Inspired.
Jackson Pollock’s “Blue Poles Number II”
Points of Order
1.) The Apophenia of Modernity re-launches this week (today, in fact! Check it out!). Due to some issues with RSS I’ve had to migrate from LiveJournal to WordPress, which actually bugs me a lot. I mean, LiveJournal is the ur-blogging tool– if I’m going to write a blog-novel, I want to give proper respect to LJ, the tool that got me blogging to begin with. And this RSS problem isn’t even their fault, it’s the feedburner people’s fault… whatever. What’s done is done. Regardless, the novel is not only now on WordPress, but has been fully edited to get rid of the typos, bad dialogue, and untenable plot devices in the initial launch. Also, I’ve decided that since it’s a blog-form novel, I’m launching it like a blog, updating three times weekly, one “day/entry” at a time. Serialization rules! Makes sure to click the RSS link at the bottom of the page so you never miss a ‘chapter’!
2.) Life After Ph.D. – Yet Another Webcomic update today!
I think the webcomic needs a few minor revisions before/during the SXSW promo blowout (by ‘promo blowout’ I mean that if I get time, I’ll print up some 3×5s and litter the streets with them… y’know, to generate traffic). These revisions are: (a) I’m going to start adding titles, but like, real titles, with words. (b) I’m going to try to switch to a 2.5x/week update schedule. (c) I’m going to be doing more ‘exposition’ about the panels, either by citing their inspiration-source (like I did here: Nine.), or just telling a fun little story to go with them.
Why the push? What’s the inspiration?
Well, as far as the blog-novel goes, y’know… I’ve been sitting on this thing, writing it on and off for a couple years now (I think I started it in summer 2007 or 2008), deeply inspired by, among other things, Jackson Pollock’s fractal paintings, the notion of recursive systems, a whole ton of stuff I’d been reading on chaos theory (Gleick’s Chaos), network theory (Buchanan’s Nexus), emergent systems (esp. Dennett’s Freedom Evolves), the development of the Internet (mostly via random links from the web), and Hauser Chomsky & Fitch’s (2002) article that basically says the only interesting thing about language is recursion. And I got to thinking, what’s stopping a new consciousness from emerging? And, given the massive amount of connectivity through the Internet, why couldn’t the Internet develop a consciousness? So, that’s where the basic idea for the novel came from.
But I let life happen and the desire to write the novel died away… blah blah blah.
Then, about a year ago, the jump-drive that contained my novel got fried and I freaked out! My mind-baby was gone! I was able to recover most of it and that near-death gave me the kick I needed to get it back up and running, but I procrastinated some more, blah blah blah. Anyway, long story short, I turned 30 and decided I needed to get this done, see if I could make something of it, and move on. So, there you have it.
As for the new push with the webcomic… that’s a direct result of going to the STAPLE! Independent Media Expo! last weekend. There were some bigger names there (like Joel Watson, the guy who does Hijinks Ensue, which I used to read on LJ, and then forgot all about, and now I love it again) but there were also a TON of people there hocking their line-drawn, back-of-a-napkin-based webcomics (some of which are really good, some of which are complete crap) and I thought, ‘heh, my stuff is as good as at least half of this… what fools’. But then that night I ran into Logan, King of All Media, and he told me about his 3-Phase Plan to conquer the world (or something like that) and one of his points was “I’m okay at stuff. I’m not great, but I’m okay. I think there’s a market for that.” And I thought, hell, me too. I’m okay… why not just let this baby fly and see what happens?
So that’s where I’m at now.
Later Party People,
-d
