Neven Mrgan’s Tumbl

I wrote a book!! It’s a heart-rending memoir of my challenging childhood and poignant blossoming into a young man… NOT. Actually, it’s a book of sketch comedy; twenty-five sketches, hot and ready to make you guffaw all through your Lyft ride. It’s like watching SNL or Broad City or Key & Peele, except you get to do all the voices. Can’t beat it.

Here’s the cover:

There’s also a neat little website you can send to your friends when they ask you WHAT on earth you’re laughing about that’s not a meme video. Or, if you’re ready to pull the trigger, here’s the good stuff:

Have You Tried Sketch on iBooks

Have You Tried Sketch on Kindle

I know you’re going to like it. I’m not just saying that; here you are, willingly spending your time reading my blog. We’re on the same wavelength, you and I. *wink* Now go get ‘em, tiger.

Thanks!!

1. Never open a review with weather. Or the occasion of your dinner. Or anything about your date. We don’t care.

2. Avoid prologues. Don’t explain why you’ve decided to write a review, or what kind of day you were having, or whether you normally like kimchi or not.

3. Never use a verb other than “ate” to describe food entering your mouth and being predigested in it.

4. Never use an adverb to modify how the server took your order or how she put the water on the table or how she reacted when you asked for Splenda. We don’t believe you.

5. Keep your “yum” points under control. You are allowed no more than two or three “yums” per 100,000 words of Yelp review.

6. Never use the words “parking” or “food poisoning.”

7. Use references to the two weeks you vacationed in Thailand and to your Mexican abuelita sparingly.

8. Avoid detailed photos of characters. It will not help us decide whether to dine at this establishment if we see a “goofy” photo of your bestie Jason holding up a beer stein.

9. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things that are not the food that you ate or the restaurant at which you ate it. Really, just don’t, why would you.

10. Try to leave out the part that users tend to want to flag as stupid and useless.

My most important rule is one that sums up the 10.

If you sound like a dipshit, rewrite it.

(See Elmore’s original Rules.)

Did you notice me? To the right of Mr. Blonde? You can juuuust see my left foot between his legs. That’s the story of my life: always cropped out of the picture. But hey, I’m not complaining.

See, for a while there I was the Seventh Dog. The fellas needed a backup getaway driver, Joe knew me from back in the day, and I couldn’t say no to that big, lovable lug. To tell you the truth, I wasn’t in it for the money—I just liked being part of the crew. They were all super cool. Just look at them! For a dork like me to get to ride around in 1970s cars with these guys, chit-chat in raunchy language about pop culture over breakfast, get briefed on capers in an abandoned warehouse? It was a dream come true.

But, here’s what I get for being the nerd of the bunch: the day of the robbery, I’m sitting there greasing my hair and ironing my white shirt, when Nice Guy Eddie phones me up. He says, “Mr. Teal, you should probably stay at home today. You might be coming down with a cold.” And just like that, I was left out of the whole thing. I’d be lying if I said it didn’t hurt me when he said it. I tried to keep myself busy that day, but the whole time, I kept thinking about what fun the Dogs were having with their jewel heist. I guess you could say I was “blue” with sadness and “green” with jealousy, haha!

Of course, when I heard what had happened to the boys, I felt more lucky than envious. That could have been me bleeding to death on the dirty floor of an abandoned warehouse! Talk about a wake-up call. I took a long, hard look at my life and realized that being “cool” wasn’t worth it. I would accept and embrace the softer side of my personality, the side I always tried to hide when I rolled around with the posse. I drove to Goodwill and dropped off my fitted black suit, my pencil tie, my plastic sunglasses. I stopped listening to K-Billy radio. I went back to school and got my degree—heck, I even went for a PhD.

Twenty-five years later, how do I feel about my decision? Well, I may not be some extremely hip gangster type, spouting zippy one-liners over the barrel of a 9 mm gun pointed at an undercover police officer in an abandoned warehouse. But I’m a working professional now, I run a successful small business, and we’re starting to branch out into national distribution. In a way, you could say I’ve pulled off the ultimate caper—successfully, too! And while I never got to burst into a jewelry store, yelling for everyone to get the fuck down on the floor and not move a muscle or else, while I never got to participate in a Mexican standoff, or torture a captured cop tied to a chair in an abandoned warehouse, I guess that in my own, small way, I still consider myself one of the Dogs. The quiet one, the thoughtful one. That’s me,

I grew up in a small and fairly underdeveloped town; a poor town, let’s say. While I never felt that I lacked for anything in my childhood, I’d get occasional reminders of objective misfortune around me. Children who considered meat—any kind of meat—a delicacy, not for reasons of dietary restriction, but because it was costly. A fifth-grade classmate I spotted digging through a dumpster, and assumed he was doing it for fun, and walked away from briskly when his dad emerged from the dumpster as well, having proudly fished some food out of it.

