Active Recall!

Podcasts, videos, and iPad art

Procreate how-to video outline

Usually I’d pound some jug of cold brew to mask the sleep deprivation, but we’re completely tapped out. I usually have a bag of Trader Joe’s instant grinds as back up, but we’re completely tapped out of that too. So I dipped into the mushroom coffee packs this morning. And that’s what I want to talk about today… having BACKUPS and always being ready to be ready even when you’re not READY.

Just kidding, today I’m going to jot some ideas down for a future video…

First, a quote about editing from Edit Better by Jeff Bartsch:

Stick to one function at a time. Do your foundation work, THEN coverage, THEN music, THEN titles, THEN audio, THEN color, etc. Don’t try to do everything at once. But does that kill creativity? Some people will say, “This is personal. You’ve got to do whatever works for you. Doesn’t this assembly line thing take out all the creativity?” Heck no. On the contrary, focusing on a single process promotes creativity.

The function right now will be drafting sections of videos.

Some title ideas

  • How I use Procreate in 2021
  • Setting Procreate up for FLOW
  • How to animate with Procreate

A roll idea: I can try to do another “Follow along with a Jim Lee stream” session and record that. Usually takes 30-60 mins but also creates that exact amount of footage which is super useful to have. Now that I think about it, one of the more popular videos I have is just me drawing and then talking over it:

Thumbnail
#The footage here took exactly that amount of time to film. Probably worth doing this again.#

Then these could be some of the sections—I won’t worry about ordering these right now. Just want to capture some of the ideas.

UntitledImage

  • Something about setting up the radial menu

I’ve enjoyed using the radial menu and my hunch is that more people would use it if they tried it out. You get 6 slots to customize in the menu. I give 3 to different brushes and then the remaining 3 for: Previous color, New layer, Duplicate layer

You can also now create different sets of menu settings to swap between. I want to set that up eventually (one for animating, one for wireframing, etc.) but haven’t done it yet.

animation books
#A couple books that I need to actually read instead of thinking I’ll absorb them through osmosis by way of them sitting on the shelf very close to my desk.#
  • My animation settings

Note: I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m sure there are reasons the defaults are to show a bunch of onion layers at that opacity.

But I usually do one onion layer at the default opacity.

I could also do a couple very simple animations to show the workflow here.

  • Procreate sawdust

Procreate generates some very nice cutting room floor stuff. You always, always have the timelapse video available. Layers can be brought into Figma to create a carousel.

And that’s that for the outline. Three sections seems like a good amount. I’ve been writing this for way longer than I planned, so I gotta hop. (Video to come!)

Midnights with Booster (Ramblings vol. ???)

Got Boostie Boost right next to me and the Cold Turky Micromanager + MarsEdit mega write-in-the-editor combo to keep me on task. And the task is to just write some random thoughts. Easy enough!

  • Just got a MacBook Air M1 — I bought a MacBook Air M1 on launch day and then ended up returning it to just keep my 16” MacBook Pro, thinking that I really needed the larger screen. I noticed that I really just ended up not using my laptop much at all anymore because I just didn’t want to lug it around and it’d get so hot in my lap. And those extra few seconds it takes to turn on and start thinking made me long for the sweet, sweet M1 experience. So I’m back and loaded it up a bit more to a 1TB and 16GB version. We’ll see how this goes and if I’ll have envy once the Pros are announced later this year. In any case, I’m immediately happy with the purchase so far.

