Walking Outside to clear and ready my mind for new ideas for the advancement of Theaphora and its various projects. There is an excess of pollen for this time of year, and with the absence of rain it collects along the roads against the curbs and onto the sidewalks. I am taken by how little shame the trees seem to carry despite their plentiful littering of the town, carrying on with their gentle dances of limbs and leaves when stirred by the breezes as if taken by a gentle melody. The way the leaves move in the opposite direction of the branches and limbs they are governed by is something I quite like a lot. I imagine that despite the seemingly chaotic motion of all the non-trunk parts of the tree, that their forces all cancel eachother out on the whole, leaving the trunk itself unmoved and resoundingly still. How is it possible that a multitude of chaotic parts can result in a stable center. Either the tree makes intensely labored calculations to achieve the perfect equilibrium, or its total giving in to the pressures of the wind allows for a perfect responsiveness so as to nullify any effective force. How should I conceive of governing the various parts, ambitions, and actors involved in Theaphora. Would it be profound control or profound relaxation that allows the center to hold while the parts are able to move freely. Perhaps either will do so long as the decision is made, or to withhold any longstanding decision for the sake of being able to choose in real time as I see fit and my desires show the way forward.
Equipment Relocation has derailed production flow. The main production site is closing, and I am in the process of relocating to a new location, which will in the long term provide quicker and more spontaneous book production. But for now, in the in-between, I am inefficient and somewhat lost. I moved everything except the main printer. But being the most essential piece, these small moves count for very little. The printer is very heavy and must be carried down stairs with a sharp turn. It is possible to lift and move around the printer on flat ground relatively easily, but the verticality of the stairs force the pair of bodies necessary to move the printer into an awkward and unbalanced position that greatly increases the risk of muscular damage. A few stairs would be possible, but the sharp turn and the cramped width of the stairway multiply the difficulty. Book production has real physical stakes. I attempted to carry it myself, with the help of an unpaid worker, but we were unable.
In the down time of this relocation, my attention turns, both avoidantly but also informed by the down time, to working on a new game, tentatively titled Paper Sorter. In the game, the player works to match paper balls, to collect coins and crate drops which extend the game loops to other small minigames and casino systems. But the main game loop is matching paper balls together. The effort in designing the game is to try and figure out how to make this basic problem interesting over a large duration of time but still allow for a kind of stressful exhaustion to increase over time, oscillating with satisfaction and surprise. A large part of the solution of this problem is reliant on the sound design of the game. Audio cues to success and failure dramatically manipulate the emotional response to playing the game. But the other side of the problem needs smart game design and elements of variation at general time markers. Solutions for these aspects require repetitive playthroughs of the draft game to make contact with a sense of player desire for more and what that more could mean or how it could take place.
The idea for Paper Sorter came partly out of collating pages to books during production. It is horribly dull to do this, and yet it is an essential part of the book making process. Any errors result in unsellable books. Money wastes. So I have to stay perfectly attentive to the dull task, to ensure a good product. The value comes from the certainty in the product, which never really comes as a positive feeling, moreso it just guards against negative feelings. In collating, all the pages feel like the same page, insofar as I do not care about the differences in text, all the pages are just pages to be sorted. But through sorting them, pages take on their special and individual characters within the context of the finished book. What this all makes apparent is that the book is ever really meaningful at the beginning and end of the production process, as a manuscript to be edited and clarified or expanded upon and as a book read by a reader. The stages in between those endpoints give no interest to the content of the book. But it is also from within these stages that I want to base my own understanding of the books I publish.
Development and Rage are the same thing. In the time between projects where a new direction must spring forth and come into focus, I am overcome by a physically moving rage. The first Theaphora Web Game is completed and I need to find another game to create, but do not know precisely what it will be yet, so I grab the metal shelves which hold Theaphora Stock, shake them aggressively and push them over. Each one. I kick over a folding poker table. I will not be able to fulfill orders for a few days. I have to destroy the office to make way for a new idea.
Woebegone and Other Poems is a book written by Claire Donato about and to her cat Woebegone. The majority of this book was written at least three years ago, another case of my slowness prevailing with the unintended effect of allowing a full project, including the companion videogame "Woebegone's Song," to unravel. I want to take time to focus mainly on the book production experience and devote some separate writing to the videogame, though. This book, titled after Woebegone, a real life friend and cousin of real life Theaphora, holds a special place in the catalogue.
The devotional is the primary concept through which I approached this book. Donato's writing throughout the book veers into the divine by way of a continual return to the subject of devotion, Woebegone. To accompany the book, I wanted to offer my own kind of devotion in response inspired by Donato's, and separately I wanted to attempt to build a short game. Donato's attention, both within and without the book, to the miniature helped bridge these two desires, I could make a game that shrunk Donato's apartment down to its essential parts and placed a Woebegone character within that domain to explore. A few months before we were ready to release everything, Claire's rent increased and she was forced to move out, effectively turning the devotional work to one of memorialization and mourning. But the idea originated within these terms of miniature translation, to translate the private domestic space into a public game space.
