The nice guy paradox

Interesting advice: The Nice Guy Paradox [Solved]

Now I know how my parents felt…

…when we in the 1980s started listening to music, putting on clothes, and using slang from their beloved 1950s: Justice - D.A.N.C.E.

Anyone one else want to smack this posers and tell them, “The 80s were shit! Live in your own goddamn era! Make something new, not a tongue-in-cheek rip-off of my childhood! Don’t you want to be remembered as a generation on your own merits!??!”

Seriously, kids today have it so easy! Music kids anyway… If you’re in a band, you can put your music on MySpace and videos on YouTube. Your art buddies can do your Web branding, album art and videos. You can even post explicit material online! A permanent detour has essentially been built around the RIAA. Censorship is damn near a thing of the past. The audio and video a band or artist produces can be as dirty, gross, obscene, profane, blasphemous, or political as you can imagine. Yet the stuff being produced is not even close to as meaty as an Andy Warhol Campbell’s Chicken Noodle soup can print.

No End In Sight

This doco, No End In Sight, is coming out in less than a week, but has anyone heard about it? (I suppose they could be planning a small Internet marketing campaign to give rise to a huge word of mouth campaign.) The trailer is chilling and makes the film out to be a sober and multi-angled look at how and why the war in Iraq went (and still goes) so badly. The bigger question hinted at is “Was it meant to go any better at all?”

Dawn of Dystopia - Chapter 1

Kenichi stirred slowly from his dreamy slumber. Even in the future sunrise was a beautiful sight to behold. As if brushed lightly with diluted yellow paint, the mist-covered post-apocalyptic landscape of broken buildings and charred spires resembled a Bob Ross painting of a pine meadow. Kenichi’s arm instinctively reached for his companion. She’d slept silently next to him. She always did this. She protected him, but needed him to protect her as well.

She wasn’t there! Kenichi was on his feet in 3 milliseconds, his body in an aggressive yet guarded stance. An adrenaline surge automatically activated his cybernetic vision enhancement system. In his eyes, the misty yellow haze evaporated revealing jagged objects and uneven ground. The closer an object was the more it had a blue halo. Faraway things were outlined in red. A green-tinged object was dead-ahead, six or seven meters off. Kenichi parsed its shape instantly, but the untrained eyes might have required a few seconds to process it’s meaning — a few seconds that could have meant life or death.

Kenichi turned his back to the green object. He scanned the land around him from the hill he’d chosen for last night’s campsite. Satisfied that he and the green object were alone for several kilometers, he relaxed, stood up straight, and turned back to face the green object.

It was a creature. He’d seen that much already, but with his adrenaline ebbing he could now see it without the green tinge. He could see how old the thing was…or rather how young. It had big black deer eyes, gray downy fur, four nubby proto-antlers on its forehead, and it wore Spongebob Squarepants Under-roos.

“You need to put that down, son,” Kenichi said in an even tone.

The boy didn’t look up, he kept staring at the unsheathed blade in his hands. Kenichi took a careful, determined step forward.

“I mean it kid.”

“Precious,” the mutant said. “Is this your Precious?”

“Something like that. She’s dangerous. Put her down. Please.” It never hurt to be polite.

(To be continued…)

Should I blog my novel?

What’s the harm in publishing your novel online before you publish it in print? First of all publishing online needs to be put in quotes. Like this: “online publishing”. Second of all, nobody online reads. Therefore you have no readers, but no plagiarizers either. Thirdly, what novel!?

I was inspired to write that based on seeing this headline: Should You Blog Your Novel?.

Then I followed this link in the article to a repository of links to online novels: Na-No-Blog-Mo

I randomly clicked on a few of the listed “online novels” and — NO JOKE! — they ALL started with images waking up, morning, morning fog, or sunrise. They also ALL used some sort of weird time tense that gave the impression that the author himself/herself was unconvinced of his/her own story’s position in time relative to the present time from which he/she was writing. Maybe this was a mental defect, maybe this was a done as if to say, “My story is timeLESS. It could take place anytime and anywhere. In fact I don’t even know if it has happened yet, but one day I hope it does happen…TO ME!” Not the sign of a person who paid much attention in writing class.

