Sunday, January 24, 2010

Well Okay so that's Odd

Over the last couple of days I've been feeling really strange. I think it has to do with how much soda I've been drinking. Cutting back on that starting tomarrow. Its just that I ran out of viteman water and I hate going to the store. Speaking of which I need to start buying that shit at Walmart cause Publix seems to think we are all made of money or something. I hate Publix so much, seriously from the bottom of my soul.

Oh well lets move on.

It is 2am! And I had many plans for how to spend this last little bit of wakefullness before heading to sleep and for some reason I am here writing. Strange no? You know from poking around other people's blogs I've come to realize that it is customary to put pictures up that are either pretty or somehow relate to your post. What is up with that? Where did it come from? And where the hell does everyone get their pictures from? I don't like looking at pictures on the internet it infects my brain and I can't stop doing it easily. It feels a bit like crack. I dunno it is just not very enjoyable to me. So my blog will go pictureless.

Though if I were to do it I would prolly just go to google and type in a random word and use the 42nd image. ACTUALLY that does sound like a neat thing to do. Maybe 42 days before Douglas Adam's birthday I could type a random word, use the 42nd image and write a blog about whatever the hell is up there. Though this project seems more suited to Burroughs we'll put those trivial sorts of facts aside. I know Burroughs would of, he's a junkie he does things like that. I'm really not a fan of the beats. Its strange because I really do love arbitrary ramblings. I really really do. Yet, at its core, there seems to be something very toxic about the beats. It isn't anything I could put my finger on, but it is something I always kind of felt long before I understood what exactly the beat movement was or who is a part of it. I came across Howl, Naked Lunch, and some other things at very diffrent times in my life and I always tied them together as similar but never as the same movement. I also was impressed with the way they all seem to have this dark undercurrent of destruction.

Undercurrents of destruction are commonplace in surrealism. It is no accident that Jan Svankmajer adapted Faust and Alice in Wonderland. Faust especially is a highly destructive story, and Alice is filmed with an eye on ruin and despair. But their dispair and the one suffered by the beats always seemed very diffrent to me. For the beats it seemed almost unconsious. Like they didn't realize that they were on a path to utter destruction and no one was really doing anything to stop it. Or something. I don't know. I actually haven't read/studied much of the beats. Their kink is not my own. A lot of people seem to get excited about them for the plain and simple reason that drugs were involved.

Drugs do have that really interesting mystique around them I'm not going to deny it. I mean it is coincidence that I own Spun, Trainspotting, Requiuem for a Dream, Naked Lunch, and Fear and Loathing. I love these movies. I also love mafia movies that show how the inclusion of drugs ruins mafia life. Goodfellas is the perfect example of this though there are others. Still it seems to me that to be fascinated by Naked Lunch because a whole lot of drugs were taken while it was being written is a little sad/odd to me. There is much more to the book than drugs, much like there is much more to each of the movies I mentioned other than drugs. Spun in particular. I love that movie because it really shows this sort of sad, terrible, crumpled group of people who wouldn't actually be that bad if they weren't so fried on meth.

Drugs work in the opposite of sex in a way. Add drugs to something and there will be a subsection of people who are immediately drawn to and fascinated by it. Add a lot of sex to something and people freak out and run. Try bringing up Lost Girls to people who know what it is. I can't tell you the number to times I've gotten immediately dismissive viewpoints solely based on the amount of sex the characters of the book have. They pay no attention to the historical detail, story telling, or the fascinating way he turns three victorian books upside down. Nor does anyone pay atension to the time period the books take place in, or anything else. Their immediate response is RAWR SEX R BAD. Woo my spelling is extra bad tonight! I wonder why?

It occurs to me that there are people who are immediately turned off by drug usage. evan for example. Man I hate starting sentences with his name. But I find him to be more the exception than the rule. It is also founded on something where I find that most people's obsession with drugs is just silly.

Then again I have a complete disinterest in doing them. That is one of those strange things. What is the difference between the people who can do them and walk away, do them and get addicted, and people who don't care about them at all. The people who can do them and just get addicted are the least interesting to me. Its a story we've all heard a thousand times before. However, what about the person who can just start and stop at will. Who will one night do a line of coke, and another night decline because it simply doesn't interest them. See that's interesting. Of course I am of the mind that nothing is so great that I would want to become a slave to it. Nor would I ever take some random drugs offered to me by strangers. Man you don't know what people do with that shit.

Oh well it is one of those fundamentally alien viewpoints. Like the time time I was talking to this swinger dude. I was saying how, "I don't understand what is with your compulsion for extra marital sex". He got offended that I called it a compulsion. Fortunatly, I was on my toes that day and I told him, "See what I mean about an alien mindset, I can't imagine wanting to have sex with most people I meet without it being a compulsion". We didn't get much further because he had to go and I never saw him again. Still it was interesting though. Truth be told I think I hit a little close to home with the compulsion thing.

No matter. I think part of a relationship is finding someone who will enable your desires while accepting your flaws, and vice versa of course. Yes of course there is more to relationships than that. That just happens to be a nice part of them. Its why I decided that I wasn't dating any non geek girls anymore. They just don't get it, and I mean after fighting all those years with my parents and then with other various girlfriends I had enough. They got do so something be it read comics, play video/bord games, roleplay, just something. Something where they have a hobby, a thing that they do and enjoy so that they understand that yes I want to spend this much money on little plastic figures rather than something practical. Or something like that. Man I don't even know what some of those fights were about. WHATEVER. No wannabie geeks either. There is nothing I hate more than when people will take a superficial interest in what I am doing just so that they can get closer to me. That is a quick way to piss me off. I once chewed out a cell phone salesman for that. That and he was being a dick to one of his employees. On the one hand I feel bad for cell phone sales people, on the other hand when I say no thankyou, then I hear a manager start badgering the poor girl because she didn't chase after me like an asshole, that's when the self rightous dickhead in me rears forth.

I hate shitty managers.

Moving on again. As expected this has been a rough week. Apparently my body is dealing with depression by shutting the fuck down. Though I seriously ate a dumptruck full of food today so I guess I am good to go again which is nice. I really want to get back to work on the post modern porn thing. I am having a little trouble focusing my attacks. So I figgure I will just start writting then I will take out the good parts and rebuild around those while discarding the bad. I've just been really loopy and out of it these past couple of days. I've also temporarly gone back to working 40hours a week. I am mildly annoyed.

I also need to shave. This is because one of my sub bosses is starting a shit storm with another sub boss about appearence. I don't fucking know why. What I do know is that I don't want or need to be anywhere near it. I also just realized via twitter how absolutly absurd and petty the whole situation is. These people need to get lives. Everything is more important than Judy's lip ring I promise you.

Bah these are people you can't reason with. I'd get a new job but I realize that they are everywhere, unavoidable, and usually in charge. This is something I will never understand but holy crap when you stand up to them they just don't know what to do. It occurs to me that there is a severe lack of leadership in our society. I am not talking politics but in everyday normal life. Not a whole lot that can be done about that though. It does remind me I need headphones, if for no other reason than the porno jazz that they play at books a million is slightly annoying.

Well okay then its three and I am out of superficial things I want to talk about. Next month a new akira book comes out, a new vtes expansion, and all sorts of other stuff. What the fuck febuary.
Peaches

Friday, January 22, 2010

Oh well these things do happen

Its funny. Sometimes when things are pretty low I sometimes think that if I cured my migrains my depression would be cured as well. Or vice versa. It is a nice thought. However, my migrains are caused by an unknown factor, lack of sleep, certain odors, and stress. My depression is a large black cloud that floats around in the back of my head and sometimes it ends up in the front of my head for a visit. One is precicise excruciating pain that really does make me redefine the term unbearable. Whereas depression just sort of sits there like a 30 ton load stone which drags me down.

