domain change stuff
» Wednesday, October 31, 2007

If all goes as planned, the URL for my weblog will soon be switching from a blogspot host to www.thepalinode.com. I'll probably be changing over on Monday, which means that my site will be unavailable for anywhere between ten minutes and twenty-four hours.

I tried to make this happen back in February, but for a series of ridiculous reasons that I still don't understand but may be related to my own stupidity, it didn't work. I'm hoping that everything goes smoothly, and that come this time next week, you'll be reading this at a swanky .com address. Update yer bookmarks and all that.

Carry on!

Labels: metablog

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x365: 28 of 365: eric the amway predator
» Tuesday, October 30, 2007

When I moved to Calgary in 1993, I made a bizarre and ill-advised promise to say yes to anything that came my way. That, I reasoned, would show me the path to adventure and enlightenment.

You do not find adventure and enlightenment in Calgary. You will find a population split between the boring and the desperate, between those who are steadily and happily climbing the wealth ladder and those at the bottom, crippled or crazy, who roll around and curse the ladder and the receding Timberland soles above. You may find some good drugs, but for that kind of thing you need a fine nose for situations where a 'no' will save you a lot of pain.

Saying Yes to everything will also lead you into the dank netherworld of network marketing.

I worked at a watch repair at the time. After work I would go to my favourite coffee shop (where Garnet worked) and sit at the bench to read, smoke, drink, write, smoke etcetera. One of the subdirectives of the Yes imperative was: always take someone up on a conversation. I believed at the time that every soul had something worthwhile to share. Calgary showed me otherwise.

Usually the people who sat next to me on the bench were fuzzed-out alcoholics or street people, but on one afternoon a slim man with a short frizz of blond hair and a navy suit took a seat on the bench a couple of chairs down to me.

Hi there, he said. He was one of those people that seemed stretched out: four long limbs and a long neck ball-and-socketed into a long smooth torso. Even the features of his face seemed stretched out, with a slightly receding chin. The effect altogether was charming - you couldn't imagine such a gangly, boyish man being any kind of imposition.

Hi, I responded.

We talked for the next half-hour. I have no idea what we chatted about, but I had the definite feeling that he agreed with me on matters great and trivial. We liked the same books and music, had travelled to the same places, and so forth. When I packed my book and cigarettes up to go, he unfolded an arm and held out his hand for a good hearty shake. I'm Eric Saunders,* he said.

Aidan ______,** I responded.

The next evening my phone rang. It was Eric.

Hey Aidan, he said, I hope you don't mind I looked you up in the phone book. I just had a special feeling about you. There's an opportunity for you to make a lot of money while having a great time, and I want to share it with you. Let's have a cup of coffee and I'll tell you all about it.

Here is the caveat on the Yes Imperative: Say Yes until it costs you more than a cup of coffee.

Yes, I said.

When I got there he had set himself up at a small table in the corner partially obscured by a hanging burlap bag that was supposed to smell of coffee beans but had this weird goaty odour. Eric got to work, drawing sketches, pulling out diagrams, telling me again about the wonderful opportunities that awaited me at WWDB.

What's WWDB?

WWDB stands for WorldWide DreamBuilders, Eric said. He pointed to a pen sketch of a globe, crowned by the corporate tetragrammaton, on a piece of scrap paper.

But what do you do? And what am I supposed to do?

Once more Eric started to diagram, but I'd sat through this kind of flow-charted come-on before in university.

This is network marketing, right?

Eric looked up from a diagram that, hand to god, described the shape of a pyramid.

Have I told you about the levels you can attain?

Why, no.

*

A few days later I was sitting in the back of Eric's Honda Civic on the way to a WWDB orientation session, chatting with Eric's wife, who was a partner in World Wide Dream Builders. We were talking politics. Eric and Eric's wife agreed with each other that the NDP were a well-meaning group, but under their left-wing social safety net, it took away your freedom to fail.

Eric got a bit excited by this phrase. He rotated his long head around to repeat himself. You need the freedom to fail, Aidan.

I need the freedom to jump out of a moving car, I thought.

