I’ve been vaguely thinking about scraping some of the old essays I’ve posted here and turning them into a book, so I imported all of my old entries on rumored from 1997 to present into Scrivener just to see what it looked like.  It turns out I’ve written about 650,000 words here, which means if I trim out the 90% I don’t like anymore, you still get a decent-sized manuscript.

A book of this size is difficult to manage. It’s big enough that Scrivener stutters a bit when you try some intensive operations, like if you select all of the text and reformat it in one pass.  (And this is on a relatively fast machine with 8 gigs of RAM).  I also got enough shit when I released my first book, Summer Rain, which was about 220,000 words.  That translated into about 650 pages, which I think is perfectly readable, but that was ten years ago, and now people tune out in the middle of a 140-character twitter update.  But printing a 650,000-word book presents challenges other than attention span.  CreateSpace can’t even handle a single volume that big; unless I made some creative font and margin choices, that would most likely take three books.

I am not sure if I’ll actually pursue this, because I really need to be writing new stuff, and even if I did, it would be some kind of best-of with a couple hundred pages, max.  But I was googling around and looking for the relative sizes of various books (Infinite Jest, War and Peace, etc.) and I found a guy who wrote a seventeen million word book.

Check it: http://marienbadmylove.com - it’s by a guy named Mark Leach.  It sounds interesting, a B-movie romp through time travel and UFOs and all sorts of things, but it also looks like it’s more performance art than readable fiction.  I mean, even if it was the best damn stuff in the world, it would require a year’s sabbatical from life and a forklift to handle all of the possible volumes.  But it appears he’s done a lot of Burroughsian experimental stuff, like using the cut-up method, to generate that much text, so this isn’t like sitting down to a Dan Brown novel.

This makes me think I should take all of those out-at-third-act novels I never finished, dump it into a big cut-up tool, and mix it down into some gigantic sick and twisted mess of a book.  It’s a thought.

I was just reading today about some rumors surrounding the system that’s being called, for lack of a better name, the XBox 720.  It’s supposed to be coming out in late 2013 or 2014, which is bad for a couple of reasons.  One, if they screw the pooch and don’t get it to hit that magical pre-holiday season shopping surge, they’re dead.  Second, the entire console gaming industry could be as lively in 2014 as the current 8-track tape industry is today.  But that’s not what shocked me about the news; neither was the fact that they’re moving to BluRay discs for their format.  What threw me is the announcement that the new system won’t let you play used games.

This hasn’t been entirely clarified, but I’m guessing that games will force you to do some sort of online activation scheme, or otherwise be bound to your Microsoft ID.  If you can’t beam home and lock that copy to your ID, you can’t play.  This would probably be swaddled in some distraction, like saying “I’m going to go online now and download all of your COOL NEW GIANT BONUS GUNS!!” and then lock down the game while pulling down updates.  The DIVX DVD player from a decade ago had a similar system, and failed miserably.  It used a phone line to connect back to the mothership, like an old-school cable box did for PPV purchases, but now that every home (in theory) has wifi and ethernet and broadband, that part of the equation is less of a big deal.

I was just reading a J.G. Ballard interview where he talked about the influence of used book stores when he was younger, how he’d dig around these places after some old geezer kicked the bucket and his widow hauled off a century’s worth of book hoarding for six pence a title, and find among the pulp paperbacks the occasional gem.  I used to do the same thing, partly because the prices were always good, but partly because the only other book stores around were Walden’s-type places that didn’t stock anything interesting, or maybe the occasional Border’s that would have the last one or two of an author’s works, at full cover price.  I spent so much time poring over titles in basement stores, taking home books that looked cool, and occasionally stumbling onto something life-changing.

I did the same thing with CDs and music, too.  I mean, I worked both sides of the deal, dragging a backpack of the lowest-rated titles from my collection every time I was broke and had to pay a massive phone bill or buy enough groceries to coast into next payday.  But I’d often spent hours going from A to Z in those used CD places, trying to find something obscure, or just looking for bands I’d never heard, so I could try them out for half the price of a retail CD.  I buy 100% of my music digitally now, and that experience is completely gone now.  I can listen to 30-second clips of an artist’s songs in the iTunes store, and that’s helpful, but the entire tactile situation of running my fingers over five thousand plastic spines on jewel cases to find some obscure d-list band on Earache is gone.

I don’t know how big the used game market is these days, although at the height of my PlayStation 2 days, I’d frequently turn in the duds in my collection for store credit.  I was always the kind of gamer that would be stuck on a single title for weeks and months on end, instead of having to get the latest games as they came out and then immediately solve them.  I am guessing if you’re that kind of gamer, you probably use one of those Netflix-like game rental services, although this begs the question if they will also be screwed by a one-player-per-title system.

The main thing killing the console game system is another reason why the game-ownership system makes less sense.  When you play something like Mafia Wars, you don’t buy the game; the client is your browser, and you “own” your online account.  You don’t spend money buying a physical disk; you buy game currency or points or guns or upgrades or whatever else.  I think more games will follow this WoW model where the client is either free or cheap, and you either pay for upgrades or pay per month or hour or whatever.

