A man with a shock of grey hair exploding back from thin framed glasses grins at me. “That could be enough tomato soup to feed a family of six. Hungry?”

“Wiley” is in his 40s, wearing tight jeans and a black denim vest encrusted with patches. He looks like the older version of the sort of guy you’d expect to see flipping tricks on his skateboard with a brown-bagged PBR close at hand. He does not look like the stereotype of a genetic engineer, but that’s what he is. He attended “a prestigious and ultimately futile” academic institution, and was a star student in bioscience. But as he approached graduation, he realized that the only jobs available for someone with his education were doing research for Monsanto or one of the other big agricultural firms, and, he says “that was just morally unsound.” So, three days before graduating, he skipped town and never looked back.

Wiley is one of a growing number of bioscientists who have dropped out and gone underground, and who are now using their skills to act against what they see as the unethical practices of agribusiness. The internet calls them “Johnnies”, after the legend of Johnny Appleseed, of course. The government calls them “Biological Terrorists”. And for good or for ill, their impact is being felt.

Wiley’s specialty, like many Johnnies, is genetically manipulating food plants to increase production. Most of the politics surrounding the movement involve the idea that locally grown food crops are being pushed out of existence by companies like Monsanto who use the land for growing food to sell, often to other countries, and usually at a hefty profit. Local farmers everywhere in the world say they are not only being pushed off their land, but that the use of resources by big agribusiness crops makes it impossible for them to grow enough to feed their families. Often, say the Johnnies, people are starving to death next to electric fences surrounding fields full of rotting crops.

So the solution, according to Wiley, is to doctor the plants to produce more food and more nutritional value. Most agricultural businesses claim that this is what they do, but Wiley claims that they focus excessively on ease of shipping and other qualities that are directly profitable, at the cost of healthy food. There’s an entire network of people dedicated to smuggling seeds and cuttings to small farms around the world. They use many techniques, and some of the same pathways, as drug smugglers. There’s an uneasy permeability between the world of agriculture and narcotics. Last year the US border patrol reported one bust which netted them 10 kilos of cocaine and several canisters filled with squash seeds. Underground grow rooms and heat dissipation systems, traditionally used for growing marijuana under the watchful eye of the War on Drugs, are now being used in some places for growing food.

The tomato is only one example. He’s shown me zucchini squash longer than my leg, and a photo of himself and another man standing next to a pumpkin that is as tall as they are. They are both wearing sunglasses and grinning at the camera in obvious pride. The other man, who Wiley will only call “Pedro”, was apparently killed a few weeks after the photo was taken. Wiley says he was shot by Monsanto guards in a cornfield somewhere in South America, while he was with a team secretly replacing the seedlings with “attack” replacements, which are genetically modified to cause problems with the crops they are grown in proximity to.

And this is the dark side of the Johnny movement. These attack crops are specifically designed to produce pollen that, when carried to other plants by insects or wind, cause them to become more susceptible to disease and environmental damage. They specifically target plants grown by big agribusiness. “Every time a corporation tinkers with the genes on a plant, they leave a signature. We look for that signature and use that to trigger our own changes.” Wiley is quick to point out that these “aggressor” plants are only designed to be harmful to agribusiness crops, and are still perfectly safe for human consumption. Monsanto representatives have said that “this kind of tinkering with life done by unsanctioned individuals outside of the rigorous safety precautions of a corporate environment is hazardous beyond measure.” Monsanto also says that attack crops spread by Johnnies cost it 1.3 Billion dollars last year in lost revenue, and that that number is growing.

Wiley says, “F**k ‘em. If they actually cared about the safety of people they wouldn’t be spreading new crops without proper testing. They’re pushing out genelines that have been in regions sometimes hundreds or thousands of years, and replacing them with plants that are only designed to make them a profit, but which ultimately cause more harm than good.” When I ask him if he isn’t doing exactly the same thing, he sort of shrugs.

“I grow for the People,” he says.

With apologies to Quinn Norton, who, by the way, is the only tech journalist I trust.

So I’ve just now reset the paragraph indentations and increased the margins all around, for readability, as a stopgap measure. But I want to say that a new site design is, in fact, in the works. There are sketches. There are diagrams. There, are, in fact, color swatches. Well. It’s me, so, greyscale swatches. But the idea is there.

