Please Report to the Baggage Claim Area
posted by Scott Hsu-Storaker at 12:00 AM
Back in the day, I used to play D&D. Well, "play" is probably a misnomer. Mostly it was my friends and me sitting around making stuff up. We would diagram out maps, draw new characters, write stories and such. There was very little rolling of the 12-sided die (I wasn't kidding when I said back in the day). The figurines mostly stayed in their boxes. Looking back, it was pretty clear where my passions lay -- in the act of creation. One of the things I vividly remember was the concept of encumberance. There was a rating for how much stuff you could lug around. There was no real world correlation in this -- most of us would never be able to walk in plate mail armor anyways. It was just a number, and it affected our combat and travelling abilities in some elaborate, byzantine way that was not clear to us. None of us really paid much heed to it. Pick up another bag of gold? Sure.
In real life, though, what would that be like? What is the measure of our own personal limit of encumberance? We go through life acquiring things, experiences, knowledge and relationships. We cart things around in boxes every time we move... well, I do in any case. We keep emails from old friends. I carry around so much baggage, I sometimes feel smothered by it. When I feel saturated, I purge. My breaking points usually arrive whenever I go out and buy something I already have but can't find. The clutter has so enveloped my life that I longer have control over the mess. Still, I have a pretty high tolerance for clutter. I have vast reserves in my brain that can wrap around large clusters of information and I tend to keep things very free and loose. On the other end of the spectrum, I have coworkers that keep their desks so free of clutter that on Fridays I can never be sure if they are actually planning on returning on Monday.
So, I arrive here with baggage. My experiences and habits affect everything I do. They usually don't own me, but they do certainly explain why I do things a certain way. Maybe explaining to you how and why I work would help you to predict my actions. Here are some examples.
1. Hold on a Minute Parddner
I don't rush. I take things slow and steady and smooth. When someone yells "Frog!" I do not jump. I like to take my time to get things things done right and done thoroughly. I am patient and persistent (some would say stubborn) and think in terms of months and years instead of hours and days. It may seem too slow to outside observers, but you know what, I get stuff done. I get stuff done that I say I am going to do, and I get it done when I say I am going to do it. I have enough experience at project management that when I say I will finish something by September 27, 2008, I feel confident that it will be done give or take 2.5 hours. I know because I have actually kept track of that stuff for years at my work. It's my job to plan and deliver. If you find me lagging on stuff it probably has to do more with me over-promising to multiple people than it does having to do with laziness or inattention.
Where does this come from? I think a big part of it has to do with the fact that I was sick a lot as a kid. A lot a lot. Pneumonia, asthma, hernia, you name it. I learned early on that the best way to cope was to be as still as possible. Wait out the storm. Trick myself into ignoring my body and keep plugging away at something. I think this is where my love of art flourished. Art takes patience. You have to be able to know while you are shading the upper right corner of a picture what the bottom left will look like three hours later. I can focus for a long, long time.
The other big part of it has to do with events more recent. I have kids. Kids take a lot of patience, more than anything else I have ever experienced. Progress is so painstakingly slow sometimes. Then BAM! One day my kid climbs into bed with a book and starts reading. Watching the learning and growth process teaches me every day to keep pushing, keep trying, and keep believing that growth and change will happen. I've seen it happen. I approach every day with the confidence that life will progress and that long-term goals are reachable.
2. Jack be Nimble
This, here, is a far more recent addition to my life experiences. It shows up in a lot of different areas in my life these days, but I think the best example has to do with a collective business I help start 15 years ago. My friends and I, all artists, started up a collective to publish comic books. It was a great success and learning experience in many ways. However, over time, the vast network of people and projects we had built began to feel like a huge burden to me. I had lost my ability to affect any change within the group and I felt like I was carting around an elephant on my shoulders. It was hard to move in any direction other than down a path that the groupmind had set. When it did finally end its forward momentum, there was no clean way to stop it. In all, it took me almost 10 years to remove myself from the entanglements I had help create before I felt free to start up something similar again. Lesson learned. It is something that deeply affects the way I conduct myself in helping guide this project. I feel we should remain nimble. We should avoid any kind of financial debt. We should not overpromise things to clients. We should own as little as possible. We should, in fact, set things up so that there really is nothing to own. We should never become so committed to one path or so entrenched in one idea that we cannot change direction without losing work that has been done. That is why I chose a creative commons license for my projects. That is why I chose to do generic, flexible, portable environment models. We need to stay nimble and open to change. Those are my feelings at least, and I come to these ideas after years of experience.
