Month: May 2015

4,206

That is the number of novel projects currently seeking funding on Kickstarter. The idea is that a crowd of interested readers gives money to a writer in exchanged for tiered prizes, often including the novel itself. I am thinking very seriously about producing a kickstarted novel if for nothing more than the experience and the opportunity.

2

That is the number of online classes I’ll be redesigning and teaching this summer. There is a lot of work to be done and I still need to solve the problem of a shared publishing forum, but I am on my way.

I’ll probably be keeping strange hours trying to develop the classes and get back into the rhythm of novel writing. It means a lot of water and potato chips–the fuel a writer needs to stay in the groove for a long long time…

Some Thoughts:

1. As far as history goes, 1831 was a fairly boring year outside of what is now the U.S. and her territories.  What there was largely included death and war. More death and war here as Nat Turner led a slave rebellion.
2. We are in a terrible political cycle that is fueled by the 24 hr news cycle. Once upon a time news used to be about reporting a story that had been fully researched. Now CNN regularly quotes random tweeters–one from the right and one from the left–as an example of what the zeitgeist is thinking.

A ton of fiction writers and some who write true life stories about the afterlife speak of the in-between. To most it is that place we go after death and prior to judgement–a halfway house for the determined to be damned. The Matrix symbolized the place as a train station where Neo found himself waiting to be in one place or the other. For me this is the best possible term to describe the upcoming few weeks. As finals roll in I am no longer in ‘teacher mode’ yet I am not on vacation (which will only last perhaps a week) I am in my own in-between, trying to capture a few moments of solitude and self reflection before I am thrust headlong into the the next thing.

While I am here I can note that last year was sub par. The work I did at the office was way below what I am capable of and while I did produce some decent fiction in my soul’s line of work, I could’ve done more and more efficiently and effectively. In some ways I am still learning how to be a writer. I think I always will be.

More tomorrow. My ten is almost up…

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Interesting tidbit about 1830. On one particular fateful trading day only 31 shares moved across the NYSC. Compare that to now where 10 times that (at least) move every microsecond.
2. I’ve been reading some more Neal Stephenson and have come to identify with his remarks about how science fiction writers often become inordinately familiar with history. I’m paraphrasing here, but the man has a good point. You have to know history to understand how it effects and often creates the future.

I used to have these dreams. They were similar to the Butterfly Effect in that I had a talisman and it allowed me to move back in forth in time. I would use these moments to find ways to gather money in order to fly back into the future and be wealthy. I suppose I became a capitalist at a young age. I don’t think it is ever going away.

I want things. I’ve bred kids who want things and shine brightest when they can see and feel the coolness of the item or the moment. It is something that led me to turn my loft into a major gaming den and to spend a significant amount of my summer upgrading the space to be even better. After a brief tour of the gamer cave at the local multitainment center I thought to myself, I can do that.

Perhaps I actually will…

 

Some Thoughts:

1. I all too often wear my heart on my sleeve, which is terrible for poker and professional life. On the other hand, that is exactly who I am and who I will continue to be.
2. When Andrew Jackson was inaugurated in 1829 people rioted and even tried to crash the inaugural ball. Needless to say, people have hated political counterparts for a long time in this country.

I took a few moments to watch the LA Clippers blow out the Rockets. Its a 31 point lead as I write this blog, but that isn’t the most interesting part of the game. Courtside tickets at a Clippers game go for $1100, yet the balance of people on the sidelines was an interesting mesh of tatted up dudes, rich youngsters, and old suits. In many ways it seemed to represent the new LA rich and that set of wealth is very colorful and seemingly different from the LA Lakers set.

There is not much more to say about that or anything else really. I’m tired and in one of those moods where I want to talk about relationships and being a single dad and all of that juicy stuff, but I don’t have the energy to get a lot more out than what you see here.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. The great military leader Shaka Zulu was assassinated back in 1828. I wonder how great his legacy would have been had he lived a bit longer. Would we be talking about his teachings? Would he have his own series of war games?

