divergent associations

So what does it say about a person if his usual haunts, places he actually logs in, even if only to lurk most of the time, are still wildly divergent?

I frequent AllThingsWeezer, 8BitCollective and NoDepression.com forums. Fifteen years ago I was somewhere between hip-to-shoulder-deep in ReallyDeepThoughts, MagicalArmchair, PrinceMailingList and SCUG.

Just reflecting.

Thank you for helping us help you help us all.

echoes and mojo thump through the brain

I've been trying to ignite the creative flow. I had mostly stopped writing as I once did and sputtered out a bunch of blog posts over the years. It's hard to know if that was due to working a lot, adjusting to being a married person, or any other in a series of challenges thrown in the path of my life.

The only real stories I'd come up with in the time I lived in Rochester MN were few and far between, shared with few if anyone, and served as wild imaginary playgrounds like Robert Heinlein had with the magnificent character Jubal Harshaw.

I have done a couple sprints now, as I've felt they represented for me personally, in the form of two NaNoWriMos. I find that just referring back to having completed the challenge more than once makes me look forward to it again. But I can't do that without wondering, pondering, imagining the future of either of those stacks of paper.

One would aptly describe the concept as Meta. Trying to imagine where a fully formed idea and manuscript has to go, to grow toward, to grow into. To become.

I find that I've been attempting to draw myself out of my shell. There are comforts to be had in hiding, but if I keep doing it all the time, I must entertain the notion that I could die while hidden and never be known. There are still stories to tell. I must find the fire inside to tell them. And it's always been there, it just has a will of its own, as anyone blessed/cursed with their own inner flame can surely attest.

Considering counseling or any help of a psychiatric/psychological kind is a wonderful metaphor. Lucy did it so well in the Charlie Brown/Peanuts strips. (Why it was called Peanuts tho, always bothered me. It had literally NOTHING to do with nuts. Why not call it Socks or Bolts or Feathers?)

Going beyond just thinking about crawling up on some shrink's couch, one can attempt to locate and gain perspective on whatever their issues are. And then surmise what the suggestions of any professional might be. Of course this comes easy for someone who was always psychoanalyzing their friends in high school. Turning that lens of introspection on yourself is certainly one path to madness.

Inspiration has struck from various corners of the world this month. I discovered an incredible ragtime musician named Tom Brier playing music from Yoshi's Island and it blew sparks into my soul. I beat the first Portal game after some struggles that only made me feel stupid for a little while. I then came to fall in love with the song Still Alive from the game. I'm now getting to know Portal 2.

So with the inspirations funneling in and the trend toward crawling out of my shell, I've taken the steps I would imagine suggested to me. I just wrote a brief scene of banter back and forth between two faceless, nameless characters that could well fit into either of my NaNoWriMo-vels inspired by equal parts Kevin Smith dialogue and the general wiseassery of my friends at the breakfast table before hi skool everyday.

You know what tho? This time I didn't consign those words, that back-n-forth between two distinct voices in me head while I stood waiting for my coffee to heat up in the microwave...I didn't drop them in a text file never to be heard from again.

Instead, I posted it straightaway to my deviantArt page, tweeted it, and of course that tweet went to my wordpress and my facebook like ka-pow-zap! So this is me poking my head out of my shell. If there are no ill consequences of these developments, I pledge to continue in that direction.

untweetable EP

oh delete button, what horrors have we kept from unleashing on the world?

knowing how many times I press the delete key, it should probably be the size of the space bar.

how often do insecure people let imaginary criticism keep them from creating anything? the world may never know.

music was invented to give writers a skill to look up to.

untweetable

Mr. President, show us you've learned how to negotiate. Don't give up everything worth fighting for before you sit down at the table. Please.

a brief statement of now-ness

I find the springtime bug has bit. I am cleaning and rearranging, reorganizing the nest. I've applied for work, hopeful that I might gain employment. Some might say I've suffered another birthday, but it actually wasn't all that bad, a pretty decent day itself.

Knowing my ancestry I could've done an entire blog devoted to my personal wellbeing and details of my health (or lack thereof.) But since I've outgrown the urge toward such milquetoast subject matter, I'll instead opine on what's transgressed recentlike.

I've dusted off the craigslist bargain I found last summer, the M-Audio Keystudio USB keyboard. I plug it into the usb hub and fire up garageband and it plays. But my hard drive needs replacing with a larger one. I can't keep any decent amount of music AND the overbearingly large libraries GB wants on my widdle stock HDD.

It's a constant game of pick-n-choose what I want to remain on that little shoehorn of a hard drive, and it's by-design that apple screwed me out of the proper amount of space to run their bloatware. So whenever the loot allows, I'll snatch up nothing less than a 250gb 2.5in sata laptop drive, perhaps up to 500gb, and drop it in there with my own two hands (and toolbox, of course.)

