I Can See Your House From Here - Archives
vol 2 number 49
Random thoughts as I attempt to stay awake a little longer...
I've stolen my first idea from Warren Ellis -- I've turned my Blog pages (if you don't know about Blogs yet, they're sort of the Internet equivalent to a diary, only the current trend is to make your diary public so that all the world can see it) into a repository of interesting Webjunk. As I find things that interest my across the net, I cut and paste into my on-the-fly journal, and my server becomes the trunk that stores all my useless junk. Best still, it's a trunk that is accessible from anywhere, especially once I get a laptop and install the script that allows me to post the useless information from wherever I am.
Technically, the page is publicly accessible -- I'm too lazy and unconcerned to password protect it, and besides, it's just news, right? -- though you'll have to guess the address. But at least now I never have to lose an idea that I have while I'm busy at the computer.
It does occur to me, too, that, just as you can tell a lot about someone by reading their diary, if you're careful not to infer too much, you can tell a lot about someone by what kind of junk they store away for future use.
Random thought #2: Necessity is the stepmother of creation
I just moved, as some of you know. Not far -- I'm only a few blocks from the place I spent the last four years, but the landlord is selling the building, and frankly, I needed the change. Turns out that, while I was convinced that the timing of this move was less than great, it turned out in my favor in a way. On the one hand, I've just a few months ago gotten through with another undergrad degree, my work contract expires shortly, and PS: it's hotter than the final hours of the Koresh compound in Waco here in Alabama. On the other, though, the immediacy of the move forced me to finish a few things a little earlier than I might have preferred, and those things turned out damn good. The things in question are short screenplays, by the way, for entrance into the Sidewalk Film Festival's short screenplay competition.
One is a Twilight Zone inspired story about a man with three wishes. It's very good, I think, with some of my tightest dialogue and pacing ever (as well as being the only comedy that I've ever penned to date), even if it does follow the stereotypical three wishes pattern. There is some predictability to the story, inherent to the theme, but I think it's subtle enough that, contextually, it's not as opaque as it could have been.
The other is an extension of a music video idea I had a few months back for Lunasect's The Art of Self-Defense . It's a return to my common themes of darker humanity and a twist at the end, although I actually managed to work a few bits of humorous dialogue in that are both natural and relief from the surrounding darkness. I'm really happy with it -- my wife Melissa commented that it was the best screenplay that I have ever written, and at six pages total, I think that's pretty good -- but even more so given that I wrote it in one pass, no rewrites, in under an hour.
Not because I wanted to, but because I should have been packing.
Random thought #3:
I'm tired of hearing people speak about the Truth, when they don't have any more of a grasp on it than I do.
I'm tired of people that argue with the twisted approach of an LSD casualty.
I'm tired of people that speak in broad, sweeping generalizations like "Liberals" and "Gays" and "Christians."
Stupid humanity.
Random thought #4: It's only there for looks
The world is approaching science-fiction at light speed, and now we don't even know what light speed really is.
Quantum computing is just around the corner, if they can trap atoms in the cones of pulsed laser light in enough quantity to do some strong computation, though, so we'll have a better idea soon. The world needs a bigger and better calculator, and that's pretty much the end of that story.
British people will be taking a balloon up 26 miles in the air later next month, and they didn't invite me.
Scientists are successfully beginning to play with teleportation in labs.
So with society doing so much advancing, where has all the good speculative science fiction gone? When the real world is more interesting than books, what does that say? Is society just too fascinating for fiction right now, or have we let MTV kill our brain cells?
Kenn McCracken has sworn never again to move in August at least twice.