A Question For Today: Nostalgia

What does nostalgia mean to you? When you hear that word, what do you see, what do you feel?

For me, Nostalgia is a double edged sword. It let’s me see the world with a glitter around the pale edges. Without nostalgia, I wouldn’t smile at the sight of a power ranger costume at halloween, wouldn’t chuckle from the thought of an Amelia Badelia book.

It is something like a crystalized twinkle of joy. Our mind snatches and holds every snapping synapse dedicated to that particular laugh, hordes them together in labeled bundles.

It can be positive. I still start crying if I hear the opening music to the super nintendo game, Secret of Mana. I can watch the spider-man animated series for hours, no matter how much the violence is neutered. Dragonball Z is still an inspiration toward friendship and hard work.

It can also lead to horror. There is no excuse for having fond memories of Sisqo’s ‘Thong Song’ (let me see that booty go, du-du du-du, let me see that booty gooooooo, that thong thong thong thong thong).

I believe the greatest fear is betrayal. For years I imagined the game ‘Ice Hockey’ for the Nintendo NES as an action packed game before its time. When I got it for Wiiware, it was a simple control scheme with modified mario sprites.

I still loved it though. It isn’t ‘Ice Hockey’s’ fault that it eclipsed all other hockey games in my mind. It also kept a beaten path to my childhood. The question is if that path is worth the disappointment in the now, the constant reference to yesteryear.

Please let me know your thoughts below.

Kids and Programming: A Goa’uld Symbiosis

Ok so it’s not really a Goa’uld symbiosis, let’s make that perfectly clear. For a while now, probably ever since the early 90′s when GUI systems came out in force, there has been a new trend in programming. This trend is pushing toward making it easier to for the uninitiated to build and author their own software for the devices they love. Smart phones and App Stores (I’m using the term ‘App Store’ to mean any easily accessible software distribution platform) have pushed this at a much faster pace, but young people are at the forefront of this evolution in software development. It seems like once they pop out of the womb the doctor hands them an iPhone. It’s difficult to deny that technology is becoming integral to functioning in our society and kids are not being left out of this trend. Being a computer geek doesn’t carry the same connotation as it once did, with new movies and shows about people who use computers, The Social Network and iCarly come to mind. With this new found digital acceptance at an early age it makes sense that a small subset of these new young computer users will be interested in building software.

With the incentive and ease of distribution of the App Store, who wouldn’t want to make a few bucks from writing a little game for the iPhone. The neighborhood grass grows tall because technically knowledgeable kids don’t have to mow lawns to make money anymore. If I wrote an app that cost $0.99 on the App Store, and only 100 people bought it, I would still make around $100. One man made over $500,000 off of his app in a few months. Sure this is the exception and not the rule, but you get the idea. I gain a user base, experience at making better apps, and I get feedback from my users as to what they would like to see in the app. As a poor high school or junior high kid the fun of letting other people see your work is incentive enough to make cool stuff, but getting paid for it is like the icing on the cake. The same way Steam has been a godsend for indie developers to get their game out there, the App Store has been a boon for iPhone and Android developers who want a good way to let people know about their work. I make it sound as if the App Stores are without their drawbacks, but I’m talking about how they mainly effect younger people, and if you just want to get your product out there, it’s a good way to go. Herein lies the kicker,  a still smaller subset of kids are becoming interested in what it means to write better software, how the computers and software they love to use works, and what types of skills it takes to become a professional software developer.

With the decline of state and therefore school budgets, less and less money gets pushed into expensive subjects. We are left with English, math, history, and science. Which of these are students probably the most interested in? If you said none of them, you are mostly correct. This is partly because the teaching styles used in schools and the lack of resources to teach in other ways besides lectures, homework, and then tests. Most students crave doing things hands on, because they don’t have to listen to someone else tell them what to do. They are in control and have to take ownership of the learning themselves. Programming lets you start with nothing, using just your own brain and the things you have learned, apply them to a problem, and end with something cool that you can share with other people. If you look at the subjects that people are really interested in it usually follows this pattern. Start with nothing, Create, Share. This is why students don’t like math or science, until you are doing college level mathematics or science, you don’t get to experiment or create. With music and art, creation is intuitive and almost anyone can do them. With something like invention or programming, you have to mix logic and the intuitive sense of creation, which is often difficult. The earlier you start thinking this way the better you will be at doing both. So when kids start programming at a young age, it gives me hope that it will catch on and have kids using logic to create. The end hope is that kids will then apply their logical minds to other problems outside of programming and make the world a better place.

Nerds abound, get yer finger based controller boards at the ready!

