Impossible To Watch

[Nate North]

I've wanted to do this for about a year now, but I thought it was probably impossible. Anyway, today I got it working. I'll improve the quality over time but starting today this is a permanent upgrade which will be available in addition to the standard 2D version.

This is a show reel of the 3D Alpha implementation, Unpolished but working. You can watch it on 3D television sets the Meta Quest / 2 or 3 headsets, Or any other stereoscopic capable headset such as the Google cardboard.

Select mode full SBS, and play.

 

[sfoster]

Wellllll......

It is kind of dystopian, But remember that chart you posted of the average life expectancy broken down into weeks? As soon as I realized how many things I wanted to accomplish and how much time there actually was left, I started trying to wring every last drop of life out of every single day. Look at how long it has taken me to get to the point where I'm at with save point right now. If I wasn't pushing as hard as I can to be as efficient as possible this would have taken 10 years for one person with no help and no funding.

To me what's truly dystopian is looking back at people doing the same job 30 years ago, Realizing I've done 200 times as much work as they ever did at eight times the quality and in some cases it's not worth what they got paid over a long weekend. For example I have around 4000 pro quality stock footage clips up on every major marketplace in the world basically. Aerial footage, Advanced Cgi, Anything you could think of. I got paid around $115 over the last 18 months. To put that into context, That exact same library I mentioned used to net me thousands of dollars per year not so long ago. A stock videographer in the 90s could sometimes put up two or 300 clips in 480p, And end up with a half million dollar house, medical insurance for life, a happy family, and three college tuitions for the kids. Today if I do the same amount of work at the same skill level and produce a much better product, I would receive Enough compensation to order three Pizza Hut pizzas on separate occasions. And don't forget that they put up 300 videos on one site, and I put up 4000 videos on 6 sites. It's definitely not just me either, every person I've met in the last decade that was capable of writing a symphony orchestra piece has ended up fighting to stay alive in an efficiency apartment. Anyway that's why I don't feel like I have time to spare.

I dont have any footing to debate you about productivity.
I'm still on the first 1/2 of my book after like... how long has it been? I'm afraid to look. 3 years maybe? IDK.

I must've had writers block for six months just trying to rewrite the first day of magic class.
I've been living with absolutely zero sense of urgency, and no dreams of sales or success.

 

[Nate North]

I definitely have writers block problems all the time.

There's really only two things that work for me in terms of getting around it. One is just being in a really good mood, Energetic, relaxed, and healthy. That's more of something that just happens though instead of a strategy.

The other is doing what I call metric breakdowns. I feel like some task is really daunting or like I'd never be able to accomplish it or get it right. Then I go and analyze a sample of someone absolutely nailing that exact task. I break it down into numbers to make the problem finite in my mind. Instead of saying JK Rowling wrote the best YA wizard novel ever and I'll never be able to do that, Which feels overwhelming and impossible, I say how many sentences did it take her to accomplish this, how many characters were in the scene, how many actual key moments made this great.

Then I go back to trying to solve that problem, But this time I'm not trying to be as good as person x or accomplish this important sounding thing. I'm just trying to write 23 paragraphs with 10 major pivotal lines said by 3 characters. Maybe that wouldn't work for you, everyone is different. Personally I do find that really defining how small the task actually is makes it less daunting to approach.

 

[sfoster]

That strategy definitely works for some problems!

My lastest stall-out was a lot more systemic, I feel pretty dumb about it.
I set out to write a wizard story, without realizing that if you completely stay in the real world you're actually writing a superhero story.

My whole concept was flawed and wrong from the start.

 

[CelticRambler]

Sometimes I'm cooking dinner in the kitchen and want to look up some recipe on youtube to make some food taste better. And I also want to watch the news at the same time. Sometimes I'm also waiting for an email or something like that or a status bar to finish. It's not uncommon for me to be waiting for three status bars to finish on 3 different computers. So I'm standing there in front of the stove waiting for this pot to boil, And I rapidly click five times and spawn 5 television sets around me, A 10 inch window showing the cooking video and instructions, A couple of 5 inch windows showing each of my work computers and their status bars that I just quickly reach up and affix to the wall behind the stove, And a 40 inch tv hanging in the air somewhere over my kitchen table showing the day's national news.

