Between various despotic and autocratic pseudo-communist regimes using the word “decadent” to describe anything they didn’t like (including the corrupt Western idea that you need to eat food or you’ll die) and the way modern megacompanies plaster the word “decadent” on anything they want to charges you an extra 20 percent on because it’s so “sinful” (Try our sinful, decadent, indulgent douche rinse now!), the word “decadent” and, by extension, the entire concept of decadence has taken quite a beating in the last century or so.

Add in the historical complications created by a Catholic church that condemns decadence from a triple-gilded and bejeweled Vatican, and the equally crazy Protestant extremists declaring war on any idea that life should be even slightly pleasant for even a second in its name, and it’s no wonder that the very word has disappeared from the living language.

Nevertheless, I think it is a valid concept, and something to be understood so that it can be guarded against and avoided whenever possible.

The problem is not that it is not a valid concept but that it has been used without being properly defined and hence used in so many different context that it loses all meaning.

Here, then, is what I consider to be the proper definition of decadence.

But first, I am afraid, we need to start with Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.

It looks like this :

As always, click to enlarge

Those of you who have taken Psych 101 or Philosophy 101 in college have probably seen it before. It’s a very simple idea : that human being have a great many drives/needs besides the basic biological ones needed to keep us alive, and that these can be arranged in a rough pyramid, with the lower levels in large needing to be satisfied before an individual can concentrate on higher levels.

A classic example that anyone can understand is that if someone is starving to death, they are going to spend most of their time thinking about food instead of, say, whether their clothes are in fashion.

But while we all understand that level of the hierarchy, what we almost always fail to see is that this progression does not end with the usual amenities of middle class life, and that satisfying the needs on one level inevitably brings the ones of the next level into sharper focus. Thus, satisfying one level can actually make a person feel less happy, as now the needs of the next level are crying out to be filled.

The worst consequences come from when people, for whatever reason, cannot acknowledge or satisfy the newly awakened needs of the next higher level, and instead attempt to drown out the pain of the higher level need with the pleasures of the current level.

My definition of decadence, therefore, is this : the misguided attempt to satisfy a higher-level need via lower-level means.

The classic example of decadence serves this definition well : the excesses of ancient Rome.

We all know the stories. Orgies, feasts, palaces, vomitoriums, in a never-ending cycle that grow more and more obscene and grotesque until whole villages were burned simply to provide a backdrop for the next horror of decadent excess.

But if you look at Maslow’s chart, you will see that for all their attempts to make themselves happy, all they were doing was hyper-saturating their lower desires while completely ignoring the vast amount of the pyramid above them.

That is what drives the excess. The more the lower level needs are satisfied, the more painful the denial of higher level needs becomes, but without a way to acknowledge let alone satisfy higher level desires, the only remedy for the pain is to increase the dosage on the lower level pleasures.

This is akin to what would happen if you try to treat your broken arm by taking painkillers. The condition worsens and more and more painkillers are needed to function, and it’s clearly not a long-term solution. But if you can’t get to a hospital…

This is also what leads to the highly modern phenomenon of the person who “has everything” and finds themselves still unhappy. They did everything they were supposed to do, and have the nice house, the good job, the car, the spouse, the kids. But they are still not happy.

How can that be? It must mean there is something very wrong with them, right?

Wrong. Look at the chart. All those “American Dream” things only take you so far up the pyramid, and “having it all” actually just makes you feel your lack of success in satisfying the higher needs all the more keenly.

In fact, one of the most shocking and heretical conclusions that follow directly from my understanding of decadence and human needs is that money can only take you so far.

The higher up the pyramid you go, the less effective money is at satisfying the need. Money is great for providing your biological needs, and pretty good for providing high quality safety, shelter, physical pleasure, entertainment, and so on.

But once you start thinking about needs like feeling connected to your community, happiness in your personal relationships, and self-actualization, wealth can help with these a little bit, but they are going to be far more strongly determined by aspects of your own personality and character, and those of the people in your life.

And when wealth becomes great enough, it actually can actively work against some or all of your higher level needs being fulfilled by providing you with so much short term pleasure to distract you and isolating you from most of the rest of humanity.

And that is where decadence truly takes its toll. When a person is stuck on a lower level, the inevitable result will be increasing unhappiness, even despair, no matter how thoroughly they satisfy their lower level needs.

Once you understand this principle, a lot of middle class and upper class problems become fair more clear and easy to understand.

There is no final happiness…. only satisfying one level and starting on the next.

Anything else is just mindless decadence.

First, start with a main character your target audience will identify with, namely someone in their early to mid twenties who is either just out of college or just about to graduate at the beginning of the movie.