This may come as a surprise to people who don’t understand what is it like to take a blank screen and add barely functioning logical rules, years worth of complicated half-coagulated libraries, backlogs of bad habits and terrible ideas, undocumented purely wizardry based command line tools, and little bit luck, but programming is a challenge, on par with golf. Sure you may say to yourself, “but there’s 16 year olds who make a million dollars on the app store.” I admit programming has been made much easier in the last half-decade. But, ask any one of those 16 year old prodigies what a quicksort algorithm is and in all honesty he could probably tell you. There are prodigies in every field, but computers are cool and kids like cool things, apparently. Back to the point, unless you have been thinking in a programmatic way for a few years, or have an aptitude for logical thinking, which of course your’s truly has one of these, programming is hard. It’s by definition not intuitive.

If you don’t adapt to it immediately it probably means you are a perfectly normal person. Changing your way of thinking from one in which you can communicate in a vague, expressive way, into one in which you must describe exacting specifications is not an easy task. You must be able to keep multiple variables juggled in your mind at the same time, and be able to imagine how each of those variables will affect the others. Here’s a thought for those intrepid few who have fallen down the slide and made it this far into my epilogue about my favorite subject. Imagine you are a girl, *wink wink*, you have 4 friends who need to come over for a party, Amy, Becka, Cindy, and Darla. They can come over in any order you want, but each order comes with dire consequences. If Amy comes over first, Becka will die. Uh oh. If Becka comes over first Cindy won’t come over at all, and Darla will bring her boyfriend Ethan, gross! If Cindy comes over first, the next person who can come over has to be Darla or Cindy. Now imagine these are variables in a billion dollar spaceship controlling the guidance computer of said ship.  If you get them out of order, the ship might crash into a major city. Bad news for you, the programmer of the control chip. I think you get the idea of being able to handle multiple variables. Sure it’s not equitable to either of these scenarios except the last one. *GASP*

Though once you learn to program and to love to learn to program, it is one of the most fulfilling things you can do. It’s both technical and creative, boring and exciting, applicable and trivial. It encompasses so much of everyday life and you learn to examine everything around you in a different way than you did previously. It will get you laid and/or paid. On second thought only paid. But I guess if you get paid enough you can get laid. It will get you extra laid if you are a girl, but we won’t go into that. You’ll always be able to both impress and shun yourself at parties, and most of the friends you end up with will also be programmers. It’s a very inclusive lifestyle, and I say lifestyle because that’s what it is. If you spend more than 5 hours a day doing the same thing, that thing is part of your lifestyle, so deal with it. Your interest in programming might go through ebbs and flows like it did for me, but it has stuck in my brain, and won’t let me escape at this point.

Bad Art and Brainstorming: The First

Hey folks, did you come here to see another post about how life is hard as a BA holder who isn’t working in the field they wish they were? Too bad, today you are going to be subjected to Bad Art and Brainstorming.

What is that? Well the first thing you need to know is that I cannot draw. My artistic capabilities are childish at best. When I made my mother a picture of our family for her birthday, she said, “It looks like a 6 year old made this,” I was 23 at the time. I consider perspective to be a noodle scratcher, and I’ve written essays in celebration of my achievement in ‘coloring inside the lines’. When I took a drawing class in community college, I dropped out after the first week because things were already ‘heating up’.

So I figured the best way to talk about some of my new creative ideas is to draw my story concepts in MSpaint, then explain them. Without further rambling, Bad Art and Brainstorming.

A sunny day in the world of colored blocks

On facebook a month ago I started asking ‘questions of the day’ as a chance to talk to my friends about things related to story, games, and art. It was pretty fun, and we’ve had some good discussions on genre and tropes, the concepts in art that we see so often that we expect them and have named them. When I asked about mega-corps, the cyberpunk staple of companies that become so large they are effectively national powers, we got into a discussion about ways to make this trope fresh for new stories.

To tell the truth, I don’t think we got there. In the end a lot of ideas circled around the same old deal, companies that become huge and powerful are bad and meanie heads. They have poopy shoes, and they smell like bum. Etc etc.

The only place where I split away from the pack was when I thought about the path of a corp becoming a megacorp. The idea was a common one, a powerful AI. Instead of an AI meant to do anything special, it would initially be meant to handle customer service, answer calls and troubleshoot problems. This AI, lets call him Ted, would work for a company large enough to support him, like a media conglomerate. As new technology was developed, Ted would get more powerful, be given more responsibilities, until he effectively was the company. The idea of an AI in charge of a megacorp has been done, humanity loves to put an uncaring super-computer at the head of their fears. It is no surprise that Terminator is as popular as it is. The question is what happens after these AI, several of them now, control the megacorps that control the world. They make requests that come from no human, they manipulate lives for the greater good of some non-human, they may set laws that no human would care for or think of. These AI have transcended, except that isn’t quite right. They were never human beings, they were just incomplete. If you give Ted all the resources he needs to do whatever he wishes, and he has masses answering to his every whim, isn’t he effectively a god?

This first picture is looking up to a corporate headquarters as if it were ‘holy’. Now I’ve taken a college course or two (isn’t that the point of this blog?), I assume most of you have as well, you understand the mass media and corporatism. This isn’t supposed to be the usual ‘have we started to worship companies as idols’ question, it is supposed to be a step beyond. In this hypothetical, the companies have gotten away from their owners, they have become their own entities, and we are the stones they pile to build their empires.