3. Shed Encumberance
I have a little story for you about a recent experience that brought me to my clutter overload breakpoint. A couple weeks ago, I went to buy a new vehicle with my wife. We were taking our beat-up old hatchback to trade-in for what we thought would be maybe a few hundreds bucks. Nothing really, just a palatable way to free ourselves of money-sucking clutter. Things did not go as planned. On the way there, two freeway exits from our destination, "pop, sssssssssssssss". Blown something or other. After a couple hours of phone calls and tow trucks, we ended up limping to the dealership with a dead car with zero value. In fact, the only value we could squeeze out of it was the fact that we would no longer be paying insurance on a rarely used car. This worked out OK, but the lesson I learned here is to not wait for the breaking point. I need to step out of the hole I am digging before I need to climb out. As my love for this project has grown, the time available to work on it has been hard to find. It will become even harder to find as the arrival of mini-scott 3.0 gets closer. To commit further to this coop and deliver something concrete on my ideals, I have had to shed work. I have had to tell people I love working with that working with them will have to wait. I have had to disengage from promising projects before committing. I have had to say no to a number of great projects, some even offering payment. I feel that this is the only way to stay focussed on the goal at hand. Cluttering my life with too many different projects was resulting in denying myself the satisfaction of completing any of them. So, I have whittled down. What you are seeing here is now about 90% of what I am working on these days -- it is all I can handle right now.
4. Go Mini
I have a long history of unfinished work. I have worked on many many indigame projects and not a single one has been finished. I have been working on the sixth issue of my comic book for two years now. I have boxes full of art supplies, many unopened. I aim to change that. In fact, I have already changed it. Creating mini-projects that can be completed, zipped up, and delivered in a reasonable time frame has been a huge boon to me and my artistic development. My daily life is divvied up into 5 minute increments, especially on the weekends when I am at home with the kids. I have to fit my few hours a day of art time in the little nooks and crannies of my daily life. 5 minutes here, 20 there. Work on the train. Work late at night. Do the dishes, model a few minutes in the kitchen. Sitting in a nice comfy chair at a well-appointed desk for 4 hours straight has been out of the question for years now. Maintaining anything close to consistent focus on a project that will take me more than 5 hours to complete is damn-near impossible. The time it takes to build an animated character can get smeared across weeks or months and ends up feeling disjointed and incomplete. So, I chose to chunk the work up into little pieces. Each mini-project can be done and ready to distribute in a few hours at most. Content in packs are modular and can be switched out at will. Work on super-projects can easily be split amongst a whole host of contributors. I feel that if the coop is to thrive, work must be widely distributed over a large network of artists and that the work each person does must be easy to complete and portable. Again, this all comes from experience, the baggage I carry around from years of false starts. So far it has worked. This project has proven to be anything but a false start. Real results have been attained and my personal goals remain clear and focussed.
All of my experiences, even recent ones, color the way I do things here. Everything I have done and experienced affects the way I function. I will make no apologies for the way I conduct myself as an artist in this coop, but I may offer explanations, sometimes at great length. Hopefully I will learn and change as I grow with all of you. I just thought I would let you know about a few of the bags that I do carry with me and in what ways they affect how I proceed.
Stay free.
