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Neil Gaiman’s Brilliant Career Advice

Neil Gaiman’s commencement speech to the graduates of the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, embedded above, is, much like his books, charming, enjoyable, and full of lots of legitimately good insight. Listen to the whole thing if you’ve got the time, but if not, at least read the best part, transcribed below. (In the clip, the below quote begins at 14:06.)

You get work however you get work. But people keep working, in a freelance world — and more and more of today’s world is freelance — because their work is good, and because they’re easy to get along with, and because they deliver the work on time. And you don’t even need all three. Two out of three is fine. People will tolerate how unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it on time. People will forgive the lateness of your work if it’s good and they like you. And you don’t have to be as good as everyone else if you’re on time and it’s always a pleasure to hear from you.

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Books and Publishing, College Life, Entertainment

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Taking Advantage of a Great Deal (Just Because It’s a Deal)

A coupon saying "Was 149.00... now 148.99"

There’s a story my fiancée likes to hold against me from when we were first dating. We went into a Blockbuster (which might date this story right off the bat) to pick out a movie. She badly needed to use the bathroom, but figured we’d be in and out of there in a second, and my apartment was right around the corner, so she didn’t say anything. I wandered into the “4 for $20” section, and started browsing for the next half hour. I found three movies I wanted, but for the fourth, I could only find movies I’d pay money to not have to see. Meanwhile, the woman I’d later decide to spend the rest of my life with was doing her best to be patient with my indecisiveness. She said, “Look, just get the three you want and throw away the fourth. It’s still a deal!” But I still kept hunting for a worthy fourth. Finding nothing, I eventually gave up, leaving empty-handed. My poor girlfriend’s bladder was put through that ordeal for nothing.

Did I need those movies? No. Did I really want to see them? Maybe a little. But I wasn’t considering buying 4 for $20 because those were the movies I most wanted to see. I was attracted to it just because it was a deal. On the simplest level, that was it. Four for the price of one, more or less. The idea of saving money appealed to me first. The idea of what the entertainment was appealed second.

That’s something I tend to notice more and more, especially with digital access to books, movies, and games. The easier (and therefore cheaper) it is to get something, the more likely I’ll buy it. There’s less and less entertainment I’ll really go out of my way for. The more I pay attention to where to get the best deals, the more likely I am to just choose something based on whether or not it’s a good deal.

For example, Amazon offers 100 albums for a $5 each, and rotates which albums are available every month. Every month I find myself checking it out. Steam routinely offers huge discounts on downloadable computer games, sometimes as much as 50 or 75 percent. In both cases, I’m not going to buy something I’m not interested in, but I’m more likely to look closely at something that’s discounted, and more likely to make an impulse buy before the sale ends.

Companies like Groupon or LivingSocial work on the same idea. Nobody goes to those sites with a specific purchase in mind. They go so that those sites can suggest some sort of restaurant, activity, or outing. While browsing their deals, people usually aren’t thinking, “I sure hope I find a coupon for Ethiopian food.” People are thinking, “Wow! 50% off lunch at that Ethiopian place. Maybe I should get around to trying that out.”

There’s nothing inherently wrong with this approach to entertainment, but sometimes I wonder if I am bogging myself down in the cheap and convenient, at the expense of the stuff I really want to read, watch, play, or do. My list of books I own and still need to read is massive and it tends to grow faster than I can shrink it. But it would be much smaller, and probably of a much higher quality, if I had to pay more for each book I bought. For example, I picked up Who Goes There? by John W. Campbell, Jr., the other day because, first, it was on sale for 99 cents, and second, because it was the basis for one of my favorite horror movies, The Thing. I honestly don’t have any overwhelming desire to read it, but it seemed like something I’d enjoy having if I ever needed a new book in a pinch. I didn’t buy it because I wanted to read it immediately. I bought it to take advantage of some time down the road (kind of like a Groupon).

I’m still willing to drop everything when something I really want comes along. I didn’t skip out on The Avengers just because I had unwatched movies on my DVR, for example. When the latest George R. R. Martin book came out last year, I had no problem putting aside my current book to read that.

But every once in awhile, convenience starts to feel like a chore. I’ve got an unused Living Social coupon for wine tasting burning a hole in my pocket as I try to figure out some way to work it into my schedule. I’ve got a couple indie games that I picked up on Steam that I still haven’t gotten around to playing for more than an hour. And books? Definitely my biggest weakness in terms of both impulse buys and not knowing when I’m going to work it into my schedule.

