i’d drink myself to death tonight, but I can’t afford it with support like this

According to my server, not fewer than 1,046 people, and perhaps as many as 8,600+ people, have viewed this site (on lessthanthis.com, no idea how many saw the equivalent page on my LiveJournal) since I put up my request for support of my Single-Sitting-Book, less than two weeks ago. With the entry remaining on the main page of the site and two links to it appearing on every page of the site, including the archives, links to the donation page and the description page have been seen at least twenty thousand times since I posted them, all told. And the response so far has been simply unbelievable!

That is, I simply don’t believe it.

A grand total of Zero people, donating the shocking total sum of Zero dollars and Zero cents, have shown their support. In addition to that, an unheard-of Zero people have emailed me or called me or commented in other ways about the project, counting all positive and negative communications together.

I just don’t know what to say.

Thank you all, for showing me exactly how much you care. I’d suspected it, but this shows it concretely – the seventeen to twenty-five thousand visitors to lessthanthis.com every month are not shy about showing what this site means to them.

Spiderman 2 is Star Wars

Briefly:

We have a familiar, friendly character who can’t forget or escape the memory of their non-father father-figure and the lessons they tried to impart regarding the way the extraordinary ought to behave. They are extraordinary, and they do what they can to be moral and upright and to help the common man. They have a colleague that they admire, another extraordinary person, who they believe may be more extraordinary even than themselves.

Except that this colleague mixes his extraordinary work with his love for his wife, while at the same time allowing his lust for power and success to lead him to take risks that endanger his morality, his professional standing, and which result, in the end, in the tragic death of his wife. The guilt, grief, and trauma of those risky choices and results in turn push the colleague over the edge, turning him to use his extraordinary abilities for evil, and to an obscene and obsessive drive for power.

In Spiderman 2, the extraordinary character, when forced into battle with a colleague he cares about and believes can be turned back to the side of the good, manages to overcome. The extraordinary character does what he needs to do, even though he has to battle his old colleague to the death. The evil, power-crazed colleague is able to see the error of his ways before it’s too late, barely able to overcome his evil nature, but he makes the choice and sacrifices himself for the good of all.

In Star Wars, the extraordinary character is forced to do battle with the colleague he cares about, who he believes can be turned back to the side of good, again for the good of people everywhere, and in a kill-or-be-killed fight. Unfortunately, the extraordinary character cannot bring himself to go far enough, and the evil, power-crazed colleague is not killed, only crippled and trapped in a prison of evil expectations, and the extraordinary character runs away scared, and people everywhere are killed and enslaved for decades.

In both cases the extraordinary characters witnessed the dangerous transformation to the side of evil, and had an opportunity to prevent it, and even to end the evil much earlier by being willing to fight to the death sooner. I’m sure there’s more here, but I lost my notes and I don’t have time to develop this right now.

A proper comparison is deserved.

i don’t think it’s fear, exactly

I’ve been thinking about the way I’ve been behaving lately, with regard to sleep. How I’ve behaved in the past, how I keep thinking about how I might behave in the future… I don’t think it’s fear, exactly, but there’s something…

Sometimes something will come up, like The Machinist, where Christian Bale’s character hadn’t slept for a year, and my mind’s reaction, that instinctual reaction before I start thinking about what I’m thinking, when he says “I haven’t slept in a year” I think something like “that would be great!”

Continue reading i don’t think it’s fear, exactly

Is there any doubt that Apple makes the best computers?

Look at this. I love the photo. And that someone was sent to the hospital with a leg injury.

Have you ever heard of stampeding mobs of people trampling each other to try to buy heavily-used four-year-old laptops made by any OTHER companies? Regardless of price, this has got to be a show of value.

Imagine the anecdote – “Yeah, I got that scar when I was trying to buy a low-end iBook that had already been used by middle school students for four years. I was trampled by the crowd when over five times as many people showed up as old, used laptops were available, and that’s where the bone broke through my skin as I was crushed underfoot. But I got my laptop.”