We drove to a building that turned out to be a church hall. The meeting was held in the basement. A smell of baking and spoiled milk clung to the upholstered chairs. The crowd was a mix of young suburban couples, slightly scruffy guys that looked like they'd been given five bucks to attend, and a few like me - young men with rumpled shirts and part-time jobs.

You are going to love the speaker, Eric told me. He's a blast. He's Diamond.***

The Diamond speaker turned out to be a florid-faced man with a silvery razorback mullet and a habit of keeping one hand in his pocket to make his gestures seem more emphatic. I don't quite know how this trick works, but whenever he took his left hand out, you knew that whatever he was about to say - well, it was going to be good.

And it was. He told us all how we could rise up the ranks, make Emerald status, make Diamond status, make hundreds of thousands of dollars. You just had to want it badly enough. You just needed to believe in your own power to make your dreams come true. People clapped at the end.

Eric and his wife dropped me off. They gave me a big cardboard box. Those are some samples of our products, Eric said. They'll give you an idea of what we sell.

I opened the box in my apartment. It was full of Amway products.

*

I discovered a caveat to the Yes Imperative: Don't sell Amway, whatever else you do. Sell your ass by the hostel if necessary, but don't sell Amway products, and don't sell people on the idea of selling Amway.

I called up Eric the week after and told him that I was giving myself the freedom to fail, and could he come by and pick up his box?

A few months later I saw Eric in the coffee shop at the table by the goaty smelling burlap bag, drawing a rhomboid on a piece of paper and telling some guy with a gigantic wool sweater and woolly blond dreads that he had the power to fulfill his dreams. I watched, just to see if the dreadlocked guy got his hair caught on the bag.

No such luck.


*

*Clever bastard spent half an hour imitating me and then gave me his full name in the hope that I would unconsciously fall in line and give out my last name.

**And I fell for it.

***Like most of these companies, World Wide relies on a ranking system based on how many people you've pulled in along after you. Like all network marketing schemes, you make much better money by getting people to sell your product than by selling it yourself. Diamond and up members preside over an empire of suckers.

Labels: x365

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the chevalier of second life
» Monday, October 29, 2007

Earlier this evening, having repudiated First Life completely, because I'm tired of using a cane to get around, I packed up my stuff and moved to Second Life. That place lets me fly, teleport and spend money. I don't see any of that happening in First Life. Especially the money spending. And downloading Quick Time. How different it all is.

As you can see, I have taken advantage of Second Life's flexibility to reinvent myself as a jut-jawed broken-nosed pouty-lipped coconut-coloured bow-legged wide-butted paunchy chevalier of my new country.

A country that I call WhycantIteleportoffthisislandia.

Labels: second life

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x365: 27 of 365: bryan adams
» Sunday, October 28, 2007

One day my boss comes in to the store and tells me that Bryan Adams will be dropping by later on. He's a collector like me, my boss says, and I think Bryan Adams is a collector completely unlike you. My boss looks a bit like Groucho Marx on steroids.

He hands me two CDs of Bryan Adams music and two toy guitars. Get him to sign these, he says, and adds: you give him whatever he wants. I say Of course, not understanding that what ordinary people want is not remotely similar to what celebrities expect as their due.

Later that afternoon a very compact Bryan Adams enters the store, accompanied by a girl dressed in something black and complicated. I've never seen a bona fide celebrity up close before, and I'm amazed at how carefully detailed Adams is. His clothing is simple but fitted to his body with precision. The jacket and pants match the colour of his hair perfectly, which is in turn arranged just so, with each hair snipped to its correct length. He looks like a statuette, as if he were his own award for being Bryan Adams.

Celebrities are premeditated people.

I say hello and let him know to ask me if has any questions or needs. He doesn't exactly look at me, but he gets an expression like he's just thrown up in his mouth a bit. I decide to ignore him unless it's absolutely necessary. After a few minutes in the stacks, he comes out with an antiquarian French book on Tunisia. He tells the girl and a man with a British accent, who has the look of a manager who's slowly slid into the position of friend, that it will be perfect for a French friend of his. Then he flips the book open and points to the price.

What's this? Bryan Adams says.

I look. That's a fifty, I say.

Look closer, he says.

I already know what he's talking about, but I look anyway. Beneath the penciled-in fifty, there's a rubbed-out thirty-five.

