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

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?

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.

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.

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!

If you’re not familiar with National Novel Writing Month (or NaNoWriMo as it has come to be known), it’s an organized effort to get people to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. While it might seem a bit ambitious to try and write 50,000 words in a month and even more ambitious to have those words form something like a story, the organizers (and several friends who’ve done it before) say it’s totally possible.

Speaking of friends, I have conscripted a few to participate in the event with me and write their own terrible novels. I really did conscript them rather than ask them. This is one of those things where you just have to tell people to “get in the car” and don’t really let them worry about the destination. Really, it’s motivation for me, as I’m going to look like quite an idiot if I encourage people to do this and fail to do it myself. Two of these people live in my house, so we’ll be able to “support” (read: mock) each other as we go.

Interestingly, I just noticed that Wordpress here counts words as you type. I just managed to crap out 250 words in a little over fifteen minutes. Considering that one needs to average 1667 words per day to write 50,000 words in 30 days, I really only need to write for around one to three hours a day to make this happen.

Like many people, I’ve started writing several novels. I’ve never finished one, though I did get pretty far along with my last attempt.  My hope is that by tearing through this one in a month, I’ll have a reasonable piece of work (or crap) to start editing.

I’ve also decided to write this novel using only open source software. I was going to use a Mac emulator running System 7 and Word 5 (the best word processor ever written, im my opinion), but once I got it running I felt like the whole setup was a little dodgy, even for me. Instead, I installed a relatively recent laptop I had with Ubuntu 9.10 and AbiWord. I wanted a machine that would be dedicated to this process, so when I sit down at it to write I don’t flail about and do anything else. I’m even going to disable the wireless during designated writing time so I don’t fall into a lolcat pit whilst doing “research”.

I’ll be updating my wordcount on my NaNoWriMo page, but I’ll also be updating it here, in the sidebar. Oh, and please, do me a huge favor: Do NOT encourage me. It has been my experience that encouragement does nothing for me. If you want to help, what I need now is cold, hard derision. Feel free to tell me how much I suck if my daily word count falls below 1667. Tell me I’ll never amount to anything. Ridicule my efforts as much as you can. This is the only effective motivation you can provide. The more you ride me, the more likely I am to defy you and succeed.

This is not to say that I’m in support of dumping my garbage in a river and clubbing baby seals. I just think that environmentalism, is, in general, a lost cause. We should be preparing for the eventualities rather than trying to prevent them. I’d rather invest my energy where it can actually do something productive.

For this reason, I’m a huge supporter of renewable energy, particularly in the form of solar and wind.  Both of these resources, are, for practical purposes, infinite and free. You’d think that would make them absurdly compelling, even if your only motive is greed. It is for this reason that I am continually amazed by the efforts the big energy industry to cast doubt on these technologies.

Yesterday, for example, I came across this article in Power & Energy Magazine on the advantages and disadvantages of wind power. The highlight was the following infographic. (Click to see original.)

Ah, yes. Nothing like the clean lines, good design and extensive use of green to aid you in your straw man argument. I don’t want to accuse the fine folks at Power & Energy Magazine of being industry stooges, but come now. Let’s look at some of their “disadvantages” of wind power, according to the article:

Unreliability

The main issue concerned with power from the wind, is that of its unreliability. Wind strength cannot be controlled and in some areas it is just not a viable source of power.

So, um, here’s a crazy idea: Maybe don’t put wind farms in places where they won’t work. Then you wouldn’t have that problem! Also: Don’t put a hydroelectric power plant in the desert.

Lower Electricity Output

Wind power generates significantly less electricity than its fossil fuel equivalent, meaning more turbines are required to generate the same amount of power. Wind turbines are also highly inefficient in terms of output capacity.

This would be a really good point, if it weren’t the fact that energy efficiency concerns kind of don’t matter when your fuel source is free and nearly infinite.

Costly to surrounding wildlife

With demand for renewable and cleaner energy sources growing it is likely that the need for land for wind farms will increase, which will potentially damage a high percentage of local wildlife In the process. It is also estimated that each wind turbine kills over 4 birds a year.

Really?  Really? Compare wind farms to say…coal mining. I’m just guessing here, but I’m guessing coal mining probably kills more than four birds a year. Hell, Thanksgiving kills a hell of a lot more birds than that.

Noise Pollution

The noise produced from a singular wind turbine is similar to that of a small jet engine and can be a cause of major concern for those living near a wind farm.

Again, let’s compare this to the relative concerns of living near a coal-fired power plant. Coal plants are known to expose people living near them to elevated levels of radiation, airborne toxins and smog. Granted, you probably wouldn’t want a wind turbine in your back yard, but I can’t imagine this is any different than living near an airport. Even so, airports tend to be in populated areas, whereas wind farms tend to be in very rural areas.

