Shorthand for Nothing

For those of you who follow Dreamers Often Lie, and I guess maybe those who don’t, I have decided to license the blog under cc-by-nc 3.0. This is largely due to the fact that I want to encourage people to make morose and brooding short films without asking for my permission, but not for commercial uses. I still want people to talk to me about commercial uses, because I, like many people, also like money.

This is part of a broader theme I have been mulling over for a while now. I want collaborative projects to happen more often. I want to work with other people to make something cooler than the sum of its parts. I’ve really enjoyed working with the estimable Chris Boyer on all of our myriad projects. I’d love to work with other people and make something really awesome. I don’t know what that awesome thing is yet, but I really want it to happen. If you are interested you presumably know how to get in touch. Let’s make something pretty happen.

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I am late in posting this! This Friday was HelloSilo’s latest apocalyptic meeting: Wing Attack Plan R. Under normal circumstances, I would say it was a success, but in nuclear war, nobody wins. The only way to win is not to play. But we bombed the hell out of the Russians with only acceptable casualties, and they will no longer be able to sap and impurify our precious bodily fluids.

Highlights of the evening include talking to someone who hasn’t really talked to me since she got a boyfriend. I offered to provide her with some information via IM, but I don’t recall what that is. I can only hope this intelligence is not vital in the dark days ahead. The inestimable Seth Woodworth’s torso became like unto a living pensive caterpillar–our success over the Russians was, alas, too late to save him. Tim Hwang did his country proud by joining the boy scouts. Plans were hashed out with Michael Wolfe, who is the new black. Mistakes were made. And I have many, many photos of Matt Blake asleep on an arm chair. HI MATT BLAKE.

Good night, and God bless America.

UPDATE: “Many, many” is apparently exactly equal to three. Now accepting bids.

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Recently I’ve felt compelled to write about this evening several months ago. It was the end of a fairly disastrous evening, which found me and a friend waiting for a green line train that was simply not coming, watching a small group of girls who were also apparently coming from a party, or a bar, babysitting their very drunk friend. “The train isn’t coming,” I said. We were considering getting a cab, and had started walking back towards Boston, when I got a phone call.

It was from my friend Chris, which is somewhat unusual: we seldom have any reason to call each other now that we’re on opposite ends of the country. I answered and asked what was going on. It took a while to figure this out: he was calling on behalf of Seth, who was locked out of the house I wasn’t at, and who doesn’t have a phone. He’d connected to our wireless and sat in the backyard.

The exchange that followed was nothing short of awkward, and the fact that this conversation was even happening was useless to an unimaginable degree. “I’m in Allston,” I had to explain. “Look, can you find out when the last inbound train leaves? Just ask Seth, he’ll understand.” We’d barely missed the last one, it turns out. “I don’t know what to say. We’re sort of stranded. I guess if he’s willing to pay for a cab?”

All of this, of course, was filtered through an operator who didn’t quite understand what was going on, so nobody really knew. Eventually we took a cab back home, paying twenty or thirty dollars worth of carfare for an evening that was ultimately wasted. Somehow it seemed to all work out to a net change of nothing at all. Gain nothing, lose nothing.

This, by the way, is why people should have cell phones. They are helpful.

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Not quite topical anymore, but man, do you know why we are still caring about pirates? We stopped equipping merchant vessels with bigass cannons. Why did we decide the waters were suddenly safe? Bring back ridiculous maritime warfare, modern style!

I’m not a big “everyone needs to have a gun and that will make society safe” person, but seriously, when did merchants decide that they didn’t need to protect themselves from crime on the high seas? And it’s not even dashing swashbucklery crimes that you can make fun Hollywood movies about, it is the kind where they are terrorists and hold you hostage, for money, because it’s easy.

