Enthusiastic Failure

Novel – i’ve gone through and marked all the things i need to fix, and am starting to slowly go through and actually fix stuff. I still hate editing, but i’m more motivated to do it anyway this time around.
Webcomic – am slowly coming to the realisation this is Really Going to Happen. In one month, if all goes according to plan. It’s at oh-crap-time-to-freak-out levels, especially seeing as this is something i’ll need to update and work on pretty consistently even after it’s up and running.
Bike – i’m… saving for it. That counts for something, right? At any rate, it’s warmed up enough for me to use my regular bike and ride everywhere now, so i’ve got about eight months before i’ll have any reason to ride a folding bike to the bus stop.
Presents – i’m on 2 out of 5 presents actually bought or made in advance (the first being a knitting book i bought my youngest sister for Christmas) – i’m making a present for my mum now. It’s at the über-shiny dammit i want to show it to her right now! phase.
General Research Stuff – My religious research has jumped through Paganism, Vodou, Catholicism, and Buddhism, with a touch of re-learning about my own Protestant religion. Mostly i’m reading Pagan/Catholic stuff – i’m having a hell of a time finding good information on Vodou and nothing Buddhist has really caught my attention any further than ‘huh, i should really read this article… someday… in the near future.’ I’m also planning on spending part of this month researching adoption, which i am in no position to do right now anyway but whatever, reading won’t kill anything.
Back to the subject of religious research, despite my relative disinterest in Buddhism, now that it’s bike-riding weather again i’m going to see if i can find a local temple to visit. I kind of doubt it, as i live in an almost ridiculously Christian-Right part of Pennsylvania, but it’s worth a look.

random other stuff

• Geeky home decor – i’m most fond of the Pantone mugs. Which i can’t use. Because i’m still trying to avoid tea catastrophes.

I put another $50 in my Kiva account and sent it off to a café owner in Armenia and an antiquities dealer in Bolivia. So, except for reloaning money when it comes back, my Kiva goal is met. Yay!

…i probably should have done this, oh, any other week ever. I’ve already spent a bit too much this week (hello, shiny new computer, shiny new external hard drive, and shiny pile of books…) and i’m wanting to start saving up for a folding bike so i can use public transit without being limited to the ridiculous only-twice-a-day route i actually live near. But as i’m going to be spending the Kiva-money eventually anyway… well, why not now. Karmacilly offset half a hard drive or something.

Click for full-size

Timing out how long it takes me to do a comic so i have some idea of how much i can do. This one’s kind of a crappy script but i wanted to time everything, including the writing.

And, yeah, i should probably do a bunch of scripts and take an average, but i don’t feel like timing out a pile of script-writing :P So just the one, for now, and i’ll re-average after i actually know what i’m doing…

The final comic is going to be on a site layout where i can actually fit the whole thing at full size. And probably just lineart for at least the first few months, as adding even greyscale took up about half the comic-making time. I’ll save greys or colours for when i can actually do lineart in relatively brief time.

I’ve done up to Week 5 in Pace and Kyeli’s 52 Weeks to Awesome course. Week 5 being ‘Introduction to Introspection’ – basically getting inside your own head and figuring out why your subconscious is messing with you.

So i’ve spent most of the week tinkering around with things i’m having trouble with – like my deep hatred of editing. Can’t exactly finish a novel without editing it, and it’s the thing i’ve gotten stuck on every time.

Discovery? I really like my stories.

‘Duh’ moment, and seemingly has nothing to do with my dislike of editing stories. Except i don’t like the first draft so much. I like the idea, i liked writing it, and now i just want the whole editing process to be done with so i can have my nice shiny story already.

Apparently the i just want the whole editing process to be done with bit is the only bit to have been bubbling up to a level of consciousness at which i actually notice it. Taken out of context, it’s very easy to mistake ‘i just want this to be done’ with ‘i just don’t want to do this any more.’

I wonder if editing will be any easier if i just start constantly reminding myself my ‘hatred’ of editing is really impatience…

random other stuff

• The anti-global-warming argument: What if we’re creating a better world for nothing? (and the older, actually-a-post-instead-of-just-a-comic What I’d Say if I Was Wrong About Climate Change) And, for those who genuinely enjoy yelling at the radio, Breakpoint News had their own bit of AGW this week.
• Why Piracy Works flowchart – i’m not one to condone piracy just because the legal version is mildly annoying, but yeah. Pirates = strip out everything unnecessary in order to shrink file size; MPAA = cram as much ‘we need to increase profits and decrease piracy as much as possible’ crap in as they can fit on the DVD.

