turbine - In consideration of details

May 13, 2010

lonelysandwich:

This and this are kind of so inspiring coming from JGA (a man already long on the inspiring) they send shivers down my spine to the top of my asscrack, where my @fireland 4EVA tat will ne’er be lasered from its verdant canvas.

Yes, yes, yes.

I personally consider Josh one of the smartest, funniest, and most effortlessly gifted people I’ve known. Tonight, he kicked it to another level.

For every peanut gallerist who thinks creativity is an existential trust fund that $deity capriciously bestows upon a “lucky” handful of geniuses for whom everything is “easy,” please go read J’s actual words.

Then step away from the Xbox, and the failblogs, and the tip-shoveling web teats just long enough to scrawl this little koan over that chair where you keep gamely hoping luck will arrive:

The good ones sweat it, because sweating it makes you one of the good ones.

Like countless of the scores of improbably charming nerds I hugged, admired, and bourboned alongside over the past few days, Josh Allen is absolutely one of the good ones.

Four things:

1. MaxFun Con looks very appealing for next year. You Look Nice Today, Jesse Thorn, and kind folks smiling in the warm California sun (Ramones version-I guess you need to click through to see the videos all nice and embedded).

(link through to “California Sun” as interpreted by The Ramones)

2. It makes me feel better about my own struggles to see that others wrestle with the same kind of things. Many writers I admire make it all seem so effortless (I’m thinking here [apropos of nothing save effortless prose] particularly of Michael Chabon, whose prose is so generous and so strong it can lift a reader up and carry him along for a hundred pages, and the reader is hardly conscious of being borne paragraph to paragraph, chapter to chapter). Yet, every author I talk to about making good things tells me time and again how many drafts something went through, how long a short story sat in a desk drawer, how much paper was swept into the recycle bin because it wasn’t ever going to be good enough to see the sun.

I think as you practice and get better, much of the soiled, unusable paper stays in your head. You become a better gate keeper for your ideas, but more and more it’s clear the best way to make awesome is to make a lot of not-so-awesome. A whole lot.

3. Sweating it, broadly and narrowly (because I can’t talk about any one thing without looking through the lens of something else):

Lance Mountain is a great pool skater. He’s arguably the best still skating as a professional, and might be one of the best of all time. Why? Because he understands that eight-foot transitions make for great pool skating. Not seven-foot, not nine-foot. Eight. The way the man talks about the pool he built in his back yard floored me. Here is a professional speaking about the things that matter to him. And like any professional, the more he speaks the more fascinating it becomes.

(link through to Lance Mountain: Behind the Scenes, pt. 2)

As you’re sweating it, it’s important to ask yourself whether you’re working towards the equivalent of eight-foot transitions. Are you making something accepting and generous for your user? Is it going to provide the best experience possible?

And while we’re at it, what’s the position of your bolt holes?

Rodney Mullen invented modern street skating. Way back when, we called it freestyle. If you don’t skate, all the kicky little flippy shit you see kids trying to do off curbs and down stairs and in parking lots? Rodney Mullen invented all of that. The flatland ollie, the kickflip, ollie impossible, heelflip, casper 360, and more.

In the video below he explains the design and manufacturing process behind Almost skateboards (a product of DSM). Some things he explains that I never thought about:

The traditional method of drilling holes could mean the trucks are moved towards the front or back of the board by as much as 1/16th of an inch. The traditional manufacturing process molded boards by stacking five, one atop the other, which meant the curve of the nose and tail on the lowest board could be off by as much as five degrees from the top-most board. It doesn’t seem like much, but it’s worth sweating for Mullen, DSM, and Almost’s riders. Without the proper nose and tail angle, technical riders like Daewon Song can’t perform at their best, so they do things like park their cars on top of their boards overnight to bend and mold the shape to their liking.

(link through to How Almost Skateboards Are Made)

That’s seriously sweating it.

You can think about it in different terms, of course: structure/arc and word choice. Character development and what kind of finial appear on the railing tops. User experience and button dimension. Large and small. The important thing is to think about it.

4. (this one’s for me)

12:25pm | URL: http://tumblr.com/ZlJibyZVvaq

(Notes: 85)