My computer is OK and believe it or not, I think it’s nice to have a rainy Friday to segue into the weekend. I guess I don’t spend much time outdoors unless I’m commuting from one locale to another, but alas the weather makes for varying thoughts… and this is a blessing. (Or as blessed as someone as skeptical as me can be.)

You see, sunny and clear days feed the fast food lifestyle. You wake up and things are the same, and you obey the creed of normality. It’s not a bad thing, I just don’t want it all the time. Rain causes people to react differently, to break their routines. And you know how I preach that routines are the antichrist. (Damn, another religious reference.) I mean, there are certain routines you have to have to make life optimal and/or maintain your health. But outside of that, you should never be stuck in a routine of anything for too long. I’d gauge the limits of any excursion to the life of a book— bringing it from concept to fruition. That could be as short as 6 months to 3 years, but no longer.

Rain often makes for a good day of regrouping one’s priorities. I, for one, am trying to put the finishing touches on a major project this weekend that I’ve been working on for a while. I should have finished this week, but I let too many distractions get the best of me (see yesterday’s entry). Therefore, I will hit the design sphere and complete my project while the desire has built to a red hot head.

You ever see rain hit the street on a 102 degree day? It’s called steam, baby. Time to make it. Peace.

After seeing the midnight show last night for Revenge of the Sith and getting up for work on three and a half hours of sleep, I can’t imagine I’ll write too many super deep thoughts right now. But then, it’s not really a deep movie, so perhaps it all works out.

Sith, in my mind, was meant to do three main things: explain what it takes for Anakin to become Vader, show how all of the mighty Jedi get killed, and bridge the gap to the original trilogy. For those goals, I think Sith succeeded. While I knew 98% percent of what would happen because I read a trite too many spoilers, Sith still gets the job done in explanation for the common folk.

With Lucas writing and directing the film, you cannot go into a Star Wars movie expecting Shakespearean lines of poetry and grace from the dialogue. It just won’t happen. The guy constructed an elaborate and imaginative sci-fi universe, that is his calling card. Most reviewers expect too much out of his movies, that they’ll somehow miraculously have a grand emotional depth that was missing before. I do wish, however, that Lucas could have gotten away from recycling some of the classic lines like he did in Episode I & II. But he didn’t, and those lines often felt like a square peg being forced into a circular hole. Oh well.

On the other hand, if you go into Sith expecting crazy space battle scenes, mindblowing lightsaber duels, and awesome digital characters, then you shall be rewarded. General Grievous, Yoda and R2D2 (when he flies) are totally CGI, yet probably give some of the best performances of the film. There were even a few sequences when everyone in the crowd started clapping after something happened, which is always a positive.

Overall, knowing Lucas is too old to compose Episodes 7 through 9, and too egotistical to hand them off, Revenge of the Sith will be the last of the Star Wars movies that I’ll probably see in my lifetime. But that’s okay. It’s been a great ride growing up with the original trilogy, and then defining my twenties with the prequels. Sith is a worthy closure to the whole cinematic space opera, and a good movie to catch this summer for the sheer value of eyecandy.

You have to enjoy the vast places that your website can reach, even if it’s on a small scale like Magic Junk.

Even if 1424 of MJ’s unique visitor hits over the past 3 months are from the United States, the web stats show that there were hits from over 17 different countries that have been to Magic Junk. That list includes (in order of visitor percentage): Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, Taiwan, Netherlands, Russian Federation, Japan, United Arab Emirates, Spain, France, Nigeria, Italy, Sweden, Brazil, Senegal, Hungary, and Denmark.

I’m sure a few of them are foreign search engines, but it’s nice to know that your words and images are reaching out globally. Even if my present words do not cause social reform or offer a definitive plan of self-help, there’s still a certain beauty in the technology of it all.

But I’m just waxing on this. I’d like to hope one day, the site can make much more impact around the world. Only time will tell.