As our movie begins, have some profound but mundane personal tragedy occur to them. Someone they know dies, a long term relationship breaks up, they lose their job, they do something crazy in a moment of uncharacteristic extreme emotion that completely derails their life. It has to be something that your audience can identify with, so keep it realistic.

The unrealistic, possibly science fictional or magical realistic element will come in later.

During or after the mundane personal tragedy with which you open your original indie movie, you show your main character’s mundane, crappy life. Their crummy apartment in the city, their weird roommate, their colorful but believable friends and/or co-workers, their jerk of a boss, maybe a parent or two.

The idea is to paint a portrait of their lives as being just like your target audience’s lives, so the movie will feel like it is really about them. To this end, work in themes of not being able to get a job with your impractical college degree, feeling alienated in a world that you don’t get and who doesn’t get you, and if possible, work in music from your friends’ indie bands and references to whatever graphic novels you like.

Once you begin to need to have a plot, introduce your unusual, magic-realist element. This not only provides a hook for what otherwise would be obviously just another indie movie, but keeps the audience interested while you slowly work through your basic romantic plot.

Yes, your breathtakingly original indie movie that Hollywood could never make because they are too busy making the next “talking animals make poop jokes” classic will, in actually, just be a standard romance movie in different clothes and locations.

But first, you need that hook. It will have to be something strikingly odd and visually arresting that your main character, in order to show how cool and indie your movie is, will treat somewhat or entirely casually, like this is odd but not big deal.

Also, it should be something with a really obvious metaphorical nature. Your main character feels abandoned and ignored? They discover they can disappear into a magical realm where they are important. Betrayed and disillusioned by someone turning out to be a much worse person than previously thought? They discover they can now see the hidden demons that cause all the evil in the world.

Things like that.

Oh, and don’t worry about firmly establishing whether this is really happening or whether it’s just the main character losing his or her mind in a particularly cinematic way. Your audience will interpret your creative laziness in not making up your mind either way as carefully chosen ambiguity that shows how much you respect their intelligence because you are not spoon-feeding them the answers, but leaving your audience to make up their own minds about how real it all is.

This excuse has worked for at least fifty years, and shows no sign of wearing out, so don’t worry, you are covered.

As for the plot, if you have seen even one romance movie in your life, you already know exactly what the plot arc will be. Your main character meets someone, falls in love with them, they grow closer through most of the arc of the film, then near the end, there will be a sitcom style misunderstanding that drives them apart and prompt your main character to have to do a big grand romantic gesture, often referencing lots of little details from their relationship as shown up till now (“I checked every store in town for that brand of dental floss you said you liked, and when I finally found it…. I bought the whole case!”) in order to make your audience go “awww!”.

This romantic gesture will not seem to work at first, in order to drag out the tension that once extra beat, but then it will totally work, and the film will end with our two lovers finally totally getting together, for real, with an implied happily ever after.

Oh, and because your indie movie is “realistic”, you will need to sprinkle in some “realistic” awkward moments in the relationship, you know, like the ones you never see in movies, assuming you haven’t seen anything made after 1960 or so.

Oh, and to prove your indie cred, be sure to use as much weird cinemetography and unusual editing choices as possible. Track from a rooftop conversation to one on the street below. Have your character fall out of a window and land in bed, asleep. Why? Because you’re outside of the box, man! You’re free! You can do whatever you want! So you’re obligated to show everyone that you know it and give the film school types something to babble on about in their faux-industry lingo.

Well there you have it. Throw in some hip pop-culture laden comedy for your comic-relief everybody but the two leads, a B plot line for whatever character seems the most audience friendly, and you have yourself a brand new breaktakingly original, impossible to make in Hollywood, fresh and groundbreaking indie movie.

You know, just like all the other ones you like!

Been slowing learning the details of the rioting in London, and been talking about it with some friends, some British, some not, and it’s brought a lot of thoughts to mind about how these sort of things can happen, and what they mean.

A lot of people are wondering what the hell happened to make a whole generation of young people willing to riot like this. The news is full of interviews with rioters displaying their extraordinarily ugly vocabulary, mindset, stupidity, ignorance, and general vileness.

It’s easy and natural to lay it all at these people’s feet, and a lot of people are going to be drawing the wrong sort of conclusions as to what makes someone like that.

“Oh, we were too soft of them!” people will say. “Obviously, what these young people need is more harshness and cruelty in their lives, that always makes people more civilized. ”

It’s the shortest distance out of really thinking about things, and the quickest route to the fun of good deep righteous punitive anger. String them up! Yeah!

