Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence?
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| High Concept Am I blogging...or am I pitching my existence? |
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Monday, June 05, 2006 The Pitch: It's like Bibble meets Babble! Hello, Internet!Actually, thanks to the Blogger being a worthless crashy git, I'm not even writing this on the Internet--I'm typing it in WordPad in the hopes of avoiding those damn Word-specific characters that muck up easy reading on the browser. Uh, where was I? Oh, right: Hello, Internet! I am without thought or resolve but why let that stop me from posting? I'm back at work after more-or-less-a-week-off during which time I saw two stinky movies in the theater (Art School Confidential and X-Men: The Last Stand) one excellent movie on DVD (Renoir's Rules of the Game--wow!) and noodled about on Guitar Hero occasionally. (Considering I can't even make it through Smoke on the Water on the Hard setting, I think it's time to hand in my axe.) Apart from that, it was a little bit of French class, a little bit of yoga class, a lot of book buying and not a lick of actual book reading. One thing I did do during my time off was get some new software. Webroot was having a sale where if you picked up Spy Sweeper, they'd give you Windows Washer free. I didn't know much about Windows Washer but it sounded cool, what with its ability to remove unwanted files on your computer and improve performance. Turns out Windows Washer really should be called, I dunno, Cheatin' Child Porn Protector. Despite all the stuff it says about helping improve performance, the main things Washer does is obliterate your browsers' cookies and history, and overwrite files with a randomizer. It's a great little program--if you're worried about the feebs raiding your computer, or your wife wondering if you're posting to Hot Or Not. Since I have neither of those worries, I haven't done anything with it, other than look at the lovely interface, which talks about adding "bleach" to your "wash" and suggesting you "throw in a little bit of bleach every so often to make your computer extra clean!" It'd be almost charming, if the cognitive dissonance wasn't more than a little creepy. Of course, I'm looking at this ass-backwards--Washer is supposed to protect you from others' abilities to watch what you do on the Internet. But I use gmail (and google calendar and their customized homepage) so I don't find that as much of a worry. Thanks to selling my soul to Google, I'm like the nudist next door neighbor doing stretching exercises in front of the window at high noon. It's already too late for me to worry about my privacy. (Although I guess if I ever sell one of my computers, I'll use it to wipe the drives.) Another keen pair of programs I purchased: BackUpBuddy and BackupBuddyVFS from Blue Nomad. Blue Nomad created Wordsmith, the word processing program I use on my PDAs with barely a problem over the last five years, and I've always been attracted to the idea of BackUpBuddy, a program that reinstalls *all* your programs and info onto your PDA in case of crash, as opposed to the time-consuming reinstall every program after the OS restores the memo, address and calendar data. And after reading around and realizing that the VFS version would allow me to save everything on my PDA's memory card and reduce the chance of lost data to just about zero, I knew I had to pick them up. When I ended up with a new one gig sd card for my PDA card, I figured it was time to make the plunge. As I said, I've used Wordsmith for a while, and have installed it across three PDAs in those five years, and unlocking the registration was probably the easiest it's been for just about any non-freeware program I've installed. But somewhere in the intervening years of program development and refinement, Blue Nomad has become an automated nightmare, like the world run by Skynet in the Terminator movies. It took three days of emailing their support desk (who was, admittedly, pretty prompt and helpful, albeit occasionally skimpy with the telling detail) to iron out the transfer of the programs from shareware on a 15 day countdown to fully registered. In fact, I had a scare-up with the memory card program on Saturday that makes me think it's still not registered. (How do you know BackUp Buddy VFS is registered? It stops telling you it's unregistered...except it doesn't always bother to tell you it's unregistered and suddenly when it mentions it you've lost another two days of your 15 day window. I believe the Maori had a word for such a situation and it was: Yikes.) So. I've got a souped up PDA with a bitchin' memory card that can store, more than likely, every bit of writing I've done in the last decade. The kicker now is, of course, the writing. I'll be honest. I'm not happy with the writing. I'm 75,000 words into a novel that is not ending, is not moving, and where I've forgotten too much of the early plot threads to smoothly take them up. More than this, though, I'm not really happy with my style. It's chatty but bland. Unimaginative and self-absorbed. At first, I was quick to blame five years of Nanowrimo (and my cumulative crap quarter-million) but I've also been writing the Fanboy Rampage for the newsletter for six years now, usually on a tight wordcount and it's made my work patter-heavy, description light. It'd be nice if it was, I dunno, terse or something but it's at best, an entertaining piffle. And entertaining piffles have their place in the world, but I want to write more than piffles. Hell, at this point, an entertaining piffle would be a step up. And that's part of why things have been so quiet here at Casa High Concept. I'm not sure if blogging, speedwriting, comics reviews, and Fanboys are what I need right now. I don't feel able to focus my narrative voice as much as I used to and until I figure out what I need to do about it, things may be very quiet here for a while. I dunno. Anyway, thanks for listening and checking in all this time. I'll post some more here this week. It's usually around the time I get really depressed and start whingeing that I have some sort of writing breakthrough. With luck, maybe it'll be right around the corner. posted by Jeff Lester | 6:05 PM | |
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