Ideas Ideas Ideas

Missed 250 words yesterday, figure I’ll give it another go today. Reading a few author Tweets this morning and it- reset for full align, wish it would do that as default. What I need to do is get out my idea book and start keeping it with me. I used to.

Ideas ideas ideas. What I want to do is enter some old writings into contests or at least see if I can get that one thing whatever it was called sold to a horror anthology or at least to some magazine. This time of year is a good time to try I’d think. Re-read it yesterday and it doesn’t seem as awesome as I thought it was when I wrote it, but that was years ago and things change and so have I.

I wrote another short, “gothic” poem a few months ago. Woke up and it was pretty well full in my mind, grabbed the slab and jotted it down quick. Notation at the end says “needs structure” and hooboy does it ever. Probably needs structured right into the Recycle Bin but I keep poking at it, hoping it’ll come together.

Was thinking this morning. Scary, huh? But no, really! “Write what you know.” What I know is NCPA is pretty fucking horrible and scary, and thought xeno:ncpa::king:maine. So there’s that for a setting. Like The Woods, with the Scary Sound. Which upon reflection was likely just the noise from Rte. 15 miles away filtering through it, but still, it was this constant, malevolent Hum. Most of the time we didn’t really notice it, kind of just prelingered there in our subconscious, but, occasionally, we Noticed, and it sucked.

Day One

Had all these ideas on the walk back from the bus stop and I enter the house and they’re *poof* gone. Something about awareness of writing For Others. And me being a private person yadda yadda yadda gotta get used to this stream of consciousness writing thing, and it’s hard to type my thoughts like there’s a block between my brain and my fingers resisting the urge to get the words out.

Maybe I think Too Fast for my fingers, though I think I type pretty fast anyway. Or I have So Many thoughts, all at once, that I can’t focus in on one. My concentration isn’t very and that’s a lot of it. Maybe I need Medication. Probably do for Lots Of Things, but eh, what did our ancestors do? They Dealt With It, or they killed themselves (which probably happened a lot more often than we know.) Not that I’m contemplat- no, I have, a lot, but not that I’d Actually Do It. It’s a coward’s way out, and there’s my kids too.

Still can’t make myself Unconsicous of the fact I’m writing this down and Someone will Read It someday. I’ve been Editting even this short amount of way in (wow is that ever an uncomfortable phrase) and reformatting to make it look better and backspacing to correct pronunciation and spelling and I will Very Likely spellcheck when I am done.

So I’ve been lackadaisically following J(Wow I spelled that right first try go me) John Scalzi’s blog Whatever and in particular a bit about Writing and Writers. (And here is the point I just went to full-blown, Purposeful editting and formatting for later posting. Scary.) I like the entire post, and it really felt targetted Directly at my personal... quandry sounds so stuffy, but that’s what it’s been, over the past few weeks of getting my mind and heart turned back to writing, and maybe actually trying to make something of it. I’ll go with his quoted suggestion of “at least 250 words a day” for now, which I’m not sure if this is yet or not, but I don’t think I’m done anyway.

So the 250 words/day is more intended for someone writing a novel or something, I Think (not having read the source, maybe context is wrong) but it seems like a good goal for me to drive myself to actually break this Cycle of Suck I’ve been stuck in for so long. Practice makes perfect, or something.

So now the question is, where and how? I have a few places to post, but none with any readers (which might make it easier at first really) but should I expand into social media like Facebook and Livejournal and Find An Audience, not monetarily, but at least find readers and get used to the idea people might Know My Thoughts, which is and really has been for a lot of my life, frankly terrifying.

That will seem contrary to anyone who knows me, as a talkative, out-going, social character in my own little drama, but because that is precisely how I view it, as a Character, it makes it easier to confront people. If I can dazzle them with details or baffle them with bullshit, they can’t Get In and I can hide comfortably behind a persona. This will not work, this MY THOUGHTS ARE MINE GET OUT if I want to make a living out of a skill I have. It is, very very likely, part and parcel of my whole anti-creating thing. I get very weird, jealous feelings when someone {views|reads|listens} to something that came out of my head, and it’s why I don’t like to write anything anymore.

Am I done here? For now? I think I am. This was pretty awkward and uncomfortable to write, and I don’t know if I hit my 250 word goal or not, and frankly don’t care, because I wrote Something and, for now, that is enough.

Blar

HAMLOG

##append previous HAM changes here##

HAMchange 5:
    switched PCI-E power cords from the main bundle to seperate cords. Tried booting to safe mode, got APC_INDEX_MISMATCH Stop 0x01

HAMchange 6:
    switched Power Options from Balanced to High Performance. Booted fine, stable for 10 minutes. Opened irk, wow, xena s1e01 in vlc, rp in itunes, ran AH scan in wow, alt-tabbed a bit more, rainymood.com, explored hard drives. Noticed one of them was unplugged though, fixing that now.

HAMchange 7:
    wouldn't POST, hit reset, wouldn't POST, suddenly the case fan took off like a turbine. Opened it up so I could see the code on the board, booted fine. Still no hard drive. Decided to check windows update quick, saw some optional updates i didn't notice before- acer display, saitek cyborg, and realtek pcie family controller. grabbed them, shut down. Noticed sata cable was unplugged from the psu, don't know how that happened, suspect gremlins, gnomes or pebkac. Plugged back in, rebooted fine.