Anyways, I’ve got to wrap this post up before it sounds like I’m really complaining about a world full of cheap and accessible entertainment. It’s just that sometimes I need to check myself before I get too caught up in a low price. It’s got to be rough for the truly impulsive.

Category:

College Life, Entertainment, Games, Movies

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Facebook’s Timeline, Mass Effect 3, and Changing Your Past

Source: http://www.facebook.com/MassEffect3.gg

Apparently, people hate the ending to Mass Effect 3. I mean really, really hate it. Compare the critics’ reaction (who typically write reviews after only a few days of playing) to the masses’ (who can submit a review whenever they want). Metacritic reports an average critic rating of 93/100 on Xbox 360, 92/100 on PS3, and 89/100 on PC. Metacritic users’ respective ratings are 4.9/10, 3.8/10, and 3.8/10. People were so outraged at the ending that they flocked to The Consumerist’s Worst Company in America poll, voting en masse for producer Electronic Arts. EA won the poll, beating out runner-up Bank of America.

Slowly but surely, the complaints transformed from “we don’t like this” to “fix this now.” And so began the demand for the developers to create a new, “fixed” ending. Less than a week ago, developer Bioware gave in to those demands and announced new DLC (downloadable content) that will expand upon the ending, offering players the resolution they felt the series denied them on the first go-round.

It’s a strange event. A company goes back and alters a creative work to retain their credibility among their customers. Stranger still is that the customers demanded that this precise thing happen. On some level, they expected it. They felt it was owed to them.

But maybe that’s not such an unreasonable request. It’s the direction the world is moving, isn’t it? When so much of our information is stored digitally, it becomes both permanent and permanently editable. Think about Facebook’s latest design: the Timeline. Love it or hate it, it does one thing very well: make it much, much easier to revisit your (or someone else’s) past. That’s a double-edged sword. Sure, other people can access old postings that you might prefer remain forgotten. But you can also access those old postings… and delete them.

If you want to scrub your past clean to present the world with a more refined version, you can. If EA wants to pretend that they didn’t make some major narrative blunders in Mass Effect, they can just write a new ending. Both Facebook users and EA/Bioware can change their past, hoping to change their present.

Unfortunately, this is the same motivation that leads George Lucas to endlessly tinker with Star Wars, adding out-of-place CGI, contrived self-defense, recasting roles, and ruining a great scene with melodrama.

The desire to change (for better or worse) indicates that all media, whether books, video games, TV shows, or whatever, are increasingly about a relationship between the creator and the consumer. Bioware gave in to demands for the DLC because they wanted to maintain a positive ongoing relationship with their customers. Facebook’s Timeline makes editing easier for users and searching for information easier for companies. Everybody gets what he or she wants through the magic of selective memory.

And luckily for the curious, despite the best efforts of PR teams, there will almost always be some record squirreled away in some Internet corner of the original Mass Effect ending, the unaltered Star Wars scenes, or the original inappropriate tweet by a Congressman long after the official version has been scrubbed clean.

Category:

College Life

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My Losing Battle Against Spoilers

The Usual Suspects

Source: MGM Studios

Ever since I got a DVR… wait, scratch that… ever since my girlfriend’s roommate got a DVR (which first introduced me to the joy of pre-recorded television), I completely stopped watching live TV.

One exception: sports games, though there are a few I’ve recorded and saved for later, or at least tried to. I’m a Redskins fan, which means I’m a Cowboys anti-fan. So when Washington plays Dallas, it’s always a big deal to me and to most of my friends back on the East Coast. But nobody cares about the Skins where I live now, so I watch these games by myself these days. Now, I don’t know about you, but I infinitely prefer watching any sports games in a social setting. It’s the only way to ignore the endless loop of five or six truck, phone, and beer commercials that I’ll have to see all season. So when I’m watching by myself, I tend to absentmindedly fill the commercial breaks by playing around on my phone or iPad. Sooner or later, that means I’ll stupidly check Facebook without thinking. That’s when I see comments that look something like this:

“ANOTHER interception?!”

“Geez Skins. What happened during halftime? Did you all get drunk?”

“Holding out hope. If we can just score three touchdowns and a field goal in the next 4 minutes… (sobs)”

“Well, there’s always next team owner.”

