December Wolves: Whys and Wherefores

Title is stolen from the final trade paperback of Y: The Last Man. The ending caught me by surprise, but it was sweet nonetheless. I'm going over everything I did and didn't do with the December Wolves project. Consider it the pre-post-mortem.

The fact that I'm even doing this shows just how disorganized and uncommitted to the project I am when it was easy to be organized and committed to the project. I have 14 updates in the hole by 10:16 and I'm pumping out the final one less than 100 minutes before time is up. It's disappointing. But. We're here, so let's go over what went well and what went so horrifyingly wrong.

The comic book reviews/deconstructions/thoughts went well, I think. I'm no stranger to criticism, so that was a little bit in my comfort zone, but having to push myself to be critical of something completely different is a good exercise, intellectually. I had to think differently about how I looked at a piece of consumable media. Also, the YouTube experiment was fun.

With that, I also had to think differently about how my language needed work but also how to keep the viewer's attention. Without putting too much effort into video-blogging, putting together the YouTube clips sucked away a whole bunch of my time. My skills are very rudimentary, but thanks to intuitive and user-friendly software, I dived in and put something together. Ideally, I'd like them to be shorter, since six minutes plus is a long time to stare at anything without it being broken up somehow, but again that's a matter of time.

Time, not surprisingly, is something I didn't use well. Whether it was starting at eight or nine on the second day with a germ of an idea or completely missing a foundational aspect of the hate for Twilight's vampire resurgences, in a lot of cases, I didn't marshal my time effectively. I spent hours staring at the screen whether it was watching YouTube or other videos, but by the end of the night, felt like I was a good two thirds done, but too tired to continue, so I put up the update, promising I'll swing harder next time.

Usually, I didn't. Going back to that Twilight post, I felt like I should have been a lot more specific in my judgment about it and wasn't. And yes, I know with the internet I can go and change it and no one's gonna know, but it's cheating. I wrote what I wrote and published what I published. Maybe I'll add some clearly labeled edit markers. But that's in the future. The Phonogram video feels like I was just going DUDE A COMIC ABOUT MUSIC THAT'S TOTALLY AWESOMESAUCE. But then again, it's been 6, 7 days since I published it, so I hope history is kinder to it than I am now.

There was also some difficulty with the software, specifically in how it warped photos. One day it worked on a sliding scale so that I could perfectly scale it down to the pixel, how big I wanted the image to be. One day, (you can guess which one by the size and placement of the images) it just plopped the image down in the window with no ability to control size whatsoever. That can also be changed in the future.

I'm taking away from this project that I need to invest more time at the front end and stop, cold turkey, putting things off until I have a night clear. Maybe if it's as simple as 15 minutes, every 2 hours, write something in the box and see what happens, the posts will improve. But, I need to learn and master that discipline.

I don't think December Wolves failed, as a concept. As a project, I know it didn't, because there's 15 updates on the 31st. But only under a limited view did it succeed. I did put up 15 original posts in 31 days. And it was grueling, but only in spots and it could have been easier on me. My choices led me to do the December Wolves project. But I also made the choices of dicking around on YouTube or Giant Bomb when I could have been synthesizing my ideas better, writing, or editing what I already written.

We'll see what launches in 2010. I'm thinking one post every three days, but that's only a thought, I can't be held to it and the usual. Perhaps 2010 will be the year of discipline. But now, I'm going to ring in 2010 by going to sleep. May your intoxication be long and your hangovers brief. I'm out.

An Accumulation of Albatrosses

It has come to my attention that it may be possible to carry this shambling persona, this self-indulgent, measured engagement, or lack thereof, with the world too far--that there may be responsibilities I am not addressing, opportunities that are lost as I lay in a pile of my own filth, gazing at my navel. (Or worse yet, reading online forum threads about videogames.)

These things have always gone in cycles, for me, and perhaps it is time to begin a new one. In short, I have decided, with no small amount of prompting from the world and my friends, that it is probably time to wake up.

There are a million things I have not told you about. Love, second-hand death, the rising tide of madness and a car crash, to name a few. It has been a year and a day since my last post produced exclusively for this blog. I know because my good friends called me on it at the bar. There have been things that I tried to tell to you, and could not bring myself to complete. Eventually, the weight of unwritten words around my neck made it difficult to even look at the website, let alone type anything.

That was a nonsensical, self-indulgent sentence, summarizing a nonsensical, self-indulgent state of affairs that has, I believe, ended.

Tonight, I have missed a movie, driven the back roads, shot pool, been thanked by a bartender and spoken words of truth and import with dear friends. I promised that I would do something, not something specific but something nonetheless, and I intend to keep that promise. I have been letting failures, or at least mismanagements and projects that drag on and on, accumulate and weigh me down, leaving the things I care about to rot in the field. It just won't do.

If you're reading this, thank you for giving our confused little website your time. Thank you for putting up with my self-indulgent nonsense, and my arrogance, and my ambitions. And thank you for putting up with my absences, all too frequent.

It is a much easier thing to read than to write, to think than to speak, and to sleep than to learn. (Which is not to say I have slept well lately, on the whole.) The world around us is ever fascinating, perhaps now more than ever, and it is so much easier for me to watch it go by than to act, even in the tiniest of ways.

But it is only through acting on the world that I can truly understand it, and myself. And perhaps I have some responsibility, both to understand and to act on that understanding.

So.

Hello, internet! It's been a long time. I think I am going to begin to write to you again. James is still here, as is my good friend the Gentlebeast, and Thom, and perhaps others will be drummed up as things begin, again, to roll.

Thank you, as always, for your time. I hope to be stealing more of it soon.

Your Pets Hate You and are Secretly Plotting Your Demise

Ahoy there sailors! It has been a while since I last graced the pages of elevennames. I had a good reason, I swear, but cant remember it right now . . . . something about updating twice a few weeks back.

It has been an unusual few days for those of us in north western P.A. You see, on Tuesday we woke up to temperatures of 40+ degrees and sun, which promptly melted our think blanket of snow. The next day was no less sunny, but temperatures had dropped to 15 degrees with a wind chill of -3. Suffice to say that many a person was startled Wednesday morning when they stepped out in to the shinning sun and freezing wind. And all of this crazy weather has put me in a mood to do something I dont often times do:

clean
(dramatic flashes of light and music)

I wouldn't consider myself to be a messy person, just cluttered. And to be honest because I was sick for like 11 days I hadn't been keeping up with the accumulating used tissues, empty water bottles, and medicine containers. And sometimes I look around mine or my friend's apartments and cant help but think that if we let things progress much further we are going to have to worry about leprosy. It doesn't help that one of Zach and James' roommates recently acquired a pet rat. It is cute in that nocturnal rodent type way, but I cant help but worry that it is carrying the Black plague .

Which causes my stream of consciousness to jump to another topic: people who give their pets asinine names. There is something to be said for an original pet name, something with character, class, a story behind it like Moses Killsie Puff, or Herr Milch Mann, or even Squizgar the Untouchable. But naming your pet rat anything that involves the word cunnilingus is just too far. Rats and oral sex should never been in the same sentence. EVER! Its like cheating at a game of Candyland with your 4 year old nephew, or saying you are going to vote for Rudy Giuliani, its just wrong on so many levels. And dont get me started on the people who put their pets in little outfits. It is a secret fear of mine that one day our pets will rise up, take over the world then dress us in tutus and little clown suits and rename us idiotic things like Foxy and Spot.

Well, thats enough babbling from me today. Really I was at a loss for what to say after Project Runway was a rerun last night.

Next week, hopefully a new theme to guide our ramblings.