake, but it isn’t something I work towards. When it happens it happens and it’s like ‘Oh that feels good,’ but then you just keep working.”

[dippedanddripped]

Don’t call Maurizio Donadi a designer. “I’m very involved with product, but I’m not a designer,” the long-time fashion-industry stalwart says. “I have no intention of being a designer. I’ve always been in the middle—I had business sense and an eye without being obsessed. I’m a studier, an observer, and a manipulator, a hacker.” As a veteran of some of the biggest and most venerated global brands—helping bridge the business and creative arms of names like Armani, Ralph Lauren, Levi’s—he has more than 30 years of experience, studying the ways we interact with clothing.

These days, the primary beneficiary of Donadi’s observation and hacking is his company Atelier & Repairs, which takes deadstock, damaged, or otherwise unused garments and repairs and remakes them into one-of-a-kind pieces. Wearing voluminous patchworked army pants and a threadbare chore coat, Donadi has an unmistakably original look—a mix of Paris flea market and American army-surplus shop. This mix of vintage military and European workwear that makes up his own personal uniform has become Atelier & Repair’s baseline aesthetic.

While it’s definitely a look, it’s not just a look. In 2015, Donadi felt the need to use his talents to help combat what he saw as an obscene amount of waste in the industry. He could no longer just make more “stuff”—so he’s taken his talents to the shocking amount of overproduced garments in the world. His hand-touched, heirloom-like approach has caught the eyes of men like Bruce Pask of Bergdorf Goodman and rapper Playboi Carti.

I spoke with Donadi near his shop in West Hollywood—where a sign out front read: WASTE LESS, REIMAGINE MORE—about his career, Atelier & Repairs, and how he’s built a brand outside of the traditional fashion system that is successful for exactly that reason.

GQ: Were you particular about the way you dressed when you were younger?

Maurizio Donadi: My own style wasn’t a style. I had pants because I needed a pair of pants. I used to buy vintage because I didn’t have money, not because it was cool or trendy. Later on, I looked back to those years and thought, I had so much fun finding things that cost a dollar or two. I was looking more for things that spoke to me than, say, looking for a black T-shirt or a pair of jeans. There was one store called American Rags in my town, and it was the only vintage shop. I remember the smell very clearly.

Your job at Armani was essentially to shop and find cool things to show to the design team. How did you get that job? It sounds like a dream.

I was hired for a very specific job, for Emporio Armani in the U.S. I had already been based in the U.S. for 15 years, and I had knowledge of the market. What I think I had was something extremely important: data—knowing what the customer wants, opening shops, hiring people. So I was bringing all that, but the fact that I was Italian and also that I had a certain knowledge of a certain market that Mr. Armani was interested in. It was the beginning of a time when there was a more casual approach to clothing, moving from something that was very formal—still elegant, but more relaxed. So he said, Go around the world and bring research. I had a budget to buy things, and I pretty much had no meetings. It was a dream job.

Why did you walk away from these big, fancy jobs to start your own thing?

I thought that Levi’s was going to be the company that I’d end my professional life with, but it wasn’t. I loved being at Levi’s because it gave me the strength to do something new. But it was time for me to stop working for other companies and start consulting and doing other projects. Levi’s gave me the strength to move to a new place—Los Angeles—and work on small projects that I can give 100 percent of myself to. So instead of getting into the mechanism of a big company, it’s like being a killer—you go and you do the job. But a killer with an emotional spirit!

Why Los Angeles?

My wife and I were looking at London, going back to New York, maybe Hong Kong. The weather here is good and I was in Amsterdam for three years, which is basically three years in the rain. The lifestyle is healthier. We loved coming here over the years. And there’s a manufacturing base here. It’s easy to go places—it’s far away from everything but easy to go anywhere, if that makes sense.

How did Atelier & Repairs come to be?

Well, at first it was this one-of-a-kind and creative project, and then we started to realize it was something that feels good. Beyond being creative, the repurposing of clothing, the restoration of clothing, the upcycling of clothing, makes you think about how much excess there is. I said, Oh shit, there’s so much stuff here. We don’t need another brand. And since then, we have not produced anything. We have transformed — manipulated. We’ve been hacking someone else’s design, and enhancing, changing, reducing, amplifying, all depending on our creative mood.

So what was the first thing you made?

I basically transformed 200 pairs of cargo pants …

Where did you find them?

You can call around. Anything you want, you can find.

And you have the background to find it.

Oh, yeah. I sourced everything myself in the beginning. You ask around: Who’s selling military jackets? There are always a few people. Here or in Northern California or in Nevada, Florida … anywhere! There is stuff everywhere. America and beyond. There is amazing second-hand American clothing in France, in Japan, in Africa! There is so much stuff. The accumulation that our industry has generated is unreal. You can’t measure it. You cannot measure it. [Ed Note: But Donadi can, and does, measure it:] 150 billion pieces produced per year and we have a population of seven billion. That’s about 22 pieces per person per year, and I’d say one-third of the population can only afford one or two. Another secret is the yards of fabrics that are leftover. If you’re looking for half-a-million yards of denim? I could find that in a half-hour — not producing anything! \

I think of you as part of a new generation — along with Bode, Re/Done, Marine Serre — that are rebelling against the system and making clothing with an artisanal feel.

Deep down we wanted to show that you can be relevant, interesting, with an artistic approach, without falling into the calendar of the industry and not falling into this system that’s clearly broken. Like, I may not be able to give you a product in red that’s trendy right now — according to some person — but we can give you green. And with green you will still survive. There’s no such thing as “have to have it,” you know? That’s the power of marketing.

Also, today anyone can get something from a luxury designer — that’s not special. To me, something that feels one-of-a-kind, like someone made it with their hands, that’s special.

That’s the most important element of Atelier & Repairs. Our job is not to be the biggest company or to dress everybody. It’s to offer an element with which you will feel comfortable. And making one-of-a-kind things, in production, is a nightmare. But the satisfaction of you going to the store and saying, I found this pair of pants and there’s only one made and it’s the one that speaks to me—that, I like. That enhances my personality.

There’s an artistic point-of-view, too — an artist rarely paints two of the exact same things. A sculptor doesn’t make two identical sculptures. And with a commitment like that you immediately reduce your commercial potential. I’ll never be a billion-dollar company, but I don’t care. I’d rather be a smaller company but more relevant.

You have many programs: custom pieces, ready-to-wear, collaborations with Gap and Dockers. Tell me about your approach to building a multi-tiered business.

We’re an ad hoc-racy, which is, in our case, an initiative, a project, a company, that changes according to the moment. So if I see that something isn’t working, I’m not obliged to follow it. Maybe it’s my disruptive nature, because I don’t want to belong. I don’t feel comfortable when I’m obliged to do certain things. I’m small enough to be able to change according to opportunities and emotions. That’s extremely relevant to me. I’m not a prisoner of the system. Many brands are very creative, very innovative but they’re part of that system — seasons, trends, fabrics and colors — but that’s not what I’m all about, for good and bad.

Having started in 2015, did you think that sustainability was going to be a big movement in the future?

We have abolished the word sustainability at Atelier & Repairs, in favor of responsibility. Let’s work responsibly. Sustainability entails that you’re doing many, many different things perfectly. Instead, we’re starting a process of looking at things responsibly. We think we can solve a lot of our problems that way.

What stops companies from doing the right thing is that their system is set. The supply chain alone — it would require change with their suppliers, the factories they work with, the way of purchasing things. Everything. That system was built over decades, and they would have to demolish that and start anew.

So what is your process of making a garment — since you don’t “make” anything?

We source about twenty items, things, like a white shirt or a Levi’s 501, military cargos, sweatshirts. We’ll get 15 to 20 items that we source. Some of them have cigarette holes. There’s inconsistency in fit, condition, color, and so on. Some are deadstock, they’ve never been worn before. So first you give them a sanitation wash. Then we grade them and sort them — some are so bad we can only use them as fabric while others are nearly perfect. When we have an idea about our inventory, then we start to create “stories.” Like, we have sweatshirts with bad graphics, so we’ll cover them. Or US army jackets, we’ll almost always use Japanese fabrics. Why? Because at one point the two countries were fighting each other. So now we want them to coexist. Each piece of military clothing we make, it’s not meant to be used in combat, [so] we’ll make the camouflage less aggressive, make it for weekends or gardening, not for fighting.

What I like about what you do is that it’s such an old tradition. This is what people did before the Industrial Revolution!

Repairing has been a natural part of any country’s history. This is an activity that has been minimized in favor of consumption. People ask, why spend three hours mending your socks when you can just buy a new pair? I remember when I was really young, my mother and grandmother repairing socks. That was a normal thing. Of course we live differently now, but I think there are ways to prolong the life of clothes. Don’t buy shit, buy less and maybe spend more. It’s OK to spend more if the item is going to last you 20 years. Instead of buying something that will make you happy right now, buy something that you know will make you happy for the next 10 years.

Do you remember when you first knew something had to change with the way you wanted to work in the fashion industry?

When I left Benetton in 1992, I thought we had sold everything we could sell and there’s no more growth, that we had reached saturation. And then I had this sense of nausea every time they’d talked about global domination. That was my first eureka moment.

What do you want Atelier & Repairs be in five years, or ten years?

I want to be in retail and I definitely want to be doing more than just clothing. Everything you can think of — paper, bicycles, houses, electronics. There is so much, so much. We could open, in theory, a department store: a cool, very unique proposition of a department store where you could come and look and purchase things with responsibility and creativity involved. Where you could buy a bicycle made from the parts of ten other bicycles. That’s not going backwards, it’s looking forward. I’m not saying for people to stop shopping, I’m saying to shop responsibly

[thelastperformer]

for the writer's ask game, can you please answer questions 1 through 4, 11, 13, 14, 19, 21, 30, 37, 41, 49 through 54? :D

Lmao jeez that’s so many thank you fren

1. Favorite place to write

At home, at my desk or in bed. All my stuff is there lol. Although when I have writing days with one of my friends, we tend to go to a library by her place, and I’ve actually been really productive there too. It’s really nice.

2. Favorite part of writing

Outling and drafting. Love that “ah-ha” moment when you realize how the plot is gonna work out. Funnest part is the beginning stages

3. Least favorite part of writing

Editing and revising. Hate that moment when you gotta go and fill in the plot holes, finding what doesn’t end up working. I like making a story stronger, but the rewriting process is… not fun.

4. Do you have writing habits or rituals?

Uh, I tend to write with headphones on.

When revising, I always rewrite/retype the whole story so that I’m rereading and refamiliarizing myself with parts of the story.

11. Describe your writing process from scratch to finish

It starts with the idea, whether it’s just a title, a character, a plotline, or a dialogue. It usually sits or simmers in the back of my mind for a while. If I cant shake it, I’ll start investing more thought into it. I tend to take notes on paper but I draft on microsoft word. These days I’ve been trying to outline more, which I either do on paper or on the wavemaker app. If it lasts through an outlining stage, then I’ll start drafting it. If it’s original fiction, I’ll send it on to my writing friends for critiques before starting revisions. Then I’ll revise and repeat until I feel comfortable enough to query or submit lol. If it’s fanfiction, I’ll usually just revise it on my own and post.

13. How do you deal with writer’s block?

These days, the main reasons I cant write are because I’m either depressed or too fatigued to write. I can’t fault myself for that so I just rest and work when I can. Thinking is writing, and I’m always thinking about it.

If it’s a motivation thing, I just try to push through it. Then I go back and revise it later because like hoo boy those words will not be eloquent lol. If it’s an inspiration thing, I try to input some creativity. I either go back and read some of my own stuff to remind myself what it is that I’m striving for, or watch/read something to get my mind going.

14. What’s the most research you ever put into a book?

My current novel ms takes place in the 1920s. Once I decided a time period, I ended up having to go and pour a lot of research into the time period and ww1 and things. I did not do any of this beforehand lol I just do it as I realize I need info, and it was mostly at the beginning of the novel, but it did stall me a lot

19. First line of a WIP you’re working on

Novel ms: “The night the letter arrived, he couldn’t sleep.”

Also for funsies, here’s one from a fanfic: “The  small coffee shop was sandwiched between two equally crummy buildings, tucked far back on the sidewalks of New York.”

21. Post the last sentence you wrote in one of your WIPs

From my novel ms: “ As he was falling asleep, he dreamed of hands running through his hair, whispers thanking him, praising him, so he didn’t think of the aches in his body.“

30. Favorite line you’ve ever written

Uhhh idk I have written a lot of lines.

“Your name is Rebecca / on the lips and hearts of your children” from a poem I totally forgot about

37. Most inspirational quote you’ve ever read or heard that’s still important to you

Oddly enough, one of my college profs in a class that was a fucking distaster and ended bottoms up said something really beautiful. He told us about how he enlisted and deployed instead of going to grad school, and as he was watching like the gunfire and seeing the war in the distance he thought something like, “I’m not going to find a reason for all of that out there. I’m going to find it here, in literature,” and that’s why he went back to school.

Also in hs, a teacher told me that conclusions are for wrapping the paper up in a way that relates to people, in a way that tells the reader, this is why this matters to the real world

41. How many stories do you work on at one time?

It just depends on how much my mind is working lol. Usually at least one or two big ones and maybe a couple small ones. Currently, I have a novel ms wip, a fanfic, and then like bits and pieces of 4 other stories floating around in my head

49. What do you find hardest to write in a story: the beginning, middle, or end?

It kind of depends on the story. Sometimes the middle, sometimes the end. The end of my novel wip is giving me a lot of trouble.

I want to be someone who writes towards the end of a story, but at this point, I am not lol.

50. Weirdest story idea you’ve ever had

This was a prompt someone gave me: “His name was Doofus, and I thought we were friends.” It became a story about aliens and stolen identities.

51. Describe the aesthetic of your story in 5 words

My novel ms: Rain, teeth, green, family secrets

52. How did writing change you?

Tbh I’ve kind of always been writing, even if I didn’t realize it. In high school I realized how much I enjoyed it and that it came somewhat naturally to me, and I wanted to pursue it and work towards it. I was going to say it didn’t really change me, because it’s always been with me, but maybe that realization gave me something more to strive for.

53. What does writing mean to you?

It’s just a part of me, it’s part of who I am. I don’t have a deeper answer than that lol

54. Any writing advice you want to share?

Uh…… idk.

You gotta know the rules to break ‘em, but please do break them.

You will inevitably write a lot of bad stuff to get to the good stuff. Don’t be discouraged about that, every step is a good one. Innovation is deconstruction and thinking outside the box. So please write a lot.

You will need to learn to take criticism. You will need more than one or two drafts, but take some time between drafts so you can look at it with fresh eyes. Build a community with some writing friends, they will help you in so many ways and it’s so fun to talk about writing processes and see their growth and their projects. You will need to learn to give criticism as well.

Understand that you aren’t just explaining the pictures you see in your head like a movie. Poetry and prose are their own mediums and should be treated as such. They have their own techniques you can use to achieve different affects on the reader but you have to know them.

Above all, enjoy writing. Enjoy the process of writing. If you don’t enjoy the process, what’s the point?

[guyveranimefan87-blog]

The thing about old cartoons #02

Since in my previous post about classic cartoons based on toys I had missed few interesting ones, I had decided to write a second part and include them too, because apparently I have too much time on my hands...

Visionaries: Knights of the Magical Light (1987)

Action takes place on a planet called Prysmos, where for some unexplained reason all technology suddenly stopped working, throwing the society back into the dark ages, with knights, feudalism etc, with two feuding groups of warriors, the noble Spectral Knights and evil Darkling Lords fighting for the control of the planet.

They are given access to magic by the mysterious, ancient wizard known as Merklynn, which enables them to use the power of animal totems, use magic to power the vehicles left from "The Age of Science" etc, elevating their battle into another level...

So, basically a fusion of Sword and Sorcery with a bit of SF, that sold so well in case of "He-Man and The Masters of the Universe", that would surely be a huge hit...

But it wasn't.

