Day 12

15432 words. Observations:

1. Writing a novel is fing hard
2. Writing a science fantasy novel is really fing hard.
3. It is hard to write super fast and write good sentences. Counterstrategy: each day write down a random sentence from a book, spend all day trying to measure up.
4. I’m really happy I took this Coursera Fantasy and Science Fiction class last year. 
5. Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood’s first episode is brilliant. Band of Brothers is amazing.
6. An iPad mini makes a sick reading/writing/music instrument of destruction.
7. Coffee?
8. The process of writing a novel seems like it could have lots in common with playing a ton of hands of online poker. Long, tilting, some days you win.
9. I’m behind pace, but 50k words and a complete story is happening. Lockdown? Lockdown. LOCKDOWN!
10. This draft will be a POS, but progress is progress. Writing a good story is like getting out of Shawshank.
11. The structure of a novel is a completely different problem than the structure of a screenplay.
12. Do better.
13. Fuck

I wish I were able to shelve every other responsibility for November, but we’ve had some exciting BET RAISE FOLD developments. I’m not making 3 hours+/day consistently, but I’m almost always getting at least 2 hours. Weekends are tough but I’m growing the beard to remind myself that I’m supposed to be a hermit.

goals for this week:
Draw
More writing
More reading
Keep better time tracking/word count on sessions
Tea

November: in which I write a lot of fun stuff really fast

I'm about to start NaNoWrimo - national novel writing month. The goal is to write a 50k word novel in one month. I read lots of books, and I’ve tried this before, but I have too much respect for people who actually write novels to say that I’m writing one. I’m writing a 50k word "exploratory draft" of a science fiction story! The last time I tried to do something insane like this I wrote a screenplay that reads like a Wes Anderson movie crossed with Kung Fu Hustle (coming to Google Glass in 2018?).

I don’t know how much blogging I’ll do during this, but it’s much easier to crush this kind of thing when you make your goal public. Because it’s so incredibly shameful if you fail. So this blog post is my failsafe. 

Also, I have a side bet with Kristy Arnett - if either of us finishes, the other has to make a video dancing on 5 strangers in public for 10 seconds each, and buy them a $100 book/writing gift. There is no way I will lose, Kristy!!! At least one of us is going dancing. (edit: unless both of us make it, then the embarrassment bet is a wash but we still get each other presents!)

Goals for NaNo:
1. Finish it, 50k words or more
2. Write for 3 hours+ for 30 straight days.
3. Be dramatic, comedic, and entertaining.

made a Pinterest board with some tools 

Yom Kippur ditty

new post via Poetry Genius:

--->Jay Rosenkrantz – Yom Kippur ditty Lyrics

Pacific Rim is the best summer blockbuster in years

As a child I spent many a weekend gorging myself on summer action adventure blockbuster movies (and sour candy). Those escapes into the cool theater were a favored way to pass the time with my younger brother and father. Star Wars was our absolute favorite, the king of the hill, but we saw all the others in the hopes that something could match it and let our imaginations run wild. Nothing really satisfied (the first Indiana Jones movies, Jaws, Jurassic Park, Independence Day and the first Matrix the exceptions). As I grew older my viewpoint on these kinds of movies grew more cynical. Nearly everything Hollywood spat out seemed like an excessive waste of money, a retread of the same old story, and a gross failure to deliver on what makes these movies resonate (the escapist thrills, a sense of fun, adventure and wonder, larger than life heroes and villains and meaningful conflict portrayed on an epic scale). This was our pop culture cinema, Hollywood was the only entity with the machine in place to create this particular kind of dream, and they were (and still are) failing miserably. 90% of blockbuster movies basically steal your money, feed you cancerous snacks, and leave you psychically violated with a primal urge to rant on Twitter.

So my childlike curiosity sent me looking elsewhere, in books and on television. Some of my favorite stories came out of the East, in the form of the giant robot/mecha genre of sci-fi. Maybe it was because Voltron was just so super cool!, maybe it was because Robotech offered a layered tapestry of characters set against a philosophically sophisticated war saga, or maybe it was the nightmarish traumas splashed across the colorful, trance inducing images of Neon Genesis Evangelion. This stuff coming from Japan was much more imaginative than the stories the West was producing, and I lost myself inside these worlds. I often tried to imagine what it would be like to see them realized using live action and visual effects. I assumed it couldn't be done, or that if Hollywood went for it, they’d fall flat on their faces (case in point: the Transformers movies).

I’ve seen Pacific Rim twice now, and Guillermo Del Toro and Travis Beacham fucking did it! The first time I saw it in IMAX 3D. The 3D was impressive, but we sat too close (rookie mistake), and my high expectations for the storytelling were disappointed when I realized the script played more like a campy Saturday morning cartoon than an epic philosophical meditation on the nature of war against monsters and the kinds of people who have to fight them. But they got SO MUCH right! In doing so they cracked my mask of adult cynicism and returned me to the silly state of a boy smiling in pure wonder. It’s an amazing achievement.

This movie delivers astounding visual images of heroes (real heroes who leap into action, not the emo, brooding kind found in most superhero movies) being heroic. The Battle for Hong Kong is one of the greatest action sequences I’ve ever seen in my life. It's so fun! This kind of pop culture cinema is important for our future. These are the dreams burned into the imaginations of the next generation, and Pacific Rim offers a humanistic, cooperative, positive dream.  It doesn’t match the resonance of Star Wars, but it’s so visually intelligent, bursting with detailed love for this kind of operatic cinema. There were literally people whooping and cheering, bursting out of their seats in both screenings I went to! It gives me some hope that we can go to a movie theater in the future and have a great time again. 

