Learning to Stop Worrying and Love the Blog
Two years ago, I started a blog. It lasted three posts. I am not proud of this statistic.
I am feeling moderately motivated at the moment, so I'm going to give it another go. But before we talk of the future of this website, I want to fill you in on some its past.
rawksome.net v1
I have owned the rawksome.net domain for five years, and this most recent version was the third incarnation of a vague purpose. I originally purchased web hosting with the intention of hosting a shared blog or forum with some friends who were no longer going to be geographically near each other. Then Facebook happened, so it seemed considerably less relevant and never went anywhere.
rawksome.net v2
A few years later, inspired to do some "creative writing" or possibly just avoiding writing an essay, a second version burst forth. Rawksome.net v2 kept the personal-life ideal of v1, but was a more traditional blog in the sense that I assumed people would be invested in my daily life if I threw in a little rhetoric dazzle. It lasted exactly one post, which was lost due to a server error. I had really liked what I had written, and the loss of my brilliant opening remarks discouraged me from continuing. The website again went inactive.
rawksome.net v3
The third and theoretically final phase actually began to take shape much earlier than January 2010. The impending new decade nagged at my mind, and by December 2009 I had a working idea of how I wanted to proceed. Instead of something that amounted to not much more than a jazzed-up diary, I wanted something that had roots in journalism. I wanted to do research, to take things that interest me, things I thought were important, and make them relevant. I wanted to explain why things matter, and have an opinion that would carry weight because I knew what I was talking about. I had the framework laid out for maybe a year's worth of entries - no content yet, just structure. This turned out to be a poor choice.
After three posts that I would consider successful and interesting, I froze. I knew what the next post was supposed to be, but I did not have a clearly designated place for it in my hypothetical ideal structure. I hate when websites are sloppy, or change approaches. I had such a clear idea from before day one that I couldn't let go of my perfectly nested categories or carefully selected featured image for this one post. Struck with indecision, I couldn't skip it or fix it, and so once again my little corner of the web fell into disuse.
Wandering in the Wilderness
Despite an appearance of complete disuse, my project was far from forgotten. Over the past two years, I have thought of revitalizing it yet again on a frequent, sometimes daily basis. There have been some major events that I would have loved to have written about, and hated that I let one self-imposed roadblock keep me from picking it up again. I have continued work behind the scenes: creating a website for my wife about our wedding, switching web hosts when the first failed in spectacular fashion, switching name servers when it was the trend to boycott GoDaddy, installing WordPress updates, playing with Google's AdSense. I even went so far as to set up Facebook Connect for ease of commenting, just in case my delusions of grandeur ever produced content instead of just structure.
Yee-haw.
I've decided enough is enough, so I am ending the hiatus. I'm going to consider this a continuation rather than another fresh start. As I said previously, I had a considerable amount of content outlined, and plenty of interesting things happened to fill in a few more gaps. I am therefore embarking on a writing adventure both old and new, as I seek to fill in the gap.
Welcome to rawksome.net v3, Act 2: A Blog in Retrospect. It's my bomb, and I'm going to ride it all the way down.
Required Reading: All You Zombies
Every so often, I run across little snippets of things I find fascinating and would like to share. There are a few short stories I've read that have been particularly thought-provoking or otherwise noteworthy, and so I'm going to try to point them out periodically. I'm brazenly calling this segment "Required Reading" for lack of a better term and in hopes I can someday hand out quizzes to my readers. Literature is probably the weakest link in my chain of media appreciation, but I'll start with the gems of my meager collection and work my way out.
This particular story is an old piece by Robert A. Heinlein, pictured at right. The proper name for the story is "—All You Zombies—", quotations included, and is misleadingly (disappointingly?) not about zombies at all. It is instead about time travel, and is still considered to be one of the ultimate stories in the genre.