Maybe while I'm cooking dinner one of those status bars finishes. I typically reach over and quickly pause the news television with a click, grab the recipe window which is kind of half blocking the status bar tvs behind it, and move it out of the way with a fast gesture, reassign the computer that finished its job to another job so that no time is wasted. Then I just reach over and grab the cooking instructions or whatever I'm looking at in that window and put it back in front of me, and unpause the news with a click.

Jeeeez ! That's surely the embodiement of ADHD?

I think the biggest hurdle faced by those who want to push the boundaries of visual technology is that the vast majority of poeple (i.e. potential customers) are already maxxed out with what's available, so no matter how great the development, it'll never be commercially viable for the masses. Perhaps it's the company I keep (virtual and real-life) but since the covid lockdowns, I'm seeing a gradual but persistent trend away from non-stop stimulation and a quest to fill every minute with "productivity".

Almost no-one in my social circle has a TV. At all. If they're going to watch movies/other video, it'll be either on a phone or laptop; but much of the time, they've adopted the limited screen-time rules that they use to impose on their children and use their eyeballs for looking at what's outside in the real world. And they're all the happier for it.

This extends to so many other areas of life too - in their spare time hand sewing instead of using a machine, writing with a pen on paper instead of using a computer, gardening with hand tools instead of petrol-powered engines. The number of people up-cyclying and fablab-ing is insane, driven by the simultaneous pressure of saving (or earning) a little money and doing something creative. Sure, they might also be buying stuff on Amazon and Temu to help the project along, but the point is they're moving away from the kind of technology that gives a quick dopamine hit and is obsolete before the guarantee period expires.

I've been living with absolutely zero sense of urgency, and no dreams of sales or success.

I have a roof to repair ... and a cat sitting on my lap.

Naturally I'm prioritising the cat.

 

[mlesemann]

Naturally I'm prioritising the cat.

I always prioritize the cat

Interesting discussion to me (this last bit).

I'm rather in the middle: there are times when I push hard to get something done fast (and well), especially because there are often other people waiting on my output. I've got a project going now where I'm an important part but certainly not the only part, and when I'm needed, I go hard and fast and as well as possible.

But when that's not the case, I'm very aware that at best I'm in the last third of my life (very possibly last quarter or less), and make sure to do things that simply make me happy in the moment, because life is too damn short.

This, to me, is the essence of making our own choices and priorities

 

[sfoster]

I think the biggest reason for my attitude is that no matter how hard I've worked, I've never achieved success at anything.
I tried so hard in my 20s! At one point I quit my job and was working 100 hours a week for over a year trying to start a software company.

Got nothing out of it but debt and an empty space on my resume.

My 30s were an even bigger failure, I decidated them to making shitty short films that aren't good enough to be watched.
I earnestly belive if I do my best on this novel, if it's as good as I can possibly make it, it will end up being read by about 12 people.

It's an extremely competitive field and I'm not demonstrating much in the way of potential aptitude.

Like.. I've been to vegas 12 times, and never won money gambling, not one single time in my life.
Of course I don't have hopes and dreams of winning at a casino, all I ever do is lose.

Contrast that with someone like nate, that has achieved success and been a millionaire, of course he wants to keep gambling

 

[Nate North]

I think the biggest reason for my attitude is that no matter how hard I've worked, I've never achieved success at anything.
I tried so hard in my 20s! At one point I quit my job and was working 100 hours a week for over a year trying to start a software company.

Got nothing out of it but debt and an empty space on my resume.

My 30s were an even bigger failure, I decidated them to making shitty short films that aren't good enough to be watched.
I earnestly belive if I do my best on this novel, if it's as good as I can possibly make it, it will end up being read by about 12 people.

It's an extremely competitive field and I'm not demonstrating much in the way of potential aptitude.

