Apparently the Keenspace gang has gotten the bugs out at last. Yay team!!! They had a server crash back at the end of January and, while they managed to get all the current comics back up in a couple of days, all the sites were in read only mode until just today. Or at least my site was. Everything has now updated. The art you see in yesterday’s entry here can be found in it’s proper context over at Sentient 39. Apologies for not providing proper links. Exhaustion and all.

So far so good. Keenspace apparently has the images. It just isn’t able to load them. Or refresh them. Or whatever.

Personal weather report – cranky with a chance of snappishness. Lack of uninterrupted sleep and an excess of caffeine have resulted in a high pressure system that is just waiting to rain on everyone’s parade. There is a possibility of a nap in the late afternoon that could diffuse the situation. Lack of nap is likely to result in much whininess and self-pity.

Now all I have to do is figure out how to add a comment field. Though that may be a Blogger Pro function.

Perhaps I could turn this into a team blog. Or start a new one. Anyone interested? The activity over on the Yahoo group I sort of started seems to have died back. Blogger didn’t exist when we created it.

You don’t have to be able to talk to Skook. There’s a lot improv sign language involved in that. Hell, I barely talk to Skook these days.

The Mystery Person wrote back on Tuesday but I haven’t been able to finish my reply and post until today. M.P.s letter is in bold, my replies are in italics –

I am sorry to hear about your mother…

Given what I’ve read about Alzheimer’s Disease, Aged Mother is actually doing really well. She knows she’s loved, she knows where she is (while not remembering the time or date) and that she’s with her family. She exhibits no desire to wander. She isn’t exhibiting any of the rage or anxiety that some Alz patients apparently do. All things considered, she’s doing great. Nizzibet and I could definitely use more sleep and more non-A.M. time but we’ll do what we need to do to see this through. Oooh. Rhymie.

I have read through your blog.  Perhaps I’m thinking too far inside the box, but I don’t get your references to the big guy.  What does Skook represent?  That is, assuming that I SHOULD take him figuratively.  

You always were a bit on the edge David, but I don’t see you slipping to the point of literally believing you’ve got a Sasquatch in the house.  Of course this could all be long-term delirium resulting from chemical alterations to your mind.  Hard to say, right?

Skook represents nothing. That is to say – sometimes a sasquatch is a just a sasquatch. And if he likes eating cigars I wouldn’t try to stop him.

I’m not much of a metaphoric thinker. I can do it easily enough but I’m less interested in something’s metaphoric weight than its physicalness. In other words, I don’t read (or write or imagine) stories about vampires (for instance) as a fantastic explorations of addiction or parasitic relationships, I read (write/imagine) stories about vampires to explore the experience of being a resurrected corpse that drinks blood to continue its existence.

No worries about my grasp on reality. I let go of that years ago. There is a sasquatch living in my garage but I’ll never get to show him to you. He knows how to make himself scarce. Sasquatches are good at hiding in plain sight.

Or more specifically, here in this journal, reality is whatever I want to pay attention to at the time I’m writing. A lot of entries never get posted. Even more never get written. Much of what I do only interests me for the time it takes for me to do it.

Many years ago, I toyed with a profoundly mind-altering substance.  Not satisfied with the effect, I intensified it through the syncope game (intense hyperventilation followed by an assistant lifting and arching the body back).  Perhaps you’ve heard of this, or even tried it.   Although no one really thinks about it when playing, the idea is to create a near-death experience by a precipitous but very momentary drop in blood pressure to the brain.

I guess this all sounds very grotesque, but the result is incredibly profound.  People observing this simply see the participant lose consciousness for a few moments.  When arriving back at a conscious state, the participant always looks completely shocked and disoriented.   This is because they entered another world and lived in it for a couple of hours in the few seconds that they were out.

With each “round” of the syncope game, the length of time in the other world increases.  I think by the forth round I was there a few days — I walked around a city, and I think I actually even went to work a couple of times.  On the fifth round, I don’t recall ever coming back out of it.   I’m sure I did, but I always have this nagging feeling…

Your trip sounds like fun. Similar to some of NO2 stunts I used to pull though I don’t recall getting away from this reality quite so far. That is to say, NO2 would put me off in another place but it was always just a short visit. What drug were you using?

The thing about drug experiences (hell, experiences in general) is that the subject experience often differs vastly from the objective (or observable) experience. Unfortunately too much of our culture says that the objective world is the only real world. Much of the time that objective world is still being observed and interpreted subjectively and the observer is stubbornly attached to their interpretation as being the “real” one.

Have you read any Ken Wilber? I particularly recommend A Brief History of Everything. He lays out one of the most inclusive interpretations of the world that I’ve run across. I wish I could summarize his work but part of his thesis is that we do ourselves, our cultures and our world damage by our tendency toward reductionism.

Parting thought:

The Office of National Drug Control Policy states that drug use permanently alters the chemical structure of the brain.  I would argue that so does thinking.

No doubt drug use changes the brain. So does juggling. Though the effects in the case of juggling are apparently temporary.

