squawking like a pink monkey bird

After the great post-eating disaster of 2008, I’ve elected to experiment with offline composition tools until I get distracted by shiny objects or I find one that I really like. My two candidates are Ecto and MarsEdit. I actually used Ecto quite a lot until I upgraded to Leopard and it expressed its allegiance to Tiger by refusing to work. Luckily for me, the developers gave it a nice talking to and the most recent version appears to play nicely with 10.5.x. I suppose we’ll really test that theory out when I hit publish, won’t we?

So, rather than make this one of those “testing . . . testing . . . is this thing on?” entries we all make from time to time, I thought I’d take a moment to share some links:

I’ve begun playing pmog. I figure that if I’m on the goddamn internet all day, I may as well rack up meaningless badges and add an extra layer of fun to my whole experience. I’m a mighty level 3, and I’m not quite ready to reveal my player name.

Warren Ellis has been doing a free weekly online comic called Freakangels. It’s been running for a couple of months now, and I absolutely love it. Unlike most of the serials I’ve read over the years (Green Mile, I’m looking in your direction), this one works in both short weekly installments and as a longer narrative arc when you read several episodes at once.

There’s a new version of Propeller in the works. I’ve seen it, and I’m just blown away by what it can do. There’s some official talk about it on Newsquake. Hear me now: Propeller is the future of social news, and the new Propeller is going to redefine the standard for a social news community. I can’t remember the last time I was so excited about something like this. Disclosure for the seven people who don’t know this: I work for Propeller as a scout.

Some dipshit at TBS thinks that it’s a really great idea to interrupt a show — by pausing the show in the middle of dialog — to run annoying interstitial advertising. This has to be seen to fully appreciate the magnitude of idiocy on display here. I submitted the link to Propeller a few days ago, and posted the video in my Vox blog.

Yes, I have a blog at Vox — mostly for pictures and videos — because what I really need is another fucking blog.

Ecto is as easy and full-featured as I remember it. I especially like how it handles creating links. Just for grins, here’s an Ecto-created Amazon link to Interzone by William S. Burroughs. There’s a story in Interzone called The Junky’s Christmas that is one of my favorite things he ever did. I was introduced to it when someone gave me the CD Spare Ass Annie and Other Tales, where Burroughs performs some of his work. Unlike a lot of authors who really should stick to the writing, Burroughs, like Charlie Stross and Neal Stephenson, just make their work something — well, the best I can come up with is more — when they read it. In fact, I think the best way to experience Burroughs is to listen to him perform it.

I just found out this very moment, through the magic of the googles, that The Junky’s Christmas was adapted into a weird and avant garde claymation movie in the early 90s. There’s a short clip from it on YouTube.

Have I mentioned before that Burroughs is one of my primary influences? It’s a little strange, because I don’t write anything like he did, but something about reading and listening to him accelerated my desire to write more than just a series of journal entries when I was in my early twenties. My first short story, called Scene Missing was heavily inspired by stories in Naked Lunch.

Okay, I am not making this up: in the middle of the last paragraph, my machine’s screen saver turned on, and it refused to wake the screen up. This is the second time it’s happened to me this week, and I had . . . an episode . . . while I shut down the motherfucker and restarted it. I thought it was the second time in two days that I’d worked on a blog entry and lost it to the land of wind and ghosts.

But! It turns out that Ecto has an auto-save feature which meant I only lost half a paragraph instead of an entire entry. For that reason alone, Ecto is a HUGE SUCCESS.

I’m off to lunch with a friend of mine who just got laid off from TokyoPop. I think we’re going to plan global domination together.

. . . I am now hitting publish, and hoping for the best.

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25 thoughts on “squawking like a pink monkey bird”

  2. Looking back, I can always tell the blog entries where I had to rewrite them after I lost my draft due to a technical hiccup. They always seem a bit more angst-riddled than my usual posts.
    You have probably answered this question before, but why not use WordPress? The new version saves a draft every time you pause.

  4. Congratulations, I think I would have destroyed something in my house once I realized the screensaver wasn’t going to stop.

  5. “After the great post-eating disaster of 2008, I’ve elected to experiment with offline composition tools…”
    The net’s Gog and Magog, aka Mr “copy” and Mistress “paste” – they also prevent much lossiness of the goodness.
    Just sayin’… (walks away whistling casually….)