I started with the visual assets first and decided to wait and let a narrative emerge. Plotting the Woebegone sprite took the longest and most iterations. I had never really worked with the pixel at such a small resolution before, so had to familiarize myself with the possible moves involved in character creation. I tried rendering Woebegone somewhat realistically and from the side, but this looked proportionally off or just strange and not exactly cute nor catlike. Eventually I realized I could adapt this way of drawing bunnies I landed on as a child to creating the Woebegone character. Large defined head and eyes, small circle body, smaller appendages. The final shape emerged immediately from this method and all that was left was figuring out how to convey Woebegone's tortoiseshell coloration. The main problem when working with the pixel is figuring out how to describe color and light in a balanced but defined way. The pixel should not reflect the exact color of a particular location, but should instead express the general blocks of color that make up Woebegone's body.
With the character sprite finished by way of my nostalgic recuperation of technique, I felt especially excited about sharing, so I made keycharms with the design using a company I was familiar with from another custom job, Kunshan Hiicoins Technology Co. My chat with Frank from the company was warm and professional and overlapped with a major personal live event about which he was sweetly congratulatory. Our global business to business relationship was teetering in and out of the formal and into the friendly. At one point I thanked him for an expedited quote he gave and said good night, forgetting the time difference, but nevertheless he responded good night as well.
Much later, the book, game, key charms, were finally finished but I had been troubled with designing the cover. We wanted to implement something from the game onto the cover, conveying the Recursive Supplementation Logic essential to the Theaphora Processs, the non-primacy of any one object, book or game, but found it difficult to land on an actual image that felt right. I tried to organize screenshots of the Woebegone's Song game map, so it would wrap around the book and give a sense of the space of the apartment. Woebegone's only world up until Claire's move. But it didn't fit the conventions of the cover so well.
While working on promotional materials I decided to make a video of Woebegone at a french cafe smoking cigarettes, drinking wine, eating croissants, to accentuate her French heritage along with her ennui, themes which mirror those present in the book as well as Woebegone's real life. In the video, Woebegone sprite sits under a red and white umbrella as pigeons flap around her table. The image, designed at first for 9:16 Reel aspect ratio, was simple, bold, and convincing of the emotional resonance the book should impart. Wonderful, succinct. So I translated the scene to fit as a cover.
There are many stages involved in stumbling into the completion of the project. The cat influenced the life which influenced the writing of the book which influenced the game which influenced the promotional video which finally influenced the cover of the book. Without the Recursive Supplementation Logic, nothing would be possible at Theaphora.
Sorting Feature update for Virtual Notebook Console. I added a sorting feature which reorganizes the notebooks by title, name, date, and random. The reason for doing so is mainly in preparation for the intended scale of the console, which will continuously expand with new uploads of scanned notebooks, so sorting features are important for users to navigate the full database in refreshing ways. Reshuffling the virtual notebooks according to these sort functions allows a user to encounter not only new virtual notebooks but new orders and arrangements of the notebooks, and does so, importantly, without scoping to a narrow subset as in a search function. Overall this is in service of supporting an open experience of browsing with transparent and multiple forms of arrangement.
There are other interesting sorting categories to implement in the future. I would like to include engagement metrics such as view count, time viewed, and an open ranking feature for users to click-to-vote on individual notebooks, similar to total global likes on the homepage. I am unsure as to whether the ranking feature is a good idea, as it could lead to hurt feelings, though if someone's feelings were hurt they could always vote up their own notebook until they became top of the list. Nobody would ever know. Hurt feelings may in the end boost engagement, which would overall be a positive for the whole of the virtual notebook console. Two other interesting ideas are sort by average cover color, thereby creating a spectrum out of the virtual notebook covers, a joke about the sorting decisions of some personal libraries I have seen even in the homes of respectable writers and artists who choose to arrange their books as to create a rainbow based on the colors of the spines, against their own better judgement and in service of a quite a silly style, the other idea is sort by page length.
One of the great strengths of digital information management is that objects can be rearranged in various ways with negligible time and energy commitment, as opposed to physical object management which requires not only physical work but mental work in order to identify and order each object according to sort categories. Because of this, the job of sorting can default to the user and even add to their experience of the notebooks. It remains important, perhaps essential, a top priority, to not only deliver a high quality product, but to create a high quality experience on the way to a customer receiving that product.
Operational Dilemma appears recently as I find myself spending more time working out just what it is I should do first and what I should do second and what I should do third and so on. The time it takes to determine these choices adds such a weight to the day's possible achievements that I spend further time in wonder over whether if it is better to prioritize arbitrarily. The suboptimal progression of tasks would surely still be quicker than the additional time it takes to figure the optimal path, as I would retain mental clarity by not having to work out the order. Though there must be something greater pulling me towards this operational dilemma. Perhaps I gain pleasure from weighing each possible task against each other, spending the day theorizing the most efficient path forward, closing the day without moving from management to work. Still there are so many tasks of such varying skill and type of craft. It is never clear what exactly to do next especially when the consideration of what to do next is itself within the set of possible next tasks.
Office Layout Clutter is at maximum disorder right now so I will describe it in an effort to account for the kind of mental space it generates. The path from the door to the desk turns jaggedly at random angles until arriving at plastic floor bottles which gate the entrance to the desk chair. I use an empty plastic soda bottle to store discarded materials from shipping, scrap tape, stamp backing strips, etc. Aside from the desktop, keyboard, mouse, and two monitors, it is the most distinct and used object on the desk. There are also notes on bits of scattered paper on the desk. There are four metal shelves around the desk. One is partly organized and against the wall next to the desk, the other three modify the path to the desk previously mentioned, and store objects which are only unified in their having needed to be placed somewhere immediately and temporarily. There are more pieces of furniture and objects which clutter the room, like a striped couch and a green chair which both hold stacks of paper and books and a padded black square table with yet-to-be-packed cards on top, but these are not worth mentioning except as they provide an ambience of dense clutter. Working at the desk amidst the clutter puts the mind already and immediately in a place of task management. Nothing will ever be complete, so the job is to triage and optimize for the most important tasks first. Typically this primary task will actually arrive second because a buffer secondary task will take its place as a warm up task. Clutter can be a surprisingly useful path to operational efficiency and clarity.
