An update on the Minigrooves project

June 4, 2012
by Riccardo Mori
Et Cetera

On March 15 I officially started my Minigrooves literary project. Describing the nature of the project is simple, and I’ll reiterate by quoting from the foreword I wrote at the time: Minigrooves are portable words, which, like songs, you can carry with you everywhere. They’re miniatures you can read when you have five minutes, when you are between things, places, times. The idea came to me last summer, while I was checking some illustrations made by a young designer. I thought that, despite having never heard about that guy, I could at once realise his talent and what style(s) were influencing him. Similarly, with a musician, I can listen to some of his/her songs and get an immediate feeling. In both cases I can see whether they’re good or not at what they do, and more importantly I can immediately feel if we’re on the same wavelength, so to speak. Then I thought: what is it I’m good at? Well, writing of course. So I realised I could offer something similar. Instead of illustrations or songs, I could publish short, self-contained stories.

An important realisation related to creativity

You should understand that before my interest in technology and before my job as a translator, I am a writer at heart. I started quite early, writing poetry and lyrics for local bands of amateurs when I was 15. And my early writings were in English already, which is not my first language. Prose-wise, my most intense creative period has been the 1990s. During that decade I wrote a short novel, a long one, and dozens of short stories (in English and Italian). Apart from some self-published works, a lot of what I’ve written over the years has remained unpublished. And not for lack of trying. But what can someone with no contacts (or the wrong contacts) in the publishing world do? I sent my stories to well-known and lesser-known publishing houses. I trusted acquaintances with a small selection of my works because they told me they knew someone who could help. I went as far as self-publishing booklets and manually distributing them in the university I was studying at the time. I also did the occasional reading, accompanied by some jazz musician friends. I accomplished very little. The vast majority of people who read my things told me they enjoyed them very much, said that I have talent. I mention this in case some of you who are reading this now think my failure at becoming a renowned writer lies in the poor quality of my work.

Anyway, I experienced a serious creative block around 2002–2003. I’ve been recovering from this block roughly since 2010, when I started writing poetry again. As for short stories, my Minigrooves represent my most serious creative accomplishment in the last fifteen years, but most of all they represent the end of my creative drought. Non-creative people cannot fully grasp the impact an eight-year long drought has on a creative person. Imagine being involved in a horrendous car crash and having to stay immobilised in a cast in a hospital bed for months. Imagine a period of eight years where your creative mind can’t ‘move’ and feels similarly immobilised. It’s awful and it really, really eats at your self-esteem. Then imagine my joy when I felt the wheels moving again at the start of this humble literary project.

The important creative realisation I’m referring to is that — believe it or not — my creativity has returned through discipline. I could have started Minigrooves by opening the website and publishing a new story whenever I wanted, whenever inspiration came knocking at my door. I could have chosen a more leisurely pace. But I have the feeling that, if I did that, now I would be here publishing my second or third story. Instead, by self-imposing such a strict schedule, i.e. a new story each Monday and Thursday, I have noticed how the urgency has stimulated the flow of new ideas for new stories. Over the years, I’ve been thinking that schedules and deadlines were something exclusively work-related, that creativity should be ‘free of boundaries’. I was so wrong.

The feedback

I’ll be sincere with you: the feedback for Minigrooves has been disheartening so far. I don’t have traffic statistics for the tumblelog where the project resides, but 5 Tumblr followers and 22 Twitter followers, combined with the almost complete silence and lack of commentary, all this speaks volumes to me.

It’s not that I was so naïve as to think that it was enough to start the project, spread the word a bit on Twitter and keep people updated every Monday and Thursday to be successful, but I honestly believed my stories were the right format and varied enough to interest different kinds of people, and I also honestly believed people turned out to be a little more supporting. I’m not asking you to do all the hard advertising work for me, but seriously, even a retweet is too much work today? Too much to ask? Even the literal word of mouth (“Hey, you should check the work of this guy I know through Internet, it’s cool”) is too much? I do the same with creatives of various fields (type designers, illustrators, musicians, app developers, etc.) I know or discover — is it really so outrageous of me to ask for the same treatment? Is a writer some sort of second-class creative? Is it because I’m not making you pay for reading (so that free content = cheap quality for you)?

