whew. so busy that i haven't been able to do anything until five minutes ago. well, all the state drive images are done. we're ready for stage two, even if everyone else isn't. that's okay. it gives us time to breathe. even if only for a day or two. we need it.

i read shopgirl by steve martin. it was an interesting little book, full of pithy little observations. completely true - all of them. it was a short book, but very good. almost like a morality play. very scathing attack (in some ways) on los angeles. that was expected, though. so it goes.

i'm reading cyteen by c.j. cherryh right now, at the request of joe (excuse me, grog). not a bad story, but the way it's written grates a bit. she assumes that we understand her when she brushes by things that need to be explained a bit more. of course, that might have just been my own sleep-addled brain at work.

on another note, i took a stab at producing some phrases for the mixed and garbled piece that i want to work on. i still have to put all of the sections together and i should probably expand a description or two, but that part of the foundation is done. now i have to do some more research about translation and mangling programs. should be fun.

i should probably update the image on this page. i just haven't gotten around to uploading the punk rock craziness yet. tonight, maybe.

yikes! skip one day of work and they make you pay for it in spades! between the drive image configurations, updating the qc corrections and the monthly progress report (which i'm compiling), it's a madhouse. crazy crazy. plus the states get on the phone and say things like "hey, my printer's got a paper jam. can you help me get it fixed?"

i have done very little beyond the standard "at work" email participation. thank god the list is slow today. i don't think i could handle high volume on this schedule. argravation.

so i'm not at work today. instead, i took the day off so that i could go to the alexandria county courthouse to get the documentation necessary for filing a bill of complaint against my wife so that she will become my ex-wife. so many pieces of paper! so many trips to the courthouse! such complication! waivers, forms, filing. and then an appearance before the magistrate to finalize after the final papers have been filed. ugh. if i'd known this was so complicated.... scratch that. it doesn't really matter how complicated things are. sometimes they're necessary. marriage AND divorce.

and that's my day. there's other stuff going on, but i'm not really on top of it, you know?

okay. this is the third try. i've posted twice today and then i was locked out of the server. i'm guessing that the superbowl meant that there were more american bloggers than usual online today. for shame, predicatable bloggers! the counterculture knows you won't be watching such shameless gladitorial combat.

i've been reading about textual manipulation. roxanne sent me a link and i've been reading theory and drooling all afternoon. i really want a copy of erasmatron. with luck, i will have a handy collection of generators, manipulators and markov chain garblers. i'm there, baby!

i just hope that it comes out comprehensible.

hrm. where to start? lessee.... yesterday was shannon's birthday and when she was in chicago on monday and tuesday, i emailed her closest friends and set up a happy hour for last night in shannon's old neighborhood. everyone reponded with a thumb's up and we all sort of drifted in at the same time, which was really cool. the only thing i was really worried about was the timing. i scheduled it for eight, but we both got off work at five and the metro ride to the neighborhood was only ten minutes long.

luckily, we had mel up there with us for dinner and we were able to stretch the dinner thing out until 7:40. then we walked down the street "for a drink" and everyone showed up. that was great timing and i got cool boyfriend points! always a good thing. so now i have to email a thank you to everyone for their support and good graces.

funny thing was that the women (for the most part) talked in one group and the men stood on the fringes and talked amongst themselves. in the middle of one of those conversations, i started talking to andrew about textual manipulation for the sake of literary experimentation. he's a programmer, so i knew that it would appeal to his design sense to try to come up with something that would be new and different.

we had a long conversation about it, which continued into email. i'm still not sure where i'm going with all of this, but i think that there is a medium ground between accesibility and experimentation. it's great if the words take on new meanings but it's even better if those meanings are easily read and understood. perhaps if the manipulation of the text were subtle and grew with each increasing paragraph?

shannon had a good idea, too. she suggested (for a different story) that the character change the direction of the story. this would work if the character changed the story in each sucessive iteration, so that the reader could see the differences in the text and how the series built itself up (or down). i likened it to having a word processor that is like photoshop and can take two seperate text pieces and overlay them on top of each other.

it's a direction and a challenge that i'm willing to explore. i might fail miserably, but i might succeed, too. i'd rather fail than not try.

