droppinglsd.wordpress.com has moved to www.droppinglsd.com

A couple posts back I said I would wait for a while before setting this site up on a new domain. Well, I changed my mind.

Click here and head over to www.droppinglsd.com.

Basically, I got fed up with not being able to customize anything. I’ll change the Dropping LSD title one day, but it’ll be easier if I’ve got everything under my control from the start. So keep visiting!

new project: a personal wedding website, completely designed by moi

Woot! I have “hired” myself to work on a nice big project: a wedding site for my my fiancée and me. This might very well be the first piece of a real design portfolio.

The Framework

The date is set for June 4, 2011, and we want to have a website available for our friends and family. It will mainly be an information repository, with venue and transportation information, things to do that weekend (aside from the wedding!), photos, relationship stories, that sort of thing.

So I bought a domain for it, put it on a host that I already have, and I will be working on it in my free time. In fact, the work will probably occur at the expense of my other law school-related responsibilities, but that’s no big deal…this is still productive and fun! If it wasn’t this site, I would just be procrastinating in some other much lamer way.

I’m using the WordPress platform as a content management system, and I’m planning on basically building a personalized theme from the ground up. Actually, using WP Framework as a base. I want to use all my own graphics, to showcase my design work.

The funniest thing about all of this is that I actually have very little idea of how to build a WordPress theme, or how to cover all aspects of design for the website (icons, textures, page layouts, etc.). But I’m not worried, and rarely am in this sort of situation, because I’m very confident that I know how to learn how to build a wordpress theme, or how to do all the graphics work. It’s really an amazing state of mind that we’re all capable of, really, although only time will tell if I’m able to pull off these things well!

The Content

So, my fiancée and I have already done a bunch of brainstorming on the content, and we more or less have the outline done. I also pinged the hivemind over at Reddit and was given a bunch of great suggestions for website features. Aside from the things described above, there’ll be an infrequently updated blog that will log all the major wedding preparation steps (e.g. venue booking, caterer booking, dresses/suits, wedding party), and we’re going to design our own cartoony map of the town (think theme park map, or novelty map) to guide people around.

But our crowning idea, and this one we came up with ourselves, is going to be our registry. We’re not really wild about getting stuff for our wedding, because we more or less have everything we need in terms of housewares. Anything extra that we receive will just be junk that ends up laying around/regifted/sold away. But what we do like is the idea of guests paying for pieces of our honeymoon. In other words, in lieu of physical things, they might pay for “a night at a hotel” or “a portion of our airfare.” Now this will require a little bit of implementation, and it is the piece of the process that I’m most unfamiliar with. However, I think it also has the potential to be one of the coolest parts of the site.

What I’m imagining I’ll set up is a mock storefront, in which money from guest “purchases” of the various honeymoon pieces end up in a Paypal account. I’m thinking of adding little thank-yous on the site to memorialize who bought what. For instance, if an aunt buys a tour boat ride, the page will return a permanent graphic describing her as the “owner” of that portion of the honeymoon. Afterwards, we could even take pictures during the boat trip to serve as a “thank you” note. But first, of course, is just the need to figure out the best way to do this.

The Design: The First Six Steps

Now, this portion has the potential to become the biggest stumbling block, because it’s so open-ended. Worse, without at least a sense of the desired design, I can’t really implement a WP theme in any satisfactory way. So I’m going to approach this systematically.

• First, I’m going to mine the internet for basic theme layout ideas. This will be from both wedding-related and wedding-unrelated sites. The point is to figure out how we want information arranged, how extensive the header, how extensive the background etc.
• Second, I will sketch, by hand, the layouts that are top candidates, and we will choose from them.
• Third, I will go back to the internet for inspiration, and see what other people are doing in terms of design elements. Fonts, menus, icons, color schemes, and so on.
• Fourth, I will sketch by hand, or in photoshop/illustrator if it’s necessary, some alternative options.
• Fifth, I will determine in more detail what the overall mood and style of the website will be. Will it have more of a sketchy, blueprint-like feel to it? Will it be a gradient-heavy, rounded corner, Web 2.0-like theme? Will it be more vector-based or photography-based? Again, this might require some additional research, but it’ll also be something I’ll be considering at at every step of the process.
• Sixth, then, and only then, will I begin to consider exactly how I’m going to pull all this shit off!

But that’s a future problem that I am laying the groundwork for now. I am excited!

Ted Olsen: “…I’m sorry if I interrupted you.”

