Things Posted About

[eredien]

1.) Crafts

I'm excited to be doing more crafts. I've been invited to two friends' craft nights, and am trying to attend both as many times as possible. I've been handed a good solution for the plethora of projects overwhelming me: organize them by time-sensitivity of each project.

Now I look at my list of 20 things and say, "gee, all I have to do is work on the most important thing first!" It's great.

2.) To do this weekend

I've listed this elsewhere in a private reference for me.

3.) Why Music Makes me Happy

I keep re-remembering this. It's silly because I know that music makes me happy. But I've been listening to iTunes at work, and it's been improving my mood and my productivity. I woke up this morning and sang Cat Empire's "The Crowd" in the shower. I'm trememdously happy.

4.) Problematic and non-problematic things in the movie "The Game"

So, this movie has incredibly creepy moments. I like that in movies. It also, upon further reflection, has a flawed premise.

This movie, in some senses, is very good.

1.) It has relatively strong women characters.
- The main character's ex-wife is not a bitch and genuinely cares about her ex but won't let him push her around.
- The first main character doesn't seem empowered at first, but this is actually a clever ruse. She's the one who, at the end of the movie, asks the main character out for coffee.

2.) It has incredibly creepy moments. They're creepy in a way that's very satisfying to me as someone who loves well-done horror that isn't guts-and-viscera variety horror. The scene where the main character realizes that an entire well-furnished apartment is just a setup is terrifiying.

3.) It has a neat way of duping the viewer just as much as the main charater is being duped. This is deliberate, and part of the point of the movie. The viewer's mind is deliberately being screwed with just as much as the main character's mind is and this reinforces the point of the movie, and the reveal for both of these comes at the same time in a nice twist of plottery.

4.) Here's the problem:
The premise is flawed. This guy hires a corporation to shake him out of the rut he's been in (rich white guy with a bad father complex who's a right bastard and a control freak). They do that by putting him in situations where he shakes himself out of the rut (Mexico, broke, running away from cops, etc.). The point is that they're providing these situations for him to show him that he's capable of changing, of being a better person. We start getting glimpses of that partway through the movie. He realizes he doesn't need as much money. He realizes he should learn Spanish. He realizes that he doesn't need to be a control freak. But the last situation feeds right back in to his fantasy of being a control freak, his father complex, and doesn't push him anywhere new. He *thinks* it's taking him somewhere new, but in fact it's the largest symbol we've seen so far that he's given up and that recognizing that having no control over life, no money, no power, makes a life not worth living. And, in fact, it takes him back to his old world--his friends wine and dine the new man that he is, he helps foot a huge bill because his funds are back in place after all, he has the possibility of a new romantic relationship, and he goes home to tidy up and slip back into a nice custom-made shirt and some brandy. I would have been happier had he decided that he didn't need that stuff and go sign up for the Peace Corps or something.

5.) Getting to Inbox 0

This goal seems impossible for my personal inboxes, but I am slowly but surely getting there.
I use gmail and am a little worried about archiving all my old mail because I am very bad at remembering a phrase in a particular email or who sent it to me or when it was, but very good at remembering that a certain email with the information I wanted was the 5th one down on the list, even if I don't remember what the information *was*. I routintely take 5 minutes to search for various permutations of phrases that are close to what I am looking for, but don't actually exist, until I find the right message. This is frustrating.

As computers move to search-based interfaces as opposed to directory/filetree based structures, it's becoming harder for me to find things and organize my files, not less difficult, because the signal-to-noise ratio seems so unstructured to me--a search turns up 15 things I don't want along with the one thing I do, whereas in a file folder with 16 files in it I can scroll to the thing I want every time.

So--what have others' experiences been with trying to whittle down your inbox to no emails and responding to or archiving the rest? Does anyone have my particular problem re: search vs. folders? Anyone found a way around it?

It's been a good technique for me at work to respond to everything as it comes in, but I can't and don't always want to do that with personal emails.

6.) Contact TIAA Cref again because my IRA information packet fell into a black hole

I should do this today.

7.) Fix credit card Now I need to fix all the autobilling. Sigh.

In the meantime, what kinds of things shoud I put on my website? Suggestions welcome.
You, internet and friends, are my audience, after all.

Thanks for the suggestions, friends.

Comments

Thunderbird

[eredien]

I used to use Eudora and I miss it.
I used Thunderbird but then I had a weird issue with trying to use it at work so I stopped using it for my personal mail as well. Maybe it's time to try using it again.