I’m also wondering if this will cause a “dark ages” in collecting of systems in the future.  I can hop on eBay and hoard away any number of Atari 2600 titles.  But will there be a point in ten or twenty years when the then-middle-aged person goes to buy all of the XBox720/PS4 games they didn’t have as a kid and be as screwed as that guy who built a replica Cray supercomputer and can’t boot it because nobody has an OS for it?

I turn 41 today.

Five years ago, I ate dinner at Per Se in New York.  I had a twelve-course meal that cost something like $750.  Then I went home and watched the movie Idiocracy.  Then my iTunes library crashed, and I spent the next day restoring it, so a huge chunk of my songs say they were imported on 1/21/07.

Ten years ago, I went to Las Vegas with Bill (who shares my birthday), Lon, and Todd, starting a long tradition of going to Sin City for our birthdays. Todd took pictures of me sodomizing pretty much every statue on the strip.  While we were in town, I bought 40 acres of land in the mountains of Colorado, starting that whole obsession.  I also shot a full-auto M-16, bought this ridiculous Coke jacket, and made far too many references to Fear and Loathing over the weekend.

Fifteen years ago, my uncle died from brain cancer on my birthday.  I lived in Seattle then. I went out the weekend before, with a bunch of people from Spry (Bill, Todd, others) and I bought a new bed, but I spent the actual day of my birthday at work.  A somewhat boring and introspective day, but those are good too.

Twenty years ago, I turned 21 and could legally drink.  Me and Bill went to Kilroy’s, the dumb jock bar in Bloomington, to get our free drink.  I still have the glass.  Then I went to a liquor store to buy something with more octane than the fruity drink with ten drops of rum in it, and the fuckers didn’t even card me, which pissed me off.

Twenty five years ago, I turned 16 and hit the age when I could get my driver’s license.  I didn’t get it for a few months, but that was the first big step in escaping orbit.  I think my obsession at that time was Iron Maiden.

Thirty years ago, I think I had a Superman cake.

Forty years ago, I was in Edwardsburg, Michigan and I still have the picture of me putting my hands in the chocolate cake that pretty much everyone has from their first birthday.

It’s now 8

, and at 8, I officially turn 41. I’m still in bed, plinking at the laptop, enjoying a day off.  Later, I will go to Denny’s.  Not really thinking about my own mortality or where the time went or any of that stuff.  Just thinking about pancakes.

Anyway, thanks to everyone for everything in the last year.  I hope the next one is even better.

As I approach the end of my 40th year, my body is falling apart.  Okay, that may be an over-exaggeration, but every morning, it feels like another piece has been overextended or abused or mutilated, from the various discs in my back to the muscles and joints in my shoulders or arms or knees or toes or whatever.  Ever since I’ve started working from home, poor ergonomics has caused a rash of various repetitive stress injuries.  Or maybe all of the steps I’ve tried to prevent said injuries have caused it.  I don’t know.

I do know that my keyboards have been the main focus of this hell.  I mean, I also bought extensions to raise my desk, a different mount to raise my monitor, and one of those freaky bicycle seat-looking office chairs to prevent me from slouching, and that all helps.  But I think in the last decade, I’ve probably put down about a million words between work and fiction, and all of those go through my ten digits via some kind of USB-connected appliance that’s based on a design originally thrown down a hundred and a half years ago by opium-deranged business machine sadomasochists trying to find a way to keep busy women in between bouts of making sandwiches.  Never mind the fact that we don’t yet have machines that read our minds or let us simply talk to our computers like we’re Scotty whipping up a batch of god damned transparent aluminum. The fact that we still use essentially the same QWERTY design as a century ago, the one that was specifically invented to slow down typists, is a travesty to all things mechanical.

When I got to Seattle in the mid-90s, ergo-mania was happening, and I knew more people who had RSI or carpal tunnel than I knew in Indiana who thought the earth was created 3000 years ago, and that’s a lot.  Ergo was huge, and there were all of these bizarre startups running out of garages churning out short runs of chording keyboards and strange split devices and custom DVORAK layouts, not to mention all of the alternate mouse designs, like track balls and track pads and track pens and track cocks and whatever else.  And this was before the advent of USB, when this stuff became really easy to make, and before Microsoft upped the ante on RSI by inventing prolific right-click menus and then the scroll wheel, two things that have caused more arthritis of the right hand than all of the collected works of Megan Fox.

Microsoft both created and destroyed the ergo market by coming out with their own mass-produced split keyboard.  I will give credit where credit is due and say this is one product that Microsoft got mostly right.  I’ve gone through a succession of these split keyboards, most recently using the Ergo 4000, which has a large number of “media” buttons, which are nice for doing things like pausing iTunes or skipping tracks or zooming the browser window.  However, aside from the fact that I go though about one of these a year (mostly because of a combination of eating at my computer and the fact that the letters wear off almost instantly) there’s always been something slightly wrong with these peripherals.

