I am going to throw some ideas out there, I just want to write them down and see what sticks. As readers, I really need your hep. Please comment.  These are subjects I already write about, but I want to give this site some direction. Or maybe these are other sites altogether.  This is in some ways about branding myself as a writer. What I am looking for a way to write about something other than myself . I want to create something greater than me.  

I have already eliminated any kind of nerdy site, while those things interest me greatly. There are much more committed fans of comics, video games, RPGs, gadgets and tall things media out there that are doing fine work.  I am not interested in competing in that field. 

I am also open to doing some sort of group blogging, a collective if you will like Boing Boing. So if you are reading this, and you are also writing, lets talk and make some magic. 

Spaceman: Urban Philosopher. The quest for the Philosopher’s Stone.  Giving a modern philisophical bent towards the blog, writing about the courses I’ve taken, the books I read, the magic and alchemy I practice.  This is a aspect of myself that is very important and that I am passionate about, but that I somewhat pass over when I write now.  Everything from Crowley to Landmark, from Harry Potter to Tim Leary, from Sex Magick to Echart Tolle and Oprah. I always wanted to call myself a philosopher.  

The Crasher’s Guide.  I am really seeing that we are on the cusp of some serious and challenging time. I shudder to say that we are in the midst of a total economic crash. I fear that there is no way out. This blog would be about the ways to deal with the hard times. Money saving ideas, gardening tips, basic survival, and how to have fun at the end of the world.  My thought is that whatever is going to happen with the economy is what is going to happen. The trick will be to stay afloat, stay light, bob, weave, have fun.  But, I don’t want to be a doom prophesier.  Ultimately, I want to foster the coming of a new kind of economy, one that works for everyone. 

The New Networker I know a lot of people. I like to think of myself as a natural networker of people. I have been looking at ways to help everyone in these times. So many of my friends have amazing skills, companies, things for sale, etc. I am thinking a site kind of like Craig’s List, only on a smaller scale, specific to my community here in LA. Film people, event people, performers, entrepreneurs, programmers, teachers, builders, photographers, writers, artists, coordinators…and on and on!  I want to bring all of us together to support each other. A micro social network. Again, I want to create a new kind of economic way. 

 The View From Space Already, I have named my blog this. This would be a fictional account, inspired by reality, of the world from a point of view of a dimensional traveller trapped her on our earth. It would be a view of the planet and our culture from the point of view of Spaceman, who is an outsider.  I know this could be really fun. Though, there wouldn’t be much of this “ten things I love about my life” stuff. Instead it would be more of a “why can’t you people see how messed up your world is, and here’s what you can do to fix it.”  Spaceman is an aspect of my self, my muse if you will, my genius, my daemon. It might be very very valuable to channel him.

Mini Sagas  Mini sagas only. This is the least likely. I love the mini sagas, and I intend to continue them for the year, But I want to distinguish them from these ideas. No matter what, they will probably end up somewhere else.  It is a great exercise in creativity and I look forward to collecting them.  

So those are the ideas I have now. All of them, except the networker site are also possible ways to release a book as small chunks to be collected later. Please give me some input, friends.

I love Tribe.net. I started Blogging on tribe a few years back. I have found whole communities through Tribe. I have found the people I meet at parties. I have organized theme camps and planned whole events through it. It was a great site, really.

But, DAMNIT! It just ate another event I tried to post when it decided to periodically go out on me.  It hasn’t been reliable in months. I think someone over there keeps forgetting to switch the power on or something. it is more than a little maddening. And now, as a result of tribe’s downess, there are fewer blog posts from my friends, which nowadays is the whole reason I even go on tribe. 

I want them to win, I really do. I want tribe to stay awesome and replace facebook as my default social networking site. I want it’s service to keep up with the rapidly advancing technology. I don’t know what the answer is. But maybe it looks like one of our genius programmer friends designing a site that operates in almost the same way. Maybe Tribe needs to give the code to the community. Maybe someone needs to invest that money we all paid for “premium” memberships into some infrastructure that works. 

