Category Archives: raincoaster

Operation Global Media Domination: The Proust Questionnaire Situation

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Yes, yet another self-referential blog post. After all, what else is there for me to talk about but…you know…me? I’m an expert on me. I know me backwards and forwards, inside and out (or at least I do since I saw that CAT scan) upside and down.

raincoaster inverted

In Bizarro World, raincoaster falls asleep every night promptly at a reasonable hour, beside one of: Viggo Mortensen, Johnny Depp, Steve Jobs, James Tiberius Kirk, Henry V as played by Kenneth Branagh, Michael Lewis, or Sebastian Junger; the bed is stuffed with fluffy, fluffy Krugerrands, and the nightgown is carved from one solid, flawless diamond. Ah, for a life of ease!

In Bizarro World, raincoaster works for Vanity Fair, or rather VF publishes old blog posts of mine, with the YouTubes embedded right in the glossy pages using special technology developed just for me.

And, most importantly, in Bizarro World raincoaster is profiled by Vanity Fair.

The raincoaster Proust Questionnaire:

1. What is your idea of perfect happiness?

Uh, didn’t you READ the post?

2. What is your greatest fear?

Server problems. If a blog falls in the forest and nobody’s subscribed to the RSS feed…

3. What is the trait you most deplore in yourself?

Modesty. I’ve almost completely succeeded in eradicating it, but not quite.

4. What is the trait you most deplore in others?

An inability to recognize my awesomenosity

5. Which living person do you most admire?

Besides myself?

6. What is your greatest extravagance?

Gin. My liver has a vested interest in keeping me poor and sober.

7. What is your current state of mind?

Fried. This getting up in the MORNING is for the birds. Right, birds wake up early. Birds eat worms. Therefore, getting up early sucks.

8. What do you consider the most overrated virtue?

Getting up early, duh. Haven’t you been reading?

9. On what occasion do you lie?

When the truth would give a falsely modest impression of my awesomenosity. It just wouldn’t be fair.

10. What do you most dislike about your appearance?

My tentacles will NOT stay combed.

11. Which living person do you most despise?

Is Thatcher still alive? Bush? The guy who cancelled M.A.S.H.? WHY MUST THESE QUESTIONS BE SO HARD?

12. What is the quality you most like in a man?

The ability to be Viggo Mortensen.

13. What is the quality you most like in a woman?

The ability not to get between me and Viggo Mortensen.

14. Which words or phrases do you most overuse?

Me, Myself and I would like you to define “overuse.”

15. What or who is the greatest love of your life?

Again, I am forced to ask haven’t you been reading this?

16. When and where were you happiest?

Any day now.

17. Which talent would you most like to have?

The ability to fake sincerity.

18. If you could change one thing about yourself, what would it be?

My socks. And if you were sitting beside me, you wouldn’t need to ask why.

19. What do you consider your greatest achievement?

Earning the good home-maker badge and the whatchamacallit, housewife emblem, in Girl Guides, thus proving once and for all that I can do ANYTHING.

20. If you were to die and come back as a person or a thing, what would it be?

The vindictive joke of a malevolent god, that’s what me coming back would be. The fucker.

21. Where would you most like to live?

Olympus. Failing that, Not-Ucluelet.

22. What is your most treasured possession?

My self-possession, obviously!

23. What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?

No Followers.

24. What is your favorite occupation?

What are you hiring for, big fella?

25. What is your most marked characteristic?

Did you read this one?

26. What do you most value in your friends?

The ability to buy me drinks at the Heather.

27. Who are your favorite writers?

The ones who buy me drinks, and not just what they’re having.

28. Who is your hero of fiction?

I’d say Caspian the Tenth, King of Narnia, but he’s not fictional.

29. Which historical figure do you most identify with?

Myself.

30. Who are your heroes in real life?

See #27

31. What are your favorite names?

Robin, Anastasia, Skippy the Klingon

32. What is it that you most dislike?

Blogathons

33. What is your greatest regret?

Volunteering to do this blogathon without laying in an adequate supply of gin and/or z’s.

34. How would you like to die?

Vindicated. Stole that one from Fran Lebowitz, but how could I not?

35. What is your motto?

49 degrees latitude, 360 degrees attitude!

This is a Blogathon post. Don’t just sit there, SPONSOR ME!

