Cat

I have the new cat. He is hiding under the bed and I must run to my show, so photos will have to wait until tomorrow.

No name yet. His finder called him Simon so that shall be his middle name. I may call him Montgomery Fleamarket Simon Minimall. Or I shall draw something from tonight's show. We shall see.

Things to do this NYC when not quite dead

In case you don't want to do things that support me and my ego (*wink wink*), here's other stuff.

Friday:
The Hungry Marching Band & The Bindlestiff Family Cirkus @ Peter Jay Sharp Building (30 Lafayette Avenue, Brooklyn): If you haven't had the treat of either of these, you need to before you die. Yep. It is that simple. There will also be some burlesque and DJs and generally the sort of Brooklyn hipster stuff that makes other folks nausious. 9:30pm. Free.

Saturday:
Whack people with a pillow. Union Square. 2pm. Free.

March is RIAA Boycott Month!

I'm going to give this quick shout out without going into the details. I'm not a big music comsumer, so this will be easy for me. There are others out there reading thais that I know it will be more difficult. And, yes, I am skeptical about boycotts in general... especialy something on this scale, with such a little understod issue. But it's worth a shot.

I'm going to quote pretty much wholesale from Gizmodo:

Gizmodo is declaring the month of March Boycott the RIAA month. We want to get the word out to as many people as humanly possible that we can all send a message by refusing to buy any album put out by an RIAA label. Am I saying you should start pirating music? Not at all. You can continue to support the artists you enjoy and respect in a number of ways.

Firstly, I encourage everyone to purchase music from unsigned bands and bands on independent record labels. There are tons of great artists out there, many of which you're probably already a fan of, that have nothing to do with the RIAA. Buy their records at eMusic, an online store that sells independent tunes in beautiful, DRM-free MP3 format.

Secondly, you can still support RIAA-signed bands without buying their music. Go see them live and buy their merchandise; they get a hell of a lot more money from that then they do from album sales. And hey, you could benefit from getting out more, couldn't you?

So direct your music money elsewhere for March. Use it as a chance to expand your horizons. The current system is pretty god awful.

Gotham City Improv! Tonight! UCB! Tomorrow!

Just a little ol' reminder...
Thank You, Robot will be at Gotham City Improv (48 West 21 St Street, 8th floor, between 5th & 6th Ave, Buzzer 13) with Bombardo and Creek Weasel. 10pm. $5.

My final 401 class performance is tomorrow at 1pm at UCB. Also 5 smackers.

Oh, and earlier tomorrow you can find me Matt Little Presents: Nerdcore Comedy! at New York Comic Con. (I should have posted this way earlier.)

Jacob Javits Center
Fri, Feb. 23 - 5 PM
Sat, Feb. 24 - 11 AM
Sun, Feb. 25 - 11 AM
@ NY Jedi Stage
FREE! (It's in the main entrance lobby, where a badge isn't required)

Oh, and it looks like in 4 hours I will have a cat again.

"Does he look like a bitch?"

I love typrography.
I really like Pulp Fiction.
This little film makes me smile. (NSFW, language)

(via Boing Boing... yet again)

SecondLife, Age-Play, and the Flood Gates

The virtual world SecondLife is easy to dismiss by most folks. To many it appears just to be EverQuest or World of Warcraft without a real game attached to it. But is coming a fascinating experiment of what people do given almost total freedom.

How will the economy develop? (It is all about owning land.)
Who owns something when it is virtual, when the concept is virtual? (That is still up in the air. I would love to see a survey of "creators/sellers" in SL and how they feel about DRM on music and movies and such.)
When vandalism and anarchy become relatively easy and non-punishable and anonymous, will everything slip into anarchy? (A bit but in general folks like order.)
What will people do will freedom to act out their fantasies?

Turns out the answer to that last one is that some people will "play" at child-adult sex.

This should surprise no one. I am going to pass on making statements about sexual fantasy roleplay and how it is healthy in some cases... if everyone is one the same page and everyone is a consenting adult. I'm not going to talk about the dangers of not actually knowing who the person behind that virtual avatar of an eight-year old is.

But I have been expecting for awhile that SL was just a media uproar in the waiting. Companies and musicians and artists have been running to SL as the "next big thing." And so have politicians. It was only 2004 when the media became amazed at Howard Dean's use of the Internet. Three years later politicians see SL as a relatively cheap way to reach people. I am just not aware how many of them realize what also goes one there and that when the media gets their mitts onto it what will happen.