Now this wasn’t the first embarrassing picture I ‘drew’ for this brainstorm idea, it was the second. Lets see the first.

A children's toy is attacked by wiggling green lines in the dreams of a pencil

 

This infantile work is supposed to represent a person coming up to a rock edge to see a castle below. How does this relate to the AI idea? In a world where Ted is trying to make his business as perfect as possible, it isn’t unreasonable that the gap between the rich, the average, and the poor, would be divided to extraordinary levels. As some see even today, the job of the poor in a capitalist structure is to put work into the process of shipping and manufacturing, and then reap very little of the rewards for their labor, before the state around them supports them just enough to get back to work. So why pretend that their wage is livable when you can change the way they live? Then change the way they see the world around them so that you never have to pay them in the first place. They would never have the money to purchase any of the products created, but that is a matter for the markets to adjust to. Soon you have a section of society who lives on a different scale of technology, and their world is driven into a more medieval society.

The art represents one of these ‘poor’ finally coming upon a home of the rich, which to him seems like a grand castle. It also helps that I’m no good at art, so I just drew a bouncy castle. When and if I actually write anything related to this, it would be a more muddled message; what exactly does it look like? and what of the protagonists life colors how he sees the building? Would it look more like the first image, skyscrapers against a skyline? The design and coloring (mostly in the lines) of the first picture may be how a person today would see a ‘divine’ building, while this second picture is how the poor from the setting would see it.

This idea seems more appropriate for some serial, many short stories showing the evolution of a character from a poor ‘dust dog’ to an agent of change in a world that isn’t equal. Sounds like fun.

All right, that is enough of that. Hope you enjoyed Bad Art and Brainstorming, there should be more of it in the future.

A Letter to My Sisters, and My Niece and Nephews

Living in this technological age, where information spreads like wildfire, has lead me to assume you younger generation know a lot. This is a fault of mine, thinking that between the internet, television, and new teaching techniques, someone would make sure you know certain facts of life.

I realize now that my assumptions may be wrong, that time is ‘of the essence’, and that a lot may elude you.

My sisters, I assume you know that you are beautiful.
I assume you know that ‘you are beautiful’ is not a phrase, not a quote from a song or a commercial, but a way of life.
I assume that you take this to heart, and know that you are not beautiful with a certain make up, in skinny jeans, or with that new hairstyle, but instead are beautiful in your bare skin, in your raw hair, in your natural state.
I assume you know you are not an object, not a billboard for the next blockbuster or platinum album.

I assume you know that school is not about your grades.
I assume you know your education is more than a diploma.
Fuck a diploma.
I assume you know that school is about the knowledge, about knowing how the world works and why. Which is why I assume you know you are going to try going to college. Because it isn’t about the degree, it is about the experience.

I assume you know about the birds and the bees.
Or about the birds and the birds, or the bees and the bees, or the squirrel that was there too.
I assume you know that homosexuality is fine. It is natural. It is nothing to shun, mock, or whisper about. I wouldn’t expect you to hide who you love, so I do not expect it of my friends sean or steve, that would be unnatural.
I assume you know that sex is natural.
I assume you know sex should not be shameful, awful, mechanical, or painful (unless you so choose).
It should be a joy, cultivated and savored like a fine wine.

I assume you know that you are your own master. Slavery is illegal now, act like it.
I assume you won’t let anyone tell you what you can or can’t do with your body, not beyonce, not bieber, bachmann or obama. They do not own you, and they never will.
I assume you know that the world is not about followers, friend requests, favorites, likes, or +1s.
I assume you know it is about people. Real people, the billions of them, who live and die on a daily basis.
I assume you know that those worth listening to are rarely seen on camera. They are philosophers, leaders, historians and teachers, reminding us that we live amongst fellow human beings who wish to be safe, happy, alive.

I assume you know that life is full of hardships. Despite what you have been told, this is not a test, you will not be graded, this is just the human condition. Billions have faced it before you.
I assume you know that your ideas are valid, you need to speak up, you need to put your opinion out there.
I assume you know that “opinions are like assholes.”
I assume you know some people’s opinions are popular, but that does not make them special or flawless. Anything you aren’t allowed to question, is not worth listening to.

I assume you know that being sick is not a failure, being sad is not a weakness, and that death is not a trifle.
I assume you know I love you, and will always.

To my niece and nephews (you can listen too girls)

About love

Love does not come at first sight, is not a pit you fall in to, and does not come from flying diapered baby angels.

Love is tough to understand. This is because love is shown all wrong on TV, and you experience the true thing every day. When you love someone, you are willing to sacrifice anything required to help them, and they will never require it if they love you. You wish for the happiness and success of the other, despite what you say or how you act.

