Paper

There's something about the texture and feel of paper that I like. I don't feel the need to read things on paper - I'm fine with the movement of fiction to digital forms - but paper itself, the pulp beneath the ink, is something irreplaceable. My favorites are heavier and grainier varieties; construction paper, comic book paper, the stuff they made paperback novels out of in the 1980s. It has a certain dry feel to it like nothing else and makes a strange and chilling noise when you rub two sheets of it together. In my memory it is forever associated with reading in the back of the classroom in grade school, in stuffing a copy of Jurassic Park in my earth science book in junior high, or in buying copies of Groo before it changed to the higher-quality glossy format.

I also remember my mother taking me to COSI in Columbus and showing me the papermaking exhibit on the Street of Yesteryear, which is another vault of great memory all on its own.

For all my digital knowledge and my daily use of computers and the sheer volume of text I read online each day, I suppose there is a reason I've never read a novel on the Internet before and have no plans to do so.

Dealing With Culture Shock in a Healthy Manner

Allow Myself To, Uh, Play With Myself

So one of the things I've been doing in my free time lately is playing through old Sierra games - specifically, Quest for Glory games. I got the idea to try a 'Let's Play' for these games on the good old SA forums. I realized after investing quite a few hours into this that I should probably make a more permanent record than SA for these things - so I started another blog. Classic Let's Play. For playing classic games.

If you're so inclined, check it out. It's not up to date with the actual LP thread yet, but I'll keep updating it when I have a free second here and there.

Also if you don't know what the hell I'm talking about as far as Let's Play goes - it's a subculture of gamers and people who watch other people play video games and attempt to make humorous comments along the way. Yes, it's geeky. It's really geeky. But at least it's not fan fiction.

Thank You Gary Gygax

On my way out of work today I noticed a couple of emails and some rumblings on Twitter and online that Gary Gygax, co-creator of Dungeons and Dragons, passed away. It was soon confirmed and has since hit CNN. I'm still a little shocked, and I almost cried a bit on the way home.

I met him once for only a few seconds but he seemed like a very nice guy, genuine and fun. I won't pretend that I knew him because I didn't - I've heard the stories and have very little to form my own opinion of him aside from a handshake and a few seconds of dialogue - but what he did for me personally is immeasurable.

When I was young I struggled with acceptance for many reasons, not the least of which was a tendency to be more concerned about creative things like looking out the window and imagining stories and dreams than being worried about baseball mitts and football cleats. In my small town, there weren't a lot of kids like me. There was a guy who lived down the street named Nick and we were cut from the same cloth; we read Lone Wolf and played Starflight and Bard's Tale and King's Quest. And we played D&D.

I bought the now-infamous first-ed books used for $5 each. I still have them somewhere too, with the green electrical tape binding the DMG together just as it was when I purchased it when I was 12 years old. And in those books we found a world apart, one that we could create on our own and populate with creatures and things and characters of our choosing. The world that Gary helped make possible.

There have been writers who have been far more influential in my life, some of whom I've had the great pleasure to get to know well and call my friends. But Gary's efforts helped start it all. He helped make it OK to have an imagination and not get beaten up because you'd rather imagine yourself as a ranger slaying drow than catching a touchdown pass.

He left the world a better place for many people who otherwise might not have been OK with who they are.

So: thank you Gary. From the bottom of my heart.

Posting for the Sake of Posting

It's February 29 and I have nothing to say aside from I want this date on my blog, so here's a nice picture of Miranda.

Poem: The Ash Tree City (Draft)

The Ash Tree City

"Circle Line chain now approaching,
stand behind the yellow line."

He growls in alleys on starlit nights
In dumpsters
Piles of human shit
Clothes and vomited kebabs
Sewer grates and curved windows.

His horns crown everyone:
Drunks in Burberry
The corner barber
BTP in H. Road Station
Football fans enjoying Premium Lager

Three sharp brass nails on a tail
Witch-dreams
and Old things, breaking through
Museum-Glass History.