Not the most depressing display of this was the way kids cherished the rare and special goods they were given. I say not depressing, because it’s a bit silly when you think about it; but it’s heartbreaking as well. What I mean is, if a child was gifted a soccer ball or a basketball, they would gleefully show it off, display it in their room, bring it out to the yard for other kids to ooh and aah over. But they would be hesitant to… play with it. It was new and unblemished and it had cost a lot of money. In a country where soccer was the default pastime for all children and most adults, a new soccer ball went unkicked, because it was precious. This annoyed me then and it just slays me now.

It may have also resulted in a personality quirk I’ve noticed in myself: I have absolutely no “collector” mentality at all. I wince at the the idea of collecting new-in-box products, amassed simply because they exist and not for the purpose of using them. Toys that stay in their packaging. Limited-edition shirts that don’t get worn or washed, limited-edition notebooks ones certainly does not write in. (I immediately hand my special Field Notes books to our kids so they can doodle all over them.) Even LEGO sets that get built according to instructions and never end up sharing the big brick box with other sets—though those got “played” with one time, at least.

Now, I don’t believe there is anything inherently wrong with collecting things; “wrong” meaning morally objectionable, or even ill-advised. YOU probably collect something, and that’s fine. I’m writing this not to judge you or change your mind—what would the point of that be, anyway—but to dig through my own head a bit. I started this post with a sad image, and I’ll have to include one more of those before I wrap this up.

I grew up in a small town in a war-torn country. One day, war came to town, and we had to flee—my family left behind the house my grandfather built, and we crossed the river to the safer town on the other side carrying what we could in a few plastic bags. From there on, those were our belongings. That was our collection. We started from scratch that day. Then we did it again when the Mrgans moved to the United States in 1999, carrying a few suitcases this time. I moved once more in 2007, from Florida to Oregon, carrying very little again; by this time, there was no pressing need to reduce my belongings, but there was an instinct, honed by these previous experiences, I’m sure.

There’s a sappy, hipster reading of all this, as if I’m saying “live in the moment” or something. I promise I’m not that precious about it. I’m as materialistic as anyone living in the US in the 2010s—I love products, items, packaging, stores. I excitedly buy things to make myself (and others) happy. I enjoy these things, in their boxes and out of them. Maybe what stops me from getting too attached to them is not spiritualism but something like zen nihilism, a cheerful fear that nothing lasts, and that you have few chances to play with it while it’s around. Maybe this is why I can’t have nice things.

WARNING: THIS POST IS ONE BIG, DETAILED SPOILER FOR THE MOVIE 10 CLOVERFIELD LANE. READ IT ONLY AFTER YOU’VE SEEN THE MOVIE, WHICH YOU SHOULD DO.

In a dark dystopian world, a woman wakes up with a shock. She finds herself in a strange room, restrained in bed. A man welcomes her and says that she has been in an accident. He says he is trying to help her, but it’s clear that something nefarious is going on here. He loses his temper, slips up, shows his true colors. She soon learns she’s not his first victim, either. There is another prisoner here, a disabled young man—friendly, good-natured, and clearly a bit in love with her. Together, they hatch an escape plan. But their scheme is discovered, and the young man is killed off. The captor relishes this and cockily plays with the heroine. This, in turn, allows her to escape, first using her muscles, and then using her wits on a lock. She exits her place of capture and steps out into a crop field. She is free, but there is much work to be done. She has learned a valuable lesson: there are others like her out there who need help. She will help them. She will join the resistance.

Oh and, by the way, this story is a spinoff of another, from a few years ago; both take place in the same world and deal with some of the same themes, but they feature different characters in different situations.

Now, am I describing the newly released movie 10 Cloverfield Lane, or my iOS game from last year, Grayout?

Hee hee hee hee

(If you haven’t played my game, trust me that the above description captures it pretty well.)

To get the obvious out of the way, no plagiarism is taking place here—it’s extremely unlikely that anyone involved with the movie has played my game. Of course not. I think the similarities come from wanting to tell the same kind of story.

Grayout is a prequel to Blackbar. Blackbar featured a heroine whose charmed life is turned upside down when the oppressors that rule the dystopian world she lives in target her personally. She fights it with the help of a stronger, wiser, more experienced friend. She wins, in a small way—really, she just takes the first step toward overturning the country’s totalitarian rulers. That’s the story I wanted to tell in Blackbar.

