The Unquestionable Suitability of Gifts

We cruised up and passed the third anniversary of this iteration of United by Glue. The same thing happened last year. Last year we also delivered an octopus, but I would argue that it's a substantially more impressive octopus this year. It has colours.

The octopus was meant to be a one off for last year, and then we were going to move beyond the cephalopod anniversary, but here we are.

This year we saw the approach of the day in question, and we made a move that, at the time, felt bold. A move to change the nature of The Glue. To change what was on offer. That was a plan from early on, and now it's a thing that is actually kind of happening.

I say 'kind of' on account of only being three deep at this stage, but the plan is to continue at it.

I hope you're enjoying Panda in this form.

Dancing with the Octo-Hoff

We're cheek to cheek at this stage, me and the Octo-Hoff. I'm seven stories deep at the moment. That's where we're at at this stage. That feels like too many, but I am trying to put some to bed. That is a process that I am coming to terms with.

For a very long time I made excuses as to why I would never actually finish stories. Lots of reasons. Some were more common than others, but the really persistent ones were kind of weird. I'm not really going to go into that now, because that is a much larger story for another day. This is an update: A progress report.

There is one thing that I have learnt, though, that helps a great deal. Something that i have observed, and also something that has been verbally thrust upon me by others that I deem important enough to repeat here.

When it comes to the written word, no author is ever forced to definitively say that they are finished with anything, and/or that whatever draft currently exists publicly of anything is going to be the last. Not until you die. That is what death is for. When you die all of your words stop, but until then you can revisit anything.

This isn't new either. This isn't something that is accommodated only by the technologies of the brand new 21C. Philip K. Dick reworked 'The Unteleported Man' into Lies Inc., Raymond E. Feist amended the pants off Magician, and Herge adjusted many of the early Tin Tin comics to better suit the collected format, and then again to more closely match his changing concepts of race.

If you write a story, and you think you might want to change it later, you can do that. That is a rule.

The Call of the Octo-Hoff

It seems now that I have once again begun with great optimism to gather ballerinas at my creative maw without that due heed paid to those lessons of days I've already past. The Octo-Hoff lurks, and I must embrace him. I must know my own bounds, and I must find my hands a way to work within them. This is the only true forward facing course of prudence.

What shadows leech anew into our surrounds as we falter unbidden into our own selfish false fantasies? What given thief have we allowed to prey upon us in these wretched hollows we dig as our dreams? Without the strength of will to see through the arduous birth, they feed in lieu of nourish. Worse, these parasites are hewn of our own hands. Wicked are we.

We imagine ourselves too capable in the face of these sudden creative outpourings. Surely we can create with speed ever increasing, should the need arise. Were we but challenged, surely we would meet such challenge with both aptitude and grace.

Are our talents not liquid? Capable without the merest of hesitations of becoming unto any form with which they are presented? Is that not the nature of the art? Do we not engage The Great Tradition for this very purpose? Do we slosh wildly against the sides of the trough, or find new accomplishment in the artistry of adherence to its herring curves?

What obnoxiously flavoured panacea have we attempted to have wrought in order to bestow upon our own selves the sole governance of the name of that herring? Are the fish our's to name?

Woe is the one who turns their back to face upon the Octo-Hoff, for he is betentacled!

Slow motion mysticality

I was sick yesterday, and I'm not feeling great today. I didn't have a bad day thanks to the internet. I'm fairly certain that lack of internet is why being sick used to suck. I was trawling YouTube for covers of 'I'm always here' by Jimi Jamison, which is more frequently referred to as 'The Baywatch Song', when something mystical happened. I'll get to that in a moment.

