less than this

I was never much for pictures... for photographs, as it were... Just one of the things I don't "get" and that no one seems to be able to explain to me. I tried for a while... I bought a reasonably nice SLR and a few accessories, and I ... well, I worked myself through a few hundred photos I now don't know what to do with. And my camera has had more use by family members in recent years than it ever got from me. And I still haven't bought a digital camera. And I don't go to flickr... or "get" flicker, for that matter... Although apparently it's a big deal, apparently it's well-enough-established among the younger generation that it's like google, it's just one of the basic assumed elements of what "internet" means. But most of the time when I'm "surfing" or whatever and I follow a link to something on flickr... I end up at some long essay, some blog post or political statement or manifesto, and ... this, I get even less. There's no photos there (that I can find), it's just words... Why is this on flickr? Why did you start your political movement on flickr, of all places, if images aren't even a part of it? Some of them even mention or link to their blogs - they HAVE blogs, they're just ... also using flickr... as a ... blog? I don't get it.

To me, well, I'm aware of flickr. It has something or other to do with photos, and with "Web 2.0" and with some "community" I'll never be a part of. According to the front page there were "1,681 photos uploaded in the last minute" - this is crazy. I didn't write this paragraph in the last minute.

What is it in my mind that doesn't connect with these things that are so easy for other people? Snapshots, classifieds, gossip, and their digital counterparts (flickr, craigslist, blogging) just to name a few. I suppose it's possible it's just a problem of upbringing; if my family had participated actively in such as these, they would seem normal to me, right? And maybe if my family hadn't been crazy, depressed, and poor, I wouldn't be the same way.

This week I did a 24-lecture series on Nietzsche, and Wednesday night my head was swimming and as I was walking to my car, trying to cope with complex philosophical conundrums, my head took me back to basics and told me that if I wanted to know the meaning of life I ought to start with a kiss. I ought to give myself over completely to a kiss, experience myself lost totally in that connection. That's how I used to teach philosophy. That's a toehold, a foot in the door, an easy way to get at the truths that cannot be expressed effectively with words. I felt lost, unanchored, mentally and emotionally and spiritually, and the safe place to turn, to get my bearings, was a kiss.

But I got in my car and I drove home anyway.

Nietzsche apparently has a lot to say against all forms of asceticism, and it seemed pretty convincing as it rolled into my mind. Gave me a lot to think about, about the various asceticism I prescribe to, cling to. Unstuck.

I have friends who can lose a job and find a new one faster than I can make up my mind about whether to kiss a beautiful woman. I have friends who don't know how or whether they can afford treatment for their depression, but who go anyway; I know at least three different ways my insurance covers therapy for me, but I stand frozen in depression for years at a time. At least I have friends, I suppose.

Last weekend went fast, but this week may have gone by even faster, somehow. I was telling someone recently about how my perception of time wasn't entirely normal, how the time from when I wake up Sunday morning to the time I get home from work Wednesday is effectively like a single moment in time. That it then usually takes a day (or a night, if I stay up late Wednesday, like tonight) to unwind from the time-compressed week. That I often lose half or more a day on Saturday, mentally crippled due to the impending work week. Such that what I was explaining at the time was that if I saw someone every weekend, it feels to me like seeing them every day. At the time I said it, I didn't mean it quite as literally as it seems to have been for me, this week. But here's another weekend.

I don't have any hard plans... Maybe I'll try to ... illustrate ... something ... for Dragons' Truth book cover? I don't know. Maybe play video games for a change, try to relax. Try not to spend money. It has occurred to me that maybe I should try to write something instead of always only focusing on my already written books. I think it's part of my conceptual idea for Modern Evil Press to have new books all the time. Alas. I probably ought to go to bed soon. I say this on account of Heath, my nocturnal, grave-yard-shirt-working brother just said HE has to go to bed. Oh well. No more terrible movies for tonight, I guess.

Well, I suppose it counts as a weekend, on account of the three days I didn't go to the travel agency to stare at a computer screen for ten hours. Of course, from about 8AM Friday to about 7AM Saturday I sat at a computer (and my television, running DVDs) and worked pretty continuously on my books. Not writing, but layout and cover designs for books I've already written. I'm watching the season finale of House on my iBook, but maybe I'll get some web-ready previews together before I finish typing this. Depends on how much I feel like typing, I suppose.

