By changing sides we turn defeat into victory

After careful analysis of the content dominating the Internet I've come to the painful conclusion that print is dead. I first heard about this idea from Ghostbusters and I vigorously disagreed with it (by inner monologue only) even as I generally enjoyed most of the movie...

Most of the movie, not all of it. I disliked enough of the movie to mildly enjoy watching the feminists rip its entrails out online. Ironically the line "print is dead," is delivered by Egon to impress one of the only two female characters in the show (the ghostbusters' secretary, cute and comforting, unlike that Fe-Man Sigourney Weaver). 

Anyway, I have devoted most of my life as a pseudo intellectual  and amateur writer to the idea that the printed word is sacred, so the idea of its death has been emotionally painful for me to resolve, especially as I long held out hope of a career as a writer and book critic. As those career hopes foundered and I became embittered towards mark twain and other fascist American writers, I began to enjoy the schadenfreude of the idea, cackling like a bitter old man on a rickety rocking chair on a dusty porch at every inroad by the illterati; Twitter, Facebook, Doom, Harry Potter, Star Wars, and more seriously, the evisceration of public libraries through diversion of resources to audio visual departments. The fools, I cackle, the fools!

In keeping with this triumphant march against long words and extended paragraphs, I have begun a word purge in my own inner, personal, and electronic lives. We will be veering this blog away from the word thing, instituting a push toward graphic novel type storytelling. This transition will be difficult, necessitating some improvement to my graphic communication skills, but I have set a goal for this blog to be 100% word-free by August 2017. 

Step 1: Pictorial communication. See below. 

Coming attractions on channel hagenart

The blog as TV network idea has gained some traction with the fictional characters whose  conversations comprise my embarrassingly stylized inner world, so I'm swerving toward animated content for this blog. Not full stories of course, I have nowhere near enough time, but gifs. Most people capitalize gif but I'm too lazy. Anyway, here's my first gif, capturing my current work in progress:

I'm hoping to improve these obviously. In keeping with the moving picture theme, I will also be instituting a periodic review of whatever TV shows I watch. Most recently I watched the pilot for "Vice Principals" on HBO. It did not capture my interest, as the producers have already made one of the basic fatal errors; writing an amusingly unlike able side character as protagonist. This only works if you cast a fantastic actor for the part, who can find nice things about the character to communicate. Actors that good are rare, even among talented comic actors. I think the lead of vice principals is good, but in the first episode, he didn't find anything nice about his character for us. He has made an amusing side character, but he needs a straight man main character. The producers furthermore chose to demonstrate this shortcoming through what they probably thought was a slick marketing coup, getting Bill Murray to appear for two scenes and in previews. The opening scene with Murray made me laugh because he understands so thoroughly how to play a sympathetic straight man. I laughed at the two other characters because Murray laid the groundwork for the scene by communicating a sense of longstanding weariness and irritation with the vice principals. He makes the viewer believe they are witnessing something real, and the arguing becomes funny. In the rest of the episode, without Murray's straight man take to make the bickering vice principals real, their words have no life and I did not find them funny. The show needs a straight person, and so far they haven't found one. 

It seems to me that there is a lesson here that I could apply to my own life, but I don't know it. That might be a good feature of these reviews, kind of a homey Sunday school type vibe where I apply the teachings and become a better person. Or maybe not finding the moral is the lesson

Injecting Vampiric Life in a Dying Series

If I ran this blog as a TV network, and I do, I would run the next installment/episode of "The Incredible Lightness of My College Experience" as a two-hour special, where the plot would turn into a bad vampire story halfway through, similarly to "From Dusk to Dawn".   I got the idea for this from "From Dusk to Dawn" of course, but also from a dream I had while sleeping at one of the creepy cubicles in the basement of the Marriott library where I sometimes had to go on busy days when all the nice upper floor study cubicles with a view were taken and I just needed a place to sleep. The similarity in layout of the floors of the Marriott fascinated me, especially the repetitive layout of study desks on each floor, but the basement desks seemed a little dustier and more cheaply made, their placement seemed subtly more haphazard, and the feng shui of the area felt oh so slightly off, just enough that no one wanted to use the desks in the basement, even to sleep, even though it was noticeably quieter. I went to the basement often during busy days, but never ended up staying long, except for this one time, when I felt tired enough to sleep there, in a study cube in a far corner of the map department. 

