My Twitter-friend Chelsea may have lost a truly heartbreaking amount of work when a powercut somehow wiped her hard drive. She and probably anyone following the awful saga have resolved to be more zealous about backing stuff up online, so I thought I’d do a post about what I use and what I think of it.

Dropbox

Dropbox runs in your system tray and keeps everything in your ‘Dropbox’ folder synced, both to their servers and to any other computer you install it on. Since I use a desktop and a laptop regularly, right away that gives me one remote and two local copies of all my most important stuff. I use my Dropbox folder as a ‘My Documents’, generally: it’s all things I’ve created and would hate to lose: docs, photos, and my game.

I pay $100 a year for 1TB of space, plus $40 a year for an add-on that gives unlimited version history: every version of everything I’ve ever put in there is stored forever, even if I delete or over-write it.

Limitations:

• It’s not good for syncing stuff that needs to stay in the folder it’s in, like a savegame folder. There’s a third party hack to trick it into doing that, but ‘third party hack’ and ‘my most precious data’ don’t really feel like good partners.
• If you regularly dump huge amounts of stuff in there, it’s a little irritating that you can’t change the order in which things are backed up. One 2GB file has changed? It’ll keep trying to upload that and not back up any of the new changes to smaller files until it’s done. Hasn’t been a problem for me since I first set it up.
• If you regularly delete thousands of files (I do!), it’s bizarre that it takes as long to upload or download that change as it would if you’d added that many files.
• You can get your iPhone to back up your photos to it, but they’ve recently split that functionality off into a separate app called Carousel, which is fucking horrible. It only syncs if you run it, then access your photos while it’s running.
• It’s not good for backing up Unity games. Unity seems to lock certain files in a way that prevents Dropbox from backing them up, and as mentioned earlier, it’ll keep trying that same file forever, ignoring all other changes in the meantime.
• The version history thing is reassuring, but if I ever lost or over-wrote a folder of thousands of files, I can’t see a way to batch-restore them – you have to click on each file individually and select the version you want to roll it back to. For my game, that’d probably take longer than re-making it.

CrashPlan

CrashPlan runs in your system tray and automatically backs up a number of folders you’ve told it to, encrypted, to any and all locations you select. I use it for absolutely everything I value outside of Dropbox – and Dropbox itself, just to be sure.

The free version will back up to a local or external hard drive, or even to a friend’s computer, so you can do a kind of back-up swap (it’s encrypted).

I pay $60 a year to back up to their servers. There’s no space limit, and I’m using over 300 gigabytes – it took a week to get it all up there when I first installed. Now it just runs silently in the background and I never notice it. It’ll back up all changes right away if you like, or you can tell it to only do it when the computer’s idle.

Limitations:

• As far as I know you can’t use it for passively keeping stuff in sync across multiple computers.
• I thought it didn’t have versioning but it turns out it does. Gosh, unless you really need syncing you should use this instead of Dropbox.

Version Control

Version control is a truly vital concept that has unfortunately been implemented by madmen. It’s basically “keep every version of my project (usually online)” but with the ability to ‘branch’ out from a version and then merge those changes back in later, which is particularly useful for teams.

I use GitHub for my Unity projects, following this guide, but I find Git itself baffling and mad, even after taking real pains to learn it. More than once it’s told me I’m not allowed to save my work, and must over-write it with the outdated online copy, and I have to go crying to Twitter to find someone who can tell me what buttons to press to let me actually save. I’ve never actually lost work to it, so I’ll keep soldiering on, but I have a hard time claiming this is a sane way to back up your stuff if you work alone.

Limitations:

• Fucking mad.

Game Maker Studio has a different version control system built in, Subversion. I tried setting it up once, using a test project, and tested deleting something and rolling back to the old version. I could not, the thing was gone forever. That concludes the past, present and future of my relationship with Subversion for Game Maker.

Limitations:

• Lost the only thing I ever entrusted it with.

Previously: Your request to play devil's advocate has been denied.

Dear Applicant,

Thank you for your recent inquiry about hearing both sides. According to our records, this marks the fourth submission in as many days as to whether or not we have heard both sides. We regret to inform you that we have not.

On March the 2nd, you interrupted a conversation by asking "In fairness, have you heard both sides?"

On April the 13th, you spoke over a work acquaintance, reminding her that "We can't actually form an opinion about this until we've heard both sides."

While in an ideal world perhaps we would listen to all sides, the volume of requests we receive on a daily basis makes this impossible.

