I’m not going to go off on a rant here regarding the astounding excess of marketing related specifications and statistics that are poured over everything you might ever want to consider buying like so much syrup and sugar. For example, an LCD TV I was considering not long ago included, among other tid bits, these variables and the relevant values for the particular model I was looking at:

Display Type: Widescreen LCD
Screen Size: 22″
Pixel Pitch: 0.258 mm
Display Area: 433.44 mm x 270.9 mm
Display Format: 16:9 Wide LCD
Vertical Refresh Rate: 56 ~ 75 Hz
Horizontal Frequency: 30 ~ 81 kHz
Contrast Ratio: 1000:01:00
Dynamic Contrast Ratio: 10000:1
Brightness: 300 cd/m²
Response Time: 5 ms
Horizontal Viewing Angle: 170 degrees
Vertical Viewing Angle: 160 degrees

Now there is a very real purpose for these numbers – so that two people in a bar or coffee shop or proctologist’s waiting room can have a debate as to whose 60” television set is superior (and, the unspoken assumption, which individual is therefore implied as being superior in some completely meaningless and juvenile way). Such discussions used to have to rely on one’s ability to use adjectives and hyperbole to describe just how amazingly stupendous the quality of the image of one’s TV is. Such subjective measurements do not form a very satisfying base for an argument that one hopes will determine a clear cut winner in such passionately fought battles, and so here we have lists such as the one shown above. The statement “My TV is clearer than yours” can now be made into a devastatingly effective argument “My TV possesses a dynamic contrast ratio of 10000:1, which clearly provides a finer quality image than the pathetic 5000:1 ratio your TV is capable of. “

Of course, is such discourse necessary, enlightening, progressive, fun, or in any way encouraged or sought after by the author of this blog? No. I immediately start to feel very weary when one of these kinds of conversations get fired up. In fact any conversation to which the only possible goal is to establish that one thing, or person, or concept or letter of the alphabet is “better” than another, to establish why something is “the best”, often without defining any kind of context that might make the conclusion actually useful, is only good for cultivating deep throbbing headaches. Yet, I understand life has an awful lot of moments when two people have a need to pass the time and this is perhaps just as good as any other options immediately available, such as actually watching TV versus debating the quality of the apparatus which delivers the programming.

So, why did I get fascinated by the statistics listed above and why do I recount them here if I do not intend to memorize them for the purpose of having the kinds of discussions I just said I would prefer to never have?

The first thought was along the lines of wondering what the statistics would be if some one listed the specifications of my eyeballs. The TV is an output generating device, my eyeballs are the receivers of that output and my brain the device that processes that output and turns it into whatever it is my “mind” needs to understand what the point of the output is, and from there, figure out what I think of it or how I feel about it. So, as the quality of the output increases (this is debatable in and of itself, but glossing over some parts here to keep things rolling) at what point does it surpass the capabilities of my input device? When does it overrun the buffers between my eyeballs and my brain? At what point does my viewing and processing equipment cease to be able to distinguish the subtle difference between one level of Dynamic Contrast Ratio from the next? And if I get the TV home and realize my built in inputs cannot handle the level of output from my new TV can I take it back and exchange it for a TV that “fits”?

Now take that line of thinking and start to try and apply it to notions of how those same hardwired input devices define the reality my mind is forced to accept, and then how those devices might be enhanced or changed and therefore change and alter what I have to consider to be my reality. How much “reality” is out there that I cannot process because I haven’t tuned or optimized the only tools I have to interact with it, to observe it? From here it goes on and on and is probably even less productive, necessary, useful, or fun than the sort of conversation outlined above. Except that for me it is outrageously fascinating, which is why I really try not to bash or look down on those who have the “better than” or “the best” type of conversations because to each his own and to her something else.

I have been working my input processing unit to death lately pondering such thoughts, quite possibly accelerating my descent into incoherent babbling madness. It is also exactly the kind of thing I plan to put into the stories I will be putting up on DarkPurpleUFOs.com, as the aliens attempt to understand our world and then, in turn, how it forces the main human characters to look at their own world in a new way.

I will probably be tossing up articles here that flow in the same polluted tributary, so consider yourself warned.

It seems the promise of a new world labelled only as Dark Purple UFOs has stayed with me more persistently than I might have imagined it would.  Though I seem to aimlessly wander around my mental laboratory, looking for new elemental substances to throw together in the hopes of concocting something original but never giving any one experiment time to sufficiently flourish, I do indeed occassionally become infatuated with just one basic idea.  I had not thought this particular one would end up as such but I am starting to suspect it may yet be so.  In fact, I think the novel I’ve written and the concept for this site could even belong to the same world and could each be elements connected together by the same silly strings.  Perhaps all of it for as long as I have been trying to find something to create has been connected to this same alternate universe that it seems now I am inevitably going to plunge into feet first and holding my nose while holding my hopes.