So it’s probably fair to say the “disadvantages” listed in this article don’t stand up to even casual scrutiny. Just to put things into perspective, I’ve prepared my own infographic for you, breaking down the advantages and disadvantages of another energy source: coal. Click for the larger version.

Such has been the problem with my garage since I’ve had a garage. My tools have traditionally been stored in a pile next to the last thing I worked on. At best, they were all jumbled up in a toolbox. After seeing how Jaime Hyneman keeps his tools organized, I was kind of inspired. So long as everything has a place and you know where that place is, the amount of time you spend looking for something in particular can be greatly reduced, if not eliminated.

I started by declaring a number of functional areas for the space. I would have one bench for small projects, like electronics and another for larger stuff, like woodworking. Bike repair would have its own area. Tool storage would be centrally located.

I decided that I what I really wanted was a way to have my tools all out and accessible at all times, but not all jumbled up. I’ve seen this done effectively with peg boards, but those get pricey by the time you’ve got a hook for every tool. I also don’t love how much actual wall space pegboards take up. I decided I wanted something that would come out from the wall a bit that had a horizontal surface with holes in it. This could be used to store all manner of commonly used hand tools, like screwdrivers, hammers, pliers and so on. I was just about to make something when I saw this milk crate in the corner of the garage. It was an older one that had this heavy metal band around the top. I turned it upside down, bolted it to the wall and started putting tools in the holes in the bottom. If a tool wouldn’t fit, I cut some of the plastic bars to accomodate it. I probably fit two pegboards worth of tools in a quarter of the space. Here’s a picture of it:

For things that wouldn’t fit in the rack, I just put a finishing nail in the wall and hung it. Another thing I’m kind of proud of is this quick but useful drill bit holder I made:

It has hooks so it can hang on the wall but can also be moved where it needs to go.

Now that everything has a spot, I waste no time looking for stuff. I can spend the hour or two at a time I might have for projects actually working on projects instead of looking for my sh*t. Yay! Here’s more pictures of the finished reorganization.

Pharrell did a nice little piece on Current a few days ago, talking about the inspiration behind artst.com (formerly known as Heywire.) The site has been blowing up this month, a huge flood of new members and artwork and always inspiring stuff to check out. If you haven’t yet, get in on that!

Here’s an easy way to get rid of them. From the command line (in any Unix variant, including OSX) and cd to the working directory in question. Then paste in the following:

Then commit, and you’re done.

In semi-related news, I found out that Rhapsody allows you to get your playlist via RSS, complete with album art and links to listen to the tracks on the free (web-based) version of the service. Pretty neat! I thought it would be fun to publish that, so one quick and dirty Wordpress plugin later and here it is. I’m sure it will be used against me at some point in the future when T-Pain puts out a new record and I play it continuously for three weeks straight.

Anyway, back to the matter at hand. Currently, the most recent Kanye West record, 808s & Heartbreaks has been in heavy rotation on Radio Jaybill. Now granted, I liked Golddigger as much as the next thirty-something uncool white guy, but this record couldn’t be less like Late Registration. I’ve decided that this record is basically to pop music what Pirates of the Caribbean is to movies. That is that it’s such a stupid idea that it shouldn’t have worked, so one has very low expectations. Then it actually turns out to be good and you’re that much more surprised. Seriously, this should have been a formula for disaster: rapper turned R&B singer makes record with little more than sparse drum machines and Auto-Tune about why he is sad. On the surface, it’s far less plausible than a pirate movie based on a theme park ride.

Somehow, though, it works. I think the most striking thing about it is how utterly sincere it sounds. Granted, Mr. West has had a pretty rough year and has plenty to be upset about. I mean, nothing worse than your average country songwriter must endure in a typical year, but still. That’s probably got something to do with why this record succeeds, actually. If someone had made a country record out of this subject matter, it would have been totally boring. The choice of medium really helps the final product.

I thought it would be difficult to feel bad for someone who makes more money in twenty minutes than I’ll make this year, and yet, I kind of did. His apparent honesty is utterly disarming. He makes no apologies for being rich, famous and powerful. If he had, it probably would have cheapened it somehow. If art is about finding a unique perspective, I put forth West has done nothing if not that. This is a record about someone who seemingly has everything and is suddenly forced to reckon with the utter vacuousness of his existence. This is combined with his realization that he’s worked so hard on his career that he’s left no room for his personal life. It’s a heady mix of inner torment that would make Trent Reznor proud.

Aside from a slew of guest appearances (including Lil Wayne and the ever forgettable Young Jeezy) it lacks most of the trite trappings of typical hip hop record. (including, for the most part, actual hip hop) While overall a pretty great record, it’s not without a few duds. The final track, Pinocchio Story, for example, shows what happens when he turns off Auto-Tune. It’s not pretty.

Overall, though, it’s a very solid record and I highly recommend it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

This is a sport called chinlone. It’s sort of a cross between sport and dance and people that are good at it are amazing to watch. I imagine if you’re a fan of this and go to events, you probably don’t want to sit too close to the action unless a really good team is playing, or you are so taking a foot to the teeth.

