What follows is a rantish thing about motivation and/or the lack of it. It's focused on a former coworker who displayed a positively superhuman capacity for slack- a capacity that frustrated and angered coworkers to no end.

Xeno's at the opposite end of the spectrum. He has, on many an occasion, stated that he's A Consumer and is perfectly happy being such. As he's stated his will and gone to great lengths to achieve it, I accord the man the respect he is due- that being a great deal more than none, which is in turn more than the respect due those who repeatedly sabotage their own efforts.

Basically, if your goal for the day is to drink beer and smoke cigarettes, and you drink beer and smoke cigarettes, then Mission Accomplished. Victory, etceteras. If, however, your goal is to accomplish something specific ("clean out my home directory", for example) and you spent all day playing CounterStrike, well... what does that say for you, having put a good seven hours of slack in front of fifteen minutes of effort?

The smart bet is to never commit to dates or times or even doing anything at all - it's the failure to follow through that mires people in inertia and sucks them into the dubious vice of "slack."

An associate of mine is finding out the hard way that the retirement plan for a life of slacking is getting fucked in the ass by a buildup of all the shit you could have / should have been doing. This is hardly news to the rest of us, but this is a guy who's repeatedly stated that he "slacks until it hurts." I've never seen this as a respectable quality- having witnessed it first hand and been burned by it firsthand, I can't even bring myself to sympathise. "The hard way" is the only way some people learn, apparently (myself included w/r/t things like bills). Draw your own conclusions.

My conclusion? Do or do not. There's no room for excuses in The Game Of Life and there isn't a single career - especially in comics or games - that was built within the bounds of a 40 hour work week. Slacking is working overtime to turn a "do" into a "didn't" - and a "didn't" isn't even a failure. A failure denotes an attempt.

Reminds me of a character flaw that greatly irritates me about my mother (largely in part by having inherited the tendency, to some degree) - mom would mutter or mumble words to the effect of "oh, I need to get up and get moving and such and such" and then sit on her ass for the rest of the day with her nose in a book.

Now, if mom had said "I'm going to sit here all day with my nose in a book," that would have been one thing. That's saying you're going to do something and following it right the fuck through to its logical conclusion. I totally support that.

But she didn't. She stated an intent to do something else and then botched the attempt by caving to vice while she was still on the launch pad. And once she caved, no amount of cattle prodding, no amount of shaped charge ordinance, no amount of screaming or yelling would motivate. Hell, she'd sleep in the same spot. She'd take the book to the bathroom and read it there (this being why I've never had any issues about pissing on a wall or a garbage can or a telephone pole if it's the only thing available - she'd bivouac in the fucking bathroom for four to five hours at a stretch in the summer). She'd take breaks to switch to a new book upon completing the previous one, but would otherwise plod on, undeterred.

In the words of William Shatner, "I can't get behind that." It's a lesson I've learned the hard way - I keep my mouth shut about what I want to do until I'm in a position to actually be doing it. I have stated "I need to do laundry today" and instead spent the time with my nose in Cerebus or The Dark Tower or whatever else. Schedules of bullshit things you don't want to do - by and large the things your parents took care of you when you were younger and didn't have to worry about bills or groceries or transportation or clothing - are the things that no one, as an adult, takes any pleasure in doing. Easy to postpone laundry when you'd rather be looking at porn. Hard to get yourself to the point where you're postponing looking at porn because you'd rather be texture mapping, or shading, or actually doing something.

Motivation isn't something you can sit around waiting for. It's either there, or it isn't- what separates the creative professionals from the aspiring fanboi is the fact that the cps have learned to make their own - to keep going even when they don't feel like it.

Hell, I stopped feeling like working on The Dualist about a year ago, and have been thinking about other projects for the past six months or so... but if I don't finish the fucker, it'll be yet another project in a huge pile of things I started but lost interest in, lost track of, got stuck on, or otherwise let slip from my grasp.

Fail enough times, you start to get sick of the stench of it. It's one of the few smells that's so thick it doesn't rise, which makes the only way clear of it a no-brainer.

Naturally, I'm not exactly a paragon of motivational virtue. For example, there's a page of ATC I still need to shade - a page I'll be shading whenever my urge to shit this out has finally run its course. There's a website I need to tweak, a friend's machine I need to look at (have, for months)- but my own tendencies towards "out of sight, out of mind" and my irritation at ones tendency to state goals for the day or week only to (repeatedly, demonstrably) fail through the suction of vice are separate and very different things. If I were to, say, tell Theresa that I'd deal with the machine's video problems TODAY and then fail to do so, I'd be in the category that irritates me. However, the situation is eternally in that ether of "a convenient time"- which could be anywhere between tonight and a month from now.

The fact remains I'd rather work on ATC than do practically anything else- which is where, I firmly believe, ones head needs to be in order to make any progress on a work of this or any scale. A "right fucking now" sort of thing, not an "oh, I'll load up after email" sort of thing. Procrastinating is a form of cowardice at worst and an inability to effectively manage the day at best. The upside is I'm no longer in a position where finishing a page depends on anyone less motivated than myself - and considering the amount of hell depending on people I have to motivationally babysit has put me through, I'll never again hang my ability to produce the project on anyone else. If I learned anything out of collaborating with Chris on the ATC models, it's that (a) he does quality work when he feels like it, and (b) there's nothing in the known universe that I hate more than wasting my own time and effort pushing along somebody who's perfectly capable of moving themselves but just doesn't feel like it.

I could go on, but I think I've vented my own frustrations in dealing with these tendencies in enough detail to get the malaise out of my system for the time being. Insert scholarly bit about human behavioural patterns and the tendency of water to find its own level, etceteras.