I dreamt that a pale and icy skinned vampire woman, walking on a broken foot like a zombie, walked over to my desk and bit my neck. Then I was on the library pay phone, berating someone who was somehow responsible for the vampire attack. Waking up after, drooling and disturbed, I reflected that the dream would make an interesting vampire movie, where two students come across a thesis paper about satanic scripts, and end up summoning a recently deceased girl who pursues them as a vampire. 

They argue over how to destroy the vampire as one of them is Catholic and the other is Mormon. They try a crucifix on her and it fails, and she attacks the Mormon again.  The Catholic is stricken and feels guilty as his study partner is dying in the hospital. He tells his family and his priest that their belief is a lie. They try a Book of Mormon on the vampire, but this fails too, and the Catholic is attacked this time.  The Mormon denounces his own family's religion. 

The Catholic's family priest, in a crisis of faith, seeks out the man who wrote the original thesis, a mysterious old man who lives on Antelope Island. He tells them that the vampires can only be destroyed by the icons of their own religion, so they must research the vampire woman's life. 

They discover that in life, she was Jewish. But, the crazy old man on the island says, the icons must be held by a true believer to kill the vampire. The priest resolves to find a good rabbi. 

Meanwhile the Mormon dies. The Catholic is terrified, certain that his friend will come after him as a vampire. "He's mad at me anyway".   He sends the priest to request that his friends body be cremated. The boy's family refuse him, referring to him as "that creepy Catholic."  The priest tells the boy he will go and kill both vampires before night falls. He meets the rabbi at the airport. They drive to Antelope island and find the crazy old man, holding a rifle and a triple combination. The priest passes out wooden stakes. They discuss their plans in a war council, where it turns out that all three are martial artists and highly trained weapons specialists.

 On their way to the cemetery, just to break the tension, they encounter a series of situations that resemble the plot to several "priest, rabbi, and Mormon" jokes. Then they find the family mausoleum of the woman vampire.  When they open her coffin, she is lying still, but she screeches horribly when the rabbi begins singing in Hebrew from a scroll. He lights a menorah, and at each lighting of the candle a graphic flaming Hebrew symbol appears on the howling vampire's forehead. Then the rabbi draws an Izmel and the other two draw their stakes, and they stab the writhing vampire in an incredibly graphic scene with sheets of black blood and green ectoplasm spraying everywhere. The vampire grotesquely degenerates into a skeleton.  

"She is at peace," the rabbi says. They leave the mausoleum and drive straight to the morgue where the Mormon student's body is located. At the sight of the vampire hunters, the staff call the police, but the priest and rabbi draw pistols and they advance to the big cabinet with the long slabs behind drawers like you see in movies. They find a mortuary staff person with a stack of file tabs with peoples' names on them. He says he's re-doing the tabs. They start pulling out the drawers to find the Mormon student, tension growing. Finally two cops burst into the room. The rabbi goes into karate mode and takes them out, but he gets shot and dies dramatically in the priest's arms. The other two frantically open drawers until they only have one left. Awful pause. The priest tells the Mormon to ready his triple combination and stake. But the Mormon confesses that he lost his faith while they killed the Jewish vampire. He says he is Jewish now, and won't be able to wield the Mormon icons. At this point the young clerk with the file tabs speaks up and bears his testimony. The priest grabs the triple combination and throws it to the boy, whose name is Trey Parker. The priest slides out the drawer to find, the body of an elderly woman. "Where is he?" the priest demands of the clerk, who shakes his head in confusion. 

"I can answer that," says the Mormon, as the door to the room opens and the mortuary staff run in with automatic rifles. As they disarm and handcuff the priest, the crazy old Mormon tells him that the body of the Mormon student is headed to Europe, where he will infect chosen missionaries, who will be unstoppable and will initiate a vampire apocalypse, as it turns out that no Mormon outside the old boundaries of the territory of Deseret is actually a true believer. The vampire plague will rampage through all the world and leave the Mormons of Utah and Idaho untouched and in control of the world. This has all been the master plan of a secret cult within the church, led by himself. He reveals himself as the clonal offspring of both Joseph Smith, Abraham Lincoln, and Martin Bormann.

