The Space Helmet Show!

Project 365 Days 13 and 14

2011-07-15T13:31:00.000-07:00

Continuing my Project 365 to the end of the second week, here's two groups of pictures from the last two days. Starting with the smaller one, on day 14:

The larger group of pictures came on day 13:

So far, I've made it two weeks into my third attempt at Project 365! Now let's see if I can make it to the end of the first month...

Back to The Space Helmet Show...

Project 365 Day 12

2011-07-12T20:09:00.000-07:00

I was walking the neighborhood, and my muse caught sight of the trees. "You will take a picture," she commanded, "and then you will post it on your blog and Google+." So I looked for a good shot. The first set of trees I considered looked right at first glance. But I decided on another. Here's the picture I took.

Project 365 Day 11: One Random Picture of Y2K Bugs

2011-07-11T22:28:00.000-07:00

Like I said, pulling off a complete Project 365 can be tough. Sometimes laziness attacks, and we have to fight back. However, when all else fails, I have the perfect reserve models: Mr. Pac, the Plotbunny, my Silly Slammer, and the Y2K Bugs. Case in point:

One picture, on a whim. It gets me through one more day of Project 365...

Project 365 Day 10: A Walk to the Store

2011-07-10T20:19:00.000-07:00

No, I didn't take pictures of the coffee I bought. I wasn't feeling the FriendFeed food meme vibe today. Rather, I was struck by patterns of sun and shade while I was walking up the street, and entirely on a whim I decided to take pictures of the big empty parking lot along the way.

The tree-lined street:

The empty parking lot:

Project 365 Days 8 and 9: That One Picture a Day

2011-07-09T19:33:00.000-07:00

Just one picture a day for the last two days. I couldn't be bothered with taking more than one this time. At least I got one in each day...

Here's the Day 8 picture. I figured I'd do something with that recurring FriendFeed food meme. It's not pretty. Even I'm entitled to the occasional dud. (Note: I immediately ate that last piece of birthday cake.)

Today's picture is a casual shot I took on the way home from a cousin's 18th birthday party:

And that's it. The thing with Project 365 is, you take at least one picture a day. It continues as long as you get that one picture. So far, I've at least gotten at least one, so it continues...

Project 365 Day 7: Forcing Myself to Take Pictures

2011-07-07T19:58:00.000-07:00

One day, two pictures. I had to drag myself away from Google+ to take them. The trip outside turned into an expedition to Value Village, where I found the Journey and Supertramp albums I was missing and a copy of James Woods' How Fiction Works for my very own.

Today's weather: overcast and kind of gloomy. But not even the worst weather stops the dedicated photographer. Nothing would probably stop me but, yes, Google+...

Project 365, Days 4-6

2011-07-07T14:58:00.000-07:00

I'm not exactly keeping pace with the pictures in this blog during this Project 365. The two previous times, I had no such problem because I had that blog at Photoblog. Anyway, I'll work backwards here, starting with yesterday's pics:

I'd say the middle one was a tad underexposed. I'll have to go back to my photography class material so I can remember what the problem and the solution are.

Anyway, I took one picture on the 5th, and it had a bit of current-events relevance, at least in a sort of tabloid spirit:

And on the 4th, I took this picture of the birthday cake I was about to start attacking, as part of the FriendFeed food meme thing:

Anyway, that's enough pictures for now. It's been said that if you take enough pictures for a long enough time, you improve. We'll see about that. Now where was that class material?

Back to The Space Helmet Show...

Project 365 Page 3: Google+ Profile Photos

2011-07-04T22:48:00.000-07:00

For day 3, I decided to take a couple pictures of myself and post them to my Google+ profile. They're not in my "Project 365 2011-2" Picasa album, but in my Profile Photos. I'm considering using one for Facebook.

One thing that bugs me is that my face doesn't look quite so pretty on camera (or at least on my camera) as it does in the mirror or to other people (especially women). But they're usable, and they're on my profile...

Doing the Project 365 Thing Again: Days 1 and 2

2011-07-02T18:19:00.000-07:00

I made the determination I would start a new Project 365 this year and carry it through. I also proclaimed in this entry that I'd be doing it on my Posterous blog. One thing happened that derailed my plan a bit: I got an invite into Google+, the new social network. Problem: it's easy to post pictures on Posterous, but much harder to import them into a post there. So, I'm doing my new Project 365 here.

For those who don't know, in Project 365 you take and post at least one photograph a day. It's harder than it sounds.

Here's the entry for Day 2. Since JulNoWriMo '11 is now on, I decided to take a picture of my Plotbunny with friends. Behold "Group Portrait With Plotbunny":

And here's the pictures I took yesterday for Day 1:

My excuse for taking so many pictures yesterday is that there was an art gallery walk going on downtown...

The hard part, of course, is persistence. But this time, I believe I can pull it off. Here goes...

Back to The Space Helmet Show...

First Thoughts on Google+

2011-06-30T16:00:00.000-07:00

So Google finally decided to release its "Facebook killer" that they were once going to call "Google Me" but which now is Google+. On the second day of its beta release, I managed to get an invite from a fellow FriendFeeder, so now I'm in on it and get to check it out. These are my initial impressions.