At the moment I am depressed. However! It isn't so bad relatively speaking. I am not pointlessly angry at Sasha over nothing. I do that shit, it is terrible and sad. I'm glad that I'm not doing that now, and I wish it were something I'd never do again. Heck I am not really angry or lashing out at anyone. Tis nice. I felt this growing in the back of my skull for awhile now, and the wave ended up cresting on Tuesday. Now I am just stuck in the undertow. Not even anime club cheered me up, and mostly for their protection I remained withdrawn for the evening. Oh well.

This bout isn't that bad, it certainly isn't the worst I've ever had which is nice. Everytime this happens to me there is that deep down secret little fear of, "what if this doesn't go away this time? What if I stay stuck like this forever?" The answer? Well I'd take up drinking and bad poetry. The combonation of the three would result in the dissolusion of my current relationship but I would exchange it with lots and lots of uninhibited sex.

As a strange aside I was talking to two girls the other day about long disatance relationships. One girl I like and I am glad I met her. The other girl I half like and I am glad that I don't talk to her outside of work. Anyway both were talking about how they have needs and that they wouldn't be able to handle a long distance relationship. Its funny though. See, I explained to them that I could pretty easily open my relationship up. I wouldn't be hard. I would just have to look her in the eyes and say to her, "Look I miss you and as a result I need to get my pole waxed by girls who I don't like enough to date/love/take care of, but I do want to fuck. You don't mind right?". She would say it would be okay and I would see the hurt in her eyes but that's okay because I could just fuck that pain away with some other girl. Yeah see that isn't worth it. Its sad because one of those girls I was talking to was like 32, and she hasn't figgured out that there are some people worth sacrificing imeaditate gratification for. Oh well. The shit I do isn't for everyone and I hope her own path is a happy one.

Anyway. Back on topic. Its strange. I cured my whole anemia thing with just one pill, it was amazing how quick and easy it went. So it is almost like maybe I could do the same thing with the migrains and everything else. Or something like that. It is a nice fantasy that I don't think I'll indulge in for to much longer.

So anyway. This shit needs to be over by Tuesday evening. That should be enough time. Tonight I clean up the hause a bit. Cleaning always makes me feel better, at the very least it is productive and it keeps me moving and when I am finished it looks like I did something. So I am down with all of these things. Sunday night I am going to do laundery. Again something nice, productive, and feel bettery. It also gets me out of the house. Sunday is also my night of choice because Books A million closes early. Anyway yeah. Saturday night I think I am going to try and write or something. Something creative and productive. Maybe another SLA bpn. Or I could shore up a couple of the other ones I wrote. Something like that.

Oh well at least my Kingdom of Loathing run is going well. I should be in aftercore by saturday evening. YAY! Hooray for small favors I guess.

Alright back to work I go or something like that.

Wednesday, January 20, 2010

Insurgancy

America is a funny place. I'm not sure how many are active and I am in a crappy mood so you can go look it up your fucking self, but there are a shit ton of anti government organizations running around in the US. It's strange because they people vocally hate the government, and sometimes black people. They rail against the current establishment and hell some of them even stock pile weapons. There are large numbers of people who live in fortified compounds in the woods with amassed weapons. Sometimes this goes tits up on them like in Waco. However, for the most part we have these large groups of people who can snap at any moment an cause huge amounts of damage. Oklahoma city was two people. No financial backing or training. Two people who leveled a building. Imagine what could happen if a 100 of these fuckers decided it was time to rise up. Sure sure they would be beaten down like dogs eventurally, but not before throwing a couple of major cities in complete disarray and causing untold amounts of deaths.

So why don't they?

See when we look at the stuff going on in Iraq, Afganastan, Pakastan, or what have you maybe we should take a peek into our own back yard. It isn't religious fervor, I mean these organizations are almost universally christian in origin and ideology. So it has to be some other factor. There is something that is keeping these people in check, some sort of social pressure, or some sort of fear, there is something. Something that keeps these people in check, and makes other people strap dynamite to their chests and charge a cafe. I think learning the diffrences between the taliban and our own collection of insurgent organizations is key to understanding the conflict there and dealing with conflict here.

It is one of those stunningly simple ideas that no one has really picked up on. But I mean good god damn we got some scary people running around our country. There has to be some reason why they aren't acting on their hate, fear and anger.

This kinda goes back to all the research I did into Neo Nazism/KKK awhile back. They always talked about the future, where the war is going to happen. The great war of the races or something like that. He said the war will start when the races unnite, the blacks will seize power, and the jewish banker conspiracy will take down the finacial system. It wasn't to much latter that we had a finacial crash with a black president. You know I half expected a waco style flair up of violence but it didn't happen. The thin is though is that they didn't talk to the real leaders of any movements. They talked to people who were more interested in putting up a respectable front, people who masked their fear and ignorance with a snappy uniform along with shouting Hail Hitler. What is up with people who still shout that, the main is dead there is no reason to shout that anymore. Find a new charismatic leader and shout his name. Good heavens.

Ignoring the looser brigade though there are people out there who are legitimatly really fucking scary. Figguring out why they are marauding would be advantageouse. After all the Taliban has shown the world that we really suck at stopping gurilla tactics. Eh okay I am fucking starving. Home times activate!

Hrmph

I shouldn't be here right now. I shouldn't be. I should be in the car. I don't like the car but I should be there. I should be crossing through Alabama into Mississippi and eventually into New Orleans. I should be walking through rain slicked streets looking for a place called Ruby Fruit, I should be getting a hug from the only person I really want one from. Instead I am in Books a Million.

I'm over it for the most part. The senario I just played out for you above will happen on Tuesday night, 6 days from now. I won't be looking for Ruby Fruit though but whatever. Delays happen, and in all other times I have handled them with varying amounts of grace. This one however, I am handleing the worst. This is because I can't go because of work. See work is one of those things. I generally let it have as little effect on the rest of my life as humanly possible.

So when my boss told me I had to come in on my day off for an hour long meeting I told him to take a flying leap. When I was asked the other week to come in on my day off I told them "no". I rarely if ever stay after to help out. My job is there to support my life, it is not to unduely interfere with my life nor is it my life. Most people seem to get this backwards.

Most people seem to think that work is life. One time I had to sit my mom down and explain the diffrence. She still doesn't get it, that's okay though. My boss also doesn't seem to understand what is so horrible about having to come in on my day off so he can drone on about things I don't give a fly fuck about. Its sad in a way because I do think that work is the sum total of his life and he is lost without it.

No matter. So yeah I am annoyed, but it is one of those things where my hands are tied. Calling in would more or less break the uneasy truce I have with the idea of work. Explaining the uneasy truce would take to long and I don't understand it all myself. I know enough about it that it is fundamentally hypocritical, flawed, and if I talk to much about it I will realize the full depths of both of these things fly off the handle and get myself fired.

AND SO! It is one of those things I try not to question to hard. I'm still grumpy though, and more than a little sad.

Most of my initial anger I took out on someone at work who deserved it. So that's always nice. Then I read War of the Kings, which was relaxing and FUN! I've also been playing a lot of Dwarf Fortress. Man I love that game. It is why I am here actually. Were I to go home right now I would prolly re-read war of the kings, andf play Dwarf Fortress all night long. However, I want to take a stab at doing something productive so I'm... bitching.

Oh well I guess I should move onto a topic...yeah it will get its own post.

Sunday, January 17, 2010

Not Candy Corn

The Secret Warriors. Its the prefect idea really. It is Nick Fury's return to the forefront of the marvel universe with all the piss and vinegar that is associated with him. Man Nick Fury is one of the few things I really love about the Marvel Universe. Back in the day he is low brow pulp action at its absolute finest. When written right he is a bastard who gets the job done no matter what the cost. He is athe sort of person who rides a motorcycle through a window, guns in each hand, mowing down the bad guys. He gets laid constantly. He is the ultimate spy.