"Stand clear the closing doors."

This is not our place.

It is bigger on the inside
Than it is on the outside.








This work is licenced under a
Creative Commons Licence.

The Beginning

The first day is always the hardest, except for maybe the second and third day. After that it will get easier and ultimately the payoff will be worth it.

I turn 30 in October.

It is time.

Update: Didn't mean to be cryptic, I'm referring to the last rounds of weight loss I need to do.

17 and Counting

Remember that post I made about suicides in Wales?

They're up to 17 victims now.

That's fucked up.

Rumor: Massive Layoffs at CIA Following Castro's Resignation

Following today's resignation of Cuban leader Fidel Castro, employees of the CIA were told to expect "massive reorganization" in the coming days.

The federal agency, whose primary mission has been the overthrow of Castro since the Cuban leader took power in 1959, is no longer necessary as the last vestiges of the Cold War finally came to an end. Castro will be succeeded by his brother Raul, who has been serving as temporary leader of Cuba since Fidel's illness in 2007.

"It's just not going to be the same without Fidel in power," said Jim Chowder, a CIA operative in Havana. "Sure, we could try to overthrow Raul, but he's got such a pussy name. He sounds like a Dancing with the Stars instructor, not an evil dictator. Fidel Castro is a brand, you know? He's someone you can hate, a symbol of Cold War power. Raul Castro, he could be your wacky Latino neighbor."

Chowder, who enjoys Cuban cigars and Cuban rum, said he would "miss Cuba" and hoped the embargo would end soon so he could return and enjoy a life there without having to attempt to assassinate the nation's leader on a daily basis.

Experts estimate as many as half the CIA could be downsized, as the agency has made Castro's overthrow or assassination its primary objective.

Meanwhile, in Miami or "Not-So-Little-Havana" as it is commonly known, Cuban ex-pats took to the streets in a drug-fueled, alcohol-spritzed, Miami style party. One Cuban, who refused to be identified (photo left), told reporters that he was preparing to return to Cuba now that Fidel Castro was finally gone.

"I can't wait to go back and see my family and introduce them to the glorious lifestyle living in the United States has afforded me," he said. "Look at dis stuff: jacuzzi, guns, power, money, women: the US has it all baby!"

When asked about the men and women of the CIA would would lose their jobs, he said he "didn't care."

"This man's reaction is not uncommon," said Chowder as he watched a pair of bikini-clad chicanas walk by his cantina. "Too many Cubans in the US get high on their own supply. Just look at that Perez Hilton guy. That's what we've got to look forward too now."

A Lot Can Happen in Three Months

On December 1, I packed up a few boxes of my stuff in Seattle to ship it to London. It's now February 19 and I'm going to have to wait at least another week before I see my stuff, making it a good three month lapse. You can read the whole story on my other blog, thanks to the lovely company VIP Relocation, who the Beautiful Competition and I now simply refer to as "those jokes."

One of the things I packed into those boxes was my good old Xbox 360, and one of the other things was an accompanying attachment I purchased as a tax break back when I was working on Microsoft business in Seattle: the HD-DVD Player accessory. In early December Heroes had just come out on HD-DVD (exclusively), things were looking really great for the format, and I was looking forward to getting some good life out of it once I unpacked it here (should it ever arrive.)

Even on January 1, that was a distinct possibility.

Then the following happened:

Warner Bros., one of the major backers of HD-DVD, switched to Blu-Ray exclusively. Blu-ray is the competing HD optical format.

HD-DVD canceled their CES press conference. Ouch.

Paramount defected to Blu-ray shortly thereafter.

Universal hedged its bets and went with Blu-ray too.

My former client announced a fire sale on HD-DVD accessories.

Netflix dropped HD DVD from its lineup, a sad move since aside from Heroes and a copy of Hot Fuzz I never bought one, just got them from Netflix.

So did Wal-Mart. Double-ouch.

Finally, Toshiba, the HD-DVD manufacturer, gave up and pulled the plug.