It was a no-brainer for me to accept the invitation, since I already have so much stuff on Google, at Picasa, YouTube, Google Docs, and so on. Looking at the main stream, I can see it has a lot in common with FriendFeed and the Facebook news feed. But the toolbar at the top (below the black main bar) gives you easy access to photos; others' in your stream as well as your own at Picasa (which you can even upload); your Google profile (mine has not just my Plus posts and the "about me" section, but my Picasa photos, the videos I haven't yet uploaded, and my Google Buzz stream); and the new Circles feature, which happens to be the best implementation of a "lists" feature I've ever seen, which even takes care of the privacy problems that have long plagued Facebook. There's a video chat feature called Hangout, and an option to download all your Google data (currently limited to Picasa and Google+ itself) if you want to back it up.

So far, so good. Of course, I'm only beginning to find my way through Google+. There's still the issue of the learning curve; it's still new. There's still a lot of glitches that have to be worked out. And it's still invitation-only. But then, it's still in beta. Hopefully Google will work out the glitches before it goes into full release, and put it into full release a lot sooner than they did Wave. But if one thing's for sure, I'm already using it a lot more than I do Facebook.

Culling Blogs I Follow

2011-06-23T23:16:00.000-07:00

After some heavy editing of my novel (the second draft of my novel is now up to chapter 4 of the ebook), I decided on a whim to cull some blogs I follow from the Google Friend Connect list I access from my Blogger dashboard. Now, I started this blog, along with my project blog, back in March '08. In the three years since then, a lot of blogs have been orphaned and/or discontinued. I myself have a music blog I haven't updated in two years.

And so I went to my Blogger dashboard and checked the blogs I follow to see which ones are no longer updated. I found several, of course, some of which haven't been updated in more than a year. I even discovered a site among them that no longer exists. So I removed them from my follow list.

I actually learned a valuable lesson from this. If you want more people to follow your blogs, update them more often. Needless to say, it's a good idea to offer valuable content, even if it's just the personal stuff you think can interest other people. Be interesting, update often, and people won't lose interest in you.

The challenge, of course, is always figuring out what to write about...

Listening: 5/29/11

2011-05-29T20:45:00.000-07:00

I was sorely tempted to avoid turning on my computer today and just listen to music, but I decided to limit my listening to three CDs.

1. Killing Joke, Night Time (1984)

This, it turns out, was the English postpunk band's most successful album. It just happens to have their most dated song ever, called, of course, "Eighties". I heard the other relatively big hit from the album, "Love Like Blood", earlier, and liked it; I have the original LP of their next album after this, Brighter than a Thousand Suns, and I hear that album's whole style in that one song. But "Love Like Blood" is track 3. At first, keeping "Eighties" in mind, I thought the first strains of the first song did sound a bit dated. Maybe it was the electronic drums that were the vogue in the mid-'80s (Van Halen comes to mind). But the New Wave Revival brought this kind of style back with a vengeance. And though they went through some personnel changes and went on hiatus a few times, Killing Joke never broke up. They're still around, and still recording.

Anyway, this was my chance to hear one of the postpunk classics. This is not one of their weaker albums. It did not disappoint.

2. Devo, Something for Everybody (2010)

I had heard that Devo's first album in years turned out to be their best album in years. I was already a fan of the video for "Don't Shoot (I'm a Man)" since they released it months before the album. So when it popped up on the library's CD rack (along with the Killing Joke album above), I snapped it up. I had to hear the whole thing for myself.

They were right. The band proved they had recovered from their years of de-evolution in the late '80s and the '90s. They're back to their old form. Their style has evolved, but it remains true to the classic style of Freedom of Choice and New Traditionalists. They even have a bitterly ironic song title like the latter album's last song, "Beautiful World" ("It's a beautiful world for you/But not for me"), in the new album's penultimate song, "No Place Like Home" ("No place like home/To go back to").

I'd say Devo are back at full strength at last. So, judging from what little evidence I've seen so far (the video to "Sad Song"), are the Cars. But I'll have to get my hands on their new disc before I can tell you whether or not the Cars have really roared back...

3. Tegan and Sara, So Jealous (2004)

For a change, I found this at a thrift store rather than the library. In the seven years since it came out, somebody already got tired of it and dropped it off at Goodwill. But I remember hearing on the radio apparently two versions of their breakout single, "Walking with a Ghost", and getting excited on the second listen when that synth line kicked in, thrilling the New Wave Revivalist in me. So when I found their complete first album, So Jealous, I picked it up.

Color me impressed. These girls are two of the cleverest songwriters I've ever heard, and I pride myself on the cleverness of my songwriting. I'd say "Ghost" was the breakout single because of its eccentricity, which of course is guaranteed to appeal to New Wave Revivalists as well as indie rock fans in general. Turns out it was the weakest track on a very strong album. There's a reason I see these two on late-night TV a lot...

In Future...

So now I've shut off my home theatre system with its five-CD changer and gone back to the computer to do some important things (edit my novel, practice my instruments, relearn German, blog). But I've picked out some CDs out of my collection to listen to tomorrow. I figure they're worth a future post...

The World Will Not End Next on October 21

2011-05-29T20:16:00.000-07:00

Now that May 21 is now past us with the world once again not ending, that Christian radio magnate Harold Camping refuses to give up and now says he got the date wrong: not May 21, saith he, but October 21. Just ten days before Halloween. One can easily guess what the wags will be wearing when they go trick-or-treating this year.