I love you little ones, Mykel, Montez, Myana. Just like I love your mom, my sisters. Just like I love my mom and dad. Just like I love Natalia. Just like I love my many friends.

This Big Year

This last year was life changing for me; I got my bachelor’s degree in English, met my first great love, decided that living well would be too easy, and became a minority again. Not all of this was exciting, but it will all be important going forward.

This whole blog’s purpose has been to talk about my post-degree survival. I have struggled to find work in a crap economy, buckled under the pressure of said economy, given up on ever finding economic happiness, recanted that statement, then recanted my recantment.

It is hard to remember back when I first graduated and dug around in the mud of the internet, hoping to dredge up a job. Now I have a job and a half. I have my desk job, my credentials to assure everyone that I am just as disappointed with my earnings as they are. My other work is in content writing, creating the bland paragraphs you read across any C-list website across the web. It is boring work, and somehow less boring than my desk job.

As I’ve done more content writing I’ve made small adjustments in my view of a writing career. It is, however, my desk job that has changed my viewpoints the most. You see, right now I am a simple file clerk. I get paid better than I used to when I had a job at my school, but probably not as well as I deserve. My tasks include copying papers in files, mailing papers in files, putting files in drawers, and taking files out of drawers. I repeat this for 8 hours, with a 1.5 hour commute each way. Don’t get me wrong, my coworkers are enjoyable, kind, helpful. Also, I understand that you have to start on the low rung, even if you have a degree. That just gets you in the door, and then you claw your way up, hoping to survive life in the meantime. There is one problem though, and it is a rather huge problem, I don’t want to move up here. I know and have heard of plenty of writers who have jobs on the side, I know that you don’t become a famous writer and live your life in paradise. All I’m saying is that if I had to continue doing my current job to make my living wage, I would go insane. This is no small thing, I value my sanity. I give my sanity due for getting me this far in life (though not without its hiccups, like that time my sanity told me to walk home from school at 10 at night), and I won’t sacrifice it over a paycheck.

Creative writers get filthy rich all the time right? RIGHT?!

So what can I do? I guess the only answer I’ve come up with is to have patience. Which is exactly why I intend to be jobless in about 10 days. All right, maybe patience isn’t the best word for it. See here is the situation, my filing job is a temporary job, and they keep extending my time there. That is awesome, it gives me money, all the while edging me closer to a face-to-face with Mr. Madness. This time my job is supposed to end at the start of February, and I intend to stick to that. If I cut this job off, without getting ‘fired’ for some bad reason, I should receive a new job from my temp agency at some point in the future. In the meantime, I hope to steep myself in the process of building my writer’s ‘platform’ and finishing a manuscript or two. Will this work? Not likely, I am dreadfully lucky when I actually get a job. I will probably get offered a full position within the week, I’ll let you guys know.

If I do get February off, I plan to spend it with my first great love. As I like to call her, my FGL, or my Fugul, all of which I have trademarked. We’ve been together for more than this last year, but this year has been quite an adventure in romance. Just three years ago you could have heard me spread my creed of ‘ignoring the ladies to achieve capital gains’. I still believe in that really. My romance is, nearly, exactly how I would have dreamed. No pointless flirting and engagements, we didn’t meet at a club, and I haven’t had to lay claim to a baby created over our 2 years together. I give us an A+.

She is more talented than me, which stings in a petty way. There are benefits to relating to another artist though, in particular I can talk to her. While I was sure that I would be stuck with a life of only showing my work to my mate for the purposes of getting empty pats on the back, instead I have someone who can critique like a pro. We discover more that we have in common every day, and we are different in all the right ways (there are anatomical differences that are of note, IE da boobies). One thing in particular is relatively new for me, but it has been a long way coming.

Again, rewind two years. If you asked me what my beliefs were as I headed off to school, I would have told you that I was a spiritualist. My family is technically Baptist, with a few Jehovah’s witnesses sprinkled in there. My belief in the structure of the church was already shot. I don’t care about what a pastor or priest has to say, and I knew that there was no house that you could shove god in. For me, there was likely some power out there though, and I was willing to believe in a spirit inside me. Maybe I read too much manga.

Now I can firmly call myself an atheist. An interesting turn for such a short period. It dawned on me one day that I shed everything else related to religion. I had no god, I had no church, I had no faith community, I had spirit within. I believed in this one life, and on treating everyone around me as a human being, not a representative of a future life. As my self-identification changed, so did I. This election cycle has definitely helped. I have come to the conclusion that I cannot connect myself, even passively, to a group that would impede the progress of the society around me and purposely harm innocents in the name of their collective beliefs. This is not a knock against the teachings of my previous faith, or any other. Christianity is all right in small doses, and I won’t hate on anyone who wants to go along with the mutated creature that is usually brought up when we speak of Christianity. That is, all the talk of ‘love and charity’ that gets left behind.

Good old Jezus!

