Amazon Kindle review

Ok so after reading reviews on various places about the Amazon Kindle (the first one being one posted by Neil Gaiman a year or so ago) and the Kindle being available in France since october 2009, I finally decided to get one. I received it last saturday and have been playing around with it every day. So these really are first impressions and they’re very good. At first I thought it would be a nice gadget tool for when I’m moving around, like going to cafés or visiting my family or when I travel South to teach. I wouldn’t have to carry the extra weight of the 3 or 4 books I’m used to carry with me and I would save the choosing time. Imagine: one small device, light as a paperback, containing my whole collection of books at all times, serving as a bookshelf as well as a bookstore. That sounded very reassuring: to be able to carry all my books with me, knowing that they are a great part of what makes home feel like… well, home. I wasn’t necessarily convinced by the real usage I would do of it. Would I use it to read even while not on a trip? Would it mainly sit on my desk, gathering dust, another underused useless tech device? Was I victim of just another fad?

But then I got it and all these questions faded away, only living me with one: How did I manage to live without a Kindle before? What first struck me was the comfort of reading. It really felt like a real book, as soothing and as forgettable a vessel for the words that would bring me out to imaginary spaces and times. My fears came from reviews I had read which stated the loading time between two pages was noticeable but I didn’t feel any difference with the time it takes to actually turn a physical page. The words just stand there, waiting to be read, lit only by external light, easy on the eye and their size adjustable to your level of tiredness. Then there were all these agreable feats such as highliting or taking notes or the very much appreciated dictionary feature (just move your cursor next to a word and its description will appear at the bottom of the page, barely interrupting the flow of your reading).

Then, I timidly set foot on the uncharted land of Amazon Kindlestore. Accessible directly from the device it uses the 3G network to connect directly to 300,000+ references (400,000 in the US): books, magazines, newspapers, browsable, searchable, and buyable in just one click. It’s like having direct access to a neverending bookstore (because let’s face it, you’re never gonna read all 300,000 titles). The perspective is vertiginous. No more delivery time, no more waiting. If you want to read a book, you can download it in less than a minute and it will appear right away in your collection so you can start reading it in the exact minute your desire flourished. And if you’re not sure you really want to read that precise book, you have access to free sample chapters.

You also have the possibility to upload your own documents to your kindle (immediately if they’re .pdf or within 5 minutes if they’re another format), which is very comfortable if you need to read a report before a meeting and have only the time of the commute to get it done.

In just a few words, the kindle is a far greater device than I would have expected and even if I’ll still read on paper I can see how my future book buying will divide evenly between books I want to keep forever (that will be paper) and books I only care to read once ; books I want to always carry with me (kindle) and ones I just want to keep for research and reference (paper) ; books I want to read for my own pleasure (kindle) and books I want to share.

Yes, this is what I dislike the most about kindle: the fact that your device is linked to your kindle account and yours only, making it impossible to share the books you buy with others. Contrary to a physical book, the kindle version is trapped in its vessel, you can’t sell it or make a gift of it. And all readers know how pleasant it is to offer or receive a book as a present. You might, however, register up to 6 kindles to one account, which makes it possible to share one account among different members of a family, creating some feeling of a family collection. But we’re far from the actual bookshelves crammed with titles, inside which to lose oneself, the eyes gazing upon authors’ names and books’ titles, being seduced into grabing one and immersing oneself into unexpected words and characters. I don’t however see why the two couldn’t share an habitat, the kindle and the physical book, each with its own perks, each both enticing and repulsive depending on what you’re looking for in a specific situation.

I still need to see how the Kindle does pass the test of time but as of now, I’m reading far more consistently as I used to these last months. I bring it nearly everywhere with me, opening it up in the metro as much as in my bedroom, my kitchen or less admittable places. It’s pretty addictive.

John the Wolf is back

Parce que ce blog est fait un peu pour tout, parce que je ne veux pas refaire un blog trop spécialisé et parce que je suis ici chez moi, j’ai envie d’écrire aussi en français. J’ai envie de parler de musique et pas juste de comment faire de l’argent et économiser du temps. J’ai envisagé faire ce blog en anglais uniquement et le traduire mais disons-le franchement, cela m’ennuie et j’ai suffisamment à faire pour ne pas faire des choses qui m’ennuient. Et comme je pense alternativement dans les deux langues, mon blog, qui doit me ressembler, en sera le reflet.

