Brian D. Buckley

“Satisfice” is a word I picked up in my college psychology class. It’s a portmanteau of “satisfy” and “suffice,” and it means to search until an acceptable solution is found. This is opposed to searching for an optimal solution, which may be much more difficult. Optimizers demand perfection; satisficers just want to find something good enough and stop looking.

I am a satisficer.

In some areas, everyone is a satisficer. When you’re looking for a greeting card, you probably don’t examine every single one to find the best. You just look until you find one that works, and buy that.

But I satisfice in everything.

In driving: I find a route that gets me there, and then I take it every time, without worrying if there’s a faster way. In restaurants: I find something I like to order, and then I order that most of the time. Investing: I find an investment that meets my financial goals, and then I stop looking for alternatives.

I’m even a satisficer in my writing. It’s just that, in writing, my bar for “good enough” is abnormally high. But once I reach it, I stop fiddling. I’m done.

Betsy, my wife, is an optimizer. She wants to keep looking.

This is especially apparent when we’re shopping for clothes or home furnishings. As soon as I find something I like, I’m finished. Everything afterward is an exercise in tedium. I just don’t care enough. She, on the other hand, wants the best-looking room, the best-fitting clothes.

Neither strategy is inherently better, and both can be dangerous in the wrong situation. I miss out on lots of cool stuff because I stop searching so quickly. Betsy is sometimes paralyzed with indecision because she compares so many variables. Together, perhaps, we form a single rational person.

Do you satisfice or optimize?

Several times, I’ve mentioned “my illness” on this blog. I never said what it was. I wasn’t sure if I was ready to. But the more I think about it, the more I realize I have nothing to fear, and perhaps something to gain. I’ve decided to stop hiding it.

So yes, it’s true. For the past two and a half years, I have had clinical depression.

If you’re wondering what it’s like, the short answer is: it sucks. You’re tired, you don’t care about anything, your brain feels like a lump of clay. And it hurts – not as a physical pain, but in a way that’s very difficult to describe.

Yes, I am being treated. I’m currently on my fourth therapist, my second doctor, and medication number I’ve-lost-count. It turns out that the process for discovering the right depression medication is akin to opening random presents on Christmas morning, one after another, except the presents each take three months to open and most of them have clinical depression inside them.

Fortunately, I’ve discovered Abilify, which – alone of the drugs I’ve tried – actually does help. Unfortunately, it doesn’t help 100% (for me), and it has side effects (for me). So there’s that.

I’ve also missed plenty of work: two large multi-week blocks, and many individual days here and there. And I’ve missed plenty of blog posts, and failed to meet various other obligations. C’est la vie. I don’t feel too guilty about it at the moment, which I suppose is rational.

If it sounds bad, well, it is. But I have never been suicidal, and I have never had anyone tell me it wasn’t a real problem, so those are two things I’m very grateful for. My family, friends, and wife have been nothing but supportive, and I’m very lucky to have that.

Anyway, y’all are a smart group, and I don’t mind talking about it with you. So if you have any questions, now is the time to ask. Don’t be shy, you won’t offend me. What do you want to know about depression? (In general, or mine specifically.) Ask away.

My latest obsession is typography – the visual aspect of text, comprising font, line length, line spacing, character spacing, and alignment, among other elements.

My wife says I’m crazy: as a general diagnosis, but also about this specifically. For her (and doubtless others) nothing could be more boring that the rigorous analysis of when to use one font, or type size, versus another.

But something about it fascinates me.

Part of the joy is just how into it people get. Apparently, Ikea recently changed its font from Futura to Verdana, and the outrage was so intense it was dubbed Verdanagate. (Dubbed by whom, would be harder to say.) Typographical nuts react to Papyrus or Comic Sans the way Richard Stallman would react to seeing Bill Gates’s face on the hundred-dollar bill (i.e. poorly). I’ve seen arguments over the merits of Helvetica escalate to a level of rhetoric normally reserved for holy war.

Part of it is just the old-fashioned fun I find in any work that’s deep, detailed, and technical – especially where it concerns the written word. I can really appreciate the beauty of a good font. I look at Garamond, and it just feels nice on the eyes.

But I have a confession.

I like Papyrus.

I understand that it’s overused, cliché, and I understand cliches are to be avoided. I’m not advocating for it. But strictly as an aesthetic proposition, I have to say, it’s slick. I like the way it looks.

Yeah, that’s right. I said it. Come at me, bro.

This whole typography thing is part of a larger interest in graphic design which has been growing in me recently. But more on that later. Maybe.

Do you have any preferences when it comes to font?

What am I working on?

I’m in the middle of revising a novel called The Crane Girl (which is fantasy), though I haven’t done any work on that in a while. I’m also writing, revising, and submitting several short stories and poems, all sci fi.

And, of course, this blog.

How does my work differ from others of its genre?

