I just got back from World Horror Con in Portland, where I met many wonderful new people, had a good time, and came home with the same body parts I left with. I am, however, very tired and am in the process of losing my voice so I’m going to keep this post short this week. My hope is to over the next few months of Mondays to pull back the curtain a little on what goes on with museum collections.

What kind of things about museums do you want to know? I know when I was young I always assumed there were crack teams of PhDs in the back rooms studiously making all the labels for the objects. It wasn’t until I was an intern and I was typing up my 200th label about turquoise jewelry… I realized the truth was a lot more mundane and sometimes relies heavily on being able to use Google to fill in gaps the object records leave.

Another thing I never thought about was the weird gaps in museum collections, because everything is what people THINK to take to a museum so there’s a lot of wedding dresses and not a lot of tennis shoes. That museums don’t really end up with consumable items. Museums get a lot of items that were hardly ever used in their original intended uses. A lot of the time it becomes a physical record of special items or unused items. Museums are very specialized records of material culture, but they are a very limited and incomplete one.

The items I get the most excited about are the ones that show the wear and usage. Things that can tell a story beyond the object. After all, a museum without stories is just a building full of stuff.

Jaym Gates invited me to a Flash Fiction Competition/Anthology to benefit the SFWA Medical Fund. Each week writers go head to head or at least Flash Fiction to Flash Fiction with the winner moving on to the next round. Last Week my Mars Flash Fiction moved me into this weeks round of Zen Vs. Glory. 

Please read.  (or listen! I did audio versions of both stories) Vote. And watch this space for the collected anthology to come. 

Enough of my friends have been trying or espousing the standing desk, that I decided to give it a shot. I had some spacing crates I’d been using to boost up some bins in my laundry room, so I just grabbed those to stack on my existing desk to boost my monitor and keyboard to standing level. I mean I’m curious, but not buying new furniture curious.

I’ve been using my Macguyvered standing desk for about a week now. I really like it. More than I thought I would. It seems to improve not only my chronic back pain, but my daily activity level. I wear a fitbit and my step count has gone up at least 1-2k depending on how long I’m working at it.

I haven’t had great luck at doing really focused work for long periods of time while standing, but I find the majority of what I do in front of the computer isn’t very focused. I do my fiction drafting longhand, so I’m usually talking to people or doing research. And if I need to focus on the computer I can take my laptop elsewhere.

I’ve got a tall stool I can rest my feet on or lean against for rests, but I don’t really find myself sitting on it. More importantly, I have a good gel anti-fatigue mat to stand on. I stole it from my kitchen, but I don’t think the kitchen is getting it back. I’ve also decided I prefer shoes on to shoes off mostly because they distribute my weight across more of the gel mat.

Still trying out various keyboard and mouse positioning since nothing seems to be perfect that way yet. So far so good, though I miss having more desk real estate to put stuff on. I’ll try to update in a few weeks to see how things continue to evolve.

Do you or have you used a standing desk? How does/did it work for you?

I was talking with my friend Brian the other day and sending him scary pictures of terrible toys, like you do. Which reminded me I had the worst toy as a kid. Someone gifted me with a red felt jester doll with a Punch and Judy puppet head (like above) that had wires inside the body so you could pose it to sit on a shelf. Someone thought it would be a great idea to put this doll on the highest shelf in my room so I wouldn’t play with it. This shelf happened to be above my nightlight. The doll had curly cue toed shoes and those grotesque facial features which cast a human-sized shadow on my wall each night.

I’d burrow under my covers and turn away from where the shadow leered on my wall. I slept in a captain’s bed several feet off the floor at the far end of the house. I could get out of bed without a problem by slipping down over the side, but I had to get a running start to get into bed by myself, which was something I didn’t feel I could do safely because of all the monsters in the dark. All of the monsters who were themselves scared of the jester shadow doll and would not go any higher than the floor level.

I’d try to fall asleep as fast as I could so I wouldn’t be asleep when the doll came to life. Which actually worked pretty good, until I developed insomnia. I want to say I was somewhere between 6 and 8 when I stopped being able to fall asleep at night and I’d just lay there and stare at the shadow that sometimes seemed to move. Eventually this became a major problem, and when I begged for the doll to go away I was just told to “close my eyes”.