~shs~
We all arrive here with baggage. I know I do. I'm carting along a long list of things, and, having been at this art thing for so many years, I know that list is longer than some. I've been associated with any number of projects. I've run a collective. I've run a business. I've been to art school years after I had already completed my first undergrad degree. I've worked in a research lab for six years. I have kids, debt, bills up the wazoo and more than a few excess pounds on my frame. It's stuff that has built up over the years. Each thing has colored the way I approach art as passion and art as livlihood.
Back in the day, I used to play D&D. Well, "play" is probably a misnomer. Mostly it was my friends and me sitting around making stuff up. We would diagram out maps, draw new characters, write stories and such. There was very little rolling of the 12-sided die (I wasn't kidding when I said back in the day). The figurines mostly stayed in their boxes. Looking back, it was pretty clear where my passions lay -- in the act of creation. One of the things I vividly remember was the concept of encumberance. There was a rating for how much stuff you could lug around. There was no real world correlation in this -- most of us would never be able to walk in plate mail armor anyways. It was just a number, and it affected our combat and travelling abilities in some elaborate, byzantine way that was not clear to us. None of us really paid much heed to it. Pick up another bag of gold? Sure.
In real life, though, what would that be like? What is the measure of our own personal limit of encumberance? We go through life acquiring things, experiences, knowledge and relationships. We cart things around in boxes every time we move... well, I do in any case. We keep emails from old friends. I carry around so much baggage, I sometimes feel smothered by it. When I feel saturated, I purge. My breaking points usually arrive whenever I go out and buy something I already have but can't find. The clutter has so enveloped my life that I longer have control over the mess. Still, I have a pretty high tolerance for clutter. I have vast reserves in my brain that can wrap around large clusters of information and I tend to keep things very free and loose. On the other end of the spectrum, I have coworkers that keep their desks so free of clutter that on Fridays I can never be sure if they are actually planning on returning on Monday.
So, I arrive here with baggage. My experiences and habits affect everything I do. They usually don't own me, but they do certainly explain why I do things a certain way. Maybe explaining to you how and why I work would help you to predict my actions. Here are some examples.
1. Hold on a Minute Parddner
I don't rush. I take things slow and steady and smooth. When someone yells "Frog!" I do not jump. I like to take my time to get things things done right and done thoroughly. I am patient and persistent (some would say stubborn) and think in terms of months and years instead of hours and days. It may seem too slow to outside observers, but you know what, I get stuff done. I get stuff done that I say I am going to do, and I get it done when I say I am going to do it. I have enough experience at project management that when I say I will finish something by September 27, 2008, I feel confident that it will be done give or take 2.5 hours. I know because I have actually kept track of that stuff for years at my work. It's my job to plan and deliver. If you find me lagging on stuff it probably has to do more with me over-promising to multiple people than it does having to do with laziness or inattention.
Where does this come from? I think a big part of it has to do with the fact that I was sick a lot as a kid. A lot a lot. Pneumonia, asthma, hernia, you name it. I learned early on that the best way to cope was to be as still as possible. Wait out the storm. Trick myself into ignoring my body and keep plugging away at something. I think this is where my love of art flourished. Art takes patience. You have to be able to know while you are shading the upper right corner of a picture what the bottom left will look like three hours later. I can focus for a long, long time.
The other big part of it has to do with events more recent. I have kids. Kids take a lot of patience, more than anything else I have ever experienced. Progress is so painstakingly slow sometimes. Then BAM! One day my kid climbs into bed with a book and starts reading. Watching the learning and growth process teaches me every day to keep pushing, keep trying, and keep believing that growth and change will happen. I've seen it happen. I approach every day with the confidence that life will progress and that long-term goals are reachable.