Almost every person could spend the rest of their life asking “what if…” questions, and trying to sort out how things became the way they did, and why they did not reorganize and prioritize their life a little more. But that is the problem with philosophy… that as great as it is to sit and ponder the universe and then (hopefully) reach conclusions, it is time lost that you could be using to do things.

I guess my question is whether one can be a philosopher and a go-getter simultaneously? Or do you constantly have to alternate between waiting to figure things out, and then applying the solution? I can only hope I have the wisdom inside to not think as much as I have in the past… because the time is now for doing things.

One’s individual identity has its definitive purpose, but by contrast, one’s name is nothing but a shiny gloss cover over the book of your life. So, what factors constitute whether or not it is worth changing? Is your name often mispronounced? Is your name generic? Is it the same as a celebrity or character, or an acronym or abbreviation for something?

I’m often left wondering the originality of my name, or cringing as people mispronounce a four-letter last name. When you say the word ‘ah’, it is the sound you make after feeling something comforting, like a warm bath or a soft bed. But suddenly put an S and M around the ‘ah’ and people pronounce it as Sam? I digress.

Additionally, there are other people named Mark Sahm roaming the Earth right now, which also perturbs me. I mean, if my name was John Smith, then I’d accept my multiplicity, but my name isn’t that common. Which leads me to wonder if there were a battle of all those named Mark Sahm, would I win? Is there another Mark Sahm who has more decadent aspirations than me? Will we fight to the death, or rather for the number one spot on every search engine? Or could all of the Mark Sahms band together for the sake of competitive spirit? An army of me? Hmmm. Nah.

Nevertheless, it all leads me to wonder about the reality of using a pseudonym. I’d never officially change my name. But to have a name that is always pronounced right… that never gets confused with a stay-at-home-mom, then that’s the ticket. But finding one I like, well, that’s the beastie which continues to bite me over and over.

Not that it’s impossible. After all, I kept a pen name for almost 4 years, from back in 2000 when I originally launched Unsung Fu and Magic Junk. But I grew to dislike it and ultimately decided against using it for my first novel. I’ve often found that something as seemingly easy as making up a name can be a hundred times more difficult to maintain in likeability.

So this leads me to… a dead end. I imagine I’ll come up with something good if I can trap my consciousness in a realm where I’m not distracting myself constantly with art and writing and sports and cute Puertoruvians… but again, I digress. There’s no such realm.

Any ideas?

I’ve been pondering the Blog-To-Novel conversion factor recently. By conversion, I mean myself converting back to daily novel writing instead of blogging long entries— not transforming my blogs into book form. Although I’ve heard this has been done, I find it hard that publishing in both formats would be advantageous.

Anyway, the reasoning for this is that I originally started blogging to get back into a (mostly) daily routine of writing. I decided to copy-paste all of my entries from Blogimus Prime into Word and see how much the word count it was (since that is very key in keeping a writing regiment). I was surprised to find that I was 11,500 words strong in just 2 months of occasional entries. Granted, the entries are incongruent but equally I was not religious to blogging and I took weekends off, which was always my prime writing time when I wrote my first novel.

Thus, if I return to the former pace I wrote, it should be entirely possible to compose a new novel in 4-5 months. Maybe less if I’m really dedicated to it… and not too distracted. But I am itching to start soon.

After all, as much as I have enjoyed blogging, it will not enhance my life in any way other than self-analyzation. And I know I’ve done way too much of that. Peace.

This review would have been posted on April 30… however I ran into some issues with the Mac OS X Tiger DVD. Since that post, Apple has added that you need a DVD drive on their Tiger requirements page. Too late for me, but so it goes.

Luckily, after waiting patiently, my OS X Tiger CDs (5 total) arrived in the mail yesterday via the Apple Media Exchange. All in all, it cost me $10 extra and 10 extra days from my original purchase.

Moving on, I’ve been a Mac user since 1991, so I’ve seen the various upgrades over the years and OSX is, obviously, the most substantial of them all. While it took a couple of years to get every program converted over from Classic mode, the positives have steadily increased.