(A question in that regard: I like the dark background/ light text for video and images, but I’m not sure it’s the best idea for text, since, traditionally, we read black ink on white paper and not the other way around. Does anyone reading this have an opinion on that?)

One of the things that I really worked hard on in this last iteration was what we now call “responsive design” but then was known as “oh shit people who aren’t me have phones that can display web pages that must be nice let’s make that suck less for them”. I spent quite a bit of time looking for and then severely modifying a wordpress theme so that was both grid based (because mmmmm grids) and mobile-friendly (because mmmmm jobs). Nowadays, people are making all kinds of crazy frameworks that fit my criteria. What I’d maybe love to do is somehow use the wordpress backend/database that already has all my stuff in it, throw out the front end, and build the whole think in scratch with something like YAML which I used for my last client site and really quite enjoyed. And I think I may have just found how to do that…

Personal site redesign is generally considered the designer’s black hole. It’s the thing you tell yourself you’re not allowed to do more than once every N months because if you do it more than that you’ll spend all your time redesigning your site over and over again. And part of that is for the reasons that are apparent (because we are the sort of people who could obsess over the position of one pixel and do you know how many pixels are in a website?), but part of it is a more subtle and actually deeply existential question, that of personal branding.

It’s become a truism, at least among my peer group, that everyone who has an existence on the internet is, to some degree, engaging in a process of branding. “You are your brand” isn’t about selling product anymore, it’s not about making your company look good so that you can Move Units, and it’s not something you can walk away from. It’s about the fact that consumer culture and capitalism have become the defining metaphor for our every interaction, a metaphor so tightly wound with reality that it may not be a metaphor anymore. And this is true regardless of whether you are selling a product, whether you are actually asking for money in exchange for goods and services or you are just asking for a moment of my time. We live, for better or worse, in an attention economy now, and the amount and quality of our interactions with people is constantly in competition with the amount and quality of our interactions with more abstract forces like companies and political parties. When we have what most people would consider a healthy mindset, we value time with those we care for more than we do time spent engaging with a product. But it’s a fluid thing, and how many times have you blown off hanging out with someone you like well enough but don’t really care about to watch a movie?

It’s a complex question, and I’m not going to debate the relative morality of any of these positions. I’m just fascinated with the process, whether it’s in its normative phase of looking up a friend because you haven’t heard what they’re up to for a while, or in it’s sociopathic phase of locking yourself in your room with Call of Duty for two weeks.

I attempt, in my personal interactions, to offer compelling content presented in an engaging format. That’s a good motto for a company, but it’s also pretty much the definition of a good conversationalist.

The other side to this, of course, is the notion that our current media landscape has led to an increasing dilution of attention per square meter / hour. I’m sitting in a cafe, and to either side of me I’ve got someone editing her linkedin profile (and fucking around on tumblr) and someone reading a news report in Chinese (and fucking around on twitter). And I’m not even trying to pay attention to them, but their screens are right there in my periphery so every time this guy gets an IM I have to know about it. Now I have more peripheral attention than most people (side effect of growing up in an environment where things try to kill you by approaching from the edges) so I’m kind of an extreme case, but I’m also juggling writing this, waiting for an IM myself, periodically checking to see if an email I’m hoping for has come in, and trying desperately to not think about all of the fascinating baubles of brain candy that are waiting for me on twitter. So you’re trying to get my attention, for your kickstarter or whatever, you’ve got about 5 seconds to hook me or I’m flipping to the next tab.

You remember that “micropayments” model we were promised back in the early 2ks? Well it’s here. But it’s in the form of attention, and not money. The long tail is getting longer, I think, but it’s less useful to measure that in terms of dollars than it is in terms of moments of focused attention, because money is increasingly just a side effect of attention.

And it’s an arms race, of course, like every evolutionary process. Entities (either human or not) will try harder and harder to get your attention, and your spam filters (either in your mind or in the extended neurology of your browser) will get more effective, and then someone will get your attention, and then those neurons will burn out… If you want to see the immediate future of the internet, look at Times Square, or The Strip in Vegas. To paraphrase Motörhead, “Everything Brighter Than Everything Else”.

Everything Realer than Everything Else
(Photo of Times Square by Audrey Penven )

So everyone can see you now, every move you choose to make public (or, in some cases, is made public for you without your consent) is part of your notional Brand Identity. But the same is true of a billion other people. So: What are you Saying? And, Who is Listening?