Six weeks ago, I wrote a little reflection about this on Twitter:

I believe that some of my short stories at Minigrooves are rather head-scratching in some places. Receiving next to no feedback can mean: 

  1. My readers are smart, intelligent fellows who don’t need explanations or suggestions. — Which is cool, and means I have an ideal audience.
  2. My readers simply accept the stories as they are, no matter how much they ‘get’ out of them. — Which is okay, but not really rewarding.
  3. My readers would like to ask questions, but then life goes on and they forget and oh well. — Which is understandable but a bit sad.
  4. Almost no one reads my short stories and/or doesn’t care to send any kind of feedback. — Which is disheartening, considering the work.

Let me say it again: I may have closed comments on this site for various reasons, but Minigrooves is a completely different thing. If you read my stories, even if you haven’t read all of them, I’d like a word of feedback, I’d like to know what you enjoyed, if you were taken by surprise by some endings, and so on. You can write me at the email address you find in the footer, or just throw me a tweet at my account @morrick or at the project’s account, @minigrooves. I don’t write these stories only for myself. I write them with an audience in mind. That’s why I really value your feedback — it helps to keep me going.

And I’ll leave it at that, regarding feedback.

The future of Minigrooves

The project won’t go on indefinitely, of course. I am tempted to follow a TV series’ format here. That is, ‘airing’ the stories in ‘seasons’, then publishing the stories as a book (I was thinking of ebook as the only format, publishing my stories on the Kindle store and Apple’s iBookstore, but if I can also strike some deal for publishing them on paper as well, that’d be grand). The books will have some ‘extras’ (just like movies and TV shows’ DVDs/Blu-Ray discs), like bonus stories, author’s commentary and notes, etc. This way, even those who have followed the stories during their ‘airing’ period will find something of value by purchasing the book.

I’ve decided that each ‘season’ will consist of 42 stories, so at the moment we’ve just passed the middle of Season 1. I think it’s a solid publishing plan, but I’m open to suggestions. 

Finally, I wanted to thank all the people who are following the project, reading my stories, and spreading the word. You’re not many, but you’re the best!

It’s toasted.

May 29, 2012
by Riccardo Mori
Software

The mandatory foreword: I’m just reporting what happened to me and I don’t have the pretence to pass my anecdotal findings as data, so take this with the proverbial grain of salt. On a personal level, this experience has been rather interesting… and time-wasting.

I don’t burn CDs and DVDs with the same frequency I used to. My usage of optical media, however, is far from insignificant. I still burn discs for photo and video backups, to watch stuff on my big screen TV, and to pass files to older Macs. Along with the internal Matshita SuperDrive of my MacBook Pro, I also own an external USB LaCie DVD burner like this one I purchased a few years back when my main machine was still a PowerBook G4 12″ with a Combo Drive. 

In all my disc burning history, I very rarely experienced failures. If I had to venture an estimate, I’d say I’ve had to throw away, like, ten DVDs in more than 12 years. Well, I’ve thrown away ten DVD-RW and two DVD+R discs in the last week. 

My burning problems (no pun intended) roughly started at the end of last year, after upgrading to Lion. It’s been hard to pinpoint a precise cause, because different burning sessions have yielded different results. Is it Lion’s fault? Has my MacBook Pro’s internal SuperDrive started to fail? Has my external DVD burner started to fail as well? Is it the software used to burn discs? Or what?

At first I thought my MacBook Pro’s SuperDrive was failing. I’ve been using it rather often since I bought the Mac in mid-2009, and Apple’s internal SuperDrives are not known for their durability. What led me to believe it was the SuperDrive’s fault was its increased distaste for reading discs, both commercial DVDs (movies) and CDs/DVDs I burnt with that same drive two or three years ago. But after cleaning the SuperDrive’s lens with an appropriate cleaner kit, everything was back to normal. At least, for reading discs. Burning them was another matter.