Like I said last post, these Christian end-of-the-world predictors keep insisting on ignoring those Bible verses which have Jesus plainly stating that not even he knows when he's returning, but only God. And yet they persist. I assume that those of them who are Pentecostal or Charismatic get a "word of knowledge" direct from God that tells them that the world is going to end on such-and-such a date. Mr. Camping felt he didn't need even that, apparently; he relied on numerology. No doubt this attracted cries of heresy from many other Evangelicals.

A personal disclosure is in order here. As a kid, I used to love reading those Jehovah's Witnesses books which spelled out exactly how the world is going to end. I found them lying around the house. Later I would find out that, according to the Jehovah's Witnesses, the world was supposed to end in 1914 and then 1976. But I didn't read those books to know the future. They were the tract versions of Bible-movie special-effects extravaganzas such as The Ten Commandments, only about the end of the world according to the Jehovah's Witnesses. You know that scene where Charlton Heston as Moses parts the Red Sea? Yeah. Like that.

It was these kinds of books, and not just from the Jehovah's Witnesses, that eventually soured me on the whole end-of-the-world thing. The world was supposed to end just like it says in the books, but it never, ever does. The dates always turn out to be wrong, and the predicted events never happen. So I leave that kind of thing to the movies.

Movies like 2012. Speaking of which, the world will not end on December 21, 2012, either. You bet I'll be posting about that non-apocalypse, too.

The Great Disappointment of 2011: or, The Rapture Didn't Happen, Yet Again

2011-05-21T18:07:00.000-07:00

The Rapture, in which all devout Evangelical Christians are supposed to be "seized" up into Heaven by Christ, was supposed to happen today at 6:00pm whatever time. Problem is, the Rapture has a long history of not happening, dating back to just after the Crucifixion, around 2,000 years ago. There's also the little thing Jesus said, in Matthew 13:32 and elsewhere, about even him not knowing when he's coming back because that's for only God to know. But don't tell those Evangelical pastors with their Bible maps, Bible codes, Pyramid inches, and convoluted numerologies like the one Harold Camping, Christian radio millionaire, used to precisely date the Rapture to today at 6pm whatever time. They know exactly when the world is scheduled to end, right down to the second. Even though only God's supposed to know such things.

The Rapture is not actually in the Bible itself. Rather, it's extrapolated from various scattered passages in the notes of Cyrus I. Scofield, whose Scofield Reference Bible is the bible of Dispensationalism, that school of Evangelical Christianity started by John Nelson Darby, founder of the Plymouth Brethren sect. It holds to the strictest historicism in all Christendom, particularly concerning the origin of the world (creationism is one of its core tenets) and the end times (eschatology). The "Bible map" phenomenon which became so familiar to me years ago when I watched Christian TV, in which the whole history of the world from the six-day Creation back in 4004 B.C. to the future Eschaton is precisely dated and placed on a timeline, is wholly Dispensationalist. Dispensationalism is not an orthodox Christian doctrine, but a strictly Evangelical one, and one not believed by all Evangelicals; non-Dispensationalists, including those Evangelical sects not influenced by the Brethren movement and which reject the Scofield Reference Bible, consider the doctrine heretical. But it's a major force in American Christianity, which is overwhelmingly Evangelical, particularly in the South and parts of the mountain West. As long as this is the case, you'll keep hearing about the Rapture a lot.

What we're witnessing here is yet another in the long series of Great Disappointments that plague the history of American Evangelicalism, the most famous of which is the Great Disappointment of 1844 which destroyed the Millerite movement but, amazingly enough, spawned a host of new sects from the Seventh-Day Adventists to the Jehovah's Witnesses. The next one is scheduled to hit the New Age movement, a religious group not normally susceptible to Evangelical manias, on December 21, 2012, according to the "Mayan calendar code" of José Argüelles, the guy behind the Harmonic Convergence of 1987. December 21, 2012 is when the Mayan calendar is supposed to end, you see, and the world with it. I'll post here about it the day after it doesn't happen.

Thoughts While Reading: Idea for a Thriller Movie Script

2011-05-15T21:43:00.000-07:00

Reading: The Suspense Thriller: Films in the Shadow of Alfred Hitchcock by Charles Derry

So I was reading chapter 5 ("The Thriller of Murderous Passions"), and, sure enough, my muse went into action. Intersecting love triangles? How about a full-blown Love Dodecahedron? Did Claude Chabrol make slick thrillers about repressed French bourgeois exploding into murder and then trying to repress all over again what exploded out? Well, I'm American, not French, so my upper-class intersecting love-hate triangles involve the far more predatory corporate-raider class, with much more pyrotechnical results. Of course, a thriller of murderous passions must include the tropes Love Makes You Crazy, Love Makes You Evil, Murder The Hypotenuse, and other jealousy tropes.

So here's the story concept for the script I have in mind, with the working title "Triple Cross". The players:

George Sasser, tycoon in the defense industry.
Evelyne Lee Sasser, his highborn Southern-belle wife.
Gary Pace, hitman.
Starla Pace, his sexy and amoral gold-digger wife.
Hugo Wells, Sasser's chief engineer.
Roy Larkin, Wells' predecessor turned Sasser's bitterest competitor.
Lina Strange, exotic dancer and the story's Only Sane Person.