I’m trying to turn over a new leaf but the damn thing is flopping and twisting as though powered by gale force winds sent down from the heavens to reject my promise. That is to say that circumstance (and some modicum of laziness) makes it difficult for me to excel in the way I see fit. I feel this will all change shortly. I will see the doctor and get whatever neck issue is going on with me fixed. I will see the inside of a gym more than once a week. I will get a priority list going and make the most of it. I think the listing, while it is painful for me to rarely finish one, is an effective means of getting my crap together. Should I find a way to successfully negotiate that, i’ll be back in the driver’s seat.

Well, I never left the drivers seat. I just fell asleep at the wheel.

Forty years have taught me that the only people who don’t have vices are the one’s not willing to admit them. My vice is distraction. The more time I have, the more I can become deeply distracted and fall into black hole projects (like binge watching) instead of focusing on what is productive and crucial. On the flip side, if I have no free time I seize up like a car engine that just realized there isn’t any oil left.  So the trick is to figure out that perfect balance that keeps me productive but doesn’t ruin me in the process…

Some Thoughts:

1. The first black-run newspaper opened its doors in 1827. The paper, Freedom’s Journal, was a four page, four column weekly rag founded by black church workers.
2. The Blacklist ran a false flag episode. Ironic as one is still taking place in Garland, Texas. People need to be paying attention to this thing…
3. Late Note — My ‘nerd fast’ internet failed last night so this post is going out absurdly late.

A lot to say tonight but none of it really goes together. Seems like the perfect night for…

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Some takeaways from watching my son’s football practice tonight–They’re gonna go undefeated. This game this weekend is a mismatch, which means a perfect record for the boys. I think he’s ready for the fall season and that level of competition. I also think the kids he plays with can handle a no-huddle offense. Smart boys who always seem to have an idea of how to execute. We are nearly at the point where coach can call plays in under 10 seconds. I didn’t watch the entire practice. I spent the second half spending time with my about-to-be-six year old prepping him for the next 6-7 season. He’s ready. He’s developing a great throwing arm and learning the offense very quickly. It isn’t tough–I rely on three routes with very simple names. I’m thinking about adding a fourth… Of course, I see my assistant coach running the offense next season–as much as it hurts to give it up. I need to work on his aggressiveness–especially on defense. He struggles with attacking the flag. Given a chance to run a practice at soccer I’d add the 50/50 drill to help train in that aggressive tendency.
2. Speaking of soccer, the mid-kid is doing outstanding in his tryouts for the U11 team, which is crazy, because he’s 8 and has only been 8 for like a week. This is not me bragging this is me freaking out after I saw the fees. How do you tell a kid who is so proud that you can’t pay the $1500+ these guys want from you?
3. I need a day off. I’ve had a few hours a few days and that felt sort of wonderful, but I was constantly nagged by impending responsibility. I need a full day–24 hours of gleeful reset.
4. #wealthies are very very stupid.
5. The Garland shooting story is going away very fast as news media shifts its attention to ISIS and their ‘potential’ involvement. However, the more I dig, the more the story falls apart. Tell me why there were no other human beings anywhere near the shooting. By no one I mean no protestors, no bystanders, no one. Tell me also why none of the so-called artists in the contest that were competing for the 10k actually attended the event… Those are just a few of the many questions that lead me to believe this was a False Flag situation.
6. Speaking of false flags, back in 1826 we had the so-called ‘auspicious incident’ in which Ottoman Sultan Mahmud II claimed the Janissary Corps had revolted and as a result was able to arrest and murder 6,000 in order to get the nearly 140k order in line…

 

I’m writing this post without the benefit of technology and it serves as a startling reminder of how dependent I’ve become on tech. For example, last night at 2 AM when I was trying to sleep but had this old memory stuck in my head, I popped open my commlink (read: cellphone) and downloaded an app to allow me to access my ‘capstone’ server and access the file. Then I routed that file through my phone to play on my TV. Once upon a time I would’ve gone downstairs and looked through a cabinet for the file, but this was techy and thus a lot better. Also, It was 2 AM and I was simultaneously lazy, tired, unable to sleep, and too stubborn to take the tech free approach to the problem. This is how I’ve come to live.