Point of Sale is an underutilized event of poetic experience. Like the cover but more detached from its own value by the whims of hurried and unrigorous deniers of aesthetic reality, the point of sale is typically thought of as a neutral experience wholly distinct from the experience of reading the book.
In fact and practice, this could not be further from the truth. The point of sale constitutes the majority of the reading experience insofar as it prefigures the text akin to an interactive preface. This is true for all sale contexts, but especially so in online commerce, where a physical environment, as in the furniture, scale, and other physical identifiers that make up a bookstore or library, is not present to innately supply a substantive background. And yet, the majority of online book sales arrive through a maximally streamlined, low friction point of sale. This has been the strategy since Amazon and the earlier Book Stacks Unlimited, two projects who were both designed to offer the entirety of published and in print books in one online marketplace. In attempting to create a universal platform for all books, the point of sale needed to become neutralized, so that any book could be interchangeable with any other book within the design framework.
On purchasing an object, I want to feel my purchasing as a specific experience which opens onto my experience of the object I purchase. The printers which I use to print Theaphora books required driving five hours west, extracting the printers, boxes of ink, and ink holders from a ruined print shop, loading them into a box truck, handing a gentleman who purchased the ruined print shop thousands of dollars as he assured me the printers were in working order, driving five hours back, and unloading and reassembling the printers. In our mutual struggle, a bond was created between myself and the printers which would have been impossible had they been delivered new from the manufacturing company. Hard work is at the core of the Theaphora spirit, and I remember the sale experience every time I begin to print a new title. Friction in this case was not only present but necessary for creating the grounds for the relationship between myself and the printers.
At the point of sale for any small press publisher who relies mainly on online sales, friction is equally necessary for creating and deploying the character of the press. Inventive ways of designing the sale experience should be implemented by all publishers who want to care for the book through all stages of its life cycle, as it is the very moment of the sale wherein the book is transformed from latent stock to individual object for the reader.
Open Submissions Period is the heart of the dominant literary economy. Open suggests democratic equity for all writers who desire publication. Everyone is on equal ground insofar as they are able to submit their writing, themselves, to the judgement of the publisher and in choosing to submit also to admit their desire to be published by the publisher, or perhaps admits their desire to be published in general. Then, the Open Submissions Period demonstrates not that everyone has an equal opportunity to be published but instead has an equal opportunity to admit their desire to be published. Perhaps this is why it is so embarrassing to respond to an open submissions period. I have never openly submitted, and for the dignity of this publishing initiative I will never. There are advantages as a writer for doing so though. If selected, then the assumption is that, since that writer is selected from a specifically open submissions period, that their work gained its publication through its value independent from the writer. This could feed into a worthwhile idea for a writer which is that their writing holds value outside of their name and social relations. The Open Submissions Period claims to provide a framework for allowing writing to transubstantiate into publication by its own merits, out of the chaotic noise of the multitude into the clarified exaltation of the singular.
The advantages for a publisher creating an open submissions period, however, are tenfold the advantages of a writer submitting to one. Most importantly, the advent of the Open Submissions Period as it corresponds to the advent of creative writing program listservs, the circulatory system of the dominant literary economy, should not go unremarked on. The creation of such a listserv demands content to fill its categories: Events, Submissions, Jobs, Publication Announcements, and Resources. The categories are specifically constructed to pull attention, as alumni and students are drawn at first look for their peers to congratulate and thereby network with, or judge or mock, perhaps hate from jealousy in the Publication Announcements. Those feelings, strong in either direction, will then lead them to look over the Submissions and Jobs categories, and since a job application typically takes more energy than produced by witnessing a peer's publication can create, they will double down their attention on the Publication Announcements category. The entire gravity of the listserv categories leads to this zone, where it is necessary for publications to offer a wish for alumni to continue to project their fantasies, as the publication is the first step of achieving fame. Listservs, and therefore creative writing programs overall, are in constant need of Open Submissions Periods to continue to lay the bedrock of achievable fantasy for their students and alumni. If there were only closed submissions periods, there would be no need for creative writing program programs. So, in payment for continually renewing this fantasy, presses and journals are given massive opportunities for advertising, if they disseminate their calls throughout all creative writing program listservs, essentially putting them in touch with every living writer who is willing to make a sacrifice for achieving higher degrees of success. Submission fees then become the most lucrative opportunity for publishers, with the books they publish only acting as objects to convince the writer public of the value in submitting during the open period.
The main purpose of the creative writing program is to act as a ledger and agent between publishers and writers by way of creating, circulating, and maintaining a listserv. An creative writing program is only of value insofar as it manages and centralizes information. This configuration of value, endowed by the centralized listserv, forms the basis of our dominant literary economy, however meek that economy is, and produces literature whose main purpose is to continue the necessity and determine the legacy of the Open Submissions Period. An interesting outcome of this system is that the reading that takes place during an open submissions period is the closest reading possible for the manuscripts in circulation. If a manuscript is chosen for publication, then it exits the marketplace as an item for the listserv, where its reading is an afterthought to the logics of the CV line. Yes, the published book will undoubtedly be read, perhaps even reviewed positively, but the potential for the manuscript's being read closely and with intimate scrutiny is closed off once it exits in the open submissions marketplace. For writers interested in open submissions periods, the path for optimizing real readership for their manuscripts is not to gain publication, but instead to continually submit their manuscript to these periods forever.
