{"id":15668,"date":"2007-10-18T16:56:00","date_gmt":"2007-10-18T20:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/hameblog\/2007\/10\/18\/pressing-escape\/"},"modified":"2025-09-12T07:49:45","modified_gmt":"2025-09-12T10:49:45","slug":"pressing-escape","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/2007\/10\/18\/pressing-escape\/","title":{"rendered":"Pressing escape"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I want to focus inwardly lately. I&#8217;m deleting all the RSS news feeds I usually follow, and just sticking with the ones by my friends and the ones that regularly contain inspiring ideas.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m sick of the news. I do feel like I should stay connected with the Scottish news, but it&#8217;s done so badly. Every day, the same few story templates are used over and over:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Crazed motorist hits man\/mother and child.<\/li>\n<li>Dog bites man\/boy.<\/li>\n<li>Man\/boy hurts dog.<\/li>\n<li>Man kills wife.<\/li>\n<li>Nurse (policeman, other trusted figure) kills unsuspecting client.<\/li>\n<li>Innocent person mugged\/knifed\/shot\/abducted while minding his\/her own business. If it&#8217;s a child, they will be referred to familiarly (&#8220;Little Rudy&#8221;, &#8220;Little Rebecca&#8221;) and be turned into a constantly-visited media cash cow until they recover\/are found\/die.<\/li>\n<li>Government has new plan that will make life much better.<\/li>\n<li>Government plan fails, costs taxpayers millions\/billions.<\/li>\n<li>War in far-off place gets worse. &#8220;My son just came back in a box.&#8221; We should never make this mistake again.<\/li>\n<li> Far-off place is acting up and really asking for it.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>And always this template is applied with the suggestion that this is some alarming new trend, when this is historically, statistically untrue.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>Meanwhile, I&#8217;m up to chapter ten of my novel and am completely enamoured of the world I&#8217;m exploring in my imagination &#8212; not because it&#8217;s a nice place, because it&#8217;s not particularly, but because I&#8217;m constantly amazed that anything I need for the book, anything I might hope to find, is already in there.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>I find myself focusing on books, movies, and ideas with fantastic themes &#8212; and they&#8217;re out there to be found right now. Maybe this is a reaction to how badly the world sucks at the moment&#8230; That is, as a story we&#8217;re telling ourselves through the collective apparatus that is our media.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>I went to see the limp remake of <em>Invasion of the Body Snatchers<\/em> the other night. It&#8217;s pretty bad when the world the invading aliens make seems better than the brutal &#8220;normal&#8221; state the characters are fighting to restore because &#8220;this is what makes us human&#8221;. I kept thinking, &#8220;Nicole, honey, just go to sleep. The aliens are right.&#8221;<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>&lt;<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>p&gt;Tonight I worked on the bookbinding tutorial I&#8217;m presenting on the 28th. While gathering ideas, I think I may have discovered the next advancement in my own process. Last year I was surprised by the hunger for this material, so this year I hope to give away even more useful ideas to help people publish themselves. I want to make more aliens.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<div class=\"blogger-post-footer\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" width=\"1\" height=\"1\" src=\"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-content\/uploads\/posts\/1017\/pressing-escape01.jpg.webp\" alt=\"\"><\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I want to focus inwardly lately. I&#8217;m deleting all the RSS news feeds I usually follow, and just sticking with the ones by my friends and the ones that regularly contain inspiring ideas. I&#8217;m sick of the news. I do feel like I should stay connected with the Scottish news, but it&#8217;s done so badly. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15668"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15668\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hame.ink\/blether\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}