The plot goes roughly like this: Evelyne is sleeping with Hugo, and they decide to hire Gary to kill George. Well, turns out George is sleeping with Starla, and they're plotting to kill Gary. Chaos and nasty plot twists ensue. Roy decides to secretly encourage the others to kill each other and manipulate the stock market so he can scoop up Sasser Engineering at a discount. Lina gets caught in the chaos by being the one all the guys and Starla sleep with and ends up being the one who survives to tell the tale.

Right now this is just a concept and needs to be worked out into a full script. The specifics aren't written in stone, so some things could change as the plot (or my muse's whim) requires. But I do think this sounds interesting enough. Maybe I could even find a way to turn it into a movie myself...

Thoughts While Reading: Can Society Be Run Like a Business? I Don't Think So.

2011-05-14T20:17:00.000-07:00

Reading: Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations by Clay Shirky

I'm reading chapter 10, "Failure for Free", and a light comes on in my head when I read the passage about how a small Canadian laboratory beat a larger Chinese scientific community with more sophisticated technological infrastructure in sequencing the genome of the SARS virus. In recent months, the US Republicans have apparently been trying to repeal democratic politics in this country, and all the states under their control, so they can privatize the governments and run American society like a business. More efficient, they insist; besides, if you put power in the hands of the perfidious people, they'll make this country communist if they aren't stopped. Or so the official spin goes.

Here's the thing: China really is run like a business. A giant corporation whose holding company officially calls itself the Collective Property Party of China (with "Collective Property" usually translated "Communist", though under its current policy of state capitalism [though some would not call it "capitalist"] "Corporate" would probably be a better translation) but might as well be called the Chinese National Management Corporation. China, following the example of large American corporations known for their paranoia about their precious trade secrets, has a perpetual ban on horizontal communications; information can only legally be shared along the established hierarchical lines of authority. The small Canadian lab that beat it to the SARS genome, the Genome Sciences Centre, used all open-source software tools and took advantage of the Internet and the public database of genetic sequences called GenBank. That is, all its information sharing outside the organization was horizontal. In the end, this proved to be GSC's unfair advantage. China ended up acting like a large, unwieldy conglomerate top-heavy with management. Like, say, AT&T.

China is what the Republicans want to turn America into. That is, they want to abolish "politics" and replace it with "business". Run government as a business! Yeah, right. Run it like Ma Bell, especially before she got broken up into several regional telephone companies back in the day. Since the most militant corporatists in America today are the brothers Koch, the better comparison would be less AT&T and more Standard Oil (that is, the oil monopoly J.D. Rockefeller built), as they seem bent on consolidating the oil industry into a colossus that can overthrow the American government. Looking at China, what would America be like if it came under corporate management? Heavy restrictions on information sharing, of course. Also, considering that the Kochs are trying to force their employees to vote for what they tell them to vote for Or Else, any criticism of national management would be ruthlessly punished, as in China. Already the Republicans are trying to shout down all the liberals and even claim that dissent is by definition treason. Just as in China!

Meanwhile, smaller companies tend to clump in big cities where the social and business ecologies are structured like internets (as explained by the Small World theory of social networking). It is in these environments that the real free markets thrive, where new companies and new ideas proliferate. Giant corporations like Koch Industries, however, strive to destroy such ecologies by consolidating them into monolithic hierarchical structures of management. The Chinese government has structured the entire society of China that way, like a gigantic monopoly conglomerate. The thing about these corporate hierarchies is that they entail monster overhead, especially the bigger they get. On the other hand, open systems can have no businesses and no employees, and yet, amazingly enough, they can work a lot more efficiently than hierarchical control systems such as, say, the management of AT&T (as Shirky shows in a personal anecdote).

The reason is that open systems, such as the open-source software movement, reduce the cost of failure to almost nothing. In a traditional corporation, there's a high inherent cost to failure because the company invests a lot of money in paying professionals (IT specialists, R&D specialists, marketing specialists, etc.) and the extra overhead needed to maintain these employees. Because failure can be disastrous to the company, it needs to filter out potential failures beforehand. That's why companies (and bureaucratic governments) are so conservative. Now look at SourceForge, where the vast majority of the open-source software projects have precisely zero users. And yet since there's no business organization and no employees, this open system has all but eliminated the cost of failure, so filtering can occur after publishing rather than before it.

Now look at the difference between democratic and authoritarian societies. China may be prospering right now, but all power is in the hands of the holding company's management, and if Chinese Communist Enterprises management becomes incompetent, they can bring the whole ~~company~~ nation down with them. In America, even if the (at least nominally) democratic political infrastructure has long been corrupted by technocratic bureaucratism, it has a resiliency that no authoritarian system, corporate or political, has. If the Chinese workers launch a national strike against the nation's corporate management, the result will be devastating. The same thing, interestingly enough, is happening in Wisconsin, where a Republican government is trying to restrict voting rights along with worker rights and meeting mass resistance that is likely to spell a GOP rout in this and next year's elections. In a free democratic society, worker resistance may be bad for business, but it's part of the political landscape, and a traditional one at that. The Chinese Communist Corporation is determined to crush all democratic tendencies because a free market spells an end to its monopoly over politics and therefore the corporation itself.