I’ve only made it through one quarter and I already know that I have nothing to look forward to but an embarrassing loss. Sometimes I’ll continue anyway, but usually I don’t feel that it’s worth it.

This is an ever-increasing problem for me in the digital age. I’m a person who generally likes to stay up-to-date and I’m also a person who likes to stay connected to my interests. But I’m also a person who wants to watch movies, TV shows, and sports games whenever I feel like it, which very rarely means live. That’s a tough combination.

The internet’s catch-all protection for people like me are the words “spoiler alert.” That pair of words is thrown around in articles to immediately justify sharing any information. The idea is that if you ever read past the magic words, you are responsible for whatever secrets are ruined.

Problem is, most people don’t read content online that way. Unless we’re very engaged in a specific article, our eyes dart around the page and grab little bits of information in a scattershot pattern. It’s very easy to read below the magic words before we’ve even reached “spoiler alert.” Worse still, but very frequent, is immediately following the warning words with the spoiler, as in: SPOILER ALERT! ­­­________ dies in the next episode. (A death of a major character on The Wire was spoiled for me this way.)

Now, I’m not complaining too much. To some degree, spoilers eventually become a natural part of the culture. I knew how Citizen Kane and Spartacus ended by the time I was ten because it was impossible to avoid pop-culture’s fleeting references to “Rosebud” and “I’m Spartacus!” I remember my older brother telling me, when I was too young to see it, the grim plot twist at the very end of Night of the Living Dead. I never felt like that was a “spoiler,” just a way of letting me know that it was a legitimately good film, not just some cheap scares. It didn’t diminish my enjoyment when, years later, I finally saw it.

A psychological study not too long ago concluded that knowing the ending of a book in advance actually enhances enjoyment. The researchers involved posited that this might be because a spoiled story is “easier” to read, that the burden of the reader is no longer on following plot but in enjoying language. Take Shakespeare for example. Even in his day, the plot lines of his stories were explicitly laid out. Comedies ended in weddings. Tragedies ended in death. People aren’t shocked by Juliet stabbing herself, but they can be shocked by a good performance that wrings anguish and pain out of her suicide.

There are a lot of films, mostly ones with some kind of twist, that I appreciated more on second viewing. But even if I liked Fight Club better on round two, the confusion of my first time is still a singular experience. Hearing a story the first time will never be like hearing it a second time, or third, or fourth, etc.

So even if science has officially decided that spoilers are helpful, I still hate knowing too much. It robs me of a potentially unique experience, even if it leads to a supposedly more enjoyable one.

So my one request to the blogging and commenting world is to be a tiny bit more cognizant of people like me. I understand that you all want to discuss what shocking thing just happened on Breaking Bad, but I feel like I have a right to not quarantine myself from the internet until I’m all caught up on all my interests.

Category:

College Life

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Welcome to the Frustrating World of Job Searching

Source: theoatmeal.com

It’s March, so those of you on the cusp of graduation are probably starting to get bombarded with advice on how to land your first “real” job.

“’Starting to’?” a lot of you are saying incredulously. “I’m a liberal arts major. I’ve been getting nagged about that for four years!”

Fair enough. But your final spring is when that nagging gets kicked into overdrive. That’s when your school starts hosting workshops on interview skills and résumé writing. That’s when your parents start politely (or not so politely) gauging how long you’ll be living at home post-graduation. That’s when that question starts appearing in every conversation: “So… what are you doing after you graduate?”

Those conversations suck. Period. There’s no way to make them feel any better. Your only options are to either (a) stumble through a half-answer about various things you’d like to do, even if there are no real plans established, or (b) just throw up your hands and admit that you have no idea, and really, how could you?

You’re going to get a lot of moments like this one, from The Graduate. Whether it’s a family friend, an older sibling, or some overly exuberant host of an interview workshop, people are going to bombard you with ideas and advice: often practical, often absurd, and often unnecessary.

It will be frustrating, incredibly frustrating, because even though the advice comes with the best intentions, it also carries with it a nagging feeling that you’re doing something wrong. Every time you hear someone tell you to not wear those shoes, to leave that off your résumé, or to make sure you shake the interviewer’s hand harder, the whole enterprise of job searching starts to seem more and more disingenuous, and more and more completely disconnected from everything you spent time learning in school. It feels like the only way to impress a future employer is to constantly project a fake version of your self that is completely flawless.