It’s hard to keep your eyes closed when you’re pretty sure the doll is leering at you and its shadow is always in a slightly different place on the wall at night. I’d try to get it down during the day, but it was just out of my reach even on a step stool.

One night, I hid my wiffle bat under the covers (I think this had to do with nightmares more than the doll, but I don’t remember for sure) and while laying there awake, I realized that while I couldn’t reach it… I could probably knock the doll off the shelf. So I crept to the end of my bed, and stood yellow wiffle bat in hand, leaning out over the gap between the end of the bed and the wall. I missed a bunch and I almost fell off the end of the bed a couple of times, but eventually I managed to knock it over, then off the shelf.

The shape of the shadow it cast as it tumbled from the shelf…  I… I dropped the plastic bat and dove under the covers and didn’t come out until morning.

The doll wasn’t quite so scary in the morning. Ugly, yes, but clearly just a doll. I shoved it deep into the cupboard under my bed and the next time I was given a trash bag to fill for donation, I hid the terrible doll in the bag and pretended it had never existed.

With the doll gone, I realized I could read my library books at the foot of my bed by the light of my nightlight and ceased worrying so much about not being able to sleep.

Three Freezers? Uhm… yes.

We live in a reasonably remote rural area and have not only a large house, but a detached garage with wood storage and a barn. One of our first major household purchases was a chest freezer so we could store seasonal berries and stock up on frozen items from outside our geographic area. Then one day Aaron bought a used fridge with an ice-maker cause he wanted to swap it in for the fridge we had. I was originally against this idea but then he convinced me because he’d have it delivered and the old fridge picked up. So… due to complicated reasons I don’t remember, the old fridge wasn’t cleaned out when the new one arrived. So it was decided the easiest thing was to pay $20 for a pickup of the fridge the next week. And… then we never did. So yes, I started 2014 with three stocked freezers.

So, when I decided we were only buying fresh fruit and veggies until we’d made a significant dent in the stores, it wasn’t terribly hard to start with. Then as we started eating through things it became sort of a personal challenge to see what I could still make. Eventually we got down to one inside freezer and a half-full chest freezer (I do still have a turkey carcass that’s 4 years old I need to do something with, but at this point I might as well save it for evil).  About two weeks after this point, the fridge with the ice-maker died in an unscheduled defrost puddle of doom. (And no, we haven’t moved it yet or called someone to come get it. And we can’t just take it out to the barn to use it as a storage cupboard for cans of paint, poison, etc. because there’s already a dead one out there with an anarchy symbol spray-painted on it that came with the house.)

So, it turned out to be serendipitous that I had already whittled down the fridge and freezer food down to one fridge worth. Almost like I was eerily prepared for things to go terribly wrong…

*gasp*

Westley: And our assets?
Inigo Montoya: Your brains, Fezzik’s strength, my steel.
Westley: That’s it? Impossible. If I had a month a plan, maybe I could come up with something, but this [shakes head]
Fezzik: You just shook your head… doesn’t that make you happy?
Westley: My brains, his steel, and your strength against sixty men, and you think a little head-jiggle is supposed to make me happy?
Westley: I mean, if we only had a wheelbarrow, that would be something.

I’m a planner. Specifically I’m constantly planning for everything to go wrong in predictable ways. I don’t EXPECT them to go wrong, I just spend a lot of energy planning for them to, so I don’t have to spend energy worrying about it. I hate worrying. I like being prepared.

Being prepared requires a lot of resources the vast majority of which never get used. You end up ceasing to think of them as assets until you’re faced with a locked castle gate guarded by 60 men and a mostly-dead man starts throwing out a hypothetical wish list of items.

So, recently I got to thinking; if I have a lot of assets that have or will soon outlive their usefulness, am I really being best prepared? So I decided it was time to go through and figure out what my true assets are, and what is just taking up space. I’m a museum collections professional, I know the true cost of keeping items more than most people. Time to: Use. Give. Sell. Dispose

I have a lot of writing assests. I have longer stories on the verge of being submit-able. I have a couple unfinished shorts. I have a large list of ideas. I have a ton of “To Read” to go through in print and digital. Sometimes it is easy to get stuck on how far you have to go and you lose track of how far you’ve come and what assets you have around you.