Read more We Regret To Announce That Your Request Of “Gotta Hear Both Sides” Has Been Denied at The Toast.

Outdoor Office

For a couple hours yesterday, the trails pictured above served as my office.

Earlier that morning, I was polishing a proof. In doing so, I needed to reference a pair of related papers. As I began reading these papers, I sensed a deep connection between these results and my own, but I couldn’t quite articulate it.

In my experience, this type of connection making is well-served by three ingredients: quiet, movement, and time. So I left my building and hiked onto a network of trails that abuts the Georgetown campus.

I spent the next couple of hours walking and thinking, trying to arrange and re-arrange my understanding of these results. I’m hoping this impromptu line of thought might yield something new and significant, but it’s too early at this point to tell.

More important for our purposes here, however, is the broader point this example underscores…

Quiet Creativity

When I talk about my purposefully disconnected life, a common retort is that I’m missing out on the creative possibilities born of the frequent exposure to new people and ideas delivered through social media and related technologies.

But here’s the thing, for the most part, this is not how high-level creative work is accomplished. It’s not, in other words, lack of input that stymies creative breakthroughs.

Take my own example: I don’t use Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, Linked In, Tumblr or Instagram, and I’m bad about e-mail, but I still have no shortage of ideas to work on.

(This is not surprising, even without these technologies, I’m still significantly more connected than most scientists and writers in most other times — and they had no problem coming up with big ideas.)

What does stands in the way of creative breakthroughs — I’m increasingly convinced — is lack of time spent walking quietly with your thoughts, working and re-working your understanding of a concept in search of new layers of meaning.

This is hard deep work. But it’s also the foundation for ideas that matter.

Hyper Light Drifter, having raised $645,158 when asking for only $27,000, was a huge success. I've spent the morning thinking about their Kickstarter video, and I'm pretty sure it's almost a perfect game sales pitch. Selling someone on something is largely about reducing risk. Hyper Light Drifter accomplishes this in two ways.

First, they overwhelm you with polish. They show you so many different zones, so many different animations, so many different enemies, all at such a consistently high level of quality that the viewer knows "these people are experts." No one wants to back something off of two pieces of concept art and a rough prototype because they don't know that the game will deliver; there is a lot of risk in that transaction.

Second, they don't subvert your expectations. Once someone has bought into something, they love their expectations being played with. However, when purchasing, they want to feel like they know exactly what they're getting into. The gameplay appears straightforward, and pretty much anyone who's played an isometric action game before will feel like they know what they're getting into. They're not selling you on some hot new innovative gameplay type that even though you can't play it at this point, you should trust them that it's the best and give them your money. You can pretty much play Hyper Light Drifter with your imagination after watching this pitch video. That makes the potential buyer feel safe, and reduces the perceived risk. Who knows, perhaps the game will have some incredibly creative and unique gameplay once it's released, but selling someone on that through a video is very very difficult.

Let's dissect the video shot-by-shot.

Opens with a shot of a very cool looking character in front of a beautiful world. Immediately we know 1. who we will be playing as (and boy do we want to play as them, because they look ridiculously rad) and, 2. the world that we are involved in (and boy do we want to be involved in it because just look at it, I'm already building 11,320 stories in my head about what goes on in that background).

The second shot shows the player moving through the world. The most important thing that this does is frame the type of gameplay. We know it's not first person, not side-scrolling, but it's isometric. The shot also shows how the attention to detail from the opening shot carries over into the actual gameplay worlds.

The second shot also shows the blink move that the player has. Immediately there's a gameplay hook. This blink move exists in a lot of games, but honestly I can't think of one that exists in a game styled like this. And the move looks awesome as well. The second shot ends by the player moving down stairs – now the viewer knows there's verticality to the movement.

The third shot shows another beautiful zone that looks entirely different from the first zone. As the opening shot showed, this world has a lot of peaks, valleys, and locales to it. This shot shows that these locales will also be explored. It also introduces that the player can move up in the isometric world, not just across or down.

The fourth shot shows yet another different zone. Completely different, completely consistent in its beauty. This is establishing that the creators are good at what they do. They can consistently create varied, awesome content. All this variation in the trailer isn't only building the world, it's building a trust in the viewer that the creators are really really good at what they do.

Next we have a series of dungeon shots. These shots are tantalizing the viewer with possibilities and questions. What created these dungeons? What are these monsters lurking around? What are these creatures in these huge water tanks? It also shows that the blink mechanic shown in the second shot will play an important role in the exploration of these worlds. They also establish that they are really really good at lighting things beautifully, something that couldn't be established in the previous outdoor shots.

