On Being Bad at Things

I don’t like practicing things. I never have. I gave up piano lessons in eighth grade, after nine years, because my teacher wanted me to spend more than half an hour a day playing scales, and I finally worked up the courage to say no.

Actually, that first thing isn’t really correct. I don’t like practicing that doesn’t seem to have a point. I want to get good at things, without looking like I'm not good at them, and in my teenage brain, there was no connection between stumbling over endless scales and etudes and the parts of music I really wanted to be good at. So I started playing guitar instead, and happily spent hours on weekends playing songs I actually wanted to know how to play, with no one judging me based on how much time I spent playing.

There’s no getting around the fact that becoming good at something requires that you be bad at it first. But the way we teach that to kids is often counterproductive. “Practice makes perfect” is basically meaningless, and also not true. You’re never going to be perfect at anything; that would require an infinite amount of practice. The best you can ever be is amazing. Not that we tell children to strive to be amazing. Nor do we tell them it’s okay to look like you’re bad at something when you’re bad at that thing.

My dad came closer to making sense with a Russian proverb: “Repetition is the mother of learning.” But I got tired of him saying that long before I found any skill I wanted to learn by repeating it. And when I did find one, I was surprised to learn that I’d been practicing for months before I even noticed I was bad at it.

That was knitting. I spent six weeks repeating a single gesture, and didn’t realize that’s what was going on because I was focused on the scarf at the end of the journey. And even then, I didn’t put two and two together until nearly five years later, when I started watching art streams on Twitch, including marathons of Bob Ross’ The Joy of Painting (and knitting while I watched, of course).



Bob Ross put it this way: “Talent is a pursued interest. Anything you practice, you can do.” That got me thinking. As a kid, everyone told me I was talented, rather than skilled, and that made me think I should be able to do everything right the first time, and that it reflected badly on me if I didn't. (This is another thing I only noticed years later, with the strength of Tumblr Discourse behind it.) What if talent and skill were the same thing? That might actually make practicing worth it.

At about the same time, Alex Steacy announced that he was going to start a webcomic (warning: full of toilet humor), so he could learn to be okay with being bad at drawing. I read the comic, and watched a few of his drawing streams, and between Bob and Alex I realized I wanted to become good at drawing, and that the way to become good at drawing was to spend some time being bad at drawing first. It was okay to look bad, to be discordant, as long as you were doing something you enjoyed and were dedicated to getting better at it. And so I started the Pokemon Art Challenge, which I post about in my weekly crafting updates. (That link is to the series in chronological order, so you can see how much I’ve improved since November 2016.) And the really funny thing about that is, even my bad drawings get praise from people who don't draw at all, because they can see the work I'm putting into it, even when the result isn't great.

In spite of all this positive reinforcement, my brain doesn't entirely get how being bad at things leads to being good at things. I have to teach it one hobby at a time. My most recent success has been with Magic: the Gathering. Last fall I posted about stepping back from Magic until I no longer put so much of my self-worth into it, and losing was no longer the end of the world. Some time after that, I started going to Lady Planeswalkers events again, and I told myself I was going less to play the game and more to spend time with interesting, nice people. And the more I went, the more I convinced myself it wasn’t about doing well at the game, the better I began to do at the game. Last night was my second draft this month where I won two rounds in a row.

Not sure what hobby is next. Maybe I’ll go back to music, and try to teach myself not to be self-conscious about practicing singing.

Here’s to a grand future of being bad at stuff.

On Homestuck: A Syllabus

Homestuck is a big deal. Written by Andrew Hussie on mspaintadventures.com between April 2009 and October 2016, it was basically the bible of the internet for American high school and college students, a multimedia introduction to webcomics and long-form science fantasy and a crash course on thirty years of popular culture that challenged gender roles, redefined the relationship between author and fandom, and ended by deconstructing its own narrative structure.

I keep coming up with clever tag lines for this blog post,
but none of them really fit. So here's some music to listen
to while you read.

It's easy enough to argue that it didn't do anything particularly new or revolutionary--fans becoming creators of ongoing series is not unusual (that's how Doctor Who keeps going, after all), and even the interactive segments, as the Geek loves to remind me, were preempted by Portal, an interactive novel from the 80s. But every generation needs its own reason to care about the world and the past, and for the people we call Young Millennials and Old Generation Z, Homestuck has often been a key conversation starter about important topics. Like "hey, Dave's brother is kind of a terrible father," or "is Vriska a good person or a bad person," or "having a moirail sounds nice; how do I find one?"

