Principles of Writing Well

Written by . Posted on January 3, 2012. Filed under Bla, Writing. No comments.

One of the great acts of procrastination well known to anyone who has to write on a regular basis, is reading about writing. Right now I’m doing this with William Zissner’s ‘On Writing Well’. It’s divided into 4 parts, the first being ‘Principles’. To save you the trouble of reading all 60 pages I have condensed each chapter down to a single line. You’re welcome.

Simplicity: Don’t use big words when you can use small ones.
Clutter: Cut out anything you don’t need. Simplify.
Style: Keep it personal by writing from first person and cutting out the I’s afterwards. Be honest.
The Audience: Forget them. Write to please yourself.
Words: Avoid cliches. When in doubt, look it up. Consider the sound of words when spoken.
Usage: The laws of usage are relative. If a word or phrase fills a real need, go ahead and use it.

These are of course just principles not rules, and this is as much a reminder to myself as help to anyone else. If anyone has recommendations for other books on the construction of non-fiction prose, journalism or criticism go ahead and bother me on email or @thesjef. Cheers.

Hello 2012

Written by . Posted on January 1, 2012. Filed under Bla. No comments.

Ok this year I’m starting on time. As you can see the site has been all freshed up, and I intend to start writing again. Attempts at fiction are unlikely, instead just commentary, reviews, rants etc. Hopefully with the occasional flash of insight or generating some useful synthesis, and at the very least just hobbling along on the crutches of self-deprecation and profanity.

In review of last years projects; baseball, bash scripting, breakfast & alcoholism:

  • I played a season of baseball, our team sucked the least out of those that belonged in our division & we ended the season 3rd of 8. Result!
  • I scripted nothing. The linux box in the kitchen was mostly used to stream Al-Jazeera while cooking.
  • Eating proper breakfasts didn’t happen.
  • Alcoholism never really took off, though I did develop a taste for Scotch.

This year’s major personal project (besides a return to shitty writing) is an experiment in post-national tech-nomadism. While remaining based in Amsterdam with our studio I intend to go without really being locked down into one place of residence and spend a couple of months here and there in other cities. I might also take up swimming. Bring it 2012.

 

Theme upgrade!

Written by . Posted on December 17, 2011. Filed under Bla. No comments.

This site has been pretty much dormant in 2011, next year I intend to help the internet out by putting more opinions and shit on it, specifically mine. Or my poorly filtered versions at the very least. To aid in this endeavour I’ve gone and updated the site theme, hopefully now people will be able to read it without also developing acute nausea. Maybe.

The discerning WordPress type nerd will have noticed this theme is based on Neutica+, nothing too fancy but a good upgrade from Neutica which I was running previously. I also have one custom plugin that tweaks a few styles & adds some new behaviour, the rest is all stock WordPress & various plugins because really, who needs the extra fucking work.

Now check back next year, and there might be some actual new new content. Later!

 

The tweets I never sent

Written by . Posted on October 8, 2011. Filed under Bla. No comments.

Since sometime early this year I’ve maintained a text file of unsent tweets. Most of these have been all typed up & ready to go, but instead of hitting send I decided the world did not need to know these things at that time. Now reading back through them as discarded thoughts instead of messages to the world most don’t seem that bad, so here are the tweets I never sent over the last 6 months.

In the interests of full disclosure I should say this isn’t the complete list. I’ve withheld the stuff from the last couple of weeks, and culled about 30% for being just too stupid, angry, incomplete or incoherent. Enjoy, I guess.

Pissing away another hour of life because I can’t spell otpion correctly… #debuggingsucks

If growing a beard has taught me anything, it’s how easy it is to lose combs.

My new system for rating mixes in iTunes? 1 star per gunfingers. Yes, I need to leave the computer more often. #thesunitburns

Now that imminent global economic collapse trader man is not a hoax again do we resume the panic or is that just funny old news now?

Reform copyright. Fix patents. Protect privacy. Institutionalize social innovation. Re-tool defunct industries. #talklikeapirateday

Bester’s ‘Stars my Destination’, @bruces’s ‘Schismatrix’ & @shineanthology’s uh, Shine anthology. Pretty good spread I thought.

’8 hours work’ doesn’t mean it will be done in a day. This is a design studio, not a sausage factory.

Read article -> Gain hope for future of humanity, problems are there to be solved! Read comments -> Lose all hope, want to kill everybody.

I think about half the tweets I type out get thrown away without posting.

That pink cowboy hat makes me think you’re a shitty, boring person.

I swear some designers think the web is rendered by rainbow pixies shaking unicorn bones at the screen.

Who uses the ignorant asshole commenter or juvenile troll stereotypes when designing their use case personas? Why not?

Hipster tourists out wandering around looking like lost time-travelers, kicked out of 3 last centuries by fashion police. #atemporality

“You’ve got the votes & the money, you’ve got no conscience. Get out of the way. Over the long term you attitude is fatal.” -@bruces

I wonder how much of that black teflon shit I’ve ingested out of frying pans over the years. Must be like a woks worth.

There you go. I can’t believe you actually read that. Check back in like another 4 months when I have another super exciting blog post to share!

Spelling & Blablablabla

Written by . Posted on July 24, 2011. Filed under Bla, Spelling & Handwriting. No comments.

So I forgot to set up robo-posts for the second half of the year and there have been no new installments of Spelling & Handwriting. But let’s be honest this is really no great loss, that shit was incredibly boring. The rest will still go up, I’ll just do it in a massive batch some time.

In other news, Google+ now exists and for the first time in the history of the social networkings I have a publicly visible profile. You can find me at http://gplus.to/sjef. I’ll be more active on there, so bar robo-posts until I embark on some noteworthy project that requires documentation this place will probably be pretty dormant for the time being.