Until then, find me on facebook,myspace or subscribe to my blog www.spaceman23.com in an RSS reader (google reader changed my life), or find spaceman on twitter. I don’t see myself trying desperately to post things on Tribe until they work their shit out. Right now it’s all on my site.

Long Live Tribe!

How Meta is this. I am blogging on how I have been working on my blog. Neat.

Last night I did a little time travel, I went back into my old tribe blog and started archiving all my old posts. I saved them all into a web archive format so that I could access them online. The pictures aren’t gonna be perfect, and the links might not all work, but at least the content will be there. I now need to post date all the posts and paste them into my Wordpress system.

Art has been doing some amazing work on the new skin for the View From Space site. Brian Shaw has been programming and setting up my web hosting. I feel like I have this amazing team. I am looking to roll things out very soon. It will bring together my writing, my carton projects that are developing, pictures, and video from my mad adventures, social networks I am a part of, my twitter feed, and my google reader feeds. It should be really cool. Art has also been helping me with tags and categories for my blog. I am so excited about finally having a good website for myself.

I am also experimenting with a program for Macs called Blogo. It has a cute bunny icon. It is an offline text editor that automatically posts your blog. It can’t post to multiple blogs at once, which would be nice. But it can handle tags and categories. It likes drag and drop pictures and video, which is key for me. The web interface of wordpress can be a little wonky from time to time. So far, first post, I like it. When I hit send, a twitter should be automatically generated. Neat.

I am also going to have google ad-words and an Amazon associates account attached to the blog. If anything I mention sounds interesting to you, please go ahead and check it out. I get pennies, but if I make a cent on this, I’ll be happy. Hand over fist cash would be nice, too. My next step is to expand an audience. How on earth am I going to get more people to read my blog? I keep hearing the words aggregator and pings… I should probably figure out what those mean.

Going back in the history of my blog was really interesting. My blog goes back years. There are like 250 entries in there. What’s kind of cool is that I get to see all the spaces I have gone through in the last few years. I get to see who was regularly in my world. I got to see who I was.

I like who I have become.

Wonderful. Mad. Beautiful. Exhausting. Inspiring. Conspiring.

***Tried to post this the other day, failed. I am home, ready to sleep! Here she is!***

I am spent. I had an epic good time at LIB. It seems that just about everyone had an epic good time at LIB.

I lost my iphone. This is sad, and I still would like to find it. I lost it sometime before dawn, and I brought this upon myself. Was it worth it? YES. But please, if you hear of anyone finding an iphone with steampunk gears on it, please send them my way. I’d rather not have to buy a new one.

***Update*** I found it. It was in my tent. I like to think that a time travelling me from the future took it, used it for a little while and then put it back while I was working. Either that, or I was so out of it when I came home sunday night that I just misplaced it. Either way…. HAPPY!

Highlights:

1. The Yard Dogs: Yeah, like I said, fucking incredible! There was one song, this mournful Etta James song, it lifted me up. I actually had to keep checking behind me to see if someone was lifting me up, or fitting me with an arial rig or something, I was sure I would fly away over the stage. It was magic.

2. Building the festival. I knew every inch of cable adding power to the show. I knew every path and golf cart route. I felt real ownership of my contribution.

3. I met great people everywhere! New members of the Do Lab, people from my past, people I have met in the future, and just smiling loving faces at every turn.

4. Gnoming it up. I scared and tricked so many of my friends, and lit up the faces of many strangers.

5. Wolfie’s set at 1:30 Saturday. It was like a family reunion. I danced, and played for the whole set. Ali and crew, you guys rocked me! I got some fantastic video, I should have it up this week.

