Category: Uncategorized

The lamentably titled Mundane Manifesto outlines what science fiction should and should not be, based on currently accepted science fact. This is a great idea, and one that I wholy endorse. They have an article about how Blade Runner qualifies, and I’d like to take that idea further, creating some kind of comprehensive list of books and movies that qualify. (Maybe this would be a great excuse for a wiki.)

I just wish I could rename the movement before I become part of it.

Link via Slashdot.

I read a personal narrative today about two couples who fell in love with each other and decided to buy a house together as a foursome. This semi-communial type relationship is something that I have often thought about, and it was fascinating to read this first-hand account. It was definitely an interesting story, and really made me feel like I’m only just scratching the surface of what’s possible in terms of human relationships.

I like to examine the edges of my emotions until I feel I have the shape of them firmly in my grasp.

Emotions can be like brightly colored holograms or like dark amorphous piles of oozing goo.

This is mostly pasted out of an email, but written in very general terms, so I don’t feel bad posting it here. I put a lot of thought into it this morning, but then I’d also had far too little sleep at the time… (And no more than now, for that matter.)

All of this is just semantics, but here’s how I look at defining friendship: I define my friends as people I don’t sleep with, and really have no desire to sleep with. People I am “just friends” with, but for whom I also happen to harbor secret (or not so secret) desires to sleep with are categorized (for me) quite differently from standard friends. I like to think of them as potential flings or potential relationships. People who I actually do stuff with have (obviously) graduated into the fling and/or relationship category already. (Not relationship as in the weighty years-long context, but just relationship in that any two people have a relationship together.) Emotions in flings and relationships can get really complicated really fast, and friends are (generally) not complicated relationships–that’s the main reason I don’t like using the word in that context.

I think it’s important to have been friends first (before sex) to really achieve a “friends with benefits” status, and that friendship has to be more powerful (stronger) than whatever sex may end up taking place. In other words, sex has to be fairly meaningless with friends, or they become more than friends, and things get complicated. I just think it’s a fairly rare relationship type, or anyway it is for me.

Another reason “friends with benefits” doesn’t work unless you’ve known each other for a long time is that you take away the benefits, and you’re in danger of losing the friendship. In a real friendship, that potential for loss wouldn’t be there.

Yes, this is all context-less drivel, but that’s all you’re getting for today. I decided last night I should be better about keeping a daily journal, so maybe you’ll get more questionable and/or ambiguous content tomorrow.

Adding to my last entry: There is a fine line between assertive and needy. I don’t know for sure, but I think I am skirting that line. It’s funny, I partially wrote that entry for S, and now when I think of her reading it I cringe. Laura thinks I was definitely being overly melodramatic.

I didn’t unicycle in the parade this afternoon as I had intended to. As an aside, you should really check out this picture of my sister’s new tattoo that I posted to my moblog. It’s a pink iguana with wings, riding on a unicycle. It’s not as blurry as the photo turned out, in fact, it’s super detailed and (I think) pretty cool (at least, cooler than I thought it was going to be from the description I heard). This guy Poohki who is a friend of my brother’s did it, and I think he did a great job.

I’m midway through Richard Morgan’s novel Market Forces and so far it’s pretty good. Damn depressing idea of a future, but also pretty good. I’m going to get back to it now.

Ahh, the chosen few, the loyalists, the stragglers who will read this days or even weeks after I write it… my audience. You either know me well, or you don’t, and I can’t fault you for either.

Perhaps it is time for a bit of the juicy… a bit of the old nasty, a bit of the new nasty. Perhaps it is time I lay it on thick, a layer of too-personal rumination the likes of which this blog has not seen in entirely far too long now.

Where to begin?

I am addicted to OK Cupid and that is S’s fault. S is someone I met a few times at a friend’s various and sultry parties, the most notable time being the one where she spent the evening bare breasted, and culminating (a few weeks ago) in the time where she sat on my lap while I answered quizzes from okcupid until we were both far more sober than we’d expected to be at that particular party.

S and I are now dating.

This is the pinnacle of the roller coaster that is my life. I couldn’t feel more exhilarated about someone. She captures the songbird of my imagination and then sets it loose upon the unsuspecting landscape of my emotion. I don’t even know what this means, but she does it without trying.

And of course there is an emotional cost. As I find myself growing more attached to S, I grow proportionately more aware of the precarious (pernicious?) nature of our relationship, and thus the coffers of my sanity are emptied as I fling coins of myself into the fountain of my own numbskull worry–making pointless wishes about an uncertain future.

What is this agony that keeps me awake at night? Probably it’s just been so long since I’ve dated anyone that I hardly recognize the gut-quivering feeling of just not knowing — what the other person is thinking, planning, intending, when I’ll see them next, or how it will be when I do. S has made some of her lack of intentions clear, (just having gotten out of a relatively important relationship she is very clearly rebounding) and I am certainly not in any position to argue. (Of course how hypocritical if I did; surely my situation with Laura makes things a bit unbalanced in that regard.)