The public application of Christianity is something different though, and exactly what I had to escape. I joined my fellow students to stand up to the Westboro Baptist Church, I have listened to people speak of their god defining marriage while ignoring the wishes of their fellow man, I have seen the leaders of faith blame the poor and sick for their trouble while hoarding power for themselves. As a person, Christianity is a failed experiment. As a writer, Christianity is a well crafted tragedy, the smiling cult welcoming the world’s ruin. It turns out that only 15% or so of my country is atheist, so I guess I’m a minority here.

This is only January though, so who knows what may come in the months ahead. Maybe I’ll get famous and meet you readers in the funny papers. Alternatively, I could find a constructive way to use my degree in the workplace, while continuing to learn. Most likely I’ll be complaining about my job for a long time now. Only one way to find out.

The Impostor Syndrome

By Daniel Fockler

For the past few years I have had this feeling like I wasn’t good enough to be where I was in my life. Sometimes I felt like I shouldn’t have the job I have, or have the grades that I get. I had just chalked it up to my already low self-confidence. I made myself believe that the accomplishments I had made were because I was lucky. I worried that everyone around me was doing so much better than I was and that I wouldn’t be able to compete with them. My self-doubt and low self-esteem in my abilities had prevented me from participating in high school activities before. My stress about failure coupled with my confidence issues, felt crippling when confronted with competition. I’m now a senior computer science student and these feelings still crop up. I worry that all of the other students will be able to find jobs and I will be unable, due to my self-evaluated programming skills.

Just recently I learned that this feeling was not uncommon but has a name, the Impostor Syndrome.  In a study done by psychologists Clance and Imes in 1978, they found that many female graduate students felt like they didn’t deserve what they had accomplished. In further studies done by other psychologists this same phenomenon was found in many other collegiate students and teachers in some cases. They also found that the syndrome presents in men equally to women. Often the ability to self-evaluate creates a situation in which the person cannot accurately evaluate themselves. They compare themselves to their peers even without the knowledge of their peers abilities. For all the impostor knows the other people they are competing with could feel exactly the same way, or have equal or worse abilities to them. Often times people will not congratulate themselves for their accomplishments, but they will dwell on their errors and failures. It’s a difficult thing to realize and even more difficult to correct.

I realize that more and more life is all about fake it til’ you make it. In my experience people with confidence rarely believe that they are better, they are just pretending until it becomes normal for them to feel that way. As a scientist it seems silly to judge my ideas on unknown information, but that is exactly what I was doing. I was letting my feelings of doubt affect how I viewed others and consequently how I judged myself. Whether I knew how my abilities stacked up didn’t matter. An important step in overcoming this feeling is to take an accurate look at your competence in your field and not to judge yourself against others without objective information of your progress. Do you know the materials you are learning? Is there any solid evidence that you are doing worse than you should be doing? It’s easy to slip back into the impostor way of thinking if you are having a tough time with your work. Truly analyze your abilities, look at your accomplishments and don’t let yourself undermine what accomplishments you have achieved. It’s easy to keep raising the bar and devaluing what you have done, but keep looking at the evidence and you will find that you are keeping up and deserve the success that you have.

NaNoWriMo: The Aftermath

Well it is over, National Novel Writing Month is done. It was 30 days of grueling work, but the deed is done.

I first wrote about NaNoWriMo back on the 27th of October. When I started the exercise, I didn’t have a good memory of exactly what it took to forget the world around you every evening and just write. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy writing. I have a degree in creative writing, if there is any dedication to a cause greater than getting a laughable degree and going deep into debt for it, I can’t think of it. Oh right, there is also dying… I guess there is that.

I got this from a stock image site. I made myself sad.

When I Started

…everything was okay. I thought I knew where I was going, I had my outline and I charged ahead. My hook was tight, my character was interesting from the first page. That is when I ran into my first problem. The character had an interesting personality, but by his own nature, he was quiet and stand-offish. He didn’t have wild conversations with others, he put them down, or ignored them. So as a writer who thrives on dialog, I wrote a main character that couldn’t participate in my favorite writing mechanic. Brilliant move on my part. I was determined to stick to the character in my head though, so I stuck with it. The obvious solution eluded me.

In The Middle

As the weeks went on, things got difficult. This is what I call the ‘OH JESUS THIS OUTLINE IS NOT AS LONG AS IT NEEDED TO BE’ phase. I have tried outlines several times now, and it always ends the same. I know the start to my story, I know the characters and setting, I know the viable ending, and I know some important stuff that will happen in the middle. What happens is that you write a scene that you thought would be good, but it turns out to be three pages instead of 10 pages. You go through a dramatic moment, and it turns out that it took a page to finish, and lead a different direction than you expected. So what is there to do? You power through it, there is no time for revision, you cannot reverse the flow of time, this isn’t Prince of Persia this is NaNoWriMo dangit.

My character’s lack of dialog was drawing conversations to a close much faster than I expected. My new succinct writing style gained from school was ending everything in half the time. This wasn’t looking pretty. So some changes happened in the story, dark changes dreamed up in midnight fevers.

