The lunatic is in my head.

I've felt fairly boring lately, externally boring, I guess. The inside of my head is as interesting as ever it was, but I think I'm having an interface problem.

I was talking about that a bit with kestrelsan a few weeks back. How the best part of writing (or vidding or whatever) is the period after you've had the idea and you're researching and planning and outlining and just thinking. And the story exists in your head as those thoughts and feelings and moods and snatches of dialogue. But you have to get it down in your text editor.

And that's hard, because the interface for turning thoughts into language is clunky. Or that's how it feels to me. In a way, it reminds me of translation. From brain language into English. And there's no Allen and Greenough's New Brain Grammar.

I've done some reading on interface design and I found that it was not only applicable to making web applications, but also to most kinds of problems, especially social ones. You can move past what's wrong with me, what's wrong with you to what's wrong with the interface.

 

Lesson learned: you have to drink a lot of decaf if you want a buzz.

 

My co-worker on seeing an IMAX movie about whales: I was much more interested in finding out how they mate -- they're huge and they have no hands.

 

Monday night TV included one of my fave eps of Trailer Park Boys -- I'm Not Gay, I Love Lucy. Wait A Second, Maybe I Am Gay. Julian wants Ricky and Lucy to get married so they'll both stop bugging him. He figures he can convince Ricky to pop the question if he tells him people are beginning to say that Ricky is gay, since he hasn't married Lucy yet.

Ricky, in his usual brilliant way, starts to wonder if he is gay. (He's not.) And if he's gay, Julian must be too. But everything gets straightened (heh) out eventually.

 

Adding and Subtracting - a body art interview. Be sure to read to the very bottom of the page. (Or at least scroll down.)

ETA: Sorry, guys, I should have been more clear about the above link. 1. It's squicky. 2. It's not real. (Check the posting date on the bottom of the page.) I just thought it was really clever and funny.