Jaybill.com

I am apparently getting old and falling apart. Within the past few months it has become clear that I need to get fitted for a pair of glasses. I have narrowed it down to six pairs that could potentially work on my fat freaking face. They are below. Would you kindly take a second and tell me which one you think looks best? I would greatly appreciate it.

Yes, I know the temple is missing on a few of them. This is a low-budget operation. Use your imagination.

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It’s 2010! According to most credible science fiction, that means that it is now the future. Granted, we do not have flying cars, but then I’m writing about that from a tiny supercomputer sitting on my lap that’s connected to a global network via an invisible wireless connection. I’d say we’re doing right by Asimov at this point.

Because it’s the beginning of both a year and a decade, I had the totally original idea of setting some goals for the year to come. To be honest, this is one of those blog posts that’s really more for me than it is for you. I mean, sure, I want you to read it, but that’s mainly so you can make fun of me in 2011 when I don’t actually do half of these things. Despite the timing, this list shouldn’t be considered “New Year’s Resolutions” per se.  The only real criteria for putting things on this list was that I must conceivably be able to check said things off within 2010. So here’s my list, in no particular order.

Lose Like…A Hundred Pounds

I am fat. I’m not kidding. I make jokes about it all the time. The fact of it is that if I keep carrying around all this extra weight I’m putting myself at risk for a bunch of terrible things, say nothing of the fact that it diminishes the quality of my life on a daily basis. No more. I am launching an all out war on fat. Let’s hope it goes better than The War on TerrorTM or The War on DrugsTM.

Be a Better Blogger

Historically, I’ve been kind of half-assed about my website. I keep committing to update it regularly and failing. It needs to be more worthwhile to read so that more people will read it. I’d also like to add some kind of podcast or video blog component to it. (I will not use the word “vlog”. Wait, I just did. Dammit.) I also one to pick a few areas of subject matter to focus on, rather than continuing the mish-mash whatever I’ve been doing so far.

Be a Better Maker

I need to re-reorganize my shop. Then I need to use it to finish a few projects. I’m long on ideas short on finished projects. I also need to do more with my sewing machine, as it is awesome and capable of doing a ton of cool and money-saving things. Making stuff is fun and rewarding. I enjoy doing it. I need to do it more.

Finish My Novel

While I did not succeed in mashing out the requisite fifty thousand words I needed to call NaNoWriMo a success, I actually didn’t fail nearly as hard as I thought. I came up with a story and characters that I’m really excited to develop further. I need to finish writing it, preferably before the next NaNoWriMo.

Make New Some Music

I used to be really into music production. I very much enjoy writing and recording music. I need to get back into it, preferably by producing an album-sized body of work. I really want to pick up guitar again. Now that Propellerhead is making recording software, I’m totally excited about getting into it again.

Take The Next Step in Education

This one is sort of intentionally vague and will likely take several years, but I have to start somewhere. I want to get a masters degree (at least) in something awesome, like astrobiology or evolutionary biology. These areas of study fascinate me, and its maddening that I don’t know more about them.

Create a Financially Viable Web Property

I’ve been talking about and half-assing this goal for a while, but I need to just bang out out. I need to pick one of my many half-finished projects and complete it. I want to do something that can more or less run on its own and cover my basic bills.

So that’s my list. What’s on your list for this year?

So, being that it is Friday, I’m going to take this opportunity to stand on my tiny soapbox and point out a rather hilarious bit of cognitive dissonance.

It has long been understood that the conservative element in America, for whatever reason, believes (or has a vested financial interest in everyone else believing) that any suggestion that the planet might be warming up is simply a hoax intended to…I don’t really know what they think the intent is. They’re fuzzy on that.

For example, yesterday, Rush Limbaugh (No, I’m not even linking to his ass.) latched on to the fact it snowed in Copenhagen during the climate talks.  If you’ve got a strong stomach, watch the episode. If not, here’s the take away quote:

“So just when [Al] Gore and all these enviro-wacko Commies and phony scientists reach the height of deceit, God dumps a snowstorm on ‘em, all over this manmade fraud. … Denmark has not had a white Christmas for 14 years. All of a sudden, God, with his sense of humor, gives us a blizzard on loan from him, right in the middle of these wackos getting together for their little conference.”

I’m not even going to get into how tenuous a grasp on reality you’d need to suggest that a single snow storm disproves global warming. What I’m interested in is the contradiction that exists both within this very statement and within the right in general. Let’s look at the two generally held (religious) conservative beliefs we’re talking about here:

1. Climate change is a complete scam that has no credible science behind it.
2. There is an invisible, almighty, all-knowing God that directly interacts with people on a daily basis.