Like.. I've been to vegas 12 times, and never won money gambling, not one single time in my life.
Of course I don't have hopes and dreams of winning at a casino, all I ever do is lose.

Contrast that with someone like nate, that has achieved success and been a millionaire, of course he wants to keep gambling

Well, if it makes you feel any better, every real life success story begins with someone failing over and over. You can't track a trajectory with this kind of goal. It's so non linear that you just get a bad read. Things can change, As long as you keep changing up your strategy without changing your main goal.

Most of my failures were caused by getting into cycles of thought that I got kind of locked into. Let's say you were lost in a forest and you were just trying to get out. You are so deep in that you couldn't even see the sun for the canopy so you started trying to just make rational decisions. Early on you found a trail where you could make much faster progress. You made a decision to just follow the trail because it would likely get you out of the forest faster since you were making better time. But unbeknownst to you that trail was just a circle. Every time you are faced with choice To follow a trail or start slowly hacking your way through that area with no trail you make what seems like the smart decision. Yet at the end of all those smart decisions you find yourself passing the same tree years later, No closer to your goal.

Here's how this tends to work with creative stuff. In creativity we have an unusual type of goal that doesn't function like the goals of most other industries. The goal is to have a unique and interesting voice, A concept or a product that takes on a life of its own via the value it gains through its rarity. The trap I think everybody gets into is doing the rational sensible thing at each step. The problem is that there are plenty of smart people and they frequently make the rational sensible choice when designing their product. Even if they didn't copy off of each other or didn't know each other you find 10,000 nearly identical products popping up all over the world and their value is essentially nothing, Because they don't stand out since they're not particularly unusual. This is advice that I should take myself more often, force yourself out of your comfort zone, Make a couple of irrational decisions and just see where it goes. It may not go anywhere, It may go somewhere bad, But what you can count on is learning something new each time you do this.

When you tried to start up your software company, Did you did you ever try just throwing the car in reverse and driving backwards as fast as you could? In a practical example that would be like dropping all the things that you thought are important like making your software better or polishing the presentation of your web page etc, And just shifting all your time to cold calling and hard selling vcs on the basic idea 8 hours a day. It doesn't really make sense right? Losing valuable development time, failing to properly illustrate what's great about your company or put Your best foot forward. Then years later you have this great piece of software or team, And no funding. And you find yourself sitting there watching some episode of shark tank and there's some complete idiot holding a jar of "surfboard lubricant" That he made by pouring a jar of vanilla extract into a jar of Vaseline and then putting a label on it with the name he made up. Then you watch all these people start handing that guy money and he's often running with some huge company. The point has nothing to do with this specific example, I'm just saying that especially in situations where there's only one mind at work as is the case for so many of us artists, There's a tendency to get stuck in these loops. Maybe if you went on shark tank you would've gotten your software company funded. Maybe if you noticed how hard it was to get your company funded you could have derailed the whole idea into something else that made sense, but offered more traction. Start selling a service to other software startups that helps them connect with VCs for a monthly subscription. Give away all your software for free and make your income model donation based, But keep every product small useful and focused so that it genuinely helps a lot of people. 32 Products a year like Winzip, or an easy to use drive mounted tool that loads disk images Windows has trouble with, a desktop widget that keeps track of how much you got done each day. The point is to try and completely break your own pattern on a regular basis without losing focus on your main goal and your central capabilities that could make that goal possible.

The last thing I would add is that in the creative field we have kind of a reverse logic of all the other fields. If I wanted to start an automotive factory the smart thing to do would be to watch other people who had succeeded at that and steer toward the methods that had worked for them. In creativity you want to watch other people who failed and steer away from what they did. In creativity copying a success is failure.

 

[sfoster]

It's okay if I'm not the most special guy in the country with a talent beloved by all
is it really so bad to have an ordinary life?

I wasn't trying to throw a pity party! I'm not giving up, it just is what it is.
actually coming off a six month writers block, I'm finally getting some good ideas down, it feels nice

 

[Nate North]

Well sorry if that came off as pedantic, i'm just trying to help. Not certain I'm particularly good at it, lol.