Discovery

Time Warp is different, in that they really do seem to have something unique. To start with, their high speed images are stunning. Then they combine this great photograpic technique with really interesting subject matter. They’ve shot and slowed down everything from The Fuel Girls to Cirque du Soleil and pro skateboarders to a guy that puts various body parts in animal traps and everything in between. While I think the show’s hosts are still trying to find their footing a little bit, they both seem to be smart, likable guys who seem to been really into what they’re doing.

Some of the more interesting things they shoot don’t even seem that interesting on the surface, like popping water balloons or punching people in the face. Somehow, though, just about anything is a lot more entertaining at 1000 frames per second. It turns out you miss a lot of things at normal speed. Anyway, you should check it out. Discovery has a bunch of full episodes of the show available online.

Also, this cracks me up every time I watch it.

It seemed like a solid premise: It’s a science-fictiony game wherein Norse mythology meets cybernetics.  As far as the gameplay, it’s the bastard child of a hack-and-slash Diablo-type game, an RPG and a fighter. (Seriously, there are combos and such.) It’s also terrible. Did I mention that?

Where to begin? How about the opening cutscene:

Click here to view the embedded video.

Skip to about 2:19 where you will find a woman-thing who, despite being mostly wires and robot parts still feels the need to wear an outfit that has about as much fabric as child’s sock. While I’m sure they were trying to appeal to teenage boys with scantily clad women, even that fails terribly.  The whole scene is about as hot as a cross between an 80 year-old grandmother and RoboCop. (But hey, if that turns you on, maybe this game is for you.)

We’re not even to the game yet! The controls are awful. Since, I don’t know, Playstation 1? The left stick is for moving, the right stick is for looking. No exceptions. Except for Too Human, where the right analog stick is for attacking. Yes, that’s right. There’s like eight other perfectly good buttons on that controller (many of which aren’t even used by default) and they put attack on the stick. As if that wasn’t enough, it would seem that you have a gun, grenades, a big knife on a stick, a mechanical spider and maybe a robot gerbil that are all governed by some combination of sticks and buttons. It’s a mess.

Then there’s the camera, (Did I mention the right stick doesn’t control the camera?) which you seem to only be able to center or set the distance of. It’s always in the wrong place.

Add to all this the fact that every time you die, there’s a thirty-second animation of you getting taken up to Viking heaven by a robot Valkyrie. A thirty-second, unskippable animation. You then respawn with full health ten feet away. (Note: I am not making this up.) Where I’m from, Vikings that die get put on a boat and then that boat is set on fire.

What baffles me the most is that this isn’t some movie tie-in game that was crapped out in two months for as little money as possible. They spent 80 million dollars and ten years on this game.  (It was originally supposed to be a PS1 title.) Amazing.

It will be going back to Gamefly in tomorrow’s mail. I’m glad I didn’t actually buy it. I feel sorry for those that did. In closing, don’t buy this game. It is really bad.

It’s kind of like Old Man Murray for people with Twitter attention spans. In fact, this blog post telling you about his blog is probably longer than most of his blog posts.

He just “launched”, but he’s off to a promising start. Maybe if he gets a ton of readers he’ll post more, but don’t count on it. Just enjoy whatever he gives you and keep quiet.

This is a really neato video I came across a week or two ago. It uses the tilt-shift technique which gives it a toy-like quality. I’ve seen this done with still photos, this is the first video I’ve seen. I think the artist’s choice to run it at a faster-than-life speed helps the toy illusion quite a bit.

Even so, I’m putting tilt-shift on notice. It’s well on its way to becoming the next HDR. That is to say, an interesting photographic technique that gets beat to death from overuse.

I was unsure of why this was until recently, when one Rick Albano (a professional blogotype of the higest order) hit it right on the head. He pointed out that many would-be frequent bloggers aren’t because they treat each post as “too precious”. Blog posts are a somewhat unique form of writing. What I’ve been trying to write (with varying degrees of sucess) are essays. Blog posts are not essays. They’re almost anti-essays. I think the best term I’ve ever heard used for blog posts was by one James Lileks, who calls them “dashed-off tripe”.The point is not to polish the crap out of them, the point is to get them written and posted.

This isn’t to say that blog post writing should trade quality for update frequency. (Though there are many blogs that use this method.) For me, it means trading update length and depth for update frequency. The way to become a better blogger, in my mind, is to blog more. It needs to cease being something special and become something that’s just a function of daily life, like drinking coffee or putting out the garbage. (In my case it’s very similar to putting out the garbage.) It cannot be a function of how busy I am. No one is going to miss me for the thirty minutes or less it takes me to write something.

So there you have it. Gauntlet thrown. I’m going to shoot for a updating at least once a day. In reality, it will probably be more like three times a week. Either way, I’m done writing essays. It’s a motherf@#king blog.