on a side note, we went to see the warhol exhibit at the corcoran today. very interesting stuff. i liked the way he used the different colors to demonstrate the range of possibility inherent in the medium and the form. it also highlighted the idea of the accesibility of the icons and iconography that he used. interesting stuff, especially in light of where my literary theories are going.

i have discovered that my blog title is the target for all manner of strange people looking for whipped cream sites. is this good or bad? well, that depends on how disappointed they are when they discover that there are no whipped cream pictures here. what's most disturbing is the fact that the latest search engine junkie was from gov.uk. the british government is looking for whipped cream pictures? the mind boggles.

okay. so i'm back into the conversation about intertextuality. sort of like what burroughs did with his cut-ups, but not so crude. sort of like what james joyce did (which actually sounds like an interesting experiment to get into. i have a storyline that might apply itself nicely). but more like what jeff noon is doing. the only thing is that i'm not sure if the gap between theory and application is bridgable. it's a great idea. wonderful. completely remove the author from the final creative process. sort of. but the end result seems.... messy.

i'm not sure that i shouldn't stick to hyperreality and metafiction. those are my fortes. except except except. except that i want to push the boundries of my own ability. write something that shouldn't work but does. write something that makes you scratch your head and go "good idea. interesting application." something new. something different. something artistic. i want to look back at my artistic history and be satisfied. somehow, i think i'll come up short somewhere. i just want to know that it wasn't because i didn't try.

okay. my days are flucuating wildly now. i get little patches of calm amidst the busy. i wish i could focus all of my energy on those little patches, but there's just no telling when the calm will end and busy begins again. it's just too unpredicatable.

shannon came home last night. she got on an earlier flight that got delayed, which meant that she shaved a whole ten minutes off of her arrival time! i kid because i love. she seemed to have a great time in chicago and she said that carrie gave her big hair. pity there were no pictures.

i had another great idea last night. no real story to go with it, though. yet. imagine that the tableaux is a science fiction story. instead of everyone accepting that as the status quo, why couldn't one of the characters stand up and ask what was going on? like an actor, thrust upon a stage with no script and no introduction to the scene. the characters within the text are talking about the text itself. "okay. we seem to be in some kind of science fiction story...." there is potential there, i'm thinking.

one of the things that i seem to be writing about is metafiction (as if you couldn't tell). i like the idea of telling multiple stories at once. making the reader cross from one universe into another. it wasn't until the beginning of the twentieth century that people began to believe that everyone existed within seperate realities. ask the common man on the street now and he'll shrug and look at you like the idea was obvious. a century ago, it seems that it wasn't.

anyway. metafiction. it's an idea to explore. i think that exploring metafiction (and metanarrative. i love metanarrative) seems like a good direction to go in. it changes the reader's expectations by removing the idea of expectation from the reader's agenda. why does there have to be a point (beyond the plot)? why can't the story go where it wants to when it wants to? as long as the story is told well and concludes satisfactorialy, where's the harm? (watch. next week, someone is going to find out that metanarrative undermines the consensual fabric of the universe and small black holes will start to appear in large chain bookstores across the us and britain. border's, virgin megastores and barnes and noble are the downfall of reality.)

hrm. recursive (and thus, overlapping) metafiction. it gets more and more devious. the plot thickens. i really wish i could be writing right now.

things have calmed down considerably from the past two days. the file freeze is on and busstop is dead, so the culture list is running on the backup mailing list server, which tends to produce less traffic, for some reason. so i can blink and get some of the crap cleared off my desk.

i really want to get to work on writing another novel. i'm jonesing for it really bad. i just don't have the time. the minute i get a good start, the computer conversion will begin and all of my free time will get eaten right up. so i have to sit here in a brief pause and contain myself. boo.

what sucks is that i had a really good story idea last night. something about gangsters and other assorted ruthless people playing a very complicated game of intrigue using a shared universe as a medium. for money. a million dollars to get in and the longer you survive, the more money you make. mandatory retirement after six months. it's one thing to watch serious gamers play shared universe games, but the level of deviousness that surrounds high-stakes gamblers is something else entirely. that would be interesting to watch. probably more interesting to write. not quite "russian cyberpunk by a scottish author," - which is the phrase that started the creative process rolling - but still interesting to me.

