Conquering the Universe, One Day at a Time

This is the single shittiest poem I have ever read in my entire life:

http://james0289.livejournal.com/191121.html#cutid1

The last few months, and the last few weeks in particular, have been pretty cool, because I feel like I've actually been making consistent, real progress on my oddball long-form webcomic/graphic novel project. It's a massive undertaking, but I increasingly feel like it's really starting to come together, and I'm beginning to understand what it's going to look like when it's done. It's pretty exciting.

Part of what makes it interesting is that long-form serious comics specifically designed for the web, as opposed to online comics in forms tied to print, are fairly unexplored territory artistically. It's one of the few mediums where everything hasn't been done already. I'm very wary of incorrectly thinking of myself as some kind of pioneer, and I know I'm not the only mad scientist out there by far, but it does seem like there's plenty of room on the internet to experiment without degenerating into novelty for novelty's sake. Other, more crowded mediums can make that a lot harder.

I chose to do it that way because of all the interesting storytelling possibilities of the internet as a medium for sequential art, and also because the barriers to entry are sooo much lower than in print. Blame Scott McCloud, I guess. But the unintentional bonus prize is that I might get to do something really new.

The flip side of that is that I don't really have enough data to know if this kind of thing is going to interest very many people. But the cool thing about the internet is that I don't really have to worry about that. No editors means that tons of stupid crap makes it to the internet, but it also means that there are no fetters. That's only a benefit if you can be trusted to work without them, and I'm starting to think that I can.

If ten people read my crazy-ass magnum opus and get it, and that's as far as it goes, I'm totally okay with that. I'm confident that I can generate a lot more interest than that, but the great thing about the internet is that I'm not obligated to give a shit. All I have to worry about it whether I'm making the thing the way it needs to be made, according to its own standards and mine. If nobody wants it, that's fine. My kind of people will stumble along eventually. And even if they never do, the thing seems to have a hold on me now. I feel more like a midwife to some kind of crazy self-evolving process than I do like any kind of writer, but either way I'm going to be carried along to the end now, however long that winds up taking.

"I sit in a plane coming in for a landing and overhear random snippets of conversations around me - remarks about how great the Indianapolis zoo is, how there's a new delicatessen at Broad Ripple, and so forth. Each snippet carries me a smidgen into someone else's world, gives me the tiniest taste of someone else' viewpoint. I may resonate very little with that viewpoint, but even so, I am entering ever so slightly into that person's "private" universe, and this incursion, though absolutely trivial for a human being, is far deeper than any canine's incursion into another canine's universe ever was."
( I'm not sure that I strictly agree with that last assertion, but hey... )

So far I'm way less exhausted and strung out by this whole polyphasic sleep thing than I expected to be. I'm surprised that the power/cat/insert-adjective-here-naps do already seem to be already fairly restful. I'll start to get that "Oh god must sleep now" feeling when it gets much past my scheduled mini-bedtime, but then when I go and briefly crash, I'll be irritable for a bit afterwards, then after a brief period of compelling myself to quit bitching and chill, I'll be totally normally functional. I expect things to get a little harsher as I go, reaching a peak around day 7 or so, but thus far it's been a much less bumpy ride than I expected. I actually missed two sleep sessions in a row today, then caught up with it later and feel fine now.

Log - day 2
Health - 9.2 I can tell I'm getting less rest than normal because I have that body-tired feeling, even though I don't feel mentally tired at all. This seems fairly steady thus far and is a cause for some concern, but I'm willing to wait to see if this evens out as I get used to it.
Energy Levels - 8.5 Fine most of the time, noticeable fluctuations when I miss a sleep session, but this goes away after I make it up.
Daily Functioning - 10.0 No issues whatsoever.
Social Performance - 9.5 Completely fine most of the time, with noticeable fluctuations of irritability and pissiness right after I make myself get up from a nap. After a brief period of centering myself I'm fine. I think this will even out as I get used to it.
Job Performance - 10.0 No issues at all. I did require *massive* caffeine intake to stay alert at work during the period where I missed two sleep sessions, but this is not really that abnormal for me.
Interesting Work Productivity - 10.0 Not too much chance to test this yet today; should be able to collect more data tonight.

(I changed the scale of these indicators by an order of magnitude for readability purposes. Not like they're really scientific anyway.)

Day 1:
I didn't adhere perfectly to the schedule today, though I think I did learn some useful stuff. First off, I slept for like an hour and a half rather than ~20 minutes early this morning, and walking up was *really* hard. Afterwards, I felt fine for most of the day. I also missed the sleep session I was supposed to get around three due to various insanities. This prompted a useful lesson - being able to stop whatever I'm doing every 4 hours is just not realistic, so if this is going to work it's going to need to be flexible. I'm going to vary the naps a bit rather than doing them regularly every 4 hours, so that my body doesn't get programmed to shut down on a rigid schedule. If this turns out to be impractical, that's okay but if I'm going to do it it needs to be adjustable.