  As he laughs demonically, the mortuary staff push the priest onto an empty drawer slab. But at that moment the door bursts open and the Catholic student comes in with a group of nuns armed with Uzis. They shoot up the mortuary staff in a firefight, and only the crazy old Mormon is left, holding his hands up in surrender. The student holds a pistol on the old Mormon, who laughs and says they'll never stop the Mormon vampire plague. The student holds up a handwritten piece of notepaper, a last message from his Mormon study partner, indicating he wants a nondenominational funeral, as he has become, an atheist!  The cray old Mormon screams, as the scene switches to an international airport in Brussels or something, where an ominous oblong box slides down the baggage chute to the claim carousel. Waiting at the carousel are a group of Mormon missionaries. The scene slowly swings behind the missionaries, to another group of people, old men with gray ponytails and tie-dye, a few younger people with nose piercings and Charles darwin shirts, all in sandals with tube socks and dumpy, I'll-fitting jeans. They are holding slide-rules and prisms and copies of "Cosmos" and "the God Delusion". They see the box and nod grimly to each other. 

As the closing credits roll, we do an inset advertising my upcoming series: "The Booth", based on my time selling magnets at Festivals.

Losing an Ocean, Capturing a part of myself I'd rather release

I've inadvertently created a sad record of my artistic decline - again. I used to bring multiple sketchbooks and bags of pens in my art satchel (basically a purse made of army surplus material) everywhere, especially on vacation, where I would expect to be miserably uncomfortable for hours at a time, and could look forward to making anyone with me miserably uncomfortable by stopping at inappropriate junctures to draw whatever and whoever I happened to be sitting or sometimes even standing by, and the combination of physical discomfort and the intense performance anxiety caused from openly drawing live humans right in front of them would lend a sense of artistic seriousness and purposefulness to the endeavor.  The absolute lack of any enjoyable stimuli would induce a trancelike focus to my drawing that I became somewhat addicted to.  This is a true sklog, where the artist's social awkwardness and physical stress imbue the drawing with a patina of desperation and shame that makes it more interesting for the viewer. 

I fantasized that I could recapture this feeling during our trip to the Oregon coast, so I brought a sketchbook and a small bag of pens. I thought about bringing the whole art satchel with multiple sketchbooks and pens but decided against it to save space. This unfortunate compromise of my artistic integrity bore bitter fruit throughout the whole trip.  

Bitter fruit plate 1:

My favorite pen ran out of ink and I had no backup fine tip, so I had to use a cheap medium point, which made my already shaky lines look worse. And it smeared a lot.  

Bitter fruit plate 2:

I disliked the cheap pen so much that I tried a few drawings with a light blue fine point. 

Bitter blue fine point plate 1:

You won't see the bitterest fruit of the compromise in these drawings, but the discerning viewer will infer it from the location and setting of the previous plates: I drew them all in the beach house. We actually went outside, to more interesting places than the interior of the beach house; we actually wandered around on the actual beach, for instance. But I only brought the one sketchbook, which is too big for a pocket, and I didn't have the art satchel, which could have held the bigger sketchbook hands free, enabling me to ward off the physical attacks of my offspring while bringing the proper art tools right up to the ocean itself, with all its rich sklog material; rotting crabs, vicious seagulls, garbage washed ashore, obnoxious tourists too cheap to take their kids to San Diego (Here!). 

We also went in a huge cave to look at sea lions, a dark and magical place that photos can not do justice to, but that with their unthinking detail, photos can give a viewer the dangerous and illusory sense that they have captured a place, so that the viewer does not know what they are missing, where a sklog would properly capture the total inability of the artist to capture the place, and would communicate that failure to the viewer. 

In honor of that failure, here is the only drawing from the trip with any ocean water in it. 