While this 4th ‘level’ of OS X has made some moderate improvement on its predecessors, it depends from what version you are upgrading from on how drastic your changes will be.

I installed OS X Tiger on a single processor 733 mhz G4 (Quicksilver) with 1GB of RAM, which falls processor-wise in the middle of the requirements Apple recommends. Installation from CD’s took 50 minutes to do the Easy Install. Set-up from there took about 5 minutes.

When I restarted my Mac, I was pleased to see that everything looked exactly the same. Tiger had, as promised, retained all of my previous settings. In fact, it looked exactly like v10.3 Panther.

But as I explored the landscape, I started finding the changes, so let’s move on to the highlighted features of the OS X Tiger update:

1. Spotlight (the upgraded Find option) Depending on the size your HD, Spotlight has to index your drive first before it can work. Understandable. I have a 40 GB primary drive, and an 80 GB slave drive. Indexing took 2 hours. Once it was finished though, Spotlight is a great improvement from the previous version. It is very Google-like in efficiency… going as far as finding a single word in a 300 page Word doc I wrote 2 years ago.

2. Dashboard (the collection of Widgets) If you’re a Classic Mac person, you’ll recall that a bunch of little applications used to live in the Apple menu in the upper right corner. When OSX came along, Apple got rid of that. Dashboard, however, is that classic Apple menu with OSX sensibilities. With a click, all of the widgets launch instantaneously on your screen. Address Book, Dictionary, Thesaurus, Live Weather for your zip, Calculator, and it goes on. Download many other free widgets online… which makes this a valuable tool.

3. Safari RSS – I’ve been alternating between Safari and Firefox for web usage over the past 6 months, and this version of Safari has fixed a few bugs. At least, so far. But nothing drastically changed.

4. iChat AV – Unless you have a digicam (which I don’t), this update is no different from the previous version.

5. Automator – Setting this up is a rainy day project. Automating tasks is nothing new, but is quite useful. It’s just the matter of stopping your life and setting up the tasks.

6. Quicktime 7 – I played a few MPEG’s and the options have improved from v6.5. Definitely a better media player than Windows Media or RealPlayer.

OVERALL: I liked the upgrades that OS X Tiger provided, but whether or not it’s worth the $129 price tag depends on where you’re coming from:

- If you are currently on OS X v10.2 or lower, I recommend upgrading to Tiger, because it will definitely increase your productivity and ease of usage.

- If you are currently on OS X v10.3 (Panther), you can probably hold off on upgrading until Apple cuts the price down a bit, or if you require it to run a vital program.

This is an unlikely source for a motivational quote, but I think the underlying meaning applies if you’re a struggling writer (or struggling with anything that involves a healthy dosage of rejection).

So try to absorb this quote from the Radiohead DVD package for Meeting People Is Easy:

If you have been rejected many times in your life, then one more rejection isn’t going to make much difference. If you’re rejected, don’t automatically assume it’s your fault. The other person may have several reasons for not doing what you are asking her to do: none of it may have anything to do with you. Perhaps the person is busy or not feeling well or genuinely not interested in spending time with you.

Rejections are part of everyday life. Don’t let them bother you. Keep reaching out to others. Keep reaching out to others. When you begin to receive positive responses, then you are on the right track. It’s all a matter of numbers. Count the positive responses and forget about the rejections.

If you watched a lot of cartoons as a kid (and what Gen X-er didn’t?), then you remember the classic Bugs Bunny cartoon where Elmer Fudd brings Bugs home for dinner (rather, as dinner) only to have the “wascawwy wabbit” dupe him into thinking there is a terrible outbreak of “rabbititus” and that they must be quarantined.

For years as a child, I always worried that if I saw the twirling red and yellow spots in the air like Elmer Fudd did, then I had contracted some strange disease and it was time to panic. Luckily, that never happened, but it is amazing what things make impressions on you as a kid.

