november 30

Today I attacked my life, the very shape and essence of the thing that I live - I woke with visions and plans and I booted my computer and took a piss and nearly forgot anything

I think for a living, because I need a living, my credit cards are attacking me seemingly outpacing my own aforementioned attacks on life

so I could

be a freelance writer

these gigs, writing pieces for magazines, they are put together best in person i think. so living in oakland is not quite right - maybe I should move to new york and hurl myself at details and ladies home journal full time. sounds like fun! i would learn to be a writer I guess. oh joy, oh bliss, oh rapture.

write a book!

not that i haven't tried - but if i picked a topic with an editor and wrote it for money it would be a different thing. maybe my web memoirs? nothing else immediately seeming salable is coming to me. and web memoirs isn't seeming too challenging, just obvious. then i would learn to be a writer! i used to think it would be hard to write something that long. but if you think about it as 12 chapters of about 20 pages, it don't seem so hard.

work in videogames

visiting home i excavated my collection from high school PCland - early Sid Meier, Wizardry I, early Battletech RPGs, games based on good SciFi - i loved them shits! I played a ton of games, and maybe if i can get them to work on this machine i can play them some more. and now that I'm older and I like do stuff and I like need a job, I could learn to be a computer game storyteller like them folks. that would be awesome!

I often say I have too short an attention span for writing a novel. but working on a small team developing plot and environment for an adventure game? that would be kicking.

So I started this quest today by looking at game company sites. nothing really located in oakland. I think I'm going to have to work as a janitor to start with because i haven't written screenplays and I can't C++ minus minus. and i'll continue my development of a cyberpunk game for the palmpilot so folks can see what i can do.

hire an agent and become An Entertainer!

by far the most lucrative thing I do is speaking - 2000 bucks for a weekend's trip somewhere interesting. and I stand up on stage and share what's important to me.

i like dealing with people directly but now I'm dealing with links98 directly about money i haven't gotten yet and i don't think they're trying to decieve me it's just a big organization with beaurocracy just like my credit card company.

so why not get an agent to hound them instead because he/she will stand to pay their bills from it as well?

and maybe that agent can help me figure out how to use this performative/ pedagogical/ hyper/ buggin' energy. kind of like a new mentor, seeing some larger context for me. because howard is a good mentor, for turning inwards and studying stuff and writing. which would do me a world of good! but i'm like busting at the seams to get out and shake the web tree and collect all the nuts that fall and play drums hurling them at the big walls that surround us all!

so i'm looking at the listfoundation every days or so and i'm lunching with powerpoeple and calling for agents and trying to get something plausible going before my next statement is delivered.

the best thing howard's said to me recently: don't look for a job. look for something to learn. i think i could learn from anything - i just gotta find something i can be excited about. i should think about learning though because if i'm just looking for money i don't think i'm worth very much skillwise so i'd have to bag groceries and then i couldn't afford DSL. i mean i think i'm worth millions of dollars a day skillwise, i'm doing such fantastic rare shit that everyone all over the world would love to know about. but until they realize that.

Steev Hise .sig today: "On the whole, philanthropy seems sort of redundant - they're already giving 70-hour weeks to the creation of new technology meant to empower the world. That's not enough?" -Po Bronson, Wired

the closer i come to having less than zero money the less i worry about selling out.

Jonathan fixes shit at Ramona years ago. Just like he fixed some shit this night!

i'm making business cards, working over my resume, collecting my clips and writing press releases. bud.com was down today and though i updated it, it's like a vacation when the web server crashes.

but still i can work - I busy myself tonight helping steuer (and steev and wilner) re-up the server and i work over daze98 and monthly day link summaries.

and after i wrote most all that above, i could be a

greenhomie

Axil visits, he enlists amy and i to work for his greenhome. sounds engaging - like someone with a vision again is trying to start an internet business. but this is the first time it starts around a way to make money, rather than the fun results. so i have a good feeling, and I'm thinking, why not spend a few months learning how to develop successful bootstrap ecommerce? he might want me to webmaster, webpromote, produce. something. it's nice and informal - no venture capital, no business plan. just build a web site and sell stuff before spring next year grows long.

hypertextbooktarian

steve rhodes sends me this articlink: "Textbooks Shifting From Printed Page to Screen" and i feel both glad to see it and lax for not being involved. I wrote a hypertextbook proposal and since then i haven't done so much about it. gotta keep the pressure on!

anyways this doesn't make me crazy restless because hypertextbooks is about shape more than pure medium. it's not just about putting textbooks online, but adding links, dude, we read textbooks to expand our minds, not just to escape.