Happy to hear that you've got some cool new ideas going!

 

[sfoster]

Well sorry if that came off as pedantic, i'm just trying to help. Not certain I'm particularly good at it, lol.

Happy to hear that you've got some cool new ideas going!

No, some of those ideas about the software were good, just didn't want to get too bogged down in the weeds with why the company didn't work out. Switching to a free release model at the time would've been a good idea in retrospect

 

[CelticRambler]

In creativity we have an unusual type of goal that doesn't function like the goals of most other industries. The goal is to have a unique and interesting voice, A concept or a product that takes on a life of its own via the value it gains through its rarity.

Ummm ... that's not (at all) how I'd see it. To my mind, the goal of "creativity" is to transform something ordinary (messy, worthless, broken ...) into something less ordinary. One might argue that a "true creative artist" would have no regard for the eventual value of the work created, but the prospect of some kind of reward is a great motivator. All industries rely on someone in the business having a creative streak, otherwise they fall by the wayside and become irrelevant.

To me what's truly dystopian is looking back at people doing the same job 30 years ago, Realizing I've done 200 times as much work as they ever did at eight times the quality and in some cases it's not worth what they got paid over a long weekend. [ ... ] Today if I do the same amount of work at the same skill level and produce a much better product, I would receive Enough compensation to order three Pizza Hut pizzas on separate occasions.

Thirty years is a very short span of time! Nevertheless, when looking back at what someone did in the past, you must consider the context and the implications of what they did. The first people to produce stock images and stock video were inventive and delivered a product to an industry that was only starting to figure out how to use it. Nowadays - as you are well aware - anyone anywhere can generate stock footage with a few well-chosen words, and the product is essentially high quality garbage, sucked up and spat out by an infinite number of YouTubers and automated content generators, to be watched on a 5" screen (or not watched at all) ...

Were you to look at my career, I left university with a shiny new degree just over thirty years ago. The work I'm doing today (when I can be bothered to do it ) is essentially the same, despite all kinds of fancy new innovations making their way into my workspace. There are things in life that just don't change from one generation to the next, no matter how much creativity you throw at them. That doesn't mean that there's no satisfaction to be gained from doing it well, or that you'll earn as much appreciation for having done it well as you would have thirty years ago.

I'm very aware that at best I'm in the last third of my life (very possibly last quarter or less), and make sure to do things that simply make me happy in the moment, because life is too damn short.

Yep. When I come across a plaque paying tribute to So-And-So for some Great Contribution, I do occasionally wonder what legacy I'll leave behind, and then realise that I probably don't have enough years left to achieve it. I'm about a fifth of the way through a To Do list that I drew up when we moved to France 20 years ago and rediscovered a couple of months ago, so ... ... so instead of chasing an early death in the quest to earn a plaque on a wall, I spend more time on achievable short-term (creative) goals with no thought of "value".

 

[Nate North]

Ummm ... that's not (at all) how I'd see it. To my mind, the goal of "creativity" is to transform something ordinary (messy, worthless, broken ...) into something less ordinary. One might argue that a "true creative artist" would have no regard for the eventual value of the work created, but the prospect of some kind of reward is a great motivator. All industries rely on someone in the business having a creative streak, otherwise they fall by the wayside and become irrelevant.



Thirty years is a very short span of time! Nevertheless, when looking back at what someone did in the past, you must consider the context and the implications of what they did. The first people to produce stock images and stock video were inventive and delivered a product to an industry that was only starting to figure out how to use it. Nowadays - as you are well aware - anyone anywhere can generate stock footage with a few well-chosen words, and the product is essentially high quality garbage, sucked up and spat out by an infinite number of YouTubers and automated content generators, to be watched on a 5" screen (or not watched at all) ...