And so I think it's a bad idea for a society to be run like a corporation. It's not just that society is structured much differently from any corporation. It's also because a managerial society is rigid and inflexible, and responds badly to both crisis and opportunity. Just look at Japan fumble after the Great East Japan Earthquake...

That's the thought that came to me while reading today. I realized right at that moment that I had to share it.

On Suicide, Personal Demons, and the Creative Urge

2011-01-07T16:00:00.000-08:00

Yesterday on FriendFeed, I came across this Gawker article containing a suicide note by a programmer named Bill Zeller who killed himself. The demons that consumed him came from a fundamentalist upbringing and a childhood molestation. Programming promised an escape from the darkness at first. But eventually the darkness destroyed him, and he took his own life. I was saddened, and I had a kind of memento mori thought: there but for the vicissitudes of fate go I.

Then the author of the FriendFeed post in question linked to this blog post by Jolie O'Dell, a tech writer I've had something of a secret crush on for some time. Maybe it's the fact that she's beautiful and a geek too? Well, turns out she shared with Bill Zeller (an acquaintance of hers) a fundamentalist upbringing, a history of child abuse, an alcohol/drug problem, and a darkness that nearly consumed her. And she attempted suicide. Then fate brought her back, so she had to learn how to live. She made the decision to be creative. Now she's in love with her life. Reading that, I came to love her more. Even though, of course, I'm still this obscure unpublished writer up in Seattle, and we've never met...

I have my own history of abuse and depression. Back when I was an autistic child, I was the school bullies' most convenient target. My late father was a bum, and I didn't have that good a relationship with my stepfather. I could have been one of those school shooters in high school, had anybody thought of that in the early 1980s. For years I was obsessed with this wild and crazy manga I wanted to draw, but hated myself for not being able to learn to draw. That culminated in the proverbial midlife crisis around age 40 or so. I realized that if I had died before then, it would be as if I'd never existed. I decided to actually do something with my life.

In 2006, I started doing National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo). My first attempts at it were lousy — but then, every writer worth reading knows that first drafts suck by definition. A frustrated would-be rocker since my teens, I decided to take up the guitar and take part in February Album Writing Month (FAWM). Together, they changed my life. Now, instead of alternating between fighting my personal demons and giving in to them, I channel them into prose and music. Eventually I'll finish my comics self-instruction so I can channel them through my art as well. Needless to say, I'm now writing that crazy story that's obsessed me so long. If my life is half over and I only half-lived the first half, I'm determined to live the rest of it with a vengeance.

Damn, it's good to be alive.

Figuring Out 2011

2011-01-02T16:00:00.000-08:00

The new year is, as everybody knows, the most convenient time to set out new goals. For me, this year's set will be a bit different from the usual resolutions I've carried over from year to year.

This year, my goals are:

To finish the five volumes of the serial novel I'm currently writing and serializing online, Chaos Angel Spanner, edit them, and get them published starting in ebook form. Currently, I'm approaching the end of Book 1 and the beginning of Book 2. (Note: it contains large amounts of political, social, and sexual incorrectness, so it's definitely not for everybody, least of all the squeamish.)
To become good at playing one instrument. This year, I want to get back to playing the guitar. I'd better start in January, because Febrary Album Writing Month is just one month away.
To become fairly fluent in one language that is not English. I've been struggling with French since I was 10, so that's the one I pick this year.
To get back into good physical condition and get my body looking as good as my pretty face. That will take some prodding, and not just by my mother (who usually takes me to the gym with her). It will probably also require some changes in my diet.
To read at least one book a week, and post my impressions here.
To take at least one photograph a day starting today, and do a complete Project 365.
To draw at least one picture a day and get my drawing skills at least back up to where they were in the mid''00s, when I pretty much stopped after discovering NaNoWriMo in 2006.

Classes I'll be taking this year:

Web design. So far, the introductory class has introduced some tags (specifically tables) and CSS (starting with boxes and layouts) that I never learned even though I've been working with webpages and HTML on and off since the mid-1990s.
Photography. A photographer friend is holding classes, and I'm taking them. The intermediate class will require that I get a tripod.

I hope to achieve all these goals this year. Previous years, I've been distracted from all my goals. This year, I believe I can pull them off.

Here goes...

Chrome Web Apps: They're "Glorified Bookmarks" For A Reason

2010-12-09T19:21:00.000-08:00

Since yesterday, I've been hanging around the Chrome Web Store to install lots of web apps onto my Chrome browser. Some, which Google officially calls "packaged apps", are small programs that install into your Chrome extensions directory on your local hard drive. The others, called "hosted apps", are the on the Web. In the comments sections, I read complaint after complaint that the "web apps" are "glorified bookmarks".

Guess what? That's the entire reason they exist.

For those who haven't heard, Chrome is not just an increasingly popular web browser like Firefox or Opera. It's also the desktop for Google's upcoming netbook computer operating system, Chrome OS. The point of Chrome OS is to keep as many applications (programs) as possible off your local hard drive and on the Web. That's why Chrome packaged apps are small programs similar to extensions and "hosted apps" are bookmarks (really, desktop shortcuts) linking from your Chrome "new tab" page directly to the existing online apps.

