Facebook

I’m no great lover of FB, but I have a lot of friends and family who I can’t easily be in touch with any other way. For better or for worse, FB is a major center of social and informational gravity, a major feature of the landscape, and for all our complaints about privacy, I don’t see us abandoning it en masse.

Flickr

Despite Yahoo’s neglect, this continues to be the internet’s most wonderful image storage and sharing tool, bar none. All the graphics I create for this blog live on Flickr, and the community there continues to be a lively one.

Google+

I don’t really know what to do with this yet, or whether I’m all that committed to it. I mostly just repost my blog posts and music there if I want to widen their reach. I don’t follow other people’s posts either. Still, it’s worth keeping an eye on.

Instagram

This frivolous-seeming iPhone app has turned into a steady source of creative gratification for me. Nine times out of ten I’d rather take Instagram photos than carry around a real digital camera. The iPhone is an awkward camera at best, but the pleasure of the filters and the instant sharing overcomes the app’s limitations. I automatically send all my photos to Tumblr and Flickr.

LinkedIn

I’m not as active in the LinkedIn groups as I should be, since Quora scratches that itch for me more effectively. But the news feed is intermittently interesting, the job postings are easy to use, and it’s a handy way to keep my professional contacts in one place.

Quora

My favorite web thing of the moment. It’s ostensibly a Q&A site, but it’s also been a rich source of blog inspiration, a networking tool, a social game and a bottomless source of amusement. It fills some of the hole left by the decimation of my Delicious network. Enjoy it now, while it still has a high signal to noise ratio.

SoundCloud

Out of all the music sharing tools I’ve tried, this is the winner. Its embedded player is attractive and elegant, the timed comments feature is a nifty one, and it has a lively community. It plays very nicely with Tumblr, Facebook and Google+ too.

Tumblr

I initially regarded Tumblr as a toy, a source of amusing internet memes and pictures of strange animals, but as I follow more people there, it’s becoming steadily more substantive. I’m starting to find full-blown essays and news there that I don’t see elsewhere. Also, the steady stream of science imagery is a daily pleasure. Effortless one-click reblogging is still the killer feature. Not too many people I know in real life follow me on Tumblr, so I automatically send all my posts there to Facebook — I wouldn’t anyone to miss a silly internet meme or picture of a strange animal.

Twitter

While Facebook is good for being in touch with people I know, Twitter has been the best tool for me to get connected to people I don’t know. I’ve even made some valued real-life friends there, as well as a bunch of valuable professional connections. But mostly it’s a hub for ideas, news, gossip, hip-hop slang and pop cultural amusement. As the saying goes, Twitter is the golf course for geeks. I mostly access it via Hootsuite.

WordPress

This blog continues to be the hub of my online life. I might post fragmentary or partial ideas elsewhere, and then they mature into complete thoughts here. Quora has been a really good source of blog fodder recently, and my old blog posts have been getting new life as Quora answers. A happy synergy.

Miscellany

I use Instapaper constantly, and not just for offline reading — it’s a good way to make web pages more readable on the iPhone, especially Wikipedia articles. I didn’t list it here because it’s not really social, and I don’t publish anything on it.

I still make nominal use of Delicious, but it’s fallen far out of the regular rotation.

I stream everything to FriendFeed, purely for SEO reasons.

My wife is addicted to Metafilter, and I look in on that from time to time, but haven’t had the brainspace yet to participate. I get a ton of traffic to my blog from Stumbleupon and Reddit, but again, don’t have the bandwidth to participate in those sites.

Marcel Duchamp

In ancient times and more traditional societies, there was never much importance attached to the concept of sole authorship or ownership of creative works. Widespread belief in the lone Byronic genius didn’t take hold until the eighteenth century in Europe. Duchamp signaled the beginning of the end of the Byronic genius with his readymades, like the infamous urinal, or this bicycle wheel:

Duchamp also remixed the Mona Lisa by painting on a mustache and goatee and writing a dirty joke on the bottom.