Bitter blue fine point plate 2:

Note how the failure to capture the ocean fairly leaps off this sad image, wistfully drawn from the front porch. You immediately sense that something ineffable has not been captured. And compare that with a drawing of an nautical setting I began long before the trip to the ocean and never got back to, the level of pointless detail, the absurdity. 

Absurdist Escape plate 1:

The final stage in the artistic and moralistic decline, the drooling daydream, the escapist nonsense. There's really nothing more to do but to begin coloring them in

Survival of the Fittest in Dreamland

Explanation: I've read a lot of science fiction, some of it fairly apocalyptic end-of-the-world type science fiction (which people in populous societies - especially young people - tend to be irresistibly fascinated with, for reasons that should be obvious). And I've learned quite a bit from those books about living in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, mainly that living in the rubble after the collapse of civilization is not so bad if you are a firearms expert with a lifetime of survivalist training, or if you are a mutant with psychic powers. 

So when I muse and ponder about what we would do in the aftermath of Armageddon, which I often do, I usually begin the story with the survivalist tactics, acquiring water and food and weapons, and then after some deeper thought, an honest appraisal of my weapons handling experience (juggling knives), physical stamina (not good), and feelings about un-refrigerated food (canned beans only), the story tends to focus on the bare minimum of mutant superpowers we would require to maintain our standard of living at the end of the world. Also some helpful robot servants, shown here accompanying the family on our wanderings. One of the robots would have a fridge compartment in their torso, with a filtered water tap, and the other would shoot lasers out of their eyes. I don't know how they would maintain their power supply - ah ha! Mutant superpower number 1: Psychic battery recharging. 

The giant magic rabbit could step in with cleaning tasks when the robots were busy. I am pictured on the far right wearing the outfit which is for me the most pleasant aspect of the fantasy; my cozy bathrobe and sweatpants, and a backpack full of snacks. My imagination gets a little hazy on many of the details of our perambulations through the ruins, but the bathrobe and sweats and snacks are always high res. Then I usually wonder how I'd clean them (as well as the socks and underwear) and end up praying that they invent self cleaning fabric right before catastrophe strikes. That problem solved, we continue our journey as pictured, wearing our magically clean robes, my  kids in their favorite animal costumes, the robots and the magic bunny amusing us with various shenanigans. I usually imagine my wife learning plant lore before the journey sometime, and brewing medicinal potions each night, to help me forget my grief over the end of baseball, while I would learn to control people or zombie's minds like Professor X or the kid in Game of Thrones. And just as I've arranged our survival in the Wasteland satisfactorily, after a great deal of mental effort, I usually drift off to sleep

Visions of the Future; part 2; You Don't Really Need a Debugger

So, I've learned enough about VBA to write a few subroutines with variables. A subroutine is what the programmers, or coders, call one little part of a program. These little subroutines were excel macros. 

I didn't know what a macro was for a long time. A long long time. I would read the word "macro" and immediately think of "macrobes", a scientific sounding term in the CS Lewis space trilogy that I don't think has a title for the whole trilogy. A "macro-title", you could call it, like "Lord of the Rings". I quite enjoyed the Lewis series, most of it, even the religious elements; because he reworked Sunday school stuff into fun science fiction elements.  Unfortunately the Sunday school stuff took over the series in the end. Much like the Microsoft part takes over and ruins all the cool stuff that Microsoft almost develops. There, I brought it all back. It was no digression after all. Macrobes, cool, "Macros" why called so?  

But eventually I learned what macros are and had lots of fun recording macros and looking at the code - You can record a macro in excel or word, and then go look at the automatically generated script in the Visual Basic editor. You can find the Visual Basic editor by employing super secret hacker methodology, going into the excel or word options menu and clicking an option in one of the menus. You'll immediately know when you go into the visual basic editor because you go from the newfangled ribbon layout of the later versions of excel to a layout looks like Windows 3.11. I think they've probably kept the old-timey look of the editor because the only people that use it are my age, and we don't like things to change. 

The editor is fun because not only can you look at the generated script, you can change it just as easily as you can rewrite an email. And you can add things to the macros or subroutines  like variables, which I learned from the Dummies book. I'm just old enough to admit that I found the dummies book helpful, and just young enough to feel embarrassed when I admit it. 