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Putting the “OW” in “Power”

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At this point, slightly less than a third into Blogathon, I have more or less no idea what I’m going to do in terms of a post to go with that title, but let us not constrain ourselves with linear notions of time, space, logic, and readability, shall we?

marriedtothesea.com

I know! Power is, like, electricity, or rather electricity is a kind of power. Sure, it’s not the kind enjoyed by absolute monarchs or the tyrants of the ancient city-states, but it’s power nonetheless. And so I hereby declare this post to be about power.

Not that most of mine aren’t, in some way, shape or form. In fact, Operation Global Media Domination is one of the busiest categories on my blog, with 238 posts, soon to be 239. Do I hear 240?? Going once, going twice, come on people, you all know I’m going to run out of things to talk about besides myself, and what does that leave us, eh? That’s right. Operation Global Media Domination: going auto-meta. Set phasers for “backlink” and fasten your seatbelts; it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

Addison DeWitt: [voiceover] Margo Channing is a star of the theater. She made her first stage appearance at the age of four in Midsummer Night’s Dream. She played a fairy and entered, quite unexpectedly, stark naked. She has been a star ever since. Margo is a great star, a true star. She never was or will be anything less or anything else.

Right, power. It’s a blog post about power.

Those of you who’ve been following the raincoaster sitch closely will know that (digital appearances to the contrary) OGMD HQ has been entirely without electricity for a period of approximately three months. Fortunately, this corresponds exactly with a period of remarkable good weather, and also with the period during which I have a hibachi, a cast-iron stove, and access to an office with a full kitchen 24/7. Essentially, I told Hydro I’d catch them later, when they weren’t asking $300 simply to reconnect the power. After ninety or so days they saw the light (so to speak) and There Was Light. And Heat. And Refrigeration.

Never try to tough it out and outlast raincoaster. I would have burned Canadian Tire flyers all winter to keep warm, if I’d had to.

This is a Blogathon post. Don’t just sit there, SPONSOR ME!

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The secret of my success

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Secret Weapon is a little buggy

There’s nothing like a secret weapon. In an event as cut-throat as Blogathon, you’d be a fool to throw your hat into the ring unless there were the equivalent of a nuclear bomb up your sleeve. Or something. Where’s that “complete invalidly nested metaphors” button???

Anyhoodle, Blogathon is nothing to take lightly, particularly when one has taken the rebel stance right out of the box.

Apparently sleep deprivation causes me to wax metaphorical, badly. And I’m supposed to keep this up for 24 hours? Hmmm, this is gonna take more gin.

Where was I? Yes, about to mention my secret weapon. Since writing posts ahead and setting them to autopost is against the rules, and since I wasn’t organized enough to line up sixteen guest posters so I could grab some z’s (known, in Canuckistan, as zeds, yes, that’s right, we even SNORE BETTER than you people) I’m going to have to stay up and come up with 48 different ideas. This might as well be called Blog Filler Day, for I see a visit or two to Blogthings in my future when I read my Palm.

See what I did there?

How am I gonna come up with 48 different ideas off the top of my head? I’m not. If I were to take the ideas off the top of my head, the titles of my posts would go something like this:

  1. How to kill your alarm clock before you remember it’s also your cellphone and you’re gonna need that someday
  2. How to hunt down and kill the people responsible for choosing a 6am start time, when all decent people are just going to bed, some of them with each other.
  3. How to locate and kill each of my elementary school enemies because, what the hell, I’m on a roll here.
  4. etc

What I am going to do is trawl through my Tumblr.

Dedicated raincoaster fans (both of you) will recall that over on our Terribly Serious social media and community events blog we examined the New York Media phenomenon which is Tumblr, and we actually found a use for the damn thing ( perhaps the first use ever found for anything coming out of that NYC circle jerk): it’s the best scrapbooking service in the world.

That may not sound like much, but it’s huge. We all have things we’d like to get back to sometime, just not right now. If you’re on the web and you use the Share on Tumblr button that Tumblr provides as a Firefox add-on, you can instantly bookmark the site you’re looking at, adding comments if you wish. Over time, your tumblr becomes a repository of notes on a particular theme or group of themes, adding an additional dimension to your online presence. Academics may use this to bookmark papers, entertainers to bookmark venues or gigs, bloggers to corral blog fodder for future reuse.

While there are many existing bookmarking services, del.icio.us being the best-known, Tumblr’s great advantage is its accessibility, both in terms of reading and writing. A Tumblr is itself a kind of blog, and so it makes sense to the reader as a web browsing experience in and of itself, which other bookmarking sites do not.