Thinking of moments like that make me realize the tremendous impact today’s scares of real life anthrax or smallpox could have on a child (if they can understand the news that is). You never realize how fortunate you are when you know that the worse thing to scare you about infectious diseases as a kid was a Bugs Bunny cartoon. But this is a blog for another day.

Nevertheless, my point is that the old concept of “rabbititus” came to mind again when I read this quote this past weekend: “If you chase two rabbits, you will not catch either one.” – Russian Proverb

While I’m certain this proverb has been around for a while (since how many people do you know chase rabbits? You’d just use a gun now), it has become valid in a new way. Chasing two rabbits and catching neither is American multitasking defined. It is the New Rabbititus. And I would bet 95% of our population is infected, including myself.

In one way or another, it could be said that the collective American attitude is to want it all. (Note the word ‘collective’ for you humble denialists out there.) For it’s an absolute that no person would turn down the opportunity to be wealthy enough to live comfortably, to have and do anything they want, to help out their friends and family with their riches, and enjoy it all.

The unfortunate reality of this truth is that most of us will never get to that level of wealth. But that doesn’t stop us all from trying, nor should it. It’s the American Dream to get well paid for the work we slave over, to live large like the lavish celebrities we are subjected to watching on television.

Thus, the only way that most of us have any means to make that happen is to multitask our lives into a state of constant juggling, hoping that if somehow we can catch a break somewhere— it will be our ticket to the high life. It seems like we follow the faint hope that the two rabbits will accidentally run into each other and we can catch them both.

So, is it worth it to get “infected” with the New Rabbititus? Well, despite your odds being low at any stellar success, it’s not impossible. Hard work and multitasking are like gambling— someone eventually has to win at it, but there’s no guarantee that it will be you, no matter how you play the game.

I believe the important lesson we should take from the proverb in our multitasking lifestyles is not just to chase one rabbit until we catch it— but after we do, we cannot stop to catch our breath. You must keep running to catch the other one before it gets too far away. Hard work is nothing with the organization to focus it on one definitive goal at a time.

So stop chasing everything in life all at once. Take a deep breath and catch that which is most important first. This will help you immensely… unless of course, you start to see red and yellow spots twirling in the air. Then maybe you might want to think about taking a day off.

The Unsung Fu warehouse has been filling up with new products over the past 3 months and our newest additions are t-shirts. We have 2 totally original designs: the White Knight and the Desert Poet.

Check them out here.

She was standing still and I was in her shadow, so she could not see me. This was not to say she could not sense my presence though. She could hear my breathing, the ruffle of fabric in my mass produced jacket as my arms swayed ever so slightly at my sides. She cried when she heard the soft sound of me laughing under my breath.

But she was frozen in place. An ice cube of flesh, completely enveloped by the absence of movement. Alive but not truly living. This did not bother me to see.

I’ve watched her for a long time. Oh how I recall days when she could run through the city, passing blocks per minute, nothing slowing her glorious strides. Onlookers would stop and turn around when they heard her footsteps. They nodded with acknowledgement at her, knowing the distances she was traveling.

But she’s frozen now because I say so. Most people walk by and think she is being productive because of the illusion that I create around her. The population and their apathies only keep my powers working at prime efficiency.

To my chagrin, she took a step a couple of days ago. However, I know the steps are few in number. In fact, I’ve been finding more power over her than ever before.

For she is the creativity of artists. I am the cliche. And because of you, she grows weaker and weaker with each passing day.

Good news came on Saturday, as we learned of a recent review for Mark Sahm’s The Art of Getting Bent courtesy of Writer’s Digest. We posted the WD review on the TAGB homepage, as well as a testimonial from an independent reviewer who had purchased TAGB. Check them out here.

Anyone else out there who has purchased The Art of Getting Bent and would like to heave some humble praise for it, please drop us a line at: sales@magicjunk.com

Additionally, if the web team at Unsung Fu Publishers hasn’t been busy enough, 4 more paintings by Mr. Sahm have been posted on Magic Junk. Check the new paint out here. Peace.