For Grayout, I wanted something similar, but orthogonal. So Grayout’s heroine is strong and stubborn and needs no guidance—she just needs a fighting chance. She wrestles her way to it with the help of a more timid assistant—who, like an emotionally important character in Blackbar, dies in the second act, signifying that it’s time to grow up, be strong, and become an example for others to follow.

In both games, the heroine is oppressed by a patronizing, authoritarian man. This reflects an unfortunate reality of the world we all live in today. If fiction demands a conflict at its core, I wanted to make it a conflict where I’m firmly on the side of the woman who has to put up with the jerks in charge.

All this made me giddy as I watched 10 Cloverfield Lane. It’s a movie I thoroughly enjoyed for its leanness, efficiency, and confidence. And damn if I didn’t also nod in agreement with its narrative choices. Good job, everyone. Let’s be friends, Drew Goddard.

Another year, another 69 books read! And hey, some of them were even published last year—though, as always, so few that it would be silly for me to tell you what my favorite books of 2015 are. Instead, here are some standout books I read last year, regardless of their publication date. We all just want an excuse to recommend things and read recommendations, right? Be honest now! Right?

In no particular order:

• A Feast of Snakes*, Harry Crews (1976). This hit me like seeing Tarantino for the first time—what am I even seeing here?? There are novels of southern gothic gone gross, and there’s this one which also adds a complete snake obsession into the mix. Grindhouse literature at its finest.
  
• Warlock*, Oakley Hall (1958). Possibly the first anti-western, and a blueprint for where the western genre has gone ever since. If you liked Deadwood for more than its crassness—hey, I loved that too—you might as well consider this another season of the show. 
• Camp Concentration*, Thomas M. Disch (1969) This is a bit like Flowers for Algernon put through more of a Ken Kesey lens, playfully loopy and showoffy, mad and humane, highbrow and low. I’d be fine reading books of this level of originality over polish-perfect classics.
• The Terror, Dan Simmons (2007). A fictional ending to the true story of the missing British expedition to find the Northwest Passage. It’s a good, solid naval adventure story, but it becomes more than that. A bit bananas in places, though I never didn’t have fun reading it.
• Fragments of Horror, Junji Ito (2015). It may not be Ito’s very finest, and I could pick a few nits here and there, but is it effective horror comics? Yes it is.
• True Grit, Charles Portis (1968). While I liked the Coens’ movie of this book, and while it captured much of the spirit of Portis’ writing, it couldn’t quite translate the memorable, god-fearing, stubborn spunk of the book’s teen heroine. A protagonist and a book to fall in love with.
• Blood Meridian*, Cormac McCarthy (1985). Maybe the darkest, most violent thing I’ve ever seen, on screen or paper. It has an undeniable brutal beauty about it, though. 
• Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad (1899). It’s a classic that reads like a classic—sometimes that’s bad, but here it’s not. Complaints I’d seen about the purple prose here pushed me over the edge and into a full-on FU mode for those who can’t stand florid language. It’s art, man.
• The Complete Stories, Flannery O’Connor (1971). Another book I finally got to, and oh wow—powering through this whole collection of delicately mean tales is like mainlining weltschmertz. I’m all about it.
• Miracleman, Alan Moore (1982). Have I blogged in the past about this postmodern reimagining of a cheeseball 1950s superhero? Yup. Is it still great on re-read? Oh yeah. Is it now finally available again? Yay!
• Man V. Nature, Diane Cook (2014). Dark, funny, and unforgettable, this collection of stories of social and psychological dystopias is a knockout debut. Can’t wait for more.
• The Best of Connie Willis (2014). A theme emerged this year: the books I love aren’t always the unimpeachable, five-star worthy future classics. I’m getting more giddy and excited about, and I’m more likely to share, books written in strong voices, with a unique style, a theme or a viewpoint I haven’t encountered before. Connie Willis does her Connie Willis thing in pretty much every story and novel of hers: sci-fi deep with history and sociology, a bit farcical and a bit melancholy and sad. She does it to a fault, and yet I don’t care—she is now a permanent Mrgan favorite.
• Black Water, edited by Alberto Manguel (1984). Short stories are possibly my favorite form of art—all art—so it stands to reason that a good collection of them would rank highly with me. This one definitely does: it’s edited in a very purposeful, opinionated way, it’s filled with authors I’ve never heard of (or never seen in this light), it knows what it’s trying to do. Seek it out if you like that twilight genre of story unsettling in a way that’s not quite horror, not quite sci-fi, not quite thriller, it’s just… weird.

