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Update to “Fortnightly"

About the link appropriately titled “Doom" Folks, I noticed that for some reason the Fun Facts link to a New York Times article on the history and ubiquity of the video game “Doom” showed up blank on the email. So here’s a link that should work: Management regrets

Fortnightly

Many thanks to everyone who responded to the poll at the end of Better living through compliments. I truly appreciate you taking time from your day to help me with this crazy little newsletter. And the results of that poll were hilariously inconclusive. The votes were evenly split between 4

Read to each other

When Mari had her knee replaced, it came with a lot of benefits: * She was able to walk pain-free. * We became closer as a couple. * Our sleep habits improved. * We started reading a lot more books. All this from a new knee? Well not directly. What happened was, as part

Better living through compliments

First, look at this. This is Troy Hawke, the alter ego of a standup comedian from England who created the fictional “Greeter’s Guild.” He’s one of my heroes. He stands in public places and greets people, like this: If you are an introvert like myself, you may be

Can Your Heart Stand the Shocking Facts?

(The shocking facts about this newsletter and its “value statement”?) When I started reading about running a newsletter, I kept encountering the term “value statement.” Simply put, it’s “why?” Why should someone read this newsletter? What’s in it for them? Here’s some sample value statements from newsletters

Mermaids & Airplanes & Ideas & Done.

💡Ahoy! I’m still somewhere on the Atlantic, so here’s a repeat view of one of my fav issues of the newsletter. A friend of mine once asked me what it was like to be a writer, and I said, “A constant state of grief and disappointment.” That was

Commit to the bit

💡Part V (and the finale) of The Edinburgh Cycle: five unlikely and useful things about creativity I learned from performing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe It was well after midnight. Danny O’Hare and I stood alone on a makeshift stage in a vaulted stone cellar in Edinburgh’s Old

Embrace the Good Bad idea

💡Part IV of The Edinburgh Cycle: five unlikely and useful things about creativity I learned from performing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe The Edinburgh Festival Fringe. The world’s largest arts festival. Where such talents as Stephen Fry, Emma Thompson, Craig Ferguson, and Robin Williams (?!) started their careers. A quarter

Find (and nurture) your shoulder devils

💡Part III of The Edinburgh Cycle: five unlikely and useful things about creativity I learned from performing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe Making anything is frightening. If you make something, it’s going to be looked at. And people might say mean things about the thing you made. And about

Gather your restrictions

💡Part II of The Edinburgh Cycle: five unlikely and useful things about creativity and project management I learned from performing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe So last week I talked about how I use (manipulate?) the Dunning-Kruger effect to motivate myself at the beginning of a project, and to then

Finessing Dunning Kruger

Part I of The Edinburgh Cycle: five unlikely and useful things about creativity and project management I learned from performing at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe So I decided to produce a cabaret show. Which I had never done before. And I decided to sing lounge music in it. Which I

Refer this newsletter, get a goodie

💡SPECIAL BULLETIN I am happy to be writing this newsletter for such an interesting group of people such as yourself. I would like to be writing for an even larger number of interesting people. And I figure interesting people like you know interesting people like you who aren't

The Edinburgh Cycle

When you look at your own life, oh my gosh, so much stuff has happened. Almost every day, you experience something that you carry with you forever. Sometimes it's a boon, sometimes it's a limp. And these incidents often occur in clusters, bunched together by time

Conquer fear of failure with experiments

Well, it's late January, and the New Year's Resolutions are starting to decay like Julian Glover at the end of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Resolutions can be fragile. They are often big changes, with only one "win" state. Everything else is "

Why did the robo-taxi cross the road?

On a recent trip to San Francisco, my brother and I took a Waymo driverless taxi to get to and from a restaurant. I found the experience smooth, seamless...and oddly puzzling. So let's talk about robot cars and whether they truly are automated harbingers of a coming

Like denial, but creative

I’m locked in a beef with Sir Ridley Scott, director of such classics as Gladiator, Thelma and Louise, and Alien. Particularly Alien. He, of course, has no idea we are in conflict. Nor should he care. But aware or not, he and I have a fundamental disagreement. About the

The (quarter) year in review

Happy New Year to you. So glad you made it. So far, I've launched over a dozen of these newsletters into your inbox. About a calendar quarter's worth, on a (mostly) regular cadence. And now, as 2024 fades in the rearview mirror, is the last quarter

A spark from a Flame

So much of life seems to creep up on you. Even the stuff you know is coming seems to suddenly jump out of the bushes. You startle, and think "Where did that come from?" In this jenga-tower world stacked of interrobang-flavored blocks of Jell-O, it's rare

Animation escalation

I've mentioned before how sound can add depth and heft to an animation. And I just realized that sometimes the animation then needs to respond to the sound. When they work together, it gets so tasty... I'll show you the example that showed me, after the

Critiques that actually help. Here's how.

I have given critiques, I have received critiques. On all sorts of stuff: PowerPoint decks, project docs, industrial videos, scripts for two-act plays, stand-up performances. Even this newsletter. And I've found some simple principles for giving and receiving critiques. These can produce more positive change, with a significant

"Dreadful, dreadful, DREADFUL."

Words of creative encouragement from the Godfather of Goth

What crushing traffic cones taught me about problem-solving

So one sunny weekend, I drove down to an empty parking lot at the Emerald Downs Racetrack, and did terrible things to many, many traffic cones. It's not that I have anything in particular against traffic cones. I just (literally) ran into a non-intuitive principle for solving problems.

When is a joke more than a joke?

When it's a Dad Joke. Quick note: I just switched newsletter services. There should be no interruption to your service – same great taste, even fewer calories, etc. But if you do have any problems with this issue, please reply to this email and let me know! I will

The joys of "pleasantly baffled"

Does word count count? When I first got the idea to write this newsletter, I was hoping I could write on the main idea for at least 300 words, maybe up to 600. I seem to be averaging well over 1,000-1,300 words. Is that too much? Not enough?

That time I asked ChatGPT to rewrite one of my scripts

Open the pod bay doors, please Once upon a time, I needed to rewrite a short script into three different voices. So, just to see what would happen, I tossed my text and a short prompt for each version at ChatGPT. And it quickly turned out three versions that reminded