Here’s my disaster of a desk, mid unboxing

Desk

  • I want to focus on this blog again because I don’t want to get further addicted to Twitter — I think Twitter’s great. In Deep Work, Cal Newport talks about the utility of online platforms and evaluating the tradeoff of doing some task at the cost of losing a bunch of focus. For some it can be very much worth it. (An example that resonated was that a college student that learns about real-life events mainly through Facebook probably should keep using it. Or I guess used to resonate, because of the pandemic and also because I am very much way too old to resonate with a college student learning about real-life events and going to them, not having social anxiety, etc.)
  • … I digressed — Okay so I think Twitter’s great for all sorts of reasons: you can find people with similar interests, share your work with others, build up an audience, etc. BUT I’m very addicted to it. For many of those good reasons, but even when I read a bunch of good stuff from people I admire, I still inevitably find myself in some replies rabbit hole. I rarely feel good after. (Which I acknowledge has plenty to do with my mindset, but in any case…) I’ve even switched my password to something much harder to type and removed it from my password manager so I have to type it in manually with the vow to only use 3rd-party tools to write threads so that I don’t see the feed. What happens is that I’m becoming very very good at typing the 28-character password to log back in. It’s madness. So I’m going to just write into the void on my blog for a bit until the urge goes away. (I guess?)

Okay I found the quote from Deep Work:

The Craftsman Approach to Tool Selection: Identify the core factors that determine success and happiness in your professional and personal life. Adopt a tool only if its positive impacts on these factors substantially outweigh its negative impacts.

In short: it wasn’t bringing me happiness. I had some mild success that maybe could build up in the long run. But the negative aspects could build up also in the long run, too. So I’m pausing to re-evaluate. 

The books say I should always end with some CTA but I don’t really have anything in mind right now. Instead I’ll just share one link and the next thing that I might write about.

One link: Really enjoyed these two episodes of Magic the Gathering: Drive to Work Podcast: #809: Arabian Nights with Richard Garfield, Part 1 and #810: Arabian Nights with Richard Garfield, Part 2. (And here’s an older episode I need to give another listen: #737: Richard Garfield.) All the early Magic the Gathering card (or I guess particularly in the early days) has a story to how it came to be. Things are probably more systematic 3 decades later. Anyway, Garfield about using Arabian Nights for flavor with a sprinkling of Neil Gaiman for “City in a Bottle”, based on Sandman #50. 

The next thing that I might write about: A quick post about my current book rotation. Right now I’m reading Musashi (Kindle version), Junior (a copywriting book, Print version), Steph Smith’s eBook: Doing Content Right (which has a convincing argument about SEO still being underrated—it very well might be the reason that I’m writing on the blog again right at this moment.), Adam Grant’s Think Again (Audible, but I did that thing again where I was listening only when I could pay attention but thennnn one time listened when I couldn’t pay attention and now I’ve lost my place where I need to go back to where I was definitely listening and paying attention so I’ll listen to the whole thing over again).

Okay that all went much longer than I expected. I need to set a timer next time and stick to it.

Reading Ramblings: “How to Get Rich” by Felix Dennis

Check out the full notes for “How to Get Rich: One of the World’s Greatest Entrepreneurs Shares His Secrets” by Felix Dennis

Using Cold Turkey Micromanager & MarsEdit to try to write in the editor and get something up on the blog without overthinking it.

I just finished reading “How to Get Rich” by Felix Dennis this morning. Thought I’d just write some ramblings about it afterward.

  • Building a moat with PSX demo discs (lesson: copy earlier or it might be too late) — These weren’t part of Dennis Publishing (Felix Dennis’s company) but he talks about a competitor that had a novel idea for their Playstation magazine. They went directly to Sony to strike a deal to do their official magazine and each month the magazine would come with a demo disc. Eventually, Dennis Publishing tried to do something similar but the official magazine had exclusive rights to the good games. The free disc in the plastic bag was more important than the magazine. They lost because the games on their discs were worse.This reminded me of The Innovation Stack, which talks about the importance of copying things you can copy to be able to focus some energy on innovating.

    Growing up, my parents bought two subscriptions for me and my brother: EGM and Game Players. Reading about how he built a magazine empire reminded me of the joy of getting those magazines in the mail each month. Whoever picked up the mail got first crack at it. I’d jump to the reviews to see what got game of the month, skim the reviews, then jump back to the front to read the mailbag.