If you’d like to see what I read as I read it, follow me on Goodreads. See ya there!

* An asterisk next to a book above means that the most widely available book cover today is horrendous, and I’d advise visiting your local used bookstore for a cooler old copy.

My favorite cookbook is Pok Pok by Andy Ricker and JJ Goode. Partly because Andy’s selection and interpretation of a-little-less-American Thai food is wonderful, partly because the writing is straightforward, unambiguous, and inviting. But also partly because the book’s data design is so good. I don’t mean the graphic design, though that’s lovely too (and it matches the restaurant’s overall branding).

I’m talking about the design of of the specific bits of information that make up the recipes—the pertinent, usable, data about food and cooking. It’s consistent, well organized, and most of all, extremely helpful. It’s a cookbook that expects you’ll actually be cooking from it.

Let me point out some specific features here.

1. A large, appealing, instructive photo. I don’t necessarily fault cookbooks for not having photos—they’re a significant investment of time and money, and cookbooks aren’t always written by celebrity chefs. However, even those books that have photos often include them more for decoration than for any practical purpose. (A Malaysian cookbook I bought on the strength of its cover is loaded with attractive photos shot so close up, with such shallow depth of field, that it’s hard to tell what on earth they even depict. Is that a shrimp or a piece of papaya or a dish towel?) Pok Pok uses very no-nonsense, top down photos, suggesting not only the plating style, but the plate itself. Austin Bush’s photos in this book have inspired me to switch away from plain, understated dinnerware to colorful, often over-the-top melamine plates, found in most Asian markets—and the oilcloth tablecloths to put them on.

2. Bilingual dish name. This is useful because it gives you the original name which you can then google, spot on restaurant menus, etc., while also describing, in English, what the dish consists of. Andy uses a more academically accepted, more consistent spelling of Thai words than most restaurants (phat instead of pad, muu instead of moo). Another Thai cookbook I have includes only English translations of dish names, which confuses me to no end. What dish exactly is “stir-fried chicken with soy sauce”?

3. Flavor profile and meal suggestions. These are invaluable. They set your expectations for what kind of thing you’ll be eating, they guide your final seasoning, and they help you plan the rest of the meal. The variety of suggested accompaniments and the generic nature of the flavor profile also let you make informed substitutions when needed.

4. Recipe note. This is nothing new, but Pok Pok makes sure to include the note BEFORE the recipe even starts—not in the middle of it, or after you’ve already gone through the whole thing. Of course, you should definitely read the whole recipe before you begin, but it’s good to know any important disclaimers or warnings early on. And a discussion of the finer points of the recipe would be distracting in the body of it, when you’re trying to get to the next step. Don’t share an anecdote about your grandma right after you have me drop batter in the fryer.

5. The plan. I haven’t seen this in any other book, and it’s incredibly handy. Typically, with involved recipes, I outline something like this myself: first make the sauce and fridge it, then fry the crunchy topping, start the stew early in the morning, etc. Andy and JJ do all this for you, turning a potentially hair-pulling day of trying to cook four things at once into a chill few evenings spent with one component at a time. Bonus points for mentioning any required, less-than-usual equipment. Make sure your pot isn’t in the dishwasher, or in the garage.

6. Ingredients. Details that stand out to me here: the list is organized into sections; quantities are specified as precisely as possible (in grams or ounces, depending on the total weight); eyeball estimates are given as well (”about 1 large stalk”). With ingredients as powerful as Thai seasonings often are, precision provided by weight measurements can make a difference between a punchy salad and an inedible mess.

7. Serving size. Note that this is specified in terms of whether the dish is an entree or not, and whether you can scale it. In some cases, you’ll be warned not to double all the ingredients at once, because your cooking vessel won’t handle it. You just can’t stir-fry four people’s worth of food in a single wok.

8. Storage. It should be legally required that cookbooks tell you how to store your finished dish or its components, and for how long. Pok Pok is very good at this; I’ve learned from it that I can freeze fresh chillies for months and keep fried shallots on the counter for a few days.

9. Recipe steps. The recipe is broken down not just into a stream of numbered steps, but into distinct, named sections. This matches my mental model of cooking the dish—a strategy this book generally aces.

(I tried very hard not to add a paragraph to this post where I go “UI designers can learn a lot from this cookbook blah blah” because I know you’re smart and you’ll conclude as much yourself. So pretend I never wrote this. Deal?)

