moss.geek.nz

Sometimes, I feel like I’m living in a science fiction novel. Usually it’s Charlie Stross or Cory Docotorow as the scribe, but I reckon somewhere around a week ago, they got together and decided, “you know what, why don’t we let the ghost of Douglas Adams have a crack at writing this kid’s life.”

Why? Because I feel yellow, dangerous, and entirely unlike making jokes in base thirteen.

Not that being written by Douglas Adam’s ghost allows me to channel him into my own writing – I’m just a character. Characters never get to write good novels within novels, unless the novel in a novel is really the author sneaking themselves into it. And I don’t think I’m a cunning enough character to be snuck into. I’d be more the throwaway guy that Douglas devotes about three sentences to, only to meet up with again at the end of the book in some significant way.

Which is sad really, he’s writing me as a supporting character in my own story. Ever get that feeling? You’re only a supporting character in your own life?

Well stop being so Elmo!

Yeah, I said Elmo. It’s a total in joke of mine. Ever since the early days of the Emo movement, I’ve been calling them Elmo – I just love the mental image of a bunch of mopey teenagers in a room, listening to depressed music, with jet black hair fopped over their black eyeliner massacred dead eyes, sitting in a circle around a bright red Tickle Me Elmo doll, taking turns to poke him into spasms of laughter and cries of “Stop doing that”, and getting progressively mopier about their lives to the point where they stop tickling Elmo and decide to cut his red fur off of him, till they have a naked robot in front of them, while he spasms and laughs the entire time.

Anyway, digressions aside, I’ve been written in as a supporting character because the scribe of my life has decided that I’m only incidental to the story he wishes to tell – the story of a sentient pub that swallows up all who enter it.

Why? Because it’s just so funny. Imagine a pub that eats people. Now imagine it like a cartoon McDonalds version, where it’s a triangular building with broad strokes, sitting ontop of a hill in a manner that it sort of sags around the hill and is mostly floating in mid air. Now imagine it having s giant mouth – not one full of razor sharp teeth, but a sort of loving anthropomorphic smile, with it’s windows being converted into giant anime eyes. And when it eats people, it gets a lolcat style subtitle of NOM NOM NOM.

Yeah, keep it nice and whimsical. None of this nightmare stuff – think of it with a child like glee where getting eaten by a building isn’t an end of itself, but a beginning of a great adventure on the inside – like when they get swallowed by a whale in Finding Nemo.

So, you’ve got that picture in your head? Great. Now what I want you to do is stand up, lie down, and roll on the floor laughing for a while.

And now I can tell you all about how, my life got turned upside down. I’d like to take a minute, just sitting right here, telling you how I became the prince of a town called literary references.

Where was I? Oh yes, sentient pubs. You feel a sort of vibe whenever you enter a room of people in it. And that vibe rides you. It gets in your head, and it doesn’t let go. And a vibe can be set by the smallest of things.

For me, it was the nametags. Oh yeah, I better tell you what this is all about, now you’ve read about a page of me rambling on about whimsy. We’re actually talking about a tweetup. Now, for the uninitiated, a tweetup is a gathering of STANDARD NERDS who use twitter.

Well, actually, there aren’t that many nerds any more. So cast that out of your head and throw it into the deep dark chasm at the bottom of the sea of misconceptions. People on twitter are people, end of story. A vast and interesting cross section of society.

And I am a tweetup junkie now. It’s weird. I’m not in marketing. I’m not in networking. But I just naturally do those things in what I do.

By the way, don’t ask me what I do, because I’ll just give you a silly answer like “I’m a Neo-Urban Tribal Systems Designer”. And by that I mean, I build and maintain computer systems, from hardware to software to online solutions for community groups. I just couch it in those terms, because, hey I “design systems” and I subscribe to the world ethos that is actually best summed up as “neo-urban tribal”. Uhh, if you don’t get what I mean there, go to http://www.craphound.com/ and read Cory Doctorow’s novels (they’re all Creative Commons) or go to http://www.tor.com/ and read Makers (also by Cory, being serialized online by his publisher). That’s “neo-urban tribal” – living in urban environments with a capital letter and working in groups that can be best described as tribes, but are not neccesarily geographical.

Anyway, whimsy. So you find with any group of people, there’s a vibe to the room. And the vibe riding me, is whimsical. You find yourself in the most interesting conversations with others – places where you talk and listen to each other on topics you didn’t realise you knew much about, but are able to converse with anyway.

The strongest trend in “social media” right now is the trend of authenticity. You are, who you say you are, or you are not anyone. And who you say you are, must be who you are. Yeah, it’s all very, well, depending on your life view you’ll either call it new age or common sense.

So who I am? I’m a guy, who has a voice. Like everyone else. I think the credo of the rifle works well.

This is my voice. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My voice is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it, as I master my life. My voice without me is useless. Without my voice, I am useless.

And with that, I bid you adieu.