Glue Recall for recent Theaphora perfect bound book, Four Concretures by Brandan Griffin. I found inconsistencies in the adhesive pellets used as binding agent for a recent Theaphora book, Four Concretures by Brandan Griffin, that are cause for cracking and uneven binding in the book spine and inside edge of outer pages. Although I found this error and instated a quality control checkpoint before shipping, I believe some defects could surface later on in the life of the product.
After assessing risk and impact, I have decided to offer the above transparency along with a replacement program for any buyers of the Four Concretures Preorder Bundle who are able to send documentation of a binding malfunction. You do not need to send the book back, you just need to demonstrate that your copy was inflicted by the defect, and I will send you a new copy.
Experimental book production comes with a suite of risks that may not remain visible at the point of sale, as the point of sale changes the book in process into the final book. It is an event which negates errors in the experimental process and transforms them into sanctified details which portend to the higher state of the final book. It is not within the purview of the Theaphora mission statement to make an intervention of transparency into the production of the book within the material circumstances of the books themselves, or in other words it is never my intention to deliver a low quality book for the sake of making clear the production techniques used to manufacture the book. But nevertheless in isolating fabrication points of large scale book production and taking them on by hand, production mishaps, despite the increasing number of quality checkpoints I prepare, are all but inevitable.
I want to reiterate gratitude for your continued business with Theaphora, and assure you that the progress and resolution of the recall will be monitored and evaluated throughout the run of Four Concretures by Brandan Griffin.
Cinema Application is an app and film management system that abstracts mechanics from explore pages and dating apps. It is an application that is also about digital supply chain compression. The invention of the explore page, with its endless scroll and algorithmic curation system, is a cinematic intervention which places the user in the position of the editor, called up with the task of making endless cuts. As the user creates more cuts, an attentional feedback loop generates subsequent input footage for continuous montage. This is because the goal of legacy social media apps is not to invent a new cinema end product but to prepare a data package for marketing agencies. Swiping in this case only marks a decision to refresh the footage, and is not a judgement but a dismissal. It generates engagement data which is fed back into the content generation loop which seeks merely to maximize attentional duration. To participate in attentional maximization a method for refreshing the endless cut is a purely social rule and not inherent to the application itself.
There is an alternative method for creating a cut, where the above de facto method is an honest reflection of attention or interest satisfaction, the alternative method is a choice in service of cultivation where a user could find interest in the content but want to veer away so as not to risk looping in similar content. The ideals or judgement systems a user adopts would play out in the refining implications of each cut. Does the user let their desires fool them into hell or do they fight them to purify the algorithm. As much as social media apps attempt to obscure the fact and make invisible and passive the implications of scrolling, participating in the scroll of explore pages is an editorial activity.
Dating apps work with a fully visible judgement mechanic. Users do not swipe left or right based on their attentional span but on whether they like or dislike the image and text sets. Although their algorithm remains obscured, they participate directly, selecting based on judgement rather than impulse. If the mechanisms and their aims are abstracted from their business models, the pairings are inverted. Editing based on judgement is more fit for creating an algorithmic feed-based film, and impulsive engagement calculations are more fit with finding a match for love, since a user is bound to have a higher chance of falling in love with someone they have incalculable interest for rather than someone they judge based on the fabrication of their profile.
Cinema Application takes the dating profile mechanic of judgement based feedback and inserts it into the explore page structure. The result is a generative cinema in which users act as editors who cut based on their direct judgement. The premise of the content creator would change with the intention of uploading content that could find a place in someone else's algorithmic montage. The roles of the content creator and of the user reverse, where the content creator is farmed for raw data, rewarded for uploading diverse footage as opposed to highly constructed attention bait videos, which the user judges to refine their auto-assembling feed.
Minigame Theory arises, like any other good and virtuous theory, from the repetition of a specific experience which produces a repeated confusion. In seeking to explain this gap between knowledge and feeling, its conclusions imply wider ramifications than the limits of its particular conception.
On playing a minigame, a user will often find themselves surprised by an enhanced enjoyment, engagement, and even dedication to the minigame in comparison to the game itself. After leaving the minigame, from here on for clarity I use "secondary game" for "minigame" as opposed to the "primary game" it is situated within, and returning the the primary game, the user will feel a confusion on recognizing the departure and return which can at times turn into a derealization akin to leaving the movie theater to step into daylight, where the gap between the two worlds momentarily swallows the whole of experience. And though the pleasure from the secondary game outweighs that of the primary, the user nevertheless returns begrudgingly to complete the main tasks.
There are three main concepts which come to explain how the secondary game gains an exalted relationship from the primary: simplification, deferment, and fictive contextualization. These concepts reflect formal, psychological, and narrative differences. What follows is a brief explanation of each.
