The Eleventh Hour

I’m getting my periodic urge to clean out my internet presence. Go away for a while. Start again, maybe, after a pause: somewhere else as somebody else. If you find all my various accounts deleted and 404s greet you everywhere, then this is what happened.

It’s just something I do, sometimes. The urge may yet subside, but while it’s there, it’s strong -like whatever calls the salmon home, or whatever drives the lemmings off their cliffs, or whatever guides the migrating birds.

We are all just so many horny salmon in the filthy ocean of internets, is what I’m saying. Sometimes this thing just writes itself.

Wake Up, You Stupid City

The goddamn New Year is over, already.

As most of my regular readers know perfectly well, New Year (April 13/14) is a big deal hereabouts. Old harvest festival, pointless rituals followed earnestly by urban folk out of the vast inertia that history brings to bear. In my entire life, I’ve only missed the ritualized New Year twice. One year I spent it waiting in a hospital room -it’s a long story- and completely missed the whole thing without really noticing. That was some years ago.

This year was the second time, and the first time that I skipped New Year because I could, and because I wanted to: I ignored the auspicious times and festivities, I didn’t wear the colours, exchange gifts, visit my relatives or go to temple. (Actually, I haven’t been in years, so that last wasn’t very novel.)  I’m sure this isn’t a big deal to some of you, and it’s not really a big deal to me, either. Except that it seems to somehow mark the end of something. It was an enormous relief, is what it was. I don’t know how I stood it all these years.

Essentially, I spent New Year on the Internets -or at least, I would have if a friend hadn’t shown up with alcohol and marijuana. But it’s the thought that counts.

you know your computer is an extension of your self when

…the reinstall after a hard drive crash feels like a spiritual cleansing.

All the detritus of failed experiments, swept away; all the tangled memories of inconsequential things erased; the choking mass of data flushed and made empty and pure. Restoring the important bits from backup is a reaffirmation of who we are, what we love, and what it is, precisely, that we do.

I/O Error

So my hard disk crashed and I lost all my stuff. Ho hum.

As Drac noted, I am comparatively calm about this -mostly because I didn’t lose all my stuff. Both work and personal email is in Gmail these days, so that’s fine. A gigabyte or so of work-related data is rsynced daily to a server at work, so that’s fine. Novel and associated notes are tarballed and emailed to myself on a daily basis, so that’s fine. Most everything else important is on a weekly backup, which means I’m losing precisely a week’s worth of data, given that my weekly backups go on Fridays and the crash happened Thursday evening -but nothing life-threatening. Apparently backing up really is a Good Thing.

There was a hairy moment with some freelance writing work I’m doing these days -I’d forgotten to back that up. I’d only been on it for two or three days -it just didn’t occur to me. I should have put it in one of the directories which are automatically backed up, but I set the backing-up cron jobs a long time and had mostly forgotten about it. Still, working at a tech company has its advantages. They dug out the external USB cables for me and I managed to recover those precious twenty-eight kilobytes. (OpenOffice makes very small documents… the plain-text version is only a little smaller)

The deadline for the freelance job was Friday, so I had to temporarily put my hard drive troubles on hold, borrow the flatmate’s laptop and stay up till 3am on Friday morning, accidentally pressing F1 far too often on that stupid Thinkpad keyboard. Still, no harm done.

They had a replacement hard drive by the time I got to work Friday morning, and I’d gotten around to reinstalling Ubuntu (from a Dapper CD that was lying around) by noon. Since then, I’ve been

• re-upgrading Dapper to Edgy.
• Firefox 2 and setting up my handful of extensions again -I always forget how to get Gmail Manager to show up in a toolbar of my choice as opposed to the bottom corner of the status bar. Every time.
• doing things like this, every ten minutes: Hmm, let’s watch a movie. Wha- where the hell is- oh, right. New install. Sigh. apt-get install vlc. Hmm.

That’s all the good news. The bad news is, I can’t seem to wedge the old hard drive open long enough to fish out all the shit I had in it -the stuff that’s was never backed up because A) it was always going to be moved to DVD, in a few days or weeks and B) because it was just too goddamn big to back up in the meantime. This means maybe five gigs of music (Goddammit! I just got that Thunderbirds are Now! album), maybe twelve gigs of comics (Goddammit! I was really and extremely looking forward to reading Wood’s Local over the weekend) and of course, the next two episodes of Prison Break- so there goes my stash of weekend entertainment.