I appreciate Duchamp’s art-historical significance, but find him to be too much of a wiseass for my tastes. I like my visual art a little more sincere.

Joseph Cornell

As a college student, I saw my first Cornell boxes, and was knocked out of my socks by them.

I didn’t know at the time why I liked Cornell’s boxes so much, but now I do. I come from a family of congenital pack rats, and Cornell shows a way to turn that neurosis into art. By combining stuff he found in dime stores, pictures cut out of magazines, and junk he found on the street, Cornell was effectively making three-dimensional mashups. Cornell himself was a weird and creepy guy, but, man, I love the work.

Cornell boxes have spawned a genre unto themselves. I see a lot of knockoffs out there, and I tend to like them better than most of what’s happening in the contemporary art scene. My sister did a whole series of them using fruit crates; here’s the one she made about my dad:

Tom Phillips and A Humument

My favorite contemporary visual remix work is Tom Phillips’ multi-decade project, A Humument. The work consists of drawings and paintings done on pages from A Human Document by W.H. Mallock, a Victorian novel that Phillips chose at random. Read the full story on Phillips’ web site. Here are some representative pages:

And here’s a side-by-side comparison of before and after:

Web memes

The internet loves visual remixes, and has unleashed wave after wave of web memes based on the idea. Maybe they’re a little less highbrow than the above examples, but they have their own charm.

We live in a world overstuffed with meaningful objects. Making new objects seems ridiculous in such a world. Better to recontextualize existing, familiar materials, giving them new meaning by combining them in unexpected ways. That’s exactly how I feel about music, too. Music is intrinsically a collage form anyway — all “original” music is assembled from pre-existing chords, scales, rhythms, melodic motifs and so on. I think our culture would be healthier if we could bring musical collage above ground and give it the same respect we give to Duchamp and Cornell.

Mostly Richard Dawkins has helped science by being an excellent
scientist, and by writing the best and clearest popular accounts of how
evolution works. Dawkins’ books are crystal clear and frequently beautiful. Climbing Mount Improbable and The Ancestors’ Tale are two of the most aesthetically inspiring texts I’ve read about anything, not just science. Dawkins does best by building up the case for evolution, rather than just tearing down religion. His awe and reverence for nature in its actual physical workings are ultimately the most persuasive tools he has.

I have a family member who was a devout Christian for many years, and Dawkins’ books sowed doubts in his mind for the first time about the validity of the Bible as an explanation of where we come from. That came about not through Dawkins’ attacks on his faith, but by Dawkins’ laying out the evidence for evolution and appealing to reason. That method is slower and probably less emotionally satisfying than calling religious people stupid, but it works.

Original question on Quora

I appreciate your awareness campaign, but it does seem like all of your answers boil down to one word. “Why does anyone do anything?” “DOPAMINE!”

Charles wrote me back:



I’m not trying to annoy or bore people, but part of my awareness campaign is to help spread the word that everything we do we do for dopamine. 

Imagine a world where the fear/power/esteem addicts wreaking havoc and destroying the planet are revealed to be desperate addicts who need treatment for the same brain disease plaguing heroin addicts. 

I’ve come to the conclusion that everything comes down to dopamine appeal and that trying to explain dopamine appeal has zero dopamine appeal. As a result, I’m working a couple of new approaches. 

If you can think of a way to make explaining dopamine appeal more appealing, please let me know.

That’s such a good question that rather than respond in a comment, I thought it merited my first-ever Quora post.

Charles is oversimplifying dramatically when he says that “everything comes down to dopamine appeal” but his essential point is right on. He’s also totally on point that “trying to explain dopamine appeal has zero dopamine appeal.” I admire the spirit of his campaign, and want to help him out. So here are some thoughts.

