GYSO Drawing Part 42 - How to Bake a Cake

Published: 2020-09-27

Introduction

Tim:
I’ve been thinking a while about what kind of cake we should bake on GYSO’s 42nd blog post. There’s the obvious significance of the number “42”, which puts a weird kind of pressure to come up with something that Douglas Adams would be proud of.

But the more I think about it, the more I realize that the great ol’ 42 post is just that: the 42nd post on GYSO.

So instead we’re going to go back to our roots, pull them out, re-plant our tomato asses, and water ourselves back to the past. The gimmick this time is that there’s no gimmick. It’s just classic back-and-forth GYSO. If we’re lucky it’ll actually be on the topic of cakes most of the time.

It’s so weird that I have the capacity to be nostalgic about how GYSO was before we started making every new post into it’s own writing gimmick. You could say there’s a lot of layers. Wait. No. That’s an onion reference, not a cake one. Hold on… It has a lot of… sugar? Ugh. Whatever. Let’s move on.

Thor:
What the fuck? This is like eating my having and caking it too.

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To be fair, even the “good old” GYSO stuff is also just continually trying to come up with new esoteric ways of stretching the format. do you remember the WWWWW shit from … post …. ööö

Or the time we wrote sections as each other, as each other’s names. That was post… something.

I can’t remember the last time I had cake.

What went right?

Tim:
Another GYSO tradition that you might not even have noticed: The fact that Tim is almost always the first person to start a post.

Maybe that doesn’t make sense to your brain. Maybe you’ve eaten an entire cake and gone into a food coma sugar high; so hyped up from the sugar but so full that you live in a perpetual state of discomfort, not being able to live out either of your impulses to nap or run out into the street naked doing the reverse macarena.

What I mean is that in the distant past of like a year ago GYSO posts would almost always be “Tim writes his sections, then Thor writes his own” and it always ends up being like two separate blog posts shuffled together like a deck of really thick cards. Can you imagine a deck of cards made of cinder blocks? You’d get the workout of your life.

If you remember the one year anniversary post (I’m pretty sure it’s post 28) than you’ll remember I talked about this very topic, and how I wanted to change the premise. I think I’ve been doing a pretty good job of that recently, what with all the strange ways we’ve been writing this thing. With that said, I think it’s nice to go back to our roots every once and a while. Like wearing a familiar blanket that’s kind of moldy and smells bad after being in your closet for too long, but you love anyways.

Wait. No. It’s supposed to be a cake analogy… Like a cake you left in your closet that got moldy and bad but you still love anyways out of nostalgia. Yeah. Everyone has skeletons in their closet, why not cakes too?

Thor:
What went right? Oh man, where do I even start?

For one, I’ve been learning about myself.

Like the fact that I just finished writing my next section and I don’t really care about this one anymore.

So I’m just going to stop he

What went wrong?

Tim:
What went wrong? Oh man where do I even start?

For one, my keyboard that I type everything on has this one spot on the space bar that I usually use to press the space bar on. Basically the only finger that presses the space bar when I type is my right thumb, so there’s a spot right there that’s worn smooth compared to every other key on the board. It’s been like that for years at this point, and I sometimes get slightly annoyed by it enough to think about getting a new key set.

But then I get a wave of apathy, since I know I’m going to have to take all the old keys out and replace them and clean out the keyboard and wait for the key caps to be delivered and buy them online. (Probably not in that exact order). And eventually I get to the point where I’m not going to do any of that, and I instead just wait until the thing is entirely unusable before I replace it entirely.

The problem is that this keyboard is built well, except for the key caps being less strong than you might want. That was the point of buying a mechanical keyboard 6 years ago: to have a reliable keyboard that felt good to use for an inordinate amount of time. Well, apparently I made a good decision, because this thing is still trucking along like it was built for typing or something.

The moral of the story is that the pain of updating my key caps is too much to convince me to actually do it, so the quality of the caps slowly degrade. The C key’s lettering, for example, has been nearly totally worn down to the point where I can only really see a small line at the bottom. The M key is also starting to get its fair share of wear on it. S is getting some “love” too, but it’s less extreme.

The pattern of wear on the key caps is really strange to me. Excluding the spacebar (the most common key to press on any keyboard), it’s really weird that C, M, and S are the keys that are wearing down the fastest (in descending order of wear). What is it that’s causing these ones to be worn down faster than something like E? Or any other vowel, for that matter.

