Someway or another, I worked my way to this state of mind where I must constantly be productive. It's not necessarily a bad thing; I've been getting tons of work done. But occasionally I find myself doing something I think is not productive, and instead of calling it "fun" I call it "wasting time."
I'm not sure how I got to this point, but I don't believe I can ever get out. Instead of watching trivial one-shot sitcoms, I find myself making "progress" on serial shows that I'm watching in order. Is that anymore productive? To me it is. Considering it objectively, it's fairly obvious no television is productive (unless, of course, you're watching that new History Channel special on how Moses was an alien). Continue reading →
Some are quick to dismiss computer games, saying they're making America's children more violent, less motivated, and less creative. While the "violent" issue is perhaps the hardest to argue (not because of the validity of the arguments to the affirmative, but because of the stubbornness of the opposition), I think the creativity aspect of games is often completely overlooked. Continue reading →
Below is a short story I wrote based on a dream, as part of a personal challenge of mine to emulate the style of H. P. Lovecraft. I hope it tingles your spine. Just a little bit. Enjoy!
I have one hope in writing out this terrible event: that somehow the fears within me it inspired will remove themselves from my mind, and be transferred upon this paper which my eyes, under no condition, will ever behold again.
It was a December night when the winds outside carried fearsome velocity and spread themselves through the walls of my house themselves so as to chill the interior of my dwelling to a terribly uncomfortable cold. And thus I lay in my bed, huddled in desperation of warmth, not able to sleep. My inability to fall into slumber was not only because of the cold; the wind itself was filled with such personality that it seemed only to wrack my house on the grounds of some personal vendetta, and I feared what terrors this imagined life inside the currents could bring. Continue reading →
Stuck in a rut? We all are, at some point. But freelancers, workers laid off, and straight-up incompetents can find solace knowing that online, there are a wealth of oddjobs to be found. Whatever you're good at, you can make money with it, if you're looking in the right places. Continue reading →
I posted the other day about where ideas come from, and part of my conclusion was that ideas come from experience and consumption. The things you consume and experience influence the way you think, and depending on what you see and hear (and smell, touch, and taste I suppose), you feel certain "inspiration" later on.
A lot of this inspiration is untraceable. You don't know where it came from. You get an idea and can't explain its origin. Chances are it spawned from an event long ago that took some detour through your neurons and showed up quite unexpected. But some ideas come obviously from a source that has you thinking about something. In an effort to track my own ideas, here's a list of my sources of inspiration. Continue reading →
This is a terrible question to ask anyone, and almost no artist or author or creative person of any kind will have a coherent, true answer (although I attempt, below). However, Rod Serling provides a pretty confident response:
Ideas are probably in the air, like little tiny items of ozone. That's the easiest thing on Earth, to come up with an idea.
But despite Rod Serling's limitless charisma and confidence, his answer is no better than anyone else's. Ideas don't really come from any particular place, they're not ozone, they don't just pop up. Continue reading →
I've spent the last two days working on this new project of mine, called Four Organs Editor. It is a very simple, not-multi-purpose tool to format HTML and CSS within the browser. It uses a bit of tricky jQuery and some sneaky Javascript to get the job done, and does it very efficiently and quickly, without a whole lot of extra code.
Four Organs will lead to a bunch of new projects; in the past two days just as many projects utilizing the fundamentals behind Four Organs have sprung up, and I'll be glad to have a hand in both of them.
Of course, there are already editors that do this (JSFiddle is perhaps my favorite), but Four Organs is designed to be much simpler. First of all, it's open source. Second, it's bare-bones, stripped down, and provides only the functions required by definition for an HTML and CSS editor.
It's designed to be completely independent of the page your editing — so long as you stay within the <body> tags.
So about 60% of the 404s I've been getting on stevencampbell.org have come from WordPress blogs or theme aggregate sites linking to an old theme I used to host at stevencampbell.org.
Well, good news for all of those people and photographers in need of an easy way to present their photos! I've updated PhotoWP to work with WordPress 3, got it ready for release, and uploaded it to this site again. Awesome!
Writers of science fiction have always been intrigued by breaking the one well known rule of physics — you simply cannot go faster than the speed of light. CERN has been able to move particles up to 99.99% the speed of light, but they can't break the barrier, which seems to be written into the underlying fabric of our universe.
Wikipedia informs me that particles can't move faster than the speed of light simply because the energy required to do so is infinite. But one German theoretical physicist had an idea so crazy it just might work. Continue reading →
Every nerd and most of America knows about Star Wars. But only the hardcore sci-fi fans will differentiate the franchise from other supposed "science fiction" classics like 2001: A Space Odyssey and Star Trek. Why is this? All three take place in space, in a futuristic society (despite Star Wars taking place in the "past"). They seem, on the surface, to be in the same genre. But Star Wars is completely different from the other two I mentioned. Why? As always, Wikipedia has the answer:
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with the impact of imagined innovations in science or technology, often in a futuristic setting.
Star Wars, as classified by the sci-fi community and Wikipedia, is a space opera. In other words, Star Wars is set in space, it's not really about space. The impact of the technology or science introduced in the series doesn't really play a large part. Continue reading →
