A lesson in productivity
Before I went to lessons today I had completely failed to sleep the night before, or much at all the night before that so when I got in to my development of criticism class, where incidentally we were covering James Joyce, I was pretty tired but decided to participate as best I could all the same. I participated, discussed some interesting points on the texts given to us, (themes, impressionism etc.) and was convinced I was being productive and getting some good notes until the break came and I looked back at what I'd written down. Scrawled across the upturned page of my notebook was the following:
"Salt mines enslave the burly people of Mars. Christsicles! So, there were bees and then discovered I had a son I didn't know about. I fed him pop tarts until last Tuesday when he died. They called it neglect but Nopopo knows the truth, it was my pons. I like fruitypops. My big toe can be used as a spoon, which rhymes with ostrich."
I have a terrible affliction whereby I automatically scrawl whatever comes to mind directly to page when I'm bored like there's no filter on my brain. Maybe it's understandable - by the time the lesson had ended I had been awake for 25 hours straight and before that I'd gotten precious little sleep too. Other than half a page on the themes prevalent in Joyce's more irritating works there were three A4 sheets of planning for a story I'm writing, an attempt to rationalise the vehicle dynamics of a formula one car with diagrams and what appears to be a Happy Noodle Boy style insert in the middle of it all.
Irritatingly this is the most I'd written since Friday, and I'd come up with a few great short story ideas too which I'm now putting in to action. The problem with my productivity is that it seems to be at its greatest when I'm supposed to be doing something else. I don't have the faintest idea why either. That said it did lead to the creation of a huge amount of my short stories and writings and the creation of a character that the few of you who've read this blog have seen before but never really known, that of Joe.
Joe started out in 2004 as a crude Biro comic-strip I'd draw in my maths book and then pass around the class for the entertainment of everyone else. Though I'm no longer taking the maths classes that saw his birth I later went on to digitize a few strips, (a laborious process involving drawing and redrawing the comic fully four times freehand) and I've always felt a little love for the crappy doodle lizard. So allow me to introduce you to a GIF remake of the very first comic, plus an advertisement for his favorite brand of soft drink, Petrol Fizz.
Now for the translation! Today, I will be transcribing this entry as if it were a lesson and fairly sleep deprived, though leaving out the huge amounts of story planing and idea drafting I got up to both then and whilst I was writing this. That'd make precious little sense and share something that really isn't ready yet.
Before I went to lessons today... god, why did I come in? I thought I'd get some insight in to the coursework today but she's giving us nothing. I hate Joyce, he's the reserve of the artsy-farty type people who suck on the literary canon. Finnegan's Wake... even the people who like him admit it's unreadable. Eh, why can't people just read for the pleasure and stop trying to be so intellectual and impressive to their peers? The mysteries of life. I'm gonna get me some anagrams... current mood... hmmm... doo... no, think I did that one... record... no, that too... Cruder on Tom? I like that, it's sort of like Less Than Jake. Music... did that, did that, did that... don't want to use 'nu', it's still not a word in my book. Gah, Metallica, why did you sell out? Lousy hollywood lovin' greedy bastards. Circus Net Rum? Circus is cool. I'll use that. Cannon. Hehehe, I wonder when that joke'll grow old? There is a severe irony in me criticising a modernist famous for his stream-of-consciousness prose I guess. I wish I could get 'the city is at war' out of my head. I may have to let Autumn know exactly what she's done to me by introducing me to Cobra Starship. Hmmmm... you know all this talk of stream-of-consciousness is giving me a great idea for a story about someone who believes their perception anchors the whole of reality. I'll write it when I get the time, I've still got a lot to work out in the characterisation on that big project of mine. Okay, so I understand slip curve and angle but I still don't quite follow on the mechanics of steering. It should