You see, the whole gimmick behind the toyline was the use of holographic stickers with a pseudo 3-D effect, that I'll admit, look kinda awesome to this day...

... But it also made their production quite expensive, which in turn made toys more expensive than for example “G.I. Joes” that were the same size, and as a result caused the whole series to tank. 

Still, it is remembered fondly by many people, and it made a kinda-sorta comeback in the 2018 comic book series “Transformers vs Visionaries”, where updated versions of Spectral Knights and Dread Lords find themselves on Cybertron. 

So, maybe it would be a good idea to give it another try Hasbro?

Comic had given You cool, updated designs by Fico Ossio, so not using them would be kinda stupid...

M.A.S.K (1985-1988)

Another series that should've been a huge hit, since it basically ripped-off both "G.I. Joe" and "Transformers" at the same time, but despite being quite popular during it's day, it somehow faded into the background and remains quite obscure nowadays.

The premise itself is nothing new, we have two secret organizations, that is heroic Mobile Armored Strike Kommand a.k.a M.A.S.K led by a millionaire named Matt Tracker, and villainous Vicious Evil Network Of Mayhem a.k.a V.E.N.O.M led by greedy Miles Mayhem fighting each other using advanced technology and vehicles.

We also got Obligatory Teen Protagonist For Kids To Identify With, in Tracker's son Scott, who often got into trouble due to his curiosity, and Irritating Non-Human Sidekick, that is Scott's robot sidekick / vehicle T-Bob, who aside from being cowardly and infuriating, could change into scooter.

Series itself wasn't really groundbreaking, since most episodes repeated the formula of M.A.S.K agents trying to stop Evil Plot of The Week by V.E.N.O.M, which usually consisted of stealing something important and using it for evil, or simply gaining some cash, with Scott getting involved into it by accident, with a big battle in the third act.

But both series and the toyline itself had two gimmicks that made it interesting despite it's very by-the-numbers plots.

Firstly, every character wore a special helmet a.k.a MASK that had given them some kind of superpower, like shooting lasers, anti-gravity fields, shooting daggers, holograms, shooting fireballs, super-strength etc.

And yeah, most of those powers involved shooting stuff, cause it was easier to make toys like that, but the idea was still cool :)

Secondly, their vehicles could transform if needed, giving them additional capabilities, for example Matt Tracker's car, "Thunder Hawk" could change into a pseudo-jet and fly, while "Condor" motorcycle used by his teammate Brad "Chopper" Turner could change into a helicopter.

Yeah, that is kinda cool, eh?

I certainly thought that as a kid, and was incredibly jealous of a friend of mine, who got “Raven” vehicle from his uncle living in the U.K, since it wasn’t sold in Poland at the time, heck even cartoon would only appear many years later, so I couldn’t get my own, despite begging my parents for one...

Yet, as it turned out, cool concept is not enough to carry the series for a longer period of time, especially since from certain moment forward it can be seen, that producers of both toys and a cartoon got bored with it.

I mean, the second season of the series had thrown away the whole concept of fighting crime, even if it is in the theme song, instead focusing on... racing. 

Because apparently don’t need too much action, or plot if You only try to add new stuff to the toyline. 

Toys themselves got a bit less creative too, since by Series Four most new figures gained the power of “projecting holograms”, that is each set had a second figurine made of see-through brightly colored plastic, that was supposed to be the hologram.

Vehicles also got hit by this, as later on there was this “Split Seconds” idea, that is making two vehicles out of one, which basically amounted of body of a car being a “vehicle” and it’s chassis the other.

Less fuss, less moving parts, and cheaper...

Yeah, it was cheap, but probably not in a way creators intended... 

Thus, cartoon had ended, and toyline quietly died, but it was still remembered well enough, that in 2016 there was a new one-shot comic book based on a series, tying it with other Hasbro properties, like “G.I. Joe” and “Transformers”.

For example in this version M.A.S.K was created as a counter for Cybertronians, and V.E.N.O.M was working with Kobra. 

It was then changed into a full monthly series in 2017, and even though it was cancelled after ten issues, characters themselves still appear in IDW Publishing’s comic books, so maybe it’s the time to bring them back onto the screen in some form?

Hmm...

I guess I would need to make this thing a series or something, since I am not even halfway through all the old cartoons I wanted to mention, and nearly ran out of space.

Oh, well, let’s see how many posts it would take me to get through them all.

[kingofthewilderwest]

Note: This personal vent post (though it’s about my own current personal Stuff) contains massive Mass Effect 3 spoilers.

I’m a bit of a latecomer to the Mass Effect franchise... played the first game at the end of 2015 and the second at the start of 2016. I decided to play the full trilogy in anticipation of Andromeda’s release, and I finally had the opportunity to purchase and play ME 3 for the first time these last two weeks. I knew about a lot of the spoilers, but it’s still profoundly impacted me, and made me feel something more deep, unsettling, real, and pressingly painful than the typical recreational feel I get with a bittersweet story. This hurts.

There are a number of reasons it hurts, but the thing that hurts me most is Mordin’s story. I think it’s the best character story hands down in the Mass Effect trilogy - I could talk for a long time about that freakishly amazing characterization and retribution arc. But the point is that Mordin’s story HURTS MAJORLY because, even though I love it, I relate too much to it.

I’m not the same as Mordin, but I found a lot of... identity comfort... and an ability to relate... to the character. I can relate to the hyperactive mind constantly doing ninety side projects. I can relate to dabbling in a lot of different areas... where he might be creative writing, music, theatre, genetics, and the like, I’m things like creative writing, music, linguistics, philosophy, theology, and the like. I can relate to using data and logical analysis as the point of choice over other factors to the point it’s ridiculous. I can relate to being outwardly smooth and confident about my choices while inside being eaten away by what I’ve done. I’ll even admit I can relate to his eyebrow-raising ethics. I can relate to ever wondering if I made the right critical choice. I can relate to being introverted but willing to converse or open up, relate to loving the sciences and the arts, relate to not being the best at socializing or showing it but still obviously caring about the people in my care. Screw it, even the asexuality thing. I guess the whole point of this rant paragraph is that I can find a lot of excitement, happiness, and comfort in Mordin’s character because I can relate to it.

And I can relate to the... success thing... I guess. The great, esteemed Doctor Mordin Solus. Pretty important guy. When he was at the top of his game working with the STG on the genophage, he had top secret clearance, worked with the best resources and team, had an extremely active life filled with excitement and companionship, and found it satisfying. I’m not trying to sound cocky or anything... but I had those years, too. Not quite as monumental, but still... that sense of self-confidence and everything going right around me and being successful? Yeah that was there. High school years, especially senior year - first chair All-State Orchestra flautist, highest GPA valedictorian in the school’s 120 year history, soccer player on the best team in the league, all sorts of awards and recognitions coming my way, great friends to stay by me... I was the TOP and I knew it. And I was thrilled and I loved it.

But life goes forth, and as it does, the consequences of our actions catch up to us. The year 2011 started as my best year. It ended horribly and led to a terrible 2012. I don’t need to explain what happened, except that things came crashing down on me everywhere. Everywhere. And over the course of the last five years, I continued losing. I couldn’t even stay in a PhD program because my depression took too hard of a toll on me for me to stay engaged (I will NEVER return to that program).

So here I am, in the middle of nowhere, some no-name graceless location, feeling like the rest of my life is going to be spent here.

Mordin’s story felt so real. After he left Omega, though, with the sleepless nights and the spiritual soul-searching... he made a comeback. Entered the Collector base. Worked with the STG again to help ‘Eve’. Even created a cure for the genophage to undo that which gave him so much ethical struggling in the first place.

I want that so badly. To get out of this mire of uselessness I’m currently in, where I sit around like a lump of potatoes doing nothing important at all, not even getting decent human contact. To get back to a state where I can be productive and impactful again.

But while there are some moments that Mordin’s story can inspire me... Mass Effect 3 also crumples me.

Fuck it, that was one of the big things that got spoiled to me before I played the game anyway. I KNEW that Mordin was going to die (yeah yeah I know there’s a way for him to live, but that requires some hoop jumping I hadn’t done). I knew that the Renegade route was literally you shooting him right then and there. I managed to piece together a lot of the rest because plots are predictable - I predicted it had to involve some sort of betrayal, that it involved the genophage, that it likely involved some sort of retribution arc where he created the cure, that it’d be a Kobayashi Maru. But I still bawled when I saw him in my Paragon route implement the cure. 

I’ve never been NUMBED and... sort of traumatized... by a character death before. In truth, I tend to adooooore these things. And I STILL will argue with you guys for centuries to come that this scene on Tuchanka is the most incredible and impacting moment in the entire ME franchise. Fight me. So I do adore it. I can’t stop thinking about it. But I *did* legitimately feel horribly, painfully numbed for two days after seeing the Paragon death with my own two eyes from my own actions in the game. It’s like I was literally mourning a real being.

Yes, I know that they write characters really well, and that Mordin was extraordinary writing even on top of that. But it wasn’t just losing a fictional character that I’d attached to. It was.......... somehow, somehow... hitting at the struggles I’m currently in. And basically telling me my life was going to explode. Whatever I do, it’ll end in a “death” - maybe I’ll accomplish something, but it’ll be my end.

I’ve been terrified since leaving the PhD that I am at a dead end. That I’m not going anywhere, that I *can’t* go anywhere, that I’m stuck in a stasis no matter how hard I fight to get something better. That I’m going to be in dead end jobs with no progression and little companionship and no sense of satisfaction. That I’ll never again feel the thrill of what it was to tackle academia in my heyday. Where getting a Masters and three Bachelors and a Minor and a Certificate in four fucking years from a university was TOTALLY doable with an extremely high GPA and a bunch of awards and scholarships and.... where I could LIVE and be in my element. I’m afraid I’ll never get that sense of element again. That I’ll just be in something lackluster, unfulfilling, unappealing. I’m afraid I’ll never leave Omega and never be able to get that peaceful night’s rest. And I’m afraid that even if I make it to Tuchanka and reach the top of the Shroud... I’ll just get shot down... and never get the returned fulfillment in my life I wanted.

Mordin surviving in ME 3 requires two bad decisions to be made in the previous games, and frankly, while it does mean he lives, it’s not a satisfying ending so much from a storytelling perspective. The story was MEANT for him to die. And it just comes as a crushing blow to me... making me feel as though my story is meant to die. I’m not saying literally - I’m not saying me dying - but me having any good experiences in life dying. No matter what I do, whether I’m shot in the back or not... it ends.

Sometimes I can look at the scene and feel inspired. I can see how fucking nervous he was to implement the cure. How he took those attempted deep breaths, how he hummed under his breath to try to comfort him as the tower was falling apart around him, how we could see how scared he was that the next fiery blast would be the one that took him out. That’s inspiring and amazing, to see someone be brave and do things despite them not feeling brave. To see him make that successful redemption in the Paragon route and become a hero that will be sung about in the generations to come (ballads about him! theatre kid Solus would feel so honored), to see that the first born krogan prince is named after him... I mean, that IS the story of a hero. That’s inspiring.

But so often what I just feel is....... a sense of loss. A loss of *me*. That I’m lost and never coming back.

And that’s not quite it either. But I don’t have the words for what I’m feeling or why I’m feeling it or why some stupid instance in just a video game (albeit a very good story) is hitting me so hard. Usually I’m like, soaking into dramatic death scenes. They’re my catharsis, weird as it sounds. I seek out recreational pain so that I can get a sense of emotional relief in my own life. But this? This was raw pain. I’m so happy I experienced it, but at the same time, I’m struggling with this. I can’t fully articulate why. I know this long vent is only part of it. 

I’m just... so sick of being nowhere.

And even if I can’t point out “why,” I just feel so... afraid... pained... hurt... to end up as he did. That I could end up like that. That a character I aspire and adore so much ended up as he did. Don’t get me wrong, it was so fitting, it was so good... but I just... emotions... I can’t.

It’s not about the game. I’m not having problems with the GAME. I’m having problems with something in my heart, resonating within my own life.

It’s the problem of seeing your own hero come crashing down I guess???

Yeah.

Seeing one’s own hero - and through that one’s own ideals and hopes and dreams - come crashing down with a bullet in his chest and a hand that never reaches the console to disseminate the cure.

Mordin’s death.

It’s somehow an attack on my own sense of hope and dreams and goals.

I just... I don’t know what more to say. I don’t even know if this is coherent... crying too hard and too lazy to reread for edits. How many times have I cried about this now?

Friendly reminder that sage all-knowing advice, “It will be okay,” or “I believe in you” responses do *NOT* make me feel better. Non-obtrusive suggestions of what’s going on in my head, saying you relate, or something like that is welcome though.

[thejustinmarshall]

Anya Miller On Climbing, Cancer, And Creative Strategy

NOTE: In 2018, I started recording interviews with creatives (writers, filmmakers, podcasters, photographers, editors, etc.) in the adventure world. I’m publishing the highlights of those interviews monthly in 2019.

Everyone finds their way into adventure storytelling in a different way, but Anya Miller’s journey to working on film projects, creative campaigns, and podcasts for Duct Tape Then Beer is definitely one of the less straightforward ones: It started with a career in architecture, then bedbugs, then cancer, then a mid-career internship making the same salary she made as a lifeguard in high school, then a job at a big design and creative firm, then finally going to work with two of her longtime friends, Fitz and Becca Cahall. Oh, and lots of climbing, snowboarding, mountain biking.

You’ve probably seen something Anya had a hand in making, even if you didn’t know it. As the Director of Brand and Creative Strategy at Duct Tape Then Beer, she does a little bit of: creative strategy, art direction, graphic design, film production, story development, photo editing, and whatever else needs to be done as part of a small team that makes two adventure podcasts (The Dirtbag Diaries and Safety Third, and films like Follow Through and Paul’s Boots.

Duct Tape Then Beer’s client list includes a lot of the biggest names in the outdoor industry: REI, Outdoor Research, Patagonia, The North Face, The Access Fund, Protect Our Winters, National Geographic, Black Diamond, Chaco, Arcteryx, Subaru, and others. I’ve been lucky to work with Anya on a short film project and see how she works (and how she draws), and why Fitz and Becca invited her to be part of their creative team.

I asked Anya to sit down for an interview a few weeks ago—here’s our conversation, edited for length:

ON GROWING UP IN CHATTANOOGA I’m the youngest of four kids. I was born in Canada in a small town called Hespler, Ontario. I have two sisters and a brother, and they are the best. My siblings really shaped my ideas of what I thought was cool, what I wanted to do with my life. Be good at school. Be Good at sports. Be able to talk with anyone with curiosity. I always wanted to do everything that they did. My brother says that my super power is absorbing other people’s super powers. I think of it more as just learning from rad people.

My parents were divorced when I was five — it was a really rough relationship and so I was a pretty stressed out kid. When I was twelve, my mom decided to move from Canada back to her home town of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Moving to the South was probably one of the best things that happened in my life because it put me in a more nature-focused place. In Canada, we lived in a small old town with stone buildings and neighborhoods full of kids. Getting outside meant going to the local school and hitting a tennis ball up against a giant brick wall, cruising on bikes in the street or watching my brother and his friends skateboard in the Taco Bell parking lot. When I moved to Tennessee, we moved in with my grandmother, Gigi, who was like a second mom to me. She lived on a small acreage that had been part of her family farm for three generations. She lived and passed on the same plot of land where she was born — so land was important. There were tomato plants, frogs, lightning bugs, fresh mint and magnolia trees — space to just run around. We were close to a lake, so I would run down there to feed ducks and swim.

There were a lot less kids nearby, so I spent a lot of time with my sister Michaela and Gigi outside — working in the yard, playing checkers and drinking sun tea. Moving to Tennessee really set a different tone for the rest of my growing up and for my life.

My family was not an outdoor adventure family at all. My mom was a single parent with four kids, so she got us into as many organized sports programs as possible to deal with our energy levels and probably just to free up some personal time for her.

