Story Archive - October 2004

Zegnatronic (10/30/2004)

I won the office halloween party contest. If you don't live in San Francisco, this is meaningless to you.

Paper Covers Rock (10/23/2004)

That this is pointless is beside the point. - Dr. Micheline Matthews-Roth

Around my junior year of college I expunged video games from my life. People were shocked to sit down at my computer, looking for solitaire or freecell, and find no games to play. There were comments similar to, "Ohh, you don't like games?" tossed around. That wasn't it. I, thankfully, have never been become obsessed over Zuma or Civilization or Tetris or Nethack or Moria or Tele-Arena or Kyrandia. I like games, but there have always been things I enjoyed doing about as much as video games that I thought were more valuable in my life. I had a stage where those things had started falling by the wayside. So, I cut the temptation.

I've been playing a lot of video games recently (more specifically a lot of one video game). I don't miss going to work or any other important things in my life. My problem is that it subsumes all of my free time. I could read another chapter in For Whom the Bell Tolls or I could gain another couple levels. I could figure out how to encode movies on my Apple or I could max out my divine magic skill. I could open up all my financial bills to file them (they're all paid automatically) or I could farm. I could go hang out with interesting strangers at the coffee house or I could sell items at the auction house

I don't think whims of fancy are a bad thing. Around this time last year I was burning through science fiction books at about one every three days. Two years ago I was cranking out mediocre short stories. Three years ago I was writing Cranial Tank. Four years ago, I think I was in Denver feeling sorry for myself (okay, this one wasn't so entertaining). Five years ago I built models. And so it goes, and so will this too I suppose.

Another Night (10/16/2004)

"Write about your love life! It's way more interesting than politics" - anonymous

I disagree, but...

I'm at home on a weekend night and the phone rings. Because I have insanely customized my rings for nearly everyone, even though I'm across the room I know who is calling. I know that there is nearly a perfect chance she is going to ask me to hit up the town. I let it go to voice mail weighing the options for the evening careful in my mind.

Option A) Stay curled up under my blanket on the couch sipping cocoa and finish reading my book, A Wind in the Door by Madeleine L'Engle.

Option B) Return the call, change out my PJs and go out for a night of partying on the town.

I am leaning heavily toward option (a) when a little voice in me says, "You are trying to work on your Get-Out-More(SM) plan. Get your lazy ass up and return the phone call." I grumble and respond to it, "Fine! I'll go out and have fun on a hot date, but it's all your fault!" So I do. Why does the person on the other end never seem to say, "Can I come over and drink cocoa with you?"

Ichi. Ni. San. SAKI-BOMB!

Combustion (10/13/2004)

There are worse crimes than burning books. One of them is not reading them. - Ray Bradbury

One of my colleagues lost her apartment to fire a little while ago. The entire place burned to the ground. The fire alarm went off in the building, she thought it was a drill, and she grabbed her phone and her cat. The next morning it was gone. I can't imagine staring at my place as it burned down smelling the ash and feeling the heat knowing everything was going up. She now has a cat and a phone.

So what would you save when you're rushed out of the apartment? You've got 30 seconds, what has the most value and the most meaning to you? It's something to think about now, just in case. I'd grab my laptop. It has the things I care about most on it. It has all my photos (I never took pictures before the digital camera). It has all of the papers I wrong from my freshman year of high school. It has all of the mindless ponderings I've typed up over the years that I never felt like sharing. It has all that lovely teen-angst poetry. Of course, it also has my will in case anybody needs that lovely thing (please use all worldly assets for evil).

The thoughts of fire and smoke and ash and cinder and embers and coal and smoldering remains trigger a long lost adab in my mind. I think I met Ray Bradbury in junior high school. I'm not positive of it. I remember that my class read Fahrenheit 451 in junior high. I remember listening to Ray speak about the book itself and about the events in his life that he found most memorable and that he wanted to capture the essence of.

I remember his face very clearly. I remember how his eyes were a bit sunken and tired and I remember that he had a deep voice that dolled on. It slurred, just a little, on some of the words that took a lot of oral gesticulations to annunciate correctly. He liked to repeat, to pound, to drum, to force, to drive a point home in a rhythmic oration.

I think he was there at the school. Yet, when I try hard to remember the way he stood or moved about I can't. When I ask myself the question, "was he there in person or do you remember watching a video of it?" I find that I can't answer. The fact that I can't remember makes me a little sad.