Especially now in the wake of open world expansionism, primary games spread themselves too thin in attempting to achieve too much, with systematic complexity, full graphics card usage, and near endless gameplay supplanting craft, thought, and originality as measures of quality. I refrain from naming specific games because I do not want to. Sometimes, as is the case with games I will not mention by name, the attempt at creating a limitless world will require building a smaller, secondary game within the primary game world. By way of set theory, we know that the secondary game will always be smaller and simpler than the large and complex primary game. As a result of the semi-constraint which necessitates simplicity, and thereby compensating the market drive for limitless complexity, the secondary game benefits from a narrow scope and clear structure. In different terms, the secondary game is allowed to exist as a true playable game whereas the primary game is afflicted by an overdetermined task to create a total open universe of playability.
Similarly, as primary games bloat and swell with excessive content that inflate the mental strain of the user (a clear connection to the transition from open world expansionism to roguelike infinitism emerges), secondary games defer and alleviate the obligations accumulated from the dragged out gameplay loops in the main world. This alleviation and suspension of obligation produces a liberatory feeling within the player that often exceeds that of the player escaping their real world problems to play the primary game. Procrastination, after all, is the highest pleasure of our time. Skipping out on work to go fishing produces heightened excitement directly related to the amount of deferral involved in the choice to leave work. So it is also no surprise that fishing is one of the most popular minigame types.
The secondary game also benefits from a narrative shelter that guarantees its reality as opposed to the free floating existence of the primary game. Games, after all, are always played within an environment, but the majority of games often treat the playable world as a lonely universe without an environment to ground it within, they rarely seek to figure the embeddedness of games within a larger world, instead attempting to coincide the world of play with the total world of the game. This is a mistake. Consider the difference in playing a table top military strategy game on the counter of a dive bar where the loser must cover the bar tab versus on the surgical instrument table in an operating theater where the loser must donate an organ. The pieces, rules, and structure of the game stays the same, but the narrative environment which situates the game coats it in entirely different qualities. Physical games benefit from the frictions of real life as generators of context. Without a situation, however, primary games suffer from a lack of contextual enrichment, as a game without a fictional circumstance is indistinguishable from an ordinary task in real life. The secondary game, then, is an attempt to ground the game back into true playability.
A bonus quality to finding more pleasure from the secondary game has to do with revelry of excess inherent to leaving behind the bulk of the full game to focus on a subset an order of magnitude smaller. Paying for a full game only to flout the prescriptive play style and engage only with a limited and niche domain.
My Old Assistant is a helpful attendant to all operations at the production site. He stands at a modest height but lumbers and falls into each step like a giant. His off-job passion is to waste hours watching a nomadic West Asian village video series. The videos are shot in a handheld cinema verite style. But the soap opera narratives embedded in the videos belie their artifice of real life. Fascinated and captured by the drama and unaware of cinematographic tricks, my old assistant only now after several months of watching these videos comes to understand that they are fiction. Still, it must be the case that the environment and actors in the videos live on site, a family or group of nomads who have captured engagement by dramatizing their everyday life. My old assistant grew up in a village in Eastern Europe within a similar climate and environment as the fiction portrayed in the videos he watches, which I can only imagine adds to his enjoyment. They are a way of reengaging with his simple past without having to confront the actual reality and emotional resonances associated with the location of his youth.
I shake my old assistant from his glazed-over viewing experience to load the work van with our supplies. He complies instantaneously. Shoots out of his stupor to carry the ink drums, paper stock, smaller tools, beer, and folding table. On our way, he shares his time in East Berlin, a short stay in a hotel where he had to "do things." His resistance to divulging the entire story was more than suspicious. I know him so well as a worker, an old worker who takes orders with immediacy and executes them with good enough accuracy, but his past life is all but entirely obscured to me. I notice as I repeat this recognition to myself, a well of feeling weigh on my body, beginning with my shoulders and rising to the inside of my face, my sadness. However, I decided not to push, he is an old assistant after all and it could be the case that he really is unable to remember.A rabbit runs out and under the van.
The production site is located next to a dammed water channel in a rural location. Too far to make the drive frequently, I soon intend to relocate and consolidate for in-home fabrication. I picture my old assistant handling the relocation on his own as I setup the printer and he unloads the van. When he completes the task I hand him the first beer and tell him to wait.
We have had two large malfunctions where the ink drum fails to connect with the sensor and alignment rotor, causing the machine to lock and requiring extensive disassembly and recalibration before starting over. I set up another drum and push through several test prints which are looking great. I am reminded of why printing in house is worthwhile, despite the headache. The quality is unmatched by any other printer. Full-bodied prints with slight but tasteful traces of the process. Commanding the assistant to set up the folding table and clean it, I load in the production stock and begin the first spread. My old assistant is finished, so I hand him the second beer and tell him to wait.
Single copies are running smoothly, but higher numbers feed multiple pages per print, so a few blank pages in between each successful print begin to pile up in the tray. I stop the run and investigate the rubber paper feeder, adjusting the pressure incrementally to reduce excess feeds. This is the balance, the tradeoff. Excessive headaches and frustration for absorbing final prints of the highest quality. Customer satisfaction. I hand my old assistant another beer. Worker satisfaction. I drink my first beer.
Low Minimum Outsourced Production is mainly made available by Alibaba. Alibaba has an interesting history I will go over at some point, and runs somewhat parallel with Amazon, as it has become not only a leading e-commerce site but also, and by way of building data centers to fortify the site, one of the largest cloud providers.