I did gymnastics, played soccer and tennis and eventually got into diving. Those sports were great for strength and discipline, but I experienced a lot of injury in high school, specifically in soccer. It seemed like I was working really hard athletically, only to then be at the mercy of some overly aggressive hack on the field.

I broke my leg the summer before senior year of high school and basically was just done with soccer — I hated every bit of it at that point, so I washed my hands of team sports. My sister was a pro cyclist at the time and gave me her old aluminum Trek 1500 and I started riding all the time. It changed my idea of distance and freedom. At this point, I was figuring out where I wanted to go to university. I hadn’t ever even been west of the Mississippi at that point — but somehow I thought that I where I wanted to be.

[photo by Anne Cleary]

  ON MOVING OUT WEST There was an image — and this does not sound that deep at all, but it was an image the old rubber-banded Patagonia Capilene packaging. Steph Davis was climbing some crack. I had never rock climbed in my life and I didn’t know who Steph Davis was at the time, but what I saw  was just a super-strong female and she had chalk on her face and her hair was whipping in the wind. Didn’t look perfect, looked like she was trying hard in a wild place, and I wondered where she was. I was inspired by her, but I was also inspired by the place and the sea of rock she was moving through. I’d never been to a place so arid or stoic.

None of my family lived out west then. All of my siblings were either still in Canada or in the southeast. I just thought the west seemed amazing. I was the last of four siblings at home, and I made no secret of the fact that I wanted to go far away, not have a support network and just see how it would go.

I remember sending away to University of Colorado and getting this information packet that had a VHS tape in it. I wish I still had it! It was so ridiculous. It had 80s synth music and this dude rollerblade shredding around the campus, giving a sort of tour. It wasn’t a causal rollerblade tour. The guy was getting rad on campus and pointing out different buildings! As I said, I was kind of a stressed out kid in school. I made straight A’s and was valedictorian. From that rollerblading video, I guess it seemed like CU was a good place for a stressed out, sometimes-too-serious kid to go.

So I applied the School of Environmental Design and Architecture, and went.

ON DRAWING I can’t remember not drawing. I was always drawing things. In hindsight, I probably just should’ve gotten an art degree. But I think when I was making the college decision, all of my siblings were sociology majors or history majors, which can be cryptic majors to develop a career from. I think I went into school with a practical driven idea that I would know exactly what I was going to do when I got out of school if it killed me.

Considering the different programs that CU offered, it looked like their environmental design program was good. It focused on sustainable architecture and reuse of old buildings, which I was interested in — my mom collected antiques and love making old things new. Plus, I thought architecture was practical. Theoretically, that major equals a decently clear career path after school. Maybe almost too clear of a path — it can be hard to stray from.

I was always drawing as a kid. I remember getting Calvin and Hobbes cartoon books for holidays. I’d go through the pages and duplicate all of the cartoons, hundreds of them. I didn’t trace them — I just redrew them identically, right down to the word bubbles and writing. I did that with Snoopy, Garfield and Far Side comics, too. I really liked cartoons in general. They were funny, they had a dry sense of humor that reminded me of my brother. He cultivated my sense of humor, for sure. He helped explain some of the more complex cartoons and cultural concepts in them.

I would draw on my own, too. For hours at a time. Sharks and birds. My own hands. I’d look at magazine covers and draw them. Time magazine’s person of the year. National Geographic — that woman with the crazy aqua eyes. There were a bunch of skateboard magazines sitting around the house — my brother was a skateboarder. I’d try to redraw the Thrasher logo, which is a really tricky logo to redraw, by the way! I liked looking at that stuff because it seemed raw and cool, for whatever reason.

ON FINDING CLIMBING My first time climbing was on Flagstaff in Boulder. The granodiorite up there is this weird conglomerate rock — it is pretty grippy until its little embedded pebbles get polished. I remember just thinking how cool it was up there. It was so accessible! And at that point, it was pretty quiet there. I lived close to the trails, so I could jog up Flag. I loved that I could go whenever I wanted to. Even at night. I didn’t have a car in university. I didn’t have a car in high school, either, so I fell in love with things that I could do right out of my door with little equipment or support from anyone.

Climbing wasn’t like skiing or snowboarding — you needed a good chunk of money and a car to do those things. Climbing, and bouldering in particular, was something that I could walk out my door, do on my own and have complete control over my experience. With team sports, I couldn’t control my experience. It felt like other people could injure me. At least I had (kind of) had control over whether I hurt myself.

The transition from bouldering to tying into a rope was pretty quick for me. I ended up stumbling into a really good group of people that were better climbers than I was. Probably within the first few months of climbing, I drove with them out to Wild Iris. I remember not really understanding the concept of grades that much, just deciding what I wanted to try based on aesthetics and the encouragement of my friends. I’d say, “That thing looks good! I’ll try that.” It was really important to me to know that my friends believe in me. They did, and I got better quickly.

It was within the first month of climbing that I wanted to try to lead something. Everything about the sport was exciting — I just wanted something of my own. And it seemed like something I could have, in terms of just being able to develop my skills at whatever pace I wanted. I climbed so much (and probably so badly) when I started that I constantly had injured fingers and weeping skin.

[photo by Anne Cleary]

  ON HER FIRST JOB After graduation, the job market was okay. I wanted to stay in Boulder for a little bit. Right out of school, I got a job at a small, residential architecture firm. They were modern and fun and also did a bit of branding and graphic design for the buildings they made. That rollerblade video was full of shit — I worked my ass off in school. I could have gotten a job at a bigger, better-paying firm, but a smaller shop felt more ‘me’. A lot of people in my class were going to giant corporate firms down in Denver or other cities, but I was more interested in smaller scale residential design — and I was more interested in working closely with clients and staying close to the mountains.

That shop was a safe place to escape to after being intense (again) throughout school. I didn’t want to jump into a high-intensity job. There, I got exposed to graphic design, brand design and architecture. They did a lot of the drawing by hand, which I loved. Right then, things were teetering on being all computer-based. Eventually, we did take all drawings into the computer, but all of the concept iteration was hand-drawn. All of the renderings were hand-drawn, which I got to do and loved.

ON LEAVING BOULDER The person I was dating at the time is now my husband, and I think after about a year in Boulder, Charlie and I were pretty ready to take off. We decided to take a trip to South America,  go to Chile and Argentina to go snowboarding and skiing down there.

We were at a resort called Las Leñas, which has an amazing zone of lift-access / assisted  backcountry. One day, Charlie and I were riding separately. It was really crap conditions and I kind of got off my line and was a bit lost. I saw these people just beyond me on this plateau with sastrugi all over it. It was sunny, but windy, like hard-to-move type wind. And I remember seeing a few people and thinking, “They look like Americans,” I screamed out to them, “Hey, can I ride with you guys?”

So we basically get together on that random plateau in Argentina. Maura Mack, her husband Jason, and Adam DesLauriers. We rode a shitty, icy line together and had a hilarious experience in super bad conditions. We got down and decided to go get beers and hamburgers and meet up with their buds, Lel Tone and Tom Wayes. Charlie joined us at the end of the day, and we all went to a hot spring and had non-stop, hilarious conversations. They felt like our people and they told us we should move to Tahoe. A week after we got back from Argentina, we decided to go to Tahoe and check it out. They set us up with a place to live, I got an architecture job, and Charlie started working at Granite Chief, tuning skis. Plus, it was only a short drive from Bishop. I was sold.

ON MEETING FITZ AND BECCA CAHALL That first year in Tahoe, I spent a lot of time in this really tiny climbing gym, if you could even call it that. The Sports Exchange in Truckee. It was really just a used gear shop that had a room in the back with some holds on a woody. But I spent a ton of time there, looking for friends like those I had left in Boulder.

There weren’t a ton of women climbing in there. I saw Becca Cahall — she was strong and I decided, “That girl’s gonna be my friend.” I like to say that I ‘picked her up in the climbing gym’. We started talking, I met Fitz, and Charlie and I started going over to their place in Kings Beach every week for dinner. Becs makes a mean lasagna. It’s amazing at that point in time in my life how much time I had — or made — to connect and chat with people.

We started climbing with those two. At the time, I think Fitz was in the very early stages of starting The Dirtbag Diaries and he was doing a bunch of writing for print publications. Becca was often gone during the summers, doing field biology work in Oregon. And Fitz and I would climb a good bit together in the summers when she was gone. The friendship really started from there.

They moved to Corvallis, Oregon, for Becca’s graduate program. From there, they moved to Seattle. Charlie and I were still in Tahoe, but we kept in touch with those guys and saw them whenever they came through. We were in Tahoe for just over seven years and I was working at an architecture firm there. I was getting really tired of designing 3,000 square foot “cabins” for people from the Bay Area. Architecture was barely providing a living in a mountain town that’s difficult to make a living in. But it wasn’t really filling me up creatively.

Charlie was tending bar, skiing a bunch and tuning skis — at some point, he wanted more of an intellectual pursuit. He started looking around at programs to get his MBA. He was interested in getting into the creation ski clothing and technical outerwear. We were poking around for schools for him — we chose Seattle because of its creative opportunities and proximity to mountains. He had also grown up in Washington, so family was a draw. It was a huge benefit that Becca and Fitz had already made camp here.

Charlie got into the University of Washington and I found a really great position at a firm called Graham Baba Architects. I basically walked into a dream job in an outrageously bad job market. So it just seemed like everything fell into place. Then I found myself in the city. I never really thought I would live in a city, but all of a sudden, I was.

Pretty soon after we moved to the city, I convinced Charlie to take half of a year of his MBA program and in France. So I took an eight-month sabbatical from the architecture firm, even though I hadn’t really been there that long. I spent the season climbing in Fontainebleau. We lived in the 11th in Paris, and traveled around to Italy and Switzerland to do some climbing and snow sports.

ON CANCER When we got back from Europe, I ended up getting a rash all over my body. I thought I had developed a food allergy, so I went to a doctor and I went to a naturopath to get tested for food allergies.

She said, “No, sweetie, you don’t have an allergy. You have bed bugs.” They were pretty common in France at that time, come to find out. She told me how to get rid of them and offered to do my annual exam while I was there (she was a nurse practitioner, too). She does a breast exam on me and she says she feels something. A lump. I could tell she felt like it was bad. She said, “I think you should go get this checked out.” For whatever reason, I just knew there was something wrong. I hadn’t been feeling well, but I couldn’t really attribute anything. Had I not brought those bed bugs back from Europe, I might not have found the tumor. I fucking love bed bugs.

So the very next day I got in for a biopsy at one of the cancer centers in Seattle, and it came back as Triple Negative Breast Cancer. That’s an invasive form of breast cancer. All at once and very quickly, things slowed down for me and sped up, if that makes any sense. I went through a  series of tests to see what the extent of the cancer was — full body scans to see if it the cancer was anywhere else. Waiting for those results was terrifying. I was trying to figure out my course of treatment, and just trying to understand and grapple with everything.

I was whisked into chemotherapy, and that was a crazy, awful chunk of treatment. It stops all fast-growing cells — like cancer — from producing in your body. That’s why your hair falls out  — your hair is fast-growing cell. I decided to take some control and shave my head before my hair really fell out. It just seemed like a helpless situation.

Can you believe that I had a wig made of my own hair? I had it made, and then I never wore it. Not once. It just sat on this weird styrofoam head in the corner of the bedroom the entire time. It was like this weird little animal sitting in the corner. I don’t know why I had it made. Like a security blanket, I think. When I put it on it felt like I was lying about what I was going through.

Chemotherapy just makes you feel acid washed from the inside out, but it’s what they said was the best and only treatment for my cancer type. Afterwards, I had surgery to take out the tumor, followed by radiation. You don’t fight cancer, you just weather it.

ON DECIDING TO SWITCH CAREERS Coming out of cancer, I realized that architecture wasn’t what I wanted to be doing. I wasn’t happy on a day-to-day basis. At that point, after all the cancer stuff, I realized I could pull the plug on architecture and not feel bad at all. I deeply realized that time is short and that I didn’t want to spend a single day doing something that I didn’t love. So I started looking around for other things.

I sat down with my pen and paper, as I usually do. I drew out my problem. I basically tried to draw an infographic of the things that I liked about architecture and the things that I didn’t. I mapped out all of the tasks that I did in between the beginning and end of an architecture project, starting from the first client meeting and ending with them moving into their new or redone house.

Overlayed on the project timeline, I drew an up-and-down heartbeat line. It trended up when I loved the project tasks, and it would go down when I really didn’t like what I was having to do. This line didn’t correlate to difficulty of task — all jobs have hard parts that need grit to get through. True. But this helped me understand what I didn’t like and why.

When I looked at my infographic of my life, it seemed like such a small portion of every project had a loving heartbeat line. The ratio of I love this to I really don’t was just not enough. This visual helped me communicate with people that I was having coffee chats or meeting with, exploring new careers and positions. I could point to the graphic and say these are the things that I’m doing in every project that A) I really excel at and B) fill me up emotionally and really satisfy me as a professional and a creator. Clear, insightful visuals are so key to having good conversations.

I met with a guy who worked at a brand agency. He said, “You really seem like a creative strategist or a brand strategist.” I said, “Okay cool — what is that?” Basically, a strategist makes creative plans and develops foundational ideas that give meaning and inspiration to projects. Strategy helps teams of understand and fulfill creative goals. I wasn’t sure I understood it at first, but I finally had a job title to search for online. I didn’t even know that job existed.

So I started looking for jobs as a creative strategist. I came across an internship that was being offered. This job was definitely aimed at someone ten years younger than me. It was at brand and design firm here in Seattle called Hornall Anderson. Basically, I took my infographic and my architecture portfolio into the interview. I got the job.

[photo by Ken Etzel]

  ON HOW BRAND STRATEGY RELATES TO ARCHITECTURE Essentially, I figured out that creating a house or a space for somebody to use is really similar to creating a brand. In the beginning of an architecture project, you meet the people that you’re going to be working with, the people that will live in that house. You understand how they want to live, the types of spaces they’ll need for their specific lifestyle. You understand the land they have to build on, whether it’s really hilly or flat. You understand the adjacent buildings and you decide how you want your building to respond to those around it. Stand out? Fit in? Be crazy or subdued? Be earthy or modern? You consider budget and you consider the builders that will actually create building. You chart a creative course.

At the end of the day, that planning process that I learned in architecture can be applied to almost any creative project, especially brands. You take a brand. You look at the landscape — where is it going to sit? You understand the brands that sit around it. You consider how your brand is going to respond to, compliment or go against those adjacent brands. You learn about the people that will be ‘living in that brand’ —  the people that are running it and the people that will be purchasing its goods. You set a creative intention that helps develop a solid plan for your building or your brand. Or solid plan for making a film. Or an advertising campaign. Or an event. Whatever that is, there can always be a front-end structuring and creative process that helps you launch into ‘making’ in a considered, intentional and (hopefully) unique way.

ON DOING AN INTERNSHIP IN THE MIDDLE OF HER CAREER I got the internship and it was three months long — terrible pay, of course. But I learned a lot. I had also been in the professional world for ten years at that point. I got hired the day my internship ended, and started working as a Brand and Creative Strategist.

The internship was definitely a proxy for going back to school. I’d definitely recommend it. That job gave me amazing experience and mentors. There, I was able to develop my own techniques of working through brand problems with large teams. Strategists shape clear creative ideas so that it is easier for multiple people to express them.

ON JOINING DUCT TAPE THEN BEER I worked at Hornall for several years. It was the type of agency that had ping pong tables and kegs of beer and free cereal for breakfast. All of those things meant that they wanted you to never leave! I worked a ton, my climbing dropped off. I felt pretty unhealthy. Creatively, I was producing a lot of awesome stuff, working with big brands and talented designers — but eventually it felt a bit soulless. You can only use your intelligence and creativity to sell potato chips for so long.