So the world has been established, the beauty has been established, the movement has been established. At this point the trailer dives into gameplay. Quickly the viewer pieces together some of the things that will be going on in this game – dodging obstacles, slicing dudes in the most beautifully-animated way possible, using a cool Starfox-in-Super-Smash-Brothers reflector move to avoid projectile damage, using some kind of super version of the previously-revealed blink move to dodge obstacles, riding and controlling mechs, using the just-revealed reflector move to throw projectiles back at enemies, fighting some crazy bosses, the list goes on.

At 1:26 we come back to the world. Remember all that awesome stuff you just saw happening for the last 30 seconds? Reminder: it's happening in a bonkers awesome world, and here are what look like the bad guys behind it. And no surprises, they look awesome.

And a beautiful title shot to seal the deal. And just as you were about to forget how amazingly beautiful this world is and how much you wan to be a part of it they leave you with this:

I didn't even read the rest of the page. I backed this project right away after watching that video. I cared about the world, and I wanted to be part of it. I wanted to play that character. But most importantly, as a purchaser I felt almost no risk that this was going to not be a good game.

A few months ago I wrote about the relationship between self-esteem and servanthood. The observation I made then was that we often fail to humble ourselves to take on the form of a servant (Philippians 2.6-8) because we are struggling to secure self-esteem.

Somewhat paradoxically, it takes a lot of ego-strength to be humble--to let others go first, to take the last place, to "wash feet," and to allow others to get the praise, recognition, and accolades. We struggle with this. Not because we are wicked but because our sense of self-worth is built upon praise, compliments, attention, respect and popularity. Thus we engage in what psychologists have called "excessive reassurance seeking," constantly taking the temperature of our social network to verify that we are being noticed, approved of, and included.

As I noted in that earlier post, this struggle for significance is made even more difficult if you lack what this culture defines as "valuable," "worthy," and "significant." We all want to be valued by others but we can struggle if we don't think we have anything of value to offer, share or show to others.

This brings me to the relationship between privilege and humility. And the point I want to make about this is how humility is often the privilege of the privileged.

Let me try to illustrate what I'm talking about.

It is easy for me, in social situations, to not attend to my reputation or my social presentation because, in many ways, my reputation is already well secured. People often kid me about just how shabbily I can dress. My friend Kyle calls it my "homeless chic."

That casualness can give me an air of relaxed non-pretentiousness. But there is a dark side to this. I can get away with this look because of my privilege and reputation. I am a male. I am white. I am a Doctor. And I have an established reputation of success on my campus. I can afford to look like a hippie or a homeless person because of who I am.

Put simply, because my reputation precedes me I can look like I don't care about my reputation. I can be inconspicuous because I'm not inconspicuous. People know who I am.

In short, I can be casual, relaxed and self-forgetful--I can be "humble"--because I'm privileged.

Here's another way to say all this. I can take "the last place"--and pat myself on the back for being so Jesus-like for doing so--much more easily than others because I'm already in "the first place." My ego-strength to be "humble" derives from my pre-existing privilege. I can be negligent, unconcerned, and nonchalant in regards to respect, praise and attention--be humble about it all--because I already have respect, praise and attention.

In this sense humility is similar to charity. It's not charity if I'm giving out of my excess. And it's not humility if I'm constantly operating out of a storehouse of social and reputational capital.

Consequently, I've come to the conclusion that a lot my "humility" isn't really humility at all. I don't think I have a clue about humility.

All this goes to a contrast in my mind between a deep versus cosmetic spirituality. Most of engage in a cosmetic spirituality. We tweak our prayer life. We volunteer to do the dishes. We show up on weekends to help with a ministry project. We try to be more patient and kind at work. And, to be clear, all this is good, good work.

But in my examen of my humility I've come to realize that most if not all of the cosmetic things I've done in order to be more humble have been built atop things like my privilege, success and reputation. Which means I haven't, as of yet, really gotten around to the deep work of humility. And what that sort of work might entail is a very scary prospect.

I don’t care about your stance on #selfies.

 

Don’t read Jezebel for thought-provoking articles on modern feminism.

 

#Selfies are not dismantling the feminist movement and they are not the be all and end of radical, subversive action.  

 

It is ok to want other people to find you attractive or to have some pride in your appearance.

#nofilter