Mille Excuses Milady - Jean Leloup

J’écoute Mille Excuses Milady, le nouvel album de Jean Leclerc/Jean Leloup/Pablo Ruiz/Massoud al-Rachid, auteur/compositeur/interprète/romancier/vidéaste de génie et de caprice. Après avoir tué le personnage de Jean Leloup en 2004, il décide que c’est l’heure de la maturité, l’heure de “s’assagir”. Il devient Jean Leclerc et sort un album noir et morbide, Mexico, en 2006. Sans grande surprise, avril 2009 voit le retour de Jean Leloup avec l’album Mille Excuses Milady où il qualifie son suicide artistique comme un “Monkey Suicide”. Sans surprise, parce que depuis le début de sa carrière, à la fin des années 80, Leloup annonce régulièrement qu’il arrête la musique, qu’il se lance dans le cinéma, dans la littérature, que c’est fini, et il revient. Son génie l’excuse. Son univers unique, ses textes ciselés et sa musique rock ne déçoivent pas. Encore une fois, l’album est habité d’histoires et de personnages, dont certains remontent quelques albums en arrière ou ont été développés sur le site internet du chanteur: http://roiponpon.com. 

 

Leloup is back

leloup.tv devrait voir le jour bientôt sans que l’on sache trop de quoi il va retourner. Des clips peut-être ou des court-métrages comme l’adaptation de Noir Destin que le Mien, un roman de Leloup écrit sous le nom de Massoud al-Rachid et dont une adaptation en court-métrage a été diffusée quelques années sur roiponpon.com. Rien de plus à dire, il faut écouter les chansons, lire les textes et se laisser porter, découvrir l’univers de Leloup et emporter par les riffs poétiques, les chants esthétiques et les paroles acérées. 

 

Mille Excuses Milady s’achète ici

The story of how Tim Ferriss became my guru without even knowing it

What striked me most when i first stumbled upon Tim Ferriss’s book “The Four Hour Workweek” is that it was classified as an economy/entreuprenarial manual. I never felt that way about the book. Sure it gives you a few keys on how to manage a company but what it mainly is is a lifestyle guide. Like Seneca’s “On the Shortness of Life” that I’ve kept as my bedside book during my teen years and which Tim loves, “The Four Hour Workweek” is a paradigm switching experience. 

Basically the logline for the book could be: “what you always deemed as unchangeable liferules is about to change for ever”. Because that’s what this book does. It reminds you you don’t have to live the life society wants to impose on you. You have the rights and the means to choose your own lifestyle – or rather your art de vivre. To reduce Tim’s book to entrepenarial counselling is, if you ask me, pachydermic crap.

 

The first lesson I applied from Tim’s book is to define your short-term goals. The biggest reason why I felt bored was because I had nothing to do. Ok there was this ice hockey class I planned to take and would have liked to take right away but I had to wait till september for the new season to begin. I was not in a hurry, just curious to try a new sport so I was ready to wait. I would have liked to take it right away, I didn’t want to take it right away. In fact, I wanted nothing. So what I did one sunday afternoon while my wife wrote her query  letter for a new job, is I took a pen, a little notebook, Tim’s chapter 4 and I wrote a list of things I had in my mind. They were things I was curious to try, things I had always wanted but not allowed myself to do, places I wanted to visit (sadly “the whole world” isn’t specific enough when you’re looking at actionnable goals) and skills I wanted to learn (makes me realize I forgot to consider people I’d want to meet, Tim Ferriss would be one of these, if only to thank him personally for the Book). And suddenly the numbness of my mind lifted and I was cramming line after line of desires on the page. I named it “Things to do before I die” which made it easier to fill than “what do I want?”

Things to do before I die

Suddenly my life felt far less boring. There was so much to learn and so much to do I would never have enough time (another misconception soon to be gone). That’s when enthusiasm came back. I was not numb at all anymore. Next step was to take my notebook and decide which 5 things I wanted to be/have/do in the next 6 months. It proved far more easy than what I expected. I understood that I had time. 6-month periods are short enough that you can plan a lot of them in your life (about 100 hundred if you’re 30) and long enough that you can do a lot during that time. Can you think of 100 things you would want to accomplish in your life? Things that would require 6 months to achieve? I don’t. Most of what I want can be done in just a few days. Do you want examples?