I write this not to offer advice, but to offer empathy. Most soon-to-be graduates will be told to do this and to not do that a thousand times before they land that first job. Each nugget of advice will be presented as if it is the magic ticket to starting your career — just get a haircut, just buy a new tie, just change the font to “Georgia.” In truth, it’s impossible to know exactly what’s going on in an interviewer’s mind and exactly what factors help or hurt on a given interview. You’ll probably never know his or her reasoning. All you can do is to prepare yourself for the small portion of the interview that you have some control over. The rest is up to chance.

This is not to say that there isn’t a lot of good advice worth listening to. There are plenty of good solid rules about professional attire, a professional demeanor, and a professional email address that may seem overly obvious, but can easily slip by unawares, and can cost you a job.

But it is just as easy to overanalyze and obsess over the little details to your detriment. If you find yourself starting to worry that the way your parted your hair is going to cost you a job, it’s time to step back and remind yourself that everyone else in the building went through the exact same excruciating process to get where they are. And they all know, on some level, exactly how uncomfortable you inevitably will feel during the interview.

So when you start getting anxious, stop and take a deep breath. There will always be another chance to adjust the little details to perfection. But a good chunk will always be left up to chance. Accept the unpredictable, for better or worse.

“’Accept the unpredictable’?” some of you say. “Well, that advice sucks.”

True. But so does the interview process.

Category:

College Life

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St. Patrick’s Day Treats

St. Patrick’s Day is this weekend.  We’ve rounded up some great and easy St. Patrick themed treats and recipes you could make for your own party. We even included an early morning smoothie to help your recover from all the celebrating.

Green Beer

What would St. Patrick’s Day be without green beer! All you need to do is put 2 drops of green food coloring in the bottom of your glass, add beer, and you’re good to go. Perfect way to start the party!

Source: My Recipes

Guiness Float

All you need to make this is some stout and vanilla ice cream. Easy and delicious!

Source: Martha Stewart

Mint Oreo Shamrock Truffles

Mint Oreos plus chocolate and cream cheese. Don’t think it gets much better than this. Check out the full recipe here: Shamrock Truffles

Source: Bakerella

Taste a Rainbow Cupcakes

Rainbow and St. Patrick’s Day go hand in hand. All you need for this easy recipe is a box of cake mix and some food coloring. It’s almost too pretty to eat. Grab the recipe here: Taste a Rainbow Recipe

Source: Disney Family Fun

St. Patty’s Day Cake

Surprise your guests when you cut into this gorgeous green cake! Takes a little extra work, but we think the result is worth it. Get the recipe here: St. Patty’s Day Cake

Source: I am Baker

Shamrock Smoothie

Just in case you need a little recovery for celebrating all night long, keep this recipe close. Some fresh fruit and yogurt make this a great smoothie. Hopefully your headache can handle the sound of the blender. Grab the recipe from Babble here.

Source: Babble

What’s your favorite St. Patrick’s Day recipe or food? Let us know in the comments and have a great St. Patrick’s Day!

Category:

College Life

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#Kony2012

If you’re on the internet at all or watch the news, you’ve likely already heard of Kony 2012. An effort put forth by the organization Invisible Children to bring war criminal Jospeph Kony to justice. For the last 26 years he’s kidnapped children and forced them into his Ugandan rebel army. The goal of the campaign is to use social media to make him famous and to help him be located and brought to justice.  To help keep his name and face in the public eye, they are utilizing social media, hash tags, videos, and interviews.

Invisible Children is a unique organization and they divide their efforts into 3 categories: Movies, The Movement, and The Mission. Their mission statement is listed on their website as:

INVISIBLE CHILDREN USES FILM, CREATIVITY AND SOCIAL ACTION TO END THE USE OF CHILD SOLDIERS IN JOSEPH KONY’S REBEL WAR AND RESTORE LRA-AFFECTED COMMUNITIES IN CENTRAL AFRICA TO PEACE AND PROSPERITY.

They have been extremely successful with getting the video shared, viewed, and talked about. In 3 days the video has already been viewed over 55 million times. They have conducted interviews on E! News, The Today Show, and Piers Morgan Tonight. They are also targeting 20 culture makers including Oprah, Angelina Jolie, Mark Zuckerberg and 12 policymakers like Condolezza Rice, Mitt Romney, and Bill Clinton. Within 24 hours several had already tweeted and made Facebook posts encouraging their followers and fans to watch the video and share. To stand up and use their voice.

