Sam's Backup Page

AHAHAHAHAHA WHAT



HAAAAAHAHAHAHA OH MY GOD.

(Thanks vickita for the image.)

Oh man, I just realised I'm living in a high-brow sitcom.

I have the wacky friends, the weird job full of slightly off-kilter people*, the glamorous crush, the crazy secret second job, the strange family, the improbably large apartment for the iconic urban area I live in, the built-in narrative device, and every day on my way to work I walk past a twenty-six-foot-tall homage to the upskirt panty shot. I'm currently arguing on the internet with someone about the cupcake industry.

In honour of my double life, I'm calling it Sam Squared.



And before you guys say you'd watch it, guess what: you're in it.

* When we got to the luncheon on Friday, each eight-person table had a plate of dessert nibbles as the centrepiece, clearly meant to be eaten after the meal. I looked around as the soup was being brought out and discovered our table was the only table that had done the sensible thing and eaten the dessert nibbles immediately.

Literally as I was writing this post a lovely comment showed up from the curator of the Art Institute Museum's "Altered and Adorned" exhibit, which I posted the placard from yesterday. You can find the comment here, including an offer of a tour if any Chicago locals act quickly, and a blog post about the exhibit here, including THE DISCOVERY OF ADAM'S MISSING LUNGS. I loled. I mean I'm thrilled, but it's still pretty funny.

I also spent some time this morning applying for a job at the museum, and I'm not sure how to vocalise the awesomeness of that properly. I'll keep everyone posted.

If I'm lucky, I get to leave work at two today, which would be nice. I'm going to buy groceries and trousers, run down to the library for a book (a specific book, I'm not just randomly in need of books), catch the blue line up to the new Chrome store out in Wicker Park, and have dinner at Lillie's Q, which I'm told is the best barbecue in Chicago.

The best barbecue in Chicago is a hotly debated topic considering nobody in Chicago actually cares about barbecue.

Anyway, all that frees up tomorrow for me to go see if St. John Cantius actually wants to share any of the art it keeps boasting about; given how proud they are of their collection, they sure are cagey on the website about where it is and how one goes about coming to see it.

And then there shall be an orgy of cleaning. My place is actually pretty tidy but badly in need of some Roomba love, and the bathroom still has some strange artifacts left over from the retiling.

I keep thinking maybe I'm having some kind of manic phase, but it's probably just my Vitamin D levels evening out now that I'm taking a jillion units of it a day.

Still not dead!

I'm running around a lot the next few days, which is fine, makes me feel important. :D The internet is intermittent but the food is excellent and the company stimulating. There are a lot of dreadful things to be said about corporate culture, but corporations are still made up mostly of human beings, who are nice on the whole.

I did have to explain to someone sitting at breakfast what a flashdrive was. That was embarrassing for all concerned. The problem with technology is that you can't really ever just explain to someone what an object does, you're compelled to explain how it does it, because if you don't understand the architecture it's difficult to make it function. "But what does the flashing light do?" "Nothing. It just tells you it's plugged in." "That's not the internet?" "Um, no."

Mind you, at home, my wireless router has a green light that flashes when the internet is active, and I can see it from my bed when I'm going to sleep. I do find it somewhat reassuring.

Also I skinned my knee this morning. I am thirty-one years old.

This is a post All About Books. Books! Yay!

fitfool was kind enough to send me a copy of Cooked, by Jeff Henderson, which I would have finished a lot sooner if I'd remembered to bring it with me to Texas. Henderson is the Bellagio's first African American executive chef in Las Vegas; he came to cooking through a job in a prison kitchen where he was serving time for drug dealing, and Cooked is his story of how.

It's a pretty awesome book -- my usual critique techniques don't really apply, because it's an autobiography, but Henderson tells a very engaging story and it's fascinating to watch his life unfold. He talks about his childhood, his career as a crack cook and dealer, his prison experience, and his struggle to become a recognised chef despite a felony record and multiple encounters with racism in the kitchen. If you're looking for a really interesting read, Cooked delivers. :)

Second, when I won the Author Sales Contest at Lulu.com in November, I started chatting back and forth with a very nice Lulu employee named Josh, who invited me to do a short piece on "Sales Secrets" for the January newsletter. My Sales Secret: BLOGGIN.

(That's just a clip from the newsletter -- if you're on Lulu and would like to receive the newsletter, it's slightly difficult to locate but you can find signup instructions here.)

And finally, here is chapter four of Trace!

You all are exhaustingly thorough in your commentary -- which is not in any way a negative. I'm loving every minute of it and getting some really useful insights. But afterwards I often need a nap. :D

So, yesterday I acquired many new friends. Hello new friends! Thanks for visiting. I feel I should warn you I don't normally achieve the peak of wit that the Prufrock parody did, but I try to entertain.

Things you should probably know:

- We call this journal "Sam's Cafe", because I can often be peripheral to the actual discussions going on in it. Don't mind me, I'll be here behind the counter inventorying the tea. But if you hear "welcome to the cafe", that's what's going on.

- If you encounter "R", and that may happen because tonight's my weekly "I have to go to a bar to make R happy" night, he is my closest friend in Chicago. R is a blues musician who I lived with for about ten months and who I now live down the street from. If you'd like...forewarning, I guess, you can check the "conversations with r" tag on the journal, that will tell you more than you ever wanted to know. We are not actually dating, no matter what anyone else here tells you.