Almost everybody believes in a soul
Cartesian dualism is an almost universal belief in America. It’s practically axiomatic, and people are very emotionally attached to the idea. Even well-educated folks resist the notion that our thoughts and feelings are nothing more than electrical impulses and molecules bouncing around an organ that’s more like your pancreas than unlike it. I agree with Charles that Cartesian dualism is an outdated and misleading idea, and that it would be really helpful to get the word out about modern neurobio. The weight of cultural tradition is heavy, though.

Answer the question: what’s in it for me?
If someone believes in an immortal soul that temporarily resides in the body, what do they gain in being convinced otherwise? How does neurobio benefit us? For me, understanding human behavior in materialist, Darwinian terms has made the world a much easier place to live. I’ve come to believe that we humans are like monkeys in a zoo of our own mostly inadvertent construction. We have a severely limited ability to control our own actions, and even less ability to control those of others. Nothing is really anyone’s fault. This attitude makes it easier for me to suspend judgment of myself and others; to extend compassion and tolerance; to connect constructively. I’m trying to learn to judge humans the way I’d judge chimps or daisies or mushrooms: not at all.

Be careful with emotional tone
Describing normal people seeking dopamine squirts as “heroin addicts” is not going to produce the desired response. Whether or not the comparison is apt, it’s a highly charged, confrontational image. It implies strong negative judgment. Better to frame heroin addiction as an extreme and misguided version of the ordinary person’s desire to regulate their own brain chemistry in a way that produces pleasure and reduces pain. Similarly, try to not call people robots and zombies; they don’t like that either.

Respect the brain’s beauty and complexity
Materialists like me and Charles get a bad rap for being unromantic, unfeeling, out of touch with a sense of wonder. My own experience is that the more I learn about the brain and its workings, the more breathtakingly beautiful it reveals itself to be. Gerald Edelman observes that the human brain is the most physically complex object in the known universe in his book Wider Than The Sky: The Phenomenal Gift Of Consciousness. Here are some images from around the web that appeal directly to my sense of beauty and possibility:

For me, actual physical study of the actual physical brain is way more poetic and inspiring than any supernatural or spiritual idea I’ve ever encountered. Any discussion of how the mind emerges from the brain should be couched in a sense of awestruck wonder at how mindless evolution could have produced such a magnificently intricate structure.

Original post on Quora

I started out using Delicious for its intended purpose, bookmarking. Then I discovered that between the tags and the notes field, it was a spectacular notetaking tool. Over time, I built up a network of around a hundred other people. My Delicious use became 10% archiving and annotating links I planned to refer to later, and 90% social linkblogging. The experience became almost Quora-like.

Not that Yahoo ever did anything to encourage the social aspect. Some people made it easy to identify themselves, and I was able to connect with them on Twitter, Facebook and elsewhere. But most people didn’t, and to this day there are users whose writing and linkblogging I followed on a daily basis, and who I have absolutely no way of contacting.

At some point, an informal tradition emerged known as “Delicious whuffie,” named for the reputation-based currency in a Cory Doctorow story. People started tagging their bookmarks “via:username” to indicate the source of the link. Someone even made a whuffie bookmarklet that automatically added the via tag. Then Yahoo made some behind-the-scenes changes, and the via tags stopped working. The social aspect of Delicious was at that point pretty much broken beyond repair.

Meanwhile, the social web continued to evolve. I now have some other tool for almost every Delicious use case. I use my blog to gather and annotate important links. I share trivia and amusing ephemera on Twitter, Tumblr and Facebook. I network with like-minded strangers on Twitter and now Quora. But none of them have totally replaced my Delicious network, which has been scattered to the four winds by Yahoo’s ineptitude.

One of my favorite finds on Delicious is C. Maoxian, an American finance guy living in China. Every day he posts dozens of items relating to finance, investment, real estate, and expat life in China. Just from reading the headlines of his posts and his witty comments, I get an excellent overview of these topics that I know little to nothing about. Every so often I’ll click through a link and read the whole story, but mostly Maoxian’s summary is enough. Since he uses the same handle on Twitter, I follow him there, too, but it isn’t the same — 140 characters just doesn’t do it for his style of writing.