Those people who complain so bitterly expect the "web apps" to be big programs like mobile phone apps, which are indeed installed on your local hard drive like desktop/laptop computer programs are. They're missing the point entirely. They're assuming Chrome web apps are locally installed programs that just happen to run in a web browser; and that if they aren't, they by definition they suck. That's the real meaning of "glorified bookmarks". These guys (and no doubt they're mostly younger guys) probably never heard of Chrome OS; if they have, they assume it sucks as well because you can't install hefty programs in it even if they run in Linux (on which Chrome OS is based).

Me, I have no such illusions. I actually like the idea of having shortcuts to online apps installed onto Chrome's new-tab page. In fact, it got me thinking: if most "Chrome web apps" are really just links to existing app websites, there's no reason you can't do the same thing to turn the programs already installed on your computer into "Chrome web apps". In fact, the only thing keeping people from replacing their Windows Explorer desktop with Chrome may be that the Chrome OS file browser still isn't available outside Chrome OS...

Goals for December 2010

2010-12-02T20:14:00.000-08:00

After winning NaNoWriMo for the fifth straight time, the question is: what should I do after that? That's where the Big, Fun, Scary Goals (link coming soon) come in. I don't have my complete 2011 list drawn up yet. However, I do know what I want to do in December.

My list of December goals:

Win NaNoFiMo and finish Spanner book 1 (my JulNoWriMo winner, not the NaNo-winning Book 2).
Draw at least one thing a day, whatever that thing may be.
Get back to learning French: review one lesson and do one new lesson a day.
Start practicing my guitar again, because FAWM is only three months away.

Even though my word goal is 50,000 words once again, I'm going to give myself time to achieve my other goals. And I actually believe that I'll be winning my first FiMo this year despite the fact that my goal is 20K more. The reason: deadlines.

Anyway, to begin...

My Fifth NaNoWriMo Victory!

2010-11-30T21:39:00.000-08:00

It's official: I've just won my fifth consecutive NaNoWriMo! You can see my word count in the NaNo word count widget to the left. Come to think of it, I should have inserted the widget into the sidebars of this blog and my project blog. I realized this when I put another counter widget in that place. Next year, I'll know better.

Next comes NaNoFiMo (National Novel Finishing Month). My goal: finish Spanner book 1 or write 50,000 words, whichever is more. I haven't written much since I won NaNo about a week ago (I reached 50,000 words on the 22nd and the word count validator bot made it official on the 25th), so this counts as another good excuse to get writing again. This will be my fourth FiMo, but I'll be going for my first win — significantly, writing a novel other than my '07 NaNo novel, Bad Company. I'll post my progress toward completion on the project blog.

A NaNo winner who wants his novel published can't rest on his laurels. I'll get back to writing soon.

Blog Maintenance: November 26, 2010

2010-11-26T16:00:00.000-08:00

What better way to procrastinate NaNoWriMo than to redo all your blog templates and then edit the posts accordingly? Now this blog, my project blog, my opinion blog, and my Posterous blog now look different than they used to. I'd even say the three Blogger blogs look a hell of a lot better than they did, now that I've updated their templates.

The reason I did it is because my Blogger templates were simply broken. I'd customized them for expandable posts and Twitter, Facebook, and Google Buzz share buttons long before Google gave Blogger its own. As directed, I'd copied the code off the customization blogs and pasted it into my own blog templates. It worked for a while. No longer. Upgrading was necessary.

Sometimes you just have to give up the old ways and join the modern world. I felt that way when upgrading my blogs. The old templates no longer worked. Now I find my Blogger blogs load faster than they did. Now it's the Posterous blog that takes a long time loading — but that may just be because I posted so many videos from YouTube and Archive.org.

One thing I noticed is that I made posts expandable that most people would consider too short. Early on, I was all but infatuated with the expandable post, to the extreme of making even two-paragraph posts expandable. I've grown out of that little neophyte vice. I've edited all the short posts on the Blogger blogs so that they're no longer expandable. I reserve that now strictly for the long posts.

In short, an attempt to fix my project blog quickly turned into a major blog overhaul. I guess I knew a serious change was in order...

Reading: The Advanced Genius Theory by Jason Hartley

2010-10-30T14:49:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, I rode the bus around town and made a few stops (library, mall) to distract myself from writing too much as NaNoWriMo approaches. At the downtown library I idly scan the "new books" section and come across one that catches my eye. It's called The Advanced Genius Theory, by one Jason Hartley. Being a genius myself, I picked it up. Turns out the "theory" deals with the decline of great artists (its two primary examples are Bob Dylan and Lou Reed) without actually explaining it as decline. I checked it out from the library, and it became my bus reading for the day.

Hartley's "Advanced Genius Theory" attempts to explain apparent decline. The conventional assumption is that a genius has a hot period, then a high point, and then goes into decline and can be safely ignored in favor of the next hot young thing. Why the apparent decline? asks Hartley. Because the genius has Advanced far beyond the ability of his fans to understand and appreciate what he's doing — and this goes double for the early fans. Chuck Klosterman (whom Amazon.com credits with being the book's coauthor despite having only written the foreword, because he's more famous than Hartley) offers a concise introduction to the theory in his 2004 Esquire article. As Klosterman sums it up (and Hartley himself quotes this): "When a genius does something that appears idiotic, it does not necessarily mean he suddenly sucks. What it might mean is that he's doing something you cannot understand, because he has Advanced beyond you."

