mirages
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Post by mirages on Jun 23, 2020 17:39:44 GMT -5
Try again:
Huh. I'm going to assume that there's an issue posting a video someone uploaded live to facebook.
Thanks, practice thread!
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mirages
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Post by mirages on Jun 23, 2020 17:35:20 GMT -5
Testing posting a video -- did not work on main daily news thread.
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mirages
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Post by mirages on Jul 2, 2015 1:20:56 GMT -5
Me, too. I see graciejane is urging us to email the reporter directly, and I can do that as well. That Disque site you have to register with in order to post a comment is an awful glitchy thing! Didn't mean for that to come across as urging, just offering an alternative; since the posting in the comments section might never be seen by the author. Some comment sections won't let you post links and that might be why vikkisusanne's post was hung up in approval. No worries -- I thought it was a good idea, so I did email the reporter. She got back to me quickly with sort of a "that's not my table" response -- she doesn't lay out the pages, but she would supply the new link to the people who do. I don't see any change yet. I also still don't see my comment in the comments section, so your suggestion to email was well taken!
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mirages
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Post by mirages on Jul 1, 2015 20:04:55 GMT -5
That Calgary Sun interview is nice, but too bad they didn't link to the Ghost Town video (at least!) rather than the Trespassing lyric Fidel and the NCOE video! Geesh! I posted a link in the comment section but so far it is awaiting "approval." Geesh is right. Me, too. I see graciejane is urging us to email the reporter directly, and I can do that as well. That Disque site you have to register with in order to post a comment is an awful glitchy thing!
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Post by mirages on Jun 16, 2015 14:19:56 GMT -5
I finally watched the interview, thanks for bringing it over - utterly fascinating.... her explanation of how we have lots of men and women inside us - how we can be more than we think, is just so simple and I so identify... and I loved how she talked about the characters finding her, and how her process starts - from words, or a character's voice - the characters tell her their stories and she just waits for them to come to her, in a way... like I said, completely fascinating... My writing process usually starts with a single scene - which can be at the beginning, or in the middle, or near the end of the story, but the main character is in that scene, so it's an important scene, obviously. I don't necessarily know who the main character is yet, what they look like, or what their story is, but they do something or say something that I find irresistible and that draws me in. It's like, I need to find out more about this, I need to explore what's going on here. It's almost like watching a trailer for a movie, and thinking: I need to see this movie, I need to find out what happens in this story, I need to watch these characters and I find out more about them. So, the writing process can turn into a discovery, as if the story and the characters do already exist somewhere out there and I just need to discover them. Sometimes, however, the process begins completely differently, almost as an exercise in thought: what if the world were like this?.... and I start jotting down notes about this imaginary world: what races inhabit it, is there magic, what are the main societies, what is the political landscape, are there any religions? etc. I basically start from the big picture, from the global, and then gradually zoom in on some characters who find themselves living in these conditions I've set out for them, in the world I've created for them. And they are necessarily affected by this world--in other words, they would have been completely different (perhaps had different personalities, different motivations, different lives to live) if I had imagined them first and then created the world around them.... But because the world was created first - in a way, the characters appear as people who I need, almost as if choosing actors to play certain roles. So - the story comes before the characters, almost.... But, that is just an outline, because as soon as the characters are formed, the story may become flexible - the characters are now changing the story because I allow them to lead me, and not the other way around. The actors which I have chosen to play these parts that I needed filled are now improvising according to their own individual personalities and that changes the rules for me, because, now, even if I know where the story is headed, I may not know how the characters will end up there. So, again, it seems, I am discovering the story through the process of writing it.... I was fascinated by her description of characters coming to her, too. I can't say I've ever experienced that, but I have experienced what you describe as the story moving on seemingly of its own and surprising you. However, I think several decades of writing professionally with a particular audience and objective in mind for what I write has made me way to controlling and goal-oriented about my writing process. I like a lot of the ideas above as places to start loosening up and allowing the story to form itself.