Here is what I’ve been working on lately, as a tangible way of demonstrating my progress.  First, I seem to have settled on a site layout:

The characters depicted at the top are rounding into my five central characters who appear in all the stories.  A few of them have appeared in other posts, in similar form, while two others have been added. The alien one in the middle is not going to be a major character, just there for some comical moments, at least that is my thinking at this point.  The one I had not really been expecting to show up was the new female character on the right, who I think is going to be a programmer/hacker who helps the research team navigate around Earth systems and aids them in developing various programs for thier experiments.  One idea there is that she has developed and runs some kind of futuristic version of an MMORPG game, but in fact the game world is meant to be an intricate study of human behavior to benefit the research team’s goals.  Her name is going to be Vyx, which comes from one of the short stories I submitted to a contest last year.  I do not plan to develop any kind of convenient romantic relationship between her and Martin (I’ve renamed Phillip to Martin, for now, just to keep this character from overlapping with one of the characters I put in my novel, which is a really useless piece of information for you because you cannot read my novel and this site isn’t operational and so begs the question as to why you’re even reading this right now).

The other piece that seems to be falling into place is that I will be using Flash content, but likely not creating long movies.  Instead pages of the story will contain very short clips that show some action or express some moment with just a few movements or event depicted.  This way I can keep the Flash portion of the content simple and quick to create.  The approach of creating long and detailed movies was clearly slowing me down, yet this seems to have potential. For now.  For example:

This little clip would be part of one page with the text of this part of the story displayed next to it.  The stories will be written out, I think, in first person as though they are journal entries, while these clips and images will visually provide details of what was really happening at the time.  I might go the route of putting the dialog into these clips and images as well, though I’m undecided on that part.  I have a feeling it will end up all mixed and mashed up as it goes along.  The secret really is to do whatever my imagination happens to find convenient at that particular phase of the lunar cycle.

One of the next items on my to do list is to update the “under construction” page on the actual DarkPurpleUFOs.com site, just to let anyone wandering by know that yes something is actually going on there, but to come back next year.  Someday.  Theoretically.

-Josh

Apparently something like 95% of all the Blogs out there are considered dead, or abandoned, and we’re not even talking about the ones that only contain posts regarding someone’s dog or cat or sock puppet. And why do we call these ‘blogs’ as though that bestows some special significance on them? Websites. 95% of all websites created to get rich off of Google Ads are considered dead. Welcome to the Internet super landfill.

Of course how such a statistic is compiled is a bit of a mystery, in relatively the same vein as the monthly unemployment rate. How do we know if a website is truly dead, dying, or if its author is simply awaiting a new source of mind altering stimulants before getting back down to business? How do you measure the intention of the owner, and why so harsh as to call them dead if they take a break for a while? Hell, let’s encourage this sort of behavior. How about a national Do-Not-Blog (-about-your-friggin-gerbil/rash/wart/etc.) Day?

Where is the statistic tracking the rate at which the Internet is filling up and overflowing with purely redundant crap? If a page contains more than 75% of the same text as another existing page then it gets rejected and the sap who posted it gets his pinky toe smacked with a hammer. Photographs should be examined and analyzed and compared and if two are determined to be basically the same image then only one gets posted. Flickr could be run off an old server with a 386 processor running Windows 3.1 if we put this idea to work.

Internet Bandwidth Conservationism. The time has come. Go Green – No, Go DARK. Think before you post. Edit twice, save a byte! There is an entire bumper sticker industry waiting to happen right here in this paragraph!

Ok, sorry, I’m done. Had to let that out. I feel better now. Yes I know the way back to my padded cell.

Given my ever declining state of intelligence, awareness and general drool controlling abilities I figured I would alter the header and footer of the site to better reflect my neat, orderly and entirely not rational point of view.  It actually took a few attempts to get it right, but the wonderful advantage of running a website no one actually visits is that you can royally screw the place up a few times and still have it all back together and thoroughly dusted in time to be not seen anyway.
There I go again with those runaway and running on and on sentences.  Let’s try some more of those.

Unfathomable

On first acquaintance I adore this word as I suspect it describes me and my writing style but then I begin to find it not entirely necessary to have included in the not entirely senseless English language.  Everything can be fathomed with enough patience and lunch breaks.
Such a fine example to ponder on a not so fine day would be to noodle out the meaning of pasta and then move on to the sauce and the bowl and the restaurant and its place in the social inner workings of a planet and galaxy spinning off at an odd angle to all that actually matters.  All of it, at once, altogether and right after taking a deep breath before tipping your little brain straight over the edge of a deep and philosophical plunge.

Isn’t this fun?

Outlets are for plugging things and this is where I get a spark and all the lights go out.  Bewildering and immensely entertaining in a way that only the ill advised use of far too many adverbs can convey to the lost and restless minds of the found and content.
The adventure to be found in the method of the procedure by which one fathoms the meaning of the answer to the question that can be divided by zero and multiplied by apple pie to produce deliciously unstable logic.

Now making that face above should be much easier.  I do what I can to get you by and off my digital property of absolutely no value, new header and footer or not.