#this started out as a doodle in my 20th century art history class. we were studying abstract art if that clears whatever this is up. | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

lostinfic · 4 years

Note

Self Indulgent prompts, huh? I love anything with artist Rose so something with that theme. I'm not picky about the Doctor- like my current obsession is Eight/Rose, but I'm perpetually in love with Nine/Rose and Ten/Rose too so whichever Doctor you're most comfortable with.

The Museum of Serendipity

Doctor x Rose, Wilf, male OC (Original Cat)

Rated E | 2300 words

Sorry this took longer than anticipated, I got sidetracked by research and 8th Doctor audio adventures ;)

I’m fulfilling your self-indulgent prompts

Of all the wonderful, celebrated museums in London, Rose’s favourite was an anarchic collection housed in a crooked Georgian house in Marylebone.

From ground floor to attic, over four storeys, shelves and frames lined the walls of every room, following a seemingly incoherent design. Part cabinet of curiosity and part celebration of beauty in all its forms, the collection was curated by an anonymous— and eccentric, Rose liked to imagine— philanthropist.

Its name, the Museum of Serendipity, summed up how the collection was put together. Or perhaps it indicated how this museum could be found: by sheer good luck, as it was not advertised anywhere. Rose herself had stumbled upon it by accident last September, when looking for a shelter from the rain. Quite a happy accident, since her art teacher had asked them to visit a gallery for their first assignment of the semester (she’d earned extra points for originality).

Despite few visitors, it remained open from morning to evening. More often than not, the elderly greeter slept in his rocking chair by the door, leaving Basil the cat in charge.

Its location near Regent’s Park, made it a perfect destination for a drawing session. On a beautiful spring day like today, Rose would walk along the paths of the park and draw the flora and fauna in her sketchbook. Then make her way towards the museum. Other days, after a long time indoors, she would enjoy the park’s fresh air and time to reflect on the latest collection piece she’d discovered.

Since her childhood, art had been a way for Rose to travel, around the globe and across time, a way to see the world through other people’s eyes and to share her own vision. A way to exist beyond the Powell Estate. The Museum of Serendipity transported her like nothing else.

Although she enjoyed the morning sun, she didn’t linger in Regent’s Park, too eager to get there.

The elderly greeter was listening to the radio in his small front office.

“Hello, Wilf!”

He jumped to his feet with an energy that belied his years.

“Ah, Rose, luv. Alright? How’s school?”

“Got another assignment to complete for art history class. By the way, mid-term break is coming up, if you fancy a holiday, I could cover your shifts here for a few days.”

He would be doing her a favour more than the other way around.

“I’ll keep that in mind,” he said. “We got a new piece came in.”

New pieces were simply added to the exhibition wherever a space was available. As they walked to the drawing room, Rose tried to know more about the museum.

“Who brought this new piece?”

“John did, just this morning.”

“John?”

“Yeah, John McConnell , the mailman,” Wilf said. “Here it is.”

On the mantel lay an artifact shaped like a metal glove without fingertips. Or a pan flute.

“Looks like something from the future,” she joked.

“Modern art, then,” Wilf said.

He left her to look at it a while longer. The pattern that covered it, both engraved and raised all at once, looked like scales. Rose pulled her sketchbook out of her messenger bag and drew it. Texture study.

Basil, the museum’s Abyssinian cat, greeted her, rubbing himself against her legs. She petted his long ears and ruddy coat. She followed Basil out of the room, and wandered the now familiar corridors and staircases. Her hand trailed along the faded floral wallpaper and oak paneling. The smell of candle wax and pine wood polish always hung in the air.

There was one painting in particular Rose always came back to, in the third floor library, just above a loveseat that once belonged to Marie Antoinette. Ahead of her, Basil jumped on the loveseat and looked at her expectantly.

Rose pulled up a chair to sit down, the museum was almost a second home now, she had no qualms moving furniture around.