Sourced from Think Progress. Ted Olsen on Chris Wallace’s show, discussing Judge Walker’s Prop 8 decision.

Boom, lawyered!

Definitely, my favorite bit started at the 3:45 mark. What an awesome technique, and his delivery of it was timed perfectly. Overall that was a pretty impressive display on Olsen’s part, although I’m not particularly surprised at the quality of the performance. After all, he was the plaintiff’s lawyer for the case, so all of that was probably sitting fresh in his mind, honed with practice and infused with zealous advocacy. No mere news anchor would have stood a chance.

For more amusement, if you click through to the Youtube comments you’ll find that there are three flavors of responses to the clip. Here’re some examples:

1. The Choir: “franzmr: This guy is the personification of awesome! Very well spoken and even got a Faux News guy to agree with him. He’s definitely a hero to all who want equality for all!”
2. The Swayed: “wilddl229: What a great video.. Changed my mind”
3. The Functionally Retarded: “LY8Ze7xK: . . . I would much prefer to have anything decided by a popular vote, than decided by activist liberal judges and bozos like this, because at least you have a fighting chance to make your argument.”

There’s also a sprinkling of a fourth:

• The Objective Reporter: “moochu2: Wow, Olson obliterated that fuck face”

Amen.

illustrator tutorial completed: watercolor and marker style portrait of a bunny

This was fun. Last night I spent an hour (Or so? Time flies.) doing a Watercolor and Marker Style Portrait tutorial for Illustrator by Miguel Cardona. It’s on Design Instruct, which seems like a really great resource.

I used a picture of my fiancée as a base. Here she is at the top of a fire tower in Door County, Wisconsin:

And after the tutorial:

There are a lot of areas where I think I can improve my technique. The outlining was not as thorough as I would have liked, I’m there are plenty of other shading details that I missed out on. The coloring is also lacking depth and complexity. If you look at Miguel’s finished portrait, the final coloring is pretty incredible.

But those shortcomings are mostly due to inexperience, and I’m sure that as I work on more portraits I’ll get a better handle on how to do the details.

Doing this tutorial reminded me of how much I liked doing them! Maybe I’ll try and do one a day to work on my noob design skills.

trying to figure out what this blog is all about

I’ve decided to refocus the content of Dropping LSD, because I have to come to grips with two of my less dependable personality traits. Also, I’m going to lay out the foundations of a Master Plan.

Two Unfortunate or Fortunate Traits, Depending

1. I get bored of things easily.
2. I am good at thinking up ideas, but very bad at the follow through.

Now the basic concept of this blog, figuring out how I can get out of law school debt doing work that I enjoy, is still the same. But I’m not sure that I want to focus on personal finance, frugality, and productivity, because while I do like those topics I’ve found that I’m unable to color in the lines, as it were. Something new and shiny will catch my eye, or I will get stuck on writing a post for days, or I may simply feel unqualified to really expound on a certain topic because it’s not in my area of expertise. What happens then, when I feel as if I’ve moved on from the blog in my head, is the blog goes derelict, and shutters its doors. Another reason is that the blogosphere dealing in these topics is already overpopulated and oversaturated with plenty of great sites. I don’t want to just be a recirculator.

Well, enough.

The only way I’m going to keep this blog going is by nutting up and simply writing about whatever I’m interested in at the moment, and this will change from month to month (actually, the real length of time is probably closer to every two weeks). This kind of violates that pick a topic and stick to it rule of blogging, but I’m going to take this advice instead.

A Master Plan

So, the main point is getting out of debt. That means making money. I’ll take a law job if I have to, if not that then a nine-to-five if that’s available, but in the time that I have left (that sounds morbid…I mean before graduation), I would like to work on my creative skills and at least get started with a feasible side career in writing. And this blog will be part of that.

I have a number of ideas, for a children’s book, for a web comic, for several sci-fi stories, for a faux travel book…but like I said above, I just have to follow through. What I’d like this blog to be is a jumping off point for these various projects. Sort of like a central hub. I envision giving away much of this content away for free, but then making a little extra on the side through the sale of hard copy or publication deals. Like any blogger, I do want to get traffic to my site, and I do want to develop a base; I do realize this will be difficult without any firm sort of direction, but if this has to be nothing more than another personal blog then so be it. People will just have to realize how great of a guy I am and keep coming back for more!