Log - day 1
Health - same as before. 1.00
Energy levels - decent until I ate a big meal, after which I crashed really hard. This was shortly after the missed sleep, too, though. After sleeping for for 2 hours to catch up I feel fine. .70
Daily Functioning - fine until I crashed, then really trashed for a while, then fine after sleeping. .875
Social Performance - normal, slightly affected by crash but fine after. .95
Job Performance - no work today.
Interesting Work Productivity. - normal, except I had more time overnight than normal. 1.1

So, I'm switching to a polyphasic sleep schedule! The idea is, sleep for 20 minutes approximately every 4 hours. I'm going to have to wiggle the schedule a little bit to make it fit around work, but based on my research I should be fine. Theoretically, based on the available evidence from other people who have tried this, it takes a week or two (sometimes less) to get acclimated to it, and then your body figures out what you're doing and adjusts. The acclimation period should be kind of interesting; supposed you get pretty tripped out around day ten or so, right before it locks in and you start being able to get REM sleep this way. After the initial rough part, I should of course have more much time, but (still theoretically) I should ultimately feel *more* rested - in a normal night's sleep you get about 1.5 hours of REM sleep, whereas this schedule you wind up with a full 2 of REM sleep per day since pretty much every moment you're sleeping is REM. (I've seen some debate regarding this point. Most sources indicate that it's almost all REM; some dispute this but nobody seems to dispute the effects, so whatever) Also, I'm hoping that it might help my back and neck a bit, since I think sleeping for 7 or 8 hours on a mediocre bed probably causes various ache-iness and tension there, and there's some evidence to support that polyphasic sleep helps with this.

Given that I'm...me, I'm going to keep track of this in an experimental way, and track my results to see what happens. Huzzah, adventure!

Log - day 0
---
Health - nominal; 1.00
Energy Levels - nominal; 1.00
Daily Functioning - nominal; 1.00
Job Performance - nominal; 1.00
Interesting Work Productivity - nominal, 1.00
Social Performance - nominal; 1.00

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/oct/26/all-the-presidents-emails

Apparently the president is copying some of his emails to the press without censoring them. Hell yeah! Aside from being a legitimate step toward the openness proper to a 21st century democracy - *every* digital communication from a public official should be a matter of public record - some of these are really funny. And hey, they're real!

To: VPOTUS <joe.biden@whitehouse.gov> Re: Fwd: "Jonas Bros music never been used in torture, except maybe here in the White House" Hilarious stuff!!!
Yeah, I've read it Joe. I'm the one who sent it to you. You see the thing at the top where it says "Fr: POTUS"? That means me. Barack

I think I'm going to start actually using this thing. My goodness, I shall have to figure out how to make an lj-style, or whatever the cool kids are calling it these days.

( A curious thing about... ) some dude.

Things on my desk currently:

Books:
Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle
Handbuch zur deutschen Grammatik
Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Paul Kennedy
A History of Violence, Wagner and Locke
Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, P.W Singer
Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufmann
Les Miserables, Victor Hugo
Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, Walter Kaufmann
Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand (cover and first few pages of introduction ripped off)
The Portable Nietzsche, translated by Walter Kaufmann
The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand and Others
The Ancient Engineers, L. Sprauge de Camp

Miscellany:
Bailey's hat
Phone Bill
Geometrical Compass
4 empty Red Bull cans
A Netgear wifi PCI card, which isn't in my computer because there's no native Linux drivers for it and I don't feel like using ndiswrapper
2 sketchbooks
Pepsi can
2 bottles of Sam Adams Honey Porter, 1 empty and 1 cold and delicious
2 venti Starbucks cups, 1 empty and 1 hot and delicious
Hydrogen peroxide, 473 ml (?)
Geometrical compass
3 Acorn Caps
Dental Floss (?)
Comb (? Not like I use it...)
Bag of 6-sided dice
3 drafting pencils
USB to micro USB cable
6 inch wacom bamboo tablet
signed moving-out papers from apartment complex
tiny Hungarian chess set, holding art supplies instead of tiny Hungarian chess pieces
various erasers of 3 or 4 different kinds
wooden ruler
12 really fucking old Primatene tablets. They aren't very good at asthma prevention or relief, which is why they're still on my desk, but I do understand they're very useful in making meth.
Headphones
G1 phone, which is no doubt wondering why a smartphone of its caliber should be expected to hobnob with all this riffraff.
Green foam (dammit Bailey!)
Random colored polygonal dice
Allergy pills. Not useful for meth, but very effective in combating allergies.
Primatene inhaler, still in the box, waiting for my current one to expire.
old-ass pocketknife
purple earplug (?)
Expired credit card
Dead batteries
Eee PC manual
Broken porcelain vase full of pencils and pennies
Lamp/iPod dock/speakers, missing the lampshade
L-Lysine, whateverthefuck that is.
wallet
Several unidentifiable CDs

As a note, this desk is about 3 feet wide by 2 feet deep.