After all, chavs, and their equivalents worldwide, are horrible on nearly every level. They seem almost designed to make middle class people recoil in horror. There is little difference between the people rioting in London and the ones entertaining the masses on Jersey Shore every week.

But if we do not want these things to occur again, or spread to our own shores, we have to ask ourselves how people get like that. How do you get these ignorant, angry, ugly, stupid, senseless, violent people in the first place? What made them like that?

I have seen these people in my own home town, and talked to them, and thought about their lives and how they ended up like that, and I think I know.

Many people will blame government assistance, and in a sense they are right, but not in the simple-minded punitive rageful way they think. The problem is the long-term dependance that necessitates the assistance in the first place.

Being unemployed is depressing. Depression makes people less capable of work. Chronic unemployment in a region simply intensified this cycle. People lose the ability to hope for work or even to think of themselves as capable of work.

Long enough on public assistance, and they, being human beings, adjust to their new existence. You can only hope for a job for so long before that hope has to die before it kills you. And when that vital link to society known as work is gone, people lose their ability to cope. Human beings have a deep, driving need to take their place in society. When society says “We have no place for you, here’s a check, go away” it causes a kind of pain that drives people crazy in a very nasty, deep way.

The drive and intelligence dies in them, or is focused on the one form of advancement by merit left open to them, namely finding new and innovative ways to scam more money out of the system. Hope dies, and with it, the ability to progress as a person.

This is bad enough when it happens to adults with life experience to fall back on, memories of times when they were accepted into society and made to feel useful.

But if the problem persists, said adults raise children who inherit this profound lack of hope, who have never lived in a working family, and who grow up in the resulting milieu of drug use, alcoholism, sexual excess, domestic violence, abuse, and all the other horrible results of chronic poverty and unemployment.

When people can’t find work, they can’t grow up. It’s truly that simple. And so they end up suspended in a perpetual angry adolescence, filled with rage they don’t know how to name at a society they know is to blame but can’t explain how.

Society failed them. That doesn’t make them any less responsible for their crimes, but it does lead to a possible solution.

We have to recognize, as a society, as a globe, that chronic unemployment is an emergency-level problem. People going jobless for a long time is a crisis that goes far beyond simply feeding and clothing them.

We have allowed the system to collect these people with the best of intentions, but without the understanding and vision to know that what people need is not just cash, but work.

Hire them. Put them to work. And not just “dig a hole and fill it up” work, get them doing something with visible results, something where they can feel a sense of accomplishment, like they earned their paycheck by contributing to society.

FDR had the right idea. Public works. Those men built things people would use for generations, things that are still in use today.

Sure, some of them will balk at first. They are terrified to hope that they can actually have a place, a real place, in society. They have grown used to the sad life of the unemployed. They see attempts to get them to work as attempts to make them grow up.

And they are right.

But it’s the only cure. And in the long run, it is far cheaper to put them to work than to put them in jail.

We just have to be willing to see past our anger and disgust, slow down our urge to punish and control, and address the real problem.

People need work. And when the private sector fails them, the public must step in.

I had originally planned on doing something more coherent, serious, and possibly even editorial today, but then I decided to get caught up on my Twitter feed, and then suddenly I had all these awesome stuff to share, so guess what?

More random stuff shall be flung at your eager noggins today, so be prepared to either open wide or duck.

For instance, here’s a simply eye popping visual from the world of science, specifically, the fun you can have with super powerful rare earth neodymium magnets.

WARNING : The following video is rated NSFICP (Not Safe For Insane Clown Posse) :

I really want a copper tube and a big ol magnet like that now. That’s really happening, folks, no special effects, no video tricks, no strings, wires, mirrors, or sleight of hand. Just a strange and wonderful interaction in between the extremely strong magnetic field coming from the magnetic and, I am guessing, the impurities in the copper in the tube (copper being non-megnetic, if I recall correctly) which create just enough tug to make the magnet fall at a slow, majestic pace.

I don’t blame the fellow in the clip for saying he could do that all day. It is mesmerizing. To see something which seems so wrong and yet so beautiful fills me with a sense of wonder at this weird wacky wonderful world of ours.

It also gives me the idea of creating a sort of dynamic art piece, where a clear vacuum tube brings the magnets up to be dropped into a clear tube (yes, the hard part would be making a clear tube with the right spacing of ferrous rings to recreate this effect) and float back down again. It would make a marvelous visual, completely arresting. I could see such a rig being mass produced for the sort of market that buys other visual toys, although the magnets alone would make the thing fairly expensive.