And Ive learned just enough about variables to write some macros that Ive used at work, but read just enough online to know that my coding is incredibly lazy and sloppy and jury-rigged. I constantly attempt macros based on ideas I have that are always slightly beyond my actual programming abilities, which due to extreme mental laziness I consistently overestimate. So whenever I have trouble with public variables, which I always do, I just slop the data into some corner cells somewhere in an unnamed sheet that I may later delete because I've forgotten about the slop and end up wondering what the hell happened to my previously kind of working macro until I go back and rework some lines and accomplish nothing or make everything worse until I remember the slop data and think I can just use a public variable and it doesn't work so I redo the slop sheet and put a note to myself not to delete them and delete the note later when I find copies of the same file in two folders and keep the newer one without checking the change history. And I write bad comments that I never understand later, during the long debugging/utilization process.  And I do not practice good file management/ organization techniques.  So I have grown very accustomed to the "Send Error Report?" Message box. It's one of the most reliable results in my macros. 

Having achieved this level of VBA knowledge, wherein I am constantly in "debug" mode in the Visual Basic editor, I decided to try web programming, the glamour child of the programming world; using html, css, JavaScript, all three coding languages with no debug mode at all, just a stab in the dark guessing game. I wanted to have a neat website, you see.  So where my bad programming with VBA results in error messages and yellow highlighted lines, the inept JavaScript programming results in a blank. It just doesn't do anything, and I end up looking through my handiwork in total confusion, looking for semi-colons and curly brackets, as illustrated in this week's pic:

Please note that I couldn't remember the names of any real laptop making companies nor what the back parts of a computer look like. 

After finally getting the script to do something, I have to get it to do what I actually envisioned it to do, which means inserting an endless series of "alert" boxes in an effort to pinpoint the parts where the written code has diverged from my inner vision. My inner vision can swing right by brackets and misspelled variables without a trip up, this is one of the marvelous things human brains can do. We can run a preposterously illogical program in our heads, we can compile almost anything, no matter how sloppy it's written. 

I easily picked up JavaScript from free iPhone apps, because it's comparatively easy if you know a little C.  It uses C type script, which Ive learned from a beginners guide that my wife got me, that I didn't think would be useful but thought would be fun and it turned out both. When I say easily picked up, of course, I mean just enough to write web pages that do things that are somewhat related to what I wanted them to do like the shadow of a cone is related to the taste of ice cream. Still making the hand shadows and waiting for that sweet taste of functionality

And another change in direction, I'll shake off you readers yet!

I learned many valuable things during my Year of Moving Constantly (covered in my previous blog series 6 Migrations - link to be updated post post).  The primary lesson: Do not keep more than you can swim with (one hand free). 

I have adhered to this valuable principle in all my efforts to build readership of this blog, and this post is one of many occasions where the enhanced mobility made possible by the light readership of the blog has rewarded this adherence. Yes, I'm changing direction again and starting a new series. No, this does NOT mean I won't EVER return to previous series. Think of this blog as a sort of verbal TV station where they do a LOT of pilots and they still haven't cemented a programming schedule but they never ever do reruns. YEs!

New pilot: Gateway to the Future - a brutally honest account of my personal attempt to learn computer programming, or "coding" as the young people call it. Lingo is important. My journey to VR will include many new terms, like "VR" which stands for "Virtual Reality", which is the future, especially for old people like me, who will be the first old people to be plugged into a VR cable and left to rot on a plastic recliner in a room strongly resembling a closet by our ungrateful children. That's if we're lucky. That's what this quest is all about. I don't mind the thought of living in video games at the end of my life, but I definitely want to be able to hack the system enough to verify that the attendants are changing my diapers and linens. Especially if the attendants are Russian. They might be robots, of course. So much the better, then I will be the secret boss of the living center, controlling everyone's meds and room assignments, scheduling snack time, who gets first dibs on the whirlpool. Obviously I've thought about it a lot. But first, I'll have to learn "coding". Don't say programming online. They'll tear you apart in the forums. It's like admitting you only know Visual Basic (wipes away tears - vicious little bastards). 