there is some discussion of horror movies over on the catacomb list right now. i sigh and shake my head because no one would ever write the perfect horror thriller, one where everyone dies. no survivors. audiences would walk out feeling cheated, but sometimes there are no survivors. it's just a simple fact of life. not all evolution ends with viable candidates. sometimes there are dead ends and blind alleys. oh well. not everyone is prepared for the wholesale subversion of narrative conventions. pity.

i was thinking about planetary the other day, too. (forgive me for rambling, but i've been too busy to collect my thoughts and now is as good a time as any other.) so. planetary. i was thinking about it because warren ellis is writing a story about stories. and one of the major traits of elijah snow (the main character) is that he is a detective. and he is investigating the secret history of the world. which sort of makes the whole thing into a mystery story, doesn't it? the first question was: who is the fourth man? that answer turned out to be almost anti-climactic compared to the question of what's up with the fourth man?

my guess is that the whole thing is set up as a mystery on purpose. ellis is writing a mystery novel and he wants us to guess the ending before he gets there. it should be obvious by the time it arrives, i'm guessing. if he's good (and he's very good), ellis will be salting clues throughout the entire series pointing at the solution. he did that with the identity of the fourth man. stands to reason that he'd do that with the ending.

that's it for right now. shannon comes back from chicago tonight. other than that, things are going well. take care of yourself.

[i reread this last line and realized that it sounds like shannon coming back from chicago is a bad thing. quite the contrary. i'm very happy about it. i'll leave the original up for people to snicker at, but i just wanted to clarify that.]

very busy this morning tranferring a cease file to every single state in the program. plus associated client computers....

i counted myself fortunate last night to get a search request that was worthy of the hallowed ranks of disturbing search requests. i feel so special. *sniff*. the question still lingers over why someone was looking for stupid whipped cream. huh?

godamit. now florida has spontaneously disconnected. i hate it when they do that. it sucks big knobbly things. grr.

oy. so busy. we got up deadly early this morning to take shannon to the airport so that she could wing her way to chicago for fun in the sun with her friends. oh yeah. and she has to work, too. but that's not such a big deal, really. just work. and chuck's out for a last-minute funeral (aren't they all?) so i'm in here juggling everything. i'm configuring three images for new york on one computer and two for ohio on the other. on top of that, one of the dot staff sent out an enclosure that had no obvious means of opening it. so i've been fielding phone calls all morning as i explain the process to people. whew.

i've barely had a chance to breath this morning. i don't even think i have any thoughts to collect, really. um. things are happening? stuff. stuff and things....

i have to plan an informal drinks-type gathering on friday for shan's birthday. and i have to get down to the alexandria county courthouse soonish to file for divorce. and i have to finish my edits on the podium. that last one is sort of on the permanent back-burner until i find some more time.

sigh. on the advice of some list members (most notably rich), i'm reading the first book in peter hamilton's epic story. it's interesting and the broad sweep is nice and all, but i'm not really certain if all of this is ever going to pull together. it might. after all, there are five other books in the series. it just seems to be a weak way to open the series. from a structural point of view, i mean. it's hard to feel for characters that disappear for fifty or sixty pages. things that i notice and will try not to repeat.

i read some good reviews in the post's book world yesterday. w. h. auden had some good lines about great writers and small writers. something about how great writers are not afraid to fail. they try big things because failure is just as important as success. both teach, if you're willing to learn. i have a feeling that i'm going to be rereading that review again and again.

i have work to do now. sorry this seems rushed, but that's what i am right now. rushed.

last night was a lot of fun. it was snowing and the traffic was shitty, so only the regulars were at catacomb. it was a chilled night, really. we talked to joe, who is an insane crazy man. but nice. he went out on a limb to tell us that when we're not there, his nights at catacomb are fairly boring. i also talked a bit to neil, who gave me some good photoshop tips.

there were no new comics yesterday, but i was able to pick up the particle tarot by dave mckean, which has some of the most beautiful photographic manipulations i've ever seen. i'm going to spend hours wondering "how the hell did he do that?" i also got a serpieri book and a french graphic novel by bilal. it's nice to stretch my awareness and read something different from time to time.

my head hurts. i think i'm going to have some tea. we're going to try to hit thirteen days at 12:20. i just hope that the film is okay. shannon heads off to chicago tomorrow morning. that should be entertaining.

