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I feel compelled to set forth, for no other reason than to amuse
myself, the writing process in its entirety.
Perhaps this isn't such a good idea.
After all, we writers like to present our work as mysterious and
exclusive. Revealing how it really works
is a bit like unveiling the mirror that underlies a particularly good magic
trick. If people knew that the process
isn't as mystical as they think, word would get out that anybody can really do it.
After all, anybody can string words together to communicate ideas. There is no monopoly on that. Beyond that skill, all it takes to be good,
really, is the ability to critique yourself honestly and shoot for high
quality. So here we go.
…
Okay, so maybe I can’t set it out in a clear, technical
manner. Looks like there might be an
actual reason why it’s portrayed in mystical terms. Let’s use a word picture (as might be
expected.)
Imagine a boy (or girl, if you prefer) standing on a grassy
hillside. Wind sweeps across the hill,
breaking like ocean spray over its crest.
The boy holds tight to a string, which leads up to a bright red kite
sailing through the brilliant blue sky in long swoops. The kite, buoyed up by the wind, tries to
escape, but the boy keeps a firm hold on the string. And so, boy and kite run through the clouds
and grass, catching the wind in their wings for a few brief seconds.
Got that?
Now imagine that the boy stands on a mountaintop and holds onto
a strand of lightning in the middle of a raging storm. The lightning strikes for far less than a
second, and the boy must not only keep watch for it, he must get to it as soon
as he sees it and take hold of it. The
lightning is not connected to any flimsy construction of wood and paper, but to
the towering thunderhead that bellows and shouts above him, trailing lightning
like flashing hair and throwing out thunderclaps like punches. And the lightning continues up still farther,
through banks of cumulonimbus and past stratus ribs, through the sun’s blazing
heart and beyond, to wrap around the moon and entwine the stars. And the boy must hold all this in check, as
it threatens to blow away. Not only
that, but he must run with it.
And sometimes, if he manages to run fast enough, the wind itself may sweep him up, the lightning drawing him to itself, with the thunders embracing and the clouds attending and, hand in hand with the Muse, he may be privileged to ride the storm for a time.
We are lucky to catch the
lightning. | | |
| Whee, I got another job. At the Sunglass Hut up in the new mall in town. I walked in there the other day to get my sunglasses repaired before school started, and happened to ask whether they were hiring. Lo and behold, they were, and had got so few people coming into the store (let alone to apply for a job) since the mall was pretty new, that they jumped at the chance to hire me. So I'm apparently employed again. This should be interesting.
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| Haven't posted for a long time, but I'm going to try to do so more now. My personal journey is moving right along, I have a kickass schedule for next semester, and I'm on the lookout for a new job (Barnes and Noble and Gamestop are hiring part-timers, ZOMG), so things look good. Also, I have won 13 Internets and counting. 
***WARNING: The true nature of the Internet is discussed below. You will be shocked and disturbed. But if you still live on that placid island of ignorance known as "everyday life," do not read further. Go back to whatever you were doing, and excise this memory from your mind. You were not meant to voyage far.***
I want to talk about the idiots that work at Time Magazine. They have given the Person of the Year to all the anonymous users who are creating their own content on the Internet, citing Wikipedia and Youtube as examples. They're going on about Web 2.0 or something, a new type of Internet where content is created by the users, an information democracy. They hope that this will usher in a new age of cyberspace, where anyone can post anything they want to the internet. Blah blah blah bright future Web 2.0, whatever.
Well, that award just goes to show one thing: the staff of Time Magazine have never really been on the Internet. The Internet is a horrible place. Somethingawful can vouch for that, and then some. (They just did a front page article on this Person of the Year thing, which is what prompted me to blog this. Go check it out, they did a good job.) Every update, they have a feature called the Awful Link of the day, highlighting a pathetic, digusting, amusing, or just plain crazy web site that someone pointed them to. From people who like to dress up as big stuffed animals and act out childhood fantasies (including sex), to silly wanna-be cool kids with hideously garish Geocities sites, to middle-aged goths who take the whole "goth" thing way too far (it would be better if they were serious about it, and claimed to be Satanic or something), to nutty conspiracy theorists (did you know that there's water on the Moon? Clearly a conspiracy of epic proportions), it pushes truly horrible individuals into the limelight and watches them shrivel.