Of course, a digital packrat’s hard disk is usually littered with obscure goodies. There may have been gigabytes of interesting stuff in there I’d just forgotten about (I know I save a lot of stuff off the Internets to read offline… I just never see it again once it goes into the “Crap off the Internets to read” subdirectory.) Non-critical stuff, of course. Anything you can’t remember is there probably wasn’t important in the first place. No, I’m sure they weren’t important. But they might have been interesting.

On Being, or Not Being, A Writer

Reading a rather good post (and comment thread) about how we define the term “writer” and whether we consider ourselves writers -Me? Hell, no. Upon my oath I am not a superstitious man, but the mere thought makes me shudder. It would be like a jinx. Writer, hex thyself. That sort of thing.

It does remind me, though, of a Richard Mitchell story.

We live in a time when writing — writing has become too common, too widespread among us. I expect any day to meet a man at a cocktail party and ask him what he does and he says, “I’m a writer,” and I ask him, “Oh, what have you written?” and he answers, “Close cover before striking.”

Or “HOT.” “HOT.” I know the man who wrote “HOT,” I wonder if he’s the same man who wrote “COLD.” Or a man who takes his brushes and paints on a door, “MEN.” A writer? Yes! We have people who write in manuals, people who write instructions, people who write speeches for other people to deliver, people who write wheedling, conniving invitations to us to spend money for one thing or another — people who write their initials on the oak tree, I suppose. We have to start understanding this business of “writer.”

This being from his Gift of Fire speech, which I’ve quoted, pointed people at, and linked so often that I now think of it as a close personal friend. My respect for its personal space almost forbade me from linking/quoting it yet again. Almost.

A Portrait of the Artist as a Capitalist Pig

On stereotypes of artists. The berets, the ’starving artist’ thing, the whole Sherwood Anderson ‘quitting the paint factory‘ schtick. Do you know why artists stereotypically wear berets? I have no idea -I googled in a disinterested way, and some people say its because French painters originated the stereotype and the beret is stereotypically French to begin with (which is another question that we’re not interested in), and Paul Graham, of all people, mentions the the “painter who can’t afford to heat his studio and thus has to wear a beret indoors” which give us a more satisfying explanation. Maybe that’s how it got started -and maybe that’s the thing that links the “starving artist” with their beret, at least in cold countries. (Which tells you that artists born in the tropics are just that much luckier, then) These are stereotypes, but they’re also archetypes. Iconic roles, things to live up to, even if only in your head -if you’re an artist. Or if you’re a novelist, the crummy day job and the ongoing secret struggle. Work all day at some tripe that you observe with a cunning eye and then write it up into your magnum opus -that’s Scott Adams in a nutshell.There is no stereotype for people who work at Company 2.0-era web/media/technology outfits while still trying to write a book, at least not if the book has sweet F.A. to do with anything you work with. Not that I’m complaining, but is it still a “day job” if you enjoy it?

You know you’re burned out on an old blog when…

…you were just waiting for WordPress.com to release XML export so that you could take a backup before deleting it.

Blog burnout, I think, is tied to a specific blog, not so much to the act of blogging. You can be a blogger for years and not get tired of blogging per se (after all, blogging is pretty much the same as writing, and writing is pretty close to breathing, at least for some), but you can burn out easy on the blog you live on.
It doesn’t mean that you hate everything you’ve written, either; hence the XML export. You want to squirrel that away somewhere, just on the off chance that you’ll want it. But you don’t intend to import it again. No, you want to start entirely fresh. And that starts off something like a fad in your brain… so you delete your del.icio.us account and get a new one. You change OSes (install Dapper), change browsers (get Opera 9), change email clients (throw Thunderbird away and get Mutt). This keeps you busy for a little while.

You just keep wondering what’ll happen when you run out of fresh starts.

drag

Histories and archives are a drag. Better to throw it all away, every once in a while, and start again. A new name, a new face, a new town.