  6. The Junkies Christmas video is one of my absolute favorites – love the story, too. So harsh. So disturbing. So sentimental.
    Somewhere online I saw the full piece, but I can’t find it now. (Except as a torrent, and since it’s a commercial DVD and all, I won’t post a direct link.)
    (FWIW, I always try to CTRL+A, CTRL+C before I hit post – even in comment boxes. And even if I’ve saved.)

  7. Ok, Wil, you gotta stop doing this shit to me. I mean, really, between the books you keep mentioning, and now Gumby starring in a William S. Burroughs production, I’m getting NONE of my own work done. Stop it. I mean it.
    ;0)

  9. Well, I got PMOG. Ill decide whether or not to thank you or curse you later, as right now Im too chicken to restart firefox. I have a window with 16 (yes, 16) tabs that I really dont want to loose, and lately Fox has been hit-or-miss in reloading old webpages after a restart.
    On the other hand, geek.com really needs a compare item/wishlist feature for the shopping section, even if all they do is point you elsewhere.
    Okay, nuff of that tangent.
    Vox looked interesting, and the parentheses blurb cracked me up, even if my coding knowledge is 2 steps above not much.

  10. ooooh Will, I’ve been on pmog for a few weeks, would love to have a buddy…i love missions they are fun.
    i’m on all of level 6, heh

  11. The title of the post just reminds me of “Pirates of the Dark Water” and their jitaten monkey bird. Weird childhood flashback, there.
    I love PMOG – I’ve been playing for a few months. Hopefully I’ve been nice 🙂

  12. When my screensaver locks me out on the Macbook Pro I plug in or unplug and plug in something USB, like a mouse, and it startles it awake for me.
    It’s worked every time so far.

  16. I was going through another Burroughs phase a few months ago… I adopted some of JWZ’s cut-up code to make some really interesting mashups (I’ll email you a link…) and I did a little animation of Bill that kinda works. (Could have been better…*shrug* my audio choices weren’t particularly inspired)

  17. I think world domination sounds like a good idea. After blogging, and book publishing it seems like the next logical step.
    And then you can turn the real world into something more like an RPG? Please?

  19. Eh, for anyone else on PMOG, Im ‘sandrak’ (not sandiek). Add me, friend me, or whatever it is and help me figure out what Im doing. 😛

  22. So, I have to admit that I didn’t know that Mr. Wheaton had a blog until it was mentioned on the DVD on TV blurb at the bottom of the screen while I was watching Stand by Me this evening. Curious, I came here to check it out and then was truly shocked and amazed that Mr Wheaton loves the Junkies Christmas. It is a masterpiece, the real meaning of Christmas spoken in terms that make me weep. Every year my husband and I pull it out on Christmas Eve and play it again. We have a full copy on DVD, it was on some sort of odd compilation of short animated stories a while back. They also rent it at Casa Video in Tucson, AZ. Anyone who is even the slightest bit interested can find it on Amazon http://www.amazon.com/Francis-Coppola-Presents-Burroughs-Christmas/dp/B000HIVIQ0

  23. “So, I have to admit that I didn’t know that Mr. Wheaton had a blog until it was mentioned on the DVD on TV blurb at the bottom of the screen while I was watching Stand by Me this evening.” Same here! Also, I never realized before that we are the same age. I have spent the last 1/2 hour or so reading some of your archived posts, instead of doing what I am supposed to be doing. Anyway, I am glad I made it here and I especially like the posts about your family. My husband and I have three kids (our oldest is 15), so I can relate!

  24. I was going to make a suggestion on why your computer would lock up like that, but I am on a PC, so maybe it’s different? Anyway, mine has been doing that lately and it turns out it has to do with the inside parts (I’m very technical, can’t you tell?) getting too hot and so, Suddenly Screensaver.
    Were you having lunch with Luis? I just heard about the TokyoPop downsizing and I am super bummed for him. But comic geeks look out for their own and I know several people working on finding him something new right now.

  25. oops – I forgot to finish my thought… the way I resolved the overheating problem with my laptop was to buy one of those fans that goes underneath to keep it cool. It hasn’t locked up on me once since then.

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