Well, apparently the Dutch have noticed and are looking to take legal action. The Netherlands has laws about virtual child pornography. It's hard to say where this lands. Is there a difference between disturbing pictures/video of adults pretending to be children (and perhaps not telling the viewer it is an adult) and two consenting adults roleplaying? But I imagine that distinction will not be debated with much coherency. As the media, especially the U.S. media start to pick up the story, SL is going to be seen in a whole other light.

It shall be interesting to see how it is covered and how it effects the SL community.

Best Song of the Day

I have to fly to my last 401 improv class, but I just had to post the song I just heard. I'm in the Tea Lounge in Park Slope. A 4-year old girl is standing by the cocktail table Ms. Pacman. Suddenly she stands on the stool and sings at the top of her lungs:

"I love being a princess!
I love being a princess!
I love being a princess!
Do you have any quarters?!"

Artistry. I wish I could do that spontaneously in my improv scenes.

Chivalry is not dead... just mistake

"It had nothing to do with him. I didn't even know if he was there. It was the woman. I thought there was a woman... So I grabbed the cavalry sword and ran upstairs..."

Porn might not make you go blind. Unless your neighbor stabs you in the eyes.

Bacon Mints

From Archie McPhee:
"Each one of these mints tastes like a delicious slice of crispy bacon with just a hint of mint flavor to give it that extra punch! It may sound weird but once you taste it, you'll see that mint and bacon is a match made in China."

(via Neatorama)

"But why did she marry K-Fed in the first place, Daddy?"

Walking through Park Slope, I was just behind a father and his eight-ish daughter. I, as I am want to do, listen in...

Dad: "Well, people go to to rehab to learn how to not take drugs, I guess. With drugs, it is sometimes very hard for people to say no if drugs are available to them. In rehab, they can stay away from all of the drugs and learn to live without them."

Daughter: "But why did she leave the first rehab place?"

Dad: "I don't know, sweetie. Sometimes the desire for drugs is stronger than the desire to stay off them."

Daughter: "Did she shave her hair because of drugs?"

Dad: "I don't know, sweetie."

Daughter: "What about her baby? Who is taking care of her baby? Do they let the baby in rehab?"

At this point I could tell that Dad was really really hating tabloids, E!, the Internet, and each and everyone of his daughter's friends.

My RSSes have asploded again

I don't know how most RSS readers work. I use Safari so it's all built in. If I have a RSS bookmarked, I just look at my bookmark bar thingie and in parenthesis after the name is a number. That is how many new article are in the feed. And if I have numerous bookmarks in a bookmark folder, it adds them all up. As soon as I look at a feed, the number disappears. Very easy to tell when something has been updated.

I have slightly less than a hundred feed in my bookmark bar, all organized into folders and subfolders. Now most of those aren't updated all that often. Many personal blogs that I once followed have probably been abandoned by their keepers. Other sites, like Fark or Digg, are constantly updating. But I have it all set up so that it is easy to keep track of and so I don't spend a tenth of my day just checking the same sites over and over.

But sometime the system fails me. For whatever reason, Safari decides I haven't read any of the sites... ever. Suddenly all the numbers shoot up and the whole system becomes useless. I them have to go through each one and look at the site, affectively "resetting" it.

That's what I am looking at now.

George Takei

George Takei has certainly embraced officially coming out. It makes me proud that every sci-fi show on the planet still wants him to cameo in their shows (recently he played Hiro's father on Heroes).

(via frakin' everywhre but I saw it on Faithful Hearts, Faithless Money first)

There is a light that never goes out

I don't know who Zoë Woodbury-High is but here she is covering The Smiths' "There is a light that never goes out."

Apparently she's from Portland.

My dreams look something like this

nfctd.

I don't know what it stands for. I am certainly not sure what it is. But it is fascinating. Sometimes flash becomes art. Not often, but sometimes.

"Well, we have an eagle suit and an ugly bird puppet... Let's make a car ad."

(via Boing Boing)

Just so you know, I'm still here

Yeah, yeah. I haven't posted a couple of days. I've been doin' stuff. Wouldn't you like to know what. Tough.

What am I doing coming up?

Well, tomorrow night I shall be trying my hand at some 3 person improv at the PIT's Improdome. Now just so you know this is an open mic type thing, so there isn't even a guarantee we'll be goin' up. But it is free. It is also at 11pm.

