Oh yeah: I’ve heard that writing is just like anything else, you have to practice at it before you get better. (Hence this weblog). So I’ve been spending the day limbering up, coming up with lines that I’ll never use.

• The MUNI bus seat was so vile and disgusting that even Rosa Parks would’ve refused to take it.
• A pack of bar-hoppers walking down Fulton Street in afterthoughts of Halloween costumes, including the guy dressed as he does every night except for the pink bunny ears, which he’s hoping will be just enough to show that he’s in touch with his wacky side and get him laid.
• The night is as cold as a a check made out to an orphanage and left unsigned.
• My Volkswagen has been recalled more times than a summer spent at the cabin by the lake.
• I didn’t just have a bowel movement, I had the whole symphony.
• And I don’t care what anybody says; I still like the pun about being a playa-hater.

Okay, so there’s going to be a lot of editing to do once November is over.

There was a story in The Sandman about a guy who was cursed with too many ideas — something about his muse getting pissed off, so she gave him infinite inspiration, too many ideas to be able to do anything with any of them. If I remember correctly, he ended the story insane or killing himself. But as he declined, there was panel after panel of him mumbling all his ideas for short stories and novels and plays. And if I remember correctly, most of them were pretty good, actually better than a lot of the stuff Neil Gaiman has done “for real.” More than anything else in that series, that was the story that convinced me that Gaiman was a genius.

Sometimes I feel like that (the too-many-ideas part, not the genius part). Except that the ideas, in retrospect, aren’t all that great when it’s not 3am and I’m trying to get to sleep and convinced that I’m brilliant. And it’s not that I’ve got too many to do anything with, it’s that I’m lazy. And most of them turn out to be episodes of “Tales from the Darkside” or “Friday the 13th: The Television Series” or “Buck Rogers” or some other television show or comic book I read and have already forgotten about. But apart from that, I’m exactly like that story.

I’m sitting in my darkened apartment, hiding from trick-or-treaters, thinking about my great novel-writing adventure which is due to start in just a couple of hours. And for you, the loyal readers of my website, I’m going to give an extra-special bonus and give away the ending:

I’m not going to be able to finish it.

Eh, I don’t know. I’ll still give it a go of course, and see how long I last. But my hopes and attention span have dwindled already, and I haven’t even started yet. Plus all the other distractions — the work which I can’t seem to finish, the fact that I’ve got to spend the entire next week in LA for work, and so many other things that it seems like I’m just looking for something to distract me.

Part of the reason I’m so disillusioned is because I just read Bloodsucking Fiends by Christopher Moore. Reading the NaNoWriMo site gives you the feeling of a bunch of excited people on a skydiving plane, getting themselves and each other psyched up about jumping out the door and feeling the exhiliration of making something creative. Reading Bloodsucking Fiends gave me the feeling of seeing the guy in front of me give everybody else a high five then make a battle cry and throw himself out of the plane, having his parachute fail to open, getting chopped up in the blades of a passing helicopter, bounce off a high-rise building, then land in a garbage truck.

It’s not the worst novel I’ve ever read — I’ve got about 15 Star Wars novels, remember. It’s not even the worst vampire novel I’ve ever read. But it’s one of the most depressing. It’s got this smarmy residue over the whole thing, a gross combination of the respective smarminess of Los Angeles and San Francisco that are bad enough on their own but even worse when combined. And you can tell the guy has been told by friends and agents all his life that he’s funny, and he’s writing the whole thing thinking how witty and clever he is and how his characters are lovable misfits and his situations novel and inventive and his dialogue just sparkles. And that in the end maybe, just maybe, we’ll learn a little something about ourselves.

But the characters are annoying, the wacky and subversive things they do are all contrived (they bowl with frozen turkeys in a Safeway after hours! how crazy is that?!?), the characters are stereotypes, and a lot of it is just downright offensive. He’s got plenty of the stock stereotypes, like the guys in Chinatown who talk with ls instead of rs, or the noble AIDS victims who are ciphers except for their disease. But also the American Beauty-style stereotypes: where you take a totally trite and insipid character, put one predictable spin on it, and act like you’ve suddenly created life from clay. I’d heard lots of positive reviews about it, and I’m sure that they liked it just because it made a half-step of effort past the most obvious cliches into slightly less obvious ones. And they probably like it because it’s so “refreshingly free of political correctness,” which means that it’s misogynistic and racist. Plus, he name-drops Anne Rice and Queen of the Damned as if they were good.

