Saalon Muyo

As you may have heard, I’m going to be driving myself a tiny bit nuts next year if everything goes to plan.  One concern is that I let this blog fall back into the netherverse as the stress mounts.  I don’t want that to happen. I like this space, and it’s good for me. It’s a place to experiment. The stakes aren’t as high here as they are in something you need to eventually publish, and if you end up in a dead end mid-post, it’s not such a big deal. Plus, if I’m going to be self publishing, the blog will have to be a part of how I get the word out. Keeping things going here would be wise.

To that end, two things.

1. Schedules! - Starting next week, I’m restricting myself to three posts a week, probably Monday-Wednesday-Friday. If I have a funny video or something, I might put that up, but as for writing a post, if I have two ideas over the weekend, they’re getting slotted into the MWF schedule so I don’t end up with a bunch of crap over a week or two of inspiration and then nothing for a month.
2. Topics! - Is there anything about which you’d like to see me write? Write about more often? Less often? Anything in the past you particularly liked of which you’d like to see more? Sometimes, what spouts out is going to come out of whatever I’m doing. If the webseries happens, I can assure you production madness will be here. Same goes if I self publish. But otherwise, anything you’d like? I’m not afraid to beg for inspiration.

I’m not going to be able to write anything on the next novel until I get some serious notebooking done on it, so in the meantime, my plan is the use the blog to keep my output respectable. Hopefully that means getting a touch ahead of the posting schedule, so that I can ignore blogwriting for a week or two when I have to. We’ll see how that works.

Oh, and as a thank you for reading, check out the totally awesome and strange opening to Paranoia Agent.

I had to go back to see when I’d hit my 200th post. It took a while, because it’s been two years. Two years for a hundred posts.  Not an awe inspiring rate. When you consider that almost half of those posts were written in the past three months, it’s downright embarrassing.  Not because I wasn’t blogging, but that it was a reflection of how writing has gone for me over the past two years.

In December of 2009 I started my job at the Cultural Trust.  New jobs are a huge disruption. I lose half of a year, at best, to the pressure of fitting into a new home.  Starting at the Trust was far, far worse. Because of how much I still had to learn about development, the better part of a year slipped into the void.  My job was my life.

I was talking with my friend Danielle on Monday, and she asked me a question.  Do I consider myself a writer or a programmer? There were a few ways I could have answered, all technically true.

I’m both.

I’m one now but am trying to transition into the other.

I’m barely a journeyman at both, so who knows?

My answer to her was, I think, more honest than those.  I told her it’s tough to say, because I get paid to do one, but not the other. But I do one without pay, and I don’t know if I’d keep doing the other without it.

I’ve done alright at being a writer.  I have done a miserable job of finding a way to get paid for it.  This isn’t just a problem for my ego.  A paycheck would mean it’s a job, too. It would mean I didn’t have to squeeze out another thousand words after a day spent slamming my head into a website.  Even a small amount of money could be the difference between needing to spend five days programming or four.

So this is where I say enough.

No, not enough writing. Enough wanting. Enough hoping.  I need a plan.

The plan starts today.

I’m going to keep it manageable.  I’m only worried about the next year. Since I know something just north of squat about getting paid for this, I could end up next year with little to show. The plan might need to change midway, anyway, so a year is as far out as I want to think. So, what’s the plan?

Wait, I actually need to come up with one? Um. Hold on a second.

Ok, plan.

First, I have a finished novel. The most important possible thing is for this novel to get into print.  The best case scenario is for publication, even with the tiniest possible press in the world. As much as I would love fame, fortune and the adoration of women for Broken Magic, what I really need are publication credits. I need a resume. I need a book in the wild. I’ll self-publish if that’s what it takes, but I’m not quite there, yet. So here’s step one: If no one has agreed to publish Broken Magic by March, 2012, I’ll publish it myself.