Were you to look at my career, I left university with a shiny new degree just over thirty years ago. The work I'm doing today (when I can be bothered to do it ) is essentially the same, despite all kinds of fancy new innovations making their way into my workspace. There are things in life that just don't change from one generation to the next, no matter how much creativity you throw at them.



Yep. When I come across a plaque paying tribute to So-And-So for some Great Contribution, I do occasionally wonder what legacy I'll leave behind, and then realise that I probably don't have enough years left to achieve it. I'm about a fifth of the way through a To Do list that I drew up when we moved to France 20 years ago and rediscovered a couple of months ago, so ... ... so instead of chasing an early death in the quest to earn a plaque on a wall, I spend more time on achievable short-term (creative) goals with no thought of "value".

Well I suppose the wonderful thing about creativity is that it has no hard and fast rules and that no one person's perception could really be called right or wrong. It's an inherently subjective art form so I would say that your take on it or my take on it are equally valid. When you get into the business side of it we have more substantial metrics, So perhaps that I should note my somewhat tangled path of logic that has developed over the years. I tried to make art for art sake kind of like you're talking about. My art at that time was live action filmmaking. I realized after a short time that regardless of the quality of my vision it would be destroyed by underfunding. I could perhaps make one film and exhaust my resources but if it didn't take the constraint of profitability into account, The next piece of art I made would be complete garbage because I simply didn't have the resources to execute it at the level the original vision demanded. I proceeded from here integrating profitability as a necessary constraint of larger scale art. That's not because I see commercial viability as a metric of artistic quality but rather because I see it as an impediment to the execution of even the purest artistic vision.

I understand there's probably a few holes in my logic about profitability but the reality is that a lot of us got sold on the future viability of one type of product or another whether it be a college education, expensive production equipment, etc, And ended up getting a pretty raw deal in comparison to people who existed in a time when the world was less dynamic. I probably wouldn't complain about those people if I didn't constantly see them on Fox News complaining about me. I'm not wealthy because I'm stupid and lazy says a guy from the 50s who dug a rock out of the ground and bought 10 houses with it one sunny afternoon. I'm not trying hard enough at my art form says the Seinfeld guest star that collects a $70,000 check every year For a three minute one episode stint in 1996 while I scramble to get $70,000 one time for a film that I worked on for 3 years. My dad for example made about the same amount of money as I did at around the same time in life, But when he went to work for one year and earned 60 grand, He could buy a two story house cash for that one year's salary. That investment of one year's time eventually grew to evaluation of around $350,000. In my instance I was basically treading water keeping all overhead paid at the exact same earnings rate while putting in the exact number of hours he did while doing work at an equivalent level of education.

If instead of working in fields like technology or art I had worked at a chain factory or something, Referencing your example of some things that don't change, I still wouldn't actually be receiving anywhere remotely close to the level of reward per time spent that those people did. There are plenty of things in our lives that we are solely responsible for, But I'd also say that there's a tremendous amount of gray area where an entire populations drew the short or long straw at different times and places in history. I meet a lot of people of a certain political affiliation that recite bullet points about personal accountability as though it's the only factor in the world's grand equation, Truth is, there's more factors than anyone has ever taken account of. You could chalk up my response to complaining or blaming, But the reality is that basically nobody in Czechoslovakia has ever been able to make a Hollywood grade film. Where you live who you know and how other people decide to treat you are often things that you have no control over, So it's significant to note That acting as if every person is on a completely even playing field is disingenuous. I'm not saying that you are doing that in your comments I mainly just using this as an excuse to soapbox about the people that constantly annoy me.

 

[mlesemann]

Yep. When I come across a plaque paying tribute to So-And-So for some Great Contribution, I do occasionally wonder what legacy I'll leave behind, and then realise that I probably don't have enough years left to achieve it.

I've made 2 movies that I'm very proud of, and they, plus hopefully the new one that I'm working on now, are what I see as my legacy. They'll be here long after I'm gone, and I know that they've impacted some people and will impact some others. That works for me. And yeah, I totally understand that 99.9% of what I've done is irrelevant to the rest of the world, but I feel good about it anyway, and that's enough.