I wanted to be climbing more. Through those first six years in Seattle, I was of course hanging out with Becca and Fitz. We loved talking about professional and creative stuff. I was always tracking on what Duct Tape Then Beer was doing. One night, I went over to their house and held a little facilitated visual Post-It party to chat with them about creative goals, what they were working on and what they wanted to be. At this point, they had positioned themselves pretty squarely as a film production company and of course The Dirtbag Diaries were still going strong.

When I was at that large agency, I saw people making films and content for brands in categories other than the outdoor industry. I saw how campaigns were being created and how solid, unique creative was being monetized. Basically, I wanted to help Duct Tape expand what they offered. People were coming to Duct Tape saying: We want a film. And then Fitz and Becca would ask: What do you need a film about and why? The brands rarely had good or solid answers for these questions. Maybe they didn’t actually need a film — maybe the brand actually needed a perspective.

Essentially, Duct Tape Then Beer had been creating emotional, unique perspectives for brands and expressing them in films. The value though, for the first years, had been being placed on the film outcome rather than the strategy and thinking that needs to be done before a good story is told.

ON WHAT SHE DOES AT DUCT TAPE THEN BEER Fitz and Becca told me they thought they could hire me. That was a big deal. I was really wary of working with good friends. I had always kept my personal life and work pretty separate. I just didn’t want to ruin our friendship by working together every single day, or having weird professional interactions with folks that I love so much. Eventually, those guys just talked me down from the ledge. They said their first priority was keeping our friendship solid — and they thought we could make some really cool things together. They said we would only work with brands and strengthen and nurture connections to the natural world. They said I could go climbing. That was it. I ended up leaving the big agency and joining Duct Tape to develop a brand strategy offering so that we could answer the brand questions before the topic of the creative output was even addressed.

Before a creative expression (film, messaging, campaign) is ever decided upon, we crystallize emotional ideas that will elicit action. How will we express an emotional idea? Maybe a film. Maybe a podcast. Maybe new headlines or messaging that gets rolled out over a few years. Maybe a social media campaign. Maybe an event. But we always start with clear, emotional ideas.

There aren’t many projects that come through Duct Tape Then Beer that I don’t have some sort of hand in. But you could say that about all of us — we all touch every project. Our skills overlap and are complementary. I make all of the pitch decks. I don’t like to admit that I am a writer — it was always so hard for me — but it has flowed as I’ve gotten older. If it’s a story that Fitz discovered, he’ll write it up and then I design a compelling story deck — sometimes with infographics —  to get our ideas across. I do a lot of strategy work for us internally and for our clients. I do the graphic design and edit the photos that come out of our office, functioning as the art director and social media person. But my official title is Director of Brand and Creative Strategy.

Our podcasts need a good bit of overarching creative strategy. We don’t just haphazardly assort stories and guests. We look at culture and we try to understand what’s going on and try to actively seek out stories that express complex, emotional topics in today’s world. I’ll work to help shape this topic mix.

At the helm of Duct Tape, we’ve got five full-time people. We are all seasoned creatives and high-functioning human beings that love to contribute and work hard for each other. I think that’s what makes project good  — when several smart people contribute in a considered way.

ON SNOWBOARDING VS. SKIING I snowboard. I skied when I was tiny in Canada a couple of times. Since being in Colorado, I’ve been a snowboarder. More and more, I stay out of resorts and am loyal to my splitboard and to snow that makes no noise. I’ve had three torn ACLs on one leg. I’ve torn my meniscus three times. So yea, I ride snow that makes no noise. Luckily, soft snow is usually easy to find in Washington.

ADVICE It was scary and hard for me to leave behind a profession that I’d put a lot of time and energy into. But I knew, deep down, that I didn’t enjoy it. My advice? Take some time and be really honest with yourself about what you like doing (and why) and what you don’t like doing (and why). Because every job is going to have something that sucks about it. Really anything worth doing is going to be pretty hard at some point, so the answer, “I don’t like doing this because it’s too hard,” is bullshit.

But I do recommend that process that I went through. Visually mapping out what filled me up emotionally and what depleted me emotionally. Visualizing that was so helpful. And clear. And it helped me realize what I wanted to be spending my time doing. Continually revisiting those two questions: What do I like doing and why? What do I not like doing and why? Continually revisiting those has been the most helpful thing for me over the last ten years.

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Anya Miller On Climbing, Cancer, And Creative Strategy

NOTE: In 2018, I started recording interviews with creatives (writers, filmmakers, podcasters, photographers, editors, etc.) in the adventure world. I’m publishing the highlights of those interviews monthly in 2019.

Everyone finds their way into adventure storytelling in a different way, but Anya Miller’s journey to working on film projects, creative campaigns, and podcasts for Duct Tape Then Beer is definitely one of the less straightforward ones: It started with a career in architecture, then bedbugs, then cancer, then a mid-career internship making the same salary she made as a lifeguard in high school, then a job at a big design and creative firm, then finally going to work with two of her longtime friends, Fitz and Becca Cahall. Oh, and lots of climbing, snowboarding, mountain biking.

You’ve probably seen something Anya had a hand in making, even if you didn’t know it. As the Director of Brand and Creative Strategy at Duct Tape Then Beer, she does a little bit of: creative strategy, art direction, graphic design, film production, story development, photo editing, and whatever else needs to be done as part of a small team that makes two adventure podcasts (The Dirtbag Diaries and Safety Third, and films like Follow Through and Paul’s Boots.

Duct Tape Then Beer’s client list includes a lot of the biggest names in the outdoor industry: REI, Outdoor Research, Patagonia, The North Face, The Access Fund, Protect Our Winters, National Geographic, Black Diamond, Chaco, Arcteryx, Subaru, and others. I’ve been lucky to work with Anya on a short film project and see how she works (and how she draws), and why Fitz and Becca invited her to be part of their creative team.

I asked Anya to sit down for an interview a few weeks ago—here’s our conversation, edited for length:

ON GROWING UP IN CHATTANOOGA I’m the youngest of four kids. I was born in Canada in a small town called Hespler, Ontario. I have two sisters and a brother, and they are the best. My siblings really shaped my ideas of what I thought was cool, what I wanted to do with my life. Be good at school. Be Good at sports. Be able to talk with anyone with curiosity. I always wanted to do everything that they did. My brother says that my super power is absorbing other people’s super powers. I think of it more as just learning from rad people.

My parents were divorced when I was five — it was a really rough relationship and so I was a pretty stressed out kid. When I was twelve, my mom decided to move from Canada back to her home town of Chattanooga, Tennessee. Moving to the South was probably one of the best things that happened in my life because it put me in a more nature-focused place. In Canada, we lived in a small old town with stone buildings and neighborhoods full of kids. Getting outside meant going to the local school and hitting a tennis ball up against a giant brick wall, cruising on bikes in the street or watching my brother and his friends skateboard in the Taco Bell parking lot. When I moved to Tennessee, we moved in with my grandmother, Gigi, who was like a second mom to me. She lived on a small acreage that had been part of her family farm for three generations. She lived and passed on the same plot of land where she was born — so land was important. There were tomato plants, frogs, lightning bugs, fresh mint and magnolia trees — space to just run around. We were close to a lake, so I would run down there to feed ducks and swim.

There were a lot less kids nearby, so I spent a lot of time with my sister Michaela and Gigi outside — working in the yard, playing checkers and drinking sun tea. Moving to Tennessee really set a different tone for the rest of my growing up and for my life.

My family was not an outdoor adventure family at all. My mom was a single parent with four kids, so she got us into as many organized sports programs as possible to deal with our energy levels and probably just to free up some personal time for her.

I did gymnastics, played soccer and tennis and eventually got into diving. Those sports were great for strength and discipline, but I experienced a lot of injury in high school, specifically in soccer. It seemed like I was working really hard athletically, only to then be at the mercy of some overly aggressive hack on the field.

I broke my leg the summer before senior year of high school and basically was just done with soccer — I hated every bit of it at that point, so I washed my hands of team sports. My sister was a pro cyclist at the time and gave me her old aluminum Trek 1500 and I started riding all the time. It changed my idea of distance and freedom. At this point, I was figuring out where I wanted to go to university. I hadn’t ever even been west of the Mississippi at that point — but somehow I thought that I where I wanted to be.

[photo by Anne Cleary]

  ON MOVING OUT WEST There was an image — and this does not sound that deep at all, but it was an image the old rubber-banded Patagonia Capilene packaging. Steph Davis was climbing some crack. I had never rock climbed in my life and I didn’t know who Steph Davis was at the time, but what I saw  was just a super-strong female and she had chalk on her face and her hair was whipping in the wind. Didn’t look perfect, looked like she was trying hard in a wild place, and I wondered where she was. I was inspired by her, but I was also inspired by the place and the sea of rock she was moving through. I’d never been to a place so arid or stoic.

None of my family lived out west then. All of my siblings were either still in Canada or in the southeast. I just thought the west seemed amazing. I was the last of four siblings at home, and I made no secret of the fact that I wanted to go far away, not have a support network and just see how it would go.

I remember sending away to University of Colorado and getting this information packet that had a VHS tape in it. I wish I still had it! It was so ridiculous. It had 80s synth music and this dude rollerblade shredding around the campus, giving a sort of tour. It wasn’t a causal rollerblade tour. The guy was getting rad on campus and pointing out different buildings! As I said, I was kind of a stressed out kid in school. I made straight A’s and was valedictorian. From that rollerblading video, I guess it seemed like CU was a good place for a stressed out, sometimes-too-serious kid to go.

So I applied the School of Environmental Design and Architecture, and went.

ON DRAWING I can’t remember not drawing. I was always drawing things. In hindsight, I probably just should’ve gotten an art degree. But I think when I was making the college decision, all of my siblings were sociology majors or history majors, which can be cryptic majors to develop a career from. I think I went into school with a practical driven idea that I would know exactly what I was going to do when I got out of school if it killed me.

Considering the different programs that CU offered, it looked like their environmental design program was good. It focused on sustainable architecture and reuse of old buildings, which I was interested in — my mom collected antiques and love making old things new. Plus, I thought architecture was practical. Theoretically, that major equals a decently clear career path after school. Maybe almost too clear of a path — it can be hard to stray from.

I was always drawing as a kid. I remember getting Calvin and Hobbes cartoon books for holidays. I’d go through the pages and duplicate all of the cartoons, hundreds of them. I didn’t trace them — I just redrew them identically, right down to the word bubbles and writing. I did that with Snoopy, Garfield and Far Side comics, too. I really liked cartoons in general. They were funny, they had a dry sense of humor that reminded me of my brother. He cultivated my sense of humor, for sure. He helped explain some of the more complex cartoons and cultural concepts in them.

I would draw on my own, too. For hours at a time. Sharks and birds. My own hands. I’d look at magazine covers and draw them. Time magazine’s person of the year. National Geographic — that woman with the crazy aqua eyes. There were a bunch of skateboard magazines sitting around the house — my brother was a skateboarder. I’d try to redraw the Thrasher logo, which is a really tricky logo to redraw, by the way! I liked looking at that stuff because it seemed raw and cool, for whatever reason.

ON FINDING CLIMBING My first time climbing was on Flagstaff in Boulder. The granodiorite up there is this weird conglomerate rock — it is pretty grippy until its little embedded pebbles get polished. I remember just thinking how cool it was up there. It was so accessible! And at that point, it was pretty quiet there. I lived close to the trails, so I could jog up Flag. I loved that I could go whenever I wanted to. Even at night. I didn’t have a car in university. I didn’t have a car in high school, either, so I fell in love with things that I could do right out of my door with little equipment or support from anyone.

Climbing wasn’t like skiing or snowboarding — you needed a good chunk of money and a car to do those things. Climbing, and bouldering in particular, was something that I could walk out my door, do on my own and have complete control over my experience. With team sports, I couldn’t control my experience. It felt like other people could injure me. At least I had (kind of) had control over whether I hurt myself.

The transition from bouldering to tying into a rope was pretty quick for me. I ended up stumbling into a really good group of people that were better climbers than I was. Probably within the first few months of climbing, I drove with them out to Wild Iris. I remember not really understanding the concept of grades that much, just deciding what I wanted to try based on aesthetics and the encouragement of my friends. I’d say, “That thing looks good! I’ll try that.” It was really important to me to know that my friends believe in me. They did, and I got better quickly.

It was within the first month of climbing that I wanted to try to lead something. Everything about the sport was exciting — I just wanted something of my own. And it seemed like something I could have, in terms of just being able to develop my skills at whatever pace I wanted. I climbed so much (and probably so badly) when I started that I constantly had injured fingers and weeping skin.

[photo by Anne Cleary]

  ON HER FIRST JOB After graduation, the job market was okay. I wanted to stay in Boulder for a little bit. Right out of school, I got a job at a small, residential architecture firm. They were modern and fun and also did a bit of branding and graphic design for the buildings they made. That rollerblade video was full of shit — I worked my ass off in school. I could have gotten a job at a bigger, better-paying firm, but a smaller shop felt more ‘me’. A lot of people in my class were going to giant corporate firms down in Denver or other cities, but I was more interested in smaller scale residential design — and I was more interested in working closely with clients and staying close to the mountains.

That shop was a safe place to escape to after being intense (again) throughout school. I didn’t want to jump into a high-intensity job. There, I got exposed to graphic design, brand design and architecture. They did a lot of the drawing by hand, which I loved. Right then, things were teetering on being all computer-based. Eventually, we did take all drawings into the computer, but all of the concept iteration was hand-drawn. All of the renderings were hand-drawn, which I got to do and loved.

ON LEAVING BOULDER The person I was dating at the time is now my husband, and I think after about a year in Boulder, Charlie and I were pretty ready to take off. We decided to take a trip to South America,  go to Chile and Argentina to go snowboarding and skiing down there.

We were at a resort called Las Leñas, which has an amazing zone of lift-access / assisted  backcountry. One day, Charlie and I were riding separately. It was really crap conditions and I kind of got off my line and was a bit lost. I saw these people just beyond me on this plateau with sastrugi all over it. It was sunny, but windy, like hard-to-move type wind. And I remember seeing a few people and thinking, “They look like Americans,” I screamed out to them, “Hey, can I ride with you guys?”

So we basically get together on that random plateau in Argentina. Maura Mack, her husband Jason, and Adam DesLauriers. We rode a shitty, icy line together and had a hilarious experience in super bad conditions. We got down and decided to go get beers and hamburgers and meet up with their buds, Lel Tone and Tom Wayes. Charlie joined us at the end of the day, and we all went to a hot spring and had non-stop, hilarious conversations. They felt like our people and they told us we should move to Tahoe. A week after we got back from Argentina, we decided to go to Tahoe and check it out. They set us up with a place to live, I got an architecture job, and Charlie started working at Granite Chief, tuning skis. Plus, it was only a short drive from Bishop. I was sold.

ON MEETING FITZ AND BECCA CAHALL That first year in Tahoe, I spent a lot of time in this really tiny climbing gym, if you could even call it that. The Sports Exchange in Truckee. It was really just a used gear shop that had a room in the back with some holds on a woody. But I spent a ton of time there, looking for friends like those I had left in Boulder.

There weren’t a ton of women climbing in there. I saw Becca Cahall — she was strong and I decided, “That girl’s gonna be my friend.” I like to say that I ‘picked her up in the climbing gym’. We started talking, I met Fitz, and Charlie and I started going over to their place in Kings Beach every week for dinner. Becs makes a mean lasagna. It’s amazing at that point in time in my life how much time I had — or made — to connect and chat with people.

We started climbing with those two. At the time, I think Fitz was in the very early stages of starting The Dirtbag Diaries and he was doing a bunch of writing for print publications. Becca was often gone during the summers, doing field biology work in Oregon. And Fitz and I would climb a good bit together in the summers when she was gone. The friendship really started from there.

They moved to Corvallis, Oregon, for Becca’s graduate program. From there, they moved to Seattle. Charlie and I were still in Tahoe, but we kept in touch with those guys and saw them whenever they came through. We were in Tahoe for just over seven years and I was working at an architecture firm there. I was getting really tired of designing 3,000 square foot “cabins” for people from the Bay Area. Architecture was barely providing a living in a mountain town that’s difficult to make a living in. But it wasn’t really filling me up creatively.