These past days I needed to burn some DVDs, making a few redundant copies of my 2011 photo archive. So I opened a 10-pack of TDK branded DVD-RW discs and a 5‑pack of TDK branded DVD+R discs. I started with the latter pack. I’ve never had problems with TDK discs, or with the SuperDrive, or with Roxio Toast Titanium. I burnt the first DVD+R, everything seemed fine upon writing, but the disc failed the verification with an error reading a certain sector. Second attempt, with a DVD-RW disc, same hardware/software combination. Same error. Erase the disc, try again with the external drive. Same error. Erase the disc, try again using Disk Utility. Burning failed during writing.

As I was getting frustrated already by the whole business (which, on a good day, it would have taken me 5 minutes per disc), I went to Roxio’s website to check something, because I started suspecting some incompatibility between Toast 10 and Mac OS X Lion. It turns out I was right. If you upgraded to Toast 10 while you were using Snow Leopard and forgot to keep Toast updated, you may still be using an earlier version than 10.0.9. As this page on Roxio’s site informs, if you’re on Lion, either you upgrade to Toast 11, or you install version 10.0.9 for Toast 10. Earlier versions don’t work properly with Lion.

I went back to my copy of Toast 10 and, indeed, I was still using version 10.0.6. So I promptly updated to 10.0.9, attempted to burn the DVD-RW disc again, but it failed, both using the MacBook Pro’s internal SuperDrive and the external LaCie DVD burner. At this point I was starting to look at the discs themselves suspiciously, so instead of erasing the same DVD-RW disc as before, I used another from the 10-pack. No joy. I then tried a DVD+R from the 5‑pack. No joy. I tried a different brand, pulling out an old 2x DVD+RW Verbatim disc, but to no avail.

I was about to give up for good, blaming basically everything, but perhaps Lion especially, since all problems started — directly or indirectly — after the upgrade. I couldn’t do any other attempt with different hardware because none of my other Macs has an internal SuperDrive with DVD burning capabilities… Then I remembered that the PowerBook G4 17″ that has been recently donated to me does have such SuperDrive. So I installed my older copy of Toast 8 Titanium on the PowerBook, picked the same TDK branded DVD-RW disc I used before, and it was a success right from the start. I then burnt six more DVDs with the PowerBook G4 17″ internal SuperDrive, and everything went well without the slightest hiccup.

What to make of this messy situation? I don’t really know. As I said before, it’s hard to give clear-cut answers because I honestly didn’t find a constant point of failure. The overall impression I’m left with is that Toast 10 + Mac OS X Lion (10.7.4) make for a crappy combination, and Toast 8 + Mac OS X Leopard (10.5.8) on a PowerPC G4 look like the winning team. I guess that, as burning optical media becomes an art of the past, I’ll have to use hardware/software combinations of the past as well. As soon as I have some time (and blank DVDs to spare) I want to try different software solutions, like NTI Dragon Burn or Disco (which is free now), and report any interesting findings to make a proper comparison. In the meantime, feel free to write me and share your experiences, if you’ve been having more problems at burning DVDs since upgrading to Lion, the software you’re using, etc. Everything helps to clear matters in this regard.

It’s time to criticise the champ

May 25, 2012
by Riccardo Mori
Handpicked

Guy English’s blog is in a folder in my RSS feed reader called “SPWSWM”, that stands for “Smart People Who Should Write More”. His most recent piece — Three Things That Should Trouble Apple — really deserves your full attention. Guy shares my exact feelings when he writes:

I believe that many Apple observers have been too invested in picking off the low hanging fruit of obviously out-of-touch commentators, columnists, and analysts. Apple is winning. It’s fun to pick on the idiots, and we do tune in for the affirmation that engenders, but that’s not insight. It’s a tag team wedgie patrol. It takes a clever intellect to dismantle bullshit but, ultimately, it often just ends up with pantsing the dumb guy. Rather than doing that let’s aim to pants the A‑grade quarterback.

I agree with him on everything, especially regarding iTunes:

iTunes is dead. But it’s still the big play. Microsoft became trapped in the Windows legacy and now, it appears, that Apple is becoming trapped into the iTunes legacy. How is it possible to make a radical transformation, with regards to media management, on the majority of iOS devices without addressing the the train-wreck that is iTunes?

iCloud is a start. But it can’t yet carry all the water.

