Fun Friday Resources
/So I’ve been working on The Brilliant List for Every Brilliant Thing — in the script it’s a million items collected by the narrator and the people in his life of life-affirming things. Think “nose kisses from your cat” or “sunset over the Grand Canyon,” that kind of thing.
Obviously we’re not going to have a million items, but we do have nearly 400 that we/I have to manufacture. I decided to go with uniform, half-letter-size cards with the numbers printed on them, and the items themselves would be handwritten.
Bear with me, I promise this is about Lichtenbergian resources.
These 400 items are extra-script-ural, i.e., contributed by people like you, not a part of the show. At the end of the show they’re dumped out onto the floor for audience members to peruse if they like, and I got it into my head that rather than just print out a whole bunch of numbers and go with that, I should categorize each item as to where it would have fallen in the list according the age of the narrator and the range of numbers indicated in the script.
Got that? The list he started as a child ran from #1 to #320. In his teens, he produced #321–1000; at university, #1001–82,675; and as an adult, #82,980–1,000,000.
So, how to number the cards so they give the impression of being random items? I went to the intertubes and found random.org, and there I found the perfect random number generator. You tell it how many sets to generate, how many numbers in the set, and the range of those numbers. For the adult set, for example, I needed 1 set of 108 numbers with a range I selected from the hundreds of thousands of unused numbers from the script.
Presto! a list of numbers I could randomly assign to those items.
You will notice that the site has a lot of other useful items. Explore!
If you’re the sort whose eyes glazed over at the above process and/or have focus issues for processes like this (and I left out over half the steps I went through), then go take a look at Goblin Tools, an AI-assisted set of tools for any of us, but especially those whose neurodivergence might cause them to freeze up at the very thought of having to tackle a task.
(I thought the JUDGE tool could be worth a revisit: If you’re not sure how others might respond to your text or email, run it through the Judge and it will give you an assessment. For example, I just ran the preceding paragraph through it and was relieved to find that, as I had hoped, it came across as “a mix of understanding, inclusivity, and encouragement. It promotes the idea that there are supportive solutions available for those who might struggle with traditional task management methods, thereby fostering a sense of community and support for neurodivergent individuals.”)
And now for something completely different: the USC Optical Sound Effects Library.
Just go explore. You’ll find lots to amuse you and possibly be of use to you. I downloaded a horse whinnying, edited it to cut the introductory voice (“NUMBER… EIGHTEEN…), and sent to a whimsical teacher friend of mine, knowing he would use it to annoy his students.
Sure enough, by lunch he had texted to say that they were sick of the whinny and that none of them were familiar with “Frau Blücher!” ::sigh:: What are we to do with the youngs?