If you like blockbuster movies with amazing spectacle, and think GIANT ROBOTS vs GIANT MONSTERS sounds pretty cool, you have to see Pacific Rim on the biggest screen possible. Watch it as if you were 12 years old again (or bring a 12 year old with you if you know any), Discard your cynicism, have fun with the story. Be an optimist again.

Also, Idris Elba (aka Stacker Pentecost - how awesome is that name?!) is a goddamn BOSS in this.

*The new Star Trek, INTO DARKNESS, is pretty good too. It's really entertaining and features some crazy images and fun sequences. JJ Abrams is going to hit a home run with Star Wars 7, imo.

Applied Game Theory

I'm part of a new video series with Josh "sthief" Plotkin on DeucesCracked called Applied Game Theory.

Applied Game Theory is your introduction to applying game theory to poker. In this series, you will learn to calculate EV tables, analyze equilibria, apply toy games to NLHE, and plug your own leaks. Join KRANTZ and Josh in learning about the ways that game theory can complement an exploitative approach to poker. Follow along they review Jay's fundamentals, discuss practical examples (including some high-stakes hands), and walk you through the slow, but rewarding steps to using math to improve your game. 

The first two videos, "Introduction" and "Foundation", went up today.

Thank You.

This is so cool. As a boy I always dreamed of playing poker or making movies. To combine both into one experience… it's only fitting that poker made another dream of mine come true. That's what poker has done for me, and I feel very fortunate right now. 

In co-producing BET RAISE FOLD I was put in an interesting position as both an online poker player and a member of the poker community. I found myself on the outside looking in, trying to analyze who we were, and after Black Friday, what had happened to us. From the outside what I saw was unsettling. I saw that Black Friday had destroyed our spirits. We loved online poker and we loved the lives we were able to live because of it. We were dreamers, but in one fell swoop the absurd forces that exist in the world turned us into cynics. We took the ultimate bad beat in Black Friday because it robbed us of the chance to keep grinding through the downswing.

Here's what I believe about poker. The spirit of the poker maverick is enduring. It will not be extinguished. The dream is not gone. If you work hard and believe in it, it will always be within your reach. I hope BET RAISE FOLD can help start to heal the wounds of Black Friday and give us hope for brighter days ahead. From the inside looking out and the outside looking in, I'm proud to be a part of this community. 

Thank you.

our bet is made

It's hard to really articulate what I'm feeling as I head off to Las Vegas to premiere BET RAISE FOLD: The Story of Online Poker in front of almost 200 friends, peers, and poker world colleagues who have, like me, such a close and personal connection to the online poker story. Overwhelming excitement trumps everything. Movies and poker have been the two defining throughlines of my life, so to have them coming together like this is such a huge event for me that I won't know how to piece together the significance until I can look back from down the road. I'm trying to just enjoy the moment and capture it in my memory as best I can. Mentally I am in the zone. Like the great Bruce Lee says, "I am water."

Despite the amazing success of our Kickstarter campaign so far, it's surprised us how cynical some people have been about our motives. I wanted to repost a reply I wrote on TwoPlusTwo to a fellow poker player/pro who wrote "I think it's kinda sad that some of the BRF fundraising is done under the guise of "this is +EV for poker as a whole" and not "You can financially support a project you will like"

My reply:

I think it's sad that so many of my peers are so damn cynical!  

Firstly, the BRF = +EV for poker = a small portion of our Kickstarter. We list 4 reasons for making the film and "to do good for poker" is the fourth reason.
Secondly, this is generally what we mean when we say the film is good for poker (as listed in our FAQ):  

This is not a promotional movie. We have no ulterior motive beyond the desire to tell the story of online poker. When we say we're trying to "do good for poker", what we mean is:

How many online pros, casual players, and poker fans have been met with a blank stare when they tried to explain their passion/profession to family and friends? The online poker boom created a multi-billion dollar industry and a massive sub-culture that changed countless lives, but it's still so difficult for people outside this bubble to really "get it". You can't ask "outsiders" to spend weeks sifting through thousands of classic TwoPlusTwo posts or hundreds of YouTube videos in an attempt to better understand online poker. You can ask them to sit down in a comfortable chair with a bag of popcorn for 100 minutes and watch an entertaining story that explains what all the fuss is/was about. BET RAISE FOLD is foremost a piece of entertainment, but beyond that, it's meant to act as a communication tool -- a film that will finally bridge that gap of confusion between you and your family/friends. After Black Friday, it's more important than ever for people to understand that online poker is (was?) a legitimate profession that should be legalized and regulated in the USA -- because these days, it often feels like that blank stare is accompanied by misguided suspicions of criminal activity.  

Beyond that, 10 years from now, some of you might still be playing poker, some of you may have moved on to other interests, but wouldn't it be great if there was a movie you could watch any time you want that perfectly captured that unique, once-in-a-lifetime period of your life when online poker was new and fresh and everything seemed possible? 

Nothing like this has ever existed before, and we feel like that's "good for poker". 

Thirdly, I personally do believe the documentary is going to have a positive impact on the perception of online poker in the public consciousness. I know I said earlier that I'm not trying to be a "white knight", but if this film wants us to be the "white knights" of online poker, if it needs us to be that for it to succeed, then that's what we will have to be. We are all-in on it. Black Friday hit all of us in the stomachs and we survived to tell the story. We were the only people to capture the drama on camera as it unfolded from the POV of the players. Now we have a vehicle to give players impacted by it a voice in the wider world. If you think believing this (or trying to get others to believe in this) is sad, we don't see eye to eye on a lot more than just this movie and Kickstarter campaign.

June 12 is the theatrical premiere. June 30 we release online, worldwide, from betraisefoldmovie.com. I'm all-in on this movie. So are many of the top thinkers and players of my generation, ~500 Kickstarter backers, and all the people who helped in front of or behind the camera to make this happen.

Take that for what it's worth, but our bet is made.