And these are the things I think about while I try to get a fluid responsive grid system to work under WordPress.

(Do you want to hire someone who cares about this sort of thing to do your front end design? You know you do. Mail me. Currently looking for front end work with which to support this burgeoning writing habit. Also available for bar mitzvahs and weddings, if you don’t mind me insulting the groom and teaching the children knife fighting techniques.)

The following is an excerpt from a mail I sent to a friend. She asked me about this subject, and I liked the results enough that I’m sharing it with you. I offer this as an explanation of why it ends so abruptly and personally. I am not actually flirting with each and every one of you. Yet.

The idea of matching your breathing to that of an opponent has a long and weird history in a number of long and weird traditions. I first learned about it through a book called “Secrets of the Ninja”, which is a flimsy paperback sold by Paladin Press, a fringe publisher specializing in survivalist literature, self defense manuals, and exposes of government mind control. The book itself seems to be a pastiche of genuine ancient oral tradition Ninjitsu and various more modern notions both written in an awkward english-as-second language style which has the effect of smearing fact and speculation together so as to make it impossible to tell the difference. This serves to further obscure a discipline which may already be more fiction than fact. Fitting for the subject, I suppose. Nonetheless, the book does contain lots of very practical techniques, on both physical and paraphysical levels. I have found the meditation exercises in it (which are bizarrely specific, “clack the teeth together 36 times while rubbing the kidneys counterclockwise” sort of things) to be remarkably effective. And as part of the subject on Ninja Mind Control (cue theremin) he talks extensively about matching your breathing to that of an opponent, so as to better understand and control them.

In Aikido, it is an expression of the principle of “Observe, Blend, Control” which flows through much of the art. In the same way you redirect an opponent’s physical force by moving with them, so do you redirect their Chi by breathing with them. In a sense it’s a form of camouflage, you become so close to them that you become invisible, and your influence becomes more subtle, and thus, more effective. Interestingly, it also shows up in Neurolinguistic Programming, which is a shady science made up of more edge cases than facts, perpetrated primarily by pickup artists and con men. And yet, despite the fact that NLP refuses to stand up to the rigors of Scientific Method, it has pragmatic tools that one can use and see immediate efficacy of. It’s sort of like magick in that sense.

In fact most of the places where one finds this idea are shady gray areas, back alleys of the collective subconscious, zen artistry that refutes rationality in favor of the sound of one hand clapping. It can be seen an an emergence of these ideas into the physical world, a border condition between the measurable and the ineffable. The breath has always been considered a sacred thing (see e.g. the etymology for “inspiration”) and in a way this technique is a way of insinuating onesself into the sacred space of the other. It is as useful, by the by, in lovemaking as it is in fighting. Try matching your breathing to that of your lover, then try breathing in the opposite pattern, taking in what they breathe out and vice versa. Feel how the energy of the situation changes.

I do not remember how this came up in conversation originally between us. But it’s clear, given everything I wrote above, that it was me flirting with you.

Just something that I’ve been thinking about lately, is the nature of writing in different media. I was talking with my friend Trista the other night, about this whole writing thing, and she said that she thought I needed a typewriter. Not just because they are stylish and gorgeous creatures of metal and filigree, and they are, even in the basest pawn shop Selectric you can sense a powerful animal trying to force its way out of the 50s plastic casing. But for the minimalism of it, for the just-you-and-the-page focus, and, most importantly she said, “because there is no backspace.”

I don’t think I’m willing to go that far. I fuck up my words often enough that it would be tree genocide to try to bang out these random things at least on actual paper. But I think she has a point, that most writers tend to overwrite and overthink. There’s a scene in the movie version of Naked Lunch which has The Character Who Is Clearly Kerouac discussing this with The Character Who Is Clearly Ginsberg. TCWICK is saying that anything other than just putting raw words down on paper as they come is, in essence, dishonest. And of course this is exemplified by Kerouac’s On The Road, which was typewritten on a single long scroll of paper. Like many of the questions in this movie it remains unanswered (Burroughs’ contribution is “Exterminate all rational thought. That is the Conclusion I have come to,” which will pretty much trainwreck any conversation), which is as it should be. It’s a dynamic give and take, not a binary.