The book was once priced thirty-five dollars, I say. That may have the listed price at a previous book store.

I'm not paying fifty dollars for a thirty-five dollar book, Bryan Adams announces, like I've tried to serve him cat food instead of paté.

There is a brief silence.

No problem, I say.

So what can you do for me? he asks.

Give him whatever he wants. Sure, why not.

How does twenty-five dollars sound?

Okay, he nods.

Great! I say, thinking pay and get out now please. That's twenty-five dollars and a dollar seventy-five GST* for a total of twenty-six seventy-five.

Adams places twenty-five dollars on the counter.

I don't pay GST, Bryan Adams says.**

I'm sorry? I say. The girl and the manager are darting their eyes around. Bryan Adams is scowling. I'm realizing that this is not one of those crazy stories where the celebrity encounters the guy at the bookstore and invites him to be part of his wacky entourage.

I don't pay GST, he repeats.***

At this, I have nothing to say. It's less than two bucks, but it seems so tiny and petty that I can't relent. Maybe my boss and Bryan are tight, and I'll be fired at the end of the day, but all I can think is pay the damn tax already.

In the end the manager breaks. He digs in his pocket and pulls out the change. Bryan Adams continues to scowl, but the awkwardness of the moment has passed. I give him his book. Then I remember the other half of my mission.

My boss asked me if you'd be willing to autograph these.

I place the CDs and the guitars on the counter. Adams surveys the materials, pulls out a marker and signs the CDs. He indicates the toy guitars with the butt end of the marker and mutters, I'm not signing those.

And out he goes.

***

*The GST is the Canadian Goods and Services Tax. It's a federal sales tax paid on nearly every item bought and sold in the country.

**Yes he does.

***Fuck.

Labels: x365

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x365: 26 of 365: Firman
» Saturday, October 27, 2007

How is it possible that anyone could be named Firman? But kindergarten provided you, with a bowl cut running to seed and teeth in transition. That was the year we all lost our front teeth. You never spoke, but you would laugh often. Your laughter came out in a series of chuffs. One day you fell off the monkey bars and Mrs. Schnare came running, bracketed you with her hands while you squealed wordlessly in the pitch of a stepped-on dog. I went to a different school the next year and didn't see you again until grade nine. You were taller and stronger than everyone else, your limbs stuffed into bleached jeans and jean jacket. I recognized you by your hair, which was cut in the same unmistakable shaggy bowl. You recognized me too. Hi Aidan, you said.

Labels: x365

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crazy turtle orgy!
» Friday, October 26, 2007

These be the turtles, what live in the pool, in the lobby of the building where I work. In the afternoons the big one lifts itself up from the water and sits on the rocks. The small ones climb up on the big one's shell and peer over the lip of the pool. All the better to stare down the humans and plan their revenge against us.

Labels: turtles

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in case of Phantom Zone failure, consult chart
» 

Labels: awesome

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x365: 25 of 365: Garnet
» Thursday, October 25, 2007

At my favourite coffee shop in Calgary, the one where I could sit with a cup of coffee after work and talk to the alcoholic ex-journalist lisping through his missing front teeth, the snaggle-toothed girl with the corkscrew blonde hair and the trenchoat with stained cuffs, the Amway predator in the navy suit, the twenty year old guy who derived his entire sense of self from smoking a pipe, the local gay AA chapter that met there on Wednesday evenings, you were hired to stand behind the counter and treat me like shit.

At first glance you were strikingly handsome, but you smelled bad. Did you jog to work in the morning and let the sweat just infiltrate your clothing? Did you rub your clothes in your sweat on Monday, just to get that aroma going strong by Wednesday? And holy shit, buddy, you wore leather pants one day. Don't deny it.

Despite these manifest character flaws, I treated you like I treated everyone else who worked there: with courtesy and familiarity. You repayed my good will by refusing to meet my eye and speaking in monosyllables, then complaining to your coworkers that I was hitting on you. Your coworkers laughed because they liked me, but more than that, they hated you.

A few years later in another city I walked into a coffee shop and there you were, standing behind the counter. Fuck. As I was drinking my coffee, you slapped me on the shoulder, leaned in close and said "I work here on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons".