Second, I need another novel. It’s been years since I wrote Broken Magic and it’s embarrassing. More importantly, if I’ve gotten a publication credit on my resume, then I need something that said credit helps me publish. So, step 2: Write the first draft of Mimesis by June 2012. Finish the second draft by November, 2012.  The upside to this is I’ll have a finished novel before the world ends in December.

Third, I’ve been running from film long enough. I’ve been working on a webseries idea with Rachel and it’s weird and interesting and it’s something I can film. I don’t have a lot of hope for anything I film making me money or leading directly to fame and glory, but it’d something with my name people could see. So step 3: Film a short webseries in the summer of 2012. Release it before the end of the year.

Simple, right? 2012 isn’t already making me feel weak and nauseated or anything. No. Not me.

This plan has implications. I’m still going to be working a full time, mind shredding programming job. I’m going to have crises I can’t foresee and vacations and mental breakdowns and any number of other problems. I’m going to hate what I’m writing, have writer’s block, get inspired by something not on the plan. It’s going to be really, really hard. That means I have no idea what my free time is going to look like next year. I’ll do what I can not to vanish. If nothing else, you’ll see me online.

We’ll call this the draft version of the plan. If you have thoughts, suggestions, ideas, hopes or complaints, let me know. But next year, I’m making progress. I’m moving forward.

Or at least, I’m giving it my best possible effort.

Vow made on my 300th post. See you at 400.

Thank you to whomever found my blog with this, my favorite search term of all time:

how the fuck do i using the mother fucking form_tag in fucking rails

I’ve been there. I hope my post helped. Truly and sincerely.

In honor of my 200th post, let’s spend a moment honoring the number 200.  I have no special love for the number 200, but a milestone is a milestone.  Also I missed 100 and that still bugs the heck out of me.  Never again, I promised myself.

Never again.

• 200 is the HTTP status code that got sent if you’re seeing this page.
• In 200 C.E., the Alexandrian mathematician Diophantus was born. Called “the father of algebra”  by some, his is a name more junior high math students should know and despise.
• That year, the population of the Earth is estimated to have been about 257 million.
• Four centuries prior to that, a Greek mathematician named Erastosthenes calculated the distance from the Earth to the sun.  For those having trouble with the math, that would place us in 200 B.C.E.
• That same year the Great Wall of China was completed.
• My favorite, often unused film speed, is 200 ISO.  Pictures look great at 200, but my hatred of flashes keeps me stuck at 400 ISO.  So it goes.
• 200 is the number of words in this post.

My research on this post was done using the awesome and always correct source of sources: Wikipedia.  I used the pages 200, 200 (number) and 200 BC.

I look at what search terms got people to my site and I see something like:

cat hair mustache

Blog spam has changed a lot since the last time I let trackbacks hit my site. In the days when I used Movable Type, spam catching software was so onerous to use that I just shut the whole comment/pingback/trackback thing off and didn’t look back. After my – I think – 3rd install of WordPress on my 3rd provider I was looking around for a stat tracking plugin and the use of it required getting a WordPress API key. This same API key, I discovered, could be used for Akismet, a spam-catching plugin that protected you from having to moderate or delete every false pingback and comment the net could throw at you.

So I installed it and let it run. The spam I used to get on my old blog was completely unrelated to my site. Lots of the same porn/Cialis/Instant Money things that showed up on Usenet and in your e-mail box. That’s still out there, but a new, odder type of spam has appeared.

You know how when you search for something on Google, a lot of what you get are those annoying link metasites that have a snip of content from real sites along with links to them? Well, there are more of those than I’d ever imagined on subjects like health food (not so odd) and mathematics (really, really strange). A lot of these don’t even have a ton of ads on them, making me wonder why they would install a bot and WordPress just to capture newly posted articles so they can put up things like:

Saalon Muyo placed an observative post today on “Reading is Overrated” – A Portrait of a TV Guide PodcastHere’s a quick excerpt … com crew as they provide inside scoop, offbeat opinions and answers to your questions about the latest entertainment headlines, the hottest TV shows, the newest m ovies and the biggest celebrities. … It at times infuriating, it spent too long talking about empty reality shows like Big Brother and too little time on deeper dramas like The Wire, but it was a good t ime

Le What? Obserative? Why, thank you.