And to add insult to injury, Gamestop won't give you any money for your HD-DVD stuff anymore - even the Xbox accessory.

Now there's nothing left to do but to tell sad stories of the death of kings.

It's pretty amusing that this all went down while my HD-DVD accessory was locked away on a boat somewhere. This is always the price of early adoption, and I don't think I'll ever make this mistake again. But on the other hand, I liked HD-DVD's menus far better than the Blu-rays I saw, which were basically DVDs with better resolution. The HD-DVDs were just cleaner, they looked more techie. Which may be part of the reason most people didn't like them.

On the other hand, all I'm out is an accessory that cost me $150 for which I got a tax write-off anyway and I did get some serious enjoyment out of for the short span in which I had it. Who knows, maybe it will become a collector's item someday like a Sega CD or a 32x or any other failed add-on video game accessories in the past.

I guess when it finally does get here I can just put it in my collection of old video game crap that I'll use when I have a house again, someday, maybe.

In Internet, News Chooses YOU!

So I promised no more marketing-related posts, but this really isn't that so don't worry. The Beautiful Competition returned from Barcelona a couple of days ago and has been sick, giving me a project this weekend that's keeping me in the house, and I've been slammed at work (but in a good way) so I haven't had time to come up with anything very creative. But this has been "knocking about," at my new countryfolk might say, in the back of my head and I want to get it down on paper.

I'm often wary of a lot of the iconoclastic ways people discuss the Internet - print is dead, print is worthless, this is the new way and the old way doesn't matter, blah blah blah. I realized though that the structure of the Internet has allowed a fundamental shift in how I receive information - not just news, but information of any kind.

Taken as a whole the Internet is nothing more than a vast repository for information: most of it worthless or irrelevant, but information nonetheless. At its most fundamental level, it is a series of wires (not tubes, although tubes could describe fiber optics and - never mind) connecting computers together in a huge network - but those wires would do nothing if it weren't for the information flowing between them. Series of 1s and 0s, vast volumes of information being sorted, routed, directed and stored. If I wanted to, with two or three clicks of my mouse I could make all the information on my hard drive accessible to anyone in the world who wanted a peek.

It wasn't that there was a lack of information before the Internet, there just wasn't a good way to store and share it. Right at this very second I'm staring at a device smaller than a half a stick of gum that holds 2 GB worth of information. According to an old forum thread I just Googled, it can hold about 10,000 books. Until about 20 years ago, that would have been impossible. Actually until about a year ago it would have been impossible, but I'm talking digital storage vs. physical storage. It is now incredibly inexpensive to house and share quantities of information that you could not before; imagine storing 10,000 books on clay tablets in the Babylonian era - it would have taken a small city. And to transport them around the world? Armies of slaves. Even the original Library of Alexandria can't hold a candle to what I can do with my 80 GB iPod right now.

The end result of this is that there's now a whole lot of information out there available to anyone with a computer and Internet access at the touch of a button. With broadband and wireless penetration reaching record numbers - the wireless Internet in Africa puts some areas of the US to shame, even though it's all happening on mobile phones - and the OLPC program has set the bar low enough that a world where everyone is online is actually conceivable - we're all part of a vast network of information. It's happening, right now.

And the most fundamental, iconoclastic and hyperbolic paradigm shift isn't that we have all this information at our fingertips - it's what we're doing with it. It's how we're dealing with it - being forced to deal with it really.

As I noted a good deal of the information out there is either worthless or irrelevant - either on an overall level or a personal level. While someone out there is interested in the migratory patterns of bees or what Alexei in St. Petersburg had for breakfast, I'm not. So we've been forced to develop ways to sort through this information on our own.

Enter RSS and other kinds of information aggregators - and this is the fundamental shift. Now instead of others choosing the kind of information I receive (whether a paper or a TV station will cover a story or the way they cover it, the limited number of books that a publisher or editor chooses to publish and so forth) I choose that information myself. I select which news sources I pay attention to, by a mixture of interest and trust. I'm more interested in what people like Brandon and Seth and Jon and Kevin are sharing through their Google Reader items than what CNN thinks is important.