So now he is back. In his own shiny new book and there I am sitting around reading it. Then it happens. And all the sudden I understand.

See when people talk about the Marvel Civil War they usually fall into two camps. My camp that is primaraly focused on the fact that we are all happy that the marvel universe is no longer a frightfully boring place and now something interesting is on, and the camp that sees charecters they have loved and charished for years being fantastically altered to fit a new world view. These people are still angry. Personally I think they should move with the times.

I still think this way because, you know, why not. Anyway I kinda of get it now. See in the secret warriors all the sudden Nick Fury makes a starteling realization, he has been working for Hydra the whole time. TO put this in perspective it would be like GI JOE secretly working for Cobra, or James Bond secretly working for the russians. Potentially this is a brilliant twist, it brings tension and drama back into the series, and gives the fights some sweet personal touch that is always fun. See and it could work, if say Iron Man found out a lot of his stock was owned by Hydra, or if the Fantastic 4 discovered they have accidently made some tech for them, or even if Hydra had been pulling the strings of the Avengers. However, this isn't the case. Instead Hydra has been pulling Shield's strings. In a way it works. It works if you've never read anything about Nick Fury or Shield before. At that point it works perfectly, he breaks into a data cache, grabs some secret information, and makes a discovery, goes on rampage. It works.

However, Nick made it his buisness to know everything that went on at shield. That is just what he did. So the idea that he has never visited this paticular data core where the information is stored is just bad. It makes him look like an idiot who has been played his whole life instead of one of the greatest soldiers ever to walk the earth.

Like I said a better role for Iron Man.

The whole thing left a bad taste in my mouth. The thing is that the rest of the comic is fantastic, the action is well done, there is moral ambiguity, and there is Nick Fury taking the low road and still getting the job done no matter who it pisses off. It is a good book and once I get over my silly prejudices I am going to really enjoy it. I guess that's the way of it though.


Backing up to the civil war I gotta say that I still stand behind it being a great event. It made the marvel universe interesting again, and it has shaped events for literally years. YEARS. The whole thing was done with a purpose. Not only that but the books itself took a moral stand against the side that Won. All the pro registration people now have serious egg in their faces now that a fucking super villian is running everything. More to the point, it shows what happens when we give into fear and ignorance. The whole arch is a brilliantly played out satire of what happens when people follow instead of act.

Maybe that last sentence is wrong. So lets start breaking things down. First an accident on par with the Hiddenburg happened. This is divergent from other books that explore the same topic. Sometimes, super heros are banned because they make people uncomfortable (watchmen), sometimes it is because superman goes crazy (powers), but this is just a balls to the wall acident which caused the deaths of a school bus full of children.

The solution is to make all heroes register. Set up a government program, train them up, make them accountable, have heroes in every state the whole deal. The problem was that this really hurt street level heroes like Daredevil, Spiderman, and the Punsiher. Some of these heroes have families, some of them have lost families to super villain attacks. Were something to happen and the information get out they had a lot to loose.

On the other side were people like Iron Man and Mr. Fantastic who have been operating out in the open for years without problems. I mean the frantastic 4 have a giant building in the middle of a city with a big ass 4 on the side of it. Everyone knew where they lived and what they did there.

However, there was a third side. A side that doesn't get talked about very often. This is the side that is to powerful to care. Most of these people showed up either after the war, or in the middle. Thor for example, he kicked Stark's ass when Stark tried to get him to register, the Eternals blew Iron Man off as if he didn't matter (and truely he didn't), Namor doesn't even like dealing with the surface world and on it goes. These people bring a dynamic to the war and its after effects which is most interesting. See super heroes have always been concepts that are above the law. On some sort of level we realize that they shouldn't be doing the whole hero thing, and we watch as they go through the motions of establinshing their reasons for doing so. So when it becomes against the law to be a hero unless you are getting a government check, what do you do when there are people who are above the law? A law enforced by other heroes? It doesn't work.

Captin America didn't give up, rather he realized that Stark would burn down half the damn world if he kept fighting and that is when he realized that this is a war of the heart not of fists. However, before he could convince anyone he was shot.

They almost lost the secret invasion because they had a difficult time getting a unified front going, and now with Norman running things all the sudden registration seems like it is the same bad idea most people made it out to be.

Alright I'm done, I haven't really been into this very much tonight. Sorry. It's been kinda a day. Oh well.

Saturday, January 16, 2010

Comic book roundup round whatever

This was going to be short because I had to go back to work from lunch but now I am home, my tummy and head hurts, and I feel like doing this. So now all of that is happening. Awesome!

Things read!

DMZ book 7 - This book is good! Really good! Let's put it this way, the book used to be on the instant buy ZOMG so good list. However, book 4 was kinda lack luster, book 5 wasn't very good at all, and 6 reverted to I'm 16 and mad at my mother. Seven though the series recaptures its stride and it seems to be back on track. It had a fantastic little two part story, and a decent 4 part story that advanced the main plot, and a one shot that had the medic girl running around. So first of all it made for quite a meaty read. So I guess ts back to that series for me.

One of the things that really makes this volume stand out from the other two is that Brian Wood really spreads out and gives himself space to let his fantastic prose style run rampant. Prose in comic books is a strange beast, and it is amazing how much information people can pack into a word bubble or a tiny box. Brian Wood is paticularly good at doing this, but for whatever reason he hasn't been doing it recently. Glad to see he is back at it again though. He brilliantly captures the desperate beauty of the warzone and desprite the fact that how hard life is there people make do with the best they can. Still, it is the little side things that make this series sing, I really wish the main story would just go away or something, I dunno. I'm picking this one and the next one up though that is for sure.

Secret Warriors- Its good but it requires more space than I have here really to effectivly talk about it. I mean the man who wrote this book is basicly writting the entire marvel universe, by himself. It seems like as he goes on he is writing more and more. People give him murderous amounts of flack for some of the changes he's been making and for the first time I understand why. He moves around the marvel universe like a kid with hammer. He smashes whatever he wants to and rebuilds from there. Now he is the man directly responciple for me caring about what goes on in the marvel universe again so I cut him mucho slack. But man...MAN I am starting to see where lots of people are coming from. More on that later though.

Road to The Siege- This book is good if you haven't been paying atension to anything that has been happening in the marvel universe at all since the Secret Invasion. Otherwise just grab, Dark Avengers (great read) and The List (I'll get to it next week) and you will know everything you need to. Disapointing. Sometimes these books are really good, like the Road to the Civil War or Road to War of the Kings. They do a great job of catching the reader up on the current events. However, the lead up to the Siege and the events surrounding the Siege are compact enough so that you don't really need a lead in book. The same thing happened with the Accept Change Trade where they introduce the Dark Reign. Strange, in fact I think both trades share a number of stories. I dunno not even worth writing about.

Authority: World's End- After Millar left the Authority it went rocketing down hill at the speed of light. It then crashed into rock bottom, bounced a few times and came skidding to a halt right next to the world's end. Well okay after the world's end. From what I can gather, the carrier crashed into the planet and brought an alternate reality with it. Bad shit y0. I picked it up because Dan Abbet and Andy Landing wrote it and they did a brilliant job with the marvel space stuff. Let me say that again because it is worth emphasizing, they did a fucking brilliant job with the marvel space stuff bringing it from hokey and stupid to some of the most amazing hero comics put out by either Marvel or DC. Seriously, their work is amazing. Then again their work on the Punisher was ultra average so...