So what do I want the YouTube guys to do? Make Delicious more like Quora. Make it social. Make it personal. Make it fun. Introduce voting and reputation. Make it like Twitter but with depth. Introduce archiving of pages you link to, so if the original page gets taken down you can still access its contents. Let us log in with Facebook or Twitter or Quora identities. Keep innovating and iterating. Be the anti-Yahoo.

Original post on Quora

• Focus on solutions. What immediate steps can people take right now? What are bigger steps that governments and corporations need to take, and what can we do to push them in the right direction?
• Don’t judge. Assigning blame is gratifying but counterproductive; it heightens tensions and closes minds. Instead, take a the thousand-mile-distant Buddhist perspective. In the longest time scales, nothing matters; the sun will explode and destroy the earth in five billion years one way or the other. Meanwhile, we’re in this situation, it’s not good, but it’s no one’s fault (or everyone’s fault, same thing.) Now what’s the most practical way out?
• Be funny. You can take the subject matter seriously without taking yourself seriously. Gallows humor is the best kind. See: Stewart and Colbert, South Park, hip-hop lyrics and Mark Twain for inspiration.

Humans are adaptive and full of surprises. We do stupid, self-destructive, narrow-minded and short-sighted things, but we’re also capable of imagination, optimism, compassion and even self-sacrifice. Which feelings do you want to stir in your audience?

Original post on Quora

Starflight came on two 360 kB floppy disks. That’s kilobytes, not megabytes. I have one-page Word documents bigger than that. And yet, the game world comprised hundreds of explorable planets, generated randomly by fractal algorithms. This was a revolutionary move, an early gesture toward the open-ended gameplay you see in the Grand Theft Auto series.

Starflight also had a compelling underlying narrative. Most of the time I don’t care about the story behind a game. The games I tend to prefer have no narrative at all, like Tetris, or a very nominal story that isn’t central to the gameplay, like Plants vs Zombies. But Starflight told a terrific story, revealed throughout the gameplay in intriguing fragments.

The storyline begins in the future on an Earthlike planet called Arth. An archeological dig deep underneath the planet has uncovered artifacts from an elder race, including a faster-than-light starship powered by a crystal-like fuel called endurium. In the game, you captain one of these ships, based in a space station orbiting Arth.

Your mission, at first, is straightforward Star Trek boilerplate. You fly around looking for endurium and habitable planets. You also occasionally encounter various alien races, some friendly, some not.

As you do your exploring and interacting, you encounter clues to the real plot: something called the Crystal Planet is moving slowly but relentlessly across the galaxy, causing every star it passes to go supernova. You ultimately need to find the Crystal Planet and destroy it before your home sun blows up. There are some nice twists to this story. The Crystal Planet turns out to be made of endurium, the same substance that powers your ship. It further turns out that the endurium crystals themselves are living, sentient beings, which are being destroyed by human spaceships. So what you’re doing is heading off a desperate act of self-defense by the helpless creatures you burn in your engine. It feels uncomfortably like being in the Bush Administration. Complicated.

In order to discover how to destroy the Crystal Planet, you have to do a little detective work on the Galactic Empire’s history, and in so doing, you discover the ‘mythical’ planet Earth. It’s Earth in the far distant future, with the familiar continents and climates, but devoid of human presence. Aside from a few ruined buildings, there’s no sign of our ever having been there. The post-apocalyptic setting wasn’t the sci-fi cliche it is now, and at the height of the Cold War it was alarmingly plausible. When you discover the deserted Earth, it’s a poignant moment. Poignancy is not a quality you find in too many computer games.

Technology has gotten a lot better in the video game world, but the writing hasn’t. I’d trade all the 3D graphics in the world for more game settings like Starflight.