- The wildebeest thing can't be explained. No, really, I don't remember the origins of the joke. Just roll with it, you'll pick it up in time.

I think that's probably all you need to know, but if you have questions we're a friendly group and I don't bite, so feel free to ask. "Relevance to topic" is something that happens to other blogs.

In other news, I have done my first fanfic masterlist update since I went insane and actually made a masterlist. Hurrah!

Between June 30th and the present, I have written and posted three Doctor Who fics, one Doctor Who/White Collar crossover, four White Collar fics, one White Collar/Sherlock crossover, and three Sherlock fics. There's a symmetry to all this that I find both pleasing and highly unsettling.

( Fanfics what I have written since the masterlist went live )

SO! I HAVE ARRIVED.

I always experience a significant amount of terror right before I travel alone -- it got so bad when I was going to Boston that I almost didn't go -- but I'm accustomed to it now and I just ignore the shakes and get on the train and I always have an awesome time once I'm underway.

Riding the train from Chicago to anywhere in Indiana is apparently a pretty bare-bones proposition. There's no first class (which I usually take, it's worth the extra $10) and no snack car, so I was glad I packed dinner. Well, "dinner"; a bottle of water, a Clif bar, and a Snickers bar.

I'll spare you the tribulations I had getting to my housing, but I will say that the Lafayette Amtrak Station is not designed to facilitate a cohesive traffic stream after dark. I got lost in the station. I did, however, finally get where I was going and I got a pretty good night's sleep, though this morning I couldn't figure out how to work the shower spigot and my shower was cooooooold. Still, woke me up.

On the train yesterday I was reading Jonathan Lethem's "The Ecstasy Of Influence: A Plagiarism", which was an article published in Harper's a few years ago and which someone told me I ought to read. Back then Harper's didn't have an accessible online archive, and if you've ever tried to get a Harper's out of a library archive, as opposed to a Harper's Bazaar, it's...difficult. So I never got to read it.

Anyway, happily, a few weeks ago Kate_Nepveu linked to it in a post about fanfic, and it really is a fascinating read on the subject of the relationship between corporate ownership and cultural commons. There are a few rough patches where I don't think Lethem quite got where he was intending to go, but overall it's a great essay.

It did get me thinking about fanfic in a slightly more abstracted way, and about why this current debate over it really enrages me so much. I don't normally weigh in on wanky matters, so to get me to make a statement about it, it must really have got under my skin. Now I think I know why.

( Extribulum and fear. )

So, that's the eventual coherent statement I have: fanfic is inherently valuable as, if nothing else, a document of response to the originating media. To decry the thing is to decry merely the symbol of something you can never control. Stripped to its bones, there's no point in fighting an author about it, because they aren't acting from a place of rationality but one of fear, and fear makes people both incoherent and mean.

See, the thing is, you don't have to fight on behalf of fanfic -- just by thinking independently and having an opinion, you've already won. Which is kind of awesome, really. So the decision you're faced with is not whether to fight about it, but whether to respect an author's foolish, fearful wish and not post it, or publish and be damned.

Given I've already violated the spirit of the wish by having an opinion, I choose damnation every time, myself.

(This is the shit I come up with on trains. Jesus I love trains.)

I sat down and looked at my inbox this afternoon and thought to myself, I need an assistant. And then I LOLed because, well, my life, you guys. My life.

I tend not to talk too much about how I work with and around having a large readership; I'm very conscious of its existence, whenever I post, but I don't think I devote much time to how that consciousness affects my activity online. I do sometimes feel like I'm approaching an event horizon behond which lies a time when I really will have to radically alter the way I use this journal, but that's hopefully still quite a ways off if it has to happen at all.

( NAVEL GAAAAZING. )

Uh. So.

This morning: sprained my wrist opening a jar of jam.

This afternoon: won a blog award.

Look, I try to have some perspective on my life, but it's sometimes very difficult.

They announced the Author Blog Awards winners at the London Book Fair this "evening" (evening London time), and I am among the winners.

Apparently there were three categories: Microblog, Published Author Blog, and Unpublished Author Blog, which is nice, because the odds even out a little, I think. Big congratulations to Emily Benet, who won for Published Author Blog, and to Neil Gaiman, who won for Microblog. I am in exalted company, kids, and a little bit freaked out.

I do want to say thank you all for voting, though, and thank you for being a part of my corner of the internet. The reason Nameless exists*, the reason Extribulum exists as a concept, is that I have a population of friends and colleagues and readers willing to play with me. You guys are what make the blog go. Don't think for a minute I ever forget that.

* Oh hay teeny tiny plug for everyone visiting to find out who Sam Starbuck is. Sorry! The PR man in me got the best of my self-control.

Unfortunately I am writing this in the ten minutes before my lunch break so it's rather hasty, but there will be more thoughts on this later.

This also gives me a comfortable hour in which to stop hyperventilating.

Man, that is the most epic fail I've had in cooking in a long while. I just tried to make potstickers and they...stuck to the pot so bad I had to scrub it with salt to get the remnants off. Gyoza, why do you thwart me?

BARROWMAN! *fistshake*

In other news, a few cafe members were asking if I would do a poll about where everyone lives, and that seemed like a lot of coding but eventually I remembered you can do this kind of thing via Google Map:

Drop a pin!

I don't actually live under the Sheridan El stop. It's just my train station. Drop a pin if you want and see where other Cafe users are too!