The I finally read the original article, the hero of which is one Warren Ellis, an author who has found (according to Jason Boog) the right balance between online publishing and online marketing (”Fuck Harry Potter: the first chapter of CROOKED LITTLE VEIN now available for your perusal.”). His novel, Crooked Little Vein, is now for sale in book-form on Amazon.com.

This situation has inspired me to rant on the non-transferability of the reading experience into a digital format:

We don’t care about reading novels online because a novel is an object. The experience of that object and the words inside of it are what make a novel fun to read — for those of us that read. If we do it in private, we curl up in a comfy chair and take a vacation from the sensory bombardment of the world around us. If we do it in public we are displaying to the people around us that we are interesting — or at least current. There is no room for online novels in either of those situations. Printing out 120 pages onto letter-sized paper is not only a ridiculous waste of our own ink/toner and parchment, it is a totally unsexy experience requiring an industrial stapler or a sheaf of loose leaves that could cut your fingers off. You can get fancy and print it in two parts on a page horizontally so it looks like a book, but there is no substitute for a featherweight, dog-eared, glue-bound paperback.

You may think a book is just ones and zeros now that we live in the future. Music, movies, and photos were once all objects. Now a pocket-sized device can store all three as pure sensory experiences, but the interface between the experience and the person has not really changed. We still use headphones to listen and a screen to watch…(more later)

"1-18-08" finally on Apple Movie Trailers

The trailer for the Bad Robot project that is code-named "Cloverfield" (officially only known by its release date "1-18-08") has finally been officially released on Apple’s Quicktime Movie Trailers page. So now everyone can throw their 2¢ in… What is J.J. Abrams up to!? Is it Godzilla? An adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s "The Call of Cthulhu"? Is Godzilla itself an adaptation Lovecraft’s work!??! Does he know that this date is the 12th anniversary of a really bad day for me???

I will go out on a limb and definitively confirm that the description of the animal that makes the groan/moan/howl is that it looks like a lion…as said by an offscreen character. At the end of the trailer the Statue of Liberty’s head DOES crash into a street in New York City (might be a hipster part of Brooklyn).

Chicago Screen Scene

Liz Armstrong writes a great article — nay! — compiles a useful resource on Chicago screen printers. I like this example by Keith Herzik. Really cool stuff…

How to make this work for me…

Wow, a lot of people were interested in data I posted on teh mysterious trailer attached to teh Transformers movie. Maybe I should nefariously work in references to it in every post from now on. Or to whatever may be teh hot topic du jour…

Gas (petroleum, petrol, fuel, auto booze, car crack, vehicle venom) prices are very high these days…Chicago actually leads teh nation with teh highest average, I believe. I guess that gives us teh award for dumbest drivers…or it gives us teh most hypocritical mayor (Da Mayer, Richard M. Daley, His Royal Highness, The Corruptest Douchebag at City Hall) cuz he wants us to think he’s all “green” and shit fer puttin’ gardens on rooves…I think he’s more like Al Green, singin’ a pretty song and doin’ a clever dance so we ferget how ridiculously chaotic and pathetic and loserish and filthy and scummy and stuff our real lives is…But seriously, how would ChiTown survive without him?

Climate change (formerly known as “global warming”) is obviously responsible for teh crazy heat, wild fires (wildfires), lower lake levels, increased hurricane activity, and ridiculously chaotic and pathetic nature of my sex life. What is your excuse for not getting any?

What is with teh political presidential candidates and their haircuts/wives with cancer/pasts of smoking and snorting dope/huge over-sized labia/no chance in hell of winning these days??? Seriously!??!

News: Sex is healthy. World: OMG WTF!?!

You know those muscles you have? The ones that are…down there? Use ‘em or lose ‘em says an article on MSNBC. Also:

The more you use your pelvic muscles, the more they stay in shape. And if you don’t use them, they will atrophy and sex can become painful.

‘Nuff said. Who needs a workout partner?

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