Before the Microsoft models, I went through a series of IBM Model M keyboard clones; in fact, my first keyboard I bought in 1991 was an honest-to-god 83-key IBM keyboard from a 5-slot 5150 PC.  In 2012, there are a lot of issues with these keyboards, aside from just the total lack of ergonomic comfort; you’re not going to find a Windows key or an Apple key, and they use a cable that predates USB by at least two or three iterations.  Most of the vintage ones have also gone from the 90s computer beige to the yellow-brown color of linen in a ten-pack-a-day smoker’s house.

But the switches in these keyboards were magic.  New keyboards don’t use individual switches; they use dome switches, where the keys push this rubbery sheet that contains little bits that complete the electrical connection. The result is a quiet and cheap keyboard that feels like typing while your fingers are suspended in a bowl of mush, and at some point, the little domes will sporadically fail, and every 10,000th character you type will randomly miss, eventually causing insanity and the cost of both replacing the keyboard and the window you throw it through in a maddened rage.  The old keyboards used actual mechanical switches, each one happily clicking with a sharp tactile feel as you snapped away at the keys.  Even if you couldn’t type fast, it felt like you were typing fast.

This introduces this never-solvable paradox that seems to creep up in every damn aspect of my life.  I want an ergonomic split keyboard, that is modern and uses USB and has all of the new keys people use like Win and Alt, and has mechanical key switches.  The Microsoft ergo uses rubber dome switches, and at some point, those fail and cause madness.  It also means that even with a brand new keyboard, it feels like I’m typing underwater.  There’s a whole cult of mechanical switch keyboards, mostly from gamers who need lightning-fast key response.  Those are all standard layout, mostly because gamers only use the WASD keys.  There’s also the issue that these keyboards are all marketed to 14-year-old Asian boys, and have names like the “Viper Frag Kill 9000” and you will pay $200 for backlighting and extra buttons specifically used for Skyrim or whatever.  And outside of Microsoft, the ergo keyboard market has largely been killed.  Add to this the frustration that every single computer sold comes with a keyboard, and because the cheapest way of making them is good enough for a person who types at most 140 characters in a row, the $19 OEM POS is fine for almost everyone.

My problem with this - or with building a kitchen island, or finding the right desk, or getting a set of sliding glass doors done, or whatever the hell else, is I fall down these deep internet k-holes of endless searching and frustration.  There are several internet discussion boards full of game playing fiends touting their favorite boards.  But of course, if you posted asking for a good ergo keyboard, you’d get a thousand responses saying RSI is a myth, kind of like if you went into a random bar in Arkansas and asked the locals about global warming or evolution.  And your first 900 results in a google search are links to the Microsoft Ergo 4000.

This fall, I finally gave up and bought a Kinesis Advantage.  They are not cheap; I spent just shy of $300 for mine.  But they use actual Cherry mechanical switches, and feature a unique split system, where the bulk of the keys are in two “bowls”, and all of the modifier keys (ctrl/alt/win/apple) plus keys like the backspace, delete, enter, and space, all sit under your thumbs.  This means you can do 99% of your typing without stretching your hands out of the home position, and the keys happily clack away to confirm your speedy typing.  The Kinesis also has a complex and powerful system of keyboard remapping and macro programming in its firmware, which I will probably never use.   The one real bummer, aside from price, is that the function keys are these little rubber chicklets that will inevitably get jammed or stop working.  There’s also the issue that I am not historically a touch typist, and I had to spend a month using a touch typing tutor program (the wonderful and open-source Tipp1o) to get to the point where those ring and pinky fingers were hitting the As and Ses and Ls and ;s with regularity.

The k-hole has been reopened lately, though.  I’ve been wondering if there’s a good way to replace those damn chicklet keys.  Maybe I should get a keypad or jog-shuttle control to remap these keys.  Maybe I should get out the dremel and buy a dozen and a half loose Cherry keys and replace the switches.  Maybe I should remap the largely useless Home key so Home-1=F1;Home-2=F2, and so on.  Maybe I should stop all of this and actually write books.  Sure, right after I try to find a Kinesis macro programming FAQ online, and then hem and haw about buying a Griffin PowerMate.

You know that new book I posted about the other day?  Well, the print version is now available, too.  So if you’re not cool with all this kindle stuff and still like to read your books dead tree style, check it out over at amazon.

The print version is 134 pages, and costs $8.99.  It’s also eligible for Amazon’s current “4 for 3” deal, so if you go buy three eligible books, you can get this for free.

This book’s a collection of 20 short stories or flash fiction pieces, and is designed to be cheap and a good short read.  This book is perfect for those with ADD or ADHD.  In fact, it’s so good, you could probably just mail me all of your unused Adderall and I’ll just send you a free copy of the book.

And if you are down with the kindle version, it’s only 99 cents.  If you’re also an Amazon Prime member (and in the US, and have a physical Kindle, not just the app on your phone) you can read the book for free.

As always, every time you mention the book on facebook or twitter, write a review, or hit that like button on Amazon, an angel gets its wings.  (Unless you are a Satanist; then it goes to hell or something.)

The links:

• Print edition
• Book page @ rumored
• Video of a baby panda sneezing
• The Kindle edition