If alienating the people of DC was the new administration’s first order of business, they have done well. Even at 1:30 in the morning, we were not allowed to cross Pennsylvania Avenue. The parade route was, apparently, sacrosanct. Our options were limited to the highway tunnels hidden across the city or going around the Capitol building like we did when we came into the city five hours earlier.

Ironies abound. It is easier for me to satirize the president than it is for me to criticize the local Goth DJ. Inmates from Lorton are setting up crowd control barriers in the dark of night while the DC police direct traffic in the rain.

In fact, if it were not raining, I’d say that this was the calm before the storm.

There are two kinds of high school football quarterbacks: those that are allowed to call their own plays and those that aren’t. I have a feeling that ours shouldn’t be trusted to. The trouble is that there is single head coach on the sidelines to realize this. I wonder if George is even able to grasp the concept of a rolling blackout?

On second thought, I’m not entirely sure that I want to know the answer to that.

Cibo Matto were excellent, though.

it looks like the rolling blackouts in california are affecting the yahoo server. am i surprised? not at all. it just makes everything that much more interesting.

ally's referrals have come and gone. the last count i got was 27 visitors from her site. not bad. i got ten from andi's friends yesterday. she sent out an archived blog entry which she found especially funny and told me to expect traffic. it was nice that she told me ahead of time, though.

cibo matto in concert tonight and cibo matto on the speakers right now. i'm really excited! and sean lennon is opening for them. your maple is so sweet....

we had to defuck two modems yesterday and one of them, illinois, went down again last night. something screwy in the microsoft dialup numbers for that region, i think. it was kind of cool, because i was dialed on to sort out the dialup problem when the local analyst called to ask me about it. i was able to tell her that i was already on it. i like being proactive like that. i just wish these people could understand the concept of "online" and "offline." when you're offline, you can't use mail. very simple. nope. that would be too easy. i must get half a dozen calls a week asking me why they don't have mail or internet access. duh. because you are OFFLINE.

i shouldn't make fun of them. the exact limits of my technical expertise get thrown in my face on a daily basis. i know exactly how much i don't know about things like programming and scripts and cross-platform patches and the like.

this picture was on the front page of the washington post this morning. i was disturbed. shannon was disturbed. it's a disturbing concept. i didn't need to see that. i would have been just fine if i had never known about it at all. we don't want to know these kinds of things about our president. clinton playing sax is one thing. this is a whole different order of wrong. worse, almost, than the baby jesus butt plugs. notice that i said "almost."

i'm going out on a limb and welcoming claire as my first regular reader. hello claire! if there are any other regulars out there that want to be recognized, drop me a line. there don't seem to be, though.

mixed news. captain kangaroo (not his real name) pissed off shannon by sending her a private letter and threatening to unsub her from the catacomb list, which is a really shitty thing for a moderator to do. so she just unsubbed and said "fuck it" to lasertag tomorrow night. the good news in all of this is that we get to go see cibo matto! hooRAY! and only $15 apiece for tickets, which is a very good price. it's sort of funny that the best music in town on inauguration weekend is at the 9:30 club from a band that most people have never heard of. hell, the girl at the record store had no idea how to pronounce the name of the band.

we have inauguration fireworks tonight just in time for rush hour traffic. cool, huh? not really. and the rain has begun. should be a good day for concerts, protests and all of the other nonsense that surrounds the lame duck president.

what else is going on, you ask? not much. i'm going to run around tomorrow telling people that they got to know their chicken. other than that? nada. bureacracy rumbles on.

so things are going swimmingly here at work. i'm configuring the drive image for west virginia even as we speak. isn't automation wonderful? instead of two computers, i now have three computers going. whee! look at me go!

bummer time. cibo matto (and special guest sean lennon) are playing at the 9:30 club on friday. but friday is lasertag that shannon set up. decisions, decisions. well no decision, really. we made a committment and we're going to lasertag. even if cibo matto is much more entertaining. ah well. we all live with disappointment from time to time. that's the way of the world.

there was some discussion of perl scripts and text manipulation on the list a few days back. i want a perl script that will help me add some texture to an apocryphal story. use the source materials from the podium and not fish; duck and throw them onto the remainder of what the thunder said. it might be an interesting reading experience. or it might not. no way to know until someone agrees to help me with the final production stages by writing the perl script. i hate not knowing what i'm doing. it makes me feel stupid.