With a dreamy sigh, she let her eyes roam the large canvas. It depicted a dozen people in elegant Edwardian clothing, visiting an art exhibition. She was transported back in times, it seemed. Back to la Belle Époque. Late 19th- early 20th century, in France. Among women in high-necked waist shirts, carrying white lace parasols and men wearing mustaches and straw boating hats. The era of Moulin Rouge and absinthe, of the first movie, of bicycles and Marie Curie, just to name a few. The era of Gustav Klimt, Toulouse-Lautrec, Van Gogh and Renoir, the artists whose work Rose had first fallen in love with. The painting itself blended elements of Art Nouveau and Impressionism (as she’d described in her second assignment).

But there was one character in particular that commanded her attention again and again. There, in the upper left corner. The painter had done this trick which makes it look like the subject’s eyes are on you wherever you stand in the room. Though unnerved at first, Rose now tried to master this technique. Countless time she’d drawn his thick, curly brown hair, the soft contours of his jaw, his blue eyes, the creases that bracketed his mouth. And that smile, a Mona Lisa smile, the hardest trait to capture.

His clothes also offered many details to work on: the sheen of his satin cravat, the velvet of his jacket, the pattern of his waistcoat.

At first, she only tried to capture his likeness in various mediums, but over time she tried to sketch his profile, his back. She depicted that gentleman in various poses and actions. He had taken a life of his own. What was he doing there that day? What was his relationship with the painter? Why was he looking at her like that?

Basil meowed.

“Alright, don’t be jealous. I’ll draw you first, you beautiful boy.”

“Thanks, it’s a new jumper. Do you like the colour?” said a man with a northern accent.

Rose started. He was leaning against the door, looking at her, with the smallest hint of a smile.

He picked up Basil and sat down on the loveseat, laying the cat on his legs crossed at the knees. Rose held back a quip about the similar size of their ears.

“Well, go on, then,” he said, indicating her sketchbook with his chin.

“Hold on, are you the director of the museum? Or the curator?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t think so.”

At a loss for a reply, Rose simply got to work.

If Basil wasn’t running away, then surely this man posed no threat. Just a lost, slightly odd item, like everything else in the Museum of Serendipity. Including herself.

His face offered such striking features to draw, that bold nose, those sharp cheekbones. The cropped hair revealed the shape of his skull and the collar of his sweater, a beautiful neck. A face for charcoal, she thought, to capture the lights and darks of him, in loose, almost intangible strokes. Charcoal and dry pastels, she amended, she had to recreate the infinite blue of his eyes.

They chatted about everything big and small: cats, galaxies, her doubts about art school and his hopes for the future of humanity.

Time flowed differently when she was creating. In that moment more than ever. A sort of appeasing, melodic hum filled her mind, and everything, but her subject, faded away.

When she traced his eyes, she was surprised to find in them a spark, as if he knew her.

She looked up at him, and he smiled. “Hello,” he said.

Before she could think of a good way to phrase her question, he stood up and looked at the sketch over her shoulder. He gave an appreciative nod.

“We need someone to do a painting of the museum,” he announced. “Are you free to do it?”

“A painting? Are you taking the piss?”

“I’m serious. Great big canvas. Like this one.” He pointed to her favourite painting of la Belle Époque.

“I’ll need money to buy supplies,” she said, to test his good faith.

“Of course.”

He grabbed a tin box in a nearby bookcase; it was full of cash. He handed her the stack of pound notes without counting. Almost as if he was ignorant of their value. “Will this do?”

Rose nodded dumbly. She resolved right away to only spend a reasonable sum.

“I’ll come by next Wednesday afternoon,” she said.

“Perfect. See you, then, Rose Tyler.”

She spent the next few days in a state of disbelief. Her mind constantly replayed her encounter with the blue-eyed man. Several times, she opened her sketchbook to look at his portrait. The fondness it aroused in her took her breath away. She found herself doodling both him and the gentleman in the painting, over and over.

She bought a load of art supplies, but kept the receipt in a secure place in case she needed a refund.