They were beautiful. Like a Dostoyevsky character, madness and frustration drove me to the edge, and there I found salvation. Actually, I found it in driving my character mad. His personality was slowly corrupted by the pressures of the world around him, and instead of a background madness his became real. This change is exactly what makes me love NaNoWriMo, by forcing my hand, I came up with an alteration to my original idea that was better than anything I could have originally imagined. Would I have gone there eventually? Maybe. The event is a fire that burns away impurities and leaves something at the bone, but it may not always be the delicious marrow you want.

Okay, not this 'mad'

As I pushed forward, several obstacles got in my way. Star Wars: The Old Republic, an upcoming MMO, had beta events several weekends in a row, and I gave them a try. I had nights where I did no writing at all because I played so late that I had no time before I had to get some sleep. Thanksgiving loomed as well.

The Big Finish

Finishing the story wasn’t going to be easy. I was behind by thousands of words. I was so far behind my 50k word goal that I was wondering if success was even possible. I pushed ahead anyway, writing down new daily goals. Soon I was supposed to write 3,000 words a day instead of 1,660.

My conclusion no longer made sense either. The development of my character was straying from my original plan, which now seemed shallow or even offensive. So something had to change, and fast. I turned my character’s friends against him, made his own mind a torture dungeon. As I threw more obstacles in front of him, I had my character climb to a conclusion that was way beyond the original. What started as a argument between former lovers was now a trial for an ostracized man.

This was about when I realized my horrible mistake. Every situation with my main character was stuck with him and his stunted personality. He was the one having a crisis, but he also never voiced it. I found myself yearning for the minds of other characters. Except I was in first person. That was the solution I missed back in those first days. The story should have been in a close third, and I would have had the freedom I wanted. Instead I had the troubled mind, but nothing else. It dragged me down every day.

The days got harder, and soon I hit the last few days. I had to write over 5k words each day. Each night I stayed up and fought my keyboard until it gave up words. Even if my story didn’t turn out exactly how I wanted, I would reach 50,000.

As the month ended, I stayed up late on that last night and threw up my word count on NaNoWriMo.org. I was over the 50k, 2,000 over actually. I made it.

NaNoWriMo tested me more this year than any previous year. The world around me was tougher than before, working a day to day job with hours that forced me to sleep at 10pm. My goal was greater, to write a story that had a serious edge, to write in a genre I never wrote in before. Still, the essence of NaNoWriMo, and the support of my friends, got me over the finish line again.

A Winrar Is Me!

The novel is a piece of crap, but that is a problem I’m saving until January.

Thanks for reading everybody.

TOP 10 REASONS THERE ARE TOP 10 LISTS

Top 10 list are everywhere. Lets face it, if you’ve been on the internet for more than a few hours, you have probably seen one of these. We count from number 10, all the way up to number 1, which is supposed to be the best of the best. It doesn’t have to be 10, the number could be 20, 6, 100, 3, it isn’t important. These are all ‘top’ list, the slough of the internet. Cracked.com is a whole website of them.

So why do we need so many lists to count stuff down? Why does the human race torture itself with these numbered cookie-cutter examinations? To answer that I’ve created a top 10 list.

#10 Humans Love Countdowns

Walk into a public restaurant, somewhere quiet but not too snobbish, bring some friends. Now everyone get up and start counting down, maybe start at 15 or something and head down toward 1. If the people in that place don’t join in, you’ll see the tortured faces of those that want to. When a count happens, it is contagious. The whole crowd wants to be part of it, whether it is because the noise overtakes us, or we just want to see what is at the far end.

Bonus points if we know confetti is coming

This is why you should never make a list the old fashioned way. Bullets are for chumps, they are the sort of list a pansy would make. If you want to list right, you go from the biggest number, and lead right down to the number 1 spot. Do you need to explain the finer points on why your spouse should respect you more? 10 to 1. Need to tell someone why you’re deleting them off your friends list? 5 to 1. Writing your essay on why Miracle Whip is superior to Mayo? You get the picture.

Of course, this is heavy on the instinctual side. This is unconscious. There are other pressures at work.

#9 How Do You Avoid Them?

So lets say you aren’t such a big fan of top 10s, or tops in general. What do you do? I have scoured the internet, and managed to come up with the only five ways to avoid these things while browsing. I will use the less popular ‘top 5′ format for this.

5 – Die. Surefire way to avoid just about anything. That is unless someone’s after-life includes DSL.

4 – Remove your eyeballs. You might still hear a top list, so this one is not recommended.

3 – Unlearn to read. This one is expensive, very experimental, and requires a brain surgery technique that I just made up in my head.

2 – Get off the internet. There is a world out there, it just isn’t all that interesting. Watch out for pamphlets though.

1 – You don’t. Well that’s not a very good answer, not a good #1 either. Doesn’t seem fair. I’ll come back to this later.