i also hate the little button on the keyboard that toggles the overwrite feature. that annoys me to no end. i know that some people like to use it but it's just in my way.

oh. and ricky martin's concert coincides perfectly with tomorrow's afternoon rush hour here in the district. federal workers aren't being given a day off but they are being asked to take a day off. i can't think of a better way to say "hello washington" than to disrupt rush hour traffic with a concert featuring a man from a part of the country that isn't even a state. can we say mixed signals? i knew we could.

today's a radiohead day. fun. grey. like a monday, only it's tuesday. no blog yesterday because i couldn't be bothered, really. blogger doesn't like my home connection for some reason.

we went to go see thirteen days last night but the film was broken or something stupid like that so they cancelled our showing. they gave us a refund and free passes. well, hey. free passes rock. can't say no to that, right? well, you could if you really wanted to see the film, really. and i was kind of looking forward to it. ah well.

finished shadow of the hegemon, which i could not put down. it was that interesting. the last book i read that avidly was look to windward. hrm. that reminds me. claire was our mystery guest from austrailia. hi claire! everyone give claire a big wave!

and that's it for now.

well, transmetropolitan came in yesterday. and i also picked up a copy of whiteout, which i'd heard good things about and a will eisner book. i've been hearing good things about eisner for years and thought "why not?" it was only $12, which is cheap for a graphic novel. aftertime is a graphic novel paradise. a bit disorganized, but very thorough.

i finished jack faust, which was good. i especially liked the bits about the naked ladies. but then i would. i'm reading shadow of the hegemon by orson scott card now, which is fairly good. he's building the story right now, but his builds are usually really well done.

i'm also talking to kathryn about not fish; duck. she liked it. she said that some parts were perplexing, but that it explained itself well and held together. she skimmed some of the science fiction parts (which i wish she hadn't) but she was able to make sense of the plot just the same. so that's a thumb's up. doubly so because kathryn is not a literature specialist. she would be my target audience, i think. and if my target audience likes it, then hey. i'm in good shape.

and a hearty hello to all of the readers wandering over here from the bitchcakes blog. thank ally for me. you're looking for the january 12th blog. it's got my side of the story in it. there have been twenty some of you so far. any traffic is good traffic, even if you don't care one whit about me, my life, my novels or my girlfriend.

urr. still groggy. it's very early on a saturday morning. but i'm awake. ready to do things. go places. see people. and kill them. comics today. i hope something good is in. authority, maybe. or transmetropolitan. or something from alan moore. that would be nice. we bought many books last night at b. dalton while we were waiting for six thirty to roll around. six thirty was the time that the juniata alumni happy hour started. i went, which wasn't bad. i ran into rachel and amy who used to live on second south. "hey," i said. "i know those two." after several minutes of conversation, they rememebered me, too. always nice to be remembered.

i posted not fish; duck to the list last night. i wonder what they'll make of it. hopefully it's comprehensible. i tried really hard, but i think i lost the focus somewhere along the line. i just need to prop it up, i think. make it clearer. the only thing i'm worried about is that making it clearer would involve using more words and it's freaking 'uge already. 70,000 words. what was i thinking?

i was thinking that i wanted to tell the story right. that's what i was thinking.

so i was checking my referrals page last night and i came across a strange one. ally here put up a link to my site after she saw my picture on this blog. the picture is really of my friend andi. i know this for a fact. if it had been any other picture, i might have been worried, because i do troll the internet for pictures all the time.

the pictures have changed (i updated my galleries yesterday) but she assumed that my picture of andi was of me. which would make me female. i slightly offended by this, but then i realized that i don't have any obvious gender markings on my blog. which is fair enough. it was also amusing to me that ally would see two pictures of andi and wonder why only the one of them looked like her.

anyway. i sent her an email that cleared it all up and she told me "Well, I'm sorry I called you a girl! I assumed the pic was you. Anyhow, tell Andi she looks like me." so that was my blog excitement.

now, where the hell is the link from this site to my blog? i'm not a sim kind of guy, but someone linked from there to here. strange connections.