I’ve decided to keep WordPress.com until I’m out of debt, and then I’ll migrate to a new site. By then I’ll hopefully have more content and more readers. Three weeks in, I kind of think that Dropping LSD isn’t the best name to build a brand around, but I’m going to stick with it in the meantime. I’ll consider it as a badge of shame I have to wear for a while.

microworld: twirling on elk plaza, yellowstone

Found a neat and quick photoshop tutorial for creating microworlds. I’ve seen the technique called little planets in other places. This one was straightforward, just four steps.

Here’s my base. This is a picture of my fiancée mid-twirl above Fort Yellowstone/Mammoth Hot Springs at Yellowstone National Park. The park town is actually behind us, this is looking north towards Montana. We’re on the high ground on the south end of Elk Plaza. We’d hiked up on what we thought was a trail from our campground below to the town, but which we eventually realized was just a game trail. So we were tired and sweaty, but the view was well worth it at the top and we had to celebrate.

And here’s the microworld! I kind of blew through the final step of stitching together the seams created by wrapping the picture, I just wanted to see what this sort of thing would look like. If done in the future, it’s definitely much easier with a level background; in this picture the hills on either side actually line up nicely, but the coloring is skewed because of the great difference in distance.

I’ve decided that so far I’ve only been dabbling in photoshop, and I’d really like to become proficient at it. I’ve got a bunch of tutorials lined up, and I torrented a “Photoshop CS5 for Dummies” book. There’s a lot I already know in it, but there’s also a ton of little detailed tools and functionalities that I’m only vaguely aware of or don’t know how to use. Since I’m thorough (read: anal) when it comes to learning the basics, I’m going to comb through it anyway.

coming up with a prepayment plan for my direct student loans

Okay, this is just a little bit of me thinking out loud.

According to the Direct Loan site, my current payoff amount (that’s principal outstanding balance plus interest) is $89,178.15. Starting next month, I’m going to start paying down my interest. I’ll be able to do this since I have a part time job as a research assistant, and I have a loan surplus because I really borrowed too much in the first place. Before I begin this little endeavor, though, it’s important that I be aware of my past financial mistakes so that I can put everything in perspective.

Now, I’d love to have financial records stretching back into my toddler years, but as far as I’m concerned the day I started law school is the day my financial life started. Everything before that is a dark and brutal prehistory.

Financial Prehistory

College was a mess; I had plenty of work-study income coming in, but I also had plenty of alcohol to drink and inconsequential shit to buy. Fortunately my $160k+ undergrad tuition was taken care of by financial aid, a college savings account, and my Dad. I did work at a relatively normal job for a year after college, if normal means growing bacteria and neurons, dissecting rodents, and using things too small to see under a microscope to mess with more things too small to see. And that normal job paid; not super well, but well enough. Of course, over the course of that year and the subsequent year of traveling and studying abroad I spent the entirety of that salary.

So I considered myself at net zero worth at the start of law school. Loans, of course changed that. But I had nevertheless entered into a more stable financial time and the matter of borrowing and spending started to claw at corners of my awareness. Rather then my accounts being a sort of black box, I would note my statements and try and keep aware of what I was doing, even if I wasn’t changing my behavior. Eventually, I joined Mint.com (before it was acquired!) and got everything centralized (by everything I mean my loans and my one checking account).

The Grand Total Thus Far

Despite all this, I’d never really gone through my overall financial situation step by step.  Well, I have now, and here’s the big picture, the Total indicated below is the total spent aside from school tuition:

So on the positive side, about a third of the tuition (which more or less comes out to $45k a year) was paid for through my school scholarship and a few other school related credits. Also, over the course of two years I have had a small $8k income that came in through my research assistant gig and gifts.

Nevertheless, the huge problem here is that I spent $31k in these two years. That may not be a lot, compared to some average middle class or upwards person, but I think that in my position thirty grand is excessive. Now, not all of that was waste. I had books to buy, rent to pay, a summer program to attend, plane tickets, patent bar prep materials, and so on. But I am more than certain that a painfully wasteful amount of it could have been avoided had I adopted a more frugal mindset earlier on.

In the Upcoming Year

As for this final year’s tuition and loans, I’ve taken out a total of ~$42,500, which will kick back a sum of about $12,000 for living expenses and such. According to my calculations for rent, I will spend at least $5,200 on rent, and will probably have to add a thousand dollars or so to that in order to cover utilities.

I’ll have to work out a budget for food, books, etc., but overall it looks like I’ll have a couple thousand left over at the end of the year.  Part of that will be an emergency fund for post-graduation, or I’ll used a chunk of it to pay off more interest. We’ll see.