Thought for the day: Dopamine.

-MP

Thought for the Friday: Dope a mime.

DLI

And there you have our latest exchange. I still don’t know who M.P. is. That would require more personal details than I’ve gotten so far. I suspect that M.P. is male but even that is uncertain. It’s a kneejerk assumption of mine based on M.P.’s writing style and the whole gaming aspect of this communication.

Of course, all this could be a co-incidence and there’s another David Lee Ingersoll out that M.P. knew. Or M.P. could be completely gaming me and not have ever met me at all. Stay tuned.

No New Ideas

I love it when I discover that someone else has the same idea for a story that I do. It means one of two things –

A. I now have no reason to write that story because some else has now done it as well or better than I would have.

B. I now have a template of what doesn’t work about the idea (for me at least) and I can improve on it.

Hack/Slash isn’t exactly the same idea that’s been tumbling around my head for the last year or so, but it’s close enough that if I were to toon it I’d need to make some major changes. It’s really such an obvious idea – Young woman hunts supernatural serial killers – that I should be surprised that no one has done it before now. Slasher movies have been stumbling about for the last twenty years now. Of course, Hack/Slash might head in a completely different direction than I would have. Sometimes a story takes some serious twists and turns from where it seems to start out. I’ll be interested in checking this out when it hits the stores. (Or more likely when it gets collected and shows up at Half Price Books in a couple of years.)

Stolen Again

Stolen from Noir Bettie –

Stolen (including preamble) from the P@, who stole it from someone else. Ahhh, the internet.

The list is from IMDB, and while I’m sure most of us have an opinion on the rankings (or the order of them), the point of this entry is to bold out the movies that you’ve seen. HTML ahoy!!

1 Godfather, The (1972)

8 Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, The (2001)

9 Shichinin no samurai (1954)

10 Star Wars (1977)

11 Citizen Kane (1941)

12 One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)

13 Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)

14 Rear Window (1954)

15 Star Wars: Episode V – The Empire Strikes Back (1980)

20 North by Northwest (1959)

21 12 Angry Men (1957)

22 Amelie (2001)

23 Psycho (1960)

24 Lawrence of Arabia (1962)

28 Goodfellas (1990)

29 American Beauty (1999)

30 Vertigo (1958)

31 Sunset Blvd. (1950)

32 Matrix, The (1999)

33 Pianist, The (2002)

34 Apocalypse Now (1979)

35 To Kill a Mockingbird (1962)

36 Some Like It Hot (1959)

37 Taxi Driver (1976)

38 C’era una volta il West (1968)

39 Third Man, The (1949)

40 Paths of Glory (1957)

41 Fight Club (1999)

42 Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi (2001) (Spirited Away)

43 Boot, Das (1981)

44 L.A. Confidential

45 Double Indemnity (1944)

46 Chinatown (1974)

48 Maltese Falcon, The (1941)

49 Requiem for a Dream (2000)

50 M (1931)

51 Bridge on the River Kwai, The (1957)

52 All About Eve (1950)

53 Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)

55 Saving Private Ryan (1998)

56 Raging Bull (1980)

57 Cidade de Deus (2002)

58 Wizard of Oz, The (1939)

64 Léon (1994)

65 Vita è bella, La (1997)

66 Touch of Evil (1958)

67 Manchurian Candidate, The (1962)

68 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

69 Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The (1948)

70 Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

71 Great Escape, The (1963)

72 Reservoir Dogs (1992)

73 Clockwork Orange, A (1971)

74 Amadeus (1984)

75 Modern Times (1936)

76 Annie Hall (1977)

78 Ran (1985)

79 On the Waterfront (1954)

80 Braveheart (1995)

81 High Noon (1952)

82 Apartment, The (1960)

83 Fargo (1996)

86 Shining, The (1980)

87 Strangers on a Train (1951)

88 Blade Runner (1982)

89 Metropolis (1927)

90 Duck Soup (1933)**

91 Finding Nemo (2003)

92 Donnie Darko (2001)

93 General, The (1927)

95 Princess Bride, The (1987)

96 City Lights (1931)

97 Great Dictator, The (1940)

98 Lola rennt (1998)

99 Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)

100 Notorious (1946)

After truthfully answering the question, “Today is Monday?” for the fourth time in an hour (“Yes, Mom. February 2nd”), one is tempted to start lying. Extravagantly.

“Today is Monday?”

“Nope, it’s Thursday. The second one this week. And it’s your birthday! Yay! Since you’re a hobbit you owe presents! I’ll take that teddy bear of yours and paint him blue!”

Trouble is, while she forgets that she just ate breakfast, she’d probably remember enough of that to complain that I’d tried to paint her bear for the next month.

Blake has posted one of her paintings. Poke around her site once you’re there and marvel at her interior decoration skills.

If you’re wondering where last week’s update for Sentient 39 is, apparently Boardy, Keenspace’s main server, crashed last Wednesday. Poor Boardy. It tried so hard.

I’ll update when the new server goes up.