Charlie was tending bar, skiing a bunch and tuning skis — at some point, he wanted more of an intellectual pursuit. He started looking around at programs to get his MBA. He was interested in getting into the creation ski clothing and technical outerwear. We were poking around for schools for him — we chose Seattle because of its creative opportunities and proximity to mountains. He had also grown up in Washington, so family was a draw. It was a huge benefit that Becca and Fitz had already made camp here.

Charlie got into the University of Washington and I found a really great position at a firm called Graham Baba Architects. I basically walked into a dream job in an outrageously bad job market. So it just seemed like everything fell into place. Then I found myself in the city. I never really thought I would live in a city, but all of a sudden, I was.

Pretty soon after we moved to the city, I convinced Charlie to take half of a year of his MBA program and in France. So I took an eight-month sabbatical from the architecture firm, even though I hadn’t really been there that long. I spent the season climbing in Fontainebleau. We lived in the 11th in Paris, and traveled around to Italy and Switzerland to do some climbing and snow sports.

ON CANCER When we got back from Europe, I ended up getting a rash all over my body. I thought I had developed a food allergy, so I went to a doctor and I went to a naturopath to get tested for food allergies.

She said, “No, sweetie, you don’t have an allergy. You have bed bugs.” They were pretty common in France at that time, come to find out. She told me how to get rid of them and offered to do my annual exam while I was there (she was a nurse practitioner, too). She does a breast exam on me and she says she feels something. A lump. I could tell she felt like it was bad. She said, “I think you should go get this checked out.” For whatever reason, I just knew there was something wrong. I hadn’t been feeling well, but I couldn’t really attribute anything. Had I not brought those bed bugs back from Europe, I might not have found the tumor. I fucking love bed bugs.

So the very next day I got in for a biopsy at one of the cancer centers in Seattle, and it came back as Triple Negative Breast Cancer. That’s an invasive form of breast cancer. All at once and very quickly, things slowed down for me and sped up, if that makes any sense. I went through a  series of tests to see what the extent of the cancer was — full body scans to see if it the cancer was anywhere else. Waiting for those results was terrifying. I was trying to figure out my course of treatment, and just trying to understand and grapple with everything.

I was whisked into chemotherapy, and that was a crazy, awful chunk of treatment. It stops all fast-growing cells — like cancer — from producing in your body. That’s why your hair falls out  — your hair is fast-growing cell. I decided to take some control and shave my head before my hair really fell out. It just seemed like a helpless situation.

Can you believe that I had a wig made of my own hair? I had it made, and then I never wore it. Not once. It just sat on this weird styrofoam head in the corner of the bedroom the entire time. It was like this weird little animal sitting in the corner. I don’t know why I had it made. Like a security blanket, I think. When I put it on it felt like I was lying about what I was going through.

Chemotherapy just makes you feel acid washed from the inside out, but it’s what they said was the best and only treatment for my cancer type. Afterwards, I had surgery to take out the tumor, followed by radiation. You don’t fight cancer, you just weather it.

ON DECIDING TO SWITCH CAREERS Coming out of cancer, I realized that architecture wasn’t what I wanted to be doing. I wasn’t happy on a day-to-day basis. At that point, after all the cancer stuff, I realized I could pull the plug on architecture and not feel bad at all. I deeply realized that time is short and that I didn’t want to spend a single day doing something that I didn’t love. So I started looking around for other things.

I sat down with my pen and paper, as I usually do. I drew out my problem. I basically tried to draw an infographic of the things that I liked about architecture and the things that I didn’t. I mapped out all of the tasks that I did in between the beginning and end of an architecture project, starting from the first client meeting and ending with them moving into their new or redone house.

Overlayed on the project timeline, I drew an up-and-down heartbeat line. It trended up when I loved the project tasks, and it would go down when I really didn’t like what I was having to do. This line didn’t correlate to difficulty of task — all jobs have hard parts that need grit to get through. True. But this helped me understand what I didn’t like and why.

When I looked at my infographic of my life, it seemed like such a small portion of every project had a loving heartbeat line. The ratio of I love this to I really don’t was just not enough. This visual helped me communicate with people that I was having coffee chats or meeting with, exploring new careers and positions. I could point to the graphic and say these are the things that I’m doing in every project that A) I really excel at and B) fill me up emotionally and really satisfy me as a professional and a creator. Clear, insightful visuals are so key to having good conversations.

I met with a guy who worked at a brand agency. He said, “You really seem like a creative strategist or a brand strategist.” I said, “Okay cool — what is that?” Basically, a strategist makes creative plans and develops foundational ideas that give meaning and inspiration to projects. Strategy helps teams of understand and fulfill creative goals. I wasn’t sure I understood it at first, but I finally had a job title to search for online. I didn’t even know that job existed.

So I started looking for jobs as a creative strategist. I came across an internship that was being offered. This job was definitely aimed at someone ten years younger than me. It was at brand and design firm here in Seattle called Hornall Anderson. Basically, I took my infographic and my architecture portfolio into the interview. I got the job.

[photo by Ken Etzel]

  ON HOW BRAND STRATEGY RELATES TO ARCHITECTURE Essentially, I figured out that creating a house or a space for somebody to use is really similar to creating a brand. In the beginning of an architecture project, you meet the people that you’re going to be working with, the people that will live in that house. You understand how they want to live, the types of spaces they’ll need for their specific lifestyle. You understand the land they have to build on, whether it’s really hilly or flat. You understand the adjacent buildings and you decide how you want your building to respond to those around it. Stand out? Fit in? Be crazy or subdued? Be earthy or modern? You consider budget and you consider the builders that will actually create building. You chart a creative course.

At the end of the day, that planning process that I learned in architecture can be applied to almost any creative project, especially brands. You take a brand. You look at the landscape — where is it going to sit? You understand the brands that sit around it. You consider how your brand is going to respond to, compliment or go against those adjacent brands. You learn about the people that will be ‘living in that brand’ —  the people that are running it and the people that will be purchasing its goods. You set a creative intention that helps develop a solid plan for your building or your brand. Or solid plan for making a film. Or an advertising campaign. Or an event. Whatever that is, there can always be a front-end structuring and creative process that helps you launch into ‘making’ in a considered, intentional and (hopefully) unique way.

ON DOING AN INTERNSHIP IN THE MIDDLE OF HER CAREER I got the internship and it was three months long — terrible pay, of course. But I learned a lot. I had also been in the professional world for ten years at that point. I got hired the day my internship ended, and started working as a Brand and Creative Strategist.

The internship was definitely a proxy for going back to school. I’d definitely recommend it. That job gave me amazing experience and mentors. There, I was able to develop my own techniques of working through brand problems with large teams. Strategists shape clear creative ideas so that it is easier for multiple people to express them.

ON JOINING DUCT TAPE THEN BEER I worked at Hornall for several years. It was the type of agency that had ping pong tables and kegs of beer and free cereal for breakfast. All of those things meant that they wanted you to never leave! I worked a ton, my climbing dropped off. I felt pretty unhealthy. Creatively, I was producing a lot of awesome stuff, working with big brands and talented designers — but eventually it felt a bit soulless. You can only use your intelligence and creativity to sell potato chips for so long.

I wanted to be climbing more. Through those first six years in Seattle, I was of course hanging out with Becca and Fitz. We loved talking about professional and creative stuff. I was always tracking on what Duct Tape Then Beer was doing. One night, I went over to their house and held a little facilitated visual Post-It party to chat with them about creative goals, what they were working on and what they wanted to be. At this point, they had positioned themselves pretty squarely as a film production company and of course The Dirtbag Diaries were still going strong.

When I was at that large agency, I saw people making films and content for brands in categories other than the outdoor industry. I saw how campaigns were being created and how solid, unique creative was being monetized. Basically, I wanted to help Duct Tape expand what they offered. People were coming to Duct Tape saying: We want a film. And then Fitz and Becca would ask: What do you need a film about and why? The brands rarely had good or solid answers for these questions. Maybe they didn’t actually need a film — maybe the brand actually needed a perspective.

Essentially, Duct Tape Then Beer had been creating emotional, unique perspectives for brands and expressing them in films. The value though, for the first years, had been being placed on the film outcome rather than the strategy and thinking that needs to be done before a good story is told.

ON WHAT SHE DOES AT DUCT TAPE THEN BEER Fitz and Becca told me they thought they could hire me. That was a big deal. I was really wary of working with good friends. I had always kept my personal life and work pretty separate. I just didn’t want to ruin our friendship by working together every single day, or having weird professional interactions with folks that I love so much. Eventually, those guys just talked me down from the ledge. They said their first priority was keeping our friendship solid — and they thought we could make some really cool things together. They said we would only work with brands and strengthen and nurture connections to the natural world. They said I could go climbing. That was it. I ended up leaving the big agency and joining Duct Tape to develop a brand strategy offering so that we could answer the brand questions before the topic of the creative output was even addressed.

Before a creative expression (film, messaging, campaign) is ever decided upon, we crystallize emotional ideas that will elicit action. How will we express an emotional idea? Maybe a film. Maybe a podcast. Maybe new headlines or messaging that gets rolled out over a few years. Maybe a social media campaign. Maybe an event. But we always start with clear, emotional ideas.

There aren’t many projects that come through Duct Tape Then Beer that I don’t have some sort of hand in. But you could say that about all of us — we all touch every project. Our skills overlap and are complementary. I make all of the pitch decks. I don’t like to admit that I am a writer — it was always so hard for me — but it has flowed as I’ve gotten older. If it’s a story that Fitz discovered, he’ll write it up and then I design a compelling story deck — sometimes with infographics —  to get our ideas across. I do a lot of strategy work for us internally and for our clients. I do the graphic design and edit the photos that come out of our office, functioning as the art director and social media person. But my official title is Director of Brand and Creative Strategy.

Our podcasts need a good bit of overarching creative strategy. We don’t just haphazardly assort stories and guests. We look at culture and we try to understand what’s going on and try to actively seek out stories that express complex, emotional topics in today’s world. I’ll work to help shape this topic mix.

At the helm of Duct Tape, we’ve got five full-time people. We are all seasoned creatives and high-functioning human beings that love to contribute and work hard for each other. I think that’s what makes project good  — when several smart people contribute in a considered way.

ON SNOWBOARDING VS. SKIING I snowboard. I skied when I was tiny in Canada a couple of times. Since being in Colorado, I’ve been a snowboarder. More and more, I stay out of resorts and am loyal to my splitboard and to snow that makes no noise. I’ve had three torn ACLs on one leg. I’ve torn my meniscus three times. So yea, I ride snow that makes no noise. Luckily, soft snow is usually easy to find in Washington.

ADVICE It was scary and hard for me to leave behind a profession that I’d put a lot of time and energy into. But I knew, deep down, that I didn’t enjoy it. My advice? Take some time and be really honest with yourself about what you like doing (and why) and what you don’t like doing (and why). Because every job is going to have something that sucks about it. Really anything worth doing is going to be pretty hard at some point, so the answer, “I don’t like doing this because it’s too hard,” is bullshit.

But I do recommend that process that I went through. Visually mapping out what filled me up emotionally and what depleted me emotionally. Visualizing that was so helpful. And clear. And it helped me realize what I wanted to be spending my time doing. Continually revisiting those two questions: What do I like doing and why? What do I not like doing and why? Continually revisiting those has been the most helpful thing for me over the last ten years.

The post Anya Miller On Climbing, Cancer, And Creative Strategy appeared first on semi-rad.com.

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44 Writing Hacks From Some of the Greatest Writers Who Ever Lived

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44 Writing Hacks From Some of the Greatest Writers Who Ever Lived

Writing looks fun, but doing it professionally is hard. Like really hard. Why on earth am I doing this?-hard.

Which is probably why so many people want to write, yet so few actually do. But there are ways to make it easier, as many writers can tell you. Tricks that have been discovered over the centuries to help with this difficult craft.

In another industry, these tricks would be considered trade secrets. But writers are generous and they love to share (often in books about writing). They explain their own strategies for how to deal with writers block to how to make sure your computer never eats your manuscript. They give away this hard-won knowledge so that other aspiring writers wont have to struggle in the same way. Over my career, Ive tried to collect these little bits of wisdom in my commonplace book (also a writers trick which I picked up from Montaigne) and am grateful for the guidance theyve provided.

Below, Ive shared a collection of writing hacks from some amazing writers like Kurt Vonnegut, George Orwell, Stephen King, Elizabeth Gilbert, Anne Lamott, and Raymond Chandler. I hope its not too presumptuous but I snuck in a few of my own too (not that I think Im anywhere near as good as them).

Anyway, heres to making this tough job a tiny bit easier!

[*] When you have an idea for an article or a bookwrite it down. Dont let it float around in your head. Thats a recipe for losing it. As Beethoven is reported to have said, If I don’t write it down immediately I forget it right away. If I put it into a sketchbook I never forget it, and I never have to look it up again.

[*] The important thing is to start. At the end of John Fantes book Dreams from Bunker Hill, the character, a writer, reminds himself that if he can write one great line, he can write two and if he can write two he can write three, and if he can write three, he can write forever. He pauses. Even that seemed insurmountable. So he types out four lines from one of his favorite poems. What the hell, he says, a man has to start someplace.

[*] In fact, a lot of writers use that last technique. In Tobias Wolffs autobiographical novel Old School, the character types the passages from his favorite books just to know what it feels like to have those words flow through his fingertips. Hunter S. Thompson often did the same thing. This is another reason why technologies like ebooks and Evernote are inferior to physical interaction. Just highlighting something and saving it to a computer? Theres no tactile memory there.

[*] The greatest part of a writers time is spent in reading; a man will turn over half a library to make one book. Samuel Johnson

[*] Tim Ferriss has said that the goal for a productive writing life is two crappy pages a day. Just enough to make progress, not too ambitious to be intimidating.

[*] They say breakfast (protein) in the morning helps brain function. But in my experience, thats a trade-off with waking up and getting started right away. Apparently Kurt Vonnegut only ate after he worked for 2 hours. Maybe he felt like after that hed earned food.

[*] Michael Malice has advised dont edit while you write. I think this is good advice.

[*] In addition to making a distinction between editing and writing, Robert Greene advises to make an equally important distinction between research and writing. Trying to find where youre going while youre doing it is begging to get horribly lost. Writing is easier when the research is done and the framework has been laid out.

[*] Nassim Taleb wrote in Antifragile that every sentence in the book was a derivation, an application or an interpretation of the short maxim he opened with. THAT is why you want to get your thesis down and perfect. It makes the whole book/essay easier.

[*] Break big projects down into small, discrete chunks. As I am writing a book, I create a separate document for each chapter, as I am writing them. Its only later when I have gotten to the end that these chapters are combined into a single file. Why? The same reason it feels easier to swim seven sets of ten laps, than to swim a mile. Breaking it up into pieces makes it seem more achievable. The other benefit in writing? It creates a sense that each piece must stand on its own.

[*] Embrace what the strategist and theorist John Boyd called the draw-down period. Take a break right before you start. To think, to reflect, to doubt.

[*] On being a writer: All the days of his life he should be reading as faithfully as his partaking of food; reading, watching, listening. John Fante

[*] Dont get caught up with pesky details. When I am writing a draft, I try not to be concerned with exact dates, facts or figures. If I remember that a study conducted by INSERT UNIVERSITY found that XX% of businesses fail in the first FIVE/SIX? months, thats what I write (exactly like that). If I am writing that on June XX, 19XX Ronald Reagan gave his famous Tear Down This Wall speech in Berlin in front of XX,XXX people, thats how its going to look. Momentum is the most important thing in writing, so Ill fill the details in later. I just need to get the sentences down first. “Get through a draft as quickly as possible.” is how Joshua Wolf Shenk put it.