 

Technology is just another tool that allows the world to see the worst version of ourselves. I personally expose my innards on a daily basis in ten minute doses in a way that is far less intimate than the notebooks I used to keep, but at the same time is far more accountable. We are all apparently more accountable as a species now. When my mother, who is presently languishing half a continent away, calls me I can’t call and say ‘sorry I wasn’t home’ because there is no home phone. If I cannot talk I am normally expected to be able to text and if I cannot text, there is a nifty feature that allows me to vocalize a text into the phone to at least relay the message that texting isn’t an option. I am dependent on that tech and often wonder if I could function without these electricity driven devices. Remember, I’m the guy who used to watch at least two hours of TV everyday. Imagine what dreams could come in that time…

 

When I started weaning myself off of cable it was more about money than the need to stop filling my head with junk and smut. Now the need and value of the act is shifting as a direct result of watching how dependent I am on my daily fixes and routines. I need to learn to be tech independent.

 

I need to do it before the zombies get here…

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Obviously I found my way online.
2. Now that I’m here I plan to research this Texas shooting and do so very thoroughly. Something feels wrong about the whole thing. One passage from an article states that “Gunfire reverberated around the complex, from the two gunmen, the armed officer and a nearby SWAT team — four of whom fired high-powered rifles, according to a source familiar with the officers involved.” Now that article goes on to promote a single police officer armed with a .45 as killing both of the armored assailants. I’m going on to call bullshit. Something feels staged…
3. If all the world is a stage then 1825 was the opening act for a much later cold war. This is year that the Russian/Canadian boundary was established and was also the year John Q. Adams took office as the sixth president and tried to make his mark as someone beginning a global agenda.

While looking through reviews and easter egg posts about Avengers: Age of Ultron, I kept running across posts about someone named Bella Thorne. Now, I have kids of a certain age and as such know a little bit about teen stars. Still, I never heard of her. In fact, I didn’t even really recognize that she was a teen star until, on my fourth article about the future of the marvel shared universe movie franchise (Spidey is coming!), something popped up about her being on the cover of Teen Vogue. Who the heck is Bella Thorne and why should anyone, least of all me, a superhero fan, care? Then it hit me: She’s being media-groomed to play Mary Jane Watson.

Despite Andrew Garfield’s ridiculously impressive turn as the scarlet spider, he will not be returning for what is likely to be a mini-reboot in the shared universe. The Amazing Spiderman is dead. Long live the Spectacular Spiderman! Now comes the difficult part of maximizing revenue by casting individuals sure to fit the target market of this particular brand of Marvel. We know that Daredevil is meant for a certain audience. Avengers is the universal catch-all for the imprint. What about spidey? Some of the early choices fill us in. This will be the teenage spider. In other words, the focus will be on the high school years and that level of intrigue and balancing the dual worlds of teen-dom and fighting with super powered beings… Kinda like the Disney cartoon. Enter then the Disney actress, Bella Thorne. It doesn’t take a genius to recognize that they are betting on the early buzz by talking her up. The algorithm tells us that.

I can’t say much to the math that defines and creates this algorithm, but when we enter the web and look for things, our search history is not only recorded, but monitored to allow some selling agent/advertiser to glom on to what we are searching for and provide us products and even articles related to what it thinks we want. This is how Bella Thorne came into my life. As I said, I previously had no idea who she was. The seventeen year old did not pop on my screen based on a historical preference for redheads (I’m not into that anymore anyhow), she popped up because I am very curious about where Marvel is taking me and Marvel, in turn, is very curious about what the customer base will do when fed bait. I took the bait, purely out of curiosity. I wish I could express that to them, because I’m honestly not impressed with Thorne at all. I don’t feel that she brings the gravitas associated with Mary Jane. The iconic red is as close as Marvel is going to get to Lois Lane, and this girl is no Lois Lane.