I think the most depressing part about the big crimes you hear about these days is how boring they are. This is also one of the reasons I think Kari Ferrell is so fascinating–she’s not running Ponzi schemes or being a terrorist. It’s good old-fashioned grifting, and that’s fun and exciting! Sure she is a massive felon and fundamentally untrustworthy, but con artists are awesome to read about. It’s good harmless fun.

The other reason is I ate pizza with her. That is a big reason I care.

In conclusion: let’s make crime fun again.

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Last night I was riding the subway from Kendall to Harvard, headed to Grendel’s Den for sandwiches and the weekly meeting of the free culture crowd. There was a girl in a green jacket seated opposite where I was standing, and we played the “we are both looking at each other but not quite making eye contact” game for a while. I smiled, she smiled, and started conspicuously fidgeting with a camera.

Like most “smiling at strangers” things it left me in a fairly cheerful mood, but I found the camera-fidgeting to be particularly amusing in retrospect. It’s up there with pulling out a leather-bound notebook and writing in it or flipping through it in “gestures you make in the hopes someone will comment on it.” Because nothing is more charming than the painstakingly obvious, “So, uh. You take pictures?”

Memo to people who hope cute strangers will talk to them: drawing attention to your artsy accessories will probably not help.

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It is quite possible I am the only person who finds awkward reintroductions kind of enjoyable, if only because of that shared moment of realization. I started the night of ISH with an awkward reintroduction to someone I’d met at Harvard Free Culture what feels like months ago, and from then on it was more or less predictably enjoyable. But in a good way.

Over previous parties, there was a marked improvement in things to both eat and drink. Previously we tended to opt for a few bags of chips and maybe some cookies, which went away quickly. This time there was a Costco run and an ungodly amount of nostalgic and semi-nostalgic snack food staples from being a kid in the 1990’s. And Capri Sun.

Sporting a nametag bearing the legend ‘it’s complicated,’ I discussed unnecessary linguistic dilemmas, Karl Rove’s Twitter account and how it is well-maintained, Moses Lake’s Twitter account and how it is poorly maintained, Washington state politics, places Greg Marra should go when he is in Seattle, memes, circus peanut candies, the classiness (or lack thereof) of drinking wine straight out of the bottle, pretentious philosophical plays, and some idiot’s microfiction blog. and several other things besides that have since eluded me.

Something about tonight felt different–perhaps the absence of some of the more conspicuous characters of previous events, or our failure to conclude the evening at the IHOP, as is our wont. This is a mystery I will probably never solve, because I am lazy and not very curious about it.

This to say nothing of XORCon, which was also enjoyable and which will receive its own treatment later this week (GET OUT WHILE YOU STILL CAN)–once again a good crowd and good times had by all.

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Everything in the last post was a lie.

Moving on! April Fool’s day, such as it was, was kind of a let-down as an April Fool’s day. No clever pranks happened. I was not much nourished by Google’s yearly joke, vaguely amused at Whole Foods’ website, and didn’t really pay a lot of attention otherwise. I’m not going to say I particularly enjoy it–my poor attempts at humor are mostly because I feel it’s sort of obligatory, and because I’m a person who likes to violate Gricean maxims and play with people’s expectations. I like it when it’s clever.

However, I unexpectedly had dinner with Ellen, who is evidently in town. It was a nice time. And, despite this past week having been rather unpleasant by most measures, I’m looking forward to several coming events. In many ways it’s comforting to live in a world where April Fool’s just isn’t a big deal.

Apologies to Michael Wolfe, who is in the future and probably read my atrocities on April 2nd, because of time travel.

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I’ve been treated well by whim, it seems. Yesterday while I was buying a bottle of iced tea at the gas station I decided I might as well buy a scratch ticket. I forgot about it until just now, produced the quarter I’d been carrying around, and scratched it.

Apparently I’ve won $10,000. This is wonderful news, for obvious reasons. My windfall comes in the midst of an amazing several days. I’ve had the most amazing streak of luck and everything is going more or less perfectly. I’ve been cheerful and confident and this is just a crown to the moment. It’s wonderful.

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