[*] Raymond Chandler had a trick of using small pieces of paper so he would never be afraid to start over. Also with only 12-15 lines per page, it forced economy of thought and actionwhich is why his stuff is so readable.

[*] In The Artists Way, Julia Cameron reminds us that our morning pages and our journaling dont count as writing. Just as walking doesnt count as exercise, this is just priming the pumpits a meditative experience. Make sure you treat it as such.

[*] Steven Pressfield said that he used to save each one of his manuscripts on a disk that hed keep in the glovebox of his car. Robert Greene told me he sometimes puts a copy of his manuscript in the trunk of his car just in case. I bought a fireproof gun safe and keep my stuff in therejust in case.

[*] My editor Niki Papadopoulos at Penguin: Its not what a book is. Its what a book does.

[*] While you are writing, read things totally unrelated to what youre writing. Youll be amazed at the totally unexpected connections youll make or strange things youll discover. As Shelby Foote put it in an interview with The Paris Review: I cant begin to tell you the things I discovered while I was looking for something else.

[*] Writing requires what Cal Newport calls deep workperiods of long, uninterrupted focus and creativity. If you dont give yourself enough of this time, your work suffers. He recommends recording your deep work time each dayso you actually know if youre budgeting properly.

[*] Software does not make you a better writer. Fuck Evernote. Fuck Scrivner. You dont need to get fancy. If classics were created with quill and ink, youll probably be fine with a Word Document. Or a blank piece of paper. Dont let technology distract you. As Joyce Carol Oates put it in an interview, Every writer has written by hand until relatively recent times. Writing is a consequence of thinking, planning, dreaming this is the process that results in writing, rather than the way in which the writing is recorded.

[*] Talk about the ideas in the work everywhere. Talk about the work itself nowhere. Dont be the person who tweets Im working on my novel. Be too busy writing for that. Helen Simpson has Faire et se taire from Flaubert on a Post-it near her desk, which she translates as Shut up and get on with it.

[*] Why cant you talk about the work? Its not because someone might steal it. Its because the validation you get on social media has a perverse effect. Youll less likely to put in the hard work to complete something that youve already been patted (or patted yourself) on the back for.

[*] When you find yourself stuck with writers block, pick up the phone and call someone smart and talk to them about whatever the specific area youre stuck with is. Not that youre stuck, but about the topic. By the time you put your phone down, youll have plenty to write. (As Seth Godin put it, nobody gets talkers block.)

[*] Keep a commonplace book with anecdotes, stories and quotes you can always usefrom inspiration to directly using in your writing. And these can be anything. H.L. Mencken for example, would methodically fill a notebook with incidents, recording scraps of dialogue and slang, columns from the New York Sun.

[*] As you write down quotes and observations in your commonplace book, make sure to do it by hand. As Raymond Chandler wrote, when you have to use your energy to put words down, you are more apt to make them count.

[*] Elizabeth Gilbert has a good trick for cutting: As you go along, Ask yourself if this sentence, paragraph, or chapter truly furthers the narrative. If not, chuck it. And as Stephen King famously put it, kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribblers heart, kill your darlings.

[*] Strenuous exercise everyday. For me, and for a lot of other writers, its running. Novelist Don DeLillo told The Paris Review how after writing for four hours, he goes running to shake off one world and enter another. Joyce Carol Oates, in her ode to running, said that the twin activities of running and writing keep the writer reasonably sane and with the hope, however illusory and temporary, of control.

[*] Ask yourself these four questions from George Orwell: What am I trying to say? What words will express it? What image or idiom will make it clearer? Is this image fresh enough to have an effect? Then finish with these final two questions: Could I put it more shortly? Have I said anything that is avoidably ugly?

[*] As a writer you need to make use of everything that happens around you and use it as material. Make use of Seinfelds question: Im never not working on material. Every second of my existence, I am thinking, Can I do something with that?

[*] Airplanes with no wifi are a great place to write and even better for editing. Because there is nowhere to go and nothing else to do.

[*] Print and put a couple of important quotes up on the wall to help guide you (either generally, or for a specific project). Heres a quote from a scholar describing why Ciceros speeches were so effective which I put on my wall while I was writing my first book. At his best [Cicero] offered a sustained interest, a constant variety, a consummate blend of humour and pathos, of narrative and argument, of description and declamation; while every part is subordinated to the purpose of the whole, and combines, despite its intricacy of detail, to form a dramatic and coherent unit. (emphasis mine)

[*] Focus on what youre saying, worry less about how. As William March wrote in The Bad Seed, A great novelist with something to say has no concern with style or oddity of presentation.

[*] A little trick I came up with. After every day of work, I save my manuscript as a new file (for example: EgoIsTheEnemy2-26.docx) which is saved on my computer and in Dropbox (before Dropbox, I just emailed it to myself). This way I keep a running record of the evolution of book. It comforts me that I can always go back if I mess something up or if I have to turn back around.

[*] Famous ad-man David Ogilvy put it bluntly: Use short words, short sentences and short paragraphs.

[*] Envision who you are writing this for. Like really picture them. Dont go off in a cave and do this solely for yourself. As Kurt Vonnegut put it in his interview with The Paris Review: …every successful creative person creates with an audience of one in mind. Thats the secret of artistic unity. Anybody can achieve it, if he or she will make something with only one person in mind.

[*] Do not chase exotic locations to do some writing. Budd Schulbergs novel The Disenchanted about his time with F. Scott Fitzgerald expresses the dangers well: It was a time everyone was pressing wonderful houses on us. I have a perfectly marvelous house for you to write in, theyd say. Of course no one needs marvelous houses to write in. I still knew that much. All you needed was one room. But somehow the next house always beckoned.”

[*] True enough, though John Fante said that when you get stuck writing, hit the road.

[*] Commitments (at the micro-level) are important too. An article a week? An article a month? A book a year? A script every six weeks? Pick something, but commit to itpublicly or contractually. Quantity produces quality, as Ray Bradbury put it.

[*] Dont ever write anything you dont like yourself and if you do like it, dont take anyones advice about changing it. They just dont know. Raymond Chandler

[*] Neil Strauss and Tucker Max gave me another helpful iteration of that idea (which I later learned is from Neil Gaiman): When someone tells you something is wrong with your writing, theyre usually right. When they tell you how to fix it, theyre almost always wrong.

[*] Ogilvy had another good rule: Never use jargon words like reconceptualize, demassification, attitudinally, judgmentally. They are hallmarks of a pretentious ass.

[*] Print out the work and edit it by hand as often as possible. It gives you the readers point of view.

[*] Hemingway advised fellow writer Thomas Wolfe to break off work when you ‘are going good.’Then you can rest easily and on the next day easily resume. Brian Koppelman (Rounders, Billions) has referred to this as stopping on wet edge. It staves off the despair the next day.

[*] Keep the momentum: Never stop when you are stuck. You may not be able to solve the problem, but turn aside and write something else. Do not stop altogether. Jeanette Winterson

That taps me out for now. But every time I read I compile a few more notecards. Ill update you when Ive got another round to share.

In the meantime, stop reading stuff on the internet and get back to writing!

But if you have a second…share your own tips below.

Read more: http://thoughtcatalog.com/

[jeroldlockettus]

How to Fail Like a Pro (Ep. 370)

Inventor James Dyson built 5,127 prototypes before he succeeded in revolutionizing the vacuum cleaner. (Photo: Bruno Vincent/Getty)

The road to success is paved with failure, so you might as well learn to do it right. (Ep. 5 of the “How to Be Creative” series.)

Listen and subscribe to our podcast at Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or elsewhere. Below is a transcript of the episode, edited for readability. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

*      *      *

In our “How to Be Creative” series, we’ve talked to artists, scientists, inventors, and others about their creative process; about having good ideas and, even more important, how to execute those ideas. Today, we’ll hear about a part of the creative process that everyone can relate to — even if you don’t think of yourself as a “creative person.” This is something we all do, probably more than we’d like to admit; it’s something that almost no one enjoys; but it’s an inevitable, and absolutely essential, component of any success. I’m going to let you figure out what it is. Don’t worry, it won’t take long. Let’s start back in the late 1980’s. A young physicist named Saul Perlmutter, at the University of California-Berkeley, was looking around for a good research project.

Saul PERLMUTTER: And at that time I was lucky enough to come across the possibility that we could go back and make a measurement that people had wanted to do ever since the times of Einstein and Hubble, which was the measurement of how much the universe has been slowing down in its expansion over its lifetime.

Ever since Einstein theorized it, and Edwin Hubble observed it, everyone knew the universe was expanding. But another thing everyone knew was that all the matter in the universe — all the galaxies and nebulae and stars and planets and moons and comets and asteroids — all the stuff in the universe has gravitational attraction. So physicists assumed that, eventually, that gravitational attraction would slow down the expansion of the universe. For a physicist, understanding this dynamic was itself an attraction.

PERLMUTTER: If you could measure how much it was slowing, it would tell you a couple really amazing things. Like, first of all, you could find out: is it slowing enough so someday it could come to a halt and then collapse? And this was just before the millennium, so we thought we could walk around with those signs saying “The universe is coming to an end.” But if we found out that it wasn’t, then we would have shown that the universe will last forever. And also we would have shown that we live in an infinite universe. It just seemed like, whatever we found would be a great story, and we’d love to know the answer.

Stephen DUBNER: I have to say, I think the latter headline is much more exciting, personally — not just because of infinity and because long-lasting but it’s optimistic, yes?

PERLMUTTER: Yeah, I think that’s right. You start getting a little personally invested in our universe even though we’re talking about billions of years from now. We sort of would like it to go on, you know.

So you can see why it’d be valuable to measure the rate of the universe’s expansion. But conducting this sort of measurement — even for an astrophysicist — is, well, it’s hard. Saul Perlmutter had an idea. It involved measuring the light coming off of supernovas. But they had to be a particular kind of supernova. And they had to be very far away.

PERLMUTTER: We needed to find these very distant ones because we want to look way back in history. And the further away you look in astronomy, the further back in time you’re getting to see, because it’s taking light that time to travel to you from those very, very distant locations. We needed to look some, three, four, five billion years back in time for us to be able to see the slowing effects that we thought we were trying to track.

Given the specificity of what they needed, and the overall degree of difficulty, Perlmutter know the project would take some time.

PERLMUTTER: We wrote the original proposals saying that we did not expect to be able to find the 30-some-odd supernovae that we would need to make those measurements in anything less than three years. And we thought this was going to be like a long three-year project.

Perlmutter and his team built a tool for this project: a new kind of high-resolution, wide-field digital camera that could be attached to the big telescopes you find in observatories. Now all they had to do was get some time on one of those big observatory telescopes.

PERLMUTTER: Telescope time on these biggest telescopes in the world is really precious.

One observatory, in Australia, was open to a deal.

PERLMUTTER: And we traded the use of that camera for 12-and-a-half nights of telescope time. And so you’re doing everything you can to try to find the time that you’ll need to make the measurements you want. In those 12-and-a-half nights, we got two-and-half nights of good weather.

Two-and-a-half nights of useful telescope time, over three years. Remember, they needed to find “30-some-odd” supernovas to make their measurements. So how many did they find?

PERLMUTTER: At the end of three years, we had not yet found a single supernova.

So, picture that. You started with a quest, a creative scientific idea. Drawing on all the knowledge you’ve amassed over time, and all the knowledge amassed by earlier generations, you formulate a plan of attack. You write the grant proposals; you get the grant. You invent a special tool to facilitate your plan, and use that tool as leverage to gain access to an even more important tool. You’ve done everything possible, and you’ve done everything right. But you know what? You still failed.

PERLMUTTER: At the end of three years, we had not yet found a single supernova.

The failure of Perlmutter’s team was compounded by the fact that there was another team of physicists out there, working on the same problem, using the same technique.

PERLMUTTER: Which meant that we were going to the same telescopes and using the same instruments, and so we passed each other in the airports, you know, going back and forth.

The rivalry was not all that friendly.

PERLMUTTER: It was highly secretive between each other in general. I’d say the competition with each other was a big deal but it’s nothing like the competition with the ways in which the universe is trying to give you a hard time.

“A hard time” meaning instruments breaking; the night sky being cloudy.

PERLMUTTER: It was so hard to get these whole sequence of observations to work in a given semester that had to all run like clockwork. And if anything went wrong, the whole thing would fall apart.

The overall challenge was so difficult, the chance of failure so strong, that Perlmutter’s team and the rival team, led by the astrophysicist Brian Schmidt, would in fact help each other out.

PERLMUTTER: So there were several occasions where our sequence was about to fall apart and the other team would help. So one time we took some observations for that team and similarly there was one time where the other team traded night with us at a telescope so that we could keep our time sequence working.

Years of effort; years of difficulty and uncertainty; years of failure. But in the end, a breakthrough: Perlmutter’s team found the supernovas they were looking for; they were able to get enough observations to take their measurements; and those measurements led them to a surprising result: the expansion of the universe was not slowing down; in fact, it was speeding up. Saul Perlmutter’s team wrote up its findings and, in 2011, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics — which they shared, by the way, with the other team. The lesson for Perlmutter in all this?

PERLMUTTER: One thing that’s really interesting that it’s important for people to hear sometimes is that a really tough, challenging problem is worth spending a lot of time on, and that you can be learning a lot while you’re trying to get there.

In other words: failure is an inevitable component of success. So in order to bring your creative project to a happy place, you’d better learn to handle failure well — or even better, as Perlmutter suggests, handle it productively. After all, failure provides data: this doesn’t work, that didn’t work, that didn’t work. Great! Now you can cross all those off the list. So what does work?

*      *      *

This is not the first time we’ve discussed failure on this program. Episode No. 169, from 2014, was called “Failure Is Your Friend.” Episode No. 42, back in 2011, was called “The Upside of Quitting,” and it looked at failure as a signal that it might be time to just move on. But that calculus is very, very tricky: what if you quit too soon? What if all your failures are an unavoidable desert you need to trek through in order to make it to the promised land? In today’s show, we look at the relationship between failure and creativity.

Dean SIMONTON: The number one thing in my view is that people who don’t understand creativity, who are looking at it from the outside, don’t really appreciate how much you have to fail.

Dean Simonton is a University of California psychologist who’s spent decades studying creative genius.

SIMONTON: How many revisions this has to go through. How many masterpieces you put out there, and nobody even buys a copy. Maybe your mom does, whatever. But the failure rate is just horrendous, even for the creative geniuses.

Which genius does Simonton pick as the most successful hitmaker of all time?

SIMONTON: That’s Mozart. And he’s about 60 to 70 percent success rate. Well, you turn it upside down, and that’s a 30 to 40 percent failure rate.

On the other hand, consider Toni Basil. Or Nena. Or the Baha Men. Who? Yes, exactly. Toni Basil brought the world “Mickey.” Nena gave us “99 Luftballons” The Baha Men? How could you forget “Who Let the Dogs Out”?

The Baha Men, Nena, and Toni Basil were some of the biggest one-hit wonders in modern history. Which puts their failure rates a lot higher than Mozart’s. But what happens when you do succeed? Success can raise expectations to a level that’s crippling. The novelist Jennifer Egan had been writing for a couple decades when she had a breakout hit with A Visit From the Goon Squad — which produced, among other things, a Pulitzer Prize. And the book after that?

Jennifer EGAN: I sort of finally got into my new book and at first I was actually having a great time with it. It was really going well, I felt. And I was excited. And then things started to feel rockier and I really started to have serious doubts about whether I could actually pull it off at all. And then, I have to say, I kind of flipped out. I plunged into a state of despair over my work. And I really thought maybe my career was over, that maybe I was kind of ruined by all of this.

DUBNER: Was the problem expectation, then? Was that the barrier?

EGAN: I think the problem was that I actually was struggling with my book because every book is a struggle, especially if you’re pushing yourself. And at a certain point I started thinking about how I would be perceived if the book sucked. And it’s never good to be looking at yourself from the outside in. It’s very difficult to engage creatively when when you know, mean and horrible commentary is flowing through one’s mind. In retrospect, I thought, I was really an abusive boss. I was a boss who was telling her employee, namely me, that I was worthless. And it’s really hard to work in those conditions.