When I write sci fi, it tends to blur the line between science fiction and fantasy. I lean more toward Dune than 2001. Likewise, in the fantasy realm, I shy away from Tolkienesque conventions like elves, dwarves, and orcs (not that there’s anything wrong with that). I see both genres in the same way: each is a license to make up almost anything you want, and run with it.

Why do I write what I do?

I like to make beautiful things.

That’s really all there is to it. I don’t have an agenda or a specific purpose in mind. I just want to make the universe a more interesting place.

How does my writing process work?

I do a lot of planning up front. I don’t understand how anyone can write a novel without a plan in mind. (People do write such novels, and good ones, too; I just don’t understand it.) I work out the entire plot ahead of time, all the major characters, their motivations, their histories, the history of my fictional world.

Then I dive into the first draft. Generally I read to my wife aloud what I have written, so I get some immediate feedback as I go. In the first draft, I try (and fail) to avoid worrying about fine details, and just get the overall structure in place. Successive revisions clean up plot holes, character motivation gaps, etc. I’m especially bad about physical details, so I add those as a conscious effort in revision rather than in the first draft.

A lot of times I print out some or all of a story I’m working on and read it aloud. That seems to help, and is recommended by many authors.

Thanks to David J. Higgins for suggesting these questions. You can see his own answers to the questions here.

I’m afraid of three things, mainly: death, needles, and failure.

Death is a big one. I don’t know how anybody gets around it. When I think of death, I think of Philip Larkin’s poem Aubade, in which he writes:

This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels…
…Courage is no good:
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave.
Death is no different whined at than withstood.

I don’t believe in Heaven. I believe that when people die, it’s over. So Larkin’s “courage is no good” resonates with me. It’s not about bravery, it’s about the extinction of a consciousness. That, as they say, is that.

Moving from the most rational fear to the most irrational: needles. This one is simpler. Somehow, some neuron or other got tangled up and saddled me with a phobia of needles. These devices of doctors, which diagnose and prevent and cure, scare me. It’s not the pain of being stuck – it’s the needle itself, somehow, absurdly.

Fortunately, this is one arena where courage can prevail. And there are other tricks as well. I prepare by looking at pictures and videos of injections, desensitizing myself. During the actual event, I hum Canon in D in my head.

I used to get so afraid that I’d become physically sick when I had to get blood drawn. Mostly, that doesn’t happen anymore. Progress.

And finally: failure.

Fear of failure is tied up with fear of death, in that I’m very aware of my limited time to succeed. I want to get stories and books published; I want to make an A.I. in some form; I want to be a good person, and a great person. I want these things because I wanted them as a child, and I refuse to give up on the childhood dreams. And so, failure haunts me.

I don’t want to die; but if I must, then I don’t want to die regretful.

Not sure why all that has been buzzing around in my head lately, but there we are.

What are you afraid of?

Diablo III is a game about killing monsters.

In a way, this is strange, because the goal of the game – defeating the evil hordes – is directly opposite the purpose of the game – having fun fighting evil hordes. The player has no interest in creating a peaceful, evil-free world. The player wants the act of killing. The monsters exist to die.

But if you don’t get too philosophical about it, Diablo is a hell of a lot of fun. Despite (or maybe because of) the fact that you spend most of your time mindlessly clicking the mouse.

See some gold you want? Click it. Need to kill a monster? Click it. Want to go to a certain place? Click it!

Sure, there’s some strategy – probably more at the higher difficulty levels. But for where I’m at now, it’s a whole lot of point-and-click, with very few neurons firing.

Part of the appeal is the sheer simplicity of it. No moral ambiguity; you’re fighting demons. No complicated exploration; you follow the map to the highlighted spots. No plot worthy of the name. Just a good old-fashioned monster beatdown.

Life is complicated; games don’t have to be.

Even the tactics of the monsters rarely change. For the most part, they just run at you.

Which is surprising, really. Even at my lowly Level 17, I am rather imposing. A shining ray of light springs from my hand, cutting down foes. Lightning crackles about my brow. A nexus of energy hovers above my head.

Yet wave after wave of zombies, cultists, bugs, spirits, and demons shows not the slightest hesitation in climbing over the bodies of their comrades to launch themselves into the killing field that is myself.

Courteous of them, in a way. They’re thinking of me, not themselves. They know I’m all about monster-killing, and they’re happy to oblige.

Well, I’m rambling. I guess my point is: Diablo III is fun, even if it doesn’t make you think.

What game are you playing right now?

*does the new computer happy dance*

Yes, it’s true, the old PC has bitten the dust. It was working fine, and then it wasn’t. In my professional opinion as a computer programmer, it got effed up.

My new machine is an HP Pavilion with 8 gigs of RAM and a two-terabyte hard drive. It also has Windows 8.1, which is a bit of an adjustment, but not too bad.

And I got Diablo III yesterday, which is a very good time. Perfect way to break in a new computer.

So yeah, I’m off to kill some monsters. What’s on your plate this morning?

I’ve got nothing.

Anyone have any questions for me? I’ll be happy to answer.