We're only just now beginning to realize the implications of this change, and it is the cornerstone of how the Internet and the New Media is will affect how we process information. And it's not simply a matter of being able to choose; with choice comes responsibility. We're now responsible to no one but ourselves for the information we choose to process and gather and share with others.

It's an interesting, scary and empowering prospect no?

Where I Been? Where YOU Been?

OK, I know where I've been. Drowning at work. No kidding. Gug. The Beautiful Competition is doing no better - last night I woke up at 2:15, realized she wasn't home yet, called her, found her still at work. She rolled in around 3:00. That's 3:00 AM. On a Thursday. With more work on Friday. She's worse off than me, but for different reasons.

This isn't a bitch about my job post or anything, but being drained so much at the office hasn't left me with a lot of motivation to update the old bloggie or do any creative writing, although I did start hammering together something that may or may not go somewhere. If it does, I anticipate it will go beyond short story into novel territory, but I'm keeping an attitude of cautious optimism about that.

In other news, I'm going to Germany for a couple of days on Sunday. Team meeting. I suppose that's not all that different than saying 'I'm going to LA for a couple of days for a team meeting,' but it's a lot cooler because it's a different country. And I get to practice my German!

"Wenn den Katze nicht zu Hause ist, die Mause spielen auf dem Tisch."

Unfortunately that's really the only single phrase I know. Five years of German and all I can say is a rhyme, the word for 'masturbation,' a few exotic animals, and enough of the language to order off a menu, get a room for the night and find a toilet. Go American education system!

Sometimes These Things Just Write Themselves

For my next short story: hot news in the UK right now, where a 14th young person has committed suicide in the same small Welsh village using the same method.

I realize this is a very real tragedy and I don't mean to poke fun, but this is exceptionally odd and it's got the imagination going. Some kind of ritual sacrifice? Aliens? The King in Yellow? Perhaps the stars are just right?

Good story fodder either way.

Would You Kindly Endorse a Candidate

With Super Tuesday looming in a few hours for American Puppeteers, I thought it was high time this blog finally endorse a candidate for the American presidency. Therefore it is with great pride that I announce the Subversive Puppet Show fully endorses the candidacy of Andrew Ryan for President of the United States.

1. Andrew Ryan built an underwater city. Ryan is a businessman and motivator with a vision, and the wherewithal to execute that vision. Unlike other visionaries he is able to motivate his base to implement his dreams.

2. Andrew Ryan believes all men were created equal. As he is fond of saying, there are no Gods or Kings - only men. Each person can become anything he wants and his success or failure is no one's fault but his own.

3. Andrew Ryan is not afraid of bettering the species. Stem Cells? Try ADAM. It's not just curing disease, it's for making humans more beautiful, stronger and more intelligent.

4. Andrew Ryan likes golf. Name one bad president who liked golf. You can't. Most people forget the golf factor. Not us.

Ah, who am I kidding. I endorse Obama. Now get your asses out there, vote early and vote often!

Short Story: The Suicide of Courtney Rayner

This is the rough draft of the short story I wrote in San Francisco. Feedback is welcome. This work is subject to a Creative Commons license (see below.)

The Suicide of Courtney Rayner
by Jason Mical
San Francisco, CA 2008

When Courtney Rayner finally committed suicide in front of the Chinese Theater the Nation claimed to be many things: depressed, pessimistic, faded, even a little sad. No one claimed to be surprised. The previous months were some of the most turbulent and troubled in the life of Rayner and by extension the Nation: the public fights with an eventual divorce from her husband, the late-night glamorous parties at the most exclusive of clubs, the entering and leaving of rehab and the now-famous breakdown on national television. The last occurred in what would become known as Courtney’s “hell week,” the seven days before ending her life in front of her last audience.