I found one of my old diaries this week.

It’s mostly from 2001, but there’s one entry dated 2003. My fake-whiny-depressive-emo years. Yeah, i was one of those kids. Even if i’d written every day, i doubt i’d have any accurate records of that time of my life, because i was busy making every problem i had out to be a big deal. To re-read any of my writings, i had the worst life ev-ar and nothing i did would ever make it any better.

I actually don’t feel particularly bad about this. Yeah, if i could tell my seventeen-year-old self anything, it’d probably be something like ‘Oh, quit whining,’ but what teenager doesn’t have an over-dramatic, over-emotional, my parents are so horrible and nobody will ever understand me and life sucks! phase? Everyone i know did. Different ages, different reactions, and some have quite frankly never grown out of it, but everyone went through it.

My rather poor choice of how to handle the Over-Dramatic Years consisted of picking at every problem outside of my control until they eclipsed all the problems i could control, making my life out to be one big dramatic mess. I knew even back then it was a load of bullshit, but at the time this made me feel better – or at least i thought it did: ‘Look at my awesome self, managing to handle all these horrible disasters. Okay, so i’m not actually doing anything with my life yet, but give me a break, look at all the stuff preventing me from even managing the bare necessities!’

I thought i was proving myself to be strong. In reality i was proving myself to be weak – too weak to solve any problems on my own, to do anything but roll over and blame everyone and everything else for my problems. Self-deception of the most irritating form.

Actually, the really irritating bit is i’m starting to slip into those old patterns of self-deception again. You’d think i’d have learned my lesson, and i have, to a certain extent: i’ve settled on ‘content’ instead of ‘miserable’ this time around. I even occasionally poke ‘happiness’ with a stick. ‘But, but, but, i can’t do What-i-Want X because i don’t have enough money and i can’t get more money at work because of Problem Y and i can’t get more money outside work because of Problem Z…’

Quit yer bellyachin’, Emo Sherry.

random other stuff…

• I will stop linking to random Cat and Girl comics when they stop being horribly appropriate for the situation.
• I also like Gretchen Rubin’s post on positive arguments, if for no other reason than because it gives me an excuse to argue with myself :P

I submitted the first chapter of Angels Unaware to Critique Circle for feedback.

Crits thus far can be summed up as ‘Cut this, cut this, this is okay but not really necessary, cut this, and… okay, you just. um. have a tendency to overwrite in general.’

I imagine overwriting is a common problem amongst NaNoers. ‘Dammit i’ve been writing for three hours, i haven’t slept in two days, and i’ve still got fifty words to hit today’s word count… fine! Make the President’s speech longer!’

Ha – so much for reloaning my Kiva funds every time my account gets $25. It reached $50 without me noticing. Ah well.

Also the easiest time i ever had choosing loans – there were only two up when i logged in (probably because it’s 12:30 Sunday morning, and whoever normally adds new loans to the site isn’t up to replenish whatever gets fully funded.) Rather than wait for new loans to be added (and completely forget about them, again) i just funded both the remaining ones – both Iraqis who sell women’s clothing. I’ve looked for Iraqis to loan money to the last few times i was on Kiva anyway, so i’m happy with this.

Something which amuses me more than it should: The #1 lending team on Kiva is, as it has been every time i look, the atheist group. It’s currently lent out $1,498,925.00. The #2 team is a Christian group, at $886,325.00. Maybe i just spent too much time as a kid being told how awesome we Christians are for our generosity, but this makes me outright giddy.

I’m reading Clock Repairing as a Hobby, though i’m not sure i’m actually understanding it at any practical level. It probably doesn’t help i bought the Kindle version, and am thus reading it mostly off the tiny screen of my Touch – which is great for most books but not so great for books with tons of diagrams ending up about five tiny page-flips away from the paragraphs describing them. Still, if i’d bought a dead-tree version i’d just sit it on a shelf to browse occasionally instead of stuffing it my pocket to actually read, and as i have neither horology tools nor spare clocks to take apart i’d not likely retain any of the knowledge anyway.