Laura, by the way, has been incredibly supportive and accommodating. I hesitate to say it, but I truly think we’ve reached a new level in our relationship, one where jealousy and petty agitations can take the back seat they deserve. No doubt it helps that she is taking more advantage of the particulars of our arrangement than she has in the past as well.

Writing things down like this helps me sort the thoughts rattling bars in the cages of my brain. Maybe I can find some sleep now that I have the dawn to accompany me.

In a fascinating (but short) article on science fiction and religion, Glenn Harlan Reynolds says:

In the old days, religious pageantry – sometimes enhanced with psychoactive substances of different kinds, or with hypnotic music – was the most exciting thing people were likely to run across in their everyday life. Special costumes, masks, ceremonies, big fancy buildings, and so on all tended to create a sense of separation between the sacred and the ordinary, and to make religious ceremonies stick in people’s minds.

Now movies provide many of the same characteristics, in a more intense form. The synthetic experience of attending a film, with its arresting special effects, meticulously-planned shots and narrative, and music carefully designed to drive viewers’ emotions into the desired state, may have a similar effect, imprinting the message of the film into people’s minds at a level below consciousness, just as religious ceremonies have done for millennia.

I have no doubt this is very true. Now if only there was a science fiction convention every sunday morning…

I just discovered some new author blogs, including my (current) favorite author, Rudy Rucker.

See also Bruce Sterling, Ken MacLeod, and Charles Stross, (who I haven’t yet read, but have on my list).

Well, I haven’t been very good about reviewing, reading, or even writing poems this national poetry month. I would blame it on the work (programming) project I spent sixty or seventy hours on (in the last two weeks), but that would really just be an excuse.

I have lots of crazy stuff happening. I suppose I haven’t mentioned this here, but I have a show in the fringe festival this year. It’s a showcase for unicycling routines, bits from nationals mostly, and I’m just the producer (not much chance I’ll decide to put together a bit for it, but I do have some ideas if it comes down to that). I already have some real world-class talent signed up, (including my sister), and feel confident that it’s going to be a great show.

I’m going to a fringe festival workshop tomorrow where (among other things) we’re going to learn about “promoting your fringe show”.

Last night I went to a midnight showing of the Hitchhiker’s Guide movie, and I thought it was nothing short of phenomenal. They got it very close to the feel of the book, and I think for a lot of people, (myself included), that was the most important thing. The visuals were also exceptional, and I think anyone who thought they didn’t do a good job with the Vogons is seriously on crack.

Anyway, it far exceeded my expectations.

Tonight laura and I watched another excellent movie, Primer, which had been on my list before this, but was coincidentally mentioned in a recent Wired article about George Lucas. (Coincidence because I happened to have read it today.) Supposedly it was filmed on a seven thousand dollar budget. Quite inspirational. Helps that it was also a pretty amazing movie.

Nate and I want to make something. I have to come up with an idea first, and then we need a camera, and then we need a script, and finally, we need to get off our asses…

I spent time this afternoon in a coffee shop installing and configuring SVN on my laptop. It’s a versioning system (simmilar to CVS if you’re familliar with it) and I’ve started using it to keep track of changes in my writing. It’s basically just a backup for files like my various journals that don’t change all that much (other than adding new matterial), but it’ll save me from keeping umpteen-dozen coppies of files around when I’m actually editing short stories and stuff.

I just finished Woken Furies, by Richard Morgan. I always write a bit about each book I finish in a journal I keep for that purpose, and tonight was no different. But rather than scrounge for some poem to review before I head off to bed, I thought I’d just post some of my book review instead.

If you can paint your main character a serial killer, and still have your audience (me) rejoicing when he wins, well, then you can write the shit out of this book. Morgan does bloody, gory, plot-twisting far-future alien thriller like nobody I’ve ever read before. There are quite a few grey areas in my head, some of the fight scenes get a bit muddled at times, and the situation with the minimints, the DeComs, those are underdeveloped, in my opinion, but overall we get a crystal clear picture of all the important stuff in the book–especially Kovaks. And Kovaks is quite interesting. It’s great, because you have what is almost a perfect prism through which to view the story… as an Envoy, he has perfect recall, he sees everything in his peripheral vision, and can call up past memories unbidden when they’re relevent to the plot via a heightened (trained) sense of intuition that isn’t even nearly as hokey as it sounds when I write it. But get this… he isn’t a superman-perfect clone. He’s got his past looming in this novel even more so than the other two, and it rears its ugly head quite a bit before we get to the end.

I’m going to stop my paste-orgy there because I don’t want to add any spoilers, but let it suffice to say that I enjoyed this book at least as much as the other two, while thinking at the same time it had a few more flaws than either of the other two did. I have this half-baked idea that I should write the auther to discuss some of them, but I’m a chickenshit when it comes to that kind of thing. I always seem to convince myself that it means less to me than it does, so I don’t do it. Or maybe it really doesn’t mean all that much to me, (I may have already convinced myself,) and it’s more effort than it’s worth.

Also, I love Morgan’s plot twists. He’s great at them.