Thanks for small courtesies.

Labels: x365

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x365: 23 & 24 of 365: Mssrs. Windmill & Sheet Metal
» Wednesday, October 24, 2007

On the official date that I'd set for my independence from my parents, I boarded a bus in Saskatoon bound for Calgary. I'd brought nothing but some cash, some clothes and a couple of books. I remember one of them being Michael Ondaatje's In The Skin Of A Lion. If I had to guess at the other, I'd put money down on Vineland.

The Saskatoon-Calgary bus is an eight hour trip. It chews up mile after mile of prairie, passing through grain elevator towns with names like Cereal, Oyen, Zealandia and Netherhill. Every so often the bus turns off the highway and and pulls up to a buiding with an inobtrusive white-on-green card in the corner of a window saying "bus". Then you sit and let the minutes flick by, or you step out for a smoke and take some command of the time with a cigarette.

I had no idea what I was going to do once I got to Calgary. Like a lot of humanities undergrads, I had no skills beyond being able to convey an air of friendliness, which made a sucker for the retail and restaurant trades. I had bought a sleeping bag and a white shirt a few days before, which I figured would come in handy. As it turned out, they did, but that's a whole other story involving comfortable sleep by night and a natty appearance by day.

The bus pulled up at a truck stop on the outskirts of Hannah. Over the scratchy PA system the driver told us all that we had thirty minutes to get some supper. The light had already begun to gather on the western edge of the horizon, and I realized it would be dark by the time we hit Calgary.

I ordered a burger and sat down at one of the round brown melamine tables. The restaurant was huge and empty, like a retrofitted small-town arena, and the bus load of passengers seemed to float along the counters and settle at benches and tables. I lit a cigarette.

A man approached my table. For some reason he reminded me of a cartoon rat - a scruffy cartoon rat in his mid-thirties with a mullet and sideburns the colour of caramel. He asked me for a cigarette, which I gave him, but instead of drifting off, he took a seat and started puffing away.

After a few words, another man came and sat down, a tall guy with a baseball cap and a smile that made him look as if he was just waking up from a really good sleep. He wasn't looking for a cigarette; he just wanted someone to talk to.

Without prompting, he told us that he was doing research on windmills on the Canadian prairies. In fact, he was following a filmmaker around who was doing a documentary on windmills on the Canadian prairies. He told us that there were a thousand fascinating things about windmills, although he didn't let us in on any of them.

The man who looked like a cartoon rat continued to smoke through the windmill guy's monologue, staring into the middle distance and flicking ashes on the floor. When the discussion shifted to techniques of filming and documenting windmills, he reared himself up and fixed his attention on the speaker.

"You're talking about windmills?" he said.

"That's right," said the windmill guy.

The man went back to smoking his cigarette.

"What do you do?" I asked.

"I'm into sheet metal," he answered.

Labels: x365

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meal planning
» 

Palinode: What do you want for supper then?

Schmutzie: I don’t know. I don’t want any fat or calories. I just want a big salad.

Palinode: Our fridge is all out of vegetables.

Schmutzie: I blame Elaine Benes for the whole big salad thing.

Palinode: You know that Elaine Benes is a fictional character.

Schmutzie: So?

Palinode: You can’t blame someone who doesn’t really exist.

Schmutzie: She exists.

Palinode: Only in your mind.

Schmutzie: She was written down and performed. She exists in a lot of minds. That makes her more real.

Palinode: She doesn’t exist in my mind.

Schmutzie: You called her ‘she’. How did you know that if she doesn’t exist in your mind?

Palinode: Well duh, Elaine is a girl’s name.

Schmutzie: I imagine watching Seinfeld must be difficult for you.

Palinode: Completely. Who are Jerry and George always talking to?

Schmutzie: You’re like, Why are they always sitting on the same side of the table?

Palinode: Yeah. Are they gay? That doesn’t seem part of the subtext to me.

Schmutzie: And you wonder why are there all those scenes with people walking into an empty office and talking to the desk?

Palinode: You know, I always thought that show would make a lot more sense if you inserted a character named Elaine into most of the scenes.

Schmutzie: There is.

