1. The District Sleeps Alone
2. We Will Become Silhouettes
3. This Place is a Prison
4. Natural Anthem
5. Nothing Better
6. Such Great Heights
7. Brand New Colony
8. Clark Gable
9. Recycled Air
10. Sleeping In

1. OK Computer
2. Amnesiac
3. In Rainbows
4. Kid A
5. The Bends
6. Hail to the Thief
7. Pablo Honey
8. The King of Limbs

Spoilers for the ending of Iron Man 3 to follow.

So as part of the climactic final battle, Tony Stark has the 30 or so Iron Man suits fly into battle like an army. This was hinted at when earlier in the movie Pepper asks if the new suit Tony was using was the Mark 5 or 10 or some low number, and we know that it is really Mark 42 (or something in the 40s, I forget). They never really comment on it, other than the fact that we know Tony has been slaving away in seclusion in the lab.

The reason this got to me, I think, is because I have been thinking a lot lately of stockpiling art. Working on things and finishing them, then putting them aside to make more.

As an example, supposedly Zooey Deschanel had a long list of songs she had written before collaborating with Matt Ward on the first She & Him record, she had been writing and recording them for years until the time was right.

I find something really desirable and satisfying about having a big pile of completed works, even if they are not all perfect or worth publishing individually, but being able to potentially see someone’s growth or how their expression changes across many different pieces. In order for this to work, I think it needs to be something that you can complete in a relatively short period of time (weeks, not months or years) like a small painting or a short story. Part of the exercise is chasing down ideas and beating them into submission, something that lends itself to smaller contained ideas.

In terms of the whole Malcolm Gladwell 10,000 hours idea, or in service to the Ira Glass quote, the idea of working your way through your shitty output to get to the decent stuff is something everyone has to go through.

In a way I am sort of doing that with my Probably Never project, each week they only go out to so many subscribers and without a collected archive online are still somewhat hidden away. But even that does not feel like I am meeting the criteria I am setting for myself. I am not sure if this means whenever Probably Never is finished I will squirrel these things away, I also do think that frequent publication is very helpful for growth, but I certainly have to think a lot harder as to what I will want to do next because as it stands, I do not have enough creative energy to sustain two separate things like that at the same time.

You are not busy. You are choosing to do something else.

We all choose how to spend our time and you make time for the things you want to do. “Busy” is an excuse and it is a shitty one. It is a crutch we all rely on too much, it is too convenient because we all understand. We are all too busy with our modern lives.

I am not talking about the things you have to do. Yes, you have to go to work and yes you have to take care of your kids or your aging parents. I am talking about the things you choose to do.

Your time is zero-sum and you are always deciding what to do with it. If you are unhappy with this, make better choices.

But do not tell me you are too “busy” to do something. Saying that is a slap in the face.

When I started watching Doctor Who, I knew that it was fun and a lot of my friends were into it but was not expecting much more than that.

On the other side of it, all I can say is that I have not felt the kind of emotional attachment to fictional characters that Doctor Who has created in me from any other TV show or book or movie. I was obsessed with Star Wars and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine for years but I never felt this strongly about the characters in those stories the way I do about Doctor Who.

After watching the fourth season of Doctor Who I felt emotionally wrecked. I was not sure I could ever feel that level of attachment to anything again, so severe was my heartbreak and wrought were my emotions.

And it all has to do with Donna Noble. Because I am Donna Noble.

I am putting aside the portion of the plot where Donna is a lady who believes she is nobody special only to be plucked by the dashing hero and proven to be someone truly unique and special and worthwhile, because that is the same journey every companion in Doctor Who goes on (and every hero, thanks for nothing Joseph Campbell). That is entry-level shit.

I am Donna Noble because I am the friend. I am not the one you fall in love with, I am the one who is there for you. Right from when she is re-introduced in series four, she makes it explicitly clear she is not romantically interested in the Doctor, nor is he in her.

