Checking my notes, my task list has ‘antagonist background/POV’ stuff that I don’t know if it should be included at all and setting flavour stuff that will have to go in at reedit. Ah… except that one there, that needs to go in. Ok, tomorrow.

Once I’ve proofed this I’ll have to get it looked at to see does it say what I think it says; I’ve stolen the title from Attempt II, theres a bunch of characters who’ve been written in as I did the scenes, I need a big chunky clean-eyes continuity check – but that can wait until I’ve made sure there are no dead sentences and remaining ‘[insert scene X here]‘ flags left…

So far so good.

So while I’ve been sitting here writing away – questionnaires are done last week and sent to everyone, this week I shall mostly be badgering people to respond (9% resonse rate so far) and starting to book people for interviews. In discussions with Uber on a somewhat related topic I discovered that I have difficulty ingesting information off web pages that arent’ laid out like news-papers anymore – I’m better if its academic papers printed off. Since this is the Green era, I usually use two sheets to the side of A4 so I’m reading A5 and its like microprint.

What was I talking about? Oh yes, so while I’m writing up all the scrawl and scribblings that I have accumulated while actually doing this thing properly – plan, do, document – I’ve stacked up a pile of mp3′s into Winamp so that they can spin and feed the scrobbler on LastFm so that it knows what I like – though frankly since my tastes span from Ash to Iron Maiden and Daft Punk through Juno Reactor out to Kylie (‘what taste’ I hear you sarky sods at the back…) – I don’t know if that machine will be able to pick any coherent thread out of it all.

Mostly I’m still writing as part of my empirically tested ‘staying up late to sleep through sunday nights’ program. I’ve done a pilot test of this time-lapse portrait notion on which I have blogged previously and come to the conclusion that someone who likes to look at me a lot more than I do is needed for all the photoshop aligning and resizing to make the daily shots line up. I should have seen this coming, I don’t really like seeing myself in mirrors so having to stare at me while I lined up my own eyeline and nostrils was probably foreseeable as not being the path to truth and happiness.

Aanyway, I’ve got a stack of Cadfael books to read – I figure dark ages mysteries are a good analog for society when writing 40Krp… ish… kinda…. oh nevermind.

* Undergrad instead of postgrad MBA or such because I’m a Computational Physicist/Petroleum Engineer by prior training, I knew nothing of these squishy arts things like business and HR and marketing. Also, it was three years, I had three years remaining on station and so why not? When I do an MBA it’ll be a year out to do it properly.

So if people are arranging events which you don’t want me to attend and stumble round drunkenly with my pants on my head you  should run them on the 21st or the 22nd.

I’m sure something will crop up soon.

Or to put it another way – thz r srs blog, thse mai srs thinkz.

I dug out a bunch of papers, did some research, you can imagine a cut scene montage of me scouring through journals for ethics articles which actually question the root ethicism of the profession of the people to whom these journals were being targeted, printing, stapling, reading, chucking over my should, drinking overpriced branded coffee, reading blogs, printing, punching, using treasury tags, reading art books on rock posters, printing, reading and eventually arriving back here.

The general gist of my findings are this – to quote O’Shaughnessy, J. and O’Shaughnessy, N. J. (2002) “Whatever influence marketing has had on the creation of a consumerism tied to the narrowest form of hedonism, it has been in the role more of a facilitator than of manufacturer. If someone were to insist that we name a single culprit, it would be the development of a strong value orientation that puts unrestrained freedom at the forefront.” A later response to the O’Shaughnessy’s by Andrew V. Abela (2006) takes issue with their points but doesn’t provide anything concrete. Abela notes “the existence of a causal relationship [between the development of consumerism and the rise of modern marketing] and its likely direction remain unclear”.

Marketing and consumerism took off at the same time. Which came first?

Ref:

O’Shaughnessy, J. and O’Shaughnessy, N.J. (2002) “Marketing, the consumer society and hedonism”, European Journal of Marketing, Vol.36 Nos 5/6, pp.524-47

Abela, A.V. (2006) “Marketing and consumerism a response to O’Shaughnessy and O’Shaughnessy”, European Journal of Marketing, Vol.40 Nos 1/2, pp.5-16

Xaoss was here when I analysed and a little bit of him died when he saw the tide of red fragmented files that filled the screen.

Actually that image probably makes it look better than it was since there was another defrag before that one which didn’t do as much.

The reason it took me so long to get around to doing this was that my hard drive was too full to defragment properly, something which only aggravated the situation. But a few DVDs full of data later space had been created and the defrag, which took quite a while, had created a lovely calming blue sea on the screen. It really makes a big difference, stuff just happens more quickly. And most importantly battlefield maps load more quickly to facilitate a different sort of fraging.

So be nice to your computer, treat it to a metaphorical hot bath and a massage.* Defragment your hard drive today.

*Note the word metaphorical in this sentence. The  author does not recommend giving your computer a bath of any sort, and massages are only likely to unplug cables or result in electric or static shocks.