For the purpose of the theory, Hartley defines "genius" as "simply someone whose instincts — artistic, intellectual, physical — happen to be valued more than most other people's." But to even be considered as Advanced, one must first follow these prerequisites:

You must have done great work for more than fifteen years.
You must have alienated your original fans.
You must be completely unironic.
You must be unpredictable.
You must "lose it" — spectacularly.

Think: Bob Dylan doing a Victoria's Secret commercial. Sting doing a pop single with Rod Stewart (who now sings old standards for people older than him) and Bryan Adams, then playing the Super Bowl with No Doubt years later. Honda scooter commercials. They no longer worry about pleasing or offending their fans because they're so established, so Advanced, that they can do whatever the hell they feel like no matter what anybody wants.

Hartley asks the question: Why do we love these particular geniuses anyway? The reasons are:

They're great.
They're innovative.
They're a part of the past. (This is what the "fifteen-year rule" comes down to.
You don't understand them. You only think you do.

The problem with your favorite artists is that, like long-term lovers, they get too familiar and start to seem stale because of it. Familiarity, it has been said, breeds contempt. This goes equally for the artist himself. The same style he built his success on now bores him. The rebel who used to rebel against the world now rebels against himself. If he's Orson Welles, he appears in Ernest & Julio Gallo wine commercials in order to fund his never completed adaptation of Don Quixote. If he's in a band, he leaves and goes solo (Sting, Lou Reed, Paul McCartney) and switches to a completely different style because, of course, he's bored with his old style (said John Lennon: "I don't do Beatles"). Sometimes he does something deliberately alienating (Reed's Metal Machine Music, Sting's forays into Adult Contemporary, McCartney marrying/teaming up with a Linda Eastman rather than a Yoko Ono). He goes into a completely different field (Mick Jagger acting, Leo Tolstoy making his own shoes in his old age, Steve Martin mastering the banjo). Ultimately, the Advanced genius rebels not only against his old self, but his fans as well, since they're pretty much wedded to the old self the genius can no longer stand.

The opposite of "Advanced" is "Overt". You openly and brazenly rebel against the Man. You are sincere to the point of dropping anvils, perhaps even to the extreme of "author filibuster" in the manner of Ayn Rand (the most Overt major American author ever). You are innovative for innovation's sake. You likely believe that True Art is unintelligible, angsty, offensive, and of course sticks it to the Man. You make concessions to the audience, especially if the audience is in revolt against the Man. Sometimes you're a "bigot": litfic bigot, Linux bigot, modern or postmodern art bigot, etc. Sometimes you're downright mean-spirited. Most of all, you want to be accepted, even if only by the Cool People.

Here's some of the strict criteria Hartley came up with that will likely make you think the theory is a joke:

You must wear a black leather jacket and black sunglasses (mirrorshades in my case, since that's the canonical cyberpunk cliché) at some point in your career. (And yes, I have a leather jacket, two actually, though I've only worn one of them in public once. No mirrorshades yet, though...)
You must sport a mullet, precisely because it's uncool. (Think: Lou Reed in the '70s.)
You must always appear on the cover of your solo albums (at least if you're a musician).
You must do the above without even a trace of irony.

Needless to say, he is completely unironic about this. These are requirements.

Ultimately, it all comes down to the genius reading the book. Am I Advanced? ("You" are, in fact, the subject of the book's last chapter, in which Hartley applies the theory to his readers.) Well, I haven't been doing publishable work for 15 years, I don't really have fans yet, I haven't had the opportunity to "lose it", and I may have a bit too much irony in me. But there is a period in which I can safely call myself Overt, better known as the Nineties. My first ten Project Notebooks (for the project that ultimately became Spanner, along with related fiction and art projects), for the decade beginning in 1991, came under the dual influence of Ayn Rand and Camille Paglia, believe it or not. It was the period when I hated on Marvel Comics at anime club meetings and proclaimed comics to be the new rock 'n' roll (in the revolutionary sense) while dancing on the grave of rock 'n' roll (the music; grunge was a corpse then rotting into nu metal while girl pop idols and boy bands ruled the music world). I hadn't yet learned to think dialectically, and my sense of irony was still underdeveloped. I was huge on the young Web but didn't yet grok it (my early attempts at a website and a blog failed, to say the least). My fiction works would remain unpublishable until two years after I started doing NaNoWriMo (that would be 2008, actually), and they took the form of script fragments.

Today I have a blog and post stories online, in words rather than pictures (though I'll take advantage of the NaNo adrenaline boost to get myself back to the drawing table). I've made my peace with rock 'n' roll's decadence and have even started watching TV shows again (some of them, taking advantage of the longer serial format, are actually better than most movies). Instead of raging (against the Machine!) with Thomas Frank over rock's Faustian bargain with the Man, I'm agreeing with Steven Johnson that modern videogames and TV shows actually make you smarter, even going so far as to adopt the complex multithreaded storytelling technique of the most popular TV dramas and incorporate it directly into my style. I still don't care for superheroes and I despise Fox News (which, in my opinion, is as Overt as one can get, consisting of nothing but shrill anvil dropping).