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mirages
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Post by mirages on Jun 16, 2015 14:16:51 GMT -5
Who knows, maybe I'm just too in love with the creative process itself, the discovery of it, and that's why I have such a trouble finishing my projects. Or, the answer might lie in psychology. A few months ago, I attended a leadership training course, and the trainer had us all do some kind of psychological test (I forget what it's called), which was supposed to show us which roles in a team we are most suited for, based on our psychology, I guess. Not surprisingly, my top team role was "original thinker", and the worst one was "finisher" (I scored 0 on that one! lol ).... But, these are all skills that can be worked on... (at least I hope so... ) All of your comments on your writing process were interesting, toramenor, but I thought I'd just highlight the last para for now because what you're describing is a typical Perceiving or P personality type according to the Jungian personality type indicator developed by Myers-Briggs. P's love potential, new ideas and new projects and they hate closure because it shuts the door to more cool new stuff coming in. The complementary type is Judging, J, and J's are great at closure, making decisions, finishing projects and moving on, meeting deadlines, that sort of thing. Of the four sets of complementary "types", P's and J's come into conflict most often, but once they can identify the unique gift and usefulness of the other way of doing things, the can work well together in teams -- or a single individual can do what you've done above with another typing system and say, "Hey, I see I'm strong here, but probably need to develop that other set of skills in order to round out my personality/tool kit/whatever." That's the only really good thing about typing systems, I think -- not to create a box for people to live in or a category to affiliate with and fight for as superior to others -- it always amuses me how quickly we humans *will* try to go there, though. One office I worked in did a typing test that similar to the one you describe, and I thought the neat thing about it was that people who may have been in non-creative jobs could be identified as potential generators and new ideas and initiatives ... our director put together a team of these folks to develop new directions. Unfortunately in that particular case they didn't actually generate much, but I thought it had potential to break people out of silos. (In that case, it just created new silos!). Myself, I swing both ways on the P/J scale and it's context-dependant: I've taken the indicator at home and at home, and tend to come out slightly J at work (deadlines, deadlines!) and a little mroe P in my personal life. More of a continuum, as with most things.
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Post by mirages on Jun 16, 2015 9:17:51 GMT -5
What I was trying to say with all this, and didn't have much time to expound on, is this: mirages, when I write stuff here, I'm really just philosophizing, expressing myself - it's a piece of prose, meant to give people a small insight into my mind. I am being myself and I am expressing myself - that is the way I try to connect to others. But that connection does not depend on their agreeing with everything I say -- the connection is made through me showing who I am (or at least a piece of me) and then the other person accepting that. It's not about agreeing, it's about getting to know somebody. So, it's fine whether or not you agree with my views on gender above, or when I wrote about what magic means to me as a writer, or when I wrote about why I love Ursula Le Guin, or anything, really. Ah, I see -- the use of "agree/disagree" must have come across as argumentative, where my intent was more to explore why I basically agreed with what you were saying but had a sense that there was something else I wanted to explore as well. That, to me, is part of conversation or the refining of ideas and not dispute. But, now I know how it can sound, especially online, so I' can be more considerate.
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Post by mirages on Jun 14, 2015 11:25:07 GMT -5
Curious that you're interested in The Lathe of Heaven. If you recall, a few pages back, we talked a lot about dreaming and reality. That's the main theme of this novel! The main character has a special ability to dream "effective dreams", which alter reality. Again, the novel falls into sci-fi, but I think it's more a psychological novel, because it explores human psyche, human nature, etc. It's a really interesting concept. I already told you about The Left Hand of Darkness - androgyny is a very important topic in that novel. Again, Ursula LeGuin imagines a new concept, like a thought experiment: what if people on some planet had no binary male-female gender, but were genderless, both and neither. Ultimately, she forces you to view them as simply human. For me personally, that is exactly how I view people: I don't care if they're male or female - androgyny appeals to me, as well, because it is the outward representation of that idea: that gender is ultimately a social construct and doesn't really exist in humans. Biologically, there are a few differences between male and female sex - not as many as some people think, though - (but let's not forget there are all kinds of intersex people as well - they are neither male nor female, which means this binary does not even exist in biology; it's a false assumption there as well) - and there are even fewer differences (if there are any differences at all) when it comes to "male and female" gender. Because gender is how you feel and identify on the inside. And on the inside, people are much too complex to say: "I am just this one thing", whatever that one thing may be. It's a false assumption that we are all either men or women on the inside and that this is some sort of natural division. First off, I know I don't have just one defining gender inside of my Self, and I don't think I'm unique in this respect - in fact, I don't think it's just a group of people within the LGBTQI population. I think genderlessness exists everywhere, no matter what your sex, what your sexual orientation, what your proclaimed gender may be. I