I browse around for puzzle fidget cube inspiration, but I see repetitions of the same basic designs. There is one that is a wooden block with a keyhole, hot water knob, and some other hardware attached to it that I find more exciting than the plastic ones, though my preference in material is plastic. For either material, the fidget devices attached to the body are taken from objects associated with the material. At first I think this is just a lack of imagination, why not make a lock and key mechanism for the plastic cube, but then I realize there are constraints to what is already available. Still I imagine the wood with metal hardware could be translated to a plastic version. Maybe I need some kind of grounding idea, a theme, rather than trying to reinvent the generalizable fidget cube.
The most readily available path forward would be to convert the tactile experiences of writing and reading. "Poetry" is conveniently six letters and so could correspond to each side of a cube, perhaps each key would have a different switch type the letters would have distinct kinesthetic feedback identifiers. This could all correspond to the cube screensaver on the main Theaphora site. A device themed on reading may be different, I return to an idea about an e-reader that specifically and only streams Schreibliga writing. There would then be several page turning systems within the device: a forward and back button, a scroller wheel, a left to right joystick, rear bumpers, perhaps more. With the e-reader and the fidget systems combined, the device would need to be smaller than a traditional e-reader, but requiring enough depth and surface area to hold all the mechanisms.
Poetry cube is a bit too simple, though I should file it away as it would work well as a party favor for a charity event. And the fidget e-reader Schreibliga streaming device is too complex and costly for current feasibility. I need something else, a fictive world of a book or work of art that a fidget or puzzle cube could gain context from. Perhaps a book is already written and has not yet found its way across my desk, maybe it is still to be written, maybe I will write it.
Breaking Even is the most liberating of all feelings. It means something is going right. More often than not, it occurs to me now, it is unclear as to whether or not something is going right in life, with its complexities and confusions that trace the edges of even the most joyful experiences with doubt. One desires joyful experiences, yes. And to become too picky about how they appear is in poor taste. But when joy and certainty meet, that is liberation, a tier above regular joy, as this rare joy is felt wholly without concern.
In all complicated and real aesthetic pursuits, the triumph of belief is the engine, prepared for a long and treacherous path into the unknown, needing nothing at all to go right, moved by sheer will of operational integrity. And while it does not suggest in any way the success of those beliefs, breaking even does suggest something is going right, and so while the specific something that goes right remains indistinct, shapeless behind the chaotic data and probabilities involved in tipping the balance sheet, there is a certainty that something indeed is going right, which can be reflected on with an uncompromised and liberating joy.
Slack Channel Drama was particularly intense and disappointing today. I am so exhausted. No matter how enthusiastic the authors are about promotion in the abstract, as they all naively desire to become globally celebrated writers with high and prosperous enough speaking fees to live off university tourism, the end of the month always has me prodding them to fulfill their vendor and publicity quotas, each of them requiring different styles of prodding for them to take even the slightest bit of responsibility for pushing sales. They have such small minds incapable of grasping a complete understanding of the situation, so I have to work strategically. The funny one responds to guilt, the intellectual one needs short imperatives, the lazy one requires anger that turns to rage and then coldness, etc.
I devote a full day to make a general reminder in the marketing channel and follow up individually with my shapeshifting personas. My devotion to these books is far greater than their author's, otherwise no follow up would be necessary. They usually do come through, but today one replied with a smart comment about the author's work ending when the book is finished. I fumed and threw my coconut water out the bay window. It is this kind of disrespect that I have zero tolerance for. Responded with the contract for the author's book and said we would no longer be publishing it but we would be maintaining full control of the manuscript rights.
One replied how I was cruel, and another worried I was planning on punishing others by icing manuscripts out of publication. Then the flood. I silenced the marketing channel and took a long walk where I considered publishing the backlash and inciting subsequent backlash every now and then to add as new chapters until a full-length manuscript emerged. Maybe it was all worth it. An author's job may be over when the book is finished, but that's only because the editor's job has no limits.
Randomization Algorithm Development was necessary for assembling Four Concretures card packs. The total card order was not large enough for the manufacturer to randomize and package the cards for me, but I figured this would be no problem, I could just sequence them by hand as one would collate and bind a small run of books. I was mistaken. Randomization and sequencing required substantial creative development of special assembling steps.
There are three tiers of rarity that inform the total amount of each card, so I calculated and batched the entire set over four different large count orders based one what made intuitive sense for the scale of the project and how I wanted the odds of pulling any given card. The cards arrived in four large stacks, each card compiled into its own set. The power of holding every Official Four Concreture card in existence almost consumed me to the point of deciding to forego the entire trading card side of the project, and keep them all for myself. I would control the entire supply and keep every card in perfect condition. This was a new feeling for me entirely, and though it was quite faint, it produced enough intrigue to recur as a distraction as I determined the procedure for ordering the cards, as if a healthy resistance to completing the task.
Determining a rarity algorithm and procedure for ordering the cards is an aesthetically essential but precarious task. There is the probability of pulling any given card, based on its total count within the full set, but there is also the probability of opening a pack with a specific sequence, which I desired to make as even as possible by creating a strong pack assembling method. In reality, most will only purchase a pack or two, so the even distribution may never be truly functional, as the odds of a buyer getting the same pack twice is impossible even with a minimally optimal distribution method. But it is of aesthetic importance that the cards be ordered according to a maximally distributive system, as I wanted a rule-based method to determine the order of the packs that could stand in as a kind of composer. Each pack would be precisely ordered according to this larger logic, such that while there may not be a functional difference between a weak method and a strong method, some trace of the effort in using the strong method might infuse the pack with a special feeling. Since each pack only contains eight of the total thirty-two cards, it is important that each pack stands on its own, as an instance of the larger set. I needed the force of the sorting algorithm to match the force I aspired each pack to carry. This systematized sequencing process would place the Four Concretures Card Game within a tradition of procedural poetics.
