Barkerburgh

I heard a young man recite this on CNN, during an item on the North Carolina fire that killed several members of the Delta Delta Delta sorority and the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity from the University of South Carolina. He was speaking about his late fraternity brothers.

It’s a little dated - and even sexist, in the sense that it could - and should - apply to women too, in any age, but I like the feel and the flavour of it.

It doesn’t last long enough.
It takes too long.
It lasts just long enough.

There’s no place to put it, or there’s no room for it anyway, or you forget where you put it just when you really need it.
If you ever remember where you did put everything, you never remember where it all was to start with.

It takes too long to get everywhere and there’s never enough time.
It’s always too far from where you are to where everything all is, and then you don’t want to have to come all the way back.

Even if you’re really interested in everything, it’s way too easy to get distracted by everything else.

It’s too small.
It’s too big.

Some of it costs too much.
There’s too much free stuff.

Everybody else is into it all, too.
You have to share everything with everybody else.

The choice of size, colour and style is too broad.

The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
There’s too many parts of the whole.
Each individual part of the sum is as interesting as every other part.

You never remember everything’s name.
The signage is too complicated, if there’s any signage at all.
The instructions are too complicated, if there’s any instructions at all.

If it was a movie, it would probably be a prize-winning foreign film without subtitles.
If it was a book, it would probably be all table of contents, endnotes, appendix, and index.
If it was a game, it would calvinball. Or fizbin.

If it was a computer application, it would be from Microsoft (which would make Bill Gates God, so never mind that one.)

Christians see everything as Christian. Communists see everything as Communist. Bolivians see everything as Bolivian. Mac users - well, Mac users.

Everything’s too high. It’s too long. It’s too much. It’s too good.

If everything was a poem, it would be the Aeneid. All except for the part about finally arriving in Italy, because you never - ever- get to Italy.

There’s too much to choose from in a reasonable amount of time.

In the end, you never find what you really needed anyway.
You never get what you really wanted either.

But somewhere in the chaos of everything, you just might find your heart’s desire. Even if you don’t really quite know exactly what that is. Or just where it might be out there.  Wondering and searching are half the joy of everything.

If everything was time, it would always be about to run out.

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Edited/Improved Monday, October 22, 2007

I’m not entering NaNoWriMo this year, but instead will work on finishing my last year’s project which so many of you contributed ideas to.

I have transferred the research and background notes to MediaWiki - a freakin’ godsend for this sort of thing, as you well know I know well - and will use that to carry on.

I won’t say I’ll hit 50,000 words, but I may very well go over…

There will be much and sincere wishing of luck starting…Now.

…<font title=”Pushing Daisies - seen the premiere thrice - and it kicks - but don’t tell anyone…”>but I can’t talk about the ones I really like, or they’ll get cancelled</font>.

Ever since the Future began in 2001 (January 1st, not September 11th, <i>pace</i> thousands), Reality has been catching up with Science Fiction, IMHO. But Reality’s also been fine-tuning Science Fiction as it goes along.

Face it, slidewalks, city-sized computers to <font title=”mmm, pi crunching…”>crunch pi</font>, or transfer booths might be cool plot devices, but Reality doesn’t have a plot (<i>pace</i> thousands of crazy-ass conspiracy theorists), the natural resources or the laws of physics (that we’re aware of so far…).

D’y'ever read David Brin’s ‘Earth‘? Published in 1985, it took place 50 years into that future, 2035. The title simply means that story action takes place everywhere in, on, and around Earth from the core to orbit. In terms of what he ‘predicted’ for the evolution of a shared global data network (and yes, I know, SF writers don’t predict; they’re storytellers first and foremost), almost everything he imagined (think of this kind of imagining as a type of private, subjective, storytelling-focussed prediction, spare and stripped down) is available now (1985+22) to some lesser or greater degree of sophistication, and then some.

‘So Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, Dave. Where ya headed?’

The Wiki. Brin didn’t call it that, but it’s here already; Wikipedia is probably the most well known example.

