So Many Incredible Shows

It took me a couple tries to get into the Netflix show Sense8, but when I finally did I was moved more deeply than I could've imagined, which is something as I was coming off the breathtaking season 2 of The OA.

What stood out through the course of the show was how it incorporates disparate people with radically different lives into a small community of unity, support, comfort, joy and love. There was a wholistic, unchallenged sense of connection between the characters resonant in a way I don't think I've ever seen in a TV show. No petty arguments, no manufactured dissent for the sake of drama, no characters set up to be opposed to or resentful of one another.

Each character had plenty of action and soap opera drama going on at any given time, and those subplots varied in how interesting or well done they were, but the interactions between the sensate and their companions stood out like a beacon and caused me to experience so much joy. The way they seamlessly moved between self and other, sharing fear and joy as though it were their own, blending knowledge, fear, and hope into something stronger and more resilient than each could be alone. They loved, cared for, listened to, and were kind to each other in a way I found profound, and haunts my thought on community. I have never seen anything like it.

It also gave me an opportunity to face some of the homo- and transphobic splinters still caught in my psyche. Considering relationships and watching scenes I may have been uncomfortable with in the past, I worked to look not with the lingering taught perspective of self serving indignity, but with a desire to see beauty and love however it's expressed and experienced. To see the beauty in a person or a relationship which deserves to be seen, and which makes me a better person by seeing it.

So many things in the world, in me, already bind love to the point of blood and hypoxia. I want to constantly be in the mode of identifying and untying those wires and ropes: celebrating, experiencing, encouraging, and engaging love where ever it struggles to move and breathe, internally and externally.

At Least There's No R.O.U.S.

Gathered all the stray bits of projects and orphaned to-do's into OmniFocus, but I haven't had as much luck as I'd hoped using Youtube as a source of gaining greater wisdom in organizing them.

Yes, it might be because I get distracted watching things like True Facts: Pangolins Posse, but it's also because most of the tubes I find are either for beginners or are about tips and tricks. Might be worthwhile buying access to LinkedIn Learning for a month as they have a couple of courses specifically for OF and innumerable ones on project management in general.

With the recent dump into OF, it's become an absolute swamp in there, complete with ghosts, bog witches, monster trees, and congregations of frogs and ravens croaking back and forth over who gets my bones. Scary, is what I'm saying. Really, really scary.

"Do You Want To Play A Game"

Back in my days on LiveJournal, the little group I was connected to would occasionally play a game where one member would throw out a list of five or more words and the rest of us would write a poem containing the words on the list. It was a game we didn't play often, but I enjoyed when we did.

I've mentioned British speculative fiction author Jeff Noon's Twitter game #speedlit before:

RULES

20 words or less

no punctuation

lower case

one line break

As a larger meme, it hasn't caught on, and even Mr. Noon doesn't play anymore. Mostly it's just me and the brilliant poet and artist ReVerse Butcher.

Words are my LEGO blocks, my lumber and nails. Programming is such a joy because it's a place where I literally build things out of words and phrases.

So despite playing it in solitaire mode, Mr. Noon's game is one I come back to at regular intervals.

Due to the limits, the initial work is quick and simple, not requiring dedicated time or energy, and lends itself to the way I get tiny flashes of story scenes or strange phrases stuck in my head throughout the day. The mental bits get jotted into a window on my screen where they sit with too many words and commas, and not enough edge or story, as I poke, poke, poke for the next several hours until I'm either satisfied or exasperated.

The rules themselves make no such requirement, but from Noon's early examples and my own internalization, I try to avoid treating the projects as poetry. It would be easy to argue the constraints and most of the forms produced are absolutely a kind of poesy, similar to a haiku, and I have no counter. My own goal, though, is to construct a tight prose narrative, a single degree of story arc containing hints of what came before and where they're going after while containing a sharp stabby sense of what's happening right now.

My own enjoyment comes from processing the original ideas through the mental still set up by dark, boozy pirates the in the Broca's area of my brain, condensing the mash originally put onto the screen into something which meets the constraints, but still contains enough flavor to be valuable. Reducing phrases to their skeletal frames, finding words with a higher degree of specificity or generality or impact, changing order to increase clarity or reduce word count, making myself do without extraneous adjectives and adverbs.

A perfect bit will create a specific image or feeling in the reader and make them intensely curious to know the whole of the story. Maybe:

dream flensing knife

only three seraph pelts

the blind ifrit calls from a back stall

time to go hunting

Or:

he never spoke

of the spider hearts

beating

keeping the watch hands sweeping

or the cost of every midnight chime

An imperfect, but good bit, does function like a haiku: capturing the image or feeling of a moment, but existing mostly outside a larger specific narrative, and making the reader content with what they have, rather than curious about what they don't.

Say:

shapes of morning

cut roughly from the sheet of night

collaged carefully together

a map

etched from real to dream

A failing piece will simply be boring as either poem or narrative, and will be dull and fuzzy rather than sharp and clear. I actually do like this:

already haunted

by future ghosts

she spat at lachesis

keep up or cut me loose

but even I don't remember what it's about or get a clear image of what's happening in its moment.

Some of them contain seeds of fuller stories I'd like to write which Is why I keep them after first throwing them to the scouring winds of Twitter.

I'll tuck the rest under the READ MORE link to keep from annoying the disinterested.

Read More

Terminating

Out of the box a modern cell phone has sight, hearing, proprioception, and touch. It’s ready to learn at least some of your biometric markers, and with a quick login has access to gigabytes of data about your preferences, relationships, and how you spend your time. With wireless access to exabytes of data covering most of what's known to humankind, we’re a Turing test away from Skynet and carrying it adoringly around in our purses and pockets.