Fortunatly, they manage to make the Authority interesting again. A lot has happened to them apparently. The Doctor is no where to be found, and Jenny Quantum is also conspicuously vanished. Still both of these charecters were of only minor concern to me. As is how the world managed to get itself ended. From the looks of things it was the Authority that actually did it so I am down with that. MOVING RIGHT ALONG, what drew me into the story is that it is, for all intentents and purposes, a post apocalyptic story. Apollo and Midnighter are separated, Apollo has to stay up near the sun because of a cloud that is covering the earth and Midnighter? Well you know he can't survive in space, or fly and stuff. So their contact is limited. I always cringe when I see the two of them hit the page, they are comic's premire gay duo and I am always terrified that some writer will not be able to handle it, or fucking it up somehow. Ellis for example largely ignored their homosexuality. Okay ignored is the wrong word. Rather the two of them were gay, but nothing special was really ever done about it. Suprisingly enough it was Mark Millar who took their relationship and made it special. I really like that. I mean the two of them share some really wonderful moments throughout Millar's run and it genuinely makes me happy to see them together.

Abett and Landing really manage to knock it out of the park though. Holy crap the moments they spend together, while brief is just so amazingly sweet that it is worth the ticket price just for those couple of pages alone. When he wants to talk the Midnighter sends up a balloon. You really just have to see it, it just so stupidly tender and they really get the idea of love pulling through the apocalypse. Its a good statement.

I am greatly looking forward to the next volume which comes out in March. As a result I began poking around the Authority trades to see if there was anything else worth reading. Apparently Brubaker did a run! YAY and it looks solid so I'll be getting that because he is quickly becoming one of my favorite writers.

So I'll be looking into that pronto. Poking around it looks as if the Authority runs haven't been as dire as I thought, moar investigation is in order.

Start Trek TNG

Considering I recently power patched a couple of seasons of star trek I should take some time and write about it. I mean after all I did spend a lot of time doing it and it is one of those core things that makes me a geek. Going back and rewatching the first season I got to understand a little bit of the show. It is clear that none of the writers knew what they were doing. An example would be when they came upon some alien ship they had never seen before and he tells Jorde to go get a better look at it. Now logically you would think this would involve a shuttle craft, or a probe, or some sort of gadget. Instead he ran to a window and started out of it for a minut using his fancy eye visors. I think the fact that hs fancy eye visors have scanning ability that is above and beyond a state of the art galaxy class star ship is a little crazy. But that's how it was in the early days of the show. The holodeck was just a place where people could go and look at nature images and there was a real honest to goodness sense of exploration, and exparamentation. Not just within the cast but also within the writting. They were carving out the history of a new future, and there were things they didn't understand, like Data. People talk about how everyone knows how to do everything in star trek and yet there sits someone who no one properly understands.

More so than anything else the main thing I noticed is how much extra crap everyone on the enterprise does. The episodes will start with people playing instruments, painting, riding horses, building a model ship, fencing, or just plain old reading. Even throughout the episode they will show Picard contimplatng math equations that have no answer. There people were more than just explorers they had hobbies, interests, they were a ship of geeks and the show did an excelent job showing what it would be like to live in an isolated area with disciplined people who were all really interested in things.

Ultimatly, that is my favorite part of the show, the thing that redeems it over everything else. These were people who are more than their jobs, they are interested in the past, in music, literature, poetry, and exploration. This is the way exploration should be, not all capitalism and shit.

Oh well that's that really.

Around season three they reached their stride and episodes became more formulatic

Friday, January 15, 2010

Okay I wish I could get do overs on my days

So there was a whole bunch of things I meant to do yesterday and I got exactly nothing done. I am not even sure how it happened but I know that I was signifigantly annoyed as a result. Oh well. Kingdom of Loathing run got wrapped up last night. I smashed my ascension record by over 200 turns which is amazingly impressive. It still took the same number of days which doesn't make sense to me but I'll figgure that out somehow where. Already this run is going fantastically and soon I hope to be able to crank out 7 day hardcore runs on a regular basis.

Other than that? Jesus I did nothing. I made a half hearted attempt to troubleshoot my desktop and that just didn't happen. As a result I ended up playing a lot of Dwarf Fortress. I love that game, but I meant to get writting, research, and reading done. I just flat out didn't do any of it. I instead just hung out. See this isn't something I don't mind doing but it needs to happen on purpose othersieI get really testy. It's important to me that I live a deliberate life and yesterday things just happened to me.

Oh well. Its good to write about these things. And it is only three now so I have 12 to 13 hours left today to get something more or less accomplished.

So!

Goals for the day:

Some PPP
Make SLA PRemade charecters
Finnish up cuntface semester
Annnnnnd then some dwarf fortress.

Wednesday, January 13, 2010

Breaking Down Walls

So I've come across two problems in the PPP, one is the transitory nature of the internet.

Okay so here is the deal. I want to turn the context that pronography is presented in as a text in of itself. I can do that because I just did. So the actual text that appears on a pornographic website, the back of the movie, and those weird random acting scenes that happen between sex scenes in certain pornos I want to take all of these things, seperate them out and turn up the heat on them. It is hard to use direct quotes with internet sources though because internet porn sites tend to be rather fly by night. Also it is going to be nearly impossible to go and verify what the back of extreame gaping three says. I like quotes, they ground your argument and give you something concreate to work from before you go flying off to mars.

No matter, exteame paraphrasing for the win! Also I think we are in a pretty universal state here.

Okay so this is the way it is going to go. Brainstorm!

Start by talking about the metaphysical problems with pornography, specifically discussing how a real sex act becomes a represntation of a sex act as a result of both how the movie is filmed and how the movie is initially presented.

Transission into how not all porn is created equal, how fetish porn differentiates from, gay porn, child porn, crushing, et cetera. This might be the section where I throw Mrs. Dworkin around and make her look right. In fact yes do that.

While Dworkin is wrong about the pron itself she is right about the way it is presented. They are all made to look like disgusting whores. First we will explore the rhetorical effects of the language surrounding the videos. It's effects are multiple, sets up the other, reduces guilt by dehumanizing the actresses, catches the talk dirty to me fetish, catches the domination fetish. It also reduces feelings of sympathy or remorse for the actors/actresses involved setting up a senario in which they are both used, and willing to be used.

Transistion into Lacan. This is where the shit gets real. Page 429 in the Ecrits book has the formula that I need to use. The language surrounding the image is the Signifyer. The image itself becomes the signified. What ends up happening though is that a metaphor ends up being formed where the image becomes a metaphore for "sluts doing dirty things" instead of leaving the image as an empty set. As a result the fact that we are watching a real sex act never enters into the equation. It becomes a simulated sex act that ends up passing for the real.

Okay I think that is right.

My head kind of hurts.

I need to review the metaphor stuff in Lacan to make sure I've gotten it right. I think I did. See the picture itself is also part of the metaphor as the meaning surrouning the picture then becomes transposed onto the picture itself, basicly this is the way captions work. The problem is that these captions are ending up being detrimental to the way these people work and on and on it goes.

Okay so I think I got half of the essay done. This doesn't actually cover the porno plot things that will be more of the simulation simulacra thing. Then when both are present the whole thing gets really crazy fun.

Monday, January 11, 2010

Loathing the Kingdom.

Okay I want to go work on the PPP but I have this one topic rattling around in my head at the moment and it doesn't fit with what I was doing earlyer so now here we go.

I've stared playing Kingdom of Loathing again on a regular basis. Everytime I start playing it again I am always left wondering why it is I stopped. Sadly it has grown to be a fairly time consuming game, but it is increadbly fun so I don't really care. I am more than willing to give it an hour and a half of my evenings.

This entry is going to be about the game. You should play! YES YOU DO IT! just go to http://www.kingdomofloathing.com and get started because this game is made of awesome. You also aren't going to fucking get what I am saying unless you do.

