Category: Writing

The process is important. How you go about doing things, getting things done. It matters.

But maybe not as much as the fact that it does get done.

Something about writing every day, and keeping notebooks and, honestly, a lot of paper of all sorts, I get to look back and see where I was in time. And for a moment, I can remember.

I think that’s what photos are, in a way, too. Little moments, frozen in time. And looking at them, you can remember words said, feelings shared, or any number of sensations that may have been occurring. And when all we have left of those moments are the time capsules, it’s nice to revisit them sometimes.

Used to be, a movie was rarely over two hours. This was from a lot of factors: shooting on 35mm, for one, was expensive. It was time-consuming to edit. Another, selling tickets at the cinema was very important. If you could keep every movie roughly the same length, then you’d be able to plug and play into most of the screens nationwide.

Now, most of our movie consumption is at home. Nearly all film and television production is digital. The turnaround from filming to distribution is shortened to mere months.

And thus, three-hour or longer movies are much more commonplace. Are they fun to see in the cinema? Well, sometimes. Though it’s much harder to hold off going to the restroom. And you almost certainly have as good a screen at home to watch it later. When it’s streaming.

There’s a point in showing up to the page. Sometimes it’s more than just writing down thoughts. It can be cathartic to, as Walter Wellesley “Red” Smith had similarly stated, “bleed on the page”.

We all write for different reasons. Sometimes we write for more than just one reason. But for people who like writing, we can’t seem to really do without it.

“Every man has his daydream, every man has his goal.”

We all have dreams, of the things we want, and the lives we want to lead. Most of us don’t fully those dreams. I think a lot of it is the relative safety of the familiar vs. the possible risk of the unknown. If anything, we are generally taught to be risk averse.

That’s not to say you shouldn’t think before you leap, or live life dangerously just because you can. But I think it is important to keep your sights set on what you actually want, and to make progress towards it – whether small steps or giant leaps.

Recently I heard someone say, “All words are made up.” Well, technically, yes. All words have an origin, and words are just used to convey something else. The word rock isn’t a rock. The thing, “rock”, is the rock. Some philosopher somewhere definitely went into this. I’m guessing Wittgenstein, but I’ve yet to read any of his work.

Anyway, something that I was thinking about is when technology moves us past the meaning of certain words. Nearly no one has a wired, cradled phone landline in the house any longer, but we still say “hang up the phone”. I don’t hear “tune in” as much anymore, but it is still common enough, though we know longer tune a television to a channel.

That just leaves me wondering, what bits of our lexicon will the next technological achievements make obsolete?

Was trying to pinpoint a direction for these postings. Sometimes I throw things at the blog, and hope it sticks. And thus it becomes this catch all of my thoughts.

Like the blob, it keeps consuming and growing, and even I have no idea what it could become.

But we’re all a bit like. If we don’t have a single direction that we’re heading in, we pick and choose little things to add into our lives. Interests, hobbies, jobs. All these things make us who we are, and quite often, it’s those odd bits about ourselves that are the most interesting.

I was sitting in group discussion some years ago, and a therapist friend of mine was telling us about nerve cells in the stomach. Over 100 million cells, effectively making the gut another brain.

This led to a discussion on why “trusting your gut” is so important. Sometimes intuition is giving you more information than just thinking can. It’s possible that you should be paying more attention to what your stomach is telling you.

After yesterday’s post about the supply chain, I’d also be remiss to not mention HBO’s hit new series The Last of Us, from the PS game of the same name.

The premise is mostly straightforward – end-of-the-world type shenanigans, with zombies (these being somewhat faster than the regular, shambling variety), survivors, and the journey to save the world. Some of the key elements that make this show unique aren’t anything incredibly new, yet still effective. Rather than a virus, this time it’s a mind-controlling fungus. Its mission, to spread.

A few weeks back, the internet was all abuzz regarding episode three. In it, the love story between Bill and Frank is watched beautifully, and painfully, from beginning to end.

The controversy comes from a large chunk of the viewership not appreciating a homosexual relationship depicted on screen.

This is obviously a much bigger topic and issue than can be handled here. Matters of tastes and preferences; of what to watch and what you feel comfortable watching; of making something commercial vs. artistic (a problem dating back centuries); of how we communicate on the web. The list can go on and on.

What I will say as a Cis-hetero man is that episode 3, Long, Long Time, had me in tears, and I found it as beautiful a love story as you can find on television. This I find even more surprising, given the nature of the tv show as a post-apocalyptic, horror narrative. But that’s no less than we should expect from our television programming.

Taking as a case study the Sony PlayStation 5, which was nigh impossible to purchase for most people during the past two years, it appears that the gaming console sold at its highest level ever in the final quarter of 2022. Perhaps the kinks have finally been worked out!

Of course, that’s one product, in one supply chain, by one company. The question of supply and demand following the pandemic is still anything but certain.

What’s amazing is how meticulously the supply chain is organized so that we don’t run into these issues. Under usual circumstances. When the wrench is thrown in the works – and COVID was a hefty wrench – it can take a long time to get it up and running again.