I want to fly. I can paraglide in tandem right now if I want, I just need to spend a few hours to get to a moutain and I can use these hours to plan whatever other dream I want. If I want to fly alone, one-week classes are enough that you have the autonomy required to do it. I want to fire a gun. A few metro stops from my appartment there’s a shooting range. I can rent a gun there and fire a few rounds. Spent time: 2-3 hours. I want to visit Vancouver. I can do that in 10 days but I’d rather take at least a whole month, giving me time to meet people there (maybe William Gibson and Douglas Coupland, that would be nice), get a real feel of Vancouver’s life. This trip wouldn’t need any preparation apart from spending a few minutes on the phone with a travel agent. These three experiences could fit in just 1/6th of the 6 month timespan I have to allot. My point is: your life is long enough and things are easy enough to get that you don’t have to make choices you can have/do/be everything, you just need to decide what you want the most right now and what you can wait for. Then, you act, one small step at a time until you get where you wanted to be. Usually it will be faster than what you expected. Plus: it’s really cheap.

You also need to learn to seize opportunities. I like teaching and I wanted to be a screenwriting teacher (another goal that could wait). I thought about creating my own school but that was too much work for the energy I wanted to invest in it. I wanted to be a teacher in my old school but never asked. Then I heard of an opportunity in an entirely different place with people I love. Teaching there would allow me to travel regularly, which is something I want. It would also give me the opportunity to spend more time with people whom company I enjoy and whom I have too few chances to see, which is something else I want. So I asked. I simply sent an email to the head of the school saying I heard about the vacant place and I was interested. She said yes. Time spent: 10 minutes of email writing. Learn to recognize and take these chances. They always happen, you just have to be wary for them and to be bold enough to ask for them. Sometimes you don’t even have to work for your dreams.

For longer dreams, start today and be consistent. I want to learn how to draw. I’ve always loved sketchbooks and I’m jealous of people who know how to sketch life. I want to be able to do it but I’m too lazy to take art classes. What I’m not lazy to do is sketching something for 5 minutes everyday. I use this simple exercize: take a picture, put it upside down and reproduce it. It’s supposed to help you detach your drawing for what it’s supposed to represent. You’re not drawing a tree, you’re assembling shapes and I’ve been told it’s a more efficient way to learn drawing than just trying to draw precise stuff. So that’s what I do. I have a picture that I reproduce everyday. I don’t know where this is going but my biggest faith in life is that exercising will make you reach anything. So I just do it. And I’m happy because I get to draw everyday and I feel I’m on my way to something. It might take me a few years to get there but that’s cool with me. Instead of staying frustrated by my inability to draw, I’m acting to change it and that makes the whole difference.

Act now, reconnect with your dreams, turn them into goals and ask yourself: “which of my dreams will I fulfill today?

 

Buy The Four Hour Workweek

How Tim Ferriss saved me from a dull life

As I said earlier in a french post, I felt numb. Not physically numb, rather my ability to dream was on hold, my mind was circling around and my passion had faded away. I had done it. I had finally reached what I had been fighting for during 17 years. What was there left for me to do? Live the dream until I died? That would be at least 50 years of the same routine. Dream life or not, I couldn’t bear that thought.

Imagine my surprise, to realise that although I had all I ever wanted I was bored. If I combined my work time, that made for 7 days/month, about 60 hours. But I had to wait for other people to give me assignments. I never knew when I would have to work and because of that I forced myself to stay reachable at all times. I sat in front of my computer every single day, waiting for an email to drop in with my new work. What’s the use of freedom if you make nothing of it? When the email finally reached me I would work a few hours and send my work, then wait for the next step. Once, the wait lasted 1 month, 1 month during which I mainly just sat at my desk, waiting. Ok, I drafted a few personal projects but my mind wasn’t focused. I was always ready to shift my attention to the I’m-sure-it’ll-come-soon assignment. Not very efficient, is it?

Before, when I was feeling uncomfortable with my life I always told myself things would be much much better once I’d be a pro writer. That’s the only thing I wanted and that’s what I was fighting for every single day. But now that I was there I didn’t know what to do, what to turn to. Everything seemed unreachable and unintersting. If become a writer didn’t solve the boredom issue, how could anything else? Was I a spoiled child who’d never be satisfied with anything or was it the human condition to experience boredom throughout one’s life? Whatever the answer I couldn’t live with it.