So yeah! Right now I am midway through a Sauceror hardcore run. At the moment I just want to reach through the computer and strangle him. Sauceror ascensions have never been very much fun for me. Once I am done though what I plan on doing is going back to pastamaster, which despite being practically the same thing is somehting I enjoy playing much more. The original point of this run was to grab the candy cookbook spell and right now I am trying to figgure out if I still wanna do that or not. I'm thinking yes I do want it, I mean it is fun and it provides a nice little boost which helps out, espcecially since I am not really using candy hearts anymore. Also the sugar rush effect isn't really half bad, actually now that I look at it closely it is pretty ballin. THough I would like the make more sauceror runs without horror and to do that I need Wave of Sauce. Tonight I am going to see what it will take to make wave of sauce pay for itself and to see if it is worth it. If it is then I'll grab it and try another couple of sauceror runs before going back to pastamaster. If it isn't worth it then screw it I am going back to pastamaster and when I come back to sauceror hopefully it will just be genericly less horrible.

In general the next few skills I want are:

Candy Summoning
Sauce Attack Spell
Pasta Attack Spell
Intrinsic Spicyness
Impetouse Saucyness
Way of the Sauce
Surge of Icing (I really think this skill will pay off amazingly)
Lasagna Bandages Actually before I do another Sauceror run I am getting this skill fuckit
Spirit of Ravioli
Candy Blast

Okay so I feel like figguring out what order I want to get these skills. Then I wasted a half hour before giving up on it. Oh well. So a couple of final things.

Notes to make the run go faster.

1) I need to use clovers more. Specifically to get Stats. I mean a couple of clovers can turn into all sorts of crazy stat gain, especially once the bathroom is unlocked.

2) There is an alternative to flyering the guy made of bees. I must know what this is. I think it is something in the bottles but I am not sure what.

3) I need to learn to use my love songs more. They aren't just stupid powerful combat items but they are powerful potions as well and I should make use of them.

4) I need to learn to balance the snowcone, stickers, and candy hearts.

5) I just read how mining works, I now feel pretty stupid. That will help right there.

6) I need to find a more effcient way to do the hippy/fratboy war. Right now I think I am doing pretty good with it, and the Bathroom is no longer sub optimal so I guess its cool, espcially now that I have Sonatta. I dunno. This go around I am going to start tracking how many turns the war takes.

7)Learn to use the He-Boulder more. That starts tonight!

8) Be more willing to try out alternative food sources. This really kicks into gear next ascension when I start doing muscle sigh ascensions on a regular basis.

okay that seems like everything I can think of at the moment. Woop! Okay off to something else.

Saturday, January 9, 2010

Dust and Kisses

This was originally a random topic blog that I started in books a million but I got hungry and ended up just going home and ditching it. Oh well. I like the title though so I am going to reuse it. It is also going to be one of those random topic things because I feel like it. It will be a good moment to collect some of my thoughts as I start rolling fowards.

One!- The post modern pornography project is still around. I got a large portion of the introduction written which I hate so I am going to go back and rewrite it. Fuck my backspace button is giving out that is really lame. Oh well it still works you just have to really want it. So expect the number of typos to skyrocket because my typing really isn't very accurate on this keyboard, not sure why. Oh well. Anyway the main reason why it is stalled at the moment is mostly due to how fucking cold it is. It is hard to type when you can't feel your fingers, and I can't concentrate hard enough while at work. I think I am going to make it a goal to work on it some tonight. I also plan to just start toughing through the cold and working on it anyway because I refuse to be held prisoner by the weather. So there. Okay so then plan set.

Two@- I've been doing a lot of reading recently, I don't know why I've just been in the mood. I went back and reread Highwater which is one of the most amazing Constantine books ever. It will get its own blog post shortly, I also got around to reading Incognito. Jesus it took long enough. I was so exicted about that book too. Oh well it was amazing. However! Since I am in this reading phase I am taking advantage of it and I finnaly restarted blood meridian. Woo I really love that book. The first time I stopped reading it cause of skool, the second time I just lost the damn thing. But I got it now and it is totally being read. I should read the Road next because Sasha said so, but I am in a Faulkner mood and she has a hard time bullying me when she is so far away. *misses sasha*. Anyway, I am in a Faulkner mood! So the next thing I am reading is Light in August cause it looks neat and it has a pretty cover. So that's gonna happen soon. I'm excited.

Okay looks like I am only getting to two, damnit. To be fair I got distracted by things. Things like Angel and Christeen. Oh well maybe I'll finish this later tonight.

Comic Book Roundup!

This is becoming a rather pleasant tradition of mine. On Fridays I got to books a million prowl the shelves and find things I want to read and then enjoy them. Lots of things I am curious about but not really curious enough to buy.

So without any further ado.

Red Hulk/Green Hulk books 1&2- Loeb is a superstar writer, or so I am told. I read the Ultimatum book by him though. Utter shit. Utter utter shit, and what the fuck is with all the cannibalism? Jesus christ it is just gets distasteful after awhile. Anyway who cares. This is about the hulk books. The Hulk is a charecter that has always interested me. I really like the idea of it, a brilliant scientist turned into a hulking green moron whenever he gets angry. It deals with all sorts of ideas like interalization, repression, anger, and there is a beautiful sort of exerstential horror to it all. The hulk is less of a hero, or a villian but more of a charecter, a living force of nature who can potentially destroy the planet just as easily as he can save it. Its an amazing concept. Even more interesting is that there is a whole family of gamma irridated people who run around, some of them look out for each other other times they fight. Together though they are all cursed with this debilitating thing that keeps everyone on the run or ostracized. Unfortunatly it is bungled by just about every writer. Loeb being no exception. There is hardly any interplay between Banner and the hulk, and when there is it is always hightly overwrought. Like handwringing cyclopse shit. Ugh. The rest of the marvel universe also gets treated exceptionally poorly throughout the book. Thor for example. No one can pick up Thor's hammer. So Red Hulk instead just sort of jumps with it into space so he can throw it there, since you know there is no gravity. See that is just stupid. Thor is a god, son of both Odin and Gaia. He doesn't need to bend to rules like that. Like the way he flies, it doesn't really make sense. So all the sudden making his hammer vulnerable to gravity is, well it is hulk fan service.

Oh well. Despite all the bitching I just did I read both books cover to cover and enjoyed myself. They are mindless and involve a lot of people hitting each other and blah blah blah. Also the identity of the red hulk actually forms a decenently compelling mystery, along with the question of Doc Samson's true motives. The fight scenes are fun and I dunno I enjoyed it. Its just that it could be so much better. It could have real depth and horror to it. Instead it is exactly the opposite. Oh well.

In other news...The Deadpool/Thunderbolts crossover? What the fuck! Andy Diggle should be perfect for the thunderbolts, but he isn't. It is crap. I don't understand why so many people love Deadpool so much. I guess it is the whole "we are 12" sort of thing. I don't know I read the whole thing but it was PAINFUL.

I didn't get a chance to read The Secret Warriors though which made me upset because it looks exciting. Oh well next time then.

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Sorry Local Buissness

I'm not a good person but I do random little things that help me pretend that I am. One of those things is today I tried to support my local used books stores. There are two of them near me, one right on the way to the other and so I was excited at the prospect of being able to pick up some books I wanted to read cheaply and quickly. Instead I was bitterly let down.

BITTERLY!

I wanted a copy of The Road. I loved what I read of Blood Meridian and sasha loved The Road so I figgue I should pick it up, and I should do it for cheaper than 15 bucks, which is the price of a new book now and days. What the fuck is all that about? Both of the books stores, were, well they were just a plain old disapointment. They were both really small, and amazingly they both had an almost identical selection of books. It was creepy. I noticed something else about the both of them, they were both closed on mondays, and they both closed up at 5.

