Recently, I signed up with super boffo music sharing service Grooveshark at the recommendation of a friend. I am having a lot of fun there, and not just because it’s the only one of these services that will accept a filthy lousy Canadian like me.

In theory, it’s just a service where users can upload their own mp3 collections and thus have them available on any web browser, on any platform, via the magic of The Cloud.

But seeing as any user can search all the uploaded songs from all the users and then add said songs to their own virtual collects, and they have over fifteen million users, what it really amounts to is a massive collection of pretty much every song ever, like an mp3 player with every song in the universe already loaded onto it, and that is the sort of thing that a long time music nerd like me simply cannot resist.

At first, I just searched for songs I already know and love and have in my mp3 collection right here on this computer, because I was just tickled pink to be able to find all kinds of my obscure faves on there, and each song, artist, and album with its own page and URL where people can leave comments.

OMG, I can express how much I love my fave music! Bliss.

But of course, what’s the point of just replicating my mp3 question? So lately, I have been going through their Top 100 to find new music, and as a result, I actually like some songs which are currently popular!

Trust me, for an asynchronous eclectic like myself, that is a new and wonderful thing.

And today I figured, why not share those songs with my audience and spread the love?

So here they are :

Hello by Martin Solveig and Dragonette. I admit, this song is not going to be everyone’s cuppa. A lot of people will find it repetitive and simplistic and dull. But I quite like it, it has a minimalist pop feel to it that makes it just slightly surreal, and it’s damned catchy to boot. Plus, the vocalist (Dragonette, presumably, unless Solveig is a castrati) has a voice that is sweet without being irritatingly jejune, and I quite like that kind of voice. All in all, a great little puff of pure pop cotton candy, sweet and light and fun.
(YouTube Link)

Mean by Taylor Swift WARNING FOR GENRE BIGOTS : This is totally a country and western song. If you can’t imagine liking one of those, then spin on. For the rest of us… we get to enjoy this thoroughly delightful little song. It is a great song for all of us who have been bullied, put down, held back, and otherwise crapped on by mean people who tried to make themselves bigger by standing on our backs. It’s also just about the sweetest little angry song you will ever hear. This song could be ska and I would still love it. As is, I have nothing against C&W, and it’s great to hear it used for such a worthy cause as telling mean people where to get off.
(YouTube Link)

How Do You Do It by Quiet Company. Another great pop song, but in quite the old school style. It most resembles the good old symphonic rock of bands like The Yard Birds or The Turtles. So sweetly cheerful and overflowing with easy goodwill that it makes you want to roll around on your back in a sun drenched meadow. Plus, I love the band name, Quiet Company, especially when you combine it with the name of the album, Songs For Staying In. Wow, music for quiet homebodies like me! How can you not love that?
(YouTube Link)

Not Afraid by Eminem. Had to finish off with my man Slim Shady, aka Eminem, aka Marshall Mathers, aka the guy who had to be three times as good as any other rapper just to get noticed because he’s white. So he did it. I am an Eminem fan. Nobody can touch him. He makes all those people rapping about thug life look like the fake front fools they are. He doesn’t need that shit, he just tells it. And this song just kicks it out there solid like there’s nothing to it. Holla.
(YouTube Link)

There’s a few more discoveries, and of course I make more all the time, but that’s enough for now. I will share more of them some other time.

Peace out y’all!

I am a very shy person.

Except that, no I’m not. Not really. Or am I?

The problem is that I do not necessarily come across as shy.

First, there is the whole issue of this slab of lard I call my body.

In life, I am a big huge bearded fat guy. I weigh well over 300 pounds, I am six feet tall (ish), I am broad of shoulder and long of limb and huge of hand and foot. I sport a thick beard and long unkempt hair. I am a large quantity of human. And I am male.

As unfair as it is to judge people by their appearance, nobody looks at a guy who, glasses aside, looks like he might have stepped out of a biker gang or a prison rape sequence and says “I bet that guy is a shy, sensitive sort who is easily hurt. ”

People tend to assume that you are what you look like. I don’t exactly look like anyone’s idea of the shy and sensitive male.

When you have this kind of dissonance between inner and outer, people tend to subconsciously become annoyed with you for not fitting their preconceived notions and so they are already somewhat confused and angered.

Further complicating my comportment is the fact that I am both terribly shy and somewhat of an attention loving performer by nature. I love having people listen to me, and I love making them laugh or think I am clever or smart. In certain senses, I love being the center of attention, although deep down, I just want to be a part of something fun. Not necessarily the center, but somewhere near it, I suppose.

