I recently found myself back at The Big Fun Glossary, which was a point of obsession a dozen years ago. It is the story of a college-aged punk rock slacker and his band of friends living in an old farmhouse in rural Virginia in the mid-90s, told in a wikipedia-type A to Z glossary. As a person who left college in 1995 and knocked around a farm state for my formative years, I took great interest in this, and ended up ripping off the entire idea, using the rough hosted wiki software on his site to start brain-dumping my own entries into a bunch of topics. This became The NecroKonicon.

I worked on The NecroKonicon on and off for about four years, although it was really more like a sudden burst of new writing, a few years of tweaks, and then a push to freeze the topics and push it into a paper book. The book itself didn’t sell at all (or, you could say it sold as well as any of my other books.) But I got a lot of comments and mails about it. And the people who started the Bloomington wiki at Bloomingpedia.org claim my site was one of their inspirations to get their own site going.

At some point, I moved all the topics to this site and made it a bunch of static HTML pages. After the book came out, I eventually pulled the site, partly because I didn’t want to potentially undercut book sales (dumb), but there were other reasons.

Now, I sometimes wonder what I should do with the site. I sometimes think about doing more work on it: updating pages, getting better pictures, adding new topics. Or maybe the “underside” of the site needs to be changed, like moved to some wiki software, or maybe like a blog platform.

There are a few things that make me waver on doing anything with this:

• A project like this is open-ended. Any time the glossary went off my radar, I’d get a (usually angry) email from someone, demanding correction of a topic. People love to do this. Certain people really love to do this, to a fault. It finally got to the point where I said the thing was frozen, and I would still get angered corrections. How did these people ever deal with print books? Did they write angry letters to Webster saying “NO IT’S COLOUR NOT COLOR YOU PIECE OF SHIT.”

• I think the culture of the internet and privacy and googling one’s own name has changed a lot between 2002 and today. Many times, when I added a person’s first and last name to the glossary, I would be the only search result on the internet for their name. Most of the time, these people never noticed. But now, everyone googles for their ex-girlfriend or high school friend, and everyone is on Facebook (or was). And some people get really offended when they find out they’re online. I hated receiving takedown requests from people, partly because I felt bad about hurting or offending them, but also because it usually meant I was “friends” with them in my head, or still remembered them, and they were not friends with me, or wanted no part in the project, or felt violated, or whatever. Also, having a person involved in multiple entries, then having to backtrack and edit them out or change their name to L________ diminished the work somehow.

• The idea of doing a “straight” project like this takes away from the amount of effort I can focus on my “main” writing, and there are only so many hours in the day.

• I feel like I can rehash the past only so much, and need to move on. I can’t be a person thinking “hey, remember 1992?” constantly. I know people who are like this, and it disturbs me on some level. I can’t fully explain it, but being stuck in the past bothers me. I need to be creating, not dredging.

But… it still calls to me. I often think about some way of turning these old entries into some sort of fiction book, or using the framework for making a hypertext book, or something.

The other possibility is something I started doing a long time ago, I think in the first year or two of this blog (then called a “journal,” because the term blog did not exist.) At that time, I’d hard-coded in a glossary of terms, maybe because I had Infinite Jest stuck in my head, or wanted to use hypertext more. I wanted to have the ability to mention “414 Mitchell” and then go to a popup or page that contained a definition and stories about the place I lived in Bloomington for two years. But I coded this by hand, and it was a huge pain in the ass.

I’ve thought about this more, and like the idea of using Wordpress shortcodes, like so a term surrounded in brackets becomes a link to a section of the web site with a bunch of pages of terms — or something. I need to think about this more. And it’s obviously something that’s a time-sink, so maybe I shouldn’t.

So a week ago, I decided to make a change, hobby-wise, and do something I’ve wanted to do for a long time: learn to play guitar.

I’ve been playing bass for about two and a half years now, after a recess of a few decades. And bass has been fun, but I’d hit a plateau, and thought I’d try something new. I’ve never really played guitar, although my stepdad had an ancient acoustic when I was a kid, and I learned like maybe two riffs, and used to mess with it a little. And I’d tried to resuscitate a few unplayable garage sale guitars when I was a teen, with no real success. (I remember getting a department store Les Paul clone with a snapped neck and trying to fashion a makeshift one from a piece of dimensional lumber, which didn’t work at all.)

So, I ordered a cheap guitar from Amazon. I got the lowest-end Squier Affinity Stratocaster, in the “beginner” pack, which included a tiny shoebox-sized amp I’ll never use, plus other paraphernalia like a bag, a tuner, some picks, and a strap. I also started scouring the web for any lessons or videos that would be helpful. I also have a copy of Rocksmith, which I used for bass, but which works for guitar, too.