“Get specific. Pick something that interests you. Revel in weird topics. Don’t be afraid to get conceptual. Keep it friendly (and human).”

The article gives Gawker writer Nick Douglas’ reasons for using WordPress as their platform. He’s right, WP is the bomb.

What I like about Gawker prose is that it uses the voices of specific, recognizable humans that inhabit the same reality I do. Gawker and its siblings are like the Stewart and Colbert of blogs.

Blog media gets very recursive. It’s easy to get sucked in to blogging about blogging. Gawker does its share of that, but they’re good humored about it. I especially enjoy their list of blog media cliches, for which they graciously shoulder their share of the blame:

“Best. [ultimate thing or experience.] Ever/Evar. [negative experience, situation, or description]; I just threw up a little bit in my mouth. [purposefully non-ghetto statement], yo. [undesirable conclusion]. Oy. [amazed paraphrase of opposing position]. Seriously? Seriously? What’s next? [outlandish scenario]? I’m looking at you, [example of complaint]. Um, [condescension]? [Undesirable experience] made my [sensory organ] bleed. [x] is the new [y].”

Here are some high points from my Gawker tag on Delicious:

How Rudy Giuliani Soothes Conservative Fears:

“The cross-dressing thing probably doesn’t put your mind at ease. And the fact that I’ve been married three times, once to my cousin, well, even I find that a little creepy. But you know what? 9/11. Also: Firemen! Flags! Kittens with firemen!”

Meet The Rich:

“Searching for Donald Trump in the VIP tent at the Bridgehampton Polo club isn’t hard. The man stands out like he’s written in all caps. TRUMP, says his hair. TRUMP, proclaim his slitty eyes.”

On a great sadness of New York City:

“It’s been such a long wait for all of us! But at last, the World Trade Centre is nearly ready for its opening day. In just a few months, it will be a proud day for all of us in Bahrain.”

From mid-2008, Will Wright To Launch 2005′s Best Video Game This September:

“Wright, the creator of SimCity and The Sims, stepped down from his platinum throne on Mount Olympus to tell Newsweek why it took so long: He had a hard time dumbing down his magical world for human minds.”

I’m Not Addicted To The Internet, I Just Need It Inside Me:

“Imagine having a conversation and being able to invisibly call up instant research. For all practical purposes, you’d be as smart as the Internet (or as dumb as the Internet, but still.) Twelve hours a day online is unhealthy; that’s why I need twenty-four.”

A beautiful caption: Photo of Britney Spears In Tiny Car Makes Us Wistful

On the death of LSD inventor Albert Hoffman:

“When you see him with his white hair and suit and tie, all looking like a Deutsche Bank senior VP, and you realize he couldn’t get his drug legalized, you just shake your head sadly for the stinky, beardy NORML kids on every college campus everywhere.”

We Are The Champions. Of Drugs:

“Shed a patriotic tear, fellow Americans: we are the most drugged-out nation in the world… Suck our woolie blunt smoke, Kiwis!… All it takes is one look at this handy chart to see… did you lock the front door? Did you hear something?”

Sarah Palin, The Life-iest Pro-Life Candidate Who Ever Scared The Crap Out Of Me:

“So by now you know John McCain picked some pretty lady from Alaska as his running mate. Crafty! But you have never heard of her before. No one really has. Sure, she was profiled in Vogue a few months back, but you don’t get Vogue for the articles, and the reason for that is that the Vogue profile totally missed one of the most interesting things about Sarah Palin, which is that she found out her fifth baby had Down syndrome through prenatal testing and she went ahead and had him anyway. Do you know how many people do that? Ten percent of people do that… There are many many people, a silent plurality I would even venture, who believe abortion is technically a kind of murder, but that it should stay legal anyway.”

Your Guide To the Endless Newsweek Story on the Endless Campaign:

“In short, this is the story of the 2008 campaign: the Hillary Clinton campaign was a stressful psychodrama, the Obama campaign was an intellectual exercise, and the McCain campaign was a ragtag bunch of misfits who stumbled into an insane family nightmare from Twin Peaks, Alaska.”