It could be something to do with the way I type. I don’t really type in the “normal” way that you were supposed to learn from Mavis Bacon in elementary school. Without going into a lot of detail, my fingers are non-standard enough to mean that I can’t do the normal “home row” typing that everyone else can do without significant discomfort. I sort of have my own typing style that involves using my pinkie fingers very very little, my right hand way too much, and moving my wrists around like I’m begging for RSI. I always return to the home row, but I fly around the keyboard all over the place.

This means that my pattern of hitting keys is different from the norm. Maybe my fingernail likes to scratch the C, M, and S keys more than all the other keys. Over the course of millions of words of writing that eventually builds into a large difference in wear and tear. Or maybe it’s just a manufacturing defect. Or something. Whatever it is, it’s interesting to think about while I slowly go instance from the tiny spot on my spacebar being worn and slick compared to the rest of the spacebar.

I do a lot of typing, and this keyboard has seen me though a lot of the worse of it. I’m honestly impressed that it’s lasted this long with such minimal care. And by “minimal care” I mean I haven’t done jack shit to take care of the thing, and it still works really really well. I wish all my tools could be like this, but computers aren’t really built to last and I can’t for the life of me bring myself to pay for high quality versions of every little thing I use. I guess the point is to get high-use priority items like keyboards, instead of getting everything. A yin-yang thing, or something.

Uhh… What do you call it when someone throws a cake at you, and you dodge it? A missed cake!

Thor:
Well, this post for one. Actually, all of GYSO went wrong. Back in the very early days of writing together, me and Tim would actually be writing together. Like, at the same time. We would use a bog standard live-writing application and usually sit down at the end of our two-week drawing period to summarize our works and our results. As we would write, we could, and often would, look back at what the other person was writing and take influences from that. A beautiful recursive real-time creative event!

While the typical “oh, he’s writing about the boxes, maybe I should do that” and “oh, he’s writing about King William IV, how can I incorporate that?” would happen,

like always.

I’m talking about a deeper form of live-creation. If Tim was using language insinuating a certain something, or using a certain euphemism, I would try to incorporate that into the broader scope of my writing. Then, when we started writing the next section, the logical continuations of the last sections would begin this pattern over and over again.

At least, I hope Tim was doing this. It’s how I wrote my sections in posts like Pastiche. I used the wordings Tim was using to make fun of him, and also not have to come up with any original content. So when we started writing separately, it became really hard to riff off each other nicely, since our sections already had such a strong and decided arc.

Which is, if you haven’t noticed, exactly what’s happening to this post. It’s like I don’t give a shit about what Tim’s doing, because it doesn’t affect me anyways. He’s done his stuff and that sucks if we actually wanted to, you know, collaborate on our collaborative blog.

You know, I’m reading back some of what Tim wrote up there, and man am I uninterested. Not because the content is uninteresting. I mean, I read it once and I think it was funny (I can’t remember). But rather because it doesn’t apply to me now that I have to write my own sections.

Actually, maybe it’s a question of not trying hard enough. Yeah, that’s it. This format is uninteresting because I’m not forcing myself down the throat of Tim’s content, bashing my way into his context. Making myself be relevant to the stuff between his sections.

Yeah. Yeah, that’s it. Tim is the secret to everything. Just do whatever he does and it will all be good. Start drawing? Absolutely! Start a blog about it? Yeah! Devour three children as a sacrifice to The Great Grandmother? No problem, I’ve got a guy who knows a guy. Stop drawing about three months in? Yeah, I didn’t want to anyways. Create a video game? Sure, I absolutely want to do that even though I have serious addiction and self-abuse issues. Get up at 3AM every morning? Thanks dad, I’m so much more happier now that I’m alienating all my social contacts.

He will be the center of my worldview. He will be the father to my children. We will be one together. Come to me.

What happens next?

Tim:
Part of the fun of this style of writing is that I don’t know what Thor will cook up. After I write my own sections, he gets to bake in whatever other madness that comes to his mind on the Saturday night before the blog post goes up.

The me writing this right now has no idea what he’s got baking in the oven, and it’s always exciting to imagine what will happen next. He could be in one of those moods and write a super heart felt incomprehensible death-by-chocolate soliloquy, or he could play along with the theme and actually bake a cake.

What ever it ends up being, it’s a nice comfort food feeling to go back to the past a bit here and not have to shit out a gimmick. Happy 42, everyone.

Thor:
The GYSO rap album gets a public release. Feat. Mad Dog Henry, Santa Pawz, Tiny Tiny Tim, Shub “Black Goat of The Woods” Niggurath, and maybe more.

Featuring songs like Rap Sods and In an Ohio State of Mind.