I struggle with this myself, in that if I’m not careful I tend towards prose so purple it could dye Caesar’s robes, and I have to be aware that supposedly clever turns of phrase like that are like paprika; they lend flavor, but if you overuse them they overwhelm the meal and make you look like you’ve got blood coming from your mouth.

Anyway, this has not gone where I meant. I was talking about writing tools, another theme in Naked Lunch (moreso again the movie than the book, because Cronenburg was smart enough to realize that actually making a movie about the main themes of the book would get him blacklisted fast enough it would give Zombie McCarthy a swell of pride). I won’t risk spoilers, but anyone who has seen the movie will understand the frission I feel when I wave a pen in someone’s face and say “I have a Writing Device.” There’s an underlying thread through the whole thing about the mechanisms of writing being integral to the type of output, possibly moreso than the intent of the writer. Typewriters are revealed as double agents, turn into monstrous sexualized creatures, attempt to kill one another, and one is said to “secrete three types of addicting fluid when it likes what you’ve written.” And the theme persists beyond the movie into all sorts of cultural areas, there’s an entire subset of art fetishizing typewriters and their componentry, my personal favorite of which is Jeremy Mayer.

This is of course part of a much larger dialogue about how the technologies that surround us affect art. Not just the actual mechanisms of the medium, but also how movements in science affect available ideas for artists to work with. The Surrealists were partially reacting to the then new ideas in psychology about the subconscious. Many people have argued that the actual source of fear in Lovecraft is less the tentacled monsters and more the existential terror brought on by the notion of higher spatial dimensions and the percieved impossibility of humans to comprehend what might live there. There is a subtle interplay between the horror vacui of Lovecraft and the sort of magical thinking that leads one to believe that a particular pen model can lead to different words. It’s all part of the human desire to comprehend the incomprehensible. Stephen King talking about the magical yellow sheets of paper that started him on The Dark Tower sounds like a shaman saying that the goat entrails have declared that it is time to plant the crops, but it it’s undeniable that, for good or ill, that series is radically unlike anything else he’s ever written (and I personally think that the fact that it’s basically an interplay of archetypes is related to allowing that sort of magical thinking to enter into your work in the first place, but that’s just personal speculation). Any ceremonial magician worth his salt in the 21st century will tell you that, no, of course, that there’s no discernable difference between this athame and that one, but this one just works better, and we can theorize on that but for practical application it’s best to just run with it ¹.

And so that’s what I’m doing here. I wrote the last post, and this one, using WriteRoom, and I am loving it. Its main claim to fame is a fullscreen mode which presents you with just a page and text, ostensibly to remove distractions. I usually do all of my writing, code or creative or whatever, in vim, and it has a fullscreen mode and far far more powerful editing capabilities (it really is the Mt. Fuji of text editing, once you climb the steep learning curve you can SEE THROUGH TIME). And I’ve been tabbing back and forth to the browser to find references and check spelling the whole time, so so much for “no distractions.” And yet. This one just works better. Maybe it’s the appeal of the new, or whatever, but in practical application I’m just running with it.

Also of note, I am frighteningly obsessed over markdown now. Yes that’s the same link that every other mention of markdown uses, and that’s because it is a dead simple system that only requires a few paragraphs and examples to explain. Basically; you write plain text, you add a very minimal number of characters to indicate things like italics and links, and magical perl elves come and sprinkle fairy dust on it and turn it into beautiful html, or pdf, or whatever. No futzing about with proprietary formats or binary bullshit, no trying to decipher which version of which editor the guy who sent you the file was using so you can open the thing at all. At it’s most complex, if you want to get really into it, and you are a pixel obsessive designer like me, you can edit a css file. I have a vast love for plaintext in all things, so this extremely clean interface between very open content and very pretty form is like huffing kittens² for me.

Anyone who knows me knows that I have an unhealthy amount of focus on tools, and fetishization thereof. So I’m being very careful here to not sound like I’m Trumpeting The Praises of these projects and that they are the magical panaceas that will Finally Let Me [whatever]. A tool is just a tool. But my point here is that the efficacy of a tool cannot just be measured in metrics or pullquotes on a website or feature lists, it can only be known when you actually grab the thing and wrestle with it and see how it performs. Some people like their art to be like close combat, tight and tactical, some like it to be like lovemaking, sensual and natural and fluid. No one’s process is like anyone else’s, and a katana in the hands of a well trained modern artilleryman is little more than a pointy club. So engage with the device, ignore what the pundits tell you, and do what makes you do like no one else can.