Anyway, they usually get the name of the site or – sometimes – the name of me, the poster, correct. Ok, they get my online nick right, not so much my real name. Today, on the post I just put up, I got this:

Klang wrote an interesting post today on

Here’s a quick excerpt

Klang. I am Klang. Yes, there is a blank after “on”, so I guess their bot is as unsure of my post’s subject as my readers are.

Couldn’t I at least have been Kang? Or even Krang?

I killed my website for a week without realizing it was down.  Go me.  Tried to edit my .htaccess file to keep mod_rewrite from taking over a particular directory, but instead managed to break everything except that directory.

Anyway we’re back to normal, here. In other words, back to my irregular posting schedule that’s kept this place from ever having an audience of any kind.

There are things out there that move us deeply.  Films and books and poetry and music that stick with us longer than all the others.  Some of them are considered classics by almost everyone, and some are so obscure that we feel a rush when someone else has even heard of them.  We all have our own reasons for why something matters to us.  It may be because of how it made us feel,  it may be because of what it meant to an art form that we loved, or it could be a mix of both.

I want to talk about the things that matter to me.  Art is a very special illusion, created both by the author and by the audience.  They show, and we take what they’ve given us and translate it as best we can.  Sometimes we fail to figure out what the artist is trying to show us, but occasionally their work becomes larger and more important because how we, personally, view it.

This is a space for me to discuss the illusions that matter most to me.  If I’m lucky, maybe I can show you something new, or maybe show you something old through new eyes.  But mostly, I’ll get to revisit those grand illusions that make me who I am.  That would be enough.

We live in a society just begging to lose every scrap of data to its name. The internet – our entire computer culture, in fact – is becoming the sole warehouse of more and more writing, poetry and knowledge every day. A disk drive is cheaper to store and easier to access than a hundred thousand books, but it’s vulnerable to catastrophic data loss in a way that scares me.

Spill a glass of wine on a page of your book and you lose that page. Delete the wrong 100kb of data on a hard drive and lose access to the entire thing. Forever. All it takes is a few corrupt sectors due to a head crash or a magnet or a partitioning-gone-wrong and you’ve lost everything on the drive. Everything. On a small scale, it’s nothing. But when you think how fragile our storage devices have become, it makes you wonder how much of what we’ve created is going to be left after the next big disaster. What will future historians make of our blank, unreadable magnetic platters?

What got me thinking this? Why, a catastrophic data loss, of course. Sometime last week our server company went to increase the size of our BSD jail at our request. At our invoices and paid for request. The operation went bad. The jail was corrupted. No backup had been made, either by us or by the company whose box our VPS sat on. Just like that, 3 gigabytes of data were gone.

We lost everything. The last backup we had was from over a year ago. Data recovery operations are ongoing by the server company, but it look bleak. Most likely, everything we had stored on that server is gone forever. For me, that means about a year of blogging posts, some web designs I was working on and a lot of time to rebuild. For the others the loss was a little more significant.

I decided that if I was going to lose some, I would lose it all. Rather than lament the loss of a year, I would just start anew. That way, I feel like I gain some power back over my loss. It’s an illusion, but it helps. A clean slate. Shin Saalon Muyo! is born.

What this new start will mean is unlcear. I can change things up a lot if I want to, but I’m not sure what I should change. Any ideas? Anything you think should be done here? Format changes? Some new blogging topics? More photographs? Fiction? Naked skiball?

The future is wide open. Meaning I’ll probably do exactly what I did before, just without the last 3 years of posts in the archives. Welcome to my own personal Dark Age. Now with 100% less sword fighting, and 99.9% less posts.