Of course, I may be merely in the early stages of Advancement or on the verge of it. Some of my fiction may strike readers as a deliberate attempt to alienate readers (hey, it's the rock 'n' roll way). Some would claim irreligion is Overt by definition, though Hartley might give me a pass for going through New Age, Neopagan, and Buddhist periods; besides, I'm not as shrill about it as an Ayn Rand (she called religion "moral cannibalism", which is as Overt as you can get) or a Christopher Hitchens. Rock fans and critics value youth and energy (and, in the case of punk rock, inexperience) for their own sake; I may not quite have the youth, but I sure have the energy, and "hot new author" probably counts as still Overt according to the theory. After all, the jocks haven't discovered my work yet and aren't yet beating up my early fans (the litfic snobs, sci-fi geeks, fanfic 'shippers, and NaNoWriMo scribblers). I still have the political radicalism of my twenties, though my libertarianism has gone more left-wing; apparently, the theory seems to require that one become blithely antipolitical on the assumption that since the world will always belong to gangsters, let the gangsters have it. Unless you're Al Gore. But then, his political career is over. He's an author, environmentalist, and documentary movie star now. And for all my "I wanna get read" literary ambition, I'm still wary of doing commercials for Honda scooters (but Vespa is always welcome to call my agent once I get published) or, in the literary equivalent of doing duets with pop idols, writing "young adult" novels starring sexy vampire boys (preferably gay). Even so, I did get derailed from my early manga calling and ended up novelizing my own undrawn comics, and isn't that like going solo?

Of course, what Advancement ultimately means is that, after your initial period of popular success, you pull ahead of your time and you don't care what your fans and haters think (and sometimes they're the same people). The important thing is: I don't care. I'm confident enough in my ability to write (and edit my own writing) that I no longer feel it necessary to ride the latest trend (which, by the way, is Paranormal Romance; my personal gimmick is to decouple cyberpunk from science fiction). I have my own style, and people can appreciate it on its merits; if they don't, oh well. Of course, Hartley likely won't read my fiction because he mostly reads Classic Novels; I'm a shameless online purveyor of pop fiction (or in the case of my more litfic stuff, pop metafiction). I can be as deliberately obscure as any litfic author, and sometimes am, but I'm no snob. Even after I actually get some comics published, I don't think Gary Groth (publisher of Fantagraphics Books and king of the art comix snobs) will be on speaking terms with me anytime soon.

So am I Advanced? Maybe, maybe not; it's still far too early to tell, since I still don't have any fans to alienate yet. I may merely be Refined Overt like David Byrne. But your mileage may vary. Besides, I don't really care, even if I just happen to be a genius...

I've barely even touched the surface of the theory in The Advanced Genius Theory. Hell, neither have Jason Hartley and Chuck Klosterman. And sure enough, as Klosterman points out, it's not even widely accepted yet. He even argues with Hartley over who actually is Advanced. But he insists that Advancement Theory is the future of intellectual discourse in America and possibly Europe. For all I know, it's the hot new theory that's all the rage in Japan. And Klosterman says it's the way we will understand rock 'n' roll in the future. After all, it's the best way so far to understand rock's decadence...

Back to The Space Helmet Show...

In Which I Break My Media Silence, Post-AugNoWriMo

2010-10-20T16:39:00.000-07:00

After I failed to win AugNoWriMo earlier this year, I spent nearly a month almost completely offline. Or at least avoiding my social media accounts except maybe an occasional visit to Twitter, and not blogging at all about anything. And now NaNoWriMo approaches, and I find myself in a sort of non-WriMo Panic Time. So here I am.

I have an explanation for my absence. Occasionally I find something that really obsesses me. This time around, it was something called the TV Tropes Wiki. I was always the kind of kid who got lost in encyclopedias, and I've gotten lost in Wikipedia numerous times. I got lost in TV Tropes for two full months, not writing any actually story words but merely listing (in a now massive Microsoft Word document) all the tropes (read: memes) that fit Spanner. I've got enough of an understanding of both the tropes and TV Tropes that it'll no longer distract me from writing my book.

Which reminds me: I need to update my NaNo profile now...

Now My Blog Posts Are Expandable!

2010-08-04T16:00:00.000-07:00

I'd heard in recent months that Blogger would be premiering a new built-in expandable post method. Until now, my Blogger blogs used a custom method for expanding posts. I'm not going to bother to link to any pages or blog posts on the old custom method because that method's now obsolete. If I want to make a blog post expandable, all I have to do now is type, while I'm in "Edit HTML" mode:



And then to read the whole post, click on these words on the main blog page:

Read more »

One thing this new method makes possible is short posts that don't have to expand at all, like the unexpandable posts on my Posterous blog. Expanding posts become an option, not a necessity.

Needless to say, this means that I'll be doing some serious housekeeping on my blogs. I've started editing my blogs' templates to remove the old custom expandable post method, and then editing all the entries so that they expand the new built-in way rather than the old custom way. And, of course, I'll be adding some stuff and getting rid of other stuff, updating my blogrolls, and so on. I've already started with my project blog; I've switched that blog to the new expanding post method and am editing all the posts accordingly. While I'm at it, I'm setting up a few Pages on that blog, mainly lists of links including the tables of contents to my novels and short story collections. And that will send me back to my project site, which I'll update for the first time in — how long was it? A long long time, I'm guessing. I'm writing some short stories, and I'll be posting some of them there.

And all this work comes at the beginning of AugNoWriMo... *sigh*