I've talked about it before and I will do it again. Small businesses can survive. They can survive things like walmart and amazon. However, they have to want it. Wanting it doesn't mean closing at 5. II mean come on I am their target customer, a crap job working ninja badass who doesn't shoplift but still hates paying 15 bucks for a book. They need to be open later if they are going to be able to cater to people like me. Subterranian books had the right idea but its gone now.

Oh well. So it looks like I am back to ordering used books off of amazon. I mean these used books come from small buisnesses so I don't feel that bad about it. And I mean nothing stops these local folks from listing on Amazon and Half.com.

See the thing is I do like sifting through stacks of books, and I do like hanging around stores and stuff. Sadly though, these stores just aren't cutting it. My eccentric needs aside, they just don't have what I need/want/desire and the interent does at the same price. I hope they wisen up enough to offload some of their stock on the interwebs. One store who is run by a little old lady will not. The other store who is run by some guy just might. I hope so. Best of luck to you kids.

In a strange side note today I was reminded of vacationing in the outerbanks with my Dad and step mom. The outer banks is an area that is almost compleatly tourist driven, and that place had more used book stores per capita than anywhere else in the world. Okay that may not be true but it certainly seemed like it. They were everywhere and they all had this dizzying collection of stuff. To be fair though there wasn't much to do on that island other than read, swim, and minature golf. I don't think most of the houses had tv and if they did there was no cable. So there were books everywhere. Out there is where I read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Amtiville Horror, and the Excorcist. The first two books actually changed my life they were absolutly fantastic reads. The Exorcist was kind of lame actually.

Anyway, we would spend hours scouring these stores looking for things to read and I would find all sorts of stuff that interested me, but I never picked up. Like this crazy series about one man's adventure in a post apocalyptic wasteland. It was pure 70s grindhouse pulp, it was a series that went on forever, there must of been over 20 books, and they all looked terrible. I wanted them so much but I was afraid my parents would say no. They aren't around now though so I'm thinking it is time to go looking for them.

Wanted

Wanted. Terrible movie. However, it is based off of a graphic novel by Mark Millar. I like Millar, he has a keen eye for widescreen, easy to follow, exciting combat. When he took over the Authority he made that comic sing. He also has a severely nasty side, a part of him which is just plain old flat out mean. It makes for a fun read. It also makes Wanted what it is.

What is it? Well that's complicated. See I am excited by little life improvement sorts of things. Movies like The Shipping News, American Beauty, The Ref, really strike a chord with me. Funny Kevin Spacey seems to really dominate that genra. Anyway, the idea that someone, usually a man, wakes up one day hates his life, and changes it. In American Beauty he decides to change it for himself. In The Shipping News he gets a tremendous amount of help from his Aunt...oh hey Fight Club fits in there. Then this person sets out to become something diffrent. Something that doesn't conform to societal norms, or just people rebelling against the rut that life has set them in. I like stories like this.

Wanted is kind of like that. Except it has that crappy 00 rock turned up to 11 the whole time, everything is about murder and sex, and money. The story is about an over privalaged 23 year old boy with confrontation issues. In essance he is a looser. The thing is that he never stops being a loser, he is more of a loser who can kill anyone though. I never once like him, and I am immeaditly more interested by the people around him. At one point he wonders why exactly he just decided to kill an entire police station, and someone has to tell him that it is okay to just sit around all day and watch tv sometimes. Everything doesn't have to be eXtreme. It doesn't really seem to stick though.

No matter. I set the stage well enough. The point is that the book makes no bones about the fact that the main charecter is a fucktart. It just so happens that he is a fucktart who comes into his own. Most of the stuff in this genra gets all preachy about how the stuff we own owns us, we need to live life to the fullest, or some sort of thing like that. Wanted doesn't do that. The charecter is immeadiatly given everything he could ever need want or desire and with nothing out of reach he chooses to be an asshole, and the book is okay with that. To be fair he was a looser first.

There is something about Wanted that should bother me. Like how Juvenile it is, or how fascinated with itself it can be, or something along those lines. Yet it has a sort of critical honesty with itself. Something you just don't see very often. While the message isn't very uplifting, happy, or soulful, it realizes that it is a book about a prick being a bigger prick and it is perfectly okay with that. Somehow I manage to respect that. Its strange just about every instinct inside of me screams out that I should detest this book. I should be ashamed I own it and I should mistrust anyone who likes it, and yet at the end up the day I like it myself far to much to be able to condem anyone else for reading it. Weird.

Saturday, January 2, 2010

It is the comic boogaloo!

Comic book roundup!

SO yeah. There are a fuck ton of comics out there. I know I see them, with my own eyes even! I love them very deeply. Well some of them. Some of them are pure crap, and some of them are good for a read or two then to be put back on the shelf and forgotten about. See the nice thing about comic books is that you can read them in about an hour, maybe 2, sometimes longer if you are reading something dense like Watchmen. They are fun though. So I decided awhile ago that despite my love for comics I can’t buy all of them, nor would I want to even if I could. With that in mind I would start reading things in the store. Something I ordinarly detest doing but hey it is amazing what you can get over when you realize you can read something cover to cover and not have to buy it, which is good cause it isn’t worth the money I would have to spend on it.

So here is what I read in the past couple of days.

Scott Pilgrim book 1- Or well most of it. This is a series of books that came to my atension through Time Magazine. Time is good for things like that, even though the beliver was better. I am so resubbing to that for my birthday or maybe after I move. I would make a nice housewarming present that is for sure. Anyway it is a book about a 23 year old guy who is in a go nowhere band, who is jobless, mooches off his room mate, and who is dating a 17 year old girl. This guy is a looser. He also has dreams of this girl who turns out to be real, real hot, fairly interested in our looser main character, and who can use door ways in reality to jump from one place to another. She also has a river of crazy ex-boyfreinds. I wanted to like the book. I really appoched it with a super open mind but the main character just turned me off so hard that I couldn’t stay interested. I didn’t want him to get the girl, either of them. I wanted him to get kicked in the nuts and to have it revealed to him just how much of a fraud he really is. He cheats on his 17 year old and it really bothered me. He seems like the sort of person who I have cleaned up after one to many times. Also when I made a similar mistake I changed my outlook on life radically. He just shouted radical and kept going. There are 5 of these books or so, and they are alright I guess if you can stomach the liquid asshole that is the main character. Oh yeah the art is also ass ugly. So have fun with that. Dunno glad I didn’t buy it.

Secret Invasion- It is a sad fact. The dc universe is more about high concepts and experimental ideas. The secret invasion ran along roughly the same time DC’s Final Crisis did. Final Crisis is about a god who has discovered the anti life equations, the mathematical proof that life is meaningless, and he unleashes it on earth prime. This sends a shockwave through the multiverse which threatens the entire universe, which is sentient by the way. By the end he is sitting in the center of a singularity and the big bad gets shot by batman who is using a bullet that fires backwards through time. Reading final crisis is like kissing an ocean it is impossible for me to fully fathom. There is an army of supermen, ground level invasions, sentient universes, the death of bat man, and just simply mind blowing stuff. By contrast Secret Invasion is about a race of shape shifting aliens who invade earth. The super heros can’t tell who is an alien and who isn’t, chaos happens. The Secret Invasion is interesting for a couple of reasons. One it brings a moral conclusion to the Civil War. When the dust settles everyone realizes that the superhero registration thing was a stupid idea. At the end of the day though it is a just a bunch of super heros pointing fingers at each other, punching each other, then punching aliens. They all get together save the day, and The Green Goblin gets put in charge of all of the earth’s security. Yep even though he is bat shit crazy. It could have been good. It could have been great in fact, but the skrulls weren’t developed enough to be interesting, and the heros spent way to much time being confused about everything,. All in all it was a really LONG really lame event. Oh well. It did usher in the Dark Reign a time with Normal in control and that, that my friends is something I find intensly interesting.