be such a simple thing, I get the basics but what's the optimum angle where the car is neutral handling? Is it following the wheel tracks directly? No, no car is that perfect, it'd slide a little... no wonder F1 cars are always suffering from understeer graining these things. Wow, is it really 4:50am? I wonder if people notice the time I was up making these posts. Then, everyone who reads it knows what I'm like for insomnia. Insomnia - I like that word. Gah, it's a pain in the arse for such a pretty word, sometimes I wish my sleep patterns were better but with so many of my friends being overseas I miss out on all the fun. Still, I really need to cut back on the caffeine. A 60/40 weight distribution rearwards has got to make it easier to turn in but makes the car so dependent on the fronts. The amount of detail that goes in to the mechanical setup and aerodynamic balance of these cars is insane. I remember once Mark Webber said you should never play chess with Adrian Newey and I quite understand. Scary guy, brilliant though. I wonder if he'll manage to turn around Red Bull's form with the RB4? Probably not actually, he may have spent his genius. Dave said, and it's more than likely true that the days of the one technical genius are long behind us. I wonder if I'll ever work again on that aero balance calculator I made for rFactor? That was pretty neat. Never did work out all the kinks. Shame I couldn't find the time to do more for the WCM. Ah, that looked so cool flat shaded in amongst all that OMGGRAPHICSLOL. I tire of the emphasis on filters in games. I quite liked that reviewer who said that Unreal 3 was the ugliest pretty game ever. Brown is real. *sighs* VGCats summed that one up nicely. Such a let down of a game. Nick didn't seem to know much about it but his gaming experience is that of a console kiddy really. Should I try it again? No, I won't bother. Why did they drop the idea of a tournament? That's just STUPID. Would this gorram spell-check stop trying to get me to use americanised words? I learned in lessons today that puritanical American settlers were responsible for the changing of 'tit-bit' to 'tid-bit'. That's ridiculously oversensitive. I guess we did send all of our puritanical types over there. I really am hungry right now, I need to go down to Tescos and get a big chunk of food and also take the trash out, this place is starting to look really really bad. I can barely walk near the window and damn that mirror is filthy, covered in more fingerprints and smudges than I know how they got there. Didn't I clean it quite recently too? Maybe, I can't entirely recall. Eh, and that said I love America, the people and the place. I wonder if Aspen is asleep right now? Shame, I'd like to show her my new blog entry right away, that's always fun. I'm so lucky to know her, her mind and soul are so brilliant. This can't be making for an interesting post. Wow, my blog sucks.. I rarely update it and I'm sure nobody's that interested in it. Still, it's fun to vent. I musn't be so ashamed of that thought, Aspen was very clear on this. Everyone needs to vent, right? I still can't believe Lewis ended up laughing so much at that news story about that dead baby. That's messed up, though I don't think he could actually help it and was laughing for said reason. Circular logic, isn't it fun? I should probably link to some of my Joe work, it's pretty typical of what I do. Yeah, been a while since I did any. If my mouse wasn't so fucked up I'd love to draw another one, I'm sure my wrist can take the abuse of another 3 hours agonizingly doodling lines. Christ, did these really take three hours solid drawing to make, just to create a deliberate impression of crudeness? I may be closer to that impressionist fool than I'd like to think some days. Now where did I upload them? Oh, right... gah, why are they so far in? Page 5? 