Palinode: Not in my mind.

Labels: conversations

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no new low left
» Tuesday, October 23, 2007

Sometimes I squint at this image and I think I'm coming close to understanding it. Then a stray thought intrudes and it all falls apart.

As far as I can tell, comic book artists of the fifties understood that the chief threat to our cities would not be poor urban planning, or Soviet nuclear bombs, or terrorists at the controls of a jet, but a miniature Earth with a grudge against our infrastructure.

Also, what the hell kind of phone is that guy using?

*

Image found on Again With The Comics

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good for ganders, at least
» Monday, October 22, 2007

In Sunday's New York Times, Deborah Solomon interviews Marjane Satrapi, author of the graphic novel (and now feature-length cartoon) "Persepolis," which tells the tale of a young girl growing up in and out of revolutionary Iran. The interview is okay until Solomon steps into presumptive territory with the question You're a Muslim, yes? Satrapi's answer: I'm not a religious person at all.

There goes that angle, you think, but Solomon clearly wants a way in to a discussion about fundamentalist Islam. When she brings up the veiling of women, Satrapi points out that women abide by strange codes of dress all over, which prompts this absolutely awesome exchange:

Are you suggesting that veiling and unveiling women are equally reductive? I disagree.

We have to look at ourselves here also. Why do all the women get plastic surgery? Why? Why? Why should we look like some freaks with big lips that look like an anus? What is so sexy about that? What is sexy about having something that looks like a goose anus?

Well, Ms. Satrapi, I hope you're reading this, because I'm about to tell you what.

1. It is commonly known that the goose is the most attractive of all the birds.


2. The goose is also the most pitiless of all the birds, against which men dash their ardour like storm-tossed ships into cliffs.


3. The beak is hard and orange, the neck is a trifle long, the wings are a potential hazard and the webbed feet are ridiculous. But the anus - come on, that stuff's the best.


4. Whereas the beauty and sweetness of song birds may inspire strong emotions, they tend to fly away and roost in inaccessible places.


5. Angelina Jolie is actually a goose surgically grafted onto a human body. She hides her long neck and beak under a wig, from which her true eyes peer. What, you've never noticed?

And those are only the most compelling reasons.

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three and a half minutes of david lynch
» 

Sometimes I spend too much time staring at the computer screen. I feel bored, anxious, but the pixels keep me locked into place. After a while, what can I do with this paralysis and boredom but turn it into something entertaining? I wish I could go for a walk, but until that day comes round, here are some short David Lynch clips.

David Lynch's "Clean Up New York" spot

This is an anti-littering PSA for New York City. Do not watch this clip if you have a phobia of or even the mildest antipathy towards rats. I never found rats disturbing until I watched this clip. Now I have a new appreciation of Winston Smith's rodent fear.




David Lynch's "Parisienne People" Cigarette Ad

Pretty much everything that people loved and hated about David Lynch in the mid-'90s can be found in this spot. If you like piles of fish inexplicably leaping upward at the behest of spooky guys in suit jacket and bowtie, all in the service of selling you cigarettes, then this is the commercial of your dreams. Your horrible dreams.




David Lynch's opinion on product placement

It's obvious that Lynch has no problems with making commercials, but he takes a very dim view of product placement in movies. Not safe for work, unless you work at Total Fucking Bullshit Inc., in which case people will think you're answering the phone.




I Am The Wolfman

Recently Lynch made a series of commercials for the Playstation 2 with the slogan "Welcome to the Third Place". I don't know where The Third Place is or what they do there, but I don't ever want to go. But I love this ad, which looks and feels more like Michel Gondry than David Lynch.

Labels: video

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headache, despair or prelude to display of awesome telekinetic powers
» Sunday, October 21, 2007

Have I shown you this before? September 2004 in Karlsruhe. I bought a secondhand Pentax in a nearby store and walked out shooting pictures.

Now that I think about it, Bryan Adams was on tour through Germany and Austria at that point. She may have been sensing a massive disturbance in The Taste.

Labels: photos

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x365: 22 of 365: ms. jackson
» 

Midway through grade three, my parents pulled me out of the class taught by Mrs. Houghton. I was sent to an elementary school a few miles out of town, a small white schoolhouse with two classrooms.