You better start liking tops list boy, you're in one!

The internet is metaphorically, literally, and metaphysically, inundated with tops lists. There is at least a tops list for every single subject you can think of. If there is not one, it is because your topic is very new, you will have to give the internet at least two hours to churn one out of its cess-hole. Even better, if you need a way to find the best tops list about a subject, you may even be able to find a tops list for the proper tops list.

If this hasn’t driven home yet, that means there are people out there collecting the top 100 websites with top 20 park rides, and then they post them on their GoDaddy.com site and they wait, in darkness, for you to come along and enter just the right words in your search box. Suddenly, when you hit their front page, they are assured that their righteous quest was the correct path all these years.

#8 Silly Internet Pictures and Videos

Well this one is easy. If it comes with cute and silly pictures, the internet cannot get enough of it. This is twice as true if the pictures are obviously photoshopped.

I'm sure you've seen this one before

If you are going to sit through an inane list describing the top reasons that the N-sync should have a return tour, you may as well have silly pictures included right? This means that when you nod in agreement that Justin’s voice is the 8th wonder of the modern world, you can be tickled pink by the photo of him surrounded by a tourist trap line. Isn’t that funny? They captured your feelings through a badly edited picture. If it was any other way, you wouldn’t be sure if they truly agreed with their opinions. The bad picture is the extra miles that prove they mean business, in the least business-like way possible.

#7 Doing Actual Research is Hard

I’ve done some of that school stuff myself, I know how you feel. Sometimes you want to know a little more, you want some information to itch that little tickle of curiosity. You don’t need any of the hard stuff, forget peer-review, even hard dates are a little much for you. Who needs to know when, where, or why something happened, I just want to see something cool and fast.

What is this? I didn't go to school so I could read at home.

I know that there are some topics that are just too annoying to research myself. So I trust the ace reports of therestoftheinternet.com to do the work for me. You see something that interest you, and you just go with it. The other day I saw someone mention the top 10 ways for a writer to get noticed, well **** yeah I want to know about that. Who is this person? I don’t know, probably some other guy who read a list on the top 5 ways to get noticed as a writer, and listened to the number 1 that said, “MAKE A TOP 10 LIST!”

Besides, who cares if the person’s research is faulty, you probably won’t share the things you saw there anyway. I mean you’ll just link it to your friends, post it on your facebook, retweet it on twitter, and then drop some of the factoids into casual conversation. You won’t take it seriously though, that will cross a hard line.

#6 Boredom

This one is about halfway up for a reason. When you’ve had a long day and can’t find anything to do, sometimes you want to put your brain to sleep and see what the internet has to offer. So why not read a list. There will be funny pictures, maybe a joke or two about a movie you recently saw, I bet someone will even throw in a nostalgia bomb. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll count down to 1.

I made this a puppy to wake you up.

Who said that entertainment had to be intellectually stimulating, no one, ever. If someone wants to tell me the top places I can go to see people bungee jump, it is only a matter of time and lack of other things to do before I’ll read that list. I have never bungee jumped, I don’t plan to ever bungee jump, I don’t even particularly like heights. That list is still on a slow-moving to-do list that is waiting for me to give up on every other productive task in life.

#5 Getting Trolled

Adorable

Now for one of the reasons these things get created. You ever been halfway through a list and seen something that just peeves you to next Tuesday? How dare they put Ocarina of time as #40 on the list of greatest games. They said that “Thriller” was below what song? Any list made by an expert, a protopper if you will, includes things like this. They want you to glow with anger early in the list, that way you have to see what else is there. You can’t just tell your friend “They said Snooki was only the 8th worst thing to come from New Jersey”, someone will ask you, “What was number 1?” Well what do you say then silly goose?

That means you have to finish the list, so you can have strong categorized points of frustration to tell everyone who gets in your way right after you read the list. I feel sorry for those poor saps.

#4 We Love To Similar

Anyone who tells you they are unique is either lying, or plotting to murder you. It is just a matter of scientific fact, we are a giant pack that strives to do whatever the cool kids are doing. The more unique someone claims they are, the more likely they are trying to join some popular group. I don’t need to tell you this though, this is the internet. If you don’t know this by now, you have other problems, and should probably just shut your internet box down.

It feels good to be special

When you see a list that includes something you might know something about, you are already making a list in your head of where things should be. You create your own top 10 before you even see their top 10. You and the author are suddenly co-topping, which is probably also the name of a dangerous sex position. When you see anything on their list that matches your top, you now can give a little cheer. You aren’t so weird, you are part of the crowd, just as cool as this cool guy who managed to put something on the web. If it is on the internet, that means a famous person had to be involved right?

Well I’m not going to argue with that. Every right answer is going to give your mind another one of those instinctual jumps. Hoorah, I am one of the pack. The author gets the same thing, though usually in some after-the-fact satisfaction through comments or forum posts.

