Notebooks

Warren Ellis has posted up some notes on how he tends his notebooks that I found rather interesting – although I admit I’m a bit of a creative process voyeur.

I’ve also moved back to doing the majority of my brain thrushing with pencil on paper, despite my trusty tablet laptop. My notebook travels snuggly, provides an immediately accessible interface for both text and diagrams, and allows for weird spatial change ups that a word doc can’t carry off.

The truth is though, in the end I need to have everything digitized and skimmable, (most of the actual construction work still happens at the keys after all,) so I tag most of my entries: Scrap, Journal, Blog, Idea, Fodder, etc. My handwriting is tremendously unreadable, but by making a little effort in keeping the tags legible I can use my scanner and some OCR software to translate things into a relatively easy-to-search interface.

Anyhow, his post also reminded me that I’d meant to point towards Lovecraft’s Idea Notebook, which is another enlightening stroll through someone else’s noggin.

Fog Of War

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8653788864462752804&ei=IoYiS9HVCcSXlAfXnNywAQ&q=fog+of+war#]

I don’t often use this platform to push people into illegal activity, but I stand by my statements that Fog Of War is one of the most important, and oddly hypnotic, documentaries produced in the last decade.

Jim Bont

This is a scan from the back of an old Green Lantern comic I had kicking around my office.

The game was so lacking in fun they had to make up a bunch of fake reviews, passed off as comedy, to try and sell it – a ploy so lame that it limps home with “The Boston Orb”, which isn’t even trying to be humourous so much as just not lawsuit inducing.

In the end, despite the fact that it was pretty widely advertised, “James Bond As Seen In Octopussy”, (the official title) never made it to market. There’s a bit of conjecture out there as to what happened, but I’m betting that listening to the  same 8 bars of the Bond theme while murdering an endless supply of generic bandits atop The Möbius Strip Express is something closer to secret agent hell than a game.

Reservoir Poker

The outside of the place was choked in the scent of stale urine – I was relieved to be smothered in cheap cigar smoke as the door clicked shut behind me.

At the end of a long hall I brushed a bead curtain aside, slid a tentative foot into the room.

Suddenly everyone was sitting at attention.

“We don’t like your kind here.” The hairy one growled, his eyes glittering.

“Uh,” I responded, my tongue having stalled.

“Hey – I said it was time to take a walk.” He leaned forward, his pipe shaking between his teeth.

I quickly considered trying to make friends, but a look around the room made it clear no one wanted to shake.

“I’ll let myself out.”

Dogs Playing Poker

Missing Selves

At first it was assumed that he had been raised like a half-wild human in forests, but during many conversations with Mayor Binder, Hauser told a different version of his past life, which he later also wrote down in more detail. According to this story, he had, for as long as he could think back, spent his life always totally alone in a darkened cell about two meters long, one meter wide, and one and a half high, with only a straw bed to sleep on and a horse carved out of wood for a toy.

He claimed that he had found bread and water next to his bed each morning. Periodically the water would taste bitter, and had been apparently drugged: drinking this would cause him to sleep more heavily than usual, and when he had awakened his straw had been changed, and his hair and nails had been cut. Hauser claimed that the first human being he ever had had contact with had been a mysterious man who had visited him not long before his release, always taking great care not to reveal his face to him. This man, Hauser said, had taught him to write his name by leading his hand. After having learned to stand and to walk he had been brought next to Nuremberg. Furthermore, the stranger allegedly had taught him to say the phrase “I want to be a cavalryman, as my father was” (in Bavarian dialect), but Hauser claimed that he had not understood what these words meant. – Kasper Hauser at wikipedia

What’s more interesting though, is that experts seem to agree that he must have made the whole story up. How long have we been taking in foundlings who’ve simply lost themselves?

I’m looking at you, “Piano Man”.

Lately

I’m really just listing these items in the hope that enumerating them will somehow help them pass out of my brain – here’s the stress list from the last two months:
  • My own swine flu infection, with a pregnant lady in the house
  • Fretting over the kids once they’ve contracted swine flu
  • The baby decides to come a month before he’s supposed to
  • A week back and forth to the hospital worrying over the baby
  • Jessica May’s Grandfather is diagnosed with bone cancer
  • Jessica May’s Dad passes after a long illness

Which feels a little like:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M5QGkOGZubQ]

imeem follow-up

Just a quick note I’ve been meaning to post regarding the imeem situation from a while ago.

Sean from imeem was intensely helpful in getting my account business sorted out; once I was back in, I recalled that I’d originally signed up while on a drive to find a service like Pandora (an internet radio/music discovery system) that would work without my having to fake an American citizenship. Imeem definitely meets that standard.

I haven’t spent hundreds of hours listening, yet, but I’m pretty pleased with the band/song selection and the recommendation mechanism.

I am, however, getting a little tired of re-selecting bands I enjoy (I’m looking at you yahoo! music/facebook/etc) – if I had the time I’d buy out personal.info and create a system that does nothing but cross-manage service profiles.