Nico MUHLY: I’m enormously self-critical. I begin and end each day with a litany of things that I consider failures and shortcomings.

Nico Muhly is a composer, the youngest ever to get a commission from the Metropolitan Opera.

MUHLY: Back in the day, it was a combination of self-flagellation and complete emotional neutrality. So, it was like I hated it, but I didn’t care. I didn’t feel anything, like I made this huge opera and I thought it was really good. But literally the sense of achievement was akin to like a successful morning of errands or like I went to the dry cleaner and bought dog food.

That began to change when Muhly started on a new medication.

MUHLY: I had a really dark like mental-health journey involving the wrong medication which I assumed wasn’t having a bearing on my artistic output, which of course it was. But the big change in the last three years is that I’m finally able to see some pieces as the end of the sentence of that conversation. So, it’s not, “I could do better next time.” It’s not, “I can’t believe I didn’t do better this last time.” And the difference is insane, to have written pieces now where I’m not in a state of constant self-flagellation. I think the first piece I wrote in my new and improved version was this mass called Spiral Mass. I can hear it and enjoy it and think that that was, you know, better than three minutes of silence.

It’s a fairly obvious fact that outsiders often overlook when they think about a creative lifestyle, and how cool it must be. In most cases, you are both creator and critic, boss and employee. Since many people who have a boss do not like their boss, it might seem incredibly attractive to be your own. But do you really want to be your own boss? Do you have the discipline to keep your projects on track? Do you have the temperament to drive yourself? Do you have the requisite paranoia?

John HODGMAN: I am a person for whom being creative is terrifying.

John Hodgman has done a lot of creative work over the years, most of it somewhere on the humor spectrum.

HODGMAN: It is the most rewarding thing that I can do. But it is a constant struggle with a very clear feeling that I am out of gas every day, every day. And that I will not be able to support myself or my family, because I have now finally run out of ideas, for sure, this time, I mean it. I started writing jokes for the Internet morphed into writing humor for books, morphed into doing T.V. on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, morphed into doing some ads for Apple Computer that gave me some acting opportunities, and all of these, I just sort of jumped from job to job very happily and very luckily, in no small part because it allowed everything to feel a little bit like a hobby. And at no point was I ever putting all of my eggs, say, into writing books, because my fear was, if I run out of gas on that, then I’m done.

If I lose the ability to write a book — which sounds irrational, but it is a true fear that I have — in fact, today I have it — then I can always fall back on the podcast, or I can always fall back on going out and touring my imitation stand-up comedy, or I can always try to get more work as an actor. It’s not even a fear. It is a certainty that I’m done, that I have no further ideas, and trick my brain into providing ideas again, because they’re in there. I’m 47 years old and I’ve been doing this — this and only this, whatever this is — now for 21 years.

DUBNER: And that’s not enough of a track record to persuade yourself that there will be 21 more?

HODGMAN: I figured out, sort of rationally, that I have enough data to support the suggestion that I will be able to continue. But even though I understand it rationally, in a deep part of me, I am certain it is done.

Don HAHN: I was lucky early in my life to have some successes in my 30s with Roger Rabbit and Lion King and Beauty and the Beast.

Don Hahn is a Hollywood producer.

HAHN: And 15 or 20 years after that, you start second-guessing yourself. And start saying, “Have I lost what I had back then?” Then you lose the process because then you don’t start. You just don’t start because you’re afraid that somebody is going to say, “Well, Don was really great back when he was 30 years old, but boy has he lost it,” you know? Those are really hard times to get over because they’re a crisis of confidence.

So how do you quiet those voices of disapproval — voices that are often imagined, either your own or someone else’s?

EGAN: It took a while. It was like a year and a half of that.

Jennifer Egan, remember, was stuck on her post-Pulitzer novel. Her solution was just to keep plowing through.

EGAN: I kept working through it because one thing I really know is that, you know, you can work through anything. I think we we think we are more fragile as artists than we really are. One thing that kind of helped me get through it psychologically was that I finally thought, winning a Pulitzer Prize shouldn’t ruin anyone. I mean, if I really can’t write another good book because of winning that, I was done.

HODGMAN: The only reason I’m terrified now is because I’m not actively working on it today, but when I get down into it line-by-line, something clicks, something comes together.

John Hodgman also finds the only solution for fearing the work is doing the work.

HODGMAN: It also helps to be in the shower. I remember back in early 2009 I was invited to do some comedy at the Radio and Television Correspondents Awards Dinner, which is sort of the junior-league White House Correspondents Dinner. The tradition was, the comedian would do comedy and the president would be there and say some words as well. This was a stunning invitation for me to receive. I had only been on The Daily Show for a couple of years. And of course, I had to say yes, even though I had no idea what sort of comedy I could do, on that stage, for then-newly-inaugurated President Barack Obama, whom I liked, but also who had no track record as a president to even make jokes about. And I really was frozen for a long time as I tried to think up “jokes,” to tell.

And then I was in the shower and I remembered, just sort of talking out loud to myself, I remembered that on a different radio show — Wait Wait, Don’t Tell Me — Peter Sagal had asked Barack Obama, who was a guest on the show at the time when he was a Senator, “Is it true that you saw Leonard Nimoy in the streets of Chicago, and did you flash him the Vulcan salute?” And Barack Obama confirmed that this was true. And I remembered that Barack Obama had been making jokes regarding dilithium crystals and Jor-El, the parent of Kal-El, who of course is better known as Clark Kent/Superman. And I’m like, “Oh, right. There’s a reason I like this guy. He’s a nerd. Yeah. Or is he a nerd? Or is it all an act?”

And I realized in that moment in the shower what my preoccupation was — what I wanted to know was, are you really a nerd, or are you faking it? Which, I realized in that moment, was sort of the question that everyone on all political sides were asking about Barack Obama. Are you for real? Of course, we remember a lot of people who did not like Barack Obama asking him if he was a real U.S. citizen, asking him if he wasn’t secretly a Muslim, or an alien, or whatever it was. We forget, there were a lot of people on the left-leaning wing of the spectrum who didn’t trust that he was a real liberal, and there was so much about him that was unknown. And for me, I had a genuine question to ask, “Are you really a nerd?,” that could serve as a metaphor for asking, “Who are you, and what kind of leap of faith are we taking with you?”

Hearing Hodgman describe this you may be thinking: wait a minute; you were asked to do comedy; is this nerd thing funny?

HODGMAN What’s more important than funny, when you’re creating comedy, is: what are you genuinely curious about? What are you genuinely feeling? Even the most absurd fake facts that I wrote for The Daily Show had to resonate around an ounce of truth. So tuning into that — what am I thinking about — knowing what you know, or knowing what’s going on in the back of your head, is kind of the hardest part. And once you get that out of there, suddenly for me, it all floods out from there.

*      *      *

Failure is such an obvious component of any success that it probably keeps a lot of people from trying things they should. That’s a shame. Teresa Amabile is a social psychologist at the Harvard Business School who studies creativity, especially in work settings.

AMABILE: If people have a growth mindset, they believe, “I can always get smarter, I can always get better at something, and I’m not going to get better unless I try things that are hard, and sometimes that means I’m going to fail at something, but who cares?”

But a lot of people do care. For a lot of people, failure hurts; and it hurts to have other people witness your failures. So who are these people who don’t care? Where does that come from?

AMABILE: Partly that’s a trait. But it’s something that can be changed. Parents can talk to their kids about it and we can certainly do that as as managers of ourselves. “Look, I know that this is a stretch for me. I’ve been asked to take on this project but I’m going to go for it. And if it doesn’t work out that well, I will have learned how I can do better next time.”

James DYSON: I had to build 5,127 prototypes. So 5,126 failures.

James Dyson is the British engineer best known for having revolutionized the vacuum cleaner.

DYSON: And just when you’ve had enough, and you think you’re never going to get the answer, that’s the point where you must try even harder. Because that’s the point where everybody else gave up. So you must go through that pain barrier in order to succeed. I would say that for an engineer or someone developing technology, it’s really a life of failure. And you have to get used to that. Because your successes are pretty rare. But it’s not an unhappy life, I mean failure isn’t something that makes you unhappy. It makes you even more curious as to how to overcome the problem. And in order to fail, you have to experiment and experimenting is exciting. Even if it doesn’t work. In fact it’s almost slightly disappointing when it does work. Because you’ve then done it and that’s the end of that one, and then you’ve got to get on to something else.

RESNICK: So as you’re building things, you have one idea in mind.

Mitch Resnick runs a project called Lifelong Kindergarten at the M.I.T. Media Lab.

RESNICK: But then it works a little differently than you expect and that gives you a new idea and you start making adjustments. And I do think the most creative and the most enjoyable experiences come when you’re involved in that process at the intersection of making and playing, where you’re constantly experimenting, iterating, trying new things, refining. And I think it’s true that in today’s society oftentimes kids aren’t given enough opportunities for tinkering. They’re given fully made things that they just use, or they’re given instructions exactly how to do things. So I really do think we need to give them the tools, materials, and support where they can tinker, experiment, and iterate constantly trying new things. That’s the way they’re going to best develop as creative thinkers and be ready to thrive in a society that’s going to demand and require creative thinking more than ever before.

There’s one word that Resnick does not use to describe this iterative process: failure. He feels the negative connotation is just too strong.

RESNICK: Clearly things go wrong, things go unexpectedly all of the time, but you should become accustomed that. Don’t see it as a problem but see it as something of an opportunity. It’s really important to create environments where kids feel safe to take the risks, because when things do go wrong, if someone says, “Hey, you know, that’s no good, why’d you ever try that?,” they won’t take risks again. So we have to make sure to create environments where kids are encouraged and feel safe to take risks, to have things go wrong but then be able to recover and to take it in new directions.

The ability to recognize when something’s failing, or at least foundering, is important in the creative arts as well. Maybe you’ve had success doing one thing for a long time. But tastes change; technologies change. And the thing you’ve been doing — even if you keep improving — it’s just not connecting the same way.

Conan O’BRIEN: Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Conan O’Brien is a history nerd; maybe he’ll become a U.S. ambassador someday.

O’BRIEN: I’d like to know what it pays. I’d like to know what kind of ambassadorial residence I would have. Am I really free to commit crimes in those countries?

In the meantime, he’s still a late-night TV talk-show host, which he’s been doing for more than a quarter of a century. But recently he made a change.

O’BRIEN: The story there is I realized a couple of years ago that I’m killing time at half an hour. When I first got the gig it was, you fill an hour because it’s this precious hour that needs to be filled and it’s all how you do it creatively. But over time you’re starting to say “and my next guest, and my next guest” And that felt artificial to me. And it felt like it didn’t fit this new world we’re in.

And so he reformatted his show, which is called Conan. It’s now 30 minutes instead of 60. He also did away with the stream of celebrity guests that march through most talk shows. Instead, he’s focusing on the comic pieces that have driven his massive online numbers.

O’BRIEN: We have YouTube videos that have had 70 million views. But no one’s watching the whole show. Other than my parents, no one is watching the show from 11 to 12. But there’s a whole generation of people that don’t watch anything like that.

There is another creative medium where taste changes so aggressively, so ethereally, that trying to outthink your audience, or the market, may drive you mad.

Jorinde VOIGT: I’m Jorinde Voigt. I’m an artist.

Jorinde Voigt, who lives in Berlin, has become quite successful: her paintings sell for a lot of money and they’re in the permanent collections of the Pompidou in Paris, the British Museum in London, the Museum of Modern Art in New York. But she doesn’t like this kind of success as a measuring stick.

VOIGT: It’s not about failing or winning, it’s just about being and doing. Failure is always part of it. To accept it and take it as part of a reason to do something new.

There’s one form of failure that Voigt celebrates …

VOIGT: Of course you could say a picture fails if it’s not sold. For a gallery it might be like that, for me not. I’m always happy when I get a picture back. Really! I mean really, because I’m — it’s also weird to sell the works all the time.

DUBNER: Yeah, is that right?

VOIGT: Yeah. It’s not made for selling. You made it because you want to know something. Yeah? And it’s ready, and you know something, then you don’t need it anymore and you are able to sell it.

I like Jorinde Voigt’s attitude: the failure of a painting to sell is actually a success because she gets to have the painting back. How you think about a failure, or what other people might consider a failure, says a lot about who you are as a creative, and as a person. Also as a brother.

Mark DUPLASS: This is Mark Duplass. I am a filmmaker.

Duplass and his brother Jay Duplass have been working together, extraordinarily closely, since they were kids. They wrote a book about it, called Like Brothers.

DUPLASS: Yeah, I mean the biggest failure we had in our career was making this feature film Vince Del Rio for about $70,000, that turned out terribly and we never even finished it. And then a couple of weeks later we turned around and we spent $3 making a short film in our kitchen and that was our first movie that went to Sundance. So we very quickly realized that being professional and making a movie for a lot of money does not mean it’s going to be a good movie. But staying near and dear to your anxieties, your fallibilities, your vulnerabilities, staying close to that conversation you had at 2:00 a.m. with your sibling or loved one or friend, where you were giggling with shame or crying about something that was so personal to you you think no one could understand it. As soon as you go into that stuff, I think that’s where you win.

The Duplass brothers over the years built an unusual and unusually robust career, making films and TV shows together. They wrote and directed together — sometimes inseparably. In the beginning, Mark did a lot more acting but eventually Jay was doing a lot too — most notably in Transparent. They made the films Cyrus; Jeff, Who Lives at Home, and they made the H.B.O. series Togetherness. That show was all-consuming:

DUPLASS: Yeah, we wrote, produced, and directed every episode of that series like idiots. And the main issue is that we had completely lost our desire to hang out with each other because we were essentially hanging out together 13 hours a day working. And we weren’t spending any time together as brothers and friends. And we always promised ourselves we would keep an eye on that, on that work and personal balance.

They’d had two successful seasons with H.B.O.

DUPLASS: And we were in the middle of writing season 3.

But there was a shakeup at H.B.O.

DUPLASS: And we got the news that we were going to be canceled, and neither of us wanted to be the first one to speak and we were both scared about how relieved we were as opposed to actually emotionally crushed and didn’t want to admit it to each other. And once we did it felt amazing. We realized that there was no way we were going to cancel Togetherness ourselves. There was no way, the situation was too good. The money was too good. The creative opportunity was too good. People were loving the show. We were going to go and drive that thing until it killed us. We had to actually have it taken away from us and that began the new phase of of Jay’s and my relationship.

So for the first time in forever, Mark and Jay Duplass weren’t really a team anymore. It was a sort of failure.

DUPLASS: And we both felt a little bad about it and both felt a little excited about it. And it’s been really healthy for us in the long run. I mean, I’ll be honest with you, there was a lot of tears and a lot of heartbreak on both of our parts. And there are times when I wake up and I miss so desperately the way it felt when Jay and I were 23 and 27 just moving through the world as one being. But we’re also aware that that was of a time and a place, when our life was a unilateral thing, and we can’t really get that back and we have to redefine what that thing is now for us.

DUBNER: Does the collaboration feel a little bit like a phantom limb that, like, “Whoa I’m used to this working this way.” And I guess another way of asking the same question is does it feel like something that you want or need to get back to or that you’re kind of happily or resignedly or just organically getting to a new phase and you’re willing to take it as it comes?

DUPLASS: It doesn’t feel dissimilar to a really amicable breakup, and I would liken it to a couple that breaks up because one wants to have kids and the other one doesn’t. They still very clearly love each other but they have different views of the future and they would miss each other desperately but also know that it doesn’t work right now if they were to do that. Right. And so that’s very similar to the way Jay and I are. There’s actually kind of a working rhythm that we have developed into where my brain is this very firework-y, loud, explosive place where ideas tend to come whether I want them or not.

DUBNER: You’re the barfer, correct?