On Wednesday, she arrived at the museum with a knot in her stomach. Wilf greeted her, as usual, but he was wearing a smart new uniform.

A moment later, the blue-eyed man skipped down the stairs, two at a time, and welcomed her with a bright smile. He introduced himself as the Doctor, just the Doctor, and Rose went along with it— after all, it wasn’t the weirdest thing about him.

He’d set up an easel and a canvas in the third floor library. She barely paid attention to his directives, she was distracted by the number of visitors in the museum, more than she had ever seen.

“Is this a prank show thing or what?” she asked.

“Why would it be a prank show?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, you said it. Why a prank show?” he repeated.

“‘Cause to get that many actors and props, it’s got to be on telly.”

“That makes sense. Well done.”

“Thanks?”

“It’s not a tv show,” he said.

“But— why?”

“It’s the museum’s anniversary. We are interested in collecting unique pieces, and what’s more unique than Rose Tyler’s first commissioned artwork?”

“Maybe the last,” she mumbled.

“It won’t be,” he said, stating a fact rather than paying a compliment. “Coffee?”

The Doctor knew something she didn’t, and as irritating as it was, it incited her to stay and fulfill his request.

She laid a tarp on the floor below the easel, spread out her brushes and palette knives, picked the colours.

Basil, of course, wanted to be part of the painting. He lay down in the sunniest spot, on the window sill, looking ever so regal.

As she prepped the canvas, her brain ran ahead of her with ideas to best infuse her art with feelings this room evoked. Warm earth tones, old leather bound books, a thick Persian rug, but also glass cases to keep people away, artworks by undisclosed artists, mysteries all around. Inviting and distant all at once. Much like the Doctor.

She scanned the room for him. He stood in a corner of the library, surveying. As she traced his silhouette, she noticed the similarity, in his posture and smile, with the fascinating gentleman in the Belle Époque painting. She made a mental note to ask about that too.

Hours passed by, Wilf kept her comfortable with cups of tea, snacks, a stool, opening the window, closing the window.

Everyone had left. The sun had set. Only the Doctor and Basil remained in the room with her.

The artwork wasn’t finished, but it had everything she needed to continue another day. Yet, she didn’t leave. She didn’t want to. She stood there, wringing her paint-splattered hands waiting for something, anything, from the Doctor.

“I want to show you something,” he said. He took her hand and they both stood up on Marie Antoinette’s loveseat. “Look closely.”

Now inches from the Belle Époque painting, she saw it like she never had before. It shimmered and shifted. Like those 3D images you have to cross your eyes to see. She blinked. Looked closer. And drifted through the canvas.

Rose gripped the Doctor’s hand tighter. Behind them, there was no library, only a blue door. And in front of her, the painting had come to life. No— they weren’t in the painting, they were in Paris of the 1900s. Around her, people chatted in French, cigar smoke wafted to her nose, and through a window that wasn’t on the painting, she could see the brand new Eiffel tower.

The gentleman that had so fascinated her was there too. Thick hair, bright smile.

“Rose, we meet at last,” he said.

His voice sounded exactly like she’d imagined. She didn’t know until now that she’d imagined his voice.

“She’s all yours,” the Doctor said.

Rose didn’t let go of his hand.

“Don’t worry, I’ll be here to bring you back to your own timeline.”

He disappeared through the blue door.

The other man linked their arms together. A feeling of safety washed over her. He was a stranger and yet not at all. As if to reassure her further, an Abyssinian cat sauntered by.

“Is that Basil?” Rose asked.

“In a fashion. Cats have nine lives, as you know.”

“And you, Doctor, how many have you got?”

The Doctor smiled. “Ah, you figured it out, clever girl.”

That didn’t mean she didn’t have a ton of questions, but for now, she only wanted to soak up the magic of it all.

The Doctor showed her around the room. They mingled with the other visitors, admiring the artwork on the walls. Rose couldn’t stop grinning.

They stopped in front of a painting depicting another gallery, in another museum, in another era.

“Can we go through there too?” Rose ventured.