  • Parallels between lessons in the book and Andrew Wilkinson’s approach to business — I picked this up after hearing about it on the My First Million podcast, either on an episode with Wilkinson or an episode where they mention him and the book. Or I’m misremembering entirely. But he does have a Twitter thread talking about the book. Anyway, while reading the book I did see some links between the book and what Wilkinson is doing—of course, these aren’t ideas unique to this book or anything but it’s what I was reading. (1) Local newspapers make good business (2) Learning lessons through building a successful media company (Wilkinson ran a successful Apple news site for teenagers as a teenager) (3) Actually, that’s a pretty direct parallel itself: Dennis Publishing had many early successes with technology magazines, including one focused on the Mac and personal computing (4) Wilkinson actually did apply those lessons successfully in the startup world, which Felix says was something he missed the boat on as far as paths available to get rich (5) Focusing on execution and hiring talented operators.

Okay gotta run, but some other things I need to post about in the future: Re-purposing content (Dennis and a partner wrote a Bruce Lee biography in the 70s and they were able to use all the interviews and other research for a Kung Fu magazine), understanding the sacrifice required to get rich (and he does mean like helicopter rich, categorizing $1-3 million as “comfortably poor”), and of course, that getting rich won’t make you happy (but that the most effective way to learn this is to get rich).

Video log – How to design your environment (for better habits)

I just posted a video about habits and designing your environment. I tried relating the environment to different things in Mario and using visuals from the game to illustrate some tips about environment design.

I planned to use examples from multiple games when I started. But as I was making the visuals it just sort of worked out to where I was just using one game. And now the retro…

What went well?

  • I put the visuals together in small parts during the week. I remembered to record draft run-throughs along the way. This always helps to see if the structure makes sense and if I need more examples or if I can start cutting things down. One big thing was realizing I needed way more stills since I wasn’t animating anything.
  • Just publishing again was good. Trying to get back into the groove of publishing regularly.
  • Got some extra motivation after recording a podcast with Wally this week and creating a mini challenge for ourselves to do 3 videos this month
  • Using stills and not doing transitions between the slides might be worth the trade-off of losing some slightly interesting visual elements. The upside is being able to clean up all of the word gaps in the audio really quickly. I was able to use Descript to remove the gaps without worrying that I would be cutting the clip in the middle of a transition.
  • I tried to spend a little more time on the thumbnail than I usually do. Some of that was inspired by listening to MrBeast interviewed by MKBHD on the WVFRM podcast. He talks about spending hours thinking of thumbnails and titles.

Tracing thumbnail

 

What could be improved?

  • The visuals aren’t great. There are moments in the video where it’s just sitting on a single visual for longer than I’d like.
  • I didn’t put any book quotes in here at all. I could have pulled some in from Designing Your Life or Atomic Habits or any of the habits books really. We’ll see how the videos does. Pulling the quotes in afterward can take long because it requires hunting them down and then deciding between a few different ones to reflect the idea that I’m talking about.
  • The premise just could have been better. I do wish I used more examples from different games. Something like Super Mario Maker clips could have been better (since it’s all about directly designing environments), but it’d take much much longer to make the video if I used actual game clips. Maybe something to try for a future video.

What will you try next time?

  • I want to continue with doing the visuals in Figma. It’ll make it easy to re-use parts from different videos and copy and paste things. It’s a little cumbersome inserting or arranging slides since they’re Figma frames. That’d be really easy in Keynote or Slides, but I’ll get faster at doing it in Figma so I’m not too worried about it.
  • I think this could be one of those decisions that compounds over time. If I can build up a library of reusable pieces for presentations for the videos, then I’ll be able to do things like create component for three slides that show a timeline. I could do that with themes and styles in Keynote but it’s just not as lightweight a system as components in Figma.

74: We’re back (pt VII) x 2021 Goals

Okay we hit RECORD again finally. Kicking off 2021. We talk about some of our goals

  • Fitness goals
  • Creation goals
  • Personal goal

We’ll be making videos in 2021 and sharing our progress as we go.