And yet, I am also painfully shy and sensitive. So I vacillate between trying to knock people’s socks off and simply wanting to run and hide and never come out again.

This sends mixed messages.

Along with this is the conflict between what my natural public personae is, my “mask” of public life (like the one we all have), and what I am like deep down.

All things being equal, I tend to try to come across as a cool, relaxed, funny, hip, sweet kind of guy. Zaphod Beeblebrox meets Nathan Lane, or something like that.

And it’s not like that is an entirely false image of me. That person is the person I would be, I would like to think, if all my mental health issues went away.

But they are still here right now, and so that image of me tend to flicker and waver and occasionally disappear entirely, and people just plain don’t like that.

All in all, I think there are a lot of conflicts in the way that I come across in public, and that might be a vital clue as to why I find it hard to get on with people sometimes.

I examine these conflicts in myself not simply to excoriate myself, but to try to figure out a thing or two which might help me to become more socially confident.

Because the thing is, lately I have become more and more aware that I have a heck of a personality when I let it shine. Vibrant, witty, kind, and warm. When I am relaxed and confident, I can be quite likable and charming, even charismatic in my own idiomatic way.

And that, to put it plainly, is the guy I want to be. I strongly wish to lose the shyness (as much as that is possible) and make use of my genuine assets in order to become more comfortable in my own skin and through that, more comfortable in the world.

The world is only as hostile as you are weak… the road is much longer for the crippled man. And it is possible to learn to be stronger, but it is not a simple thing that you can call into existence through a simple act of will. One does not rule one’s soul by fiat.

Instead, it’s a long process of rummaging around in one’s soul and finding the deep suppressed pains that drag you down and hold you back, and then going exactly against your instinct and bringing those emotions into the light, where they can be experienced, released, and plague you no more.

I am not saying that is easy. If it was, we wouldn’t need therapists.

But the prize is so enticing : living a happier, more relaxed, more comfortable life.

You have to let that draw you forward, and let nothing hold you back.

There is something that goes on in my brain that increasingly worries me and makes me wonder what the hell is wrong with me, and I can’t seem to change it, so I thought I would just write about it here in my trusty ol’ blog and see if I can’t at least exorcize some of the stress I have been feeling about it.

For as long as I can remember, possibly extending all the way back to my early childhood (I can’t be sure), I have had a very deep compulsion to (in inner monologue) explain and justify whatever I am doing at the time to… well, someone, but that gets complicated too.

Usually, it’s whoever is in my life at the time, whoever I have last explained something to in the world outside my head. But I get the feeling that said person could be anyone, and that I am really explaining or justifying what I am doing to myself, somehow.

It’s a hard idea for me to get across, so I will try to give some examples.

Say I am playing a video game. Spontaneously, in my head, I will begin explaining just what it is I am doing and why in the game, exactly as if someone had sat down beside me and asked me what I am doing, or why I did what I just did.

Or, even worse, I might be in actual conversation with someone, and there is a lull, and my brain just starts justifying and explaining what I just said, actually interfering with my ability to keep up with the conversation and making me seem like I am not really paying attention to what the other person or people are saying.

I have only been consciously aware of this phenomenon for a couple of years or so, and until recently, the most I did about it was think to myself “Yeah, that’s kind of weird. Seems like a big waste of effort and a bit crazy to boot. I should stop that some day. ”

But I wouldn’t actually do anything to try to stop. I am not sure why, whether it was just plain laziness and procrastination or whether I had some sixth sense premonition of what I would be getting into if I did try to stop.

Because I have been trying to stop recently, and that is when the depth of the problem truly showed itself. I can’t seem to stop, and all trying to stop has gotten me is a lot of frustration and stress from being confronted with something my brain does that I apparently have no control over.

I keep saying to myself “Why are you doing this? Who are you explaining yourself to? There is nobody here, nobody who needs to know!” but it just keeps happening, so for now, I am trying to just accept it. But it is hard.

It just seems so pointless. Sometimes, it even leads to my becoming stressed out if I can’t explain myself to myself well enough, or even the effort itself seems painful when I am not feeling one hundred percent mentally together. I would dearly love to save myself the energy and effort and especially the splitting of my mind this phenomenon entails.

But that does not seem to be an option. And maybe that is a good thing, I don’t know. Perhaps all this internal verbalizing over my entire life is a vital part of what makes me a writer. It’s like constant low-level practice, and expresses that deep down feeling that one has something to say that is the mark of the writer.