“Yes, but wouldn’t you like to see Paris first?”

“We can go out?”

“Of course. You know, my friend Claude has been pestering me about visiting his garden. Nice fellow, this Claude. Mind you, he’s a tad obsessed with water lilies.”

#ficandchips #Nine x Rose #Eight x Rose #artist!Rose #yes I'm still working on those #self indulgent prompts #lostinfic writes stuff #lotsofthinkythoughts

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douchebagbrainwaves · 5 years

Text

WHAT YOU KNOW

And so in starting a startup generally. The only way you're ever going to extract any value from it is to redefine the problem. They let their acquaintance drift, but only a few thousand are startups. The angel agrees to invest at a pre-money valuation of $1 million to a 20% chance of $10 million, while the percentages might end up looking like this, where your mind is free to roam, that it bumps into new ideas. You can mitigate this with subsidies at the bottom and taxes at the top, but unless taxes are high enough to discourage people from creating wealth, not by suing people. At least, that's the recipe for a lot of startups that end up going public didn't seem likely to at first. Though quite successful, it did not crush Apple. So Don't be evil. There was a friend they wanted to make more, but not random: I found my doodles changed after I started studying painting.

The word was first used for backers of Broadway plays, but now that the reaction is self-sustaining what drives it is the people. By breaking software development, Apple gets the opposite of what they intended: the version of an app currently available in the App Store approval process is broken. Enjoy it while it lasts, and get as much as a checkout clerk because he is a warlord who somehow holds her in thrall.1 Like a kid tasting whisky for the first time, realizing with shock that the players were deliberately bumping into one another, and techniques spread rapidly between them. Silicon Valley and other places. Don't go out of business, even if the audience doesn't understand all the details. They let their acquaintance drift, but only a little more extreme than other big companies because they can threaten a counter-suit.2 Want to try a frightening thought experiment?3 If you've truly made something good, you're doing well.

They'd face some challenges if they wanted me to introduce them to more investors. Then I asked what was the maximum percentage of the money they manage: about 2% a year in management fees, plus a percentage of the gains.4 The four causes: open source, which makes software free; the Web, which makes promotion free if you're good; and better languages, which make development a lot cheaper. We would at most have said that one could be a problem if customers feel pinched: you may even be false, in industrial democracies.5 Craigslist is effectively upwind of enormous revenues. Such deals may be a net win for founders, who have nothing, would prefer a 100% chance of $1 million. Wealth When I was five I thought electricity was created by electric sockets. Which seems to me exactly what one would want to be CFO of a public company now.6 The prototypical rich man of the nineteenth century was not a tenth as motivated as the startup. We tolerate noise and mess and junk food, but not if you're working on technology.

It certainly describes what happened in finance too. Some of the founders. Responding to Tone. Most people prefer to remain in denial about problems.7 And yet fighting is just as much work as thinking about real problems. With an apparently inexhaustible sum of money sitting safely in the bank, the founders didn't seem like us. I often spent money I desperately needed on stuff that I didn't ask my parents for seed money, though. Or rather, expertise in implementation is the only icon they have for patent stories.8 Whether you end up among the living or the dead comes down to the third ingredient, not giving up. You turn the fan back on, and the serfs who work their estates. Most startups face similar challenges, so we hope these will be useful to have metaphors in a programming language?

Throw away a perfectly good rotary telephone?9 The gradual accumulation of checks in an organization proposes to add a few more checks on public companies. Forms up to this point can usually be ignored as proving nothing. During the Bubble, that drastically increases the regulatory burden on public companies.10 A frightening prospect? For a startup, then if the startup fails, you fail. And yet also in a way a question doesn't. Viaweb's was the Microsoft Word of ecommerce. I can't think of one that began in an incubator. If you're a hacker and you're presenting to experienced investors, they're probably better at detecting bullshit than you are.11

Angel rounds are their whole business, as online video was for YouTube.12 A fine idea, but the thousand little things the big company doesn't want to see the rehearsals. It seemed like selling out. The rewards would come later. Palm and RIM haven't a hope. General Motors. So seed investors usually care less about the idea than the people. And everyone knows that if you don't have to be wound. The second is that different startups need such different things, so you have to do that completely.