And every week, they have a feature called the Weekend Web, which is even worse. It takes that limelight, and shines it into the dark corners of the internet, into message board hives of truly wretched individuals. From grown men who dress up in diapers, poop themselves, then take pictures of it and congratulate each other, to people who go further than the above-mentioned furries and think that they're actually animals living in human bodies, to people who think AIDS is sexy, to White Supremacists, to people who fetishize everything under the sun (Zits? Vomit? Pig roasts? Not out of the question here), to people who get WAY too excited about Yoshi, Weekend Web leaves no moldy Internet corner untouched. You may think that those people aren't serious, that they're just saying those things to be goofy online....no, they're not. There are too many of them. They are perfectly serious. There are actually men out there who inject their testicles with quarts of saline and think it's sexy despite that fact that they now have a penis that doesn't work even for urination, or voluntarily mutliate/cut off their genitals and get off to it, and worse. It's real.
Somethingawful also has a whole series of features devoted to Second Life, an online simulated community where people can make their own avatars, animations, objects, etc. and are free to basically live a "second life" outside the constraints of the usual one. They form communities, neighborhoods, towns, governments, you name it. There are businesses that sell virtual stuff on Second Life and make real money. Time actually included a small article about Second Life, because I guess the whole thing about people making money on it set off their Business Radar. Know what they found when they sent a writer in there? They found sex. Virtual sex. And they apparently didn't see anything wrong with that, with the fact that they went in there expecting to find a market or comprehensible culture of some sort. But the thing is, they didn't even scratch the surface of what Second Life has. Virtual child prostitution. Furry sex. Every fourth person having an avatar from Harry Potter. And having sex. Everything under the sun that you'd expect, and worse. I do not exaggerate here.
But I digress. So what if Somethingawful points out the horrible stuff that's online, and Time has now labeled that stuff as "content" and rewarded the severely maladjusted/disturbed/creepy people who put it up. That's not what my problem is with Time's decision, no sir. I'm not up in arms that Time gave the Person of the Year to all those freaks. I'm up in arms that they never really saw the true face of the Internet at all. Let me explain.
There exists, out there in Internetland, a little place called 4chan. A message board, if such a thing can be called that at all. It is a place where anyone can go and post a message and/or an image, totally anonymously. Completely anonymously. Nobody will ever know it's you. It is a forum where faceless individuals congregate by the thousands (there are over 18 million posts in 4chan's General discussion board alone) and show their true selves. Ironically, by giving everyone masks, we see humanity without its mask. And it is horrifying. Even I, who harbor the lowest, most cynical view of humanity was somewhat taken aback by the level of innate hostility shown completely arbitrarily on those boards, and by the fact that this place really has no rules of decnecy at all. It is a truly free environment. 4chan is like a singularity of the Internet. It shows humanity as it really is. Childish, hostile, and perverted, all in the extreme. This is not a joke. The posters may not take it all that seriously, but nevertheless, there it is: what humans will do when they know they have nothing to lose. If you had any hope for humanity, if you thought for an instant that humanity was noble or decent in any way, left to its own devices, if you thought that there is a spark of goodness in every individual, that hope will be destroyed upon viewing 4chan.
Actually, I lied. There are rules on 4chan. No posting of illegal content. No posting of child pornography. That's about it. Also, furries are generally loathed by the population of 4chan, and sometimes banned just for posting. They don't show up much there...anymore. There was a time when they were among the posting population, but there came a point when their fetish was not tolerated anymore, and they were universally banned (they made a Furry Board, and after a week or so of heated controversy and flame wars, everyone who had ever posted in it was banned for good. A brilliant trap.) But they went off and made their own Furry-chan, and now have their own version of 4chan. And there are others. For pedophiles, people who really get into anime (we're talking a serious break from reality here), people who get off on gore and blood (no, seriously), and many others. These people all have their own communities, where they can be free to mirror each other's twisted interests back, and think that it's normal. I'm not making any moral judgements here, I think the existence of these things speak for themselves. And there's more. We've all seen goatse, and the more recent Tubgirl, but there's far worse, ad infinitum. I wanted to cite some of it here, but I don't want to commit any of my uninitiated readers to mental institutions. I'll leave you to do the math and imagine what all that is, or maybe your curiosity will get the better of you and that wonderful engine called Google will break your innocence. Don't blame me if you want to gouge your eyes out.
People, I'm sorry to have to point all this out, but this is the Internet. There was a Warning above, you chose to read further. It's a horrible place, and anybody who still thinks the Internet holds any promise for the world is fooling themselves. It's a delusion, the Dot-Com Bubble already burst. There are companies who deal online, but it will never be more than that: companies that distribute their product online. Big whoop. Web 2.0 is a farce. These are the people you are encouraging. They are now the Person of the Year. I hate to break it to you, but the content they post is either inane, disturbing, pathetic, or perverted. No values or morals are needed to make that judgement.
*sigh* I've said my piece. Here are some of the people that Time Magazine has made Person of the Year.
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| With wind chill, it is now -14 degrees.
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