But imagine just watching the magnets falling like they are in space… it would be would amazingly cool objet d’art.

Moving along, we have this rather neato little chart of what the sounds familiar animals make sound like to people who speak many different major world languages.

I am fascinated by the study of onomatopoeia around the world. After all, languages vary wildly in their approach to the problem of communication between humans, and for the most part, there is little commonality that is meaningful to us non-linguists.

But with onomatopoeia, we have a common starting point. One of the first things we learn as children is what sound the cow makes. Why? I think it is a sort of proto-language development step. After all, when we are small, we are much closer to being little animals than we are to being adult humans, and we are intensely curious about how all the other little animals talk.

And we take advantage of this, as adults, by using it as a way to engage our little ones in their first exercises in associating an image with a sound, which is exactly what we will want them to do when they learn to speak, read, and write.

Going back to the chart, the most variation seems to be in the dog sounds, which, as a friend pointed out, makes sense, because dogs come in a far larger variety of shapes and hence sounds than cat, ducks, or cows.

But for the most part, we are looking at the same basic sound represented in the phonemes of various different languages. Nobody out there thinks a dog goes “wooolah woolah” or a duck makes a sound like “hoooooooogah” or anything like that.

Good to know that we all have some things in common, isn’t it?

Finally, we have this rather extraordinarily epic piece of My Little Pony : Friendship Is Magic fan video, called simply PONIES : The Anthology.

Be patient, it seems like nothing is happening at first, but at about a minute and a half in, things kick off.

Oh, and there’s some fucking swearing, so you will just having to fucking deal with it.

In form, it’s rather like those Anime Hell or YouTube Poop videos, but less about abusing your brain and more about having a lot of fun with video editing, pop culture references, and (presumably) like totally every episode EVER of the show.

It’s really amazing how good people are getting at syncing the mouth animations from cartoons to pre-existing audio, isn’t it?

It’s getting to the point where you can make your own original cartoon show just from frames from another show.

Hmmmmm. Nah, too much work.

Hello, welcome, bienvenue, vilkommen, and how the hell are ya? Welcome to another Sunday’s worth of content even less serious than my usual frivolity and drivel! Stuff so silly that I just had to call it foobles, or “foobs” as they are known to their small but tightly-knit community of friends, and proceed to make every Sunday’s column a paean to all in the world that is delightful, adorable, ridiculous, fantastic, or just plain fun to look at.

In that spirit, we will open with a dog who has, by canine standards, pulled way out ahead of the pack in terms of sleep efficiency.

And now, Rex does his impression of a Jawa

And doesn’t he look pleased with himself? And rightfully so, he gets to cuddle up in his cage in his favorite blanket and does it all in one smooth, elegant motion. I’m sure if there were other dogs around, they were suitably impressed. I know I am.

I’d guess that he did this once entirely by accident, and his owners saw it, and made sure to put his blanket atop the cage the exact same way from then on, and realized, as all modern pet owners do at least once, “the Internet must see this. ”

And on behalf of all of us who have enjoyed this little clip….. thanks!

Next up, we have a cute and comical little concatenation of nerdity.

You shall click to enlarge. These are not the droids you are looking for. We may pass.

As a comedy form, this sort of “Impact bold on screenshots” kind of thing has been the common grist for the Internet LOL mill for a long long time, but this one charmed me more than this sort of thing usually does.

I think it’s the punchline that does it. Lots of people do the “hey, these two things!” comedy and do it badly, but adding the third thing, and almost as importantly, keeping it nice and short and simple, makes this one a cut above the throng.

I mean, when you can thread together Star Wars, Lord of the Rings, and Monty Python in a way that is clever and funny, you are officially, in my books anyhow, a Geek of Note.

And speaking of clever and funny, here’s an example of someone taking the art of funny sign writing to the next level :

You, sir, are one funny son of a batch

Granted, the comedy form of “implied dirty word” is quite common and trendy lately, but still, I like this one. For one, it’s modernized with the bringing in of that ever so modern source of comedy, smartphone spell checkers and word completion “assistants” which often subvert the intended meaning in funny and sometimes horribly inappropriate ways.

But from the point of view of a true comedy nerd like moi, the real art is in structuring the joke so that the payoff is on the very last word. If you can do that, and maintain a good natural flow of language, then you are a long way towards being a quality jokesmith instead of just someone with a funny idea.

Next up, an image for the next time you think you have the worst job in the world.

It could be worse.

You could be this guy.

"Finally found my boss' head!"