call myself a woman, I self-identify as a woman, but I also know that I am not a woman in my mind. I've always known that my mind is of all genders and none. The mind has no gender, but I can use it to imagine whatever gender I desire. That's probably one of the reasons I'm a writer and I like telling stories, because I can imagine myself in the shoes of any character and I don't have a problem envisioning how would a man deal with this situation? Those kinds of things just don't occur to me. It's absurd to me. My characters are figments of my imagination, they are exactly the way I want them to be and they act according to the personality I've given them. Not according to their gender. I actually stumbled across a Youtube of The Lathe of Heaven last night and got partway into it -- intriguing for a number of reasons including the fact that it was one of the first TV movies and both the musical score and the acting style feel like they come from such a different era. It was too late to finish the whole thing, but I'll get back to it -- sure had vivid dreams after watching it, though -- thankfully, not effective ones! I really want to read The Left Hand of Darkness, but haven't yet been able to find it in an accessible format. I will eventually, though! I both agree and disagree with you on gender. First, I was struck by how much what you said about gender being just one thing about you and not defining you reminded me of Adam's comments about sexual orientation, and I think that's so. I think when someone from the heteronormative community looks at someone outside that community, we assume that it must be such a big thing to be "outside" that it MUST define your experience of all of life ... but we think that about celebrities, too, right? Adam seems determined to tell people that no, he doesn't dress glam all the time, isn't fabulous all the time, has the same friends he always has, and doesn't sleep hanging upside down from a curtain rod -- again, we tend to assume that someone rich and famous has a life defined by those conditions, but the human experience is more similar than dissimilar despite the trappings. Anne Lamott often says that aspiring writers assume that being published will "solve" (or perhaps justify) their lives in some way, but that it isn't so, that being published will just highlight whatever neuroses and insecurities they have all the more ... So, yes, ditto with gender. I recall as a young woman being told more than once that I "think like a man," and at that time (the late 70s and early 80s) that was meant and received as a compliment! I'm still shaking my head over that ... but it relates to what you say about the mind being neither gender. At the same time, I am the mother of one boy and one girl, and they have rocked my original assumptions that gender had more to do with nurture than with nature, and I hear the same thing from most of the other moms of kids of both genders. And that's bearing in mind that my daughter loves video games, manga, Comicon conventions and other typically "boy" stuff and favours sweatpants and a t-shirt pretty much 24/7. I also find the conventional conceptions of masculine and feminism a helpful shorthand if we can dispatch with the biological determinism that sometimes goes along with that ... the helpful part, for me, is in looking at the full range of human potential, looking at where we may need to develop more of this or that aspect of ourselves with a view toward wholeness. I personally tend to sit most naturally in the "passive/receptive" end of the scale often characterized as the feminine, but need to work on being my ability to be more active and initiative. Similar to how I think the Myers Briggs personality types are meant to be used -- they show you your "resting" strengths and tendencies and show you where you might want to develop. I can see, however, that because the feminine has been so under-valued, people might want to move toward a different way of characterizing what were previously conceptualized as masculine and feminine energies.
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Post by mirages on Jun 12, 2015 15:29:48 GMT -5
Oh, and since we're doing slightly askew comedy at the moment, here's my favourite routine by my favourite comedian (note that the first few minutes are a little bleak -- it gets funny at about 4:00):
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Post by mirages on Jun 11, 2015 15:50:23 GMT -5
Thanks for that bit of Fry and Laurie, toramenor -- I'm a fan of both, and have been binge-watching "House" on Netflix periodically over the last year, so very disorienting to see the doctor doing a sort of vaudeville! Love Stephen Fry, too -- have you ever seen his documentary on bipolar? Fascinating, self-reflective stuff. I have seen the documentary - it is great. I have watched pretty much everything I could find that Stephen Fry has ever done. A Bit of Fry and Laurie was a post-Monty Python comedy sketch show that was hugely popular in the UK in the early nineties (it ran for 4 or 5 seasons, I believe). In fact, it has influenced a lot of later British comedians, because it was so original and - well - because Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry are two really funny individuals who play off each other so well and who also happen to be incredibly smart. Take a look at this sketch to see what I mean (I think it is especially suitable for this thread LOL): Oh, I LOVED that -- thank you! Got lost in "related videos" for a bit, too -- wouldn't it have been great if ABC had responded this way after the AMAs? I also watched the Bill Moyers interview with Ursula LeGuin last night -- they talk a lot about "The Lathe of Heaven," which the presenter references at the end of LeGuin's speech that you posted earlier. I may have to pick that one up. She also has some thoughts on characters and gender toward the end of the interview. I confess I'm missing Adam's more overt androgyny these days. I find it interesting that both he and Freddie played a lot with more feminine style and mannerisms early in their careers and then began styling themselves much more classically masculine, muscles 'n' all, in their 30s. Don't know that it "means" anything, just noticed the similar trajectory.
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