NaNoWriMo: 20% Done

If portrayed in the proper light, death is funny.  In fact, death can be downright hilarious.

For example, the old joke about three travelers who are caught by a tribe of vicious natives who plan on making canoes out of their skins.  The travelers are given the choice on how they’d like to die; the first says by bow and arrow, the second says by spear… and the third asks for a fork.  The third traveler then jabs the fork into himself again and again and again until he’s bleeding all over himself in dozens of places.

The punchline: “You bastards won’t be getting a canoe out of me!”

Funny, no?  This joke is a racist and old-fashioned bit of humor that depends on the brutal and senseless murder of its three protagonists, with an extremely gruesome ending and a tiny tension-relieving lift at the end.  And yet it’s still funny.

In real life, it’s not funny.  When it’s someone we know or a friend of a friend, it’s not funny.  But when a celebrity accidentally dies through auto-erotic asphyxiation, we laugh.  When one of the most popular men in the world suddenly passes away, we laugh.  To our generation, more than sixty years after it ended, the Holocaust is still potent comedy material.

Oh, we are a wonderful race of people, are we not?  Imagine how much greater the world would be if we were all incapable of being amused.

Dream the Impossible Dream! And Most Likely Fail!

It is November again.

I have three tasks to accomplish for this month:

First, and by far the most important, is to accomplish everything I need to accomplish for school.  ‘Nuff said.

Second, and important but not quite as important as the first item, is to read The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, a first-edition copy of which is now sitting on my bookshelf, its prominent swastika emblem daring visitors to comment upon it.

Third is to write a novel.

Yes, that’s write, I shall once again be attempting to “win” National Novel Writing Month, in which thousands of brave individuals attempt to get 50,000 words down in the space of 30 days.  Last year I didn’t even break 20 thousand.  But what is life but a series of learning experiences, and what better way to learn than to set oneself up for failure?

Oh, sure, attitude has a lot to do with it.  If I go into this motivated to see it through no matter what, I’d probably rack up the required number of words by the end.  They’d be terrible and barely connected and wouldn’t have a cohesive plot and I’d be ashamed of them, but it’d be finished.

But I cannot do that.  I may have the motivation, but I can’t – well, I can, but I hate it – write when I’m not flowing from idea to idea.  That’s the problem I ran into with my first attempt, actually; a couple of chapters in, I realized that I’d given all the backstory, developed the necessary plot points, and had no idea where to go from there.  I floundered.  I drowned.

Not this year, though.  I shall succeed.

I’m thinking a slice-of-life story of a boy who has a perfectly normal family, a perfectly normal home life, and no mysterious tragedies from his past.  He gets up in the morning, does whatever it is he does, and then goes to sleep without dreaming of dark strangers or bright green lights or dragons or vampires or anything like that.

Then, I think, he’ll be eaten by an multidimensional demon who promises to let him go if he can solve some sort of puzzle.

He fails, and he dies, and then he is plunged into a hell of his own design, where he is tortured for eternity.

I just love a happy ending, don’t you?

Harkening Back to the Olden Times

It certainly has been a long time since I went off on a hate-filled tangent about something that really doesn’t matter.

Time to change that.

Earlier this fine evening I cracked open a container of something called “All Fruit Salad” which is a mix of dried fruits, mostly pleasing to the palate.  On the lid and the ingredient list, however, was listed the most foul of all fruit: the raisin.

I don’t understand it, really.  Grapes are wonderful.  Raisins… not so much.  In my humble opinion, there are only two uses for raisins: first, as a necessary evil in trail mix (only when so dry as to the point of being crystallized, and I’d still prefer dried cranberries) and for playing snap-dragon (in which raisins are placed in a bowl of brandy which is then set afire, and players take turns to reach in, pull out a raisin, and eat it).

But it’ll be okay, I thought.  The other fruits will overcome the raisins.

So I opened the lid, and there they were.

Golden raisins.  Sultanas.  The bane of my culinary existence.

Nestled between the papaya and pineapple and cranberries and strawberries were some 35 or 40 of these things.  Ever the adventurer, I did indeed try a mouthful with one of the golden devil-fruits… and it was exactly as horrifying as I had expected.

I hereby declare war on the golden raisin.  May we drive them to extinction, burn them all, and salt the ashes.

No, No, No, No, No.

Curiosity is not one of my many flaws.  I am not the type to wonder about a cut-off conversation or rise to the bait dangled by an attention-seeking narcissist.

But once – just this once – I decided to indulge.  There was a URL scrawled on a sheet of paper on a bulletin board in my dorm.  It was intriguing, if a bit odd, and I figured that since I was headed off to the internet anyway, I’d give it a shot.

And lo and behold, the site – video blog, really, although I use “blog” only because it’s hosted on Blogspot – was exactly what it said it was.  I had been hoping for something witty: perhaps a pun on one of the words in the URL, or else a different definition than what is conventionally used, but no.

This bothers me, to be frank.  Honesty is one thing, but it has no place on the internet.  Besides, the subject matter of this site is (while not the slightest bit obscene or even remotely offensive, far less so than even some of the things I’ve written here) something that I cannot imagine being of interest to anyone at all, for anyone with a modicum of intelligence or self-respect would look at it and say “this is stupid” and then go somewhere infinitely cleverer, like here.

So the moral of the story, then, is twofold.  First, don’t do stupid things with a webcam.  Second, don’t be curious about anything.

So Basically I Just Hate the Internet

As I slowly traverse the great wasteland that is the internet (with the help of my StumbleUpon toolbar, of course) I cannot help but become annoyed at some of the things that people find noteworthy enough to attempt to bring to my attention.

Yes, I know, being annoyed at the ‘net is foolish.  I am comfortable with that.

Anyway, lately it’s been those lists of reasons why men and women are different, or why women are like cats and men are like dogs, or how your favorite browser is like a woman, etc.  It doesn’t help that I’ve seen most of them before, but the primary source of my irritation is because they’re simply not funny.  Yes, I get it, men are sex-crazed animals and women are cold and dispassionate, men communicate in grunts and cheers and women take twenty minutes and use thousands of words to explain something simple, men are unhygienic pigs and women are vain and obsessed with their cosmetics, blah blah blah.  Sexism, even dual sexism designed to poke fun at both groups, is not something that I find particularly amusing.

Oh, and I also don’t find it particularly amusing when people latch onto a brief bit of topical humor and use it to define something, or someone, for a much longer period of time than is proper.  Sure, Joe Blogger might make an offhand remark about how he can perform a keg stand without having people hold his legs because his sense of balance is so acute, but does that mean that everything from anonymous comments to private emails to him should be addressed “Joe, Master of the Lonely Keg Stand”?  No, of course not, because that would be imbecilic.

And captioned cats.  I hate captioned cats.  Captioned animals in general, really, even the ones that are trying to be ironically funny or to mock the whole meme.  At least I have someone to blame for that – I have a few friends among the goons of Something Awful, and I never let them live down the horrors they’ve brought upon us all.

So yeah.  I probably shouldn’t spend as much time with StumbleUpon as I do, but “probably” and “should” never put a man on the moon.

Although, according to some people on the internet, we’ve never put a man on the moon anyway, but they’re idiots, so who cares?