The guitar: well, it was DOA out of the box. The jack screws were loose, hand-tight.  I took it apart, futzed with it, and it’s fine now. It looks very nice: a transparent blue, with a white pick guard. It’s a Strat, same size and design, with the three single-coil pickups, and same curves and lines as the more expensive cousin. The neck isn’t too bad, with a couple of sharp frets, but it was playable out of the box with no adjustment. It’s amazing to me that in the day of CNC machines and overseas factories, a hundred-dollar guitar is much more playable than what I’d find in a pawn shop for $100 back in high school or college.

Physically, it’s taking some time to get used to it. It’s much lighter and shorter than a bass, which is nice. The strings are much thinner, and closer together, which makes it feel much different to me. And playing chords is an alien process, as is using a pick. After a week, I am starting to be able to play some chords without my fat fingers dragging across other strings, but it’s going to take much more practice to move around and get used to it.

I’m having a lot of fun with it, though. There’s a complete different psychology to guitar, and it’s the reason I wanted to try it. I like and appreciate the bass, but it’s a different mindset, and I wanted to shift gears. I am not at the point where I can sit down and play complicated things yet, but it’s easy to turn on the distortion and Iommi away on some power chords.

Anyway, here’s the short list of what I’ve found useful for learning guitar:

• http://www.justinguitar.com - a great source of free lessons for beginners.
• http://get.yousician.com - a fun game with a guided learning path and lessons. I’m just trying the free option, which is time-limited per day.
• I got the Dummies book, but I’d only say it is half-useful. I don’t like the dead humor tone in it, and I think they burn a hundred pages on useless stuff before they really get going. Plus I don’t want to learn to play “On Top of Old Smokey” - I’m not seven.
• This book is only four bucks in paperback, and is short (50 pages) but has good info. For that price, the back cover’s chord chart is worth it.

I typically have some windmill I’m chasing, eating all of my spare cycles with google searches.  At some point, there’s going to be some huge lawsuit and google is going to be forced to release all of its search data to people like the way we now buy our credit reports, and I’m going to look back and wonder why I searched for Amiga 500 hardware 48,757 times in mid-2002.  Anyway, here are a bunch of recent brain viruses that are consuming me:

• Is there a way to install track lighting without a ceiling fixture?  I’m looking for some magical system that will either draw power straight from the air in some Tesla-like fashion, or a way to conceal a cord so it runs across the ceiling and down a wall, maybe behind a bookcase.  I don’t know.
• I need to build a kitchen island.  I think Ikea has the cabinets, but I also think they have a $1400 minimum on their engineered stone surfaces.  How do you get that crap built, and am I looking at a twelve-week wait time?   I thought we were in a recession and all of the trade people were dying for work?  If so, why don’t any of them return my phone calls?  And why do I ever need to make a phone call?  Why can’t all of this shit be online?
• Searching for the perfect KVM switch to connect a MacBook Pro (mini-DisplayPort) and a ThinkPad (DisplayPort) to a monitor with DVI input.  It amazes me that it’s 2010 and 90% of the KVM solutions out there are still PS/2 keyboard/mouse and VGA that caps out at like 1280x1024.  That’s like if I went to a local new car dealership and every model still had a hand crank.
• I keep searching eBay for NeXT hardware.  I need to stop doing that.
• How do you repackage a 16-bit InstallShield installer so it works in Windows 7?  Why can’t you just use a 16-bit installer in Windows 7?  I thought the whole deal with Windows was you trade off usability and performance and reliability for the fact that they still need to support decades-old legacy software.  So why does a five-year-old installer crap out on me?  (Yes I tried running it in compatibility mode.)
• Has anyone ever written an online version of Advanced Squad Leader?
• I need to learn Python to use this mythical scripting extension to FrameMaker, but I also fear that said extension won’t be able to script 90% of the application, so maybe I don’t need to learn Python.
• I need to buy/build/find a new entertainment system for the TV.  One that doesn’t look stupidly small with a 17’ ceiling, but that doesn’t cost more than my car.  Maybe the Ikea Besta.
• I also need to find a medicine chest for the downstairs bathroom that doesn’t look like it came out of a mobile home and that isn’t some old country kitchen Paula Deen looking bullshit.
• Didn’t someone make a vertical docking station for the new MacBook Pro or did I hallucinate that?  And not some little metal clippy stand that cost 17 cents to make in China and retails for $79.

That is all.