For my many soon-to-be-famous SF&F stories, I need to do background development, and occasionally considerable research and development. A while back I had downloaded an interesting looking wiki setup from SourceForge, called Wikka, free and open. I figured it would complement FreeMind, an excellent, simple and easy to learn Java-based (and thus cross-platform) mindmapping application, (like a much easier to learn and use Visio; flowcharting and the like) again from SourceForge. Wikka was okay, but a little like 1985 email, if anyone remembers those anymore. Very Flintstones. MS Word-style GUI functionality is mostly missing for formatting and editing - most commands are things like two apostrophes before and after a text string to italicize it, or two equals signs before and after to bold it. To be fair, wikis are web-based and some Word type highlight-and-click functionality is present, but it’s rudimentary, and sometimes even warmly funny for its earnestness, like a nerd doing a box-step at the prom.

Then, God bless me, I found Mediawiki. It’s the wiki engine that Wikipedia uses, free to download and install. (I’m running an Apache/MySQL/PHP server and it slots right in.) Its back end is more sophisticated than Wikka (and one or two others that I tried) but it’s got a GUI (still a bit too fancy a term for what it is, but hey, we’re living in the Future, not the Future Perfect), and it takes no time to learn.

The ability to order and categorize information, research, ideas, and connections - all interlinked - is built in (that’s one big idea of a wiki, after all) and I can construct glossaries, dictionaries, and encyclopaedias, with tables, images, and lists of all types to help me keep my ideas straight. Granted, one other big idea of a wiki is collaboration, but I like to think of this as a collaboration with myself over time.

MS Word is still the main tool to actually compose the oeuvres, but my beloved Mediawiki helps keep all my ideas straight.

What’s next? Well, I’ve always (insofar as a sentient adult creature with a limited lifespan can use the word) liked the idea of Geordi Laforge’s e-worktable in the engine room on the Enterprise, an IPhone-like touch-screen tabletop for whatever you need to do. Well, just this morning I saw on TV that Microsoft is introducing a prototype Surface Touch-Table, which they’re showing off at a downtown hotel today.

And next after that? The Lost In Space robot, a flying car, the space elevator and immortality.

C’mon, Future!!

If y’all haven’t seen Stranger Than Fiction, with Emma Thompson, Will Ferrell and Maggie Gyllenhaal, then I suggest you do. Sharpish. Here’s Roger Ebert’s review.

I was over at Peter, Leslie and Simon’s (sans Peter, he was off Indiana Jones botanying in Australia) for dinner on Saturday. Leslie made enchiladas and cob-in-the-corn, I visited with her and Simon and then we watched this movie on On-Demand.

I loved it. It’s still spinning through my head.

And no, I don’t like everything. I don’t see many movies and I just really enjoy what I really enjoy.

[SEPT 10, 2007: REID HAS FIXED IT AS FAR AS I CAN TELL…THANKS, REID (THANK GOD THIS TERROR IS FINALLY OVER)]

[REID SAYS HE CAN SEE THE YOUTUBE LINK THAT’S SUPPOSED TO HERE, BUT I CAN’T SEE IT IN FIREFOX OR MSIE]

This guy, Kyle Garchar, is a genius.

This is the Canadian Press story via Yahoo News.

Below is Reid’s attempt to embed the YouTube video.

The other night on CITY there was an hour long documentary on Forrest J Ackerman, the creator and longtime purveyor of Famous Monsters of Filmland, one of my favourite magazines when I was a teen.

I came across the show by accident while surfing. I saw this old Ramses of a living man looking quite chipper and lively all things considered, and thought “I should know who that is…”, and then they id’d him.

Well, I spent the next hour having great flashbacks about the magazine itself, the movies I learned about from it - and often eventually saw, sometimes decades later - and the great ads for movie monster stuff, like rubber masks and costumes, posters, memorabilia and so on, et cetera.

Lotsa fun.

FJA: Did you hear about the new cafe on the Moon? No atmosphere.

I was watching ‘Princess Mononoke’ on YTV when I suddenly remembered I have it on disk somewhere.  I mean, why would I watch an edited TV version with commercials when I  can totally immerse myself in that world for like, what? - 2 hours?

Done.

I had almost forgotten how weirdly trippy the second half of that movie is.  I haven’t watched it for maybe a year and a half / two years and a lot of the imagery that sticks in my mind is from the first half.

Well,  not anymore.  Wow.  The imagery: the heads of the wolf and boar clans, the forest spirit, the kodama (maybe my favourite…), Yakul, and so on, on and on.

and bows and keyboards and frets and woodwinds and…

Happy 14th Anniversary, Urban Tapestry. I’ve only ever heard you live once but you’re still hot.

Y’all should do a calendar!