Then on Friday night, Thank You, Robot shall be at Gotham City Improv with Bombardo and Creek Weasel. That should be pretty kick ass. You should definitely come to that. Especially if you missed us last Friday. (Why did you miss us last Friday? What was your damn excuse?) It's at 10pm and will set you back $5. But $5 gets you robots, weasels and bombardos. And of course love.

So what are you doing Saturday at 1pm? I know what you are doing! You are coming to UCB and see me in my final 401 class performance. Yes, you are. Yeah, I know it's 1pm on a Saturday. Not the funniest time of day. But what else are you going to do at that time? Laundry? Come on! It is also $5. Think of it as giving to the cause. What cause? Make up your own damn cause.

Mmm. What else? I think that may be it. I am going to see This American Life. Live. On stage. Yes, I am paying money to see a radio show live. Shut up. Sarah Vowell makes me swoon.

Too much improv

I overloaded a bit this last week.

Class on Wednesday, show on Friday night, 3 person practice group Saturday, Thank You, Robot practice to day 12 to 3, and then a somewhat random practice group from 4 to 7 today. I had plans to go to a music think at 9pm, but that was apparently cancelled. Now I am wasting time in Starbucks before a thing at 10pm. (There is one persn out there that will admonish me for this evenings plans. Yeah, yeah. But my other plans fell through and if I just went home, I was going to be depressed. Better into the lions' den than to hide in the corner. Besides I'm feeling kind of strong.)

Anywhozits, I've had yet another brain switch with improv this weekend. Nothing huge, but I am seeingthings more three dimenstionally. Imagine that I have spent the last 2 months staring at a square. I've been staring and staring, and I feel I understand the sqaure in total but my hands just can't quite hold on to it. On Friday night I saw something strange about the square, something that didn't quite make sense. On Saturday, I was shown the other side ofthe square, the mirror image. It was disorienting at first to see this other square that was in fact the first square but entirely different. Today someone gently proded me to turn my head. And I suddenly saw that it wasn't a square at all. It's a damn cube! Now I can see three sides of the cube, some sides clearer than others. The sides are all part of the same object, all the sides are connected and rely on the others, but they are different. And I can only see three sides. There is another three I have never even seen (assuming that it is actually a cube and not some more complicated type of object... god forbid that it might be a four-dimenstional cube!).

Yes, stupid analogy, but that's as close I can get.

The novel continues apace. It took me much longer to getto the body than it should. I am going to have to cut a lot of my flashback stuff. The problem is that (1) the flashback stuff is easy to write because I can just expand on the first portion of Genesis, and (2) I have been thing about the flashback stuff for going on 15 years. Not all the time when I first became fascinated with the story of Lilith, Eve and Adam. I think back now to how one dimenstionally I used to think of the story. Ah, the heady days at college! The story means a lot more to me now... and no longer reads like a sensitive straight white boys rant against the patriarchy.

I just need to devote time to the "present" portion of the book. I got to the body too far in. The next thing is that I need to get to Eve. I've been riminating on her for awhile. She used to be so hard for me to concieve of. On the surface she seems so weak compared to Lilith's strength. But now she appeals to me. Both of them share a deep sadness, and their is a kinship bewteen the two. I have been thinking that Eve would only be in one scene, but I am thinking that she my come along for the investigation.

Adam is still dodging me. He needs to be there, he is very important, it is just hard for me to get past what a sheep he was/is. All of his choices seem so shallow and passive. I know that the hook is him as father. (Admit it, he has to be a crappy husband/lover.) His moment has to come from his love for his sons and his attempt to be a good father... and we know how that turned out.

There are some other major points I haven't quite figured out. Like who actually killed Cain. Yeah, the thing that the whole novel hinges on. Sigh.

Neil Gaiman (yes, two Gaiman mentions in one day) recently commented on finishing the first chapter to his new novel.

And today I finished writing Chapter One of The Graveyard Book, and it's a real book. I know it's a real book because there are all sorts of things I don't quite know yet, and I can't wait to find them out.

Happiness.

It's so nice to know that the feeling continues.

Year of the Pig

Ah, my year! I suppose this is my 4th year of the Pig, the first being the one I was born in. I have no idea if that has any importance or not. Neil Gaiman points out that pigs are "loveable, brave, noble and intelligent animals who have adventures." Man, do hope to live up to that this year.