And were I all super cool and in control of myself, if I was really the one in charge inside my own skull instead of being, at best, chairman of an ill-tempered and decadent board, I would simply accept that this is part of Being Me and relax about it. And who knows, maybe writing all this down will help me towards that goal.

But for the moment, I can’t help but be spooked by the discovery of this bifurcation of consciousness that I don’t want and I cannot seem to stop.

Why is it there? Is it because I was such a lonely child that I made a sort of amorphous invisible friend who was always keenly interested in what was I doing, unlike the people in my real life who never paid the slightest attention to me?

If so, it’s almost unbearably sad.

And it seems like small justification indeed for constantly persecuting myself.

My god, I need help.

It’s good to be home.

Here I am, home from Vcon, the local science fiction convention and general nerdfest par exellence. Three days of awesome panels, sweet room parties, and hobnobbing with a gangly flock of my fellow intellectuals.

It kicked ass.

In fact, the only thing that makes its awesomeness less than total is that, like Christmas, after its over there is always a little bit of depression that follows as you return to your usual life and make the painful readjustment back into the normal flow of things.

It’s totally worth it, though. I had so much fun!

I truly love science fiction conventions. Were I wealthy, I would attend half a dozen a year, including and especially every year’s WorldCon. I absolutely thrive on fannish discussions and panels on intellectually stimulating conversation. Despite my obesity, I would much rather feed my mind than my stomach, and from that point of view, a convention like the one I just attended is an absolute smorgasbord feast for the mind.

But boy, does it wear you out! I am so tired now. Even just typing my thoughts like this seems hard, and I have already had a long nap.

I suspect there’s a lot of those in my near future.

It’s always hard for me to get proper sleep at a convention. Our hotel room was quite nice, and the beds were lovely, although much softer than my bed here at home, and I didn’t stay up all night partying and end up with no nap time.

It might just be the strange environment. A lot of people have trouble sleeping someplace new and it’s not like I stayed there long enough to adjust. Just three nights. (Although it still felt a tad wistful to leave the hotel room this morning. It had been home. )

But no, I think the primary factor is that I have an overactive, even hyperactive mind in my normal life, and when I go and stuff it full of stimulation at something like a science fiction convention, it just gets revved up to such a point that sleep becomes impossible.

It’s something that happens in my mundane life as well sometimes. A side-effect of genius, perhaps, or insanity. They are said to be similar.

If I had more self-discipline, I would return to the meditation practices I once experimented with, in order to learn to calm down the chattering scrambling horde of poo-flinging monkeys in my head when I need to rest. Some people complain of racing thoughts, and I suppose mine qualify. But for me, it feels more like trying to shut down a huge fireworks display, where every explosion leads to more explosions, every thought leads to more thoughts, and the whole thing is like trying to squeeze a fire-hose shut with your bare hands sometimes.

I just have so much going on upstairs. My brain is a very loud neighbour sometimes.

Oh well, this too shall pass. I am still processing all that happened in the last few days, and catching up on sleep, and trying to get some food into myself on a regular basis, and in general letting all those momenta I acquired over the weekend work themselves back down to the point of stasis.

Thank goodness for entropy.

I went to lots of fascinating panels. One of my faves was the one on selling short stories and poetry. Lots of highly valuable tips on how to get your short piece into proper shape for submission, how to write a cover letter (didn’t even know you needed one… eep!), what not to do, and so forth and so on.

And I must have at least seven or eight short stories just kicking around waiting to be hammered into shape and sent out into the big bad world to fend for themselves. Selling any of them would make me insanely happy, as not only could I use the cashola, but it would be wonderful confirmation that I am, indeed, a writer, and that I should just plain keep on writing because there might just be a career, or at least a nice income source, in this writing thing for me.

But for right now, I just want to go back to bed and sleep for another century or so. Might take me a day or two to catch up on my Z’s and get back to my usual sad little life.

But who knows? Maybe some day, I will write myself out of this box.

Wish me luck, dear readers!

Well, after going to the panel about it yesterday, I am willing to publicly commit :

I am totally doing NaNoWriMo this year!

NaNoWriMo stands for the National Novel Writing Month, and it’s an annual event where thousands of writers all over the world challenge themselves to write 50,000 words in 30 days.

That is 1,667 words per day. As the guy who wrote a million words in eleven freaking months, I scoff at such a petty challenge, with the hearty, mocking laughter of the bullying villain in a martial arts movie! HA Ha ha ha haaa!

