Vintage Links 003: Phish, Insane Clown Posse, Design, Clouds, and Habits

Back in March, before my dad passed away, I’d started the Vintage Links project in order to put some structure around clearing my overstocked “To Read” folder. At time of writing, there are about 600 of them remaining, and I’m going full Marie Kondo on those fuckers: everything is checked, thanks, and either deleted or filed away so I don’t have to deal with it again.

I got through two instalments before life went all kinds of chaotic, and I think it’s time to resume now that the year is settling down. This week I’m clearing a grab bag of useful links for writers and one particularly pretty short film that’s well worth giving ten minutes of your time (and if you want to see more, you can see the prior instalments using the Vintage Links tag).

9 Lessons from Phish and The Insane Clown Posse For Deep Fan Engagement (Fast Company, 2013)

Read the post over at Fast Company

Back in 2013, journalist and pop culture commentator Nathan Rabin wrote an entire book about deep fan communities that had built up around acts like Phish and The Insane Clown Posse. This post is a fantastic distillation of what these sorts of acts do to engage such fervent adoration from their fans, and in particular how they’ve built a loyal following that follows them from project to project (I mean, seriously, the Insane Clown Posse built their own wrestling federation from their fanbase, it’s…well, insane).

It’s an incredible list of ideas if you’re working in a niche (which, frankly, many emerging writers are), and I’m vaguely disappointed that the book is still only available in print.

The Ten Basic Elements of Design (Creative Market, 2017)

Check it out over at the Creative Market website (and there’s an infographic to go with it)

I got interested in design about fifteen years ago, when I first started looking at RPG book covers and trying to figure out what made them work beyond the great cover art (which, as an emerging RPG publisher, was well beyond my price range). By the time I started working for the writers centre eight year slater, we were starting to have those conversations with writers who were venturing into the world of indie publishing as the kindle took off.

I’d tagged this one because it was an incredibly useful primer for people starting to look at cover design and start thinking about the elements that made something work.

Four Common Myths About Habits, Debunked (Lifehacker, 2015)

Read the post over at LifeHacker

There’s a lot of bad advice out there with regards to building habits, and the worst of them (also the first debunked in this article) is the idea that it takes 21 days to bed a new habit in.

Teaching people habits (and hacking habits) is frequently a huge part of teaching people to write, so posts like this are always a handy reference point. The real useful thing to do is probably reading Charles Duhig’s book on habits and their formation, which I recommend to writers and other artists at every available opportunity, but stuff like this is always a useful reminder.

The OceanMaker (Vimeo, 2015)

Watch it over on Vimeo (or click the embedded video below)

A short, ten-minute animated film about a post-apocalyptic world where pilots compete to harvest water from the last remaining source of moisture–the clouds. It’s incredible what the film gets out of a simple concept and some really nice design–particularly when you consider it’s the result of a seven-week project done on a laptop.

The OceanMaker from Mighty Coconut on Vimeo.