6. Watching Adam Freeland from the lighting booth Sunday night.

7. Partying like a rockstar on a sunday night, just like old times, eh gang?

8. My camp. It was so sweet. I was surrounded by good friends that I really wanted to connect with, my tent setup was super sweet, and I leveled my futon frame perfectly. After Matt Cole hooked me up with a new blanket, and scotty picked up a jacket for me I was warm as could be.

9. People saying to me “Oh you’re Spaceman!” Apparently people are actually reading this! That makes me happy! It seems that people have been talking about me, forwarding my lists, and reading without comments.

10. That kiss.

*** 11. Wrapping all the lighting in 1 1/2 days.

*** 12. The amazing sushi dinner on tuesday night for the crew. I love being a part of the Do Lab!

I remember when I first started learning about sleep.  I was in high school and in a psychology class and our teacher Mr. Chip Phillips told us that sleep was for learning and processing.  I always thought it was for relaxing.

2. I am taking Ryan’s staff class. I am not exactly sure why, really, other than he invited me. I have no interest in performing with it. It is his method that interests me.  I like the idea of physical tasks being much easier than we think. I am intererested in Metaprogramming my human biocomputer, especially in my interactions in the structural realm.  I am also practicing with my axe. I had to trim some tree limbs up at the cabin, that thing can chop wood like nobody’s business.

I missed a couple of blogging days. I did however spend a bunch of time on my personal writing projects. So to get back into the swing of things, I will do another 10 Things.

TEN THINGS I LOVE ABOUT MY LIFE

1. I am trying some new web blogging programs. Today I am trying Wordpress (thanks everyone). I like it. I just need to figure out a way to post date posts and get all my old blog posts from tribe into this other site. I am really loving my blogging lately. It has been such an opening for me.

2. The media I have been getting into lately. It has all been so good! I am rereading Promethea and in the process relearning magick that I thought I had all figured out.  I finished BSG season 3. It was absolutely incredible! I saw Forgetting Sara Marshal last week with Alicyn and it was so much better than I expected. A friend loaned me the new series of Dr. Who. It makes me want to time travel! And then there are my podcasts and audiobooks I am listening to. Eckhart Tolle’s A New Earth and Tim Ferriss’ the 4-Hour Workweek have been rocking my world! I guess being freelance and unemployed does have it’s benefits.  I am really just amazed at how good everything is!

3. Despite being without work this week, I have no concerns for money. I am just not worried.  Flow.

4. Through my good friend Sammy and his wonderful girlfriend I have a connection with HBO’s experimental webfilms division. It has me really thinking what less than a minute kind of short films can I get out there?  Obviously, I am going to need some help. Who’s in? Last night, I did a list of my production resources and holey moley, I have great resources!

5. Between working out and the no sweets and booze… I am really loving my body.  Not like loving the way it looks, but treating my body like I really love it. It’s been really fantastic.

6. I love my macbook.  The other day, I got to go to the Mac Store to deal with a minor missing program that I accidently deleted. They replaced it lickity split and I ended up spending an extra $60 on a program and iphone case. I left happy. By contrast, when I called microsoft to just deal with an extra $2 charge that I wanted to get removed,  I had to deal with 2 emails, an hour of phone time, mostly made up of hold time, I talked to 4 different people, and got hung up on. The $2 issue, still not resolved.

7. Another benefit of plenty of free time is that I have been sleeping really well lately. I have these amazing dreams, full of incredible special effects, dazzling characters and spectacular scenery.

8. Birds. It’s springtime and several families of birds have taken up residence all around my house. It’s so beautiful.

9. I also have a pool. Wolfie pointed out that with a pool comes certain maintenance responsibilities. For instance, on hot days, sometimes you have to just hang out around it to make sure your responsibilities are handled. Cold drinks and music add to the quality of this maintenance.

10. Number ten is always difficult for me. Okay. Flowers. My roommate is a gardener. He has this habit of cutting fresh flowers and putting them around the house. It’s nice. It is also nice that all around my house are all these beautiful flowers this spring. It’s gorgeous.

Yeah… It’s a good life.