I don’t know why the hell he’s up there, but I have watched (and read) enough All Creatures Great and Small to hazard a guess : presumably, Jumbo there has something very wrong way up in there, and it was way less invasive to get to it from the inside than to cut through a lot of elephant to get at it from the outside.

I can only imagine that our intrepid veterinary spelunker has a light like on a miner’s helmet and his own oxygen supply in there.

Now that image was fucked up. Granted. But that’s just me warming you up for this next image, which I just have to share with you all because…. well, look at it.

Oh, and roughly as NSFW as the last pic, depending on how your workplace feels about flaccid deer wang urinating…. clouds?

The mind boggles

Now that’s some serious WTF right there. There is so much going on in this pic, it defies analysis. I mean, you have Mister T as a toddler, and someone possibly experiencing apotheosis via their eyeballs, and of course Bambi pissing (on) a bush….

Whoever made this, they have gone considerably beyond the normal bounds of fetishism or obsession and have created something very much like religion with this pic.

Assuming, of course, that this pic is real art, and not just someone throwing together a bunch of stuff to make people go WTF.

No, even someone doing that could not come up with the above pic.

Truly, the Internet tubes are filled with more miracles and wonders than are dreamed of in your philosophy, Horatio.

Because your philosophy sucks.

Seeya next week, foob fans!

You know, kidderlings, it’s never an easy task for me, your humble science reporter (well, accumulator, anyhow), to choose which of the Super Totally Awesome Neato Science Stories he has accumulated over the past week’s time to share with you. Science is just plain awesome, and having to winnow down the field to just a few is often harder than osmium steel.

But this week is special. There are just so many incredibly cool stories that even hit on my own specific special interests (I have a lot of those) that I am going to have to just load up the blunderbuss of science and shoot them at you gangsta style.

Ready? No? Good, let’s go.

Let’s get the ball rolling with sex. Or rather, the grim and horrible specter that took a lot of the fun out of it, AIDS.

We’re getting close to have that sumbitch beaten, at least on points, and now there’s a $1 microchip that can test for HIV in fifteen minutes
coming soon.

Is that not enormous bags of awesome? Seriously, one drop of blood, fifteen minutes time for analysis, boom, tells you if you have AIDS. Also does syphilis. And it’s the size of a credit card, with no need for a human interpreter and an accuracy rate about the same as a lab. And all for a buck.

My dream is that we can get back to the sexual liberation of the seventies before AIDS came along to wreck the party. Imagine a sex club where they tested people before letting them in. I think people would be willing to wait 15 minutes for an orgy, don’t you?

OK, what else…. well, it wouldn’t be a true FSR without some self-driving cars!

Granted, it’s not going to be on the road till 2020 and hence we are still in the blue-sky WTF BBQ stage, but still, GM has plans to make a two-person self-driving highly futuristic pod-car (NO POD RACES) and has made some neat looking prototypes for the press.

In terms of scientific progress, it’s little more than a PR stunt, but in terms of illustrating the powerful forces in play behind the self-driving car future, it kicks an entire burro ranch’s worth of ass.

What else… oh! In terms of sheer hardcore nerdity, the current champion is the rather amazing fellow who, no bull, built his own damn electron microscope.

Granted, it only does 50x magnification and not the 1000x that the big boys do, but seeing as he built it basically in his back yard for around $1500 (plus 100 hours of his own labour, but it’s a labour of love) and the big boys start at $250,000 and only go up from there, it’s still a staggeringly significant achievement.

That’s one of the things that makes this era we live in so exciting for us science buffs is these tool revolutions that completely break the rules on how much money you need to do serious big deal science. That’s going to throw the field wide open for millions of amateur scientists to get into the game and propel science and technology faster than ever before.

Just what we need to invent ourselves out of the problems we invented ourselves into!

Or how about a total revolution in computer graphics? A new way of looking at the problem of rendering 3D environments could lead to a radical leap in detail level.

The technology is rather provocotively called Unlimited Detail, and the idea is this : instead of building objects out of polygons, like we do now, you build them out of virtual atoms, millions of them per (virtual) square inch.

But that would take way too much CPU to do even a very small virtual area, so the genius of this guy’s method is that it only renders the atoms needed to produce a certain angle of view. Thus, the number of atoms to render is vastly reduced.

Of course, the people behind this technology have a unique problem : how do you prove your amazingly realistic computer graphics are not, in fact, just some digital video that you shot with your camcorder?

What an odd little gully in that big Uncanny Valley, huh? The only solution I can see is to do hyper realistic renders of things that simply do not exist. Nobody can claim you just used your camcorder to capture video of a giant space monster snorting cocaine off the Brooklyn Bridge, now, can they?

