Conspiracy Theory?

Maybe tobacco companies that are forced to spend money to make anti-smoking ads make them purposefully obnoxious. These in-your-face commercials featuring starry-eyed young people making outrageous public statements against evil companies thereby operate on a reverse-psychology principle: by making you want to cringe and change the station, the commercials create a subliminal connection between people speaking out against drugs and just being plain annoying. Therefore, if a concerned friend tells you to stop smoking, you'll associate them with people you just want to go away.

It's brilliant, I tell you! Not that I actually believe it.

The other day, my professor thought he was being profound by saying that sometimes you just don't know how much you believe something. That was supposed to be eye-opening, like we all go around in our non-enlightened states thinking that we know what we believe and how much we believe it. Well, maybe I'm just unusual, but I frequently reflect on the fact that I'm really not sure how much I believe something. Is it unsettling? A little. Is it unusual and creepy? Not really.

Griping

Netflix has once again changed its layout. I'm not going to care enough to discontinue my service, since it's still way too freaking convenient to get new movies in the mail whenever I really want them (okay, more like two days after I really wanted to watch them, possibly four days if there's a weekend involved). But I am going to gripe about two things. First, the recommendation system continues to be idiotic, like a dope fiend who just got done shoveling half his brain into a tupperware bowl to save for later. According to my front page, because I enjoyed the classic Japanese samurai film Sanjuro, I should enjoy the first two seasons of Homicide. WHAT?! So appreciating Akira Kurosawa's masterwork epic about a travelling samurai should make me like a police drama set in Baltimore? Yeah, I'm sure that's reasonable to a computer, but a real person with half a wit would never make a connection like that. Also, the qeue used to say whether the movie I have waiting is DVD or Blu-ray. I really appreciated knowing which format the movie was coming in, so I'd know whether I'd be playing it on my TV (Blu-ray) or my computer (DVD). Now, I guess I kind of have to remember which is which. Or maybe they've decided to just make them all DVD. That would be a hoot.

My other bitch is about blogs. Now, I remember the days a big fat wall of text from a blog was considered (at least by me) respectable. The word is the mind at play, and what have you. In any case, it's a wonderful medium. These days, blogs are all people's pictures of their crotches, or else other peoples' crotches, or else that fun Rock Band party they had with Larry, Susy, and Sasquatch. It'll do for dogs, but men should have more to say. Yadda yadda. I'm starting to bore even myself now.

Stay away from sharp objects.

Guilt

A while back, someone messaged me on MySpace, asking to be my friend because, to cut things to the chase, she wanted me to buy her book when it finally comes out. Seeing a chance to chat with a fellow novelist about the writing process, I started sending messages with her back and forth. Now, I've decided to stop replying. She's been nice, but I just can't bring myself to care about the story another writer I don't know is writing. I'm not particularly interested in the story from what I've heard. What hurts even more, to be honest, is that she hasn't shown any particular interest in my own writing. I've talked about it a little, but I guess she isn't clairvoyant in being able to leap onto the fact that she should be quizzing me about my own theories about writing and the details of the stories I'm working on.

I'm not saying I don't like being part of a "writing community," as if there was such a thing, rather than just a bunch of writers who are friends. I'm saying that, I'm sorry, but since I don't know this person and she doesn't seem particularly concerned about getting to know me, there's really not much for me to do other than wish her luck, which I did. Maybe I'll buy her book if I see it on store shelves. But there's no personal connection there; frankly, her self-promotion left a bad taste in my mouth. I want to be friends with people who genuinely want to know me and my writing, not just people who want my Benjamins.

Today was a good day. I watched Battlestar Galactica with some good people. Sharing something that I like isn't nearly as satisfying as sharing something I like that I've created, but until the sweet, sweet day I finally get something published, the story of BSG will have to do. Maybe I'll do a blog later giving my own anti-Cylon sentiments. I also had poetry class. That's always an adventure. That class always feels much too short; one of my criticisms is that we spend too much time "workshopping" poems. I have the good fortune of studying under award-winning poet Michael Sowder. Sometimes, I just don't consider how fortunate I am, as a writer, to work with people like that, even though I'm a fiction writer at heart, not a poet.

But Shakespeare never wrote prose fiction, and Chaucer himself was a poet.