In 2010, I wrote an average of 3,030 words per day for eleven months. That’s within spitting distance of twice the amount required by NaNoWriMo, and for eleven times as long.

Obviously, I respond well to crazy challenges. And with NaNoWriMo, I will be sharing the task with writers all around the world, instead of just crazily going it alone like I did in 2010.

Turns out, there’s a big online community for it, and local people in Vancouver who do it with their own webspace, and people get together for “write-ins” where everyone brings their laptop and people write for 20 mins, then stop for 10, lather, rinse, repeat. I am not going to do those, because I absolutely loathe being interrupted once I get started. It would be torture.

But they also have purely social gatherings, and I will likely go to those, unless I go into full Scribbling Hermit mode and can’t beat to leave the computer, lest my muse put a leather bag over my head, drag me into a dark alley, and beat the ever loving crap out of me for stopping.

Don’t laugh. It happens.

I already know the jumping-off point I want to try, though I might not be able to wait. In fact, waiting is going to be the worst part, because I’m super stoked right now and November is 29 days away. Argh!

Maybe I will write a novel this month too, just to warm up.

Or might that seem a tad arrogant?

Feh. I could use some arrogance. After all, I am awesome!

I just need to cry havok and let slip the hounds of words.

Mush, you huskies! We’re going crazy and making great time!

Oh my gosh! Zut alors! Goly gee willikers! Whad de fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuug?

Did someone tear a hole in the sky? Did an ill star cross twixt Earth and Moon and rain disaster on barbarian and Mok alike? Did a fowl wind blow up from the depths of Hell and cast the world into garbage smelling darkness?

What could possibly have cause the Mighty Emm Jay Bee to miss writing a post yesterday and thus leave a blog-shaped hole in all out hearts?

Two things : Vcon, and illness.

As I write this post (in a Gmail window no less, because the terminals here at the hotel have the temerity to block my blog because it is supposedly “adult”, the shit-sucking cuntfaced pigeon-humpers!), I am attending Vcon, the Vancouver area’s sole science fiction convention, and hence, the only one cheap enough for me to attend.

Yesterday was the beginning of said con, and my intention had been to write a quick but heartfelt “seeya Monday!” type post to explain my absence this weeking, but alas, my Irritable Bowel Syndrome chose yesterday morning and afternoon to drag me entrails-forward through three hours of gut-wrenching hell, and by the time I regained enough intestinal integrity to get anything done, it was time to get cleaned up and pack for Vcon.

So alas, no post for yesterday. IBS stole my time away. Luckily, this hotel provides free Internet enabled terminals for all room guests, and so I am perfectly free to steal an hour here and there to write something today and tomorrow. So Friday should be the only day I actually miss, although these posts will not actually appear on the blog until I get home Monday and then back-post them.

So don’t adjust your reality receptors, podlings, you did not somehow “miss” the posts on Saturday and Sunday, even though they have now mysteriously appeared in the archive of this blog. Using my powers of Internet time travel, I will be sending these posts back in time by back-posting them to the archive on Monday. Relax. Breath slowly. Massage your thorax. And gurgitate.

So far, I have been having a grand old time here at the local geekfest. These are my people, after all, the flock that matches my pelt, and it is a pleasure and a joy to frolic amongst them. I have been to only one panel, but that is the way of the Friday of a convention. Fridays are largely for arriving, checking in, settling in, registering, greeting, and sampling the early room parties.

And the one panel was on a subject which thrills and excites me greatly, gamification (terrible word, but we’re stuck with it), which is the use of the mechanics and methods of video game design to make software that accomplished more than just entertaining people. Video games have the potential to educate people, let human imagination tackle the sorts of tricky scientific problems that computers can’t handle, and even motivate people to live healthier lives and engage in social change, if we can but dip our dippers into the vast stream of human potential current focused enjoyably but otherwise fruitlessly on video games.

When I thyink of the man-years of sweat equity, mental ingenuity, and sheer persistance that I have personally invested in videos games over my 38 years, and imagine that even a tiny percentage of that could be redirected into something which adds value to the world instead of merely passing the time, the prospect makes me shiver with excitement.

Dungeon Fighter Online alone could probably take a bite out of cancer by now, I reckon.

And further intellectual nourishment awaits, including a live interview with Author Guest of Honor Larry Freaking Niven, and a panel on food in science fiction. Nourishing indeed!

Well, this terminal is threatening to kick me off, so I better go.

Seeya later, my darling readers!