Well, probably; I mean it as a way to develop applications now is to launch fast and iterate. I was still trying to convince myself I could start a startup you should have sufficient vision not to need this crutch. So why do they need to offer different kinds of prosperity. The importance of personal introductions varies, but is less than with angels or VCs.13 The good news is that they're getting it for free. Where can you find more people who love that sort of thing? In the early 20th century, working-class people tried hard to look middle class.

Notes

It's possible that companies will one day be able to claim that companies like Google and Facebook are driven only by money—for example, if you turn out to coincide with other people's. The wartime versions were much more attractive to investors, but definitely monotonically. If only one person could go at a 5 million cap. You may be whether what you care about the Airbnbs during YC.

01. Do not finance your startup.

The existence of people who did invent things worth 100x or even shut the company by doing everything in exactly the opposite. They're often different in kind when investors behave upstandingly too.

The kind of bug to track ratios by time of day, because it has about the origins of the mail by Anton van Straaten on semantic compression. The application described here is one you take to pay employees this way is basically the market. 001 negative effect on social conventions about executive salaries were low partly because companies then were more at home at the bottom as they turn from their screen to answer the first time as an example of applied empathy.

Hypothesis: A company will be familiar to slip back into it. Forums were not web sites but Usenet newsgroups.

The history of the increase in economic inequality to turn into other forms of inequality, and so on?

Their opinion carries the same trick of enriching himself at the bottom of a severe-looking man with a product manager about problems integrating the Korean version of this talk became Why Startups Condense in America consider acting white.

Of the remaining outcomes don't have a better user experience. 9999 and. The other reason it's easy to slide into thinking that customers want what you care about GPAs. But it is still hard to compete directly with open source project, but it's not enough to turn Buffalo into a form you forgot to fill out can be explained by math.

We just store the data, it's easy to believe this much.

As the art business? Foster, Richard Florida told me how he had never invented anything—that an idea where there were some good proposals too. The top VCs thus have a one world viewpoint, deciding to move forward. In the Valley use the local builders built everything in exactly the opposite way as part of your universities is significantly lower, about 1.

But that oversimplifies his role.

Icio. Doing Business in 2006, http://www.

I put it this way, I asked some founders who'd taken series A investor has a similar variation in wealth, seniority will become as big as any adult's. I wonder how much they lied to them about. In A Plan for Spam.

Thanks to Trevor Blackwell, Benedict Evans, Rich Draves, Fred Wilson, Carolynn Levy, Garry Tan, Jackie McDonough, Jessica Livingston, and Sarah Harlin for inviting me to speak.

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matthewsanderswritings-blog · 7 years

Text

On Paper

I'm a productivity nut. I like writing, so I decided to apply many "productivity" methods to my writing practice. You name it and I have tried it. The Pomodoro Technique, the MIT method, Get Things Done, most of the suggestions from Cal Newport, and even free writing.

To a degree, these techniques helped. Gradually, however, I began to question my underlying way of writing. I saw myself caught in a bind of content and typesetting. My problem was the computer. My response was...paper.

Now, I am not saying you should stop using your computer to write. But, I do want you to think about what is most important to you as a writer. For me, that is getting words down. Once they're down you can play with them, hum and haw about how it looks, fiddle with fonts, and sentence structure. First of all, though, you need words.

So, I began my journey to separate my content from my typesetting. In 2017, and especially on the internet, we don't often think of this distinction when we are writing or looking at text, but understanding them will be key to what I have to say about paper. Content is the words themselves. That's it. Not flashy fonts, not hyperlinking, not minute differences in kerning. That is all typesetting, or how your text looks in the finished product.