So, to sum up, I’ve got my big picture finances squared away, I’m working on a rough yearly budget for next year, and I’m planning on starting to pay down the interest once a month, with any and all income that comes into my bank account.

unemployment, lack of jobs, generation y, and such

And for today, an uplifting msnbc.com article on unemployment and today’s young adults.

“The ‘scarring effects’ of prolonged unemployment can be devastating over a worker’s career,” according to the report. “Productivity, earnings and well-being can all suffer. In addition, unemployment can lead to a deterioration of skills and make securing future employment more difficult.”

Ouch.

“At one point, I applied to Whole Foods, hoping they might see some potential for me to move to some type of management position,” Hueseman said. “The e-mail I received from them said I was far too overqualified for any of their hourly positions and as such would not be considered for a position.”

Ouch.

Baby boomers also are delaying their retirement, adding to the competition.

And ouch.

Looking forward to some good times.

ancient wisdom: marcus aurelius on motivation and getting your ass out of bed

Here’s the opening paragraph of Book 5 of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, translation by George Long:

In the morning when thou risest unwillingly, let this thought be present- I am rising to the work of a human being. Why then am I dissatisfied if I am going to do the things for which I exist and for which I was brought into the world? Or have I been made for this, to lie in the bed-clothes and keep myself warm?

– But this is more pleasant.

– Dost thou exist then to take thy pleasure, and not at all for action or exertion? Dost thou not see the little plants, the little birds, the ants, the spiders, the bees working together to put in order their several parts of the universe? And art thou unwilling to do the work of a human being, and dost thou not make haste to do that which is according to thy nature?

– But it is necessary to take rest also.

– It is necessary: however nature has fixed bounds to this too: she has fixed bounds both to eating and drinking, and yet thou goest beyond these bounds, beyond what is sufficient; yet in thy acts it is not so, but thou stoppest short of what thou canst do. So thou lovest not thyself, for if thou didst, thou wouldst love thy nature and her will. But those who love their several arts exhaust themselves in working at them unwashed and without food; but thou valuest thy own own nature less than the turner values the turning art, or the dancer the dancing art, or the lover of money values his money, or the vainglorious man his little glory. And such men, when they have a violent affection to a thing, choose neither to eat nor to sleep rather than to perfect the things which they care for. But are the acts which concern society more vile in thy eyes and less worthy of thy labour? (emphasis mine)

God damn. I’ve decided to memorize this and recite it whenever I wake up. Going through the Meditations, about half of what he says I can discard for lack of relevance to modern society and its scientific worldview, but the other half unfailingly gives me the shivers.

Although the emperor’s more general, stoic point is that you shouldn’t complain about whatever cards life has dealt you, you just play them, for those who think that they do know what they’re doing this advice is an even more powerful motivator.

So I’m going to sidestep that deeper philosophical point that he’s trying to make: that everyone’s life is as it should be, that their personal situation is already part of a perfectly well-ordered universe, and that taking part in that universal dance is reason enough for living. Obviously if everyone could swallow that about their less than pleasing existences we wouldn’t still be having the same problems described by Marcus Aurelius nearly two millenia ago.

But if you can come to grips with your existence, or are fortunate enough to be pursuing some sort of work or passion that is self-actualizing or leads to self-actualization, then this passage simply says it all. It’s a potent reminder for  whenever you might lose sight of the point of your striving. You do what you do because such doing is the very fulfillment of what you are.

Also, according to wiktionary a turner is “a person who turns and shapes wood etc. on a lathe.”

should your work be fulfilling? sometimes no, but ultimately yes.

I came across this blog post yesterday, and it certainly got me thinking. It’s titled “Post College: Realizing they were talking about you…” Here’s the tl;dr version.

• College student dreams of becoming a movie director or some kind of video editor.
• College grad has trouble finding a job, and when he does take jobs, they’re not in his dream field. When he gets a job offer in his dream field, albeit in a menial, entry level position with worse pay, he gets angry at that offer because was “beneath” him (the article doesn’t clearly say if he took it and then left it, or rejected it outright).
• College grad now works in telephone technical support, and as he describes it, “it’s been almost 7 years since [he’s] edited anything substantial. [His] demo reel is moldy, [his] skill-set is ambiguous — and [he’ll] be 31 this year.”
• College grad has an epiphany, and blogs about it:

In hindsight, I can’t remember ever accomplishing anything really HARD that I didn’t already love to do before I started. Most of my successes have been in things that I was really already naturally good at and didn’t have to try very hard to finish. At some point I got it in my head then , since that was the case, work wasn’t supposed to be difficult. Which is why the last seven years have been such a mystery to me.