Aside from the fact that this makes a very nice break from the cycle of the new companion coming and falling in love with the Doctor only to be rebuked and settle down with a nice human boy, this means that Donna can be more of the companion that the Doctor needs. She can yell and joke and be close in a way friends can when there is no sexual tension.

I know this because I am that friend. That is my role. I am the one driving you to the airport, not the one you want to fuck. And I do not want to fuck you either. That is how it works with me and you, and that is how it worked with The Doctor and Donna.

And by the end of the series the two of them were a great team. At least until the shit goes down and she has to give up everything. And this is why I love Donna and why it hurt me so much to see what happens to her.

I fundamentally believe that you cannot have what you want. That everything is just a time-bomb waiting to go off. That my life is going to come crashing down, probably by my own hand, and it is only a matter of time.

So for Donna to receive what she wanted, the ability to live travel forever with the Doctor as his best friend, she only has it for a brief moment before she loses it forever. Even worse, she can never remember any of her adventures with the Doctor at all. In that way, she has the worst fate a companion can have, even worse than death in my opinion. Rose gets her meta-crisis Doctor, Martha gets Mickey, Amy still has Rory, River got to spend countless nights with the Doctor before meeting her own tragic end, but Donna gets nothing. She does not even get to keep the confidence she found in herself.

And of course it had to happen this way. Because you cannot have what you want.

Nevermind the series of atrocities that Donna has to endure, including being given a fantasy life where she has a loving husband and children who disappear in a flash without giving her time to recognize they were not real. And then almost immediately she is taken to the alternate reality where after enduring a series of increasingly horrible conditions, she has to sacrifice herself, literally kill herself, to make things right, and in her dying moments is told that it still is not enough. Ignoring all of those things, which I think are still more than any companion had to deal with let alone back-to-back, it still pales in comparsion to her final fate.

When I was nearing the end of series four I did not want to continue because I knew at the end of it, David Tennant’s Doctor would die and I was not ready for that. But after what happened to Donna in Journey’s End, that did not matter to me any more. The tenth Doctor could live or die for all I cared, because there was no way to bring Donna back and nothing mattered.

As I have continued watching I was very cold to Matt Smith’s Doctor and the Ponds at first, but have warmed over two series. That all three leads have an incredible amount of charisma help a lot, but I have finally moved on and recognize the differences in tone between the two. In this way I am grateful, if there had been another series with Tennant picking up another cute girl who would fall in love with him I am not sure I would have been able to handle it. That there was the shift to a new Doctor and a new direction for the show was healing for me.

In Donna we see that you can be brilliant, and the exact right person for the job and still be ignored and passed over. You can get everything you want, but only for a minute, before it is taken away and you have to start back over from the beginning. That life is cruel and there is nothing we can do but endure.

Between week #13 and #26 my readership has doubled, which still seems crazy to me. I got a large boost after coming back from the cruise and at this point most of the people signing up are either people I am not directly familiar with which would lead me to believe that word-of-mouth is working. As I mentioned in the post about the cruise, I was told that I need to be more up-front about my ambitions for this project and desire for more readers. I will figure out how to self-promote without bugging myself too much and I will do it. Maybe not in another 13 weeks, but by August I will double my readership again.

In general the work has been getting better, at least as far as I can tell. The ratio of hits to misses in the last 13 has been pretty good and I have hopes for the stuff that is coming down the pipe. One thing I feel has been getting worse is the proof-reading and editing. I keep finding glaring mistakes in the final emails that bothers me to no end.

My name is Alice and I am still living in New York.

My writing project, Probably Never, has its six-month anniversary this week. There will be another quarterly report shortly thereafter.

I have two different podcasts:
– Girlfriend Mode is a video game podcast where Lindsay Pavlas and I talk about what games we have been playing. It is released once per month and is only 30 minutes long!
– Ladysplaining is Sara Chicazul’s podcast where she explains things. I produce and co-host.

I continue to use