So, Algorithm, send me someone else and while you’re at it, spin up a couple of possible male leads. Asa Butterfield, maybe?

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Clever too late, I should’ve named yesterday’s post ‘Orphan is the new black’
2. Back in 1824 Lord Byron shuffled off his mortal coil, leaving us with Don Juan as the great work to remember him by. The poem is particularly interesting because it looks at Don Juan not as the womanizer as he is seen by so many, but as someone who in fact, is more often manipulated by women…

Orphan Black is getting a lot better.

At the head of season 3 the storyline is about the male ‘Castor’ line of clones and more surreptitiously about the Leda line that created our protagonist sisters. My own, albeit limited, understanding of mythology suggests that Leda is the mother of the Dioscuri and as a result the Castor line may in fact be the child strain of the Leda line.

Director John Fawcett has improved as well. The progressions now are linear and make sense in the concept of the story and our natural order of understanding of the clones. As I write this I am preparing to watch ‘Formalized, Complex, and Costly’ which promises to reveal more of the story and develop the personalities of individual characters further.

I look forward to the promise of season three and the promise of original fiction that excites. There are few shows that do that anymore. I’ve grown accustomed to different flavors of the same crap stew. Orphan Black is one of the few that don’t give me that… not yet.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. What fleeting satisfaction racism provides. How much of people’s psyche is built around the idea that they are somehow superior to others and inherently better than one particular racial group? How much of it is unconscious? How much is challenged by the trials of daily life. It is no wonder then that those of racial exclusionism withdraw from society to a place of their own making–much as I discussed in the thoughts yesterday.
2. The last supposed appearance of an Angel that led to the formation of a church was in 1823, which was when the angel Moroni was said to first appear to Joseph Smith. The angel led him to a book written in what Smith referred to as reformed Egyptian, but based on what has been shared about the plates, has no direct correlation to any known human language. How much of this is real and how much is fantasy? No more or less than any other religion I suppose…

I’m recovering–if barely–from a haze of shuttling folks back and forth to practices and trying to find within myself this brief window of peace and writing happiness. I knew the day was long when, sometime around 3 PM I found myself on the couch, legs draped over the armrest and hands adjacent to a glass of wine. In the distance I could hear the boys spiraling up the bouncy house and bickering about which song to pipe in as their ‘entrance music’. A moment later it was 4 PM and I was still in that same spot, though slightly more rested and less aware. Such are the hot AZ days, and I have many more to come this summer.

Everything in my life seems to build towards Saturday. Though I often try to argue otherwise, my life seems geared towards the three little boys and their sporting lives. I’m a soccer dad. A football dad too it seems, and a basketball dad in the summers. All of it serves as wakeup call about the priorities I’ve chosen for my life. At some point we are all just slaves to the advancement of our children, and when they are gone it may feel too late to advance ourselves.

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Meanwhile back in 1822, Liberia’s colonization was starting to take place. Boston was finally incorporated as a city, and the American Indian Society got off the ground. Independent acts to be sure, but there is a thread here of a founding of places–new places and organizations–built on the idea that something new can be made and be reflective of the kind of place people want for themselves as an ideal.
2. If a math teacher says 2 + 2 = 4 and someone says, I’m skeptical of that being a legitimate equation, people view the skeptic as crazy. If a rising chorus of scientists across the globe point to climate change and someone says, I’m skeptical of that being a legitimate phenomenon, people still say, ‘he has a point there.’
3. Mayweather v. PacMan was not great. Decent, but not great.
4. With the cat dragging in so much stuff every night I am about to begin locking things down for the evenings again. It is a drag for the dog, who will need to be kenneled, but it keeps the house a little more bug free.