Despite not understanding most of it, i’m at least thinking about things i’d never considered before. Like chimes. It somehow never occurred to me to wonder how century-old clocks can functionally chime the hour, or even play little bits of music. It’s one of those things i still don’t nearly understand, something about a little snail-wheel with twelve steps moving a bit every hour and the chime levers being triggered X number of times based on what step they end up on when some other lever does something else… Right. It’s a brilliantly clever system, though, and i’m wondering now how i managed to go so long without ever stopping to think ‘Wait, there’s no computer in there telling it how many times to chime – how does it do that?!?’

I think this is the first time in my life i’ve been almost sad by how easy computers make everything. Necessity being the mother of invention, in the old days, when horologists needed their clocks to make noise every hour, they had to design complex and beautiful systems of gears and levers. Now we can do the same with a few lines of code. Even if some brilliant engineer were trying to build an analogue clock with no previous knowledge how they worked, e’d probably use some sort of computer workings instead of gears for the chiming bit. Maybe even the chimes would be mechanical, but triggered – and timed – not by gear trains, but little sets of electrical contacts lining up on the hours… lovely, but just not the same.

Of course, they also had to readjust the pendulums practically every time the weather changed, and pull out the mechanics every few years for cleaning, and do a ridiculous amount of other stuff which more than cancels out the brilliance of the gears. But still. Chimes.

Food-Tracking: Done. I even tracked my tea consumption, which was kind of a bitch as i drink around seven cups of tea a day and being only about four calories a cup, there’s not much motivation to track. But i did.
Apparently i don’t eat enough in general and my carb:protein ratio is way off. Fat intake was perfect, though. So apparently i just need to eat more protein. Bring on the meat!
(…which will also up my fat, but lower my carbs, and i think a goodly amount of my carbs came in the fattening-junk-food form, so if i actually eat less carbs due to being full up from protein, it’ll maybe balance out. I have no idea how nutritionists and the like keep from going insane.)

I worked on other stuff this week, too. Lots of other stuff. I did research on various things and started scripting ideas for my webcomic and worked on my novel.

I feel really distant from it all now, though… Suffice to say i had multiple tea-and-computer mishaps this week, culminating in a keyboard which refused to work (and the Getting of a Travel Mug, aka ’sippy cup for grown-ups’). So Friday was spent ordering a new laptop keyboard and trying to convince local computer stores that yes a non-Apple USB keyboard will work with a Mac stop telling me it won’t before a Grizzly Old Computer Expert suggested pouring a bit of alcohol over the offending keyboard. And now everything works except my brain, which thinks it’s still supposed to be fixing stuff and has a particular type of ‘but why am i not applying a screwdriver to this problem?’ sort of ADHD.

random other stuff

• A Rant About Women. But a nice ‘Ladies, you can kick way more ass than you actually do’ kind of rant.
• Logitech has a wireless keyboard app for the iPhone/iPod Touch. Which i totally could have used three days ago. Yay timing.

if xkcd says it's good, it's good enough for me.

Turns out it’s kind of tough to decide on a programming language to learn. I don’t want to learn just one – i want to learn Python, Perl, and PHP at the very least, and probably in the future some variety of C.

I know a bit of Perl and PHP already, but for the purposes of learning one new language at some point in the next two years, i think i’m going to go with Python for now. It’s supposed to be ridiculously easy to learn, and the whole reason i already know any Perl and PHP is because they keep popping up in personal projects.

Logically i should be reasoning ’since i keep using them, they are obviously useful to me and i should learn to use them properly’, but i’ve got the feeling everything i haven’t learned yet is stuff i only don’t know because i consider it boring or useless or over-complicated. I know there will be boring, complex and seemingly useless bits in pretty much any programming language, but at least if i’m starting from scratch i’ll be learning the interesting bits alongside the boring bits.

random other stuff:

• Tarot Dame crocheted an awesome little bag for one of her decks. I kind of want one but there’s no yarn in the world which will actually look proper with my Russian tarot :P Maybe some of those scraps of faux leather i have lying around…
• Ever wonder why people who seem to be total idiots make tons of money? There’s a Salary Theorem for that…