Speaking of which, let’s do one more line of science then call it a night : the Chinese have discovered the world’s largest fungus.

The sucker is half a ton and 33 feet across. It was found eating rotting wood under a tree in China, which allowed it to get so damn huge.

Now like all the things we think of as mushrooms and fungi, the above-ground bulbous part is actually only there to produce and launch spores. Its function is purely reproductive.

So yes kidderlings, what we have long suspected is actually true : fungi are actually giant bulbous sexual organs.

And now China has the biggest one.

Symbolically speaking, we are all screwed.

Seeya next week, folks!

After the initial emotional aftermath^[1] of the recent breakup of my three week relationship with someone not worth naming, I am feeling the increasing stirrings of my long-smoldering desire to do something more than these meandering missives with my considerable talents.

Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy writing my little article each day. It gives my mind and creativity much needed exercise, it lets me try new things and explore my ideas, and most importantly, it gives each day a sense of purpose and direction and makes me feel like I am doing something with my life, that there is a point to all of this, and I am not just biding time until I die, waiting for life to start.

For someone with my kind of mental and physical issues, purpose is more important than life.

But this doing 750 or so words a day about whatever was never supposed to be a destination, just a stopped point between the massive accomplishment of the Million World Year and that misty mystic mystery known as Whatever Comes Next.

I should know better than to give myself an out like that. Complacency is my worst enemy. Sometimes, the ability to adjust to anything and get by on very little is a bad thing. It makes it far too easy to settle for far, far less than what you really need.

Sometimes, the best thing in the world for you could be something that makes you very angry or sad in the short term…. if that pain spurns you to finally do the things that will make you far more happy than you were before the painful event.

I really feel like this recent romantic misadventure, though it ended in pain and anger and sadness and bitter disappointment, also helped to clear out the emotional deadwood in my soul, like a prairie brush fire, and after that, came a cleansing rain of tears.

I am still not “over it” entirely. That will take a while yet. But I am over the worst of it and feeling feisty and pugilistic.

So I am trying, in my sideways and inconstant way, to get a thing or two done on some more ambitious projects I have been thinking about lately, and see if I can “do the next thing” already instead of just treading water like I normally do.

One idea I am poking around is the idea of started my own “fake news” type online magazine. I tried this a little bit once before, ages ago, but it never really went anywhere.

But I have a name, The Naked Eye, and its tagline, Your Source For Objective Reality, and the basic idea that it would be, in a tongue in cheek way, an incredibly snide and self-assured news magazine, in the style of a top flight news rag like Time or Newsweek. It would feature “fake news”, fake columns, fake sports, and so forth and so on in order to provide a platform for a lot of different kinds of comedy written entirely, at least at first, by yours truly.

The idea would be to set it up like the website for Time magazine, with all kinds of little cubbyholes that need filling, and hence to provide an open-ended (as opposed to once daily) creative stimulus.

The faster I come up with enough content for launch, the sooner I launch, and so there is incentive there as well. It would give me a reason to just write like hell.

Of course, there will still be the sticky issue of promoting the darn thing. Oh well, one thing at a time.

Another thread : pitching an idea for a radio show to CBC radio.

I already have a show in mind, an idea for a short skit comedy series I had last year during the Million Word Year, as detailed here.

Luckily, those darling people at the Ceeb have an open pitch process , and while the response time is three months and the odds against my pitch being successful are considerable, I have enough confidence in my ideas and my talents to think I at least have enough of a shot to be worth bodging together a proposal and binging it to then via email, and doing my best to then completely stop thinking about it.

After all, I can put together a funny and compelling pitch document.

I just have to snap out of this summer vacation mentality and get down to it.

No, this isn’t the opening section to a brand new snazzy tabletop RPG, after where they explain to you what an RPG is and what dice are (in case you’re a moron from space) but before the cool part where they list all the spells and superpowers and stuff.

This is about the other kind of character building, the kind your parents talked about, invariably when forcing you to do something incredibly unpleasant.

“It builds character!” they said, as if that meant something other than “I’m in charge and so there’s no way I’m gonna be the one to clean the gutters, chump. ”

“Screw character, I want to build a LEGO fort!” we defiantly retorted, right to their faces, in our minds, as we sullenly got out the rake.

But as it turns out, like with a lot of the crazy and apparently nakedly self-serving nonsense our parents babble at us when attempting to raise non-axe-murdering children, there is an important nugget o’ truth in there that is worth learning, if only they had bothered to actually explain what the hell they were talking about.

