Stoptimizing

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.

New by me

• This week, I reviewed Criterion’s new 4K disc of Michael Mann’s Thief for Screen Anarchy. It’s good!
• I also popped open the new Howler from the Vintage Collection, complete with new(ish) Sabine Wren. This time, she has a poncho!

Not by me

• Great interview with terminally doing-the-most filmmaker Steven Soderbergh by Matt Zoller Seitz. (Vulture)
• “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)
• Burning Swasticar merit badges, for those who want to get a jump on scouting season and help a trans couple conceive. (Sophie Labelle)
• Eight-session, anti-oppressive practice-focused Dungeons & Dragons. ‘Nuff said. (TATI Online Art Therapy)