TEDERICK.COM

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Stoptimizing

—

by

tederick
in

Stoptimizing!: There is no greater scourge to the modern being than the curse of optimization.

Stoptimizing!: A simple rubric to help you break the hold that optimization has forced on your life.

Stoptimizing!: You, too, can start stoptimizing. Just follow these simple steps:

  • Stop hustling
  • Stop biohacking
  • Stop minmaxing
  • Stop carbo-loading
  • Absolutely no Marie Kondoing
  • No fitness apps
  • No smartwatches
  • No dumbwatches
  • No watches
  • Fuck time, actually
  • No A.I.
  • No gaming the system
  • No gaming the metabolism
  • If your hobby earns money it’s not a hobby it’s a job
  • Get a hobby
  • No life hacks
  • No “one cool trick”toks
  • No technique
  • No grindset
  • No e-readers
  • Stop e-learning
  • Stop e-dating
  • Stop Skyping
  • Stop stretch-goaling
  • No curating
  • No backlogging
  • No planned obsolescence
  • No using your creative time to do the laundry
  • Do not even think of taking a supplement
  • Punch anyone who says “quiet quitting” in the taint
  • Drink pasteurized milk, fuck-os
  • Turn in incomplete work
  • Do less with more
  • Push the meeting
  • Walk, don’t run
  • Arrive late
  • Leave early
  • No one else is thinking that much about you, I promise

The pyramid opens

Some major creative strides on variously huge projects by a couple of my closest friends in February — a movie; a book — had me playing mopey catch-up for the first half of March… but I finally, finally put the best two words ever in the screenplay draft for Safecrackers — “ROLL” and “CREDITS,” in that order* — which was the end-result of a lengthy, thrilling, torturous, creatively-exuberant process. First draft: done.

Second draft: started yesterday.

*Remind me to tell you guys what I was going to do with the screenplay draft for a fantasy adaptation of Marvel’s NextWave: Agents of H.A.T.E. sometime.

I’ll let you know at some point if the first draft of a screenplay is always the hardest or if it’s actually the (nominally godawful) second-to-third-draft pipeline. What I have now can only actually be called a first draft to save my fragile ego, since it’s an abject mess from a readability standpoint. (In other words: it makes sense to me, but that’s about all.)

But like so many such things the tale grew in the telling, and now I have to go back and clarify, clarify, clarify the butter till it’s transparent gold. I ran into a shitfucker of a story engine problem at the end of the second act and had to excavate my way out; I also deleted the entire exposition briefing scene in the first act, and invented an artificially-intelligent crocodile. So it goes.

And I did a few surgical snips to Enneaka before sending her off to publishers this week, both firming up my opening gambit and, maybe, making those first chapters a bit more beguiling. We’ll see.

It’s springtime in Toronto, thank goodness; and springtime (and second drafts) are for coffee shops and diners and headphones and concentrating, condensing, limiting. Here’s hoping my 2013 Macbook has at least another few months in her.

A laptop with "concentrate, condense, limit" taped to its exterior in bright colours, next to a sticker of She-Ra and Catra kissing.

New by me

Not by me

  • “The break with reality has been a long time coming — QAnon and Pizzagate preceded it — but in the pre-pandemic era, it was largely the fringes of the conservative movement. Now it is the main event.” (The Verge)