There are two limiting factors for sorting the cards however. The order of cards in the eight card pack are as follows: one resource, three readers, one of each creature. All packs follow this order and set list, unless I made a mistake in packing them, which would mean the lucky receiver purchased a rare error pack. The other limiting factor is physical. Moving cards around with one another, like shuffling, causes great wear on the cards. I am not willing to put the cards through wear, and ensure my hands are oil free before handling them into packs. I try to touch the cards only when necessary. Deciding to minimize card handling means an entire host of methods for distributing cards into packs is off limits. I allowed myself to cut the stacks into smaller stacks, merge them into larger stacks, and of course pick up the cards to put them in packs, but these were the only three moves I would allow.
Working with stacks to cycle for each of the eight card positions would be the most effective deterministic distribution spread method. If each card position set has a total number of stacks that all reduce to different primes, then cycles would never overlap and it would guarantee even distribution of cards throughout the packs while keeping with my rule of minimal intervention. The card pack ordered positions and their associated stack primes are as follows: Resource 1-1, Reader 1-7, Reader 2-13, Reader 3-11, Creature 1-2, Creature 2-9, Creature 3-5, Creature 4-17. Acting as a base, the Resource stack would be a single stack with no cycling required. I could construct all card position sets by the permissible cut and merge actions. Since the individual stacks vary in size, I would merge and recut stacks to maintain the number set in the beginning of the process. This accounts for the entire process of distributing cards into packs without any intervention on my behalf outside of setting up and proceeding.
Management Techniques differ inwardly from outwardly. I do not place the same pressure on myself as I do the authors or artists whom I direct for Theaphora. Allow me to explain. I began writing this piece about something else entirely, until the truth became apparent, that I did not want to write about what I began this writing about just yet. So I saved it to another file for another day and began anew. It is, for my person, best to hold off on things until it is no longer possible to hold off. If I can hold off on writing, that means I should. For Theaphora, and the authors it implicates outside of myself, it is my task to artificially create the circumstances for the authors to feel they can no longer hold off, even if they perhaps could.
We have the new circuit up and running, Schreibliga, which I claim no ownership over nor direction outside of convincing specific people to join. There was substantial though non-threatening difficulty in coming up with the right name, the concept was so great, which is often a bad thing as it charges the fulfillment of the concept with anxiety and doubt, and not knowing German made it difficult to know what would actually make sense. Luckily, a great and eager German friend was able to give generous support and guidance, and we worked out "Schreibliga."
Talked to another friend, who coincidentally is in Berlin for a short trip, urging him to join the effort. Felt confident after our conversation that he will, though it is difficult to make anyone do anything, especially when it is writing. He has the opportunity to do a lot of reading through June, and this fact mixed with his distinct perspectives on Art, Politics, and directing Chatham Soccer all point to a great addition to the Schreibliga.
There are several others, too, that I am actively trying to court into this circuit. I mentioned that making anyone do anything is difficult, but I have some new ways of thinking about this process that counter the difficulty, increase ease. Instead of mentally framing the process as encouraging or pushing momentum into a different direction, I think about it as presenting something before someone else and continuing to present it there until the desired task is finished. This shift in mental framing will have minute effects in the communication, sure, but most importantly it allows for the almost total negation of hesitation when it comes to urging, reminding, or asking someone to do something. It also removes a lot of the need for explanation, instead letting them come to their own methods and routes of fulfilling the task. Hopefully this management insight will bring great productivity for Theaphora.
Centralized Distribution for small presses must have been essential when bookstores were the main sites of sales. Online retail obviously disrupted all that, so I am not surprised to see the closure of Small Press Distribution, though I would want to see their accounting books. They should upload them for transparency. Still, the event remindes me of some thoughts that informed the decision to distribute in-house both for direct-to-consumer and for bookstore sales.
Presses that chose to distribute through Small Press Distribution attempted to streamline their supply chain, but in the choice to simplify, forewent completely the curation of their customer purchase experience, leaving their special books adrift in an undifferintiated sea. If presses are wary of storing packaging, printing labels, and making runs to the post office, they can simply lower volume and feel the comfort of their bottom line as it benefits from the increased margins of direct-to-consumer distribution. I would do anything to ensure my customer does not have to wander through a nondescript retail hub to purchase a Theaphora book. The experience of buying, overlooked as it is, always involves choice and direction on the part of the press.
For direct-to-consumer, there is a common misconception that the context of a sale always produces a neutral experience. This is incorrect. Buying is an activity that feels a specific way based on the circuit and circumstances that enables the purchase. Sometimes buying feels better than owning. A clerk selecting optimal fruit based on your birth chart and preparing a basket for the coming lunar month is wholly different than you selecting and shooting your desired fruit into a Nerf hoop for a discount. If I hit the shot all net, the Fuji apple will memorialize my success in its taste, so that when I eat it the next day it will be elevated. Reading begins at purchase.