I remember being moved. It is the first memory I have of listening to another person speaking and mesmerizing me with their voice. I can vividly recall the emotional state of thinking how amazing the combination of his words and voice and movement were. The blend of words with the syncopation of the pace enraptured me. He speech felt like the meter of a poem. It captivated me to the point where a decade and a half later I can still close my eyes and see him and hear him and remember how it made me feel.

One of Ray's main points was the lack of human attention to the titillating joy of sound and smell. Touch and taste as fine senses, but they're tactile. With sight, sound and smell the originator can be a great distance away.

This past Saturday at the library I was rereading Fahrenheit 451 and there is a wonderful passage about how much more the experience of a book should be beyond just the reading of the text. I went to one of the shelves that doesn't receive much use and pulled down an old bound book. I took in the light aroma of dust. I ran my fingers over the old cover. It wasn't a new shiny plastic jacket or slick cover, but the old textured style that friction across the tips of fingers. I opened the book and drank in the groaning of the spine. Then, I closed my eyes and took one more whiff and could just barely smell the scent of old paper and ink that tantalized like a spice from some far away place. How can one not love the library on a crisp autumn morning?

The future of books is questionable. I read nearly half of my novels electronically now. I have the complete Musketeer's series, the complete Don Quixote series, the Bible, the Qu'ran, the Hobbit, the Lord of the Rings, the US and California constitution and so much more in my pocket right now as I'm riding home on the train. There's magic to that as well. There's a different sense of wonderment being curled up late at night in bed with the PDA giving off a faint warming glow as it self-scrolls the texts of books.

Someday, Garamond will probably win out over good old fashion Times, Verdana will take out Arial and authors will start turning over in their graves. Wrap them in wire, get a magnet, and we'll have power for years.

Veeps and Calico Cats (10/05/2004)

It's like a lion and a tiger mixed—bred for its skills in magic. - Napoleon Dynamite

The vice presidential debate is over! Inspired by an acquaintance, I made presidential debate cupcakes! The frosting had red, white and blue goodness. I am sorry to say that I thought Dick, Dark Lord of the Sith, did a better job as a debater. Johnny Sunshine kept ignoring the question asked and instead proceeding with a rebuttal to the previous question or changing the topic. It's the sort of frustrating thing Algore did back in the 2000 debates.

On an aside, I'm not precisely sure at what point my coiffure became a playground for my friend's peroxides, but it did. Now I feel like a liger (aside: I was confused when I just typed liger in an attempt to make a brilliant allusion to Napoleon Dynamite and the word did not receive a red-squiggly underline. I looked it up and was shocked—awestruck—to discover that it's a real word and not merely the insane concoction of a script writer).

My Buddy Wil (10/04/2004)

So, I had a totally different thing I was going to post, but this one just made me happy.

Jordan wrote:

| Wil, didn't you tell me you were going to get the RSS alternate tag into the head on your page so I can add a "Live Bookmark" in the new Firefox?
| <link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="RSS" href="http://www.wilwheaton.net/mt/index.xml" />

Finally. Done and done. Thanks for making it as easy as cut-n-paste!

Check it out: from now on, whenever someone says, "Hey, I used the firefox thingy to add a live bookmark for WWdN." You can say, "Wil pasted that code from my e-mail, because he's lazy, and I made it easy for him."

Rock.

On.

Wil

The Man Behind the Man (10/02/2004)

Debate is the death of conversation. - Kitty O'Neill Collins

The debate party happened after all. It was small and intimate as we jeered the candidates and ate Klondike bars. The audience was less than politically diverse, but hey, that's what you get in San Francisco. Next time I must aim to have a few more republicans in the audience to appropriately jeer at Kerry's stumbles.

I was lucky enough this weekend to be visiting friends that had cable and C-SPAN was replaying the 2000 debates. I loved the vice presidential debate between Joe and Dick and was happy to see it again. My favorite exchange from that debate:

Joe: I'm pleased to see, Dick, from the newspapers that you're better off than you were eight years ago, too.

Dick: I can tell you, Joe, the government had absolutely nothing to do with it.

Joe: I can see my wife and I think she's saying, "I think he should go out into the private sector."

Dick: I'll help you do that, Joe.

Joe: I think you've done so well there, I want to keep you there.

Can you image that kind of civil jabbing between Curious George and Algore? How about Curious George and Johnny Flipflop? In 2004, I'm again more impressed with the running mates than the actual candidates and I've got my fingers crossed that the debate between Johnny Sunshine and Dick, Dark Lord of the Sith, will be pedantically superb.