DUPLASS: Yes I’m the barfer, and they’re noisy and they are at times quite annoying to Jay because he can’t get the space to incubate his really well-crafted, quiet, thoughtful, soulful ideas. At the same time, Jay can be really annoying to me because I’m ready to go. My fireworks are going off and he’s holding me back because he’s like trying to do his thing and so we had to get honest with each other and be like, “Uh-oh, we might be creatively bad for each other right now. And this is just one rhythm and one phase we’re in.”

And God knows what’s going to happen a year or two from now. We might listen to this podcast and be like, “Whoa, you were totally wrong you just needed six months away and then you’ll be fine.” But you know, he’d be the first one to admit he feels like an albatross to my rhythms at certain times. It’s really good for us. But the phantom limb thing is I would say very, very accurate. I can go make a project on my own. I can literally hear what Jay is saying to me without him saying it because I know what he would say. And I can get a lot of his feedback.

DUBNER: So who needs him?

DUPLASS: And — yeah who needs him, yeah? And then the other element is that we have been able to take some of the lessons we’ve learned as collaborators and collaborate with other people and make those collaborations pretty successful too. Because I will say this to anyone out there, if there is anyone in the world who is interested in collaborating with Jay Duplass, there is no greater, more self-aware, sweeter, more generous collaborator in the f—ing universe.

DUBNER: Would he say the same about you roughly? Slightly different adjectives maybe.

DUPLASS: I think he would use different adjectives. I think what he would say — I know what he would say. He would say that there is no more generous collaborator than Mark. There’s no one who is willing to drown himself while holding you above water so you can achieve your glory than Mark, which is you know something else I’m working on in therapy too but, you know. That’s a whole other podcast.

Thanks to Mark Duplass and everyone else who’s shared their ideas, their fears, their advice in this “How to Be Creative” series. If you want to hear some of the full interviews from the series, check out Stitcher Premium — you’ll find my full conversations with Jennifer Egan, Conan O’Brien, and Wynton Marsalis.

*      *      *

Freakonomics Radio is produced by Stitcher and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Matt Frassica, with help from Stephanie Tam and Harry Huggins. Our staff also includes Alison Craiglow, Greg Rippin, Zack Lapinski, and Corinne Wallace. We had help this week from Andi Kristins. Our theme song is “Mr. Fortune,” by the Hitchhikers; all the other music was composed by Luis Guerra. You can subscribe to Freakonomics Radio on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Here’s where you can learn more about the people and ideas in this episode:

SOURCES

Teresa Amabile, psychologist and professor emerita at the Harvard Business School.

Mark Duplass, film director, film producer, and actor.

James Dyson, inventor, industrial design engineer and founder of the Dyson company.

Jennifer Egan, novelist and journalist.

Don Hahn, filmmaker.

John Hodgman, humorist.

Nico Muhly, composer.

Conan O’Brien, television host, comedian, and writer.

Saul Perlmutter, astrophysicist at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Mitch Resnick, leader of the Lifelong Kindergarten research group at the M.I.T. Media Lab.

Dean Simonton, professor emeritus of psychology at University of California, Davis.

Jorinde Voigt, artist.

RESOURCES

Creativity In Context by Teresa Amabile (Routledge 1996).

A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan (Knopf 2010).

EXTRA

“How to Be Creative,” Freakonomics Radio (2018).

“Where Does Creativity Come From (and Why Do Schools Kill It Off)?,” Freakonomics Radio (2018).

“Where Do Good Ideas Come From?,” Freakonomics Radio (2019).

“A Good Idea Is Not Good Enough,” Freakonomics Radio (2019).

The post How to Fail Like a Pro (Ep. 370) appeared first on Freakonomics.

from Dental Care Tips http://freakonomics.com/podcast/creativity-5/

[damnthatnoise]

The Future Is Now | An Interview With Zilla Rocca

Philadelphia is rich with hip-hop history going back to Spoonie-G, DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince, The Square Roots (The Roots) on through Freeway, Beanie Sigel, Dice Raw, Lushlife and of course the Wrecking Crew’s own double threat Zilla Rocca. With more than 15+ years deep in the game Rocca is approaching the release of his latest and in this writer's humble opinion most impressive album yet via legendary music journalist Jeff Weiss’s POW Recordings with, Future Former Rapper set to drop in the coming months. 

I reached out to the Wrecking Crew, Career Crook, Grift Company Producer/Lyricist to talk about his career, parenthood, how his approach has changed and all sorts of shit in between. Over the course of the conversation I digested the new album and the more I listened to it the more one thing became clear to me...Zilla Rocca is one of the NICEST FUCKING MC’s THIS CULTURE CURRENTLY HAS AROUND! The man has not only studied the greats but he holds tight in his essence the core of what made many of them great to begin with and when you get your hands on this album you will see what I mean.

For now, grab a drink, roll a blunt, and read my interview with Zilla Rocca!

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Damn That Noise:  "Future Former Rapper" you said has taken around 4yrs to create, and in that time you dropped 3 Career Crooks projects, your joint EP with Curly Castro as Grift Company and your "Hard Boiled EP" not to mention becoming a father and husband, and writing for Passion of The Weiss. What was it about this specific album that you really wanted to take your time on, and where do you think you've matured and refined yourself as an artist and man since "No Vacation for Murderers" dropped?

Zilla Rocca:  That’s a great question. All of heady stuff takes me 1-4 years to make for some reason. This album went through a lot of incarnations even though the songs are pretty direct and the conceptual stuff is digestible. When I started making it I decided to record maybe 4-5 songs, play them live, see how people reacted, and then go back and re-record them after doing field research. I’ve never done that before and it was great! Plus as an emcee it helps you catch pockets with the rhymes in a live setting that you might now catch in the booth. 

I think after No Vacation specially I wanted to make more straight forward stuff. I feel like my Shadowboxers projects are ahead of their time and take a minute to digest. Once real life stuff intersected then I really had no time just to experiment and meander with songs. I wanted to get my point across on different types of production on some Danny Brown and Vince Staples steez since they challenge people while being bare bones rappers. The bulk of the album was done before my son was born and his first year I had to pause with all music stuff and just be a Dad and husband. So that year off helped me recharge to do new stuff like Career Crooks and Grift Company.

DTN: I had written about your really growing into an MC who belongs alongside the caliber of folks who came from the DITC era, and you had replied in a tweet saying that you had really been studying those guys for a while recently. What is it about Finesse, Diamnond D, Big L, OC and the rest of the Digging in The Crates crew that inspires your asthetic? You sound like you and not a knock-off, but the essence is there which is hard to do some times....how do you incorporate those inspirations into the process?

Zilla Rocca:  Just being mentioned anywhere near DITC is a blessing so thank you. I feel like DITC is still an all time great secret in rap. I love Wu and Mobb Deep and all the other big groups and cliques but everyone knows them. How many people who love Fat Joe know DITC? I think those guys are incredibly consistent first off which I admire. AG is still great! Showbiz still gets busy. As does OC and everyone else. And their sound has always fluctuated between dark and cinematic but also shiny and bouncy. They could do clubby joints for the car and do headphone cypher riding on the train beats. I’ve been making beats for 15 years and definitely studied their approaches. I told Small Pro that “Good Luck with That” is his Buckwild album. And as a rapper I love Finesse and Diamond D for being so in pocket and dead on with their lines. There’s a beauty to their simplicity on the mic. It’s hard to be simple and dope. Plus Big L was the opposite using 5 syllable rhyme schemes while talking fly street shit. His rhyme structures are like cheat codes. I’m not a die-hard Big L dude but I’ve listened to him for 23 years and his shit is incredibly memorable and catchy. That’s why I did “Lamont Coleman” off Hard Boiled - I had those Big L lines in my head for a week and thought they’d be a great hook. And the beat had that eerie Word...Life/Jewelz feel. So it was the ultimate genuflect to the whole unit.

DTN: We seem sometimes to be in a Renaissance of hip-hop with artists like Armand Hammer's Elucid and billy woods both releasing such prolific group material not to mention solo material, as well as the likes of Milo, Mike Eagle, JPEGMAFIA, PremRock, Karma Kids, Ka, Marci, Westside Gunn and the Griselda fam continuously coming with heat and of course yourself and the countless others dropping really noteworthy albums....do you think we're hitting a creative stride right now that we were worried we might not see again 8-10yrs ago? 

Zilla Rocca:  I think we’re just in a media consumption phase as a culture right now. Binge watching shows. Staying glued to the news all day on twitter and cable. In the past only a handful of rappers were wild prolific like Doom, Kool Keith, Lil B, Lil Wayne etc and it made them stand out. Nowadays people hear your project and say “that’s hot but when’s the next one dropping?” Because people are just consuming endless shit now more regularly in that fashion. I’ve always worked on music and did it damn near every single day from 2005-2012 so once I saw people respond more to lots of music these days, I was game to feed them. I’ve always been diligent with lots of songs on deck so it’s nothing for me to try it this way for now. It’s been highly successful I’ll tell you that!

DTN: As someone who is an artist, and as someone who also writes about music where do you think music journalism specifically online has gone wrong over the last 5-10 years? Blogs at one time seemed like the spot where new artist could be broken and discovered but now most places seem no different than the old pay to play models of old. What do you think killed this?

Zilla Rocca:  With music journalism, it’s just things are always changing. Blogs were a reaction to music magazines becoming corporatized and shitty. Then blogs became corporatized and shitty and streaming took off so they got wiped out. Plus youtube has now been around for over 10 years and people just digest and learn shit from video so sitting and reading something is now a different option for music writing or criticism, whereas in the ‘80s through ‘00s it was almost the exclusive means to know about music

DTN: What about this album was different for you in the approach to bringing it all together? How did you decide on the group of producers you gathered and why them for THIS album?

Zilla Rocca:  I really thought this album would be my last. I was about to be a dad and I didn’t think I’d ever have time to work on music again. So I thought about making an album to capture every era from my career. I started in the early 2000’s doing more experimental stuff. Then did boom nap East coast underground music. Then some artsy indie rock sampling stuff. So this album was about showing off all of that.

So choosing the producers to handle that was the key. Steel Tipped Dove is the bridge between the more loop driven east coast beats on here, from Small Pro, Ray West, Disco Vietnam, and Messiah Musik, to the EDM/trap type beats by Starkey and my man William J Sullivan. I probably started the album with his beats and Messiah Musik’s first then chose beats around theirs. I feel like Danny Brown has been really good at that mixture so I patterned it after Old specifically without doing 2 sides to an album that breaks up the style of production. DTN: Jay is 48, Em is 46, El & Killer Mike are 43, do you see yourself actually becoming a Future Former Rapper at some point in time or do you think that it's just going to transition into a different path of creative writing for you, but keep the same essence?

Zilla Rocca:  There will be a day when I hang it up. Maybe it’ll be when I’m 40? I’ll be 36 tomorrow but I feel energized now with people still discovering me. But once my son gets old enough to play sports I know my time will be even more limited. And I’ll be ok with that. Like I said I really didn’t think I’d be doing music right now a few years ago. But great writers get better with age so you shouldn’t stop if you can help it.

DTN: What inspires 36yr old you now to keep moving forward and creating? If you could sit 18yr old you down and give him advice about what to expect and how to move what would it be?

Zilla Rocca:  I just really do what I like now and I don’t care about what happens after that. If no press gets behind it or If it sells 7 copies I’m ok with that. I’m not as thirsty as I was when I was 18. It’s really just about the work. Since I’ve approached music that way things have gotten easier and I’ve found new fans. I would tell my 18-year-old sell the line I said on “Career Crooks Theme”: nothing comes your way when you chase, best be patient.

DTN: What do you hope Future Former Rapper expresses to the people who take time to sit down and listen to it? What do you want the listeners to walk away with from the experience?

Zilla Rocca:  Phonte described his new album in a way that applies to mine: it’s for people who have other shit to do. I was really conscious about the overall running time and number of songs. Selfishly I just want people to hear it and think I’m a great rapper. If they can relate to some of the topics on a personal level, that’s a win too. It’s really autobiographical and very specific to my life growing up loving rap in South Philly in the 80’s and 90’s. But there’s a song about my wife and son and how they became the first thing I loved more than music. So there’s a lot to digest but I wanted to get in and get out like a bank robbery.

DTN: You have Serengeti, Armand Hammer, Curly Castro and another I know I'm missing on the album as guests... What was it about those voices on this album this time around? I know Curly is a regular voice but why Geti and AH...?

Zilla Rocca:  Castro is the most important voice. I deliberately put him on multiple songs because I wanted the album to reflect my life. He’s my best friend and we talk every single day so his voice should be heavily involved. With Armand Hammer, I’ve been working with Elucid since like 2009. It’s great watching people catch up to him now. Billy woods is one of my favorite rap friends ever so even if he didn’t rhyme on the album I would’ve just called him and recorded him talking cause he’s brilliant and hilarious. With Serengeti, I’ve just been a big fan of dude for years and we’ve been twitter homies forever with lots of mutual friends but we’d never worked together. So I wanted him in the mix because he’s very adventurous and bold while being original. Plus he doesn’t do a lot of features so I feel like it’s special getting him on my album.

DTN:  Why is storytelling such an important element in your writing? Even with your writing being more straightforward you've always focused on telling stories, and your favorite MCs have all been great storyteller... What is it about bring able to tell a story and not just say fly shit that has no real depth that calls to you?

Zilla Rocca:  I think storytelling is hugely important. To me, you’re not a great rapper if you can’t tell a convincing story. I like writing in that form because I’m an avid lifelong reader too. I also like structure and coloring within the lines sometimes and stories make you do that. There’s a beginning, middle, and end. Maybe a cool plot twist. I’ve written a fantasy type of story songs, sports stories, crime stories, relationship stories, and personal stories and I appreciate it when they connect with people. “Time Ran Out” off my new EP “Hard Boiled” is a breakup story and it’s one of the most mentioned favorites which shocked me. I wasn’t sure anyone would like it but I felt like it would break up all the random rhyming and fly talk like you said!

DTN: Favorite rap magazines growing up and why? 

Zilla Rocca:  Obviously The Source. I also loved Blaze Magazine and then later Scratch Magazine. It was a real elation seeing the newest issues on newsstands cause we had to go hunt and search for hip hop back then. It was a secret.

DTN: You've dropped shit on your own label, you partnered with Urbnet for the Career Crooks albums with Smallpro, and now you've decided to sign with Jeff Weiss' newly formed POW Recordings for your latest solo. Why at this stage of your career when you're capable of navigating it all on your own would you sign with a new label, and what is it about Jeff that had you decide to work with him for this release (other than the obvious fact he's a clear champion of great hip-hop of all kinds)?

Zilla Rocca:  I only deal with labels that love the music. I like partnering with people who are excited about the project first and foremost. I just left Toronto where URBnet is located and it’s such a clean and diverse city. Made me realize they really had to love Career Crooks to sign us cause our stuff is gritty and edgy being from Philly, which was not my experience of Toronto at all! With Jeff, we’ve known each other 13 years. I knew of POW Recordings when it was just a thought. His plan was to only sign up and coming cats to help them get shine, not Old grizzled vets like me from the Blog Rap Era on the verge of turning 40 years old. So when he heard the album, he fell in love with it and wanted to be the person who put it out. And I just went with it. It was effortless.

DTN: Thank you for your time my dude, do you want to leave the people with any final thoughts/words?

Zilla Rocca: Check my upcoming album. Check the singles we’ve dropped. Check my latest solo EP “Hard Boiled”, the latest Career Crooks remix album “Thieving as Long as I’m Breathing”, and the Grift Company EP from me and Curly Castro! Psshhew...ok that was a lot. Now, to sign off, peace to everyone who checks my stuff whether you’ve been down since 2008 or 2018. Just you reading this is built off my work ethic and stubborn refusal to quit rapping because I never had a major co-sign or a big manager or was down with a crew that blew up. I just keep doing it year after year so thank you for listening and reading!

Future Former Rapper by Zilla Rocca