And for all the impact Homestuck has had on people my age and a little younger, there's been remarkably little scholarly writing about it and how it and its readers interact with the culture that produced it. There's a few discourse analyses on Google Scholar, not to mention the I Like Homestuck Project, the Tumblr blog my sister and I wrote from 2014 to 2016 (which is still somehow gaining followers, and if that doesn't speak to the cultural importance of Homestuck I don't know what does), but nothing that really situates it in the world it was written for. So at some point around the end of the comic, I started developing a syllabus for a hypothetical upper-level undergraduate course on the narrative construction and social themes of Homestuck. Here's a draft of that, with assignment descriptions inserted as they come up. Feedback is welcome.

On the Needles 4

Here's what I've been working on this week.

Knitting

Right after I posted my last crafting update, I decided to use a completely different yarn for the shawl I'm test knitting. At time of posting, I'm halfway through the first of three lace sections.


It's a half-pi shawl, which means the finished shape will be as close to a half circle as is mathematically possible with whole numbers of stitches. The practical result is that each lace section has twice as many stitches per row as the last one. So I'm hoping I finish the first lace section quickly, because the last lace section will have almost 400 stitches in each row.

Drawing

Here are this week's Pokemon. Today is day 453: Croagunk.

On Podcasts: Recommendations

I've been doing a lot of traveling lately, and when I travel, I like to listen to podcasts. They're easier to half-focus on, like if I want to knit or just keep an eye on what bus stop I'm at, than novels or video games, and there's just so much interesting stuff out there to be entertained and/or edified by. Here are some of my favorites, in alphabetical order.

(Note: The podcasts on this list that are recorded by LoadingReadyRun are also available on Youtube, and often have visual components that make watching preferable to listening.)

• 99% Invisible: Numbers come first in the alphabet, right? 99% Invisible is a podcast in the Radiotopia network. It's about design--everything from architecture to user interfaces to logos and public policy. The host became famous in 2015 for a TED talk on poorly designed American municipal flags, many of which are referred to as "a seal on a bedsheet."
• Lingthusiasm: A podcast about why linguistics is cool, by two linguists of my online acquaintance, Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne.. The presentation is fantastic--not too technical for beginners, but with enough esoteric detail to amaze and amuse professional linguists.
• Looks Like Some Sort of Sidewalk Slam: Graham and Adam from LoadingReadyRun geek out about professional wrestling and complain about the WWE's terrible sense of narrative. The Youtube version includes video clips. If you don't care about wrestling, this podcast will cause you to care about wrestling.
• Nerdette: Tricia Bobeda and Greta Johnsen interview famous people about their secret nerdy hobbies. It's a lot of fun.
• Ocarina & Wine: This is the Geek's brother's podcast, in which he introduces his girlfriend to video games and she teaches him to think critically about wine. As someone who knew basically nothing about video games until grad school, it's refreshing to hear about games from someone with a similar lack of experience.
• QWERPline: A LoadingReadyRun comedy show that grew out of a running joke from Desert Bus. Graham and Alex host a morning radio show in the bizarre Middle American small town of Nsburg. The show is partially improvised, and the action occasionally stops when the actors make each other laugh too hard.
• Reasonably Sound: An intermittently-released podcast by Mike Rugnetta (late of PBS Idea Channel) about sound, sound design, and the music industry. His voice is soothing, and I've learned a lot. Check out the recent episodes on the history of applause and booing.
• Super Marcato Bros.: Two brothers, and sometimes a third brother, showcase good video game music and discuss it from a music theory perspective. This one's also extremely soothing--so much so that I listen to it when I have trouble sleeping.
• TapTapConcede: Various LoadingReadyRun members talk about current events on the Magic: the Gathering scene. This is actually the podcast that convinced me to start playing Magic--they start each episode by opening a booster pack from a random set, and I was drawn in by the art and the worldbuilding. There's also a spinoff called North 100, which focuses on a local format called Canadian Highlander.
• Underscore: Two of the Marcato Bros. discuss film music. They're currently (on hiatus) in the middle of a series on The Incredibles.
• The Endless Knot: Etymology, history, and thematically relevant cocktails. A companion to Mark Sundaram's Endless Knot Youtube series.
• The Feast: Stories about historical foods, meals, and culinary traditions.
• The Memory Palace: Another Radiotopia podcast. Nate DiMeo tells little-known stories from American history, often about women and members of other marginalized groups.