HAMtest 2:
    running Windows Experience assessment as a minitest. no problems, shutting down and putting case back together. Booting back up. Was stable for 15-20 minutes. Then Windows Explorer stopped working. After the whole process of report and wexplorer restarted, about a minute later bsod SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION 0x0000003B. Going to swap out cards with the one in HAL to rule out a gpu problem. Really thinking it's my psu right now. Giving up for the night.

HAMsearch:
    http://forum.corsair.com/v3/showthread.php?t=81790&highlight=TR3X6G1600C8D&page=2 I am not the only person having a problem with this ram and mobo combo. Need to check version number on the ram itself, but from what i have read there, i am likely RMAing it and getting something betterer. Also going to set BIOS back to defaults and try running it.

HAMchange 8:

    set memory frequency back to auto, booted fine. going to run it as normal for a while, then run prime95. Still stable after 2 hours or so of normal use. Now 4 hours of normal use with no issues.

HAMchange 9:
    set memory frequency one step up to 2:10 (1333Mhz). Booted fine, will continue monitoring and using as normal. Stressing with prime95 after at least 1 hour of uptime. Running fine for about 3.5 hours now. Don't know if i need to run prime95 or not really. Will let it go a bit more and then bump up to 1600 again and see if it starts crashing.

HAMchange 10:
    set memory frequency back up to 2:12 (1600Mhz). Booted fine, etc etc. Running prime95. Well, it passed a very short test. But Still. Also trying to crash it right now and just can't get it to.

HAMtest 3:
    *tried* to crash it. running irk, itunes, wow, tf2, steam, tweetdeck all at the same time. both games running absolutely fine, itunes running fine. opened up explorer windows, alt-tabbed through everything really fast, kept prime95 running, everything. I rebooted to safe mode to run avast uninstaller and then rebooted to windows, uninstalled the rest of avast through remove programs, then had to restart again to finish the uninstall and it crashed twice trying to reboot.

HAMchange 11:
    changed QPI PLL from 1.1 to 1.2, IOH VCORE from 1.1 to 1.2, BSOD 0x7F, changing back

HAMobs 1:
    removal of avast maybe? it scanned rootkit whenever on startup, no crashes since i removed it, fingers crossed.

HAMobs 2:
    stable for 5+ days since avast removal- think that did it.

HAMobs 3:
    stable for 9 days, shut down to go Away for 2 days. Came back, powered up, BSOD. Restart, BSOD 0x0000003D atapi.sys INTERRUPT_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED, restart to Startup Repair, BSOD 0x3B SYSTEM_SERVICE_EXCEPTION, Reboot forced Startup Repair, Repair hung and would not complete after 5-10 minutes, reboot, BSOD 0x7E, reboot, logged in, used for 5-10 minutes, BSOD 0x00000050

HAMchange 12:
    going to reinstall 7.

HAMobs 4:
    came back from Pittsburgh (4 days) and started up and it won't boot at all, even into safe mode. Errors all over the place, Tried reinstalling 7, hung on Setup is starting... for 10-15 minutes, reset, ran memory diag from disk, crashed with 0x24, ran chkdsk from disk, no problems, running chkdsk /r now.

HAMtest 4:
    chkdsk /r came back with no problems, running WD's disk utility, extended test

HAMtest 5:
    disk utility extended test came back clear, running memtest with a stick in slot 1. Going to try moving it to slot 2 after a few passes, but the mobo manual specifically says it won't run in that configuration. Will test other two sticks accordingly.

HAMobs 5:
    first stick passed 5 passes in slot 1

HAMobs 6:
    5 passes in slot 2 as well, started 3

HAMobs 7:
    slot 3 passed all 5, stopping for the night, starting next stick tomorrow

HAMtest 6:
    stick 2, slots 1-3

Listening Pattern

So for the past few weeks whenever I've been listening to my own library rather than streaming radio or news I have had shuffle turned off, and I am going through my library alphabetically. I am now approaching the end of C, and discovering just how much crap I have.

At the end of this exercise, I intend to get rid of anything I have one-starred. How well this works to clean out my inventory depends on how far into the alphabet I make it.

Write

Write frequently, write often. Write when you have nothing else to write about, write when you do, write down what you did for the day, jot down notes. These are things I've read and heard for years and either ignored or out-right defied. Then this morning, as I tried to compose the first Real Entry on The Other Blog, I sat stone-walled for a good 15 minutes, my mind a blank.

Writing is practice. Blogging, online journals, updates on social networking sites, even tweets on Twitter; all of these are practice, and something I should embrace if I want this to turn into anything real. More, writing Publicly opens one up to critique and, if you build an audience, demand. Demand and pressure for More, which of course is more practice.

I never really thought of writing this way before. The idea will take some getting used to...

Something something something something

Guess I need to start writing more and get in practice if The Other Blog is ever going to take off. Feels weird to be breaking my years of Internet Silence (discounting the Other other blog). I've been anti-blog/social networking/what-have-you for so long I don't know that I know anything else. But, Ideas. I try very very hard not to have them, but I did, so I have to act on it. And who knows where it could lead? The niche is there, the Desire is there, and, maybe, the Intent.