Thursday, as scheduled, Heath and I went to IKEA. First we made a quick (three hour) stop at the MVD, where Heath finally took the driving test and got his driver's license. I guess we're going to be switching the car insurance details around and he's getting title to the green car, finally, this week as well. Anyway, after that, IKEA. Office furniture at IKEA, while significantly cheaper than traditional office furniture, is still way out of my price range right now. After gathering as much information as was necessary for Heath to be able to plan out his office furniture purchases, we looked at bookcases. IKEA has re-tooled BILLY (the bookcases I've been buying - actually, the most popular bookcases in the world, from what I've read) and the options I used to buy are no longer produced, and some of the options I was hoping to purchase are no longer produced. It should still match with the ones I have if I buy more. So I worked out how much it would cost to get a little more bookcase, a bit more bookcase, a sufficient amount more bookcase... too much, too much, and way too much, respectively. Heath and I discussed it a bit, discussed what I already knew, and I ended up buying only chopsticks.

I actually worked on some of the electronic 'paperwork' for my books Thursday night, among other things. Actually went to bed a bit early, for a change. Got up at a reasonable hour and went to work, getting two more books ready for the new process. Lost and Not Found and Dragons' Truth. See, for about the cost of the bookcases I couldn't afford, and for somewhat less than the cost of the filing cabinet I need, I can get another two books set up and online and available to the public and to book stores. Obviously, there's some work to be done on my end - I've done most of it in the last two days, although there are a few things I'm still having trouble with. Getting things registered with the Library of Congress, updating the national ISBN registrar with the publication details of the books, getting the bookblocks updated with a consistent style (the same style for both books and -hopefully- any future individual novels), developing and implementing a consistent design for books of the same category (ie: individual novels by Modern Evil Press)... Just updating the text styles throughout each book to be self-consistent and without obvious error was an hours-long challenge. There was one point where I was making fractional-point changes to the type size of Lost and Not Found and seeing tens of pages of change in the length of the book; this is significant because, while I want to be able to price the book reasonably and to make money from them and I am charged by the page, I also want my books to be reasonably readable from a text-is-large-enough-to-read point of view.

Before Heath got home from his graveyard shift I'd done what I could with the bookblocks and basically finished with the first cover design, and before I went to bed I had a draft of the second new cover design (I've been working on them on my iBook, they should be 'below the fold' as it were) and ... well... I'm not certain I like them. I mean, I like them, they look good, but ... There's not really anything about them that makes you want to purchase them. I think the reaction might be something like "well, there's a very nice looking book... not that I see any reason to pick it up... but that's a very sharp design." I'm afraid I haven't got a grasp of what makes a book cover attractive to people. I personally tend to buy books based on their author and/or the reputation of the book (ie: what I've heard about it). For a time, for certain subjects, I would learn about new books by browsing titles for keywords and then reading the jacket notes. For the purposes of the new covers, I kept the old jacket notes, from the old covers, and just lay them out in the new designs. I just don't know. I like them and at the same time dislike them. It's somewhat frustrating. Tell me what you think, if it's worth enough effort to email me.

Then today ... well, I recall spending a long time trying to get these bookblocks to create "compliant" PDFs, mostly. Apparently, when Pages (Apple's word processing and layout application, which I use for all my books-related word processing and layout) has a graphic inserted into a document, even if the graphic itself was created in CMYK colorspace, even if the graphic is a compliant PDF with CMYK colorspace defined within it... Pages takes that image and, when outputting to the Adobe Acrobat Professional Distiller print driver, hands it over in RGB colorspace, which -by the way- is not compliant. The graphic, by the way, is the Modern Evil logo on the title page. After spending all day on it, unless I have an epiphany during the week, I'll probably create a new typeface with the ME logo in it (perhaps a 1-character typeface?) and just have it embed the new typeface - it seems to have NO trouble with text, and actually I was told I needed to start using Distiller and making 'compliant' PDFs by my new printer on account of I use dingbats and they don't translate properly otherwise. Fine. I'll make a ME dingbat.

Alright, enough of this. Sleep. I work in a few hours. Ugh.

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