You had long brown braided hair and smiled at every student in your class. You read us The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, and you cried at Aslan's death. Or should I say, you cried at the children's grief. Even at the age of eight, I understood that you read this book every year to your students, crying every time.

Years later, when I was doing spectacularly badly in high school, my mother wondered aloud if I would have benefited from staying in Mrs. Houghton's class for the rest of grade three. I would have survived the experience, but I would have lost infinitely more by never having met you.

Labels: x365

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x365: 21 of 365: mrs. houghton
» Saturday, October 20, 2007

Derek called you Shoutin' Houton, but you didn't need to shout. Your voice possessed a certain tone that could silence everyone, so that your insults, delivered to an eight year old in front of the entire class, were delivered in complete silence. First you didn't like me because I was given accelerated English material. Then I disagreed with a mark you gave me on a spelling test. You didn't like my cursive, and chose to mark me incorrect. You informed me that my parents thought I was clever, but I wasn't. It occurs to me now that if you'd really thought there was a problem with me, you would have spoken to my parents. I'm not sure how lasting the satisfaction can be from insulting children, but I imagine you wrung as much pleasure our of it as your grim heart could allow.

That was 1979. You're probably dead, and that saddens me, because I'll never have the chance now to hurt you back.

Labels: x365

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two cats
» 

One of them sits still and poses for the camera. The other is so fidgety that this is the sharpest, stillest shot I could manage. However you please.

Labels: cats, photos

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fossil conflict
» 

Lonely coelacanth in need of a good home


It's morning! You know who doesn't like morning? Hungover sods, that's who. Palinode and Schmutzie lounge in bed like the hungover sods they are.

Palinode: When we got together, people told me you were empathetic.

Schmutzie: Really?

Palinode: Would you describe yourself as empathetic?

Schmutzie: ...

Schmutzie: Why are you asking me this again?

Palinode: Because I still don't have a pet coelacanth.

Schmutzie: That is totally illegal!

Palinode: You say you have all this empathy, and yet you miss out on my need for a coelacanth to call my own.

Schmutzie: Empathy is not like being psychic.

Palinode: All our friends have been picking up on my coelacanth vibe. They've taken me aside and asked me point blank why we don't have one yet. What can I tell them?

Schmutzie: I'm not stopping you from getting a coelacanth.

Palinode: Oh, you're not stopping me. But you're not being proactive either. Where was my coelacanth last Christmas?

Schmutzie: I'm not getting you a coelacanth.

Palinode: I would have named it Irvine. It would have lived in the tub.

Schmutzie: It would have been gross.

Palinode: I don't really want a coelacanth, you know.

Schmutzie: Really.

Palinode: It's just that I feel so alive when we fight.


Lucky man strokes his pet coelacanth lovingly

Labels: conversations, fish

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x365: 20 of 365: Star Wars
» Thursday, October 18, 2007

In the summer of 1995 I was dating a girl five years my junior. She hadn't met any of my friends, so one afternoon I took her to a restaurant with couches and fancy pizzas with mandarin orange slices. This was considered interesting in 1995. My friends were all around my age, born between '69 and '72, a collection of grad students, slackers and people with an embarrassing concentration of Rush and Vangelis albums.*

At some point the conversation turned to movies, and then to the first movie we'd ever seen in a theatre. She had seen The Aristocats, back when Disney classics rotated through theatres every five-seven years or so.** As for the rest of us, we had lost our movie virginity, every last one of us, at Star Wars.

I saw Star Wars at the age of six. It was playing at the Cove Theatre in Halifax's north end, which at the time usually played more adult fare. The place may have been seedy and small, but to my eyes the place was huge. We walked in on a cartoon already playing, and the darkness of the theatre combined with the bright screen gave me a sense of floating in space. Then the movie opened on a field of stars, and I was utterly lost.


***

*I was one of the only members of that circle who'd grown up on groups like The Smiths and Billy Bragg. The rest of the group tolerated my taste in music, provided I never mention Morrissey in their presence.

**Does anyone else remember this? For the longest time, Disney wouldn't release their classic cartoons on home video. Instead, they would release them in theatres every so often.