The obvious question here is, “When did you guys start caring about having credible science behind your views?”

Seriously, if you want me to take it on faith that Adam and Eve rode to church on dinosaurs six thousand years ago and that there’s a war between religious superheroes in space, you can’t in the same breath talk about anyone else’s scientific credibility. You just can’t.

Adding “-punk” to the end of words to describe a setting and design aesthetic is a staple of speculative fiction. It began (as a language construct, anyway) with cyberpunk, a type of fiction which suggests a dystopian future dominated by cybernetics, virtual reality and people running around in tight black things one minute and poorly rendered green 3d wireframe graphics the next.

Steampunk, despite having highly disputed origins, has a very consistent aesthetic involving high technology powered by steam and mechanical means. The dress code is all about brown leather, tweed, brass accents and anything else that looks vaguely Victorian.

While cyberpunk and steampunk have become widely understood, there is, in my mind, a third x-punk aesthetic. While it’s equally as prevalent, codified and overused as its brethren, it has not, until I named it just now, had a name. Its name is “Zombiepunk”. It just is. Because I said so.

Zombiepunk fiction is based on the idea that some event has effectively ended modern civilization, leaving the survivors to fight over the scraps. The name comes from the fact that this event is often the outbreak of a disease which turns most of the population into a horde of murderous zombies. This isn’t always the case, sometimes the event is a nuclear war or an alien invasion. It creates a world where the events of Sex and the City could not take place, or at the very least, they would become watchable televison. As far as design sense goes, it is effectively an a kind of “un-aesthetic”. Its technology is cobbled together from the remains of a dead civilization. As far as fashion goes, there’s a lot of denim, canvas and inexplicably, bondage gear.

In the service of clarity, I have prepared this handy chart:

Just to be thorough, let’s look at some examples. (Mouse over each for alt-text.)

Cyberpunk – Dress Code

Cyberpunk – Vehicles

Steampunk – Dress Code

Steampunk – Vehicles

Zombiepunk – Dress Code

Zombiepunk – Vehicles

You may wonder why I’ve suddenly become obsessed with this, and you would be right to do so. (I even did a pretty major overhaul of my website visuals.) I’m not sure, really, other than I am not-so-secretly planning for a zombie apocalypse. It’s by far the most plausible speculative fiction there is. Sure, you can wait until it actually happens and then figure out what to wear. Me? I’m already stockpiling canned food and ammo and warming up my welding gear.

It’s day three of NaNoWriMo. I’m pretty pleased that I’ve managed to crap out over three thousand words in such a short time. One thing is that’s becoming readily apparent, though, is how much I suck at writing compelling descriptions of things. Not having any idea what I’m doing, I’ve sort of been approaching this novel like I might approach a screenplay (which I have written before) in that I’m trying to weave a thread of narrative through a series of set pieces. Granted, no one is going to win a Nobel prize in literature using this method, but it’s how Michael Bay approaches a story, and that motherf@#ker is rich.

The problem arises from the fact that my set piece ideas are visual. I can see them clearly in my head. This would be fine, you see, if I were writing this thing just for myself. It would seem, though, that any potential reader needs me to describe that which I see in my head. This has been harder than it initially appeared for me. I had been handling it like I handle all difficult problems, which is to say that I simply avoided them in the hopes that I’d figure something out later. This was going well until last night, when I read the first few paragraphs of my girlfriend Sarah’s NaNoWriMo efforts. Sarah has a degree in English from the prestigious Smith College in western Massachusetts. She is an unqualified genius and an absolute painter when it comes to words. In less than two hundred words, she was able to evoke an utterly compelling sense of place and a whole set of emotional responses to go with it. She’s painting the Sistine Chapel whilst I lay on the floor of the den with a box of crayons, drawing stick figures next to a two-dimensional house with a sun in the sky.

I knew full well what my set pieces and characters made me feel like, but I was having trouble describing them. Then it hit me. What I’m trying to do is paint a picture. What I simply called out places in my text where I wanted to paint those pictures and pasted in a photograph of what I wanted to describe? Once my description matches the picture to my satisfaction, I can simply delete the picture. I tried a test with a road through a forest I wanted to describe, and to my amazement, it worked really well.

I spent the first part of today finding the right pictures of people and places I want to describe and inserting them into my text. I’ve got around twenty right now. If a picture is worth a thousand words, describing these pictures should get me twenty thousand more words! At least I think that’s how the math for that works out. I’ll let you know.

Crap. Here’s 489 words that aren’t in my effing novel. Back to work!