Great care was taken in creating the character of Courtney Rayner from the beginning: a marketable, fresh-cut, girl-next door actress and singer who could be equally comfortable selling movies to tweens as she was selling concert tickets to tweens. It is no mistake that the only people who use the term “tween” are the cynical types who see nothing but opportunities for financial gain from art, and it is these men and women who helped craft that perfect heroine. Great playwrights were humbled by the process, as even their most spectacular onstage personas only had two or three hours of life at the absolute maximum; Courney Rayner was a method-process that spanned ten years and millions of dollars in investments.

As the backgrounds on her compact discs switched from pink to more adult shades of blue and then to black on white, so too did Courtney’s character grow with her audience. Her dancing went from innocent to suggestive to erotic. And carefully-crafted rumors began to circulate about her wild and carefree lifestyle. If she wore a new pair of sunglasses, it was guaranteed that 100,000 girls would purchase the same pair in the next week. The Nation was almost Pavolvian in its predictability when it came to Courtney Rayner.

After the fact, many of the Nation’s experts agree that the toll of playing Rayner was simply too much for a young actress to handle. Others indicate that only once in the span of her ten-year career did Rayner ever step out of character, the breakdown on the Tara Sanders Show. That video is still the most played video on YouTube, and numbers do not lie. But the role was executed with such accuracy that it seems almost unfair to criticize an artist for a blunder that amounts to a fraction of a percentage of the overall time spent in character. That mistake is reprinted in whole at the end of this story for interested parties.[1]

As hell week began, the bookies who thusfar profited greatly from the Courtney Rayner death pool stopped taking bets. Evidence of cocaine use mounted, and the police were said to be waiting for Rayner on the lot outside of the Tara Sanders Show; she narrowly avoided them by running to a friend’s waiting Civic. Family members came forward, pleading with her to stop her partying. Somewhere, investors started drawing lines across old charts and planning what to do next with their fortunes.

In the end, Courtney Rayner died with as much dignity as she was allowed. According to the best corroboration of eyewitness accounts, at 10:52 PM on the 7th she drove her custom white Ferrari to the Chinese Theater, running it onto the curb and disturbing a homeless man camped nearby. She calmly removed a 9mm automatic pistol from her glovebox, stepped out of the car, looked down Hollywood Boulevard and without saying another word shot herself in the head. She did not miss. By the time the bullet entered her skull and ended life processes in Courtney Rayner’s brain, a crowd of about 20 people were assembled around her, many of them taking pictures, recording video or texting friends.

Within 30 seconds the first image hit Flickr and Twitter streams everywhere hummed with the news. Perez Hilton caught it from Twitter and posted an image, scooping Them magazine by a half-hour. YouTube routinely policed videos but they hit BitTorrent within minutes and had more than 500,000 seeds after an hour.

It instantly became the topic of conversation on message boards and blogs, and moved to talk shows the next day. The popular psychiatrist with his own show devoted an entire week to the problem of suicide, arguing that Rayner’s family should have done more. A month and a day later, Rayner’s previously-unknown brother crashed his BMW into a brick wall at 120 miles per hour, killing him instantly. Her husband was found in his bathroom, a pile of pills still clutched in his hand.

The Nation’s health statistics for that year list Courtney Rayner Copycat Suicides as the 45th leading cause of death, followed by accidental death from thresher insertion.

[1]Tara Sanders: Do you have anything to say to those would think you should be a better role model?

Courtney Rayner: Actually, I do. First I want to apologize. I never wanted to be a role model. It kind of goes with the territory, you know? The territory of being famous. Which I didn’t really want either, but here we are and I’m doing the best that I can at it.

Sanders (Looking uncomfortable): Right, so tell us about your plans for a comeback tour.