There are indications that iTunes as the hub is losing favour. As it should be. iTunes was a terrific app ten years ago, but today, it has absorbed too much functionality that there has to be a rethink. 

I’ve been criticising the bloated-ness of iTunes since version 8, more or less. I’ve been jokingly calling it ‘Apple’s very own MS Word’ for its progressive feature creep. I’ve often played armchair-designer with iTunes, asking myself how I would rethink it if I had the daunting task of redesigning it. The first obvious thing that comes to mind is splitting iTunes into different, smaller, sleeker applications, each taking care of major tasks like managing music, managing books/audiobooks and managing apps and iOS devices. Then I thought that maybe some people, despite iTunes’ shortcomings, still prefer having just one application running instead of three separate ones, but on the other hand iOS’s aesthetics are increasingly getting everyone used to this kind of separation. 

Or maybe Apple could maintain iTunes as a single application but remove a lot of visual clutter and make users feel it’s a lighter application. For instance, when it’s used just as a media player, iTunes’ interface could morph into a simpler one, showing only media-player-related features. 

Whatever the approach, it’s undeniable that iTunes is in bad need of a change.

On modern loneliness

May 25, 2012
by Riccardo Mori
Handpicked

Last month I forgot to link to Is Facebook Making Us Lonely? — a magnificent article by Stephen Marche published on The Atlantic. It is a long, but required reading, because it deals with a problem that’s getting increasingly serious: loneliness. The report’s summary says it all: Social media — from Facebook to Twitter — have made us more densely networked than ever. Yet for all this connectivity, new research suggests that we have never been lonelier (or more narcissistic)—and that this loneliness is making us mentally and physically ill. A report on what the epidemic of loneliness is doing to our souls and our society.

I particularly liked this bit:

To Cacioppo, Internet communication allows only ersatz intimacy. “Forming connections with pets or online friends or even God is a noble attempt by an obligatorily gregarious creature to satisfy a compelling need,” he writes. “But surrogates can never make up completely for the absence of the real thing.” The “real thing” being actual people, in the flesh. When I speak to Cacioppo, he is refreshingly clear on what he sees as Facebook’s effect on society. Yes, he allows, some research has suggested that the greater the number of Facebook friends a person has, the less lonely she is. But he argues that the impression this creates can be misleading. “For the most part,” he says, “people are bringing their old friends, and feelings of loneliness or connectedness, to Facebook.” The idea that a Web site could deliver a more friendly, interconnected world is bogus. The depth of one’s social network outside Facebook is what determines the depth of one’s social network within Facebook, not the other way around. Using social media doesn’t create new social networks; it just transfers established networks from one platform to another. For the most part, Facebook doesn’t destroy friendships—but it doesn’t create them, either. 

Take your time, but make sure you read the whole report.

The HAL Project enters Stage 3

May 16, 2012
by Riccardo Mori
Handpicked

HAL simulation

I’ve always followed The HAL Project & HAL 9000 Screensaver with great interest since the beginning, and have been running this screensaver on my most used Macs for a long time. Three years ago, developer Joe Mackenzie started work to improve the already great version 2.0 (Stage 2) by redrawing all the animations with maniacal accuracy, and also creating new ones, for what would become version 3.0 (Stage 3). It’s clear that a project of this kind would take some time, and I knew it was worth the wait.

Mackenzie explains:

The new HAL 9000 Screensaver (version 3.0) now features more detailed animations than ever before. Each has been redrawn (using an improved curve rendering technique) to optimise image quality. Custom made typefaces have been used to improve accuracy while multiple displays, wide aspect ratios, and all Windows and Mac OS X platforms are now fully supported. There are now also two versions to choose from; full screen animated displays or the animated console.

The previous version of the screensaver is still offered for free, while the new ‘advanced’ version costs $5. If you’re thinking “What? Five bucks for a screensaver?”, think again. Download the older, free version just to see what this is about, then imagine something so much improved. Think of it as a way to acknowledge the passion that went into this project. Of course, for Kubrick fans, this is a must-have.