Like many in our media saturated culture, when I was young I adopted the notion that we all had a calling. That was the career that took advantage of whatever you were naturally good at. Success in life then was simply going to be a matter of finding that calling and sliding right in behind it’s desk. If things were too hard then you just weren’t doing it right.

Since I hadn’t found “it” yet, I picked jobs that were less money but also less work and responsibility. That was preferable to having to bust my ass at something that wasn’t “fulfilling” (the word tastes a little acidic now.) When things have gotten tough I’ve bitched and cried and switched jobs. In my present position I have told friends before that a monkey could do my job, and yet sometimes I do my job poorly because I “just don’t wanna.” The inherent implications of this make me cringe.

“This isn’t really what I’m doing, this is just what I’m doing until my ship comes in.”

Even now considering this, my propensity to just complain and resist difficulty is already kicking in. The realization that you’re an alcoholic doesn’t make the urge to drink go away.

I guess what I’m saying is it occurs to me today that I never learned how to be a hard worker. I had quite a number of dreams and aspirations, but was totally unwilling to suffer for them. Now that the thought occurs to me, I’m not sure where to start.

Before I start on this, I just want to thank this guy for taking the time to write about his soul-searching and put it out there. It’s given me a lot to think about and I think many others will appreciate it. I also respect him for deciding that he needs to move on out of his old mindset and figure out what to do next.

But…

That being said, when I first read this,  I couldn’t quite put my finger on why the post rubbed me the wrong way. Now, I realize that it was because the targets of his blame-fest don’t really seem to be the source of his problems. He blames the media (i.e. popular culture and contemporary American society) for pushing the idea of a “calling,” and then he blames the idea of a “calling” for causing him to settle for nothing less than rapturous career fulfillment. But while that seems plausible enough, it doesn’t quite jive with his story.

First, he defines a calling as a career that has you doing what you’re good at. If you find a job that you’re good at, then you’re automatically successful.  Okay, so his calling was videography; if he would just do something involving videography, then he would be automatically successful.

One problem: according to his story he never actually took a job that involved his aspirations. At what point did he feel unfulfilled while working in a job related to videography? It seems like there was no such point, because he turned down the one job that was remotely related to his aspirations and one would expect that he would find the other ones unfulfilling anyway.

He didn’t give up on his dreams because he was working in his dream field and found it hard, he gave up on his dreams because he had the unrealistic expectation that his dream would simply come to him.

Maybe he meant it was hard work just finding a job that would be fulfilling? But what does that have to do with his criticisms of callings and fulfilling work? Again, there’s a vast difference between quitting because something is hard work, and quitting because something didn’t fall into your lap.

For instance, he links to a Cracked.com article criticizing the “training montages” trope in movies because they create the impression that “hard work isn’t really that hard.” (Amusing article, by the way.)  But even in the montages, the characters actually go out and try things out. The Karate Kid learns from Mr. Miyagi, Rocky’s pounding away in the gym, et cetera, et cetera. They didn’t wait for their victories before training.

Why do I care?

Well first, I feel for the guy. Realizing shit like that sucks.

Second, I don’t think that the blanket mocking of the ideas that people have callings and that people should find work that fulfills them is the proper sentiment to throw out there. Granted, sometimes people have unrealistic estimates of their own ability, and granted, sometimes people will be good at things they can’t possibly make a living off of, but that doesn’t mean they should settle for grinding away at any shitty job that comes their way.

That’s not to say there aren’t situations where you shouldn’t take jobs like that. If you have no choice, then so be it. But if it’s unfulfilling, then don’t blindly go through the motions just because you bought into the bullshit zombie notion that “any work is a privilege.” Is the “system” some sort of feudal overlord handing out scraps? That attitude’s just indicative of a lack of imagination.

If you have to do a shitty job, you do it for as long as you have to. Sometimes that will be as long as it takes to save up whatever resources you need to overcome real world obstacles. And sometimes it will be as long as it takes for you to clear your head. If you can’t do hard work at anything, then yes, that’s a problem. But once you figure out that life requires hard work that doesn’t mean you have to give up on your calling and the search for fulfillment.

Third, I have related entitlement issues, though I think I draw different conclusions about them. But that’s another post.

So to address the question in the title: Should your work be fulfilling? Sometimes it won’t be, but that should only be until you find new work that is. If you don’t, then in the end, what’s the fucking point?