YouTube is kind of a lot like Wikipedia. Most of what you see there is only partially real at best, and it is ridiculous how easy it is to end up miles away from where you started. Not real miles. Digital miles. It's a conceptual distance. Unless you're on a train or some other mode of transport. Then the miles could be real, actual miles (or real, nautical miles if you're in a boat) as well as being conceptual, digital miles. Don't trawl YouTube when you're driving though. They don't make ads about it yet, but you can kind of extrapolate from the texting ads that they probably aren't going to be happy if they catch you doing it. It's kind of a no brainer really. If they do end up making ads for it, it means that there is a problem. Those kinds of things are rarely preemptive. It's usually on account of people doing 'x', and the scientist bursting dramatically through the political doors and saying, "Damn it, man! Look at this graph of 'x' over time. 'x' is getting way out of hand. Shit's gotta change! Damn it, man! Lives are at stake! Real, actual lives (or real, nautical lives if you're on a boat)!" The politicians then bring in their own 'scientists' who usually studied a form of statistics that allows probability to exceed 1, which results in things like 'The number of people doing "x" in 2032 will be equal to the population plus the population over pi.' So, they make an ad to scare the shit out of you. I think the YouTube one should be someone who finds a link to a clip titled 'Ultimate hot girls in bikinis driving fail', with a corresponding thumbnail, but when he clicks on it is actually him dying in a car accident. Then he dies as depicted in the clip, and there are no hot girls or bikinis anywhere!

Freshly showered and isolated in my bed with Panda and a packet of blueberry bagels, I was ripe for this kind of link-hiking. Starting with the the Baywatch intro, I progressed to covers of the song, believing that the sort of people that would cover it would be the kind of amazing people that I would want to watch brushing their teeth. Some people don't edit their clips very well, and you end up with a keen insight into their oral hygiene. I moved through the standard YouTube heroes singing a variety of ridiculously awesome songs that a lot of people think they're too cool for. You're not by the way. No one is. It makes you look less cool. You know who you are! Then there were clips of people talking about how they did their recordings, which lead to interviews with stand up comics. Whenever I think of stand up comics I think of pop-up comics, which I imagine to be a cross between a comic book and a pop-up book 'Where your heroes really leap off the page! Available from all leading book retailers.' And probably comic shops.

There was an interview with Aziz Ansari about the animation work that he does, which I didn't realise he was that into. He is. He loves it. Then there were interviews with other voice actors about their animation work, including Mark Hamill who plays the Joker in so many things. He has played the Joker more than anyone else on the planet. I'm making that up. It might be true, but I don't know that it is. I'll say it again though, and I won't even know then unless someone else tells me, but even then I am taking their word for it. We're always taking somebody's word for it. ALWAYS! Not always. Sometimes we know through empirical discovery, which is different to imperial discovery, which I have no empirical knowledge of, unless you count when you find out that someone takes up too much of the bed, which is a kind of imperialism. Domestic imperialism. My housemates are engaged in domestic imperialism with each other. She has recently taken regions in the office, while he undertakes a slow invasion of the sunroom. They tried to forge a treaty by having a son, but he has already led a successful campaign into the living room and the bathtub, and has recently been conducting some yard based reconnaissance.

Did you know that there are a lot of people who reenact scenes from cartoons with the assistance of animation? I didn't, but I would've said yes had I been asked. No. That's not true. I would've waited for an opening to sneak off and investigate. It's pretty cool. It's also 'pretty cool' how many people do similar things for iconic intro sequences from eighties and nineties television series. Particularly Baywatch. Which brought me full circle. I like to think that I had done a lap of cyberspace As I sat there looking at the the link to 'Baywatch intro', the very same clip with which I had started. I was distracted though. Right there above it was a clip. 'Baywatch: Season 1 | Episode 1 | Panic at Malibu Pier'. I'm not super sure how official this whole situation is. They've been up for over 4 years at the time of writing, and license holders are pretty severe are coming down hard on this sort of stuff. The poster seems to have posted season one in its wholepletedness, but most of everything up to the end of season four seems to be there, but looking a whole lot less 'official'. If this is a deliberate and official situation, then this is probably a good way to get people into older shows. I'm pretty hooked. Baywatch is definitely a show I never even would have thought about having started watching again unless I had the opportunity to start from the beginning for free while I was burrowed deep beneath the covers with my favourite bear.

I watched Baywatch a lot when I was younger, which some of you might have deduced from my whole thing with The Octo-Hoff. I claim now that I was a viewer solely because my mum watched it and the TV was on anyway. This isn't true. The drama is ridiculous and the situations are occasionally right on the edge of believability (I don't know enough about lifesaving to really know any better), while at times crossing right over the edge and goes deep into the realms of 90s TV action/drama fantasy land with nuclear warheads, and earthquakes, and what have you. It's great. It knows where it is at, and there are times when you're all like, "I can't talk now, Mitch's friend's kid that he kidnapped, not Mitch, but the friend, it's a custody thing, is stuck in a drainage canal and the tide is coming in, and he might drown." People are like, "What? You better get back to that." I also really like Magnum PI, which is not as mathematically oriented as the title may suggest, but has a very similar tone and more moustaches than the Baywatch. Here is a picture of me dressed as Thomas Magnum.

