Ben Crowder

Yesterday’s post was a bit on the obscure side, as we found out the hard way when not even our family members knew what we were talking about (and they already knew!). Here, then, is the translation:

We’re pregnant, due March 17. :)

I love going to the theater, both film and stage. There’s something magical about walking into that black box, large or small, and sitting down to watch a story play out. Theaters brim with atmosphere that you just don’t get at home.

So now I’m wondering what it is that makes the theater magical. The velvet curtains? The sticky floor and smell of buttered popcorn? Being in a dark room with strangers?

I think the dark room does have something to do with it. Theaters eliminate distractions by surrounding you with darkness. All you can see is the story unfolding before your eyes. You get sucked in and wrapped up in it, almost possessed by it, as if you are the story. It’s pure mind, body not included. (Most of the time I almost forget I even have a body.) And it’s a displacement of the mind, transporting you straight into the land of the movie or the play. Isn’t that incredible? Teleportation is already here, folks, waiting for you at your local Cinemark.

Perhaps part of the difference has to do with the space as well. Theaters are large and grander than most home theaters. All that empty space hanging above you is ripe with possibility — that’s the power of the high ceiling (cathedrals, anyone?). Speaking of space, watching a movie on a smaller screen — say, on a phone — isn’t the same, but it isn’t as bad as you’d think. Once your mind gets immersed in the movie, it’s as if it takes up your whole viewing space, like you’re sitting on a windowsill watching things go on just outside (or inside). Size almost doesn’t matter.

Except it does, and the larger screen at a movie theater brings with it an even stronger immersive magic that’s much harder to maintain when you’re being distracted by your peripheral vision.

The benefit of watching movies at home: cost and convenience. That’s why most of the movies I watch are at home. But the magic is important, I think. I’m not sure why, but it is.

We’ve been talking mostly about movies, since you can’t watch plays at home unless they’re filmed first, and that just flattens them out and makes them boring. Conversely, live stage theatre is even more magical than movies in a way. Not only are you in a large, dark room surrounded by strangers (strangers = possibility and suspense and intrigue), but the story is being strung to life by actors mere yards from where you watch. With enough gumption, you could climb up on stage and touch them if you wanted to. (That’s generally discouraged, of course.) You feel as if you could enter the story with your body and not just your mind. And even though you don’t actually waltz on stage much to the embarrassment of your companions, that feeling of “couldness” triggers something surreal.

Inside the theater, whispers take on a mystical aura and everything seems tinged with more importance than before, plump with meaning and portent. Afterward, you see the world with new eyes, refreshed, rejuvenated. After all, you’ve just spent the last two hours inside the mind of the story.

I hope theaters don’t disappear. I don’t think they will. If it takes shenanigans like 3D glasses to keep the movie theaters in business, so be it. (But if they stop offering 2D movies, I’ll stop giving them money.)

Back in February, I posted about my iPhone home screen. It’s a lot more beautiful now (click for detail):

The changes

• Fourth row. It’s empty on each screen. And it’ll stay that way. I love having the extra breathing room.
• Camera. Now that double-clicking the home button pulls up the multitasking tray, I had to bring the camera app back to my home screen.
• iBooks. I only use it for reading PDFs (the Unicode standard, the InDesign and Photoshop manuals, etc.).
• Gospel Library. It’s the Church’s official scriptures app.
• Stanza. For reading ePubs.
• Twitter. The official Twitter app. It’s grown on me, and I’m glad I switched from Birdfeed. (Though I still prefer Birdfeed’s tweet display.)
• The tray. I moved the iPod and Safari apps to the second screen since I don’t use them nearly as much as I use Things and Messages.
• Beautiful Retina Display icons. They make a huge difference. Mmm.

Second screen

And here’s what’s on the next screen over:

• Kindle. I don’t use this very much, but it’s mainful for reading book samples and deciding if I want to read the full book. I wish I could turn off full justification.
• Nook. Ditto. The app isn’t terribly well done — it doesn’t feel like an iPhone app at all — but I absolutely love the Amasis font, and it makes me want to read more books on here. Hopefully they’ll allow us to import our own ePubs someday. In the meantime, I just use it for reading book samples.
• Netflix. ’Nuff said.

I have a third screen that’s full of folders for all my other apps. Keeping the number of screens down has proven useful, if only to make it faster to get around.

The background wallpaper, by the way, is a modified version of Bartelme’s.

Today’s book release: Don Quijote en español. It’s available in both ePub and Kindle formats.

Formatting poetry for ebook readers is an exercise in frustration. Each reader ignores its own selection of CSS styles, which makes cross-platform formatting much harder than it needs to be.