6? They're going to be on something like 8 or 9, I know it.. Oh, no, five and four. Well, that wasn't so bad I guess. *sighs* Mozilla Firefox 3 really needs a bit of tweaking, it can't do tags for shit. I'll just do the HTML by hand. Right, that's good... I think. Gods my last post was a mess with all those tags. Fun though. I wonder what Jhonen Vasquez is up to right now? I still haven't done location. Let's see... That guy needs to return to writing comics. I'm going to listen to scissor sisters for a while to chase away cobra... right, now I need a translation. How about stream of consciousness nonsense to create a sense of irony? I wouldn't be cruel enough to do it without punctuation like in Ulysses. That word's spelling will never fail to be alien to me. Three esses? That's excessive, isn't it? Esses. I wonder how long until we get some better F1 news? That crap about racism at Barcelona was so depressing. Humanity really knows how to be unpleasant when it tries and it tries so hard too. I'm never going to go in to straight news journalism ever, I'd probably end up killing myself and I can't bring myself to wear a suit either. Such a weird thing, I wonder if I'll ever get over that fear of them? Then, esses also has three. Huh. Yool-esses? Yool-isies? I'll stick with Youl-isies I think, I'm too British to do otherwise. Esses... I wonder how refined an F1 car's center of gravity has to be? I remember some Minardi guy mentioning they got it to within a couple of inches but still, Minardi never had good technical resources so what could they do? Location... cancer, erotic... definitely did that... Not calico turner? I like that. Calico is a fun word. Calico Turner sounds like some sort of tedious chat show host like Opera Winfrey. I loved Stephen Fry's parody of her. "Let's take a vomit break..." that guy rules. I need to see again if tehre are any QI episodes I've missed. Not likely, true, but I must. They also had those Vodcasts that looked pretty fun, though it could just be Alan Davies pratting around with a camera again. Vodcast is such a stupid word. Why did he assault some homeless guy? Is he really as vicious as that? His career hasn't really gone anywhere since that ridiculous Johnathan Creek show. How did I like that crap when I was young? Young*er*? Still, the theme music was pretty cool. I have to listen to that again. Calico cats are so pretty. I'm gonna post this now. I miss having pets around. I wonder how Gretta and the lot are doing? And Pudgey's eye... poor thing. Everyone was so shocked and upset. Aspen's dad scares me when he's angry, he really does. Nice guy though, put up with me all through winter. I wonder if he's feeling any better? I wonder if they ever tested her for diabetes? She really was getting thin, shedding and drinking/eating a lot. Now to do the tags... hope this doesn't fuck up again. Firefox don't screw me now. Right... LJ cut... it was the part you want removed, right? I think so. Okay, text... small? X small? XX small? XX small looks best and makes this all the harder to read. Fun. I wonder if anyone'll actually bother?
(All shit and drawing/writing on this page is the shit of Chris Neira. Yay!)
"Salt mines enslave the burly people of Mars. Christsicles! So, there were bees and then discovered I had a son I didn't know about. I fed him pop tarts until last Tuesday when he died. They called it neglect but Nopopo knows the truth, it was my pons. I like fruitypops. My big toe can be used as a spoon, which rhymes with ostrich."
I have a terrible affliction whereby I automatically scrawl whatever comes to mind directly to page when I'm bored like there's no filter on my brain. Maybe it's understandable - by the time the lesson had ended I had been awake for 25 hours straight and before that I'd gotten precious little sleep too. Other than half a page on the themes prevalent in Joyce's more irritating works there were three A4 sheets of planning for a story I'm writing, an attempt to rationalise the vehicle dynamics of a formula one car with diagrams and what appears to be a Happy Noodle Boy style insert in the middle of it all.
Irritatingly this is the most I'd written since Friday, and I'd come up with a few great short story ideas too which I'm now putting in to action. The problem with my productivity is that it seems to be at its greatest when I'm supposed to be doing something else. I don't have the faintest idea why either. That said it did lead to the creation of a huge amount of my short stories and writings and the creation of a character that the few of you who've read this blog have seen before but never really known, that of Joe.
Joe started out in 2004 as a crude Biro comic-strip I'd draw in my maths book and then pass around the class for the entertainment of everyone else. Though I'm no longer taking the maths classes that saw his birth I later went on to digitize a few strips, (a laborious process involving drawing and redrawing the comic fully four times freehand) and I've always felt a little love for the crappy doodle lizard. So allow me to introduce you to a GIF remake of the very first comic, plus an advertisement for his favorite brand of soft drink, Petrol Fizz.