What they meant when they said “It builds character!” is something roughly like this : “as hard as it may be to believe, the ability to just do things you don’t want to do without a lot of time and energy wasted whining or foot-dragged is actually amazingly important in life, and the sooner you develop this ability to basically get the hell over yourself and get the job done, the better off you will be when you leave the nest and go out on your own, my dear child, whom I love more than life itself. ”

You can see why this is a bit much to explain while heading out the door to run a million errands on a Saturday morning.

Sure, by definition, we don’t want to do things we don’t want to do. Duh. But all of life involves doing exactly that. If you try living a life where you don’t do anything that you don’t want to do, you end up having a lot of things you don’t want happening to you, and not getting nearly anything that you actually do want, and brother, that sucks way worse.

Your parents, being, as it were, advance scouts into the world of adulthood and reality for their children, know this truth intimately (you think they want to be running your butt to soccer instead of popping a brewski in front of the bigscreen? or hell, go to work five days a week to pay for your, you know, everything?) and in their fumbling way are trying to pass that lesson on to you and save you a lot of what they had to go through in order to grow up and get on with life.

There is always things that you don’t want to do, but you want the result of doing it, so it’s do them or do without. That’s as true of going to work at a kinda sucky job every day as it is of going to the kitchen to make yourself a sandwich and risk missing the last five minutes of House. Even rich people end up doing things they don’t particularly want to do because they want the results of doing it.

Like appearing on reality TV programs, for instance.

And if you have already decided that you want something bad enough to do what it takes to get it, there’s no point in wasting time and energy and wear and tear on your pouting muscles fucking around about it.

You are way, way ahead of the game if you can just go and do it, and save yourself a lot of grief, and the ability to do that is what is meant when people talk of “character”. Like all skills, it gets easier with practice, and if you are smart, you learn that when you are young enough to use it to get ahead and get more out of life than your whiny, foot-dragging, time-wasting friends at school.

It’s really just about making your actions match your intentions. Sure you don’t feel like doing it and you wish you didn’t have to do it to get what you want, but you want the result bad enough, so why waste time?

Just do it, and get on with your life.

And that, believe it or not, is what they were going on about when they told you that doing something “builds character”.

They really were trying to help you.

Don’t you think maybe you owe them an apology?

Today’s been…. different, so I am in an unusual mood for me.

Not a good one, either.

Until today, I kind of had a boyfriend.

Today, I got dumped.

Hey look, Coppola’s new flick is a creepy horror film called Twixt.

Well hey howdy there, buckaroos, you already got my attention by having my chaise lounge lizard hero Tom Waits doing the narration. And then you got Val Kilmer looking like some kind of mutant cloned from the sweat of Steven Seagal’s left nut and sounding kind of like Michael MacKean in the lead.

I sort of feel like the trailer told me more of the plot than I really needed to know, but that’s the way with movie trailers these days, isn’t it?

He dumped me over email. Classy.

But it looks like a spooky supernatural mystery story, which is a subgenre I absolutely love. Where the supernatural elements are used to slowly and eerily unwind a tale of evil secrets incompletely scabbed over by the veil of history and obscurity and left to fester in that supernatural realm that, in fiction at least, exists as a layer between reality and the dark and dusty halls where all that we suppress molders in unmarked crates and unread files, growing blind groping tentacles of grey-furred fungus that seek the light without being able to see, driven only by their hate and their need to, finally, be seen.

The local kids seem especially loud and raucous tonight. That’s always a sure sign that summer is past its prime and all the residual civilization from the previous school year has left their bloodstreams and the unfettered freedom that was such a joy a month ago is now a fever that clogs the blood.

To call him my ex-boyfriend might, I admit, be a bit of a stretch. After all, yesterday was the first (and likely last) time we’ll meet in the flesh, such as it is, and Internet romance is nothing like the real thing, as we all should know by now.

Check this out. They’re going to have a marathon where you get chased by zombies.

But for the last three weeks or so, I had been IM-ing (no way to spell that which looks right) with this guy and he had, through persistence and sweetness and compatibility, managed to slip through my thick, caked-on, soapy psychological defenses and coaxed me out of my rusty old shell and got me to think that maybe, possibly, there was someone out there who could both know me and love me.

Nope. Met me and the dumped me. That feels nice.

The way the zombie marathon works is simply enough : you have your marathoners (that’s what they like to be called, those weirdos) and your zombies, and the marathoners all have a ribbon stuck to their chests which represents their “life”, and the zombies have to try to snatch that “life” away.

Must me nice to have one to lose in the first place.

And the marathon course is through woods and urban areas with obstacles and such set up, to make it all as Romero-approved as possible.

