Last Saturday we had to spend the day in the city. My daughter was doing her first (and probably her last, she doesn’t want to continue) ballet show and rehearsals were in the morning and the show itself after lunch. So, me, my wife and my three year old son wandered Dublin city for a few hours.

The city used to be my second home before we had kids. And it was lovely to spend the day with no real purpose there. Everything’s changed but it’s still the same. Different shops, same streets. It was on Grafton St. where a busker was performing. A puppeteer. We stopped and watched for a while as the “silly statue” (as my son called it), interacted with the small crowd that gathered. The puppet itself looked old like a ragged classic jester but the puppeteer played loud modern dance music. A weird mix as this puppet made modern poses to the music while pretending to “steal” passerby’s shopping. It was quite obvious the skill and art the puppeteer had in bring his puppet to life.

I explained to my son that if you enjoyed a busker’s performance you should give them some money as a thank you but he was much too shy to come near the puppet.

I’ve wrote a little about my experiences on creating something for fun and my thoughts on creating as a product. But I also think how you present and frame your outpourings is as important, if not more important, than the thing itself.

For some reason, after I saw that puppeteer performing I thought of this article where a world famous violinist decided to busk in a subway station instead of a $150 per ticket concert hall. He dressed in ordinary clothes and just played his violin. Barely anyone noticed. By any definition or expert opinion, the music would be among the best in the world.

The article kinda makes some point about people rushing too much, not slowing down to listen and other such things. But I’m not surprised either. Any urban dweller learns to tune out things, “chuggers”, buskers, blaring music, glaring advertisements, smells from rubbish trucks and restaurants, etc. Sometimes something catches your eye and sometimes, like last Saturday, you don’t mind being distracted.

The puppeteer picked a street that’s popular for busking, on a weekend when people are browsing and willing to be entertained. The street is also popular for tourists to the city. He interacted with anyone who did stop. He framed his performance. His presentation was nearly more important than his actual act: he choose the best location, time and how to engage his audience. He stood on a box so he marked himself as not someone else on the street. If, like the violinist, he had chosen to perform in a busy train station, early on work day and refused to interact with his audience, do you think he’d have gotten the crowd we saw on Saturday?

And it’s like that with the internet. People prefer short blog posts than long winding slow-to-the-point ones. The internet is so full of spam, adverts, attention-whores, me-toos, trolls, re-posts, etc. that any good internet citizen, like any urban dweller, learns to tune out these things. Normal. Though we always slow down for certain voices (like specific friends or authoritative personas, reputations), certain trends (cats) and so on.

Producing a good or great work and putting it online means nothing without promoting it and sharing it in the right places and presenting it in a way that doesn’t automatically turn people off (like say presenting it as a “wall-of-text” or as a Word document instead of a webpage).

I remember arguing years ago that putting something, like say a free RPG online, was pointless because no-one would attribute any value to it. If they had to pay for it, they’d sit up a bit more (but also expect more). To be honest, that was a terrible simplistic view point. But “free” does have it’s own value indicators.

Which brings me all the way around to me being a moany git really. My frustration at my lack of ability to better present stuff I make. It’s not about validation. Going back to my previous blog posts on “making it for fun” or “making a product”, there is some thing to be said in treating the “making it for fun” as “making it a product for fun”. Which is a whole package of skills, that make introverts like myself don’t have by default.

What say you? How much does the way something, like a free RPG or fan-fiction, is presented/packaged (artwork, layout and other media) or how it’s framed (it’s relation to other similar things, it’s author’s profile, interaction with the audience, etc.) determine how you perceive it?

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There is a point in the morning, where if we leave before it, we arrive ten minutes early at the kids’ school. If we go past it by just five minutes, we’re late and the difference isn’t five minutes, it’s about twenty minutes. The difference gets exponentially longer the later you leave after that point as Dublin seems to wake up and pile onto the roads.

It can be hard to calibrate leaving time in the morning as sometimes the point shifts for a never-ending list of reasons. For example changes in the weather, such as shifting from Spring to Winter, means more people take to their cars and many leave earlier, though initially most people seem to struggle with getting up in the dark so there is always some fluctuation early on. There is a storm predicated for this week and it’s dark, rainy and gloomy all morning. More cars and their leaving earlier.

Of course knowing about this point really doesn’t help that much. It puts stress on the morning routine to get everyone out on time and if you have kids you know the have a tendency to fill up the time, so getting up even earlier (I already get up at 6am), isn’t a good option. And if you miss it, you stress yourself out, even though there is nothing you can do. You just have to sit in traffic for 30 minutes and accept it.

It didn’t help of course that on the M50 motorway my 3yo son climbs out of his car seat and I have to pull over, get him back in and then try to get back into the unforgiving traffic.

Also, I didn’t get my bun from the shop at school.

TL;DR: We left five minutes later this morning and the kids were late by five minutes at school (twenty minutes later than normal) and it took me an extra thirty minutes on top of that to get to work.

*breath deeply*

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Being a proud Redbrick member, I keep up to date on all the Redbrick blogs on Planet Redbrick. Last week I saw this post by lickylip. I thought I’d highlight it a bit by posting about it here.

He’s recently married and living in their most-of-the-time quiet estate. Then you have a few of the local kids who decide to throw eggs and stones at their house and burn out their car when they go on holidays! Feckers. The Gardai are powerless of course and there isn’t much recourse fro them.

I really feel for them, because we’ve just moved recently and even though we’ve been here a few weeks, we don’t really know anyone yet. I don’t know what we’d do if we became victimised in the same manner because we’re both exhausted from moving again and wouldn’t like to think about the safety of our two year old daughter.

I didn’t think Dublin was still so bitter about “blow-ins”. I mean, I’ve moved house/apartment three times now, from City Centre to Kildare and now to Wicklow, and we’ve always found the locals fine. It’s nearly a necessity in Dublin these days that people are forced to move where they can afford.

While I completely dislike the idea of ASBOs, I guess they were designed to try and tackle the situation faced by lickylip.

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I managed to take this photo of a strange occult ritual being performed in Dublin. Whats worse several Redbrick members were involved; duke, tomo, dshagins, dimples, p zircon and grimnar… I overheard mention of werewolves. We’re they trying to summon such a monster?

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