Dark Reign Fantastic 4: I picked this up because I want to like the Fantastic 4 but I don’t know where to start reading them. They are reffered to as Marvel’s first family and for very good reason. They have been around for almost as long as Marvel has and they bring a lot of history with them. Like I said I am really interested but I am unsure where to begin. This book was a good choice though. Written by Jonnathan Hickman of Nightly News fame, Mr. Hickman’s run picks up right after Norman takes power, and the first thing he tries to do is to bring the FF to heel. It is reminiscent of right after the civil war when Tony tried to bring people in line. It really delineated between the marvel have and have nots, There are pleanty of people who just simply can’t match Tony in power. Then there are people like Thor who threw Tony across a city when Tony tried to bully him. This is the same thing only Norman is a bastard.
The thing about the FF though is that they aren’t really super heros. Not in the traditional sense. They are more exploreres than anything else. If you had to take all the concepts of star trek and boil them down in to a comic starring 4 charecters it would be the FF. So while Norman Osborn is trying to threaten them with legal action they are lost in compressed space time as a result of Reed Richards building a machine that lets him see alternate realities. He blames himself for the skrull invasion. Granted it is partly his fault so some blame is warrented. So by looking into alternate realities he tries to see if he can find a sequence of decisions that would of ended peacefully. There weren’t many, and in all of the good ones he acted alone, without consulting anyone. Of course sometimes when he acted alone he came up with some terrifying results, like killing several of his friends, or taking away all super powers from everyone, or giving super powers to everyone. The point being he acted alone. While he is looking into this the rest of his family is lost in alternate compressed space time realities, I am litterally dazzled by how cool some of the alternate realities were. Everything had a cool steam punk like aethetic to it and it went from knights, to pirates, to the wild west, to ww2, and it was pretty fricking awesome. The sheer wild creativity displayed means this is a book that I definatly want to keep up and I more than certainly want the rest of the run. Oh yeah and in an amazing couple of moments Reed’s kids totally fuck with Norman Osborn it is pretty epicly cool and well worth buying/reading.

Iron Man: World’s Most Wanted- Yeah I read this too. This is another Dark Reign book. Post Civil war Iron Man was in charge of everything, right in time for his movie to come out too. Now he has fallen from grace and is literally the most wanted man in the world. You’d think it would be more interesting to read about, but it wasn’t. Basicly it was just Tony running and gunning, whining about how his technology is behind the curve, and he destroys his brain. The whole technology thing, man that really started to get tiresome after awhile. As soon as someone popped up you would hear first about hot Tony’s designs are better, how he isn’t using his snazzy designs, so he has to use crap weaponry or something like that. It happens 3 times, all one right after the other and it started to drive me a little nuts after awhile. The core idea is cool, a super genius, with the world’s most valuable database trapped in his skull, on the run from literally everyone. It could be all sorts of cool manuvers where he outsmarts people at the last second running from secret base to secret base, doing all sorts of cool things. See that happens, but instead of him oursmarting anyone he is on the ropes constantly and he is relentlessly complaining the whole time about his shitty technology. Christ. Not a good book. It is especially not good when Norman steals the stage from he title character. I found myself far more interested in his movements and actions than any of Tony’s. After awhile I was reading more to see what Norman would do, and I didn’t really care what Tony did.
This is mostly because I knew what he would do. Complain, fight for a bit, then run. Norman however? Now that man is crazy, unpredictable, and when written correctly he is downright scary. Good stuff.

Okay I am tired of doing this, but Dark Avengers is worth buying cause it is awesome. Ultimatum is all the crap that people made it out to be, read at your own risk, Hulk Red/Green is surprisingly not shitty. It isn’t great but it isn’t bad.

Okay I am done.

Somethings man was not meant to know

It’s a matter of perspective I guess. I don’t know. I was once talking with this one girl over the internet and she said to me, “You work really hard to be who you are”. It struck me as a funny thing to say then I realized how true it was. Then I realized how little work most people put into themselves. I bring this up because new years just happened, there was great celebration, lots of setting off of lame fire works, and other silly bullshit. Then immediately the world put its pants back on and got back to work. This is a time of renewal for some people. People look back on the past year or even decade and realize that they need to make changes and that they should start now. This is where the divide starts to happen. I do something like that every couple of months. I constantly look out for things I don’t like about myself and I change them. I try to stay “stuck in a rut” as little as possible and I do make a concerted effort to use my time as productively as possible. For example, I realized last month I was watching WAY to much TV and I wasn’t being an active watcher while I was doing it. That shit was put to an end and I was back on track. Reading more, writing more, eating more, doing more et cetera. I do have some serious road blocks, or rather things I just don’t know how to get around. Like socializing more. I don’t know how I’d do that even if I wanted to. Okay I do. Start drinking and go hang out at the Azelia. Or hell I could just grab a coke and hang out there. Bring my baby lap top and start writing there on a regular basis. Easy as pie. So never mind I do know how. I don’t want to though and that’s the point.

The point is that new years doesn’t make sense to me. I mean so what the earth is billions of years old, humanity is hundreds of years old, we pocess the technology to end world hunger but not the social maturity, we hate people who look different, we have the word hate period, there is still religious persicution, and more people care about the winning football team than the government who is trying to make everyone’s lives better. The thing is though it might fail. That’s scary. Still we all feel a need to celebrate to pat ourselves on the back and be all happy that the year has happened. It isn’t that I disagree with this, or anything like that at all. I think it is great, and a little more fellowship and comradery amongst people is a nice thing. It is just that the idea of New Years is a concept that is fundamentally alien to me. I don’t understand it. I can’t see it as anything more that a sad excuse to party, a pathetic cry for help, and a time for people to make resolutions they don’t intend on following. I mean seriously if they really wanted to do any of the crap most people resolve to do they would just do it, and not need some sort of special date to make the occation.

I realize it isn’t like that for everyone. Hell it might not be like that for anyone. But when I said that it is a view that is fundamentally alien from my own I wasn’t joking at all. It really really is. I don’t get it. I don’t think I ever will. I’ll admit though some of it is due to lack of trying. New Years seems to fit this social need for people that I’ve transcended. Okay transcended is a bad word, it makes me sound super arrogant. Moved past I guess is better. Hell this whole thing makes me sound super arrogant and I don’t mean it to. I really don’t. I look at the people who all rush out on new years and they see and feel something special, something grand, something that I just don’t see. I don’t see it at all, and that’s a little bit sad to me. Then again though my life is filled with 75 pounds of beauty. I realize I don’t write about it enough. Like the woman I saw clutching her head, or how pretty I find my street, or how I like the way certain words are structured, the art I look at, and the people I surround myself with. I laugh, and shout a lot. Even if I am by myself and to me, that is okay. This is something I am find with.

I don’t really celebrate any holidays. It has to do with my family and how I had to spread them out, and hurt my parents. I realized this awhile ago and that is the sort of thing that sticks with you for the rest of your life. It is a sad sad thing. Perhaps my inability to enjoy New Years is part of that. No matter though. I run, jump, and laugh ten times harder than just about anyone else I know, and I deal with 50% less shit as a result. Woo! It is one of those things I guess, nothing can be done about it cept just keep moving on. There is a stream of worries waiting in 2010, I’m going to start tackling them though with the same vicous force I’ve been using all along. I don’t need to wait for a mile stone to make things happen, neither does anyone else. Ah whatever. I hope everyone that actually enjoys the damn thing had a happy new year’s eve. I know I did.