Do you have any idea how hard it is for anyone to get truly close to me, even if it was just two writers scribbling to each other in the dark? I am very good at staying at arm’s length from people and protecting this big bruised peach of a heart of mine, while giving all the impression of being sweet and open and funny and warm and wonderful.

Which I am. To a certain depth.

And the thing is, he found me. He found my profile on okcupid.com, liked it, emailed me, we emailed back and forth for a while, then started with the Google chatting, and I thought things were going pretty good. We have an awful lot in common, with a lot of the same values and priorities and outlook. We found ourselves in remarkable accord on many things, and I felt like I had quite possible found a kindred spirit. We knew each other’s deep down fucked up secrets and neither of us ran away screaming. He expressed much ardent desire for me on many levels. I have never experienced that kind of attention in the real world. It was working.

But then he met me, and guess what? Game over.

There is but one glitter of silver treasure amongst the broken and eroded wreckage of a once great temple to an obscure but mighty god that is my heart right now : this pain, despite how deep it bites and how cold its teeth, lets me know I am alive.

More so than usual, anyhow.

At least I am feeling something real, and hence, feeling real.

There are worse things to feel than pain.

Had a long day which I will blog about tomorrow (don’t worry, it’s all good stuff!), but today I am tres fatigue and so I have nothing more to offer all you wonderful reading people other than some fun stuff culled from my Twitter feed et al, accompanied, as always, by my sparkling and highly listenable commentary.

Note : these are not foobles. Those are on Sunday. The very idea.

First up, a piece about one of my favorite artists in the world, Theo Jansen, and his simply mesmerizing quasi-living creations.

Ignore the Wallace and Gromit angle (the show sucks, seriously) and the rather fatuous tone of the voiceover, and just listen to the man describe his process and look upon his amazingly haunting and beautiful strandebeests.

It’s like he is creating life, inventing it even, though art and nature and simple mechanisms instead of via biology. With every generation, his pieces become more efficient, more elaborate, more elegant, and more eerily lifelike.

A lot of people find them creepy or even downright disturbing, and I totally understand that. In fact, I can’t say I disagree. They are definitely alien and crypto-living and yet somehow very wrong in a way we might not even have the words to describe.

But to me, there is also something achingly, chillingly, thrillingly beautiful about them. Every time I watch the video, I get this strong urge to just follow them down the beach. Maybe some bizarre, alien part of me wants to join their herd. I don’t know.

Of course, part of the problem with truly modern art like this is that you can’t exactly buy it and stick it on your mantelpiece. Even if I was rich enough to pay this guy to build me my own set of “beests”, I would have to buy my own beach to keep them on.

And I would so want to just set them free and see them head for the horizon, and liberty.

Keeping with the weirdo avante garde art scene, we have a fun little social experiment called iPsd Head Girl.

A simply idea. Take four iPads, arrange them so they form a topless and bottomless box, and arrange it so web cameras both relay an image of the face of the person inside to the appropriate iPad face, but relay a picture of the outside world into a possible fifth iPad inside the box so the person inside can see around and navigate the world.

I thought people’s reactions were pretty tame overall. I love how so many people immediately waggled a hand in front of her “face”, though. I love those basic human curiosity and investigation responses. Like poking something with a stick. That is a very smart way for a cautious but curious tool-user to explore the unexplained.

After all, why touch it with your hand and get close to it when the stick will do it for you? Safe monkeys are smart monkeys.

I would have had to try to talk to her. I doubt they programmed it for that, but I think they would have been pleased by the attempt to up the interactivity of their little art projecy experiment.

But enough poetic musings of the eternally lost. Time for a change.

And now, for something completely different. It’s…

Every Michael Bay movie in sixty seconds!

Another decent comedy joint from the folks at College Humour, who would like to remind you that it’s not unfunny just because stoners laugh at it.

I am paraphrasing, of course.

Someone in the comments on this blog entry rather accurately snarked “wait a minute, someone actually made fun of michael bay? good. that guys gotten a free pass for too long! it’s about time someone had the stones to call him out!”

Fsir enough. Making fun of a overgrown fourteen year old like Bay is like shooting fish in a barrel, and by this point, there’s no fish left, and not much barrel either.

It’s natural for people with taste to want to rage against bad art that is a financial success. We all wish the rewards and the artistic merit were always perfectly proportional. But it’s always futile as well, and you just end up wallowing in your own bilious fumes while the crap merchants hyuck all the way to the bank.

And then buy it.

There is always bad art that succeeds. Just ignore it and concentrate on the good art, and help it succeed if you can. The other cannot be defeated and can only bring you down.