Now for the translation! Today, I will be transcribing this entry as if it were a lesson and fairly sleep deprived, though leaving out the huge amounts of story planing and idea drafting I got up to both then and whilst I was writing this. That'd make precious little sense and share something that really isn't ready yet.
Before I went to lessons today... god, why did I come in? I thought I'd get some insight in to the coursework today but she's giving us nothing. I hate Joyce, he's the reserve of the artsy-farty type people who suck on the literary canon. Finnegan's Wake... even the people who like him admit it's unreadable. Eh, why can't people just read for the pleasure and stop trying to be so intellectual and impressive to their peers? The mysteries of life. I'm gonna get me some anagrams... current mood... hmmm... doo... no, think I did that one... record... no, that too... Cruder on Tom? I like that, it's sort of like Less Than Jake. Music... did that, did that, did that... don't want to use 'nu', it's still not a word in my book. Gah, Metallica, why did you sell out? Lousy hollywood lovin' greedy bastards. Circus Net Rum? Circus is cool. I'll use that. Cannon. Hehehe, I wonder when that joke'll grow old? There is a severe irony in me criticising a modernist famous for his stream-of-consciousness prose I guess. I wish I could get 'the city is at war' out of my head. I may have to let Autumn know exactly what she's done to me by introducing me to Cobra Starship. Hmmmm... you know all this talk of stream-of-consciousness is giving me a great idea for a story about someone who believes their perception anchors the whole of reality. I'll write it when I get the time, I've still got a lot to work out in the characterisation on that big project of mine. Okay, so I understand slip curve and angle but I still don't quite follow on the mechanics of steering. It should be such a simple thing, I get the basics but what's the optimum angle where the car is neutral handling? Is it following the wheel tracks directly? No, no car is that perfect, it'd slide a little... no wonder F1 cars are always suffering from understeer graining these things. Wow, is it really 4:50am? I wonder if people notice the time I was up making these posts. Then, everyone who reads it knows what I'm like for insomnia. Insomnia - I like that word. Gah, it's a pain in the arse for such a pretty word, sometimes I wish my sleep patterns were better but with so many of my friends being overseas I miss out on all the fun. Still, I really need to cut back on the caffeine. A 60/40 weight distribution rearwards has got to make it easier to turn in but makes the car so dependent on the fronts. The amount of detail that goes in to the mechanical setup and aerodynamic balance of these cars is insane. I remember once Mark Webber said you should never play chess with Adrian Newey and I quite understand. Scary guy, brilliant though. I wonder if he'll manage to turn around Red Bull's form with the RB4? Probably not actually, he may have spent his genius. Dave said, and it's more than likely true that the days of the one technical genius are long behind us. I wonder if I'll ever work again on that aero balance calculator I made for rFactor? That was pretty neat. Never did work out all the kinks. Shame I couldn't find the time to do more for the WCM. Ah, that looked so cool flat shaded in amongst all that OMGGRAPHICSLOL. I tire of the emphasis on filters in games. I quite liked that reviewer who said that Unreal 3 was the ugliest pretty game ever. Brown is real. *sighs* VGCats summed that one up nicely. Such a let down of a game. Nick didn't seem to know much about it but his gaming experience is that of a console kiddy really. Should I try it again? No, I won't bother. Why did they drop the idea of a tournament? That's just STUPID. Would this gorram spell-check stop trying to get me to use americanised words? I learned in lessons today that puritanical American settlers were responsible for the changing of 'tit-bit' to 'tid-bit'. That's ridiculously oversensitive. I guess we did send all of our puritanical types over there. I really am hungry right now, I need to go down to Tescos and get a big chunk of food and also take the trash out, this place is starting to look really really bad. I can barely walk near the window and damn that mirror is filthy, covered in more fingerprints and smudges than I know how they got there. Didn't I clean it quite recently