The whole book just feels like having an over-long conversation with someone who has above-average intelligence and a reasonable imagination, but is horribly, cripplingly shallow, and just doesn’t have the talent to reach his aspirations. And that’s about the least inspiring thing to read when you’re supposed to start writing. Reading something transparently bad just gives you the reassurance that no matter how talentless you are, at least you’re better than that. And reading something really good, of course, gives you something to aspire to. Reading this was just unsettling and depressing — it’s possible to be an uninspired C-list hack doomed to mediocrity, and still get published and praise and positive reviews and never realize how much you suck.

On the other hand, I’m still wanting to do NaNoWriMo out of spite. Spite for Alma Hromic, a humorless, bitter, self-important woman who would be bad enough just for writing “I was born with ink in my veins, in a town on the banks of an ancient river, in a country which no longer exists.” But she secured her place as a hero to the creative process with this screed against NaNoWriMo which shows how much she completely misses the point. (Unfortunately, it also demonstrates how much people put their self-worth into their own writing ability, but I guess that’s a topic for another therapy session).

So this book, if it ever gets finished, will be dedicated to you, Ms. Hromic!

I’ve looked at the news for the new World of Warcraft expansion, and my reaction is pretty much “meh.” Of course, I’m still going to buy and play the hell out of it, but I can’t get all that excited about it. Partly because it seems like it’s most appealing to people who are either at level 60 and have run out of stuff to do (I’m not), and/or people who have played all the Warcraft games and see some recognizable back-story there (I don’t). Plus I’m just tired of Blizzard and have realized two things about the company:

1. Blizzard has dicked over enough of my friends now that they have officially become “the bad guys.”
2. You’ll only get my World of Warcraft game away from me when you pry it from my cold, dead, Wizard’s Ring of the Monkey (+10 Agility, Soulbound, required level 33)-wearing fingers.

So it’s kind of a love-hate relationship.

And that’s why articles like this one piss me off. It’s kind of old news: WoW has a program that runs when the game is running, monitoring other apps on your machine to make sure you’re not running some cheat software. One of the things it does is check the title bars of your other open applications, a commonly-used and publically-available Windows API call for years, to look for known cheat programs.

What pisses me off is that now, like with New Orleans vs. the Bush Administration, I’m finding myself siding with the bad guys (Blizzard) over the good guys (the Electronic Frontier Foundation). Now, I support the EFF (in spirit, not financially) and think it’s good to have them around. But they’ve taken what is at heart a great concept that everyone can agree with, and gone too extremist with it, much like Greenpeace, PETA, the ACLU, and NAMBLA.

From the article:

Digital rights group The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) branded The Warden “spyware” and said its use constituted “a massive invasion of privacy”.

The EFF said that it was not acceptable simply to take Blizzard’s word that it did nothing with the information it gathered. It added that the Blizzard could get away with using The Warden because information about it was buried in licence agreements that few people read.

A “massive invasion of privacy?” Please. And getting upset about what Blizzard might do with the information is what gets branded you an alarmist and conspiracy theorist. The last part is the worst, though. Anyone who’s alarmed and upset and blaming Blizzard should maybe, oh I don’t know, read the license agreements that they agreed to.

One quote from a different player of the game, who has a surprising amount of common sense for a Blizzard fan:

“If someone is afraid of the program reading sensitive information from their programs, one possible solution is simply to not run any additional programs while playing World of Warcraft,” he said, “which is certainly advisable from a performance standpoint to begin with.”

What a novel concept. If you don’t like Blizzard knowing that you’re looking at porn sites or on an AOL chat with DarkNEO2731, then just close those windows before you play the game.

Here’s the bit about the Brainiac who “discovered” the “massive invasion of privacy” by “dissasembling the code” of the program to watch in action (read: he ran a copy of WinSpy):

Writing in his blog about what he found Mr Hoglund said: “I watched The Warden sniff down the e-mail addresses of people I was communicating with on MSN, the URL of several websites that I had open at the time, and the names of all my running programs.”

Mr Hoglund noted that the text strings in title bars could easily contain credit card details or social security numbers.

Okay, complain about Blizzard all you want on your blog, yeah whatever. But let me give you some helpful advice: if you’re dealing with a bank or company that puts your credit card details in the title bar of its site, it’s time for you to stop complaining to a videogame company and start finding yourself a real bank. Sheesh.

Having to read all these tech news websites, especially where privacy rights online are concerned, just makes me realize what a bunch of whiny, paranoid bitches computer people are.