2. Jack be Nimble
This, here, is a far more recent addition to my life experiences. It shows up in a lot of different areas in my life these days, but I think the best example has to do with a collective business I help start 15 years ago. My friends and I, all artists, started up a collective to publish comic books. It was a great success and learning experience in many ways. However, over time, the vast network of people and projects we had built began to feel like a huge burden to me. I had lost my ability to affect any change within the group and I felt like I was carting around an elephant on my shoulders. It was hard to move in any direction other than down a path that the groupmind had set. When it did finally end its forward momentum, there was no clean way to stop it. In all, it took me almost 10 years to remove myself from the entanglements I had help create before I felt free to start up something similar again. Lesson learned. It is something that deeply affects the way I conduct myself in helping guide this project. I feel we should remain nimble. We should avoid any kind of financial debt. We should not overpromise things to clients. We should own as little as possible. We should, in fact, set things up so that there really is nothing to own. We should never become so committed to one path or so entrenched in one idea that we cannot change direction without losing work that has been done. That is why I chose a creative commons license for my projects. That is why I chose to do generic, flexible, portable environment models. We need to stay nimble and open to change. Those are my feelings at least, and I come to these ideas after years of experience.
3. Shed Encumberance
I have a little story for you about a recent experience that brought me to my clutter overload breakpoint. A couple weeks ago, I went to buy a new vehicle with my wife. We were taking our beat-up old hatchback to trade-in for what we thought would be maybe a few hundreds bucks. Nothing really, just a palatable way to free ourselves of money-sucking clutter. Things did not go as planned. On the way there, two freeway exits from our destination, "pop, sssssssssssssss". Blown something or other. After a couple hours of phone calls and tow trucks, we ended up limping to the dealership with a dead car with zero value. In fact, the only value we could squeeze out of it was the fact that we would no longer be paying insurance on a rarely used car. This worked out OK, but the lesson I learned here is to not wait for the breaking point. I need to step out of the hole I am digging before I need to climb out. As my love for this project has grown, the time available to work on it has been hard to find. It will become even harder to find as the arrival of mini-scott 3.0 gets closer. To commit further to this coop and deliver something concrete on my ideals, I have had to shed work. I have had to tell people I love working with that working with them will have to wait. I have had to disengage from promising projects before committing. I have had to say no to a number of great projects, some even offering payment. I feel that this is the only way to stay focussed on the goal at hand. Cluttering my life with too many different projects was resulting in denying myself the satisfaction of completing any of them. So, I have whittled down. What you are seeing here is now about 90% of what I am working on these days -- it is all I can handle right now.
4. Go Mini
I have a long history of unfinished work. I have worked on many many indigame projects and not a single one has been finished. I have been working on the sixth issue of my comic book for two years now. I have boxes full of art supplies, many unopened. I aim to change that. In fact, I have already changed it. Creating mini-projects that can be completed, zipped up, and delivered in a reasonable time frame has been a huge boon to me and my artistic development. My daily life is divvied up into 5 minute increments, especially on the weekends when I am at home with the kids. I have to fit my few hours a day of art time in the little nooks and crannies of my daily life. 5 minutes here, 20 there. Work on the train. Work late at night. Do the dishes, model a few minutes in the kitchen. Sitting in a nice comfy chair at a well-appointed desk for 4 hours straight has been out of the question for years now. Maintaining anything close to consistent focus on a project that will take me more than 5 hours to complete is damn-near impossible. The time it takes to build an animated character can get smeared across weeks or months and ends up feeling disjointed and incomplete. So, I chose to chunk the work up into little pieces. Each mini-project can be done and ready to distribute in a few hours at most. Content in packs are modular and can be switched out at will. Work on super-projects can easily be split amongst a whole host of contributors. I feel that if the coop is to thrive, work must be widely distributed over a large network of artists and that the work each person does must be easy to complete and portable. Again, this all comes from experience, the baggage I carry around from years of false starts. So far it has worked. This project has proven to be anything but a false start. Real results have been attained and my personal goals remain clear and focussed.
All of my experiences, even recent ones, color the way I do things here. Everything I have done and experienced affects the way I function. I will make no apologies for the way I conduct myself as an artist in this coop, but I may offer explanations, sometimes at great length. Hopefully I will learn and change as I grow with all of you. I just thought I would let you know about a few of the bags that I do carry with me and in what ways they affect how I proceed.
Stay free.
~shs~
posted by Scott Hsu-Storaker at 12:00 AM
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