Of course we don’t always like to agree, especially with those we are actually close enough to know.

#3 Competition and Vindication 

Sometimes you just want to know that you were right and everyone else was wrong. This is especially true for any top list made by more ‘official’ sources. Which usually means that some giant company hired their media managers who hired their PR guys who hired a writer you don’t know to write a top 10 about some product that the aforementioned giant company owns. Maybe some technology was used to calculate this list with hard data, or maybe it is just based on random opinions and TMZ articles, it is obviously fact and you are obviously smarter than Stephen from 8th grade, that jerk.

Everyone who doesn't agree is a loser

Not that pointing and laughing is the best way to make new friends, but it is one of the best ways to start a petty argument with old ones. Sure there is probably an equally important list that says the exact opposite of what your list just said, but this is the internet people, and we play for tops. That means facts aren’t important, the only thing that is important is that number 1 spot.

#2 Anticipation

Once you’ve come this far on a list, you don’t know what to do. I mean, number 2 is always a downer. Maybe it is your favorite, maybe this is the ultimate troll spot that is going to force you to head down the page further to check out number 1.

Everything was suspenseful in black and white

How could you possibly stop at this point. The final answer is just right there. Especially if you haven’t seen your favorite answer in the list just yet. I mean, I read through 14 Disney movies so far and they haven’t listed the Genie as the worst sidekick, so that means he should be #1 right? It is the only possible solution. I don’t have to commit myself to this, I can just look down, get my answer, and leave. Come on weakened heart, you can make it, we will get through this together.

So you prep yourself, still your baby-bladder, and you move forward to see what is at the top of the list, by looking at the thing at the bottom of a web page. Alternatively, they will enhance your anticipation by putting the #1 on a different page, or making you wait until next week. Okay cool, now I’m dedicated to your ridiculous list, and your funny pictures, don’t mind me as I subscribe to your site just so I can forget to read the conclusion.

#1 Disappointment

Your tears fuel the internet, random baby

You will be disappointed with the top spot. Those few times that you are not disappointed, you won’t even remember. It will be just another thing on the internet, some code that floats off into the aether. That isn’t what a top 10 list author wants, that isn’t his or her diabolical plan. When they put this list together it is to drag you, kicking and screaming from the page your mother linked you, to its horrible conclusion. Then when you get there, you face the horrible monster at the end of the page.

Your own rage.

If you see red, they see green

Why should they make you hate them, why should the top spot be something you will categorically disagree with? Because that is what keeps people coming back. If you agreed, if you liked it, you would go to sleep satisfied. I don’t go around the internet reminding people of things that made me feel really calm, neutral, mellow. My links are about my unfathomable rage, that will be exacted against JTBLOGGER94 and anyone on his, I assume, respectable staff of internet writers.

So when you go spreading links to their top 10 just so you can tell everyone how much you disagree with it, they get hit after hit. Notice this is the opposite of how a lot of things work. If I wanted to get more hits on a news piece, I would try to be agreeable. I want the hugs and kisses of all the internet peoples. A top 10 list? I want you to hate my guts, I want you to think I have betrayed mankind on a fundamental level.

What will I be doing? Collecting your screams of agony in specially prepared bottles meant to keep me alive for another 10 years. My plan is in motion, and there is nothing you meddling readers can do about it.

Well, you could write a top 10 list of your own, that would show me.

A Rapidly Deteriorating Lifestyle

By Daniel Fockler

When you get into college you have this idea of how it will be. You might imagine that you will study diligently every night in your dorm, and you will hang out in the library with the comforting quiet of the books surrounding you like a blanket. You might envision yourself partying everyday, coming to class hungover and tired, but still skating by on wit and charm. How ever you thought it would be there are fundamental truths about college that persist through the many years of the collegiate institution. It’s not about studying or partying though, it’s about the life you have in college.

The more I think about it the more I realize that school is a lifestyle and working is a completely separate lifestyle. I’m in my senior year and as I think about graduating, it feels like being let out of prison into the population. I’ve served my sentence for 16 years and my time is finally up. As soon as you’re done with your last day of classes the world is completely different than the minute before. You have no responsibility other than to your self. You have been trained for this for a decade and a half. A decade and a half of people telling you what to do, assigning you homework, and expecting things from you. Whether you flounder or fly is up to you, but you have been pushed out of the nest and the reliance on any form of structure you once had has disappeared beneath your feet.

I would imagine it’s similar to culture shock. The idea is that when you are introduced to a culture other than your own, their practices and standards are completely disorienting to you and cause you to have social anxiety. How you change from one lifestyle to a completely different lifestyle over the course of a month is the difference between succeeding as an adult and being stuck in your culture shock. Eventually people get out of their shock and acclimate, but until that happens not much progress is made. For whatever profession you chose/choose people will tell you the tips and tricks, how to network, how to succeed. But it doesn’t matter all that much compared to you, and how you are able to progress from one part of your life to the next.