Time is becoming an issue here. I'm involved in way too many things at once. So nothing ever really gets done.
I really need to pick, like, maybe just a dozen different things to concentrate on at once; that might help.
So.
The National Prevaricator is one such thing. For something that we're supposed to release weekly, it's not really getting done. Granted, there have been various reasons for that--the latest of which was that all the articles were trapped on Hunter's computer while her computer was dicked. But that's apparently about solved now. Hopefully, I can get the text off of that and get it into the new issue, which should be out soon.
About that: I might not be changing the format all that much after all. There were a few good reasons to do the site in Flash, and those reasons still exist. The downside to Flash is that printing it out never works very well. On the other hand, it turns out that trying to print out a hypertext version doesn't really work any better. So our best reason for switching to hypertext turns out to be useless.
So I have a better solution. We'll do the thing in Flash, and work out some alternative for Print. Text is text, after all; it's not really that much extra work to copypaste the content into Microsuck Word and set it up to work on paper. That way, while the versions will differ slightly, the thing can look as good as we can get it both on the 'net and off.
So there's that.
Then there's Subheroes, which has been another formatting debate lately. And that's largely a symptom of general miscommunication.
At this point, I'm not entirely certain who's going to be involved in the project. I've got a list of suspects, but no real clues. At any given time, the cast of credits include half the damned planet. Including Swyndle doing the animation and various voices, Corey doing the voice for one of the characters [his idea, incidentally], and a number of other people who have EMailed me or hit me IRL asking whether they can be in the cartoon.
As far as I'm concerned, anyone can be in this thing as long as it gets done soon. The problem there is that each extra individual geometrically causes delays once I start expecting anything more than a passing interest in being involved.
So that's one of those quagmire things.
I'm not really sure who's doing what with the cartoon anymore. I'm beginning to assume that I'm the only one doing anything at all. And that's kinda too bad, since there's only so much I can do at once.
Artwise, I can pull this off; I majored in graphic art before making the admittedly idiotic decision to switch over to writing in a world where ninety-eight percent of Duhmericans are functionally illiterate. I could probably write, direct, animate, and generally produce an episode of Subheroes per week, if that's all I were doing; but then I wouldn't have any time to do the Prevaricator, or anything else I'm supposed to be working on. So we're back to not really having enough time to get much of anything done if I'm trying to do everything at once.
What I should really do is take a week off. I haven't actually done that this millennium. But, granted that no one's realy seen me do much of anything this millennium, I doubt people would understand that.
Not that I really care much who understands what anymore. If I ever really did.
Which leads us to Damnitology.
Oddly enough, there's more demand for the release of Damnitology than there is for the release of Subheroes and the new Prevaricator. Based on the number of people demanding its release, the thing is apparently a bestseller already. Except that the same people who want it to be released are the ones who want a copy of NotS for free; so I'm not sure how well that's going to work.
Anyway: the release of Damnitology is kinda postponed until I get round to doing the damned cover. Which I can do pretty much whenever I'm not working on everything else. Which goes back to not having enough time to do much of anything.
Aside from all that, I'm working on various other things which aren't really critical enough to mention just yet. And, of course, I'm writing websites for other people--which is kinda important since the people paying me to write their websites are a little more reliable than the people asking for free copies of books.
I could probably blame the economy for that, but that would be the act of an idiot. The economy is a self-fullfilling prophesy. It's also cyclic. But people don't get that because people are morons.
It works like this.
At the beginning of a decade, the economy collapses. You blame various events for that, but only because you're looking for something to blame. Act of God shit. Viet Nam went wrong, so there was a recession at the beginning of the seventies; Carter wanted a nuclear society but Three Mile Island fucked up, so there was a recession at the beginning of the eighties; Desert Shield conjured images of Viet Nam, so there was a recession at the beginning of the nineties; Clinton was an idiot, so there's a recession now. Want to know the next one in advance? First we have to look at the mid-decade upswings.
Viet Nam ended, so the economy bounced back in the mid-seventies; Reaganomics cured the issue in the mid-eighties; the DotCom surge fuelled the economy in the mid-nineties. All of which is about the same as claiming that some deity or other works in mysterious ways.
The next surge will probably be the nanotechnological revolution in 2004; as nanorods become cheaper to produce, for example, people are going to go batshit for nanotechnology. In the modern world, there's nothing more important than a three-metre widescreen television which can be rolled up and carried away. Which makes nanotech the odds-on favourite excuse for the next upsurge.
Which will last for a few years until everything crashes around 2010--probably because everyone suddenly realises that nanotech is merging quickly with biotech, and that StemCell Research could lead to faster, bigger, smaller, better computers--thirty-two-terabyte organic processors connected to nanorodular [that might not be a word--yet] screens. Because the only measurable difference between an organic processor and an organic cyborg is the application. And that angers various deities, which prevents the rest of us from getting much of anything accomplished.
So there it is. In two or three years, the economy will be all happy again, and everyone will be rich and powerful. Cocaine prices will plummet and meth prices will pretty well disappear. Things will coast along like that until about 2010 when everything predictably crashes again, and everyone will blame everything from the cybernetic cloning issue to the drug abuse issue to the dichotomous debate over whether oil or nuclear power is the worse evil in propelling cars--since batteries aren't going to get much better without the introduction of an isotopic reaction.
I'm probably getting ahead of myself. You'll see what I'm on about soon enough.
More later....
--Gremlin