Fanboys

I thought I'd weigh in on the "controversy" over the release of the Fanboys movie edited. Apparently, the movie was orinally about a guy who's dying of cancer, so his friends take him on a wild trip to Skywalker Ranch to get a copy of Star Wars Episode One before it's released so he can see it before he dies. The new version has no mention of the disease; the characters are just a bunch of geeks who want to see the film. The "controversy" (again, note the quotes) revolves around the fact that people who call themselves real Star Wars fans say the cut takes away the heart of the film and ends up making fun of the fans.

Here's a link to people bitching: http://stopdarthweinstein.chris-marquette.com/

First and foremost, this isn't an issue. No-one is clubbing baby seals. And hell, you have to club something small before you can graduate to something big like Scarren, so you might as well club baby seals, too. Second, and this goes back to the first thing and why I put quotes around controversy: nobody has heard of this. I would be very surprised if this movie saw wide release. It's probably going to show in three movie theaters and go to DVD in two weeks, where both versions will be available. Shouldn't these people be busier, I don't know, anticipating how awesome the new Clone Wars animated series is going to be? THAT's a good use of your time.

Bluefish signing off. Take care, my pot rosts.

Thoughts

I saw a commercial on TV for something that's "hand-blown." You really have to wonder how they can manage that. I know there's the guy in Pan's Labyrinth with eyes in his hands, but this takes it to a whole new level. Mouths in your hands? Does the esophagus run all the way up the hand?

Late-night G4 has commercials for hookup lines. One of the tag-lines was "Meet REAL girls!" I guess they know that their audience might have difficulty differentiating real girls from the other kind. Here's a hint, guys. The girl in math class? Real. Lara Croft? Not real. Angelina Jolie? Mostly real.

Being a geek always gets better. Video games are constantly becoming more beautiful, more interactive, more interesting, and just more engaging. Seriously, though, does anybody ever think of the one-handed geek? What about the blind geek? I can imagine that for the average guy, losing an arm doesn't take away his ability to watch football or hang around drinking beers. But for a geek, it's socially crippling. Not only does it halve one's talking speed (typing, of course), but it makes being a 1337 gamer virtually impossible.

I mean, sure, they had that program special about some blind kid who was really good at Soul Calibur 2, but one of the kids they had playing him on the show even said that he couldn't figure out how the kid kept pulling off those unblockable moves. What?! They had this kid playing n00bs who don't even know how to execute an unblockable? No wonder he kicked ass. If they would have given me a controller, I would have kicked his ass. Just keep walking around him until he loses track of your position, gets frustrated, and throws out a few attacks. Step in when he's vulnerable in the middle of a combo and lay on the hurt. Once you break his flow, he won't recover. Yes, I actually put thought into how to kick a blind kid's ass in SC2. What next?

People need to start coming to me for ideas about writing comics. I leaf through comics and say to myself that the stuff I come up with is much better. Yes, I'm probably the only one who thinks so. But if you're desperate for ideas, get in touch. I've got this one involving demons. You won't be disappointed. Or maybe you will, but if you're wondering where all that came from, it's really from my watching G4 and them talking about comics, but I'll pretend it's a built-up frustration from my constant effort to find someone to do the art for my webcomics ideas.

Here's an exchange of messages that happened a while back with the guy who promised to do a volume for me, but didn't do a single page. Not even a single frame.

Him: How's the comic going?
Me: I might ask you the same thing. Or are you asking whether I chose anyone else to do the art after I stopped hearing from you? I didn't.

And that was it. After half a year of not hearing from him, waiting for ages to see some sort of progress from him beyond basic head concept sketches, I got nothing. And I've still gotten nothing. Maybe I'll send him a message.

Okay, here's what I just emailed him:

Hi,
Did you ever get more work done on that comic we had planned? Or, even if not, are you working on anything comic-like? No hard feelings if you've decided to go back on making the comic, but I'd like to know if that's the case, so I can try to move on with the project.

Okay, so I lied about the no hard feelings thing, but I never tell people when I'm really pissed at them. Maybe I should. But enough people hate me as it is.

Now that's futuristic!

Being an early adopter doesn't always have the consequences you've foreseen...

http://tech.yahoo.com/blogs/patterson/14047

The unavoidable blog question, and others

One does have to wonder what they mean when they say things like "bloggers responded by... " and "the blog community...". Exactly who makes up these nebulous organizations? Who decides who is a worthy blogger, a fellow of note and repute, while the rest are more or less empty windbags? I ask you.

