Category: Blog Page 12 of 141

It’s November 1st, boys and girls!  And you know what that means!

You don’t know what that means?  Oh.  Well, bear with me.

Once upon a time, I wrote regularly in this space.  Some of it was personal life update rambling, and some of it was musing on this and that, and some of it was just random cool things that I found around the Internet.  when I look back on it, though, it gives me a insight into where I was in my head at the time.

Around late 2008 or so, I stopped writing so much.  There’s a variety of reasons why, but the primary one is that there were things going on that I didn’t want to talk about publicly, but that were taking up a large number of my mental cycles.  And then after going for a while, there was an odd inertia, where I couldn’t post about topic Z because before I write about that, I really should write about topics Y and X, and the next thing you know you’re backed up to topic A and the whole thing feels insurmountable.¹

In fits and starts, I’ve tried to relaunch my online blog, most recently in May and June of this year, and I had a good roll until I got derailed by a few unexpected psychic bumps.  But inertia works both ways.  If you can get the momentum, you can sustain it.

November is traditionally NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), where people promise to produce a 50,000 words towards a novel by the end of the month.  It is also NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month), where people pledge to produce at least one blog entry every day for the month of November.  So that is what I intend.

I aim to misbehave.²

I can’t promise every entry will be scintillating.  Perhaps they won’t even be as scintillating as this one.³  But I’m hoping that the inertia of doing this will get me back into the regular habit.

You can help!  I’m absurdly response driven, so if there something that catches your eye and you have something to say about it, please comment.  My posts are mirrored on LJ and Dreamwidth, and linked on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr.  Follow me wherever suits you.  If you want to comment where you see the post/link, do it there.  If you want to comment on the main blog, you should be able to authenticate with whatever service you like in order to leave a note.

In closing, I leave you with a video I return to again and again for inspiration.  Ze Frank sent this out to all his kickstarter backers just before he restarted his online video show.  It’s titled “An Invocation For Beginnings”, and it’s worth watching, no matter what project you’re about to undertake.

“There is no need to sharpen my pencils anymore.  My pencils are sharp enough. Even the dull ones will make a mark. Warts and all, let’s start this shit up.”
–Ze Frank

1. Yes, you could just skip all that and start where you are, but that’s your brain, not mine. ↩

2. And by “misbehave”, I mean “write a blog entry every day in November.  And also the other things.  Not because they are easy, but because they are hard. ↩

3. A friend of mine on LJ has a tag that reads “don’t be interesting just post”. ↩

In the beginning, God created the universe, and the planet Earth, and He created all the plants and animals and living things that grew on the land and swam in the sea. 

If you’ve ever been part on a big R&D project, you’ll know that things sometimes go wrong, or wander down blind alleys, or just don’t turn out right. Things were created that simply didn’t work well with the overall theme of the project. So God said “Make an enormous island off in the corner, there, and we’ll put all the problem stuff there, where it can’t hurt anyone.

And God looked up on his Work, and saw that it was good. So he closed the project and went onto other things. it’s a big universe, and you can’t micromanage.

Millions of years of later, one of the angels called to report that there was a problem on Earth, and since He was the original Lead Designer, could he possible check it out? So God goes to take a look.

“WHY ARE THERE *PEOPLE* LIVING IN AUSTRALIA?!?! EVERYTHING THERE IS VENOMOUS AND AGGRESSIVE! WASN’T THAT A CLUE? LIKE, A REALLY, REALLY BIG CLUE? JESUS, WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU PEOPLE?”

And from the next room, a voice replied, “Did you call me, Dad?”

“No, no, it’s fine. it’s nothing.” God sighed and, figuring it was too late to fix Earth, went back to that nice little nebula He was working on over in the Andromeda galaxy.

Today is National Coming Out Day.  According to Wikipedia:

National Coming Out Day (NCOD) is an internationally observed¹ civil awareness day celebrating individuals who publicly identify as bisexual, gay, lesbian, transgender—coming out regarding one’s sexual orientation and/or gender identity being akin to a cultural rite of passage for LGBT people. The day is observed annually by members of the LGBT community and allies on October 11.

I am bisexual.  I have known this for a very long time.  Now you do too.

Also:  happy weekend!

1. Making the word national rather reductive, but never mind… ↩