Here I was, contemplating my fate of numbness, reading books I didn’t care for, surfing sites I held no interest for and listening to music that couldn’t get my mind out of that state. I needed something else. I wondered if maybe moving away, beginning a new life in some other place of the world… that could be a solution. I wouldn’t be bored if I had to learn a new language, build a new network and a new work experience. Would that be an acceptable alternative? Being a noob my whole life? I assumed it would take me 2 years to make my way in a new culture. Let’s say I could feel the novelty of the experience another year? Would that mean moving again to some other place every 3 years? Even with 5 years spans it all just appeared to me as the perspective of yet another routine. Which was exactly what I was searching for a way out of.

How to change your life paradigm

 

The situation looked irremediable. I was doomed to a routiny life. That’s when I found out about Tim Ferriss’s The Four hour workweek. I don’t remember how, I just remember that I read a few reviews on various blogs, mostly about economics. Most of these blogs displayed large extracts of the book and that’s what convinced me to buy it. I read it in one big gulp and immediately was convinced that what it offered was not at all a way to make easy money but a whole new paradigm, something I was myself trying to define and adopt in my life. Tim is 5 years older than me and he was 5 years ahead of me in his life design. What a chance for me: a shortcut was offered. Some other guy had tried stuff, he had gone through the suffering and the astonishment, the fear of emptiness and he had emerged even more alive on the other side. Just what I needed.

I immediately decided to listen to myself and to him at the same time. I didn’t want routine and I didn’t want boredom? Then why would I want to force myself into categories I didn’t care about? Why stay a screenwriter? Why did I only project myself in other cities doing the same job? Truth is I was afraid. My big motto in life is never to let fear stop me from doing things and I failed at applying it. I was afraid to lose what I had fought for, I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to get my comfort back, I was afraid of lots of stupid things. I was getting old. Not age-old but mind-old. That’s the worse.

It was time I kicked myself in the butt and forced myself into new experiences. It’s been years since I want to build a company, I have no skills in economics, I suck at budgetting and when I play boardgames I never know how to manage my resources. I can learn. I can even hire people who are comfortable with it and can teach me while doing the job for me. That’s new experiences, new learnings, a new art de vivre. Now I know how to fill the 3 weeks I have left every month. I don’t need to waste this time, I can use it to grow.

Scrivener overview: The best crafting tool I found so far

Tim Ferriss, author of the great great great life changing book “The 4 hour workweek” twitted this morning, asking for people who knew about Scrivener.app to give him the pros and cons of the app and compare it with Evernote. Unable to reach him fast I took the time to write a sort of really quick review of the app. Being unreachable makes it so that people will take initiatives like this one. What could have been a “Scrivener is the greatest crafting tool I’ve ever used” tweet became a 1300 words long overview of the app. that I decided to post here for all to enjoy.

I cannot recommand Scrivener too much to anyone dealing with the craft of writing.

[FrenchVersion] Pour les francophones: ceci est un aperçu de l’excellent logiciel de construction de manuscrit/projet/articles/etc. Scrivener. Je l’ai écrit suite à un tweet de Tim Ferriss, auteur de “La Semaine de Quatre Heures”, que je ne saurais trop vous recommander. En substance, Scrivener est l’outil parfait pour organiser les différentes versions d’un texte, ses éléments de recherche, prendre des notes, tout ça dans un unique document et au sein d’un logiciel doté d’une foultitude de fonctions toutes plus utiles les unes que les autres. Et tout ça pour la modique somme de 40$ (~30€).[/FrenchVersion]

 

@TimFerriss Hi Tim, I work with Scrivener mostly for screenwriting and boardgame reviewing. I discovered your awesome book, about a week ago. It helped me put light on the boredom I experienced even if I had reached my dream of being a pro writer and gave me the motivational boost I needed to put some longing projects into action. So for that, thank you!

 

First, let it be known that I’m not a user of Evernote. I only discovered it thanks to your WordPress conference, two days ago, and haven’t yet given it a thorough look.

 

Ok so here’s a bit of backgroung story about me and the needs I needed Scrivener to cover. It should read fast but you can jump directly to the bolded sections for a list of pros and cons.