Which brings me to the first installment of Gateway to the Future, learning Visual Basic for Applications, which is super easy to do if you have MS Excel, which I do, and you like it, which I do. Excel is the best thing Microsoft ever did. As a matter of fact it might be the only good thing Microsoft ever did. I'm thinking about it, but no sense in wasting too much time...

I've actually taken a few stabs at learning programming in the past, one a long time ago, in high school, in the computer lab, when a friend who was TA'ing in the computer lab and who I played this King Kong banana throwing game with (I was not taking computer lab, I was TA'ing across the hall, don't remember anything about it as I spent all my time in the computer lab or riding around with my friends) showed me how to call up a list of Basic commands from the DOS prompt. I remember the mindless enjoyment I had, typing at the prompt, watching the files and directories whiz by, and then typing DEBUG and something else and suddenly seeing a column of characters and gibberish, all hex numbers, and discovering that I was seeing a text file Character by Character, as it was actually written on the disk itself!  I was amazed , but I was also thinking a lot about girls and dice and sci fi novels at the time, and we didn't have a home computer, and I will totally give up on something, at the drop of a hat, so I never learned more. 

Later, during one of my many spans of unemployed time, I took a stab at learning Visual Basic.Net, which seems to have flickered in and out of existence in the time since then, and I don't really understand what it's for now and can't afford to re-learn and there's so much free stuff to learn that there's no point. I quite enjoyed that experience, to the point that I eventually made a picture viewer for my web page, where people could click through some of my drawings that I'd scanned. But eventually my unemployment ran out and I had to go back to work at various horrible temp jobs and had no time to return to it until now. 

And I discovered that not only could you record macros in Excel, which I had used often and on some rare occasions even for actual work, but it would actually generate VBA code as you recorded and you could edit it!  It was on a par with the time my wife showed me the board editor in Age of Mythology. I was amazed that Microsoft had included something fun in their office software - but of course, it was for Excel. I eventually got a for Dummies book on Excel programming, and midway through that book, I experienced my major insight on computers and my relationship to them: I hated and feared computers for the same reasons I hate and fear air travel; total loss of control.  You are in the maddeningly indifferent hands of others, subject to their soul-sucking security checks; bag probes, password requirements, security questions, long lines, progress bars, enforced bare-footedness (an ancient Assyrian technique for humiliating prisoners), swirly word pictures that don't make a recognizable word!  

The solution? For air travel, to find superman's fortress and steal his green crystal (if you dare run through the gigantic hologram of Marlon Brando, denouncing you in a voice like thunder! - it's just an alarm system, but superman is coming and he is very swift and fast) that is to say there is no solution but the proud highway, meaning road trip. 

But for computers there is a solution, the green crystal is out there and you can steal it from them, we are aged but cunning and I still have a day job thank Christ. Many my age have no net, and face the grim prospect of mass competition with the other career refugees, learning to program in some language they will come to despise in "coding boot camps" with masses of other bewildered old timers, now rendered useless by the creepy millennials in Feel the Bern T-shirts, waving batons (crafted to look like light sabers) and herding us and our children to the vast tent cities accumulating just outside the inner city cosplay-grounds for twenty somethings where they work. 

I will be avoiding the boot-camp type learning system for now, as I prefer to learn at my own pace (think glacier), but I'm not above jumping in if the financial opportunity presents, like an old people scholarship or a bequest. 

Back to the VBA for Excel book, and my quest to learn to learn coding. Upon experiencing the epiphany, I made a goal that I would make a game written in VBA and configure it as an Add-in that anyone with a copy of Excel could install, but since then I resolved on another goal which has put the Excel game on the back burner: To rework the hagenart website with JavaScript. I resolved on this goal because I picked up some JavaScript from a free app, (which I will credit and discuss in time), and JavaScript is fun and maybe I take too readily to quick and easy and I'm tired of all the remarks on Stack overflow. 

Also, with html and JavaScript I'll be able to put actual examples on this blog! Maybe, not sure of the support