Monthly Archives: October 2014

Rubbing Shoulders

Constructive Fallacy of the Secondary Activity – or, perhaps, The Delusion of Mastery through Proximity.

Whilst making breakfast this morning, I had BBC Radio 4 burbling away in the background, as is my wont. There is a lovely 10 minute programme called, “A Point of View” which has a variety of presenters putting across, well, a variety of points of view.

Today’s episode was called “The Football Fallacy” and was presented by an American, Adam Gopnik . To quote directly from the BBC website, he “explains why the English are better at watching football than they are playing it and why the Americans are better at talking about democracy than they are at practising it.”

He also went on to explain why the French, a great literary nation, currently produce no readable great literature, and so on.

The extension of this to our hobby, particularly on the various web forums where there are a lot more posts about talking than doing (and yes, I can and do include myself in this criticism) is a simple matter, but it does occur to me that most blogs are about doing.

Web forums: The Delusion of Mastery through Proximity.

Addendum: My thanks to Michael L for emailing me with a link to the programmes’s transcript.

Framed!

Mike Cougill and Chris Mears have done it again!

Whilst I ponder olfactory stimulation, they have pushed ideas further forward – much further forward, as far as I am concerned.

There are certain memories which I would most likely destroy by trying to model them, for I will never be able to capture all aspects which inspire me. So, I shall enjoy my memories. I can even visit preserved railways, but they can’t take me back to 1978, as I can never be 13 again. Nothing I can do will change that – apart from memories, but they are best kept locked in a safe place. That’ll be my head, then.

If you haven’t visited Mike’s or Chris’s blogs yet, I suggest you do.

What’s that smell?

My good friend Mike Cougill has made another insightful post, on finding the “magic bullet“. But regular commenter Matt has provided a blinding observation on the need to find the right inspiration.

When it comes to layouts, I have no problem coming up with designs – got them coming out of my ears, to be honest (as several unfortunate friends can no doubt attest*, and indeed do) – but I find myself inspired by three or four different themes, each mutually exclusive, each identically time-consuming. Each appealing for for different reasons, and none getting ahead of the others by a large enough margin to square the circle.

Finding that spark is the hard bit: unlike layout design issues where “analysis paralysis” can take hold, this is more fundamental. Emotional constipation?

What fires me up the most? Sound and movement and smell. Movement is about quality of construction, leading to smoothness of motion and not quantity of “operation”. Sound is relatively simple to arrange with high quality digital systems, although I wonder if a duplicate sound card should be driving a sub baseboard woofer – just a few watts. But smell?

Yes. Smell.

It’s the smell which stumps me. It is the most evocative sense when it comes to memory, yet we pay so little attention to it. I have no desire to sit inhaling the fumes of a dirty diesel engine as it revs up after idling for a few minutes (I am not suicidally pre-disposed in my modelling!) but if I could somehow generate just a hint of that odour, I would be transported back to my teenage years. (The slightly acrid smell of steam engine smoke, on the other hand, I tend to find a little off-putting.)

When I find my muse, I’ll let you know: I will also be able to blog about modelling, rather than philosophising about it!

* What they don’t know, is just how many plans they don’t see…