A word about Stanza: it nails the user experience of reading, but oh my goodness, formatting ebooks for it is like spending time in Dante’s ninth circle. (It ignores almost every CSS style known to man.) I’ve given up on trying to get things to look good in Stanza.

And because I want to live a happy life, I’m going to avoid publishing books that have poetry in them until the ebook readers repent and start letting book designers have more control over the output. It’s just not worth it.

Minimal Mac is asking what’s in your Simplenote. Here’s what’s in mine:

• Project scratchpads (notes, URLs, process lists, todo lists, etc.).
• Kind words people say about me (for when I’m feeling down).
• A list of book/design project ideas.
• A list of books I want to read.
• A list of fonts I want to get someday (mostly book typefaces).
• Agendas and meeting notes.
• Drafts for some blog posts and occasional emails.
• Short snippets of stories I’m working on.
• Drafts of my Twitter profile bio.
• Odds and ends (the VIN on my car, phone numbers, URLs).

Once again, let me just say that I love Simplenote and use it every day. And the new 3.0 release is quite nice.

Issue 11 of Mormon Artist is up, with some rebranding and redesigning:

Vim 7.3 came out a few days ago, which is something akin to a mini Christmas for a geek like me. It’s a minor release, but the two exciting things are persistent undo (after you reopen a file, you can still undo changes you made before you closed it) and relative line numbers (which I thought were wacky at first but now seem genius).

Installing MacVim was a breeze (just download and double-click). For the terminal, though, I ended up compiling from scratch. Here’s what I did after downloading the tarball:

tar -xvjf vim-7.3.tar.bz2
cd vim73/src

CFLAGS=-DCOMPILER_FLAG ./configure --enable-pythoninterp \
  --enable-rubyinterp --enable-multibyte

make
sudo make install

The --enable-pythoninterp and --enable-rubyinterp lines are optional. At first I compiled without multibyte support, but then Unicode stuff stopped working (go figure).

It installs Vim into /usr/local/bin by default, so if you don’t already have that in your path, you’ll want to add it (before /usr/bin, which is where the default Vim is).

Relative line numbers

A word about these. Basically, when this is turned on (via set relativenumber), your cursor will always be at line 0, and if you move up or down, the line numbers will change.

Why it’s useful: You can see at a glance how many lines away something is, which makes a world of difference when you’re using the movement keys (and you should be). No more having to count lines before you dd or j or what have you.

Just a quick note to say that volumes 2, 3, and 4 of the Journal of Discourses are now available for download. Enjoy.

I do a lot of writing (not as much as I should, but a lot nonetheless), and since I spend so much time in word-related apps, I figured I’d give them some gush time.

I’ve dabbled with tons of word processors and text editors — Bean, OmmWriter, WriteRoom, TextMate, you name it — and yet I always come back to Vim.

It’s my wordmaking home. Vim is a geek tool, certainly, and the learning curve is oh so steep, but it does exactly what I want it to do, it has extremely powerful text editing commands, and MacVim gives me distraction-free fullscreen mode (Cmd-Shift-F). Plus, it’s a keyboard-based editor, and I love the keyboard something fierce. So fast, so smooth, so easy to dump what’s in my brain straight into a file with hardly anything getting in the way.

Vim suits my needs 95% of the time, but when I’m away from my computers, I use my Field Notes if I’m feeling analog, and Simplenote on my iPhone if I’m not.

Simplenote is wonderful. It just works. It syncs over the air and I can get my plain text notes anywhere — on my iPhone/iPad, on my computer via Notational Velocity, or anywhere else via the web app. Beautiful.

I didn’t discover Notational Velocity until a few months ago, but wow, I’m in love with this app.

(The weird spacing has to do with how Old English poetry is formatted, by the way. It’s not a Notational Velocity glitch.)

The keyboard shortcuts are delish. Even better, NV is free (open source) and syncs with Simplenote. And it gets better. NV lets you store notes as text files in a directory, so I’ve got my laptop storing NV notes in Dropbox for extra redundancy. Bonus: This means I can drop a text file into my NV folder on my laptop and it’ll automatically sync it with Simplenote. (To be honest, I’ve never done this. Maybe someday…)

And that’s it.

Disclaimer: While it’s fun to talk about tools, tools do not a writer make. Words are words, regardless of whether you put them down with a pencil or in Word or on your phone or via dictation software. Tools can make it easier, but the more important thing is the writing itself — getting words out of your head and onto paper or screen — and you can do that with pretty much anything.