(and while researching for this I came across this: The History of the Typewriter, Recited by Michael Winslow. Michael Winslow, if you spent any time in the late 80s, was The Sound Effects Guy in the Police Academy movies. The video is about what you would expect, but for 20 minutes. The amount of intense focus he puts into every moment is incredible. He even gets the electric hum on the Executive Model 42.

I also found this book which is immediately going on my I won’t have time to read that list.)

I know, I know, it’s a horrific thing to hear from someone you love, and I can already see you recoiling in horror. Being a writer is the thing mothers warn their children against doing. “Go to school and get good grades,” they say warningly over the evening vegetables, “or you’ll wind up as a whore. Or a writer.” The implication is, of course, that the two professions are roughly equivalent on the social scale of any reasonable person. They’re both the sort of people you see on the street and vacillate between offering them a smile out of pity and avoiding eye contact so as not to catch some horrible thought disease.

But the time has come to admit to it. For many years I’ve been showing all the behavioural characteristics. I furitively secret away miscellaneous ideas into text editors like drag queen paste jewels shoved into the overflowing drawers of an unlabeled filing cabinent. I gaze unblinking into an anonymous night sky, the Abyss, occasionally oncoming traffic. I drink a lot of coffee.

So I’ve come to accept the social pariah-hood that comes with this cripling disease. This leprousy of words. This compulsion to type shit like “This leprousy of words”, who the fuck says that? The problem, though, is that I lack the one thing that allows writers to really come to terms with the truth of who and what they are. I don’t ever actually write anything.

I’ve spent most of my life with this sense that I’m an artist of some sort, that I need to create in order to be happy. But I’ve never been able actually settle on a medium. I’ve tried drawing, painting, sculpture, architecture, music (assuming a rather modern definition thereof), video, javascript, and, briefly and disastrously, hairstyling. I’ve always had the sense that I’m aiming toward some as yet unknown sythesis of things, and I still feel that way, but it’s really goddamn hard to talk reasonably about that sort of thing when 1) the very terms of the argument make you sound like a pretentious ass and 2) you don’t have anything to show for it but a handfull of fragmentary projects because every time you finish one you think “yes I’m sure that fits in somewhere, on to the next thing…”

In the last few months I’ve been through some really interesting personal shifts. Some of you already know about these, some of you know just enough to be concerned but not enough to actually get a grasp on what’s been going on. And this is not the place to explain any of that, at least not right now. Right now I want to talk about the fact that I have been writing my little nubs off, banging away at any text editor that will take my stinking words. It’s nothing Good, it’s nothing even really cogent. But goddamn if it hasn’t done more to lift my head out of the malaise of uncertainty and lack of direction than any of the NLPs or OTOs or SSRIs I already had in my neurological toolkit.

And I’ve come to the realization that one of the reasons we Do Fucking Art in the first place is to create an order out of the unstructured whirlwind of stimuli we all stagger through every day. Actually, that wasn’t a realization, I’ve known that forever. The realization is that writing, language, is one of the most deep and primal ways we have of selectively editing that chaos into something meaningful. Other art can do it, of course, any medium can, and it operates differently for everyone. But language has a special primacy of place for reasons that… well for a bunch of reasons that are for another piece later. I’ll just say that one of my most formative experiences as an artist was the man who had just promised to shove me out of a third story window if I lost that hand of poker afterward giving me a copy of Derrida’s Of Grammatology. I won the poker game, read the book, and never looked back.

And I’ve been deconstructing my way across the landscape ever since, but it’s seriously time for some synthesis. And nothing allows that, at least for me, quite like words.

So I’m writing this in the form of a blog post, but I’m not at all sure where I’m going to put it. The reasons for this format are multifold. I’ve been reading and getting a lot of inspiration from Warren Ellis’ blog for the last couple of days, and I have a tendency to pick up the style of whatever I’ve been reading (and god the week after we read David Copperfield was hell on my attempts at high school love notes). Also today I made the joyful and completely random discovery in a used bookshop that BLDGBLOG has a book. I blame the fact that I had totally missed this to the natural blindness that comes from knowing you shouldn’t be spending your money on books online, but for some reason when it’s just sitting there on the shelf saying “Hey! You! Remember how Geoff Manaugh’s writing has pulled out out of more funks than you can count? Show some love!” it’s harder to ignore.