too? Maybe, I can't entirely recall. Eh, and that said I love America, the people and the place. I wonder if Aspen is asleep right now? Shame, I'd like to show her my new blog entry right away, that's always fun. I'm so lucky to know her, her mind and soul are so brilliant. This can't be making for an interesting post. Wow, my blog sucks.. I rarely update it and I'm sure nobody's that interested in it. Still, it's fun to vent. I musn't be so ashamed of that thought, Aspen was very clear on this. Everyone needs to vent, right? I still can't believe Lewis ended up laughing so much at that news story about that dead baby. That's messed up, though I don't think he could actually help it and was laughing for said reason. Circular logic, isn't it fun? I should probably link to some of my Joe work, it's pretty typical of what I do. Yeah, been a while since I did any. If my mouse wasn't so fucked up I'd love to draw another one, I'm sure my wrist can take the abuse of another 3 hours agonizingly doodling lines. Christ, did these really take three hours solid drawing to make, just to create a deliberate impression of crudeness? I may be closer to that impressionist fool than I'd like to think some days. Now where did I upload them? Oh, right... gah, why are they so far in? Page 5? 6? They're going to be on something like 8 or 9, I know it.. Oh, no, five and four. Well, that wasn't so bad I guess. *sighs* Mozilla Firefox 3 really needs a bit of tweaking, it can't do tags for shit. I'll just do the HTML by hand. Right, that's good... I think. Gods my last post was a mess with all those tags. Fun though. I wonder what Jhonen Vasquez is up to right now? I still haven't done location. Let's see... That guy needs to return to writing comics. I'm going to listen to scissor sisters for a while to chase away cobra... right, now I need a translation. How about stream of consciousness nonsense to create a sense of irony? I wouldn't be cruel enough to do it without punctuation like in Ulysses. That word's spelling will never fail to be alien to me. Three esses? That's excessive, isn't it? Esses. I wonder how long until we get some better F1 news? That crap about racism at Barcelona was so depressing. Humanity really knows how to be unpleasant when it tries and it tries so hard too. I'm never going to go in to straight news journalism ever, I'd probably end up killing myself and I can't bring myself to wear a suit either. Such a weird thing, I wonder if I'll ever get over that fear of them? Then, esses also has three. Huh. Yool-esses? Yool-isies? I'll stick with Youl-isies I think, I'm too British to do otherwise. Esses... I wonder how refined an F1 car's center of gravity has to be? I remember some Minardi guy mentioning they got it to within a couple of inches but still, Minardi never had good technical resources so what could they do? Location... cancer, erotic... definitely did that... Not calico turner? I like that. Calico is a fun word. Calico Turner sounds like some sort of tedious chat show host like Opera Winfrey. I loved Stephen Fry's parody of her. "Let's take a vomit break..." that guy rules. I need to see again if tehre are any QI episodes I've missed. Not likely, true, but I must. They also had those Vodcasts that looked pretty fun, though it could just be Alan Davies pratting around with a camera again. Vodcast is such a stupid word. Why did he assault some homeless guy? Is he really as vicious as that? His career hasn't really gone anywhere since that ridiculous Johnathan Creek show. How did I like that crap when I was young? Young*er*? Still, the theme music was pretty cool. I have to listen to that again. Calico cats are so pretty. I'm gonna post this now. I miss having pets around. I wonder how Gretta and the lot are doing? And Pudgey's eye... poor thing. Everyone was so shocked and upset. Aspen's dad scares me when he's angry, he really does. Nice guy though, put up with me all through winter. I wonder if he's feeling any better? I wonder if they ever tested her for diabetes? She really was getting thin, shedding and drinking/eating a lot. Now to do the tags... hope this doesn't fuck up again. Firefox don't screw me now. Right... LJ cut... it was the part you want removed, right? I think so. Okay, text... small? X small? XX small? XX small looks best and makes this all the harder to read. Fun. I wonder if anyone'll actually bother?
(All shit and drawing/writing on this page is the shit of Chris Neira. Yay!)