Blog of Josh Hall

A few people have been coming here to find out what’s up with legendofsix.com.  It was disabled over the weekend due to "excessive CPU usage."  The host is refusing to enable the server for me to move the domain or so i can get the latest snapshot of the database.  It seems this won’t be a quick fix, but I promise to get it up as soon as I can.  Thank you for your patience.

Had this idea for a story during the night, when i was partially dreaming, partially awake, which really makes the best setting for cognitive creativity.  Your mind has the boundaries of normal thought and imagination removed, but your logic is present enough to keep it all in order.  Anyway, I digress.

The main character is the narrator, even though I criticize that so often, it must be done.  He’s a ~30 something guy, and everything around him, life as he knows it is in reverse.  Everyone and everything is moving chronologically and silently backwards.  It’s as if someone hit the rewind button on his life, but he’s not there.  It wasn’t always like this, he lead a normal life, up until something traumatic happened, like his wife dying while giving birth.  So as his life is moving in reverse, if he interacts with life to change it, he gets to participate in "forward life" again.  So, he likes to hang out at morgues, funeral homes, and read the newspaper, to see what happened, and then he can go change it.  As an less dramatic example, and maybe how he finds out this ability, he’s walking down the street, sees a girl trip over the leash of a guy walking his dog, so as everything is moving backwards, he stops to pet the dog and delays the owner from tripping the girl, and all of a sudden, it’s forward life, and he’s talking to the owner and maybe even he makes a comment that the girl hears like, "These dogs are so excited!  You better hold them back before the end of tripping these beautiful women walk by." 

So he becomes a superhero of sorts, but he’s not getting any recognition because he’s alone.  So, pulling in "Early edition" (remember that TV show) and maybe even a Quantum Leap (since he’s zapped back to reverse life) story possibilities, but the circumstances are unique.  But there’s a lot you can do with that set up, add some humor with him liking to just sit at home sometimes and watch movies in fast forward.  You can throw in some religion with him asking what his purpose is, is he supposed to be saving lives, did he make 1 mistake and he’s getting a redo, it’s just taking a lot of time to get there?  And then what happens when he reaches his own birth?  He’ll be aging like normal.  I have a few ideas, but obviously I can’t give them out here…

have you ever realized how ridiculous men’s fashion is?  We basically have a clearly defined spectrum of fashion with no blurring inbetween.  You’ve got the T shirt, the polo, the button down, the suit, and finally the tux. The fabulous 5 fashions of non-females.  We get jeans, khakis, and dress pants.  All we ever really get to chose is color, but even that can be asking for metro-sexual accusations.  We’re all walking billboards too, with the little Nautica or Ralph Lauren logos on our left chest.  I can’t remember the last time I saw a girl with a logo on her outfit. 

Debt cannot transfer to anyone but a spouse, correct?  The way it worked when my dad died was that those that were owed money from my dad could come after his assets, such as his house, by placing a lien on the property.  So what happens when someone is single and has huge amounts of debt, but no assets?  I’m just trying to see if there is a flaw in the systtem to abuse, and it would seem that a smart dying person would by all kinds of gifts and non titled/deeded items for people on credit cards, selling all their assets and giving that money away too, and there’s nothing creditors can do about it.  Another situation would be the value in dead people’s credit cards.  Maybe it’s a little too dimented for some to contemplate, but I’m surprised more old folks aren’t held captive in their houses, a few online orders made and shipped to their house in their names, and then the robbers leave untraced.  right?  This isn’t common, right?  Even some crooked in house nurses could be doing this with ease.

  I dunno, I’m just thinking ahead, really.  I’d love to max out credit cards a few days before I die and give the stuff away to charities and such and no one has to pay for it.

NIN (Nine Inch Nails) have released their latest album under the Creative Commons license, which means that anyone can download it and use it how ever they like for free as long as the credit the original author.  Trent Reznor, a western Pa native, is a smart dude.  I can’t wait to see them live at lollapalooza.  Radiohead, the first big band to release an album completely free and online, will also be headline that show.

you can get the tracks here: http://dl.nin.com/theslip/signup 

So I had a dream last night where I rode my guitar case all the way from pittsburgh to my mom’s house.  The case had 4 wheels on the bottom of it and it stool vertically, and I sat where the handle would be.  I was just kicking off the ground for momentum.  The dream really lasted all the way home as I remember riding along 79, down through scenery hill, stopped at the national city in richeyville, and then to my mom’s house.  Everyone was so impressed that I did it, and I demonstrated how easy it was to just kick off the ground and coast for a bit.  It worked out to 3 hours to get all the way from pittsburgh, which is what I said in the dream, but now I’m realizing that would mean I was doing ~20 mph on a guitar case…that’s pretty fast.