I’ve been using Scrivener for two month now. I used it for the sake of developping a videogame universe for Ubisoft. Before I found Scrivener I used Freemind for mindmapping and Microsoft Word for text editing. But I wanted to find an alternative to MSWord since it bugged too often and was very slow. Plus I ended up with litteraly hundreds of .doc files with all my notes, drafts and research. This is something I hated and that concurred to making MSWord bug and slow down since, needing my notes, I opened half a dozen files everytime I used the app. Needless to say the stress it built plus the time it wasted were huge. Also, MSWord isn’t really good for navigating through parts of your work while you’re writing it. Let’s say I’d be writing a script. The way I work, I need to be going back and forth throughout the scenes all the time to tweak things. Or if I’m writing a novel or an essay I never do it in a linear fashion and I need to be able to add chapters, etc. easily.

 

I used to work on my scripts with Montage and my novels with Storymill, both by Mariner’s software and they solved most of my problems: one file for all the subdocs (research notes, but not versions) and ease of navigation through different views of the script. Part of the automation process didn’t work very well though and I spent a huge time in word manually reformatting what the app had autoformatted. Plus they’re filled with bugs that hopefully don’t affect the work but slow the process of creating down. A lot.

Then I came upon Scrivener. There’s a 30 day demo where you can use the software as much as you want and then decide if you want to buy it or not. I played with it 2 hours and decided it was the perfect tool and bought the license (which, at 40$, is really reaaaalllllly cheap). I haven’t opened Montage or Storymill ever since. I still use MSWord alternatives such as Bean or Mellel for viewing single documents and editing or TextEdit for fast typing stuff I don’t need any research or drafts for (such as to-do lists, thoughts of the day, writer’s training…). I didn’t quantify my gains with Scrivener but I’m pretty sure it at least doubled my efficiency and lessened my stress about as much as I’m just a few clicks away from any info I need and I don’t even have to change files to refer to my research or old drafts.

 

How I use Scrivener

I created about ten .scriv files, one for each of my writing areas even if I suspect I’ll merge some of them into one big .scriv file because I tend to open them all at once and that disctracts me. So I’ll have something like: comicbooks.scriv; blog.scriv; animation.scriv; games.scriv; moneymaking.scriv; general_research.scriv and some project specific scrivs for bigger projects such as an animated series I’m currently developping called Cave Canem that has its very own cavecanem.scriv.

I’m a fond user of folders as they tend to help me save time. So I’ll create folders and they’ll help me find the files I need faster and reorganize my work in a glitch. For example In Comicbooks.scriv, I’ll name my folders after spectific projects and subfolders after categories (characters, outline, drafts, etc.), in games.scriv, since I review games monthly, my folders are named after months. Then in every folder I can create files and folders as I see fit, reorganize them, compare them, tweak them, colorlabel them, etc.

 

 

Scrivener's split view with labelcolored pins in the Corkboard

 

 

 

I mostly use Scrivener to keep all my files relating to the same topic in the same place. I can then easily navigate from one to the other, edit them as soon as an idea strikes me without having to open a new file, search for the place to edit, save it and go back to the previous file. I can do all that in just a few clicks without ever losing focus on my current file.

I need to refer to research docs a lot while writing and Scrivener makes that super easy thanks to its split view.

Labels work great. You can define as many colored labels as you want and you can then color the icon of the files in your sidebar to quickly see which belongs to what category/issue/topic.

There’s a nice built-in scratch pad that you can set to stay on top of all your apps, making it easy to copy-paste stuff and send it to your Scrivener without changing windows. I wish there was a hotkey to make it popup over whatever app I’m using instead of just having it float above all the time.

 

My mostly used features:

- Labels

- Splitview

- Corkboard (allows you to see your project in an index card form, very useful. Labels can be reflected in that view, too)

- Scratch pad

Some features I like:

You can assign keywords to your files, which works great to search for issue related files.

In splitview, you can play videos, audiofiles and display pictures, .pdfs, or any text file while you’re typing a text. The pause/play control is only one key combination (cmd+enter). Great for quoting, transcripting, taking notes…

There’s a cool “snapshot” feature that allows you to save an image of your work before modifying it so that if you’re not happy with changes you made you can always go back to the previous version. Why is that good? You don’t keep all drafts in your way, they don’t appear as files either in your .scriv file or on your hard drive but they’re still there if you need them.

 

So pros:

- All your files in one

- Split view allows you to open two documents at once and navigate in them independantly

- The ease of manipulating sub files, reorganising a work, outlining a story etc.

- The color labels to easily find related files, view in one glance if your topics are balanced in your whole work, etc.