On a lighter note, the new Conan trade paperback by Dark Horse is coming out. It's well worth checking out, because this comic series actually takes the original work by Robert E. Howard and turns it into comics, rather than trying to tell new Conan stories. Of course, Howard only wrote one Conan novel, and many short stories that were hit or miss, but his writing is much better than that of any other Conan writer. Why? Because Howard told a story that was important to him with characters that he believed in; everyone else, to some degree, is just "doing Conan." And whether you know something about Conan or he's just a big muscly guy in a loincloth to you, it's never going to be the same as the complex, powerful individual Howard visualized and brought to life.

Writing continues to progress with difficulty. I think I have far too many projects open at once. It's time to wrap up a short story for my occult story collection and focus on the four other major projects I have right now: my thesis for grad school, my fantasy novel, my cyberpunk novel, and a new project. Why a new project, when all of that is already weighing on me? Because I'm constantly on the lookout for something new and exciting that gets my imagination going at critical mass and makes me feel like I'm creating a world that's really and deeply meaningful.

Maybe I'll talk more about how I intend to do that in a later blog.

Take care, my ugly ducklings.

A very odd day

So today, I decided to move into my new apartment. That involved signing out of my old apartment. Let me preface this by saying I'm no slouch. I cleaned my room thoroughly two months ago, when I moved out. I'm fully aware that that was two months ago, and things happen in two months. Also, I'm a single 23-year-old guy. I'm not a French maid. I man-clean. If I was dedicated, I'd find the PvP episode that describes what it means to man-clean something. Basically, it's an illusion hinging on not opening any cupboards, drawers, or closets. The apartment was, in fact, much better cleaned than that. There was fuzz on the carpet and dust in places, but I would think that's hardly surprising.

But the guy who checked my apartment must have been the biggest clean-freak in all of China. First, he tells me I have to vaccum the floor. As I said before, there wasthe occasional piece of lint here and there, and I didn't mind vaccuming the floor. But then he checked the drawers of the desk and the chest of drawers. And he pointed to the drawers in the latter and exclaimed, "This is dirty. There are hairs in it." I was shocked. I looked in it and said, stupified, "But it's close enough, right? It's pretty clean." And it was. There was a bit of dust in the corners, and, if I may say, perhaps four human hairs between all four drawers. I wish I was exaggerating, but in this case, truth really needs no embellishment. He just looked at me and said I have to clean it, asking whether I had any cleaning stuff with me. I reiterated, as I had stated before, that I had moved all of my stuff out of the apartment. As my room was as empty as a room can be (save, apparently, for fewer hairs than Patrick Stewart has on his head), it was fairly clear. But then he insisted that I use paper towels (where he proposed I procure some paper towels, or whether he assumed I had moved out everything but the paper towels, I know not). I instead used pieces of toilet paper pilfered from my roommate. As he was standing and watching me clean, he said, "Maybe that's too small. Maybe you need paper towels." I just said, with gritted teeth, "It will do." And it did. He looked again, and it was fine.

The apartment he moved me into was, I kid you not, a mess. The carpet was filthy, the paint was rotting off the walls in several places, and I found a bag half-buried in the finger-thick layer of dust behind the chest of drawers. There were large, bent, rusty staples sitting on the desk and one of the drawers in the desk had what I can only assume to be unusually large, chunky pieces of granola. The mattress had large, brown stains I can only hope came from coffee. When I pointed these out to him, he just shrugged.

The biggest irony? If my new apartment is in the condition it is in now when I move out, I'll be fined or forced to clean it again.

That means that, effectively, they're forcing me to be their maid.

What a world.

Solution

I worked out a solution to the current real estate problem. All they need to do is start selling houses with a Star Trek theme. That way, all those countless hordes of geeks living in their parents' basements, garages, attics, etc. will finally venture into the light of the burning day-star to perhaps boldly go where no man has gone before... or, in their case, farther from home than they have ever been.

I'm only poking fun at geeks because I don't think one could ever chase me down, and even if he could, he'd probably be too winded to do much more than swear at me in Klingon.

I just watched Trekkies today. I've seen the second one, but this is the first time I watched the first one. To be honest, I found the second one a lot less terrifying, perhaps because it was more international. There are some genuinely bizarre people out there. Then again, I'm inclined to say that as long as they're not hurting anyone, let them have their fun.