Over the last few years we’ve seen time and time again how powerful social media is. Within just a few hours this story went viral and brought people together and united over a cause. I can’t think of a better reason to be a part of  social media then to let your voice be heard.

Let us know in the comments below if you’ve watched the video and what you thought.

All the links and ways to connect with Invisible Children and Kony 2012 are included below:

Twitter:

@invisible

Invisible Children founder Jason Russell  @jasonrussell

Facebook:

http://www.facebook.com/invisiblechildren

Kony 2012 website

Invisible Children website

Invisible Children tumblr

Invisible Children financials website

Category:

College Life

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What College Does to Your Casual Reading Habits

My best guess is that I spent around 40 percent of my college education reading books. Another 25 percent was spent writing, another 25 spent in the art studio, and around 8 in classes. I’d mark two percentage points as “Other,” which includes pseudo-educational experiences like seeing pretentious indie films, hanging out at the campus radio station, or getting into a religious conversation with a Rastafarian shop clerk. I’m leaving out the large number of not-particularly educational experiences like re-watching Arrested Development and Chapelle’s Show on DVD for the 50th time, using cafeteria trays as makeshift sleds, and various anecdotes that I probably shouldn’t write down if I ever want to pursue an elected office.

Point being: I read a lot, for just about all of my classes. At any given point, I’d be reading three different things at once — a Shakespeare comedy, a nonfiction history of the Ottoman Empire, and Frederick Douglass’ autobiography. Check in with me a month later and I’d have moved on to a biography of Marcel Duchamp, King Leopold’s Ghost, and a handful of short stories written by other Creative Writing students. Four years of reading, four years of needing to constantly switch gears.

Immediately after graduating, I barely read. It wasn’t that I was burned out. I just had spent so much time totally focused on assigned reading that when it suddenly ceased, I wasn’t really sure where to start again. I carried around a copy of Stephen King’s The Gunslinger on a few plane rides, but it took me much longer than it should have to complete that fairly short book.

Like every new graduate, if I was going to expend energy, it was toward finding a job. With my free, non-social time, I mostly just played guitar and caught up on one- or two-year-old video games I didn’t have time for in college, like Shadow of the Colossus.

I landed my first real, serious, full-time job in September after graduating in May. It was at a magazine and I worked in production. That meant my primary responsibility was to be available to do my part as the writers and editors finished up their job. If it was a slow week, and I could stay on top of everything, I’d sometimes be left with a good chunk of downtime.

So I started reading again — first slowly, then voraciously. My old habits came back. I burned through the rest of King’s The Dark Tower, alternating each book in the series with something completely different. Then at a co-worker’s insistence, I started George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. I ate it up, but I maintained the alternating schedule. Following up the gritty high fantasy of A Clash of Kings with the narrative of a dispassionate English butler in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day worked as a very effective palate cleanser.

Eventually — inevitably — I got my hands on an e-reader. I’m frequently asked if having an e-reader changes my reading habits, specifically, if I’ve given up on paper books. The answer is no, I haven’t given up on print. All that having an e-reader has done is to encourage me to carry around and read two or more books at a time, one print and one digital. I’m straddling multiple books at once, just like I did in college. My reading habits have reached their logical conclusion.

Sure, this is just a case study of my personal experience, so there’s no saying if this exact thing will happen to you. But, even if it’s not about reading, don’t be surprised if you find yourself circling back towards old college habits and interests years after graduation.

We spend so much of our lives as students that by the time we reach our early twenties, most of us are all too eager to move on to the next stage. But your education will stick with you whether you want it to or not. Even if you never take another class, write another paper, or stay up all night working on a project again, curiosity will creep back up on you, and you’ll find yourself approaching the real world with a student’s mind.

Category:

College Life

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Welcome!

Welcome to the Bookbyte Blog!

Here you’ll be able to get all the latest info on current promotions, contests, and giveaways from Bookbyte. We’ll also have posts about college life, education, technology, food, fitness, and all sorts of great stuff for college students!

Thanks for stopping by and make sure to click the subscribe button so you don’t miss anything.

Before you go, let us know in the comments what you’d like to see on the blog. Lots of giveaways, prizes, recipes, tips, whatever? We’d love your help in making this a great blog and resource for you during college.

Category:

College Life

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