- Ease of use, intuitive design (lot’s of hotkeys to learn, though but nothing that will take more than one day of use to remember)

- Lots of options for labelling, keywording, categorizing your files and a comprehensive search engine

- Fast and reliable

- Autosaves whenever you’re idle. I never thought I’d lose the habit of cmd+Sing every thirty seconds but I did in less than a week

- Super cheap

- Great full screen mode, with scalable opacity

- Great “index card” view, with synopsis of your files, status and label. Makes it easy to overview and rearrange your draft.

- Bonus: if you want to write a screenplay, there’s a template for formatting it and it works great.

 

Cons:

- It’ not a text editor. It’s a tool for crafting. You’ll need another app for the final appearance of your text

- .scriv files are huge and it’s next to impossible to email them

- Auto reformats by default when you “compile” your draft, making you do extra clicks to keep your set format. Not a good thing when you’re dealing with 100+ files.

- Scrivener is not made for cowriting and sharing files. Splitting work could turn out messy.

 

So here you go, it’s a very quick overview of the app. I hope it helps you.

Anael

 

Scrivener is a Mac only Application that you can download HERE

L’ennui

Étrange quand même. On passe 25 ans à se battre contre le monde et la société pour réaliser ce dont on a toujours rêvé: être “auteur” professionnel, dans mon cas scénariste, on réussit à en vivre plutôt bien, à se lever le matin sans avoir rien d’autre à faire qu’écrire. En cours de route on acquiert la liberté absolue, celle d’être responsable de sa vie et d’avoir le choix, tous les choix. Et puis un jour, après quelques semaines à ce rythme-là, c’est l’ennui. La journée passe, le travail est fait, mais l’enthousiasme a disparu. Oh, rien ne pourrait remplacer la situation durement conquise, mais à se projeter dans l’avenir, à entrevoir une vie à l’image de chaque jour, ne correspond aucune satisfaction. Je ne voudrais rien faire d’autre comme métier mais c’est justement là que le bât blesse: écrire n’est qu’un métier et ne peut pas remplir une vie. Je ne pourrais vivre sans écrire, j’ai déjà essayé et je déprime. Mais je découvre qu’il m’est impossible de vivre (i.e. être vivant) d’écriture.

La routine appelle l’ennui, même si elle naît du rêve

Le sentiment d’avoir atteint un palier dans l’apprentissage du métier, que je ne pourrai dépasser que par une expérience nécessairement longue et laborieuse. La théorie est digérée, maintenant je suis un scénariste compétent et impatient. Mais surtout un scénariste qui s’ennuie. Je pourrais faire plein de choses, écrire plein de nouveaux concepts mais aucun ne me tente vraiment. Il me manque cet enthousiasme propre à soulever des montagnes. Tout ça n’est plus qu’un job comme un autre, répétitif et routinier. C’est triste et je n’ai pas envie que ça dure. Je veux m’arracher à cette fatalité, changer de métier me semble une bonne idée mais comment renoncer au confort d’un rêve réalisé? Maintenant, tout me semble morne et petit au regard du combat que j’ai mené. Quel sera le prochain défi? Vendre un script à Hollywood m’apparaît comme un accomplissement supplémentaire mais m’ennuie déjà. L’esprit comptable s’empare de moi à mesure que s’égrènent les étapes: devenir bilingue à l’écrit en anglais, analyser le marché, écrire le script et le vendre. Tout ça est facile à atteindre en un an d’efforts concentrés. Disons 5 en s’y mettant en dilettante. Pas de quoi soulever les foules. Je le ferai. Pas tout de suite. Je veux d’abord retrouver la passion.

 

Vaincre l'ennui en cherchant de nouveaux défis

Alors quoi? Comment remplir le temps libre? Comment (res)susciter l’enthousiasme? Quoi apprendre maintenant que j’ai réalisé mon rêve? Je suis tombé, il y a peu, sur le livre de Tim Ferriss, je ne sais même plus comment, La Semaine de Quatre Heures et c’est une chance. Je l’ai dévoré et il m’a aidé à accélérer le processus de réflexion dans lequel je m’étais engagé. Réfléchir en chronorêves sur 6 ou 12 mois, voyager, vivre à l’étranger quelques mois par an grâce au télétravail et provoquer de nouvelles expériences, voilà qui me convient. J’ai gagné un nouveau point de vue sur mon problème. Plutôt que de chercher un nouveau métier, c’est définir mes envies qui importe et que j’oubliais de faire. Plutôt que de tout jeter, le bébé, la bassine et l’eau du bain, construire sur l’existant apparaît comme une meilleure option. L’idée est d’arrêter de perdre mon temps à des activités non constructives.