So for the past several months, instead of keeping a text file called “shit to blog” I’ve kept a Tumblr with all of that in there. It’s currently sitting at nearly 500 entries, so I’m stocked for quite a few of these little turns around the blog. They are not in any sort of order, nor are they on any particular topic, so yeah, you shouldn’t really notice any difference whatsoever.

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Blogathon for Federation of BC Writers

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Charles Dickens breaks through writer's block

Did I mention that on Twitter I’ve talked two rival gin houses into shipping me “care packages?” Now if only it worked as well with men! All the ones that volunteer to give me their packages are ones I wouldn’t care to have, so it seems. But that’s neither here nor there; it is, in fact, nowheresville.

Anyhoodle…

This Saturday (because I am insane) from 6am I’ll be participating in Blogathon 2009, a 24-hour, 48 blog post postathon, to raise money for the Federation of BC Writers, BC’s home grown support system for Left Coast literati, of which I used to be the Lower Mainland representative, back when I had (what do you call that…that thing…where you can do stuff…) TIME! Oh yeah, and if I sleep in (likely) I’m gonna hafta do a post every ten minutes or so until, like, noon. That could get a little crazy.

What are you waiting for, now that this fabulous news has broken? Reach deep into your heart and your wallet (or your neighbor’s; God knows, I’m not fussy). Sign up to sponsor me by selecting “raincoaster.com” from the list of available blogs. Clicky, clicky! You can sponsor me X amount per post or a lump sum for the entire 24 hour slogathon. For a $50 donation, I’ll make an ego-gratifying post entirely about you, You, YOU, and will even include a link to your Facebook Fan Page (if you insist).

If you want to watch this madness live, you can come on down to Workspace at 21 Water Street in Gastown, where the blogerati of Vangroover will be holed up, typing (or napping) away. Vancouver’s own Mojave band will serenade us with a private concert, and April Smith of AHA Media will be taking video (gee, is 6am too early to get my makeup done?), so you need not feel left out.

A word of warning: I will get my 48 posts up, but I will NOT get them up promptly every goddam half-hour. I AM NOT A BLOODY MACHINE and I am also not cheating by pre-posting and scheduling things, tempting though it may be. I may or may not attend Illuminares and liveblog it; depends if I can catch a ride to and fro; forty minutes on the bus each way is a killer. On the other hand, Miss 604 is judging a bartending contest in the middle of everything, so if she can do that, perhaps I can do this (who wants to be my DD?).

After Blogathon wraps, the procedure is simple: you just tote up your donation and send the cheque straight to the Fed, which will put it to good use on behalf of British Columbia’s home-grown literary talent. And, hopefully, buy me a drink. I’m gonna need one if that gin doesn’t get here on time.

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keeping up with the ‘coasters

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Total Information Awareness, baybee

No relation to Edwin Coaster.

You think it’s easy being me? You think it’s easy being raincoaster? Try coasting the way I do some time. This? This is what I do on a typical day. This is, in fact, what I did today:

Posted:

More Shatner Awesomenosity:

https://raincoaster.com/2009/07/16/mc-shat-attack/

Announcing the 3 Day Novel Contest Writer’s Retreat

https://raincoaster.com/2009/07/17/3-day-novel-contest-writers-retreat/

http://raincoastermedia.com/2009/07/17/3-day-novel-contest-writers-retreat/

http://theshebeenclub.com/2009/07/16/3-day-novel-contest-writers-retreat/

http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/event.php?eid=137381746232&ref=ts

http://events.linkedin.com/3-Day-Novel-Contest-Writers-Retreat/pub/97202

Announcing BookCamp Vancouver:

http://theshebeenclub.com/2009/07/16/bookcamp-vancouver-opens-registration/

What not to wear to your wedding:

http://teenymanolo.com/2009/07/16/what-not-to-wear-to-your-wedding/

I always KNEW Herc was gay:

http://lolebrity.net/2009/07/17/i-always-knew-herc-was-gay/

Participatory Art with Pierre-A. Sonolet:

http://raincoastermedia.com/2009/07/17/participatory-art-with-pierre-a-sonolet-at-science-world-and-waterfront-station/

Oh, and sent out almost 400 invitations to the retreat. And negotiated with the resort to nail down the final details before registration opens. And did this post. And now, seepies.