I devoured the introduction on the train ride home, and in it he basically says (and I am liberally paraphrasing, sorry Geoff) “I am interested in lots of things. They all have a common ground for me, but no one else seemed to be writing about that. So I started this blog.” That, my friends, resonated with me, on the order of having your head used as a clapper for the bells of Notre Dame. Synthesis. Now Geoff clearly has a background that gives him a certain academic intellectual rigour that a self-styled dilletante like myself probably lacks. And he’s approaching his synthesis from the standpoint of architecture in the broadest sense, which gives him a bit of an advantage in having a pretty solid historical basis for a lot of what he deals with. But, like Geoff and the esteemed Dr. Worm, “I’m interested in things.” And I think I should talk about that more.

What will I write about? Who knows? I have a wide variety of interests. Right now I have a piece festering about the idea that, assuming we create gods (in the literal metaphysical sense, not in some cultural abstract way) by way of worship, what happens when we make gods out of figures of fame who are still around to change their mythologies? I’ve been thinking about the use of semiotic systems that imply informational authority (in the form of charts and graphs) to create intentional fictions that bypass our ability to detect untruth. Also I’ve been thinking about geopolitical models as metaphor for romantic relationships, fetishizing plaintext as a format for all data ever, and playing with javascript libraries. And God knows how many posts about Todo list methodologies you’ll have to slog through.

I’m not making any promises, here. I’m not going to claim anything as structured as regularly scheduled updates, I’ve been on the internet long enough to know that for the fool’s errand it is. This is not yet another “everything has changed, the time to strike is now” manifesto of the sort that has littered every sketchbook I (and I suspect many of you) have had. I don’t know what’s changed, if anything, except for the fact that I have realized that if I am going to accept the reality that I may be a writer, I should write things.

So. You’ve been warned. My brainspores are coming to nestle down in your synaptic gaps. I’m tired of the silences of uncertainty. It’s time to Write Something.

In life, one must have a balance between the pre-rendered and the generative. So, because I’ve been spending so much time in After Effects lately, the goal for this weekend was to create something pretty in code. After a rather inspiring conversation with a fellow artcoder I remembered that I had been wanting to play with three.js for a while. And, here’s my first experiment. It’s not that complicated, just an array of very elongated spheres floating around with a single point light source and some bloom in post. But I think the effect is pretty nice.

Click on the thumbnail to open it in this window. It will work best on Chrome, it should work fine on Firefox, and if you’re running IE I feel bad for you son, I got 99 problems but the DOM ain’t one.

Many things to @jerome_etienne for the three.js boilerplate, Paul Lewis for the fantastic Getting Started Tutorial, and of course MrDoob for writing the thing in the first place.

A study in audio-reactive form and light. The song is an excerpt from “Aurora” by Ryuichi Sakamoto and Alva Noto. More on them may be found at http://www.raster-noton.net/anrs/

I got to thinking, people do all this stuff with particle effects being all bright and shiny, what would happen if you made particles … of DARKNESS? (also a friend showed me a nice trick with aux systems being used to create sparks on surface contact, so I wanted to play with that)

I uploaded and linked an earlier version of this, and then immediately saw a bunch of improvements that needed to be made, so I did. I improved the camera motion a lot, made significant changes to the lighting/ color correction, and made some minor changes to the particle system. Oh, and replaced the dummy floor texture I accidentally left in last time with a real one. It’s nice, though, that on this case my turnaround time between “this is awesome!” and “oh I can do this much better” is in this case measured in minutes. The original is still on vimeo if you want see the evolution.

I don’t know what it is, but it’s trapped in that tiny room with you, and It Wants Out.

This is a still from the video I shot at the Occupy Port of Oakland March, 12.12.2011. Color manipulation done in After Effects. Really I just made this so I could use it as a wallpaper, but you’re welcome to it if you’d like it. Click through for 1920×1080 version.

This is the video for Unwoman’s cover of Hurt, off of her album Uncovered. It was shot and edited (minimally) by me. This was originally meant to be the key shot in a more complex video, but when we watched this we both knew instantly that it carried itself so well that doing much more to it would risk overworking it. A gorgeous sunset, a beautiful woman, and a fantastic song; what more does one need?