Till the loot allows such an admittedly minimal purchase, I've taken to training myself to mimic the earworm melody of the ending of Super Mario Bros. 2. The first video game in that series I actually beat by myself.

Among the dozens of useful sources of help at youtube, I found this one http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=58NBfxeSFEM and began training my typist's fingers to learn to step over each other on a different kind of keyboard.

More on these developments as time permits. If I might be permitted a slight Stephen-King-ism, even if it is a throwback to writers of a previous century...I think often of thee, dear reader. I will not be away for long...

i think too much

So if the quake and such in Japan affected the whole Earth, its tilt and thus its path through the solar system, has anyone re-ran the calculations for our interstellar near-misses and other trajectories?

I've said to several people now that I imagine there are interns deep inside some institution somewhere running these numbers. None of them report to me, of course. I wonder about it and then guess that I think too much, and try to put it out of my head.

I have a topical juggernaut as-yet-unwritten but warming up in the mental/intellectual bullpen, wreaking bloggish and opinional about how Rachel Maddow is quantitatively different than the television commentators she gets compared to regularly.

Guess you could say that I've been politely witness to right-wing friends of family and distant relations waxing goofily partisan about how Ms. Maddow is no different than their favorites, the Sean Hannitys and Michelle Bachmanns - bottom dwellers in the shallow end of the gene pool.

I keep feeling a strange flavor of silent horror when seeing the huge zombie fandom surrounding Sarah Palin. Intellectual lightweights making their logic-free views a choice that they think everyone, everywhere should have a right to hear about everyday.

Bearing any shred of critical thinking skills in such anti-intellectual times gives anyone with half a mind, aware of how little they know in the scheme of everything that their brief time at college had to offer, shivers of a somehow hopeless, mentally disturbing kind.

Oh mankind, humanity, everything sacred in the great landscape of truth and light, I bear the science-fiction gene that lets me imagine better tomorrows. But there are times when you all do not make it very easy.

untweetable

Anti-women’s rights & anti-abortion groups want to be called “pro-life”?? Disgusting. Wish to make Christianity irrelevant? This is exactly how.

untweetable

unposted tweet #fmjk039

the phrase "make no mistake" is a idiotic collective social tic same as "frickin'" once was. will you all please stop using it now? #kthxbye

dumpster-diving through life

I don't really get much out of doing anything the average way. When I can afford to purchase something at the retail price, I often will attempt to find the "deal" regardless of the time of year. I have friends who inherited the bargain hunter gene, but will only indulge their gift the same days every year when everyone else is taken over by the deal-zombie within us all.

But when I was working regularly enough to get paid enough to have a couple twenties left from the last payday when the next one finally made it around...those times I might splurge, as grandma would say, and buy myself something "new." The few times I've done that, I usually end up feeling hustled. By corporate America, or capitalist Japan, Taiwan or China, regardless I regret buying something manufactured to be replaced within three years. I don't use my devices endlessly, leave them on everyday for dozens of hours, and let my toddlers feed them PB&J sammitches. So my stuff lasts longer than the warranty.

Game consoles are sold below cost, so the first and often yet the third iterations of their hardware are flawed and easily broken, overheat or malfunction at a high rate. Fony had the issues with their initial ps2s. The xbox360's first model became notorious for overheating and getting the "red ring of death" when a design flaw unseated the processor chip from the board at high temps.

Your toiling author here fetched himself a repairable unit for a fraction of the retail price of a new one, paid a competent local to repair said unit, and have a grand total of ONE title to play on the deck. It might have been tweeted that the 360 sounds like somebody left a hairdryer on. Hyperbole or not, it's louder than the ps2 with a hard drive in it. And that's without a hard drive in the 360.

All totaled the expenditure for the experience of playing Portal on something far less laggy than the Intel GMA 950 excuse for a video card, with a wee trade-in at the game store, a shave over $100 with a wired controller and more if I figure in the $11 I spent over 2 years ago on my 1GB memory stick, the only one of several I own that fits in the deep-seated 3rd usb port on the back of the 360 near the ethernet port.

It's noteworthy that the deck in question here for solo offline gaming whenever the whim takes me, has a broken 2nd USB port in the front, no doubt caused by someone knocking the thing over or yanking out a controller cord. I tried to press the usb stick in that port next to my controller and found there's only two prongs left of the port and the middle wafer of the usual female plug is entirely snapped off, absent. Ah the wonders of craigslist dumpster-diving and thrifty methods.

Then after being monumentally unimpressed with the corporate prices imposed and fixed, no doubt, for the wireless controller from macrohard for their console, a deal was nonetheless found for half the retail price and no shipping costs, so grudgingly we lemming'd up to fetch one. The prices they seem to think they're entitled to charge for the games are pretty absurdly high. No game is ever worth more than $20, kids. Anything more and you're just paying premium prices to beta-test it for them.

Onward to teach myself how to make this new piece of property sit, stay, roll over and beg, maybe even do some pretty neat tricks I've read about.