I just simply wouldn’t do anything that I wasn’t terribly in charge of. I don’t let anything go. I worry about the font on the back of the DVD.
-Ricky Gervais in an interview with The A.V. Club from 2007
You know it’s true: Ricky Gervais is the director/writer/star of two hit television shows, The Office and Extras.
His quote reminds me of Tonedeff, a hip hop artist who released his debut album, Archetype, in 2005. Most of the album was produced by himself with guest appearances confined to one song. Included was a self-edited DVD of extras and a self-designed cover/booklet.
Also, I’ve read that David Chase, the creator of The Sopranos writes the story arcs for each season and finalizes the scripts for every episode.
In my opinion, these guys consistently put out high quality creative media, but usually with a longer delay between project releases (since they have to stretch themselves across several jobs and take their time with the creative process).
Television shows, movies, record albums, etc. that are essentially created by committees might release things at a quicker pace, but the voice/tone and feel isn’t nearly as consistent cause so many people are throwing their input into the creative pot.
I promise not to clog up this website with pithy quotes of the day from various clever people. The market for that is already way flooded.
-Stephen J. Dubner
Excuse me while I go hang my head in shame.
Design can be art. Design can be aesthetics. Design is so simple, that’s why it is so complicated.
-Paul Rand
A little while ago, I re-designed this website because I wanted to add a few things and make a lot of tiny layout changes: tons small tweaks to margins, fonts and colors that will probably be appreciated only by myself. It’s also the first design of mine to be done completely away from home, in Los Angeles, produced solely on my MacBook (utilizing every single pixel of the 13” screen).
We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
-Carl Sagan
(The picture of “that pale blue dot” that he is talking about can be seen here.)
It’s quite humbling, but also a bit depressing at the same time. One of the reasons I was actually interested in Astronomy in school was because it really forced you to think about things in a different way. Among other things, it made me realize at a young age that a lot of what mattered on Earth was of little importance in the Universe. Everyone is so concerned about trivial things. So many people are selfish and cruel for reasons that won’t matter a few years later. We are such a miniscule part of the grand scheme of things. We all live and die in such a tiny space – there’s just no room for the bad things.
“There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.”
-W. Somerset Maugham
Whenever I go to a bookstore, I always try to thumb through at least one book about writing (usually books that are specific to writing novels). I hope to actually write something worth reading one day. Or write anything at all, really.