That's me in the middle. The one least looking like Magnum. The guy to your left was at the time my future housemate, and now former housemate, while the guy to my left is a guy of whose existence we became aware a handful of minutes earlier. About two minutes. Probably less minutes. About the amount of minutes (or parts there of) that it takes to convince someone in a similar costume to take a photo with you. Not many. If any. It wouldn't be zero though. I was quoting a song that is not related to anything I have been talking about.

I mentioned pi twice without even thinking about it!

2 years the Octopus

It's been just over two years. I drew this octopus to celebrate, because the second anniversary is the cephalopod anniversary. Honestly, I drew the octopus, and then later realised that it was my blog's cephalopod anniversary, AND both of these things happened two weeks after the the actual anniversary. The day just kind of came and went. I didn't write it down at the time. Google did that for me. It happened automatically. They built it into the site. It's very technical. It probably isn't that technical, but let's leave it where it is.

It's strange to think that some things have changed, some things haven't, and some things changed and then unchanged. Actually, not that strange at all really. Pretty straight forward as far as life is concerned. I'm not really saying anything of merit here in this paragraph. You could skip ahead, but I don't know where you would come back in. I haven't written that bit yet, and it's unlikely that I will come back and mend this once I have. You might just have to stick with me for a moment.

What is weird is that I was convinced that I would end up writing less and less, and eventually get to a point where I posted once every few months, which very immediately looked like that was what was going on. United by Glue was, in my mind, the kind of place that my words would come to die. I wasn't expecting to get to a point where I was writing as much as I have ended up writing for this thing. It waxes and wanes, but it doesn't ever really drop off to nil. That is weird to me.

That was the fate of the original United by Glue. There was another one, years ago. I never had the url before, but there was a United by Glue that was kind of a blog, but also kind of a deliberate navigation nightmare. There was this whole thing about forcing the user to explore the site to find things, and it would get more and more advanced the deeper you got. I found the html files recently. Some of the other original files are missing. Part of me is interested in re-exploring that idea with the things I have learned since then, but that is a fairly epic project. The kind I couldn't really find the time for these days. I t was going to be my major work for my final year of art school, which I never completed.

It's a different scene now. The internet is less abrasive as an entity. It has definitely mellowed. The tools and the rules have changed, and it seems to be far more about opinion info dumping these days. Selling things, and counting visits and visitors. I like the idea that people are reading my opinio-dumps, and they do, but in the end I'd be here anyway. I enjoy the sound of tapping, and the nearly total lack of accomplishment while doing so.

Somewhere along the way Twitter entered the scene, which is kind of a non-event for me. It works a bit. It would work better; I'm using it wrong, which is something I should change. I probably not going to do that, realistically speaking. I kind of like the way I use it. Occasionally I think of a thing that could be expressed as words, and when I think of it I send those words out to people's devices via the tubes.

Everything is just kind of bits and pieces right now. I want to try some other things, but they take time to plan and set up. I'll see what I can do. I hope you enjoy the octopus. It might be the Octo-Hoff; I haven't decided.

Jed's lost years

I've known Jed Hutchinson for a fair number of years, maybe eighteen. Anyway, we crossed that boundary when it became most of my life some years ago. There was a particular period in which we both lived in Sydney's Inner West. Actually, we even lived in the same building. There were times when we discussed running cables through his floor into my apartment for whatever it was that we got up to at the time. For Jed, this was the arse end of what he would later refer to as The Lost Years.

I spent a lot of time sleeping on his sofa, even when my own bed was only a few metres away, which afforded me the opportunity to be there 'where and when the magic happened' a lot of the time. He had been in the area for a number of years before I came along, and had become something else other than the person I had known before. He'd grown in someways, and had been hurt and worn down in others.