Rayner: Wait Tara, I’m not done yet. I mean, yes, I realize I have a responsibility. But is what I’m doing so different than what goes on in any other home across the Nation? Sure, I’ve got more money, but there are a lot of girls out there making decisions as dumb or dumber than mine. Right now, some girl is having sex with a boy she hates because she has no other way to deal with her psychological problems. Right now, there’s a girl doing weed or coke or something worse because she feels like she has no other way to deal with how she feels on the inside. Am I not a reflection of that? Am I not the Nation’s girls, just magnified a million times bigger and brighter than anyone wants to admit? Sure, we can take all the glamour and glitz but by God we can’t handle the single bit of fault. Show fault, and you’re a slut, or a drunk, or a bad kid or a bad parent or a bad person. What I have to say to them Tara is: we’re the same people. The only difference is, there’s a camera on me.






This work is licensed under a
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Barack Obama: MLK Day

I challenge you to watch this and not get just a little teary-eyed.

100 Reasons

Offered without comment: 100 Reasons to Watch Jericho

Bless Me Father, For I Have Blogged

Bless me father, for I have blogged. It has been eight days since my last post.

In those eight days, I have been evaluating my priorities not just for this blog but overall in my life. I've also flown to San Francisco and back, so I had plenty of time cooped up on airplanes to turn my thoughts inward. But London is a thinky sort of city; being around this much stuff makes you start to look at things in ways you didn't before. Moving has that effect as well: a need to re-evaluate aspects of your life (do I really need to keep this coffee mug?) inevitably leads you to re-evaluate other aspects of your life (do I really need a big house that I feel compelled to fill with meaningless bullshit?)

I got some of my old fiction out and read through it, especially a story that I loved writing but hate the ending of called The Paper Priest. It's a story that started with a title and worked from there, and the first three-quarters are some of the best stuff I've written but it ends poorly. If I cut out the offending part, it doesn't end at all and clearly lacks something. But I've been writing other things. In fact, I've written almost two short stories in the last week - the second is incubating in another window as I type this - and I'm slowly taking this opportunity to shift some of the proverbial boxes around in my mental storage space to make things more conducive to what I want to do with myself. And one of those boxes is this blog.

So to any of my coworkers reading this, I apologize in advance. I've been posting about PR and marketing and Web 2.0 and all that stuff and while I find it academically interesting on the surface, I feel that it's a subject where most people have said all there is to say and 99.9% of the rest of us are just playing echo chamber. I'm not doing it anymore. Unless it somehow fits into what I want to write, I'm not going to be making any more fancypants posts trying to impress people (and myself) with my superior knowledge of podcasting the digital media revolution.

I'm getting reacquainted with my creativity and he's an old friend that I feel I've neglected far too long. I originally started this blog after one of the writers I most admire recommended blogging as a way to keep the creative pen sharp. For the almost 5 years I've been doing this, I've struggled to find a voice, largely because I've been concerned about what people would want to read on here.

Part of what I realized is that catering to what I think people want to hear - so-called New Marketing professionals, or PR people, or whatever - isn't true to the original intent of what I set out to do. It's not keeping the creative pen sharp. My creativity and I need each other, like peas and carrots, like Batman and the Joker. And I've been driving him away by flirting with all this other, well, bullshit.

So expect to see less of that and more of what I want to write. That may mean that I update less often, but if that happens, it probably means I'm off doing something more creative with my time. Like finishing this story.

Speaking of.

Temporarily Offline

The Subversive Puppet Show is temporarily closed for maintenance. All performances have been cancelled until further notice.

The management would like to thank you for your continued patronage.

Update: Nothing serious, just a lack of time and an attempt to reprioritize how I spend my time online.

Nietzsche vs. Jason

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his eyes. "Whither is the artist?" he cried; "I will tell you. We have killed him --- you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how did we do this? How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? ... Do we hear nothing as yet of the noise of the gravediggers who are burying the artist? Do we smell nothing as yet of the artistic decomposition? Artists, too, decompose. The artist is dead. The artist remains dead. And we have killed him.

"How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? ... Must we ourselves not become artists simply to appear worthy of it?

...

It has been related further that on the same day the madman forced his way into several galleries and libraries and there struck up his requiem. Led out and called to account, he is said always to have replied nothing but: "what after all are these galleries and libraries now if they are not the tombs and sepulchers of the artist?"