When I was building the Theaphora site, I wanted to generate a physical experience in the customer associated with purchase, while minimizing friction. The Nintendo DS home screen design allowed for the book-as-game-disc conceit, requiring the customer to drag and drop the book into the game slot in order to open the description of the book, the price, and a buy button. A slight gesture, but the act of dragging the object to a desired space creates a satisfying feeling that evokes clicking into place a game cartridge into the console slot. I assumed this action to be intuitive enough, the books bounce up and down to indicate interaction, but still people sometimes have a difficult time figuring it out. Everything has tradeoffs, but one must be willing to ask more of their customers if they want to have total control of the reading experience from start to finish.
As for bookstore sales, it is simple enough to expect presses create and maintain real relationships with the bookstores that stock their books. Choosing a few bookstores in a few cities, targeting the correct context for a press, is also a worthwhile activity for ensuring the books end up situated in a physical environment which is in accordance with and supports the aesthetic of the press. Rather than putting these decisions in the hands of a distributor who will merely fulfill demand with conservative oversight, a press who controls their own distribution can make relationships with bookstores or non-bookstore storefronts with flexibility and nimbleness. A comic store, car dealership, or bottle center could all be worthwhile stockists if a relationship emerges, but is rendered impossible when a press forfeits their distribution to an intermediary.
There were two things that were nice about Small Press Distribution. I enjoyed being able to see the quantity of each book they stocked. I also enjoyed watching the rise and fall of market darling presses on their best seller lists. Maybe if they had introduced comment and review sections for the books, like Amazon, they would still be around. For a central node in the small press supply chain to pass on providing a much needed public forum was the biggest missed opportunity.
Low Minimum Outsourced Production offers exciting new possibilities for publishers to render and distribute texts on object types outside the conventional two page bound book form. Custom-formed polyvinyl inflatables, diecut full color metal keychains, uncut sheets of playing cards, to name a few underutilized product types. Print-on-demand sites promoted an uninventive and uninspired self publishing boom a decade ago. There has never been an event which misrecognized and harmed the history of the book more, as conventional books have always been easy and low cost to print and bind in a home studio. The print on demand boom flooded the market with undead mockeries of mass market text objects, placing the focus on making any random writer feel the exhaltation of being authorized. This was a mistake that birthed serious consequences.
Creating and promoting new authors should have never been the point. The point is to renovate and expand the horizons of book experiences by developing new techniques, forms, and marketing for physical textual objects. In this way, the fidget cube is the most successful and inspiring book innovation of the twenty-first century because it back-read the two handed habits of page flipping and condensed the tactile experience into the simplest possible device, while low minimum production allowed for massive lateral customization and format design. Fidget spinners understand that reading is already taking place on the mobile screen, that the distribution of text is no longer a problem, but there nevertheless remains a free hand. At the tactile loss of page flipping, the fidget spinner declares "I will be a universal page as long as my bearings function properly," and acts as a supplementary physical object to complete the reading experience of mobile screen based writing.
Four Concretures is a book by Brandan Griffin that is distributed between two versions. Originally written in the manner of a traditional book, the manuscript was ready to publish two years ago. Brandan conceived of the project to extend his work on living organisms in text into the domain of the inert, to animate them in order to reveal the life and movement inherent to inorganic materials. Then, something special happened. I was slow in getting Theaphora started and even slower to start manufacturing books. Because of this slowness, we were allowed to think Four Concretures as a world unto itself which could take on different physical manifestations and organizing principles. We settled on the trading card game after a year of imagining various secondary applications of the Four Concretures world.
Publishing books with supplementary accessories or merchandise was part of the early vision for Theaphora, though not entirely developed, as Shane McCrae's booklet comes in two versions, the Special Edition acting as a lottery ticket for his pro-deck. The interim period where I was either too nervous, leisurely, or distracted to move fully forward with the second Theaphora release allowed our (Brandan and me) collaboration to push this idea of the supplementary forward into what I believe is a new formulation of The Book.
We could have gone in a different direction which would have felt more like traditional merchandise. For example, a scrapped but interesting idea was a Lego set that would include pieces and instructions for building each Concreture, though as I write this I cannot remember if I ever actually brought this up with Brandan. In the end, we settled on the card concept because it would allow for Brandan to extend more of his typesetting and worldbuilding skills into a precise but modular form. We studied several popular trading card games to understand the basic reading structures and card mechanics. As an editor, I was granted more creative control over the layout, design, and aesthetic of the cards, which altogether reminded me of the feeling of mutually coordinated daydream walks Brandan and I used to take around Central Park.
The card pack became a unique opportunity for me to exert more directly the vision of Theaphora. After thinking through the basic shape of the collection, four creatures with three hydrations phases each, a large set of reader cards, four resource cards, the supposed add-on felt more like its own distinct version. Further still, the card project opened up this question of where to locate the primary version of the book both against the manuscript version but also within itself. Let me explain. There is the collection of thirty two cards as a whole, but there is also the pack of eight cards which are organized according to a rarity algorithm and ordered specifically with the resource card first, then three reader cards, and finally four creature cards. Both the full collection and the chance-based pack could equally take the space of the primary, and furthermore, we started to think of the playing or trading the cards with others as a place where different experiences of the book could also emerge.
Because of these multiplying possibilities of experiencing Four Concretures, we began speaking of the two versions, and the different variations contained within them, as reading scenarios. Opening a pack and viewing one card after another is its own reading scenario, just as attempting to battle with an opponent is its own, just as reading the manuscript version is its own. The primary book might not be either, but instead it may be the idea of the open world of Four Concretures which is instanced in these reading scenarios.