I’ve got more than a wheelbarrow and a holocaust cloak, and it is time to use them.

I’ve been putting off writing this entry. I’ve told friends I would write it for months. I keep dragging my feet, but I’m just going to try and plunge forward and write it even though I can feel a cold orb of dread forming in my stomach.

I want to talk about failure. Specifically my own failure. Before I wrote about walking away from my epic fantasy cycle in order to succeed. I do not consider that a failure, I simply consider that a project I’m still lacking the skills to complete.

I want to talk about a project I can never complete, the webcomic PFFFT.net. Oh, every so often someone will talk to me about starting it up again and my response is always “maybe” but I know it isn’t true. Today I’m going to write its post-mortem instead.

In 1999 I joined an online community centered around a series of EZ boards full of wonderful and creative geeks. In 2001 we launched PFFFT.net (it isn’t there anymore so no link) with a webcomic written by me, drawn by Lis Mitchel with web elements by Jennifer Osborne. The webcomic centered on fictional versions of our webpersonas: Petite Fantome, PixelFish, and DigiFox, who in the comic became PFunk, PFish, and PFox three geek-girls tasked with saving the world. The rest of the comic cast were likewise fictional versions of our internet community. Of the characters who appeared on screen only the computer AI was not based on a real life person.

It was, a pretty snazzy comic. Lis’ full-color artwork made it instantly popular, the concept of geek-girl heroes was good, there was an over-reaching story arc planned out, there were lots of little easter eggs, pop culture references, and some of my jokes were pretty good (some were terrible). So what went wrong?

Did not plan for Life – We didn’t have much for lives when we started and for some reason assumed this would always be the case. There were two international moves, various health issues, relationships that fell apart, money problems, and a wedding, at various points that caused problems with getting the comic out on time or at all.

No buffer. – This was a rookie mistake. We were so excited about sharing the comic with everyone we did not build up a buffer of at least a month’s worth of comics before going live. We assumed we could just do a bit extra and get a buffer going as we went. Ha ha ha. No.

Artwork was too labor intensive. – If we’d done a proper buffer’s worth of material to start, we’d have quickly realized that having full-color page-style comics took around 20 hours a page. A week’s worth of comic was 60 (unpaid!) hours.

Using Real People is a BAD IDEA (TM). – Everything else lead to a slow death, but this is the thing which put the kind of nails in the coffin that prevent raising it from the grave. There are likeness issues which weren’t a problem when we weren’t making money off the comic, but massively problematic if we were. We absolutely could not continue to put the kind of time into the comic and NOT make money, but we’d tied our hands there. Also, relationships CHANGED. What on earth was I thinking not only putting real people in the comic but working their real-life relationships into the plot. At the time we started this there were a number of webcomics that used fictionalized real people. Of those, I think only Penny Arcade is still around (and while no separation between characters and creators made them successful, it has also bitten them in the ass). You see, I only control what characters do. Character control is required for successful writing and using real people often left me reacting to real world events rather than telling the story exactly as I envisioned. Also, it is TOTALLY gauche to ask the artist to continue drawing a character based on her ex-fiancee during the break-up and turmoil phase that ended up with her living in my house in a different country. I really regret doing so even if she told me it was fine (it was so not fine and I’m an idiot for thinking so). I’d like to take this opportunity to publicly apologize to Lis for all of the stupid things I did and said during that time period thinking I was saving the comic. It was so beyond saving at that point because of how *I* structured the comic and characters in it. Me culpa.

Did not do enough with the supporting website– With the clarity of hindsight. This is probably where I screwed up the most. I should have been putting 20 hours of content up every week in comic, game, and movie reviews, editorials, whatever. I could have had an on-going serial within the universe that went up without art. Ignoring this part of things is what made people stop coming.

Using the name Pfunk for a white girl with blue hair was racially problematic and I rightfully got hate mail over it. It doesn’t matter what I meant by it, it rubbed people the wrong way, and I totally see why. Even if I felt I could reboot the entire story, I no longer feel this is an appropriate name for the character.

Our fans were amazing. We got fan art, fan mail, and even an 8bit sprite flash game. The greater web comic community were supportive and amazing people. From encouragement to guest artists, we had an amazing community and I will always regret letting them down. However, I do not regret the experience or that I ended up taking another path.