BrokenJPG

Ira Glass on Storytelling from David Shiyang Liu on Vimeo.

Also, this is going to be the reason and excuse for every short story I write between now and my 40s.

At first glance, Google Glass looks absolutely pointless. It’s like if a race of sentient eyeballs became jealous of all the super-dope bluetooth headsets the ears get to wear, and came up with this in retaliation. But then I realized what the true implications of this technology are. And I have to say, I’m pretty excited:

It Begins
The second Google Glass hits the market, all the iHipsters will purchase a pair. This is because people with the disposable income to spend on a pair of $1500 glasses that don’t block the sun or improve vision are desperate to find ways to inform the rest of us just how rich they are.

It Continues
Half of them will of course get robbed for their glasses. Particularly enterprising thieves will then make use of Google Maps to find the quickest escape route.

The Dark Ages
This rash of glasses-thievery will spark a recurrence of the trend of “people with glasses getting knocked down, beat up, and their lunch money stolen”. This is how life used to be for the geeks, kids. It wasn’t pretty.

The Empire Strikes Back
In response, the geeks will throw all their combined brainpower into perfecting defensive nanobot technology.

Fwoosh! Zap!
Within two years’ time, we will all be running around wearing Iron Man style armor under our clothes. Fights over bespectacled individuals’ lunch monies may still happen, but now they’ll occur 40 feet in the air, and with lasers.

As you can see, Google’s latest device will usher in an amazing new utopia for all of us. It will undoubtedly forever change the way we interact with one another. And, if there is a just and loving God, not a single one of you mouth-breathers will live-stream it from a pair of stupid glasses.

An open letter about the future 365 days too late to be useful.

Yo, 2011 me! Sup, brah? Life was good, yeah? All that stuff you told 2010 us about came true, obviously.

I’m gonna tell you man, this is a big year you’re heading into. Lotta firsts.

You should start the year by changing the way you post on the blog. Stop killing yourself to update it weekly. It’s kind of a minor thing, but it’ll actually result in exactly what you’re hoping for- more energy spent on new creative pursuits.

That kid you impregnated our The Wife with comes out. Winds up being by C-Section. This will result in the creation of two things: our daughter, and the greatest picture we’re likely to take in our lifetime*:

You’ll publish our second book. Huzzah and cheers all around. It should be noted however, that the silly idea you have that this book will be easier than the last one -whether because it’s your second, a children’s book, or whatever- is absolutely laughable.

That awesome job at a place you never heard of that you took last year? Yeah you’ve still got that. You know we don’t talk about work much on the blog, because we strongly believe that leads to pink slips and having to look for new jobs. But if we did, this post would wind up being about three times as long. Lotta stuff gonna happen, man, lotta stuff. Suffice it to say that you’ll finish the year with some of the coolest stuff you’ve made since the last coolest stuff you’ve made.

You’ll finally do NaNoWriMo. That’ll be a bit intense. I commend your impending dedication to that cause. It won’t be easy. And then, somewhat shockingly, it will be.

And just because that wasn’t interesting enough, you’ll move in December. In a week. Like, you’ll find a 2-bedroom in the building, and then you’ll swap apartments 6 days later. To be honest, it’s one of the least painful moves you’ll have made. Still exhausting though.

Oh, and you don’t need me to tell you this, but the Mayans were totally wrong.

-The Ben from “now”, which is your “then”.

PS- Hey, one last thing. In October a really freaking enormous storm is going to hit your area. It’s going to fuck shit up. You’re going to lie awake at night at your parent’s place and try to come to grips with the fact that according to all the information you can find your apartment is underwater and nearly all your possessions are gone. In fact, you’re going to be incredibly lucky and the entire place will be untouched, so try not to worry about it, ok?

*Holy crap, the tense in these letters is/will be/was murder.

Done. 50,828 words in 26 days. NaNoWriMo can suck it.

I’ll post some kind of reflection later. Right now I’m going to sleep.

When I was 12, I wrote a comic book. I don’t think I finished it until I was 14, and I know I bugged the shit out of everyone with it for those two years.

I found the comic, scanned it, and spent entirely too much time retyping dialogue. Then I added commentary to nearly every page. Partially so you could all enjoy reading my inner voice, and partially to ensure that no one would ever come across this and think I did it yesterday.

From the forward:

When I was 12, I started a comic book.

When I was 29, I wrote a 1,000-word critique of it.

This is VIRUS. A comic drawn by 12-year old me, about 12-year old me getting struck by lighting, zapped into my computer, and fighting a digitized villain through a series of games.