Re: Thunderbird

[eredien]

BTW, if you send me your snailmail I will write you. Did you get my last letter?

email

[baniszew.livejournal.com]

I used to just put old work email into a folder for each month, where the name of the folder was the date. For work these days, I organize things into folders by project. It' going okay so far, but it's still kind of weird.

I also hate having to find email by searches or threading; I remember things by where they fit chronologically too much. I have some folders in my personal email where I put things from high-traffic categories, but I mostly find things by going, "Oh, I was having crazy dreams just before [larp], so if I want to find [conversation about psychology] I should look at last January, since [larp] was right before I went to Florida, which was on Presidents Day, which is in February." This is why my inbox is at nearly 800 messages now, so I guess I'm saying I have no advice but I have sympathy.

For work these days, I organize things into folders by project.

Re: email

[eredien]

I think I have the work email licked, but personal email is still a problem. For me, I was thinking, "oh man, I had a crazy dream where I was a hawk woman last fall, so I should look for that."

Except "last fall" will have turned out to be an extremely cold August, the hawk will have turned out to be an eagle, and the word "dream" will be nowhere in the text of the email, which will have been about something else entirely...

Re: email

[lotusbiosm.livejournal.com]

In a situation like that, will you remember who the email was to? Start by searching for that.
Do you remember other parts of the conversation?

[tirerim.livejournal.com]

I have the same problem with finding stuff by searching. I've never even remotely attempted to get to inbox 0 (my personal inbox currently has over 9,000 messages in it), though, which means I tend to rely on searching anyway, usually based on who sent something. More generally, though, maybe labels would help? Since they're the closest thing Gmail has to folders, and you can then just look at a particular label to see what's in it, which can be a lot like scanning through a folder if your labels are specific enough.

[eredien]

This sort of works except that then the thing doesn't stay in the label, it gets moved around and shows up when I am looking for entirely unrelated stuff.

[csbermack.livejournal.com]

I use gmail label tags aggressively. You get all the goodness of folders - you click a button and only the stuff relevant to that shows up - with the goodness of a giant archive. And you can have more than one label. I have a lot of filters that add labels when the mail comes in, too.

[eredien]

Maybe I will look again at how my filters are addding labels to my messages.

The Game

[frameacloud]

That's kind of how I felt about The Game, too. While I was watching it, I kept saying over and over, "Wow! This is such a brilliant movie!" but afterward, I only thought that it was a clever idea that was defeated by certain portions that were very badly executed.

I like stories that are scary and mysterious, where you're not totally on top of what's going on, but more keeps being revealed that turns all previous expectations upside down. (The "Blink" episode of Doctor Who is a perfect example of what I like.) However, I don't like actual horror stories. Maybe I'm just not quite the right audience for The Game, then, but this one seemed like it alternated between fun-scary and not-fun-at-all scary, where you feel like enjoying it would be inappropriate, and leaning more toward the latter.

Mainly, what wrecked the movie for me was the conclusion, too. It was clearly meant to be inspirational, motivating the protagonist toward adventure and vitality, rather than being passive and bourgeois. Instead, he attempts suicide and almost kills his brother. It would be appropriate for him to have a collapse of some kind at the climax, but the resolution really is all wrong. You've put your finger on it exactly. He had an adventure, let's go back to normal now. It seems like all the other rich old fogies who played the Game were likewise unchanged.

(Darn, I just lost The Game.)

Re: The Game

[bossgoji.livejournal.com]

That's kind of how I felt about The Game, too. While I was watching it, I kept saying over and over, "Wow! This is such a brilliant movie!" but afterward, I only thought that it was a clever idea that was defeated by certain portions that were very badly executed.

Aaaah, good ol' Fridge Logic. (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FridgeLogic)

[lotusbiosm.livejournal.com]

Inbox Zero is a concept that makes no sense to me. But I'm a packrat.
If I don't need to read an email, I just don't. I'm also terrible about keeping emails I might want to read later. So then with a lot of email accounts I end up with the need to go through and delete a bunch of emails to empty out the box.

I do, however, use filters in Gmail. In doesn't necessarily help the inbox zero, because I filter/archive a bunch of stuff that I really don't care about and should just unsubscribe from the lists.

But. It's great for making sure I don't miss out on the emails I actually care about, and lets me handle things in groups. All my LJ comments go to one place, all my volunteer stuff goes elsewhere, and I can do them all at once. I also have good search luck. One of the things I do is search by sender, and then go chronologically through them.

Things shouldn't be getting moved around in your gmail if they're under multiple filters and archived. But you should be able to access them from multiple places. Think of it less as a folder and more as a Venn Diagram of what your email is about.