oh, and someone did a google search for oletheros. i'm guessing it was someone from the culture list. maybe. maybe not. still, it's kind of startling to get headhunted like that. am i famous now? doubtful, really.

and the chinese food we ordered last night took two hours to get to our door. five minutes after we called to cancel the order, the delivery guy showed up. we told him to go back to the restaurant with it. they tried to argue, but we hadn't been on the phone all night. seriously. what kind of morons do they take us for?

finally, just the title of this article from nerve is enough to give me pause. and the giggles. sort of.

so blogger is working. hooray for them.

theforce.net put up a link to the virtual edition of episode ii yesterday. the virtual edition has assembled enough clues of the story to piece together a fairly detailed storyline. should be pretty good, according to what i've read. which brings me to the point. i've been reading stuff since shooting started because it was an exercise in online intelligence gathering. it was fascinating to watch a group of dedicated people try to piece together a puzzle from hints and clues and fragments of pictures.

now it's time to stop and see whether the storyline they've gathered is in any way similar to what i see on the big screen. we're what, eighteen months out now? we'll see how well they do. there is a point where you have to compare the intelligence reports to the reality. and i've drawn my line. from here on in, every piece of information that they get will just cement the storyline and bring it closer to reality. it's an artform and i want to see what kind of artists the virtual edition people are.

in other news, i finished zeitgiest, which took me in a different direction than i was expecting. in a good way, mind you. i have to reread it. now i'm reading the truth by terry pratchett. and that's it for now.

so much stuff to talk about. according to the date down there, i haven't posted in a whole week! seems strange to be back at the keyboard, typing things down like this. i can always claim that i wanted to ease up the traffic so that the blogger team could get their servers together. every little bit counts, right?

anyway. it's been fantastically busy here at work. things are just going nuts. we've had two server crashes in two days and everyone seems to be having problems with their memory. the upgrades should take care of that, but we've got another file freeze coming up in two weeks so everyone has their nose to the grindstone. i swear these computers are holding together with spit, duct tape and chicken wire. we're doing everything we can to keep them connected and running. march will be a good time.

i went to the doctor about my shoulder and he gave me some flexeril and told me to get a heating pad. i'm not taking my drugs as assidiously as possible because the ibuprofen/flexeril combo makes me sleepy. but the heating pad feels nice. it's just going to be a matter of time.

gotta go now. hawaii is calling.

okay, yeah. i skipped a day. so sue me. i was out wandering around the very cold suburban realms of northern virginia with my cousin greg. we went down to woodbridge to visit the octopus garden (gotta love a headshop named after a beatles song). and i got a huge pile of books from greg. my cousins are like a lending library. we come over to each other's bookshelves and borrow books. anything that looks interesting, really. i'm more responsible for the phenomenon than most, but greg does it to me, too. i don't feel guilty about it.

my shoulder is really starting to aggravate me. now my neck is starting to hurt. should i see a massuese or a physical therapist? i'm thinking that a masseuse might be better in a holistic kind of way.

i started reading zeitgiest by bruce sterling this morning. good stuff. i hope it's better than the critics have said. i like his novels.

welcome to the first day of the year. these things happen. time goes by. et cetera and so forth.

i saw eric and kat and ed yesterday, which was cool. i gave eric and kat hardcopies of the podium and not fish; duck. ed gave me a pocket critique of the podium: "you can really write." that's cool. greg got the night off at the last minute and was going to show up at rob's house. when i talked to him, he asked why i wasn't going to be there. i told him that i had plans. which i did. i'm not a last-minute kind of guy. not these days.

we went to bound's new year's eve event last night, which was nothing like it was billed to be. the walls were uninsulated and there was no place away from the dance floor. the speakers were too loud for anyone to talk and the bathrooms were down one flight of stairs. strange evening. i almost had more fun downstairs in the vip lounge watching the club event on the floor below that. and there was an appearance by the police after we left. always a sign of a quality event. i just hope the picture of the buffet (cheez-its still in the box) came out. those will be hysterical.

i do know that the owners of catacomb, nocturnia and alchemy (who all co-sponsored last night's event) were VERY unhappy with the state of the event. it was bad.

so the question you're asking me is why i chose the club over my family, right? good question. i'll give you the answer if you ask me in person. otherwise, you have to guess.