I’m the hero of the story. The room, hairstyle, and games are all accurate to my life in ‘95. If you keep this in mind while reading, everything is roughly 400x funnier.

Thank you, Joe, for reminding me this existed. Thank you, Mom, for making sure I kept all my old art.

Click here to download.

Enjoy.

The last two years, I had awesome explanations for how I was actually aging backwards. That ended this year.

This year, I turned 29. In itself, not a bad thing. But it’s 29-with-an-8-week-old-daughter, which is 45 in parent years. Many of my friends are in their 30s, but they can all sleep easy knowing I’ll always be older than they are.

The Spawn is two months old now, which means she’s ten pounds and smiles and laughs. Her gift to me was seven straight hours of sleep. It was the first night since she was born that I didn’t have to get up to feed her at least once.

So while I might be older than ever, I’m terminally behind on life, and I’m in a constant state of exhaustion, I could be feeling a lot worse.

I found this article about how drowning doesn’t look like drowning fascinating. Mostly because my brother almost drowned right in front of a life guard when we were little. Literally 2 feet in front of a lifeguard. Who was sitting at ground-level. Watching my brother do a fantastic impression of someone treading water.

What the life guard wasn’t noticing was that he was pushing the water right into his open mouth. Which was at water level, not above it.

The first clue for me was that my brother wasn’t supposed to be in the damn pool by himself. If I hadn’t known that, I might not have really seen what was going on either. The upshot was he didn’t die. Another benefit was that since I’m the one who jumped in and saved his life, I didn’t feel as bad when we discovered his horribly deviated septum was from that time I accidentally kicked him in the face.

Sorry, bro.

The thing I’ve found with side-projects is that you can’t sit on them. If you don’t strike while the iron’s hot, get a jump on them, or make the most of some other crappy cliche, you wind up finding your old notes like 4 years later and going “oh yeah, that would have been cool.”

About a year ago, someone told me I should make a mobile game based on the dick book. I laughed. “How would I even make a game out of that?” I said, “It would have to be something like 20 different bras you would need to open, each with a different clasp that would basically be a puzzle. And for each bra you unlocked, you’d get a free chapter of the book.”

There was an uncomfortable silence. My friend was staring at me with a slightly open mouth.

“Look- no,” I began, “I haven’t even finished the first mobile game I started, and this one isn’t…I mean, sure it would be easier to build but…-”

He was still staring at me.

“…crap.”

I got excited about it, but I didn’t move on it. I came up with all sorts of reasons not to. I couldn’t decide how best to display the book pages. I wasn’t absolutely sure it would work. I’m not a programmer. How could I make the puzzles intuitive but still hard enough to be entertaining? Would anyone ever play it?

A year later, it’s made.

Oh, not by me. No. You see, I was too busy asking myself stupid questions. The game that was made is called 100 Floors. The puzzles are elevators, not bras, and you have unlock one floor to move to the next. Many are not particularly intuitive. Your only reward is moving on to the next one. And for a week it was the most popular free game in the android store.

“…crap.”

Good lord, was that a chore. Someone once said “When you’re 95% done, you’re halfway there.” Dude knew what he was talking about. But it’s done. Finally up and available. Click, buy, etc. If you don’t want a silly overpriced physical copy, or if you have embraced the digital apocalypse, imma have a super cheap ibook version up in a few days weeks whenever I get around to it. Gotta go feed The Spawn.

If you’re wondering why I haven’t pushed the “Owl Book” more, it’s because I’ve discovered it is fucking expensive to print color. It’s looking like this 24-page book is going to cost something like $15. That’s ridiculous, but it’s a whole other order of magnitude on the ridiculous scale when you realize my last book was 100 pages and sold for $10. What the hell do they make color ink out of anyway? Baby harp seals?

With shipping, it cost me an absurd amount to get my proof copy from Blurb. Something like $22, after coupons. The printing is gorgeous, and the quality is amazing, but I can’t even sell that to people “at cost” with a straight face. I found a way to shave at least $3 off the base price with Lulu, but for some reason their book upload process shits the bed when faced with CMYK files, and all my colors turned neon.

As interesting as my new book about a radioactive owl was, it’s not quite what I had in mind. As was evidenced by my stream of consciousness tweets.

Don’t worry, the neighbors don’t even have a cat. (any more)

So I converted everything, and now I’m going to sit here wondering what the hell the colors in this book will actually be when it shows up on my doorstep in a week. And then, if it looks as good as it should, I’ll put up a site and pimp this owl properly*.

If you people didn’t keep liking this stupid shit I do, I wouldn’t have to go to all this trouble.

Thanks for that.

*I am totally going to start a gameshow called Pimp this Owl Properly. Who’s with me?