Oh and zombies is last decade. This decade it is all about the sea monsters. Spread the word.

January Preview!

January Outlook- So this is a new thing. Not really entirely a new thing but more of a variation of an old thing. In combnination with the month in review I also want to start doing a monthly preview of sorts. Or more of come up with a list of things I want to do, start doing or need to do. Something like that. I am not sure what sort of form it is going to take but I figure if I start now I’ll be able to get a move on.

So what do I have planned for January. Well first of all my lease is up in Febuary, and I’d like to move. It isn’t so much that I don’t like where I am living now. I mean I was never supposed to live here for longer than a year, but it grew on me. I love the road I live on, it is an absolutely beautiful road. My neighbors are quiet and nice for the most part. Some of them are poor though. They aren’t poor because of lack of money but rather lack of an ability to put what little money they have to work for them. They feel they are victem of circumstance and they keep allowing themselves to be vicemized by circumstance instead of taking the horse by the reins so to speak. It is a tricky dangerous topic and it really only applies to a couple of people so lets move away from it. Long story short this place has grown on me, and the location is absolutely perfect. It is just that the individual unit I live in is just so shitty. At this point every window leaks. Every single one. The roof in the back bed room leaks, and because of the pit of dirt all around us the whole place is dirty. So it is time to go now. I’ve only done something like this once before and I am worried about it. I am not good about stuff like this and I wish I had someone around to guide me. I don’t. No one I trust that is. So I am going it alone. It’s strange I know people who can do this sort of thing effortlessly but they can bearly tie their shoes. We all have our achillies heels I suppose. From the looks of things I’ll be sticking with the trailer life. This is fine with me. Tuesday and Wensday I am going to go looking at places, Craige’s list makes this sort of shit easy as pie.

As a result writing and other projects might be a little light. I find this sort of thing stressful.

As for my writing projects I want to get at least one part of the PPP written in big boy voice. That means pictures and everything. I think I am going to start with something simple and go with the deifinitions and breaking down some of the misconceptions about pornography. I’ll be starting with softcore and working my way up. I plan on doing several compariosons with art to actual paintings. Famous ones! I want to talk about representations and the different ways we interact with representations and how they cause us to both enter into and interact with a hyper real state. It is going to be a lot of fun, it also might be an unmitigated disaster. So we’ll see.

I also want to get a couple of more SLA bpns written and put together. I also want to run at least one game session this month. Depending on how things go with moving that may or may not be possible. Hrm I need to figure out how to take apart my damn futon. I can dismantle just about anything putting back together however? Ah well. This thing sucks I might just ground score a mattress.

Comic wise? To the best of my knowledge nothing new comes out that is on my must buy now list. The new walking dead book maybe? Maybe. I dunno. I need to save my pennies because next month the new VTES expansion comes out and I plan on hugging it to death. With knives!

Gaming wise I want to get better with Rufus and to figure out what I want to do video gaming wise. Really? Right now I am at an impass. I don’t want either next gen system and getting a new computer is really not something in the cards. Right now? I think I’ll just save my moneies. I would like to play DMC4 before I give him back his 360.

I was going to say I wanted to start hitting up used book stores and getting some books but if I am going to be moving that is a retarded idea. Ah what the hell though, I have enough milk crates for everything. It shouldn’t be a problem. Specifically I want more McCarthy books. I’ve only read half of Blood Meridian before ADDing out of it. I have a hankering to start reading again and that is what I’ve settled on. I feel like a bit of a kunt because I still have stuff I grabbed from Sasha as she was moving. However, I am a man of strong desires and I feel no need to ignore them in this particular instance. Asides, I promised myself I would start reading more, and it worked swimmingly! The problem? I can’t keep up. Especially if I am going to be buying new books. So first I am going to see what I can get from used book stores. Half.com is nice but once you factor in shipping most times you only save a couple of bucks. So! Like I said off I go. Sasha called it to my atension the other day that my copy of A Clockwork Orange is missing. Which is sad I like that book a lot. Okay well that seems like everything I need to say for this month. I’m going to be really disappointed with myself if I don’t successfully move.

Oh hey yeah I want to hit the fiction writing again. I’ll figure that out latter in the month. I might want to weave that in with the SLA stuff or something. I dunno.

Okay now I am done. Lets see how things go in the monthly review.

Friday, January 1, 2010

December in Review

So now then. December totally happened, no matter how much I want to believe it wouldn't. Lets review shall we?

Blog wise, 16 entries. Some of them were shorter than usual. Four of them were angry rants. The one about parenting was paticularly unfocused. Evan wrote his own response to it in his own blog. Ultimately I fell victim to the same thing the writer of the article did. It is also a subject that hits a little close to home to me, after all I more or less raised myself with my parents making guest appearances. It is also a sticking point for me. I see SO many people who are just unable to handle life, myself included. Maybe I am just angry at my inability to do basic things like get an apartment by myself. Who knows. At the end of the day I am still 16 and my parents suck.

The religion one was just weird for me.

I liked the your pal the president thing. It was a nice fairly solid two part blog entry. What I really need to do is to read less time and more Harpers/Atlantic/Foreign Affairs and do commentary on articles like I did with the president thing...only you know on really good articles. I dunno. We'll see, right now I am in the middle of my own thing. Speaking of which at the end of the month I start getting some nice solid brain work done on that, that's nice.

I aborted the whole let's play Dwarf Fortress thing because doing a season by season update of that game doesn't interest me. It is needlessly time consuming. Still taking time out and outlining what is going on in the fortress was a lot of fun. I want to do another one now that it is further along. I just went through my second siege and it went rather hilariously.

Unpublished, I wrote up two SLA bpns. That is quite a bit of writting actually. I plan on putting them up in the licking the subconsious blog once I run them. Or sooner if I just sort of feel like it. What I think I am going to do is publish the session and then in the comments post what actually happens. Cause you know the two things are compleatly diffrent from each other.

Okay that about takes care of the writing all in all a pretty good month. Lets move onto the life thing.

So I realized earlyer this month I was enimic, aenimic...fuckit iron deficient. I was like that all november too. Basicly I would come home from work and some nights I would just literally pass out for an hour. Then I would wake up fit as a fiddle and carry about my buisness. After a month and a half of that I decided to worry. Then thinking about the problem logically it sounded like an iron deficiency. So I picked up a multi vitamin with iron in it and started taking it every day. Wouldn't you know it? The shit cleared right up. Hasn't happened once since I've been vitamen enhanced. The solution was almost to simple. Though I suppose it is nice to have one or two things that aren't a struggle.

I also go into a nasty habit. See feeling tired and crappy after work I would come straight home instead of writting, watch Star Trek the next generation, and then go do something else. The problem is that that I started watching more and more star trek, sometimes I'd spend three hours a night on that shit. Now I am not adverse to a little tv watching but twords the end I just had it on while I was looking at pictures on the internet. That's when I pulled the plug. About that time the iron thing happened and I started getting back on track. A couple of days later I started serious construction on the post modern pornography project. Of course it might not of happened if every fucking store wasn't spamming christmas music but whatever! We are good to go now. I am banned from the tv until further notice and as a result my productivity skyrocketed. That isn't to say I can't watch movies. However, movies are diffrent. I don't know how they just are.

My mom came an visted me. I think it has been two years. Maybe more. Not everything is for publication though.

I did get to see Sasha though! I don't get to do that every month so it is a big deal. However I don't think her parents like me very much. Every time they seem to track her down and collar her I am there. I wonder what they think of that. Prolly not much.

I didn't get sick, I didn't kill anyone, and I still fucking hate Christmas with a passion. Oh well.

Oh yeah new years happened. Whatever. Actually I might give that its own blog. I am seriously in the mood to write at the moment.