Se pousser vers de nouveaux apprentissages

Aujourd’hui, mon apprentissage passerait peut-être par la BD, un nouveau média aux codes narratifs différents de ceux de l’audiovisuel. Mon premier objectif pour les 6 prochains mois, c’est d’en finir une. Mais la réussite ne dépend qu’à moitié de moi puisque je ne sais pas dessiner. Apprendre à dessiner aussi fait partie de mes objectifs, mais pas pour faire de la BD cette fois. En tant que dessinateur, ce que je voudrais, c’est faire du sketch book. Croquer le mouvement, le réel. Savoir reproduire en quelques traits brouillons et pleins de vie, un visage rencontré dans le métro, une scène de rue entrevue au cours d’une balade. Reproduire la vie dans tout ce qu’elle a de fugace et de changeant. Pouvoir faire vite. Passer plusieurs heures courbé sur une page ne m’intéresse que si c’est pour utiliser le langage. A la rentrée, je me mets au hockey (les cours ne commencent pas avant) et cet été, j’essaye de voler en parapente. Faire exploser la bulle du confort, s’ouvrir à de nouveaux horizons et ne pas se contenter de ce qui est facile et évident. Rester curieux comme un remède à l’ennui? Ca me plaît!

La conclusion que je tire de tout ça? N’importe quelle activité, si elle est trop pratiquée, nous plonge dans l’ennui alors souvenons-nous de faire de nos vies un apprentissage sans fin, une découverte quotidienne du monde et un constant dépassement de nous-mêmes. C’est ce qui nous permettra de ne pas devenir des morts-vivants.

Mais si allez, j’ai du temps

Pour ne pas vous abandonner et parce que je galère sur mon synopsis, je prends deux secondes pour lancer une nouvelle rubrique: les variantes du Monopoly. Oh, ce n’est rien d’aussi passionant que les variantes de règles, c’est plutôt de l’ordre de l’ébahissement. La culture de masse a qualités mais elle a aussi beaucoup de travers. A vous de juger.

—-

So as not to abandon this blog and because I’m having a rough time with my outline I take a few seconds to launch a new category of posts: Monopoly variants. It’s nothing as interesting as rules variations that could make the game actually feel like a game, it’s more related to astonishment. Mass culture has qualities but it also holds lots of flaws. As of this, I’ll let be the judges.

Tester une mécanique de jeu

La méthodologie de 2D Boy (World of Goo): http://2dboy.com/2007/11/12/rons-rules-for-playtesting/ 

Bon ça devrait peut-être être une page fixe plutôt qu’un post mais là je manque de temps pour me poser ces questions. Si vous avez un jeu (vidéo ou non) à tester, ces quelques conseils m’ont l’air bien précieux. Je vais essayer d’en trouver d’autres, voire d’interroger des créateurs de jeux et de répertorier leurs méthos.

Jouons maintenant

Loin de moi l’idée d’ajouter encore un site de critiques de jeux à la pléthore déjà contenue par le net. Pour mes critiques et news autour du jeu (et celles de mes confrères), vous pouvez aller sur le site du mensuel Jeux sur un Plateau ou, mieux, lire la version papier du magazine que vous trouverez en vente chez les meilleurs marchands de journaux pour 5€. Mais il m’arrive d’avoir des choses à dire, pas toujours pertinente pour le magazine, pas toujours développées, souvent des idées comme ça à faire partager au monde. Ce blog pourra leur servir de vitrine.

Il pourra avoir comme complément mon feed twitter, accessible ici: http://twitter.com/AnaelVerdier.

Contrairement à mon blog sur la dramaturgie, pour l’instant en sommeil, celui-ci sera éminemment personnel.

Comme son nom l’indique, il ne parlera pas que de jeu, mais de toutes mes activités créatrices en-dehors du scénario audiovisuel. Écriture littéraire, écriture BD, création de jeux. Et expériences spectatorielles ou actrices connexes: pratique du jeu, lecture littéraire et BDphilique.

En nous souhaitant de bons moments de partage.

So long for now.