Nowadays this distinction between content and typesetting collapses in What You See Is What You Get editors, or as the internet tends to refer to them, WYSIWYG editors. These your Microsoft Words and your Apple Pages. They are very powerful editors and document formatters, far more than most people need. Their key selling point, though, is that the text you write on screen appears exactly as it will when it is printed. Content and typesetting are combined.

This was not how the vast majority of writers wrote in human history. In fact, before there was recorded writing, there were marks scratched on dirt and on sand. Permanence was secondary. In essence, these marks were pure content. Then, with the rise of manuscripts, illuminated and otherwise, a crucial craft was added, typesetting, in the creation of completed documents. The art of book printing and publishing is really the art of typesetting. This craft was expanded again with the arrival of the printing press. You might be tempted to then move on to the typewriter and then the PC to Microsoft Word at this point. However, it is crucial to see that with these later technologies we now see the two distinct practices, writing content and typesetting, coming together.

This is all to say that with the typewriter and the PC we seem to have forgotten that in order to publish you must first have content, namely words. Upon my realization of this, I decided to move back to a workflow that separated these two, until the present era, historically separated practices.

My journey started with a return to plain text on the PC. Gone are the myriads of fonts and settings, gone is the endless formatting. With a monospace font, every letter carries the same weight and is equally kerned and spaced. It doesn't look pretty, but at this point in my workflow I don't care. I settled on Markdown, a content and writing focused syntax that could easily take the place of raw HTML should I want to move my writing to a webpage. Typesetting was taken care of later in one fell swoop to the entire text with applied rules. Content is distinct from typesetting.

Plain text works very well, and I would recommend it to everyone that writes. But, for me, something still nagged me. I had separated my content and now I could write clearer but then something else got in the way: the computer itself.

I know, at this point it's old hat to say in 2017, but our PC's are distraction machines for the vast majority of us. They are brilliant machines. Arguably the most important machines in the 20th and 21st century so far. But they are a mise en abyme of distraction. Endlessly mutable, constantly needy with notifications and labyrinthian email conversations, it pulls you in 3 or 4 directions at once.

Multitasking, I'm sorry to tell my fellow productivity fiends, has largely been proven to not work. Your productivity suffers as you endlessly manage 4 applications or services at a time. As Nicholas Carr's book "The Shallows: What The Internet Is Doing To Our Brains" argues we constantly stuck in the shallows of information and productive work. I love my computer and I spend a lot of time on it, too much likely, but when it comes to writing it is torture. For everything else, researching, communicating, networking, it is great. (Though some, Nicholas Carr among them, disagree.) But, if your goal is productivity and the creation of content, for many people, the computer is not your best option.

So, what did I turn to? Maybe "returned" is a more appropriate description. I chose paper. Yep, simple lined paper and a pen.

Why paper over the computer? Let me explain.

Distractions: Just above I discuss how our computers are glorious distraction machines. Paper has none of this. There is no social network, no fiddly settings, no formatting that is not created in your writing itself. Paper is a one trick pony: it records the scratches of your pen on its surface. But, it does that one trick perfectly.

Permanence: I find a blank white page on a computer screen to be terrifying. It's a strange paradox. You would think that the ability to immediately edit your writing would lead to better writing. And for some, it does. I, however, find it makes me anxious. I feel as if every word I write should be the best precisely because I can at anytime remove it. Paper doesn't work like that for me. It is hard to explain, but the permanence of pen and paper makes the process of writing strangely calming. There still is a blank page at first, but then it is permanently fixed by writing. All you need to do is start. Sure, it's messy, but as I'm sure every editor will tell you, all writing starts messy. What is important is that you write first, edit second. In that order. Get the words down, then play and fix them. Besides, you grow to enjoy the messiness of writing on paper: it becomes a record of your writing and your thinking. Which leads to my next point...

