Dreaming About Things... and Stuff.

Dreams are weird. You have good dreams, bad dreams, dreams where you're naked that are fun and dreams where you're naked and they suck. Your brain basically says "Hey, here's a random assortment of images and sounds from your life... how fucked up would you like to be tonight?"

And just like that - your day either starts out good... or shitty.

I, for one, have some pretty messed up dreams from time to time. Not bragging - just more of an FYI. My wife, on the other hand, has what she calls "weird dream theater" - and trust me - it's weird.

LET'S DO THE TIME WARP AGAIN!!!! and again and again and again and again...

May is national Time Travel Awareness Month!

... that is not true at all, but I'm running with it. Especially as I just spent a night with a pacifier-less child who spent 3 achingly long hours of the night telling me in no uncertain terms that she, in fact, wanted her binky. So we're hitting the coffee again today like it's meth and I'm some sort of crazed addict.

She's lucky she's an adorable child. 

But - her binky-less, cry fest got me thinking about time travel. Because, OH HOLY SHIT how great would it be to travel back in time to when she lost the binky - and make sure it didn't go missing!?!?

It also helps that I'm currently reading Paradox Bound for the 2nd time... It's a pretty excellent time travel story by Peter Clines... so time travel is on my mind ALREADY... and her pleas just added to that. And I don't just mean traveling forward in time - I mean jumping around, doing stuff... time is, after all, a wibbly-wobbly, timey-wimey thing...

I've come here to drink coffee and be REALLY random...

Some days - life just isn't fun. Migraines, work, stress, kids kicking you in the kidneys while you sleep... stuff like that.

It's on those days I like to rely on caffeine.

Shitloads of caffeine.

Like... oh, holy shit, that's a lot of caffeine.

Today... is one of those days. I'm on cup #2 of coffee, plus a Mt. Dew kickstarter**... which, by the way, has become my new favorite thing. I imagine there will be more of these in my near future.

But I'm not here to talk about coffee... Well, not SOLELY to talk about coffee anyway. I'm here to talk about... uh... something?  I'm not sure. Let's see where this goes.

I took a poll on Facebook to see what exactly I should write about... the answers varied wildly. Music, Politics, artificial lifeforms, listening to people talk about their swolness, travel, driving without a top on my jeep, candy corn... and so on.

And yet... none of these topics moved me. That is because I am a heartless, over-caffeinated monster... I'd make a great villain in a book. Sitting behind my keyboard, laughing maniacally at my computer monitor as I laugh at the people of the internet and ignore their pleas for entertaining material. I would just sit and drink my caffeinated beverages, browse reddit... Wait... that's not very villainous. Sounds like a dude in his 30s.

Crap.

Hollywood needs to re-think itself

Books and movies! Movies and books!!  WAIT!!!  Let's take some anime and make it into a movie as well!!

Why do we as a culture have such a hard-on for movies?

I can say that, in my 40 years of movie-watching and book reading, I have seen MAYBE 3 dozen movies that I consider "amazing feats of story-telling"... but I've read literally HUNDREDS of books that are absolutely AMAZING feats of story-telling.

But my question is - again - WHY do we feel that EVERYTHING would be better as a movie?  Because, lets face it, statistically speaking - most movies suck.

We need to think bigger. We need to think more episodic. We need to get away from the idea that everything needs to be boiled down into a 90-120 minute long, trite representation of an amazing work of someone else.

The problem with social media...

Peter Clines posted in his blog the other day about people asking him to read their stuff for free or offer advice on their manuscripts... and not just writer friends, but complete strangers off of the internet... and doing that is a dick move if you ask me.

To paraphrase -
"Hey, Mr. So-and-so, I've read your book and I'm a huge fan. You've inspired me to write... as such, I feel you owe it to me to check out my things and tell me what to do... oh, and I want it all for free. I mean, you are seemingly pretty cool and take time to answer your fans on social media from time to time... so, how about it?"

Storytellers and "writers"...

I'm not a writer. Clearly.  I am a terrible speller. I suck at grammar. And my use of punctuation is... erratic at best.

But... And here's the thing - I can come up with all sorts of stories. And, in my humble opinion, they're not half-bad. The jury is still out on whether or not they're half good... I've run several "short story" groups on Facebook. I have at least 3 failed writing blogs dating back to the days of AOL and Geocities... Generally speaking - people like my stories. Or at least the overall idea of the story I was writing. 

Telling a good story, however, doesn't necessarily stand on its own. It has to be written well. Or else people will just ignore it... or write bad reviews about it online in their blogs. 

Audiobooks... they're like crack only more addicting.

Can I just say - I LOVE audiobooks. I mean - truly.

It's the one thing that has kept me sane and centered on my time driving trucks across the country and my, now 3-year old, commute of 100 miles each day. (Technically it's 96 miles - but I like to round up)

I've listened to some books a dozen times over the last ten years. I've gotten to the point where Ray Porter and Wil Wheaton's voices are almost as known to me as my wife's... In a strictly familiar sense.

I've read listened to Ready Player One about 9 times now... Wil Wheaton nailed that one.

I've read listened to some of John Scalzi's books so many times I feel like I'm BFFs with John Perry and Jane Sagan...