If you buy Pok Pok, I strongly recommend that you grab a physical copy. While the ebook is about as well done as ebooks can be, that’s not saying much—the layout is still a bit all over the place on different devices, through no fault of the publisher. The printed book is pretty, filled with great recipes, and it’s an excellent assistant to you when you get down to cooking.

This week I was honored to speak at one of the neatest conferences I’ve been to, Layers in San Francisco. It’s a great way for designers to enjoy the craziness of WWDC week, but it’s more than that. The speakers, the crowd, Jessie and Elaine’s refreshing approach to putting it all together—the vibe is just noticeably different. You should go next year.

My talk was titled X+Y. I wanted to share some of my “secret weapons”, less-than-obvious influences and references and media favorites that have shaped who I am and how I think. Here they are:

The Day The Earth Stood Still, 1951′s classic sci-fi flick which hugely informed my game Space Age.

Manos: The Hands of Fate, in its MST3K form. Unbearable otherwise, lovable when mocked.

I Seem to Be A Verb by R. Buckminster Fuller, a hyperdesigned futurist essay.

The movie posters of John Alvin, Gremlins in particular; clever, engaging, beautifully rendered. A bit of a lost art.

BYTE magazine covers; similar in concept, dorky in an artsy way.

Voice of The Fire by Alan Moore; his only novel, unfairly ignored.

Who Killed Robert Prentice (or Murder off Miami or The Malinsay Massacre) by Dennis Wheatley; a multimedia, environmental-storytelling game… from 1937.

The Bucket Rider by Franz Kafka, my favorite short story. Dark stuff.

The Black Riders and Other Lines by Stephen Crane, even darker.

Stripy, the most contagiously funny character.

La Linea, a cartoon with a very “why didn’t I think of that?” premise.

Duck Amuck, my favorite short feature; the first thing to blow my childhood mind to pieces.

Swiss Federal Railways logo, the one thing that made me decide to become a designer.

Principles of Two-Dimensional Design by Wucius Wong, the book that taught me what little I know of design fundamentals.

I argued that since we are all shaped by our influences, we should acknowledge this and try our best to be shaped by the less obvious ones, the deeper cuts, and that we let them combine (X+Y) in unpredictable ways so that we can create interesting, unique things that are so us… which will then make them influences and inspiration for others.

Thanks to everyone who came to my talk. I hope you learned a little something, found a new favorite, or at least went, “hey, it’s that thing!”

I take meds three times a day. My dosing schedule is a bit annoying: take two of them at least an hour before and an hour after food, take one with food. It’s bad enough remembering to pop these at all, but doing so at specific times—forget about it, I’m way too dumb to stick with the program.

Luckily, there’s an app for that. My current pill-reminder assistant is Easy Pill. It gets the job done—I never had any real complaints about it. However, I’ve found that even after I’ve set up alarms for my meds, even after they infallibly pop up at the right time… I still sometimes skip taking the darn things.

What happens is, if I’m in The Zone, and my phone buzzes me with one of these…

…I’m likely to just tap the highlighted time and go back to clicking away on my Mac, ignoring the pill bottle on my desk like a fading Netflix envelope on the coffee table. Again, I understand that this is because I’m an idiot, but what can you do—I never said I was a Steinberg.

A few years ago, I had an idea for a way to address this issue (”how do I get knocked out of my routine and into taking the damn pill?”). I thought up an app that would present you with a very simple problem before you could dismiss its pill alert. Something like “21-15=?”, or “CARPEN_RY”, or a game of tic-tac-toe; easy enough that you wouldn’t get stuck, but substantial enough that it would pull your brain over to the shoulder of The Zone.

You will surely not be shocked to hear that the app never materialized.

Now, Easy Pill recently shipped an Apple Watch version. While having the pill reminders on my watch is cool by itself, the app does something else that’s a little big genius, a subtle psychological trick that has resulted in my not missing any doses so far. Here’s what the watch app’s reminder looks like:

See the difference? The button I’m supposed to hit says “Take”. Hitting that button and then not taking the pill would be a lie. Hitting the “Skip” button would be an admission of failure.

Making the UI button a specific, promissory action-word makes it a contract. It also reads as a command to me: hey, lazy boy, go Take your meds! This is nothing like tapping some numbers in a roundrect, an action of no promise and no weight.

(Please don’t read this as a general recommendation of text-buttons over iconic or otherwise abstract buttons. Most buttons in most apps aren’t like this; Photoshop and Excel are your apprentice, Easy Pill is your mom.) 

I’m not sure if this was intentional, or a fortuitous accident caused by Watch OS’s preference for text buttons in action sheets. Either way, the psychological trick works beautifully on me. I cannot lie to an app.