The story is longer than that, and I feel like you might need a starting point for the comparison, so I'll say that his capacity for speaking to the point of things concisely and poetically is equaled by few that I have met in my life. In this I am not talking about the way that he writes songs, which is a separate matter, because a lot of people can tap the vein when they put the effort in, but in his day-to-day when he reaches for words to tell you how he is feeling, or what's happening in his life, he often comes out with the way that I would hope to write it after editing. By that arse end of the lost years this only really came out when he was writing songs. The stress and exhaustion mentioned in the bio on his website had dug a hole, and that place where the words came from became a place that he only visited in private.

He has recently released an EP named after that period of his life, which is comprised of a handful of songs from that period of his life, and In those six songs manages to cover most of the more salient points of what was going on. They're songs that are about the things that we do to each other, and the things that we do to ourselves, just because we don't really know how to be better. They resonate because they are a part of our own stories, and describe in detail the way that we operate or the way that we have been operated on, and we understand because the message is clear. Often so simply put that you wonder why it hasn't been put like that before. There are other songs that are waiting to be released. Songs that I know are there. I've heard them. Some of which are available here and there. Some of them are the rest of that particular story, and some are the stories that have happened since.

I talk to the guy now, and I hear the familiar cadence and imagery rolling again in the way that he converses. He has easier access now to wherever he gets those words from than he did some years ago. Like all artists he still wants more though. Which is healthy. We should always strive to create more than we do, whatever quantitative and/or qualitative measures we choose to use. Right now though, the stuff is good, and there is more on the horizon, and I think it will get better. Sometimes we talk about his creative process, and where he is at, and it is clear that he has his own Octo-Hoff, but the momentum is forward.

If you are interested in the bandwagon, and aren't sure where to get on, I wholeheartedly recommend Rapunzel, The Cowboy Song (Marching Along), and this fantastic Elliott Smith cover.

Some people stand in the darkness, afraid to step into the light

“When I feel difficulty coming on, I switch to another book I am writing. When I get to the problem, my unconscious has solved it.”

- Isaac Asimov

I've used this quote before. It is my lifeguard in what often feels like an ocean of pages and words that are capable of losing all meaning at a moments notice. It is something I cling to for safety, but at the same time something with which I am not entirely comfortable. In this way my lifeguard is also an octopus.

We must all have these from time to time. Advice, methods or guidelines that we have adopted, that seem to work, but we don't feel entirely comfortable with the processes until it is actually clear on each separate occasion that they're working. An old octopus lifeguard of mine is my method for writing essays, that to most people appears so counter intuitive that they will not even attempt it. People just flat out refuse. At first I wasn't entirely comfortable with it either. It seemed too convenient. We need to embrace the octopus.

I am reluctant though. The lack of appeal in this little kernel of wisdom is in the writhing suckered tentacles of our previous relationship, which was abusive and unhealthy. I used it unilaterally as the foundation for a cornucopia of poor literary decision making and general copping out. Apparently the octopus lifeguard is also my ex-girlfriend now. 

The point I am actually trying to make with this increasingly convoluted metaphor is that sometimes you need to look at how you've been doing things and accept that it isn't working, and that just because you executed it poorly last time doesn't mean that there is a fault in the octopus (or the method). 

At the moment there is only The Book, but most of the time I spend with it is horrible and unproductive. The other side of this is that there are also one hundred and thirty-two other stories in various stages of The Process. Some of these have been put aside because the structure and characters exceed my current ability and experience, while others have been outgrown, and others still are trapped in there own circular logic. They aren't all like this though. Some of them are just waiting. Waiting for the The Book to be finished so that they can audition for the lead. Well, one of these budding understudies is being promoted to the status of The Other Book (or The Second Book, I haven't decided yet). They will share time in my life. Neither one will be treated as the dominant role. 

To be clear, the books are ballerinas and the process is the Baywatch Octopus. You can have as many ballerinas as you want, but only one octopus. You can suck back on ballerinas like they're going out of style (seriously, they aren't real people, they're metaphorical people), as long as it doesn't impact negatively on your relationship with the Octo-Hoff. I'm sure I could've made some better choices with this metaphor earlier on, but I'm enjoying it now. The point being that I am staying wary that this approach has been handled poorly by myself in the past, but sometimes it's worth trying old things anew.

Embrace the Octo-Hoff, but keep it professional.