We Are Old And Sad:

“On one hand, we’ll get to see The Roots on TV every night; on the other hand, Black Thought opening for Jimmy Fallon every night is the cultural equivalent of Miles Davis playing his horn on the subway platform to back up a semi-trained dancing spider monkey.”

Barack Obama’s Secret Identity Revealed: Boring Yuppie

“Barack Obama — he’s just like us, if you’re a constitutional law professor married to a lawyer.”

White House Memo: Please Damn Bush With Faint Praise

“The single nicest tribute to the man from roughly January through November of this year came from Oliver Stone. But, post-election, post-John McCain, mid-Sarah Palin, Republicans are grudgingly, mildly complimentary of the inept man-child president they used to love. The nice thing about the Republican media machine is that they generally repeat their talking points verbatim instead of, like, reworking them to sound original.”

My online presence aspires to the condition of Gawker.

It amazes me now that I ever tried to organize my thoughts any other way.

Consider this image:

For most of us, music is the most familiar context for a cassette tape. But you can store any kind of data on a cassette, not just audio. Back in the seventies and early eighties, cassettes were a popular computer data storage medium. Seeing this picture on the same screen as Alan Turing led me to the insight that a cassette with an operating system stored on it is a perfect physical analogy to the concept of a Turing machine. Then I see the Apple cassette on the same screen as Run-DMC, because in the late Jam Master Jay’s hand is a cassette deck.

It brings the connection back home to music, leading me to the idea that music and computer programs might be kind of the same thing. From there it takes me to the idea that music is made of algorithms. From there, I get the idea that maybe memes are algorithms for getting themselves copied, and maybe genes are too. Like I said: useful.

The whole experience has proven to me that I can shuffle images together into a narrative way more easily than hunks of text, no matter how cool Scrivener’s index card view is. I’ll bet there are a whole lot of artsy types out there like me who would be having an easier time in their writing life if they got hip to visual outlining.

I’m finding also that I like developing my ideas in public, throwing images out there and seeing how people react to them. I used to play jazz guitar, and now I laptop DJ. I like improvising in front of an audience. Coming up with ideas is only the front half of creativity. The equally important back half is the pruning, the editing, the rejections, the natural selection. Social writing and image gathering is like social music. When you’re trying to impress other people, you instinctively prune based on what’s going to be the least annoying to everyone, what’s going to raise your social standing. The more time I spend trying out my ideas in public, the more sophisticated and adaptive they become.

You can make folders for your images, known in Flickr as sets. You can also make collections, which are sets of sets. A particular image can belong to as many different sets as you want. And Flickr also supports tags, for another layer of more associative sorting.

All the way around, Flickr is a slick piece of interface design. Anybody trying to create a dashboard for a large, complex database will find a lot of inspiration there.

Like Delicious, Flickr offers a variety of creative alternative display methods. One of its simplest and most delightful toys is the randomizing web site badge. I have mine set to choose three images at random. It chooses a different three every time you refresh the page. Here’s my most serendipitous threesome so far:

Just sitting there and playing random images against each other could keep me supplied with creative nonfiction inspiration for basically ever.

Flickr gives you a lot of nuanced feedback on your viewers. Here are my most popular photos according to Flickr’s interestingness measure, a weighted sum of page views, favorites and comments. For some reason, the image below is the internet’s favorite thing I’ve ever posted, by a large margin. This is probably because I titled it using the word “Matrix,” inadvertantly guaranteeing that it shows up in a lot of google searches.

I myself did not create this image. Some random person on the intertubes did. I found it unattributed on Ffffound. I do a lot of reblogging with Flickr, which is not exactly what the terms of use had in mind, but everything I’m doing could be reasonably characterized as fair use, so I don’t think Flickr minds. I’m not making any money whatsoever from reblogging images. (I wish!) I’m scrupulous about including links to original sites when I can find them. If I include an image from pop culture, like an M.I.A. album cover or something, it’s in the context of an enthusiastic endorsement, the kind of heartfelt word-of-mouth that drives most sales, so I doubt the artists mind either.

