Sunday, April 1, 2012

So what?

So what about me? This blog is supposed to be about me, but I resist writing about myself. Maybe I take for granted my skills and assume that everyone else can do the things I do, and I'm afraid I'll embarrass myself if I brag about something that everyone else takes for granted as well. For example,  I sometimes wonder if my spell-checker is working or not, so I must occasionally test it by deliberately misspel[l]ing words. Yes, it is working, so I must be pretty good at spelling. However, I lose a lot of points on punctuation, grammar and composition. I slack off on my own blogs. I know I shouldn't because I would like to show them as portfolio material.

I recently collected some of my old blog posts and self-published them in a book called "Fred Slocombe's Menagerie of Madness" at Lulu.com. No rules applied in that publication. Just a collection of extremely short stories. I often entertain myself with crazy scenarios and conspiracy theories when I'm bored. Some people really think I'm crazy but some of those stories actually are coming true, almost like Nostradamus, but without all the enigmatic quatrains. One story I called "Genetic Weeds" is about a chemical company developing a herbicide alongside a genetically altered weed that could only be destroyed by that specific herbicide, but the weed mutated.

How much of a stretch is it for anyone to read the news and mentally extrapolate the long-term outcome?

I fell in love with photography when I was in the 4th grade. I would get together with friends and we would set up shots like a comic book. Back then we had to send the film all the way to Saint Louis to get developed and it took a few days, but it was fun to finally take the photos and glue them to a sheet of paper to tell stories. That was some time around 1976. Of course as soon as Adobe Photoshop came out I was instantly in love.

Suddenly I'm reminded of all the frustrating interruptions in my life that kept me from doing what I wanted creatively. High school graduation led to the necessity of finding work, which led to joining the Navy, which kept me at a frustrating distance from computers from 1986 to 1990. I'm still angry about it. When I enlisted I already taught myself Applesoft BASIC and was teaching myself Apple Assembly language. By the time my enlistment was up everyone was learning C and I didn't have the time to catch up. I wish I left for Silicon Valley back in 1983.

I'm getting the urge to shift gears right now and take a few more steps toward another major goal I have in the near future. Enough about me for now.

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