Labels: x365

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cleaning house
» 

In my last post I scanned in some of my handwriting. Sometimes I write in all caps, as you can see in this scrap I wrote at some far flung point in the past:



The only thing is, I'm not sure whether I'm the author of those words. I may have taken it down from something I was reading, but since I usually write down the source, I think it's safe to lay claim to it.

I also lay claim to this:



That's the latest marine sensation, the act that's wowing them in the waves: Wubsy, Flubsy, and Lousy Tail, the Fish Derby Singers. For which I apologize.

Labels: fish

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x365: 19 of 365: pilot v5 hi-tecpoint pen
» 

Labels: x365

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all hail Dark Room
» Wednesday, October 17, 2007

Wow. Remember when all applications were really, really simple? When the features were few but the interface was clean? When the point of the program was its usefulness, not its ability to load on feature after feature for 'the professional user,' with all sorts of shortcuts whose ostensible purpose was to save time but actually resulted in a complete loss of productivity as you spent the day diddling with mail merge and 'publish to blog' extensions?

With Dark Room, you can take a nostalgic trip back to those days. When men were men and Windows was 3.1 and Wordperfect was 5.1. Dark Room gives you a black screen and a column of green Courier New text. Except for a few features here and there - statistics with word count, control over window opacity (that may be a Vista-only feature, but don't quote me) - there's nothing you can do outside of Window's native controls. Open a file. Save a file. Undo, redo, select all, find and find again. Cut, copy, paste.

You can tweak the visual settings to your heart's content, if that's what contents your heart. But the retro look of green-on-black in a monospaced font is too clean, too nostalgically pure to muck with. It's like putting Joy Division on the stereo after listening to Flaming Lips for 24 hours straight. Most interesting and gratifying of all, there's no attempt to reproduce the look of a blank page; Dark Room embraces its computer environment.

The only concession I've made to bells-and-whistles modernity is to cut the opacity. I've done that because a) it looks so fucking cool and b) I can see the weather and time settings on my sidebar. This is the best of the old and the new, and I'm determined to enjoy writing on it until the inevitable army of third party plug-ins marches in to dilute the experience.

Here it is in all its nekkid glory:



And here's how I use it:



A note on the desktop: I hate desktop clutter, and since I'm such an offender, in digital and analog realms alike, I only keep items marked for immediate use. Otherwise, I find myself picking through useless shortcuts and ignoring items that I placed there and subsequently forgot about. With this arrangement, if I see something on the desktop, I use it or file it immediately.

My frequently used programs are all located on the Quick Launch menu in the task bar, which you can't see because I hide it. Because I'm just that way.

***

Note: Dark Room requires the Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 to run. I believe that Vista comes with .NET, but for XP/2000/2003 you may need to download it. I don't know a great deal about the in and outs of .NET, so you may want to do your own research.

For those of you who hate .NET but still like the sound of Dark Room, a guy named Duncan Jauncey (a name that reminds me inescapably of Chauncey Gardener) wrote a Java-based version called JDarkRoom. Coders may have weird libertarian beliefs and Doritos crumbs on their shirts, but god bless them all for doing what the rest of us are completely incapable of doing.

If you're reading this on a Mac and you use OS X 10.4 or later, you can use WriteRoom.

If you try it out and your computer blows up, it's not my fault.

To sum up:

• Dark Room (Windows XP/2000/2003/Vista)


• .NET Framework 2.0 (required for Windows)


• JDarkRoom (Java-based version of Dark Room)


• WriteRoom (for Mac)


• Not my fault if your computer catches fire.

If your computer were to catch fire, it would probably look like this. You would not be so lucky to have some guy giving you helpful instructions like "If this were a real life situation, the best strategy would be to move away from the laptop, quickly". Worth watching for the strange contrast between the narrator, who sounds a bit like a golf commentator, and the guys off-camera who say "Yeah!" every time another battery cell explodes.

*

UPDATE: Sgazetti from the well-worth-your-time Isoglossia points out that I neglect to mention the main selling point of Dark Room: in full screen mode, it provides a completely distraction-free writing environment - no notifications, no other windows, just you and the text. He goes so far as to call it "interesting