Honorable mention goes to Welcome to Night Vale, a podcast that tells the story of life in a small town where eldritch horror is a comforting commonplace. I listened to it religiously until just after the second anniversary special, when the relationship drama started to get unhealthy; but the first two years are a lovely, absurd little drama that simultaneously scares and soothes.

On Knitting 1: Why I Don't Like Seed Stitch

In my first crafting update, I mentioned that I was modifying the pattern for my shawl because I didn't like seed stitch, and I'd explain why later. Now that it's later, here's an explanation.

Seed stitch looks like this (image from Knitting For Dummies):



It's a rough, bumpy texture that feels like it's full of tiny knots. I prefer textures that are soft and smooth, especially in things I'm going to wear. In the case of this shawl, it puzzled me that the texture switched so abruptly from nice squishy garter stitch to basically the opposite.

Not only does it feel uncomfortable, it's also annoying to knit. It goes something like this:
Cast on any number of stitches.
Setup: *knit 1, purl 1* across.
Row 1: Purl the knit stitches and knit the purl stitches.
Repeat Row 1 as many times as you want.

Seed stitch is a perfect combination of being really boring and needing lots of focus. I find it very easy--and I've spoken to a number of other knitters to agree with me--to forget that on each stitch, you have to do the opposite of what you did to it in the previous row.

It's easy, especially if your mind has a tendency to wander, to do the same thing you did before, and then you end up with ribbing, which looks totally different and is much softer and stretchier.

I'd been really enjoying working on this shawl as a sort of mindless fidgety knitting, and I didn't want to switch abruptly to a technique that required more of my attention just to end up with a texture I don't care for. So I went hunting for alternatives. The new stitch had to:

• Be reversible, so it would lie flat.
• Be softer than seed stitch.
• Alternate knit and purl stitches in a way that looked kind of like seed stitch.
• Look good when I add stitches to one end of each row and subtract them from the other, which is how the basic shape of the shawl is made.

The best-looking and -feeling answer I came up with was Little Pyramids, which looks like this:

Don't be afraid to modify patterns if there's something in them you don't like. There is always a way to avoid seed stitch.

On the Needles 3

Here are this week's project updates.

Knitting

This week I finished a couple of small projects: the entrelac thing, which I'm probably going to turn into a pillow and stuff with rice at this point, and a pair of slippers. And now that I've wrapped those up, I feel less bad about starting another new project: a shawl I'm test-knitting for a friend on Mastodon. It doesn't look like much yet, but I should be starting the first lace section this weekend.

Side note: I've become a lot more open to the idea of digital photo filters since I realized my phone has one that's basically color correction. I can take a picture in yellow light, and the filter makes it look like it was taken in white light. Makes it a lot easier to take project photos.

Drawing

Today is Pokemon day 446.

Writing

The first two chapters of my Magic fic are now on Archive of Our Own. Chapter three is progressing a sentence at a time.

Deckbuilding

I now have a Zacama, Primal Calamity for my dinosaur deck, and a Rekindling Phoenix for my pirate deck.

On Books 10: The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet & A Closed and Common Orbit

The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet by Becky Chambers is a lovely book, and so is its sequel, A Closed and Common Orbit. If you liked Firefly but wish it was less depressing, or had a more diverse cast, or developed its romantic arcs properly, or even if you just wish it had aliens, you will enjoy these books.

In this setting, humans have long since abandoned Earth, though a few religious fanatics have gone back to try living in the woods without technology. Humanity is a minor player in galactic politics, still struggling to heal the rifts caused by all the rich folks going off to colonize Mars and leaving everyone else to escape in generation ships. Our story follows Rosemary, the estranged daughter of a Martian politician, leaving home and joining the crew of Wayfarer, a wormhole-making ship, as administrative personnel.

Spoilers ahead.