Heinlein wrote "—All You Zombies—" in a single day in 1958 and had it published in Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine the following year. On the simplest level, it is a story of a time travelling operative who goes back in time to recruit a young writer into his bureau. It quickly gets much, much more complicated, and it will probably take multiple readings to fully make sense. This is essentially the mother of all time travel paradoxes, so prepare to be overwhelmed. It's about ten pages long though, so you don't have to stick it out for very long.
Continue reading to (hopefully) see the story embedded from Google Books. If that doesn't work for whatever reason, you should be able to read it here.
My Favorite Films of 2009
This past year was a great year to be a cinematic connoisseur. Some critically-acclaimed movies made a killing at the box office; some summer blockbusters actually had great storytelling backing them up. While there were, of course, movies I hated to see do well, and others I thought should have made a larger splash, it always seemed like there was a movie worth getting excited about right around the corner.
A note about this list: I am intentionally not referring to this as the "best movies of 2009", as I am certainly not qualified to make that sort of base judgement. These are simply the ten movies that I saw in theatres that I enjoyed the most. Thankfully, many other people seemed to enjoy them as well, but I am entirely confident there are movies that would have made the list had I seen them at the appropriate time.
Here, in no particular order, are my top ten:
This Was Supposed To Be The Future
It would seem appropriate to begin a new blog at the beginning of a new decade, and a highly-anticipated decade at that. The year 2010 is to be the first year what I would consider the future. Or rather, it was supposed to be. The reality seems somewhat different from most predictions now that we have arrived.
In 1968, Arthur C. Clarke, the one of the founding fathers of science fiction and futurism itself, wrote 2001: A Space Odyssey. In it, humans are making regular trips to a station on the Moon, and are capable of sending manned expeditions to the moons of Saturn. We have obviously missed that prediction; not one person has set foot on the Moon since the Apollo 17 mission in 1972.
In 1982, Clarke wrote a sequel titled 2010: Odyssey Two, not surprisingly taking place 9 years after the first novel. This in itself is significant - the era we are presently living in is so far in the future that it is actually the sequel to the original future. Also worth noting is that this is when Clarke writes that the human race as a whole first comes in contact with alien lifeforms. (In 2001, the iconic monoliths that bestow sentience to humanity are alien-made, but their creators are only seen by scientist and astronaut David Bowman after he is pulled through a stargate and cut off from the rest of humanity.) While it is impossible to predict what events may transpire this year, it is probably a safe bet that the discovery of extraterrestrial life will not be among them. And we will continue to be disappointed by it.
Of all the vehicles produced for model year 2010, not a single one can fly or even hover, travel at high-speed on a magnetic or otherwise advanced freeway, nor is there a single model that is powered by fusion, fission, or nuclear energy. A relatively small percentage is electric-hybrid, but very few are electric-only. The average car gets 27 miles to the gallon of gasoline. The Ford Model T, first manufactured in 1908, clocked in at 21 miles to the gallon. A hundred and two years later, we've managed to improve by 6 miles? Good job, future. I had hoped that we would have cars that drove themselves by now.
My point here is that our fictional anticipated year 2010 is quite different than our actual current 2010. Somehow the timeframes of "present day" and "the year 2010" have two very different connotations, even though they are now literally the same. If a movie or television show is set to take place in 2010, I expect it to be futuristic in some fashion, whether a brilliant, shiny utopia or a dark, gritty, preferably post-apocalyptic dystopia.
Since it would seem that most science has a long ways to go to catch up to the vision, I'll be bracing myself for some sort of world-altering event to go the quick-collapse-of-society route. A nuclear holocaust, worldwide plague, or cataclysmic natural disaster would serve nicely, or even a government/large faceless corporation conspiracy would be a good candidate for bringing about the fall, assuming it is in motion even now.
Even so, I'll forsake my dreams of interstellar space travel, cybernetic implants, bullet trains, advanced artificial intelligence, antigravity, and deflector shields if somebody would just invent a laser pistol. I really don't think that is too much to ask. Just one laser pistol. Please?
Image credit: ~aksu