In your daily stat report, Flickr lists all the Google and Yahoo image searches that resulted in a view of one of your images. It does something better, actually, it links to those searches. If I post a picture of a cool molecule or interesting knot or colorful bird, a bunch of science students find their way to it immediately. Usually their searches turn up some other cool molecule or knot or bird pictures as well, a rich source of new material for me. And so the cycle continues.

Word started off pretty useful, but each successive version was a bigger and bigger drag. There were more toolbars and menus and animated characters giving unwanted advice. Finally, I couldn’t take it anymore. I followed the geek example and switched over to plain text editors and HTML.

But this year I wrote a book proposal and some other long-form, complicated stuff. It got to be difficult keeping track of which thoughts were in which text file. Then I read a blog post by Steven Poole called “Goodbye, Cruel Word” that hipped me to Scrivener, and I’ve never looked back.

Scrivener costs $39.95 to Word’s $229.00. Instead of Word’s awkward metaphor of sheets of paper in a typewriter, Scrivener is based around the idea of index cards on a corkboard. Here’s part of my book proposal’s sample chapter.

You can reorder the cards by dragging and dropping. Cards can contain groups of other cards, or even folders of folders of folders of other cards. You can also drag and drop in and out of the outline on the left. You can drag and drop stuff from the Finder too.

Having to come up with little titles for your index cards forces me to think on the meta-level. This has been valuable, because I need all the help I can get to come up with a point and stick to it. You can write your own summaries on your index cards, or you can have the computer generate them automatically from the cards’ content.

In its basic word-processing capacities, Scrivener is really just a dashboard for TextEdit. This is a good thing. Scrivener has its own particular file format, but it conveniently exports to Rich Text, Word documents, HTML and myriad other formats.

The only way for me to have fully-formed thoughts is to write them out of order in nonlinear chunks that I rearrange later. I don’t have the attention span to write from top to bottom. I admire people who do. One of my literary heros is Philip Pullman, the author of the “His Dark Materials” trilogy. Pullman says on his web site that he writes for three hours a day longhand on a legal pad in his tool shed. I don’t even approach having that kind of discipline. I’m a child of TV and the internet. I grew up in a fragmented family in a fragmented city in a fragmented country. If I can’t even think in linear streams, it’s not realistic to expect myself to write that way.

The index card format also helps with anxiety and writer’s block. There’s nothing worse than a blinking cursor in the upper left corner of a blank screen. I prefer to copy and paste in some text from wikipedia or my Delicious bookmarks and then start organizing it into index cards.

I appear to have two writing behaviors. There’s the efflorescence stage, where I start with my notes and source text and let things flow outwards from there, doing my best to not judge or criticize, just banging stuff out. Then comes the pruning stage, cutting the unwanted branches off, letting the inner critic do its job. Pruning mode is also where I have to come up with all the metadata. If I can’t find a home for something, it can always go to the blog or the odds and ends folder.

Scrivener is a good outliner, but my Mac came free with an even better one called OmniOutliner. It’s all too rare for the name of a program to explain what it does, but OmniOutliner describes itself well. It makes outlines, in an omnipotent and omniscient way. In fact, that’s all it does, which is a refreshing change of pace when you’re used to Microsoft bloatware. Scrivener has a lot of OmniOutliner’s core functionality, like drag and drop ordering and metadata and expanding/collapsing sections. But OmniOutliner does automatic section numbering, which Scrivener doesn’t. More importantly, OmniOutliner renumbers your sections and subsections as you move stuff around. Once you’re done you can just export your neatly numbered outline as Rich Text and drop it into Scrivener. Bring on the writing jobs!