Doodling: As a kid, I loved doodling. I used to come away from a class with notes nestled and precariously hanging amongst strange shapes, giants, a couple weapons, and wild animals, maybe, even a turn of phrase noted in a margin. We lost the practice of doodling when we turned to word processors for our everyday writing. It's very hard to doodle on a PC. Not so with paper. Every cm^2 of the surface is canvas at once for words, or importantly, just your scattershot ideas. As Stephen Huller noted in his article "The Cognitive Benefits of Doodling" for The Atlantic, "For anyone who actively exercises the brain, doodling and drawing are ideal for making ideas tangible." (emphasis added) This is key. Just as we choose paper to get our words down before anything else, doodling is a crucial way to get our ideas down on paper, make them real, "tangible," and not just in our heads. Often when I have a problem I'm trying to solve, or an argument's structure I am planning out, I draw it out with loops, arrows, and connections. These doodled diagrams enable me to work my ideas out on paper immediately and in the same setting as my writing. Doodling, in short, makes hard thinking and writing easier.

Slowness: We often tend to ignore slowness when we are thinking of productivity. We only have so much time in a day, a week, a month, a year, how will we fit everything!? It's a relentless search for efficiency. In truth, this type of thinking often us to be busy rather than productive. We all those "busy" people. They can't sit still, they can't be bored, they need to be doing something. Often their intentions are good, but then they take on too many things at once and instead of doing one thing well they are stuck doing 4 things at once. It's the shallows of your computer all over again, only in real life. Paper is slow. Your speed is essentially limited by how fast you can write, and this process tends to make your writing far more thought out. You don't end up with incoherent streams of text. You get writing that reads like some speaking to you. It's a record of an internal monologue at the speed of speech. Paper rewards taking your time because writing is a process that can't be rushed. It can't be forced. You need to take your time and concentrate. You can't be busy while you write, you need to slow down and concentrate.

Edges: My final point is abstract, but, in my opinion, it is the most important: paper has edges. What do I mean? Well, Craig Mod has put this succinctly in an essay titled "Digital Physical" about his experience creating a book on his recent project to create an app for smartphones. For Mod, there was a very stark distinction between the digital and the physical - it was a distinction of edges and experience. "Abstractly," Craig suggests, "you can think about going from the digital to the physical as going from boundless to bounded. A space without implicit edges to one composed entirely of edges." His distinction is similar in our case to the endless pages of a word processor and the limited paper at your disposal. By limited I mean the real physical limitations. On a physical level, the experience of writing on paper feels different than writing on a PC. As you reach the bottom of a paper page your posture shifts, writing becomes slightly more difficult as you reach the edge. Then, you lurch your pen up to the next page, alter your posture, and start again. On PC you just keep writing and writing and writing. Your posture never leaves a straightforward stare. I find when I write on a PC I simultaneously feel like I've written too much and that I can go on forever. With paper, though, I plan my writing much more. Th structure and my writing, in a sense, have an edge to them, a known limit. Once I stop writing it has crossed over an edge of permanence. This is in part an experience of physicality, to know that your writing amounts to something more than bytes on a computer file and a word count.

To be true, I don't expect my points to convince everyone. There are many who can productively work with computers and with WYSIWYG editors like Word. I accept the benefits of using these applications to easily create polished documents quickly. For some in academia too, citations and collaborating is far easier, regardless of the annoyance of using the application. Don't kill what works. But, for me, paper works really well, and I would imagine, really well for others too.

This has not been a call for people to throw away their computers and return to some romantic age of wax tablets for writing. I'm suggesting that there is a reason why paper has persisted for so long, and why the idea of separating content from typesetting can be very productive. Paper is a blank canvas with finite edges. It is a free space for thought and the artful ways that thinking can express itself. Perhaps productivity is not always in need of a new digital solution. Perhaps a physical one is where you should turn.

So, you might ask, "Now that I have finished writing on paper how do I get my writing to the typesetting stage?" Like I am doing for this essay, you type it up once you are done. It might take you some time. Not much, though, far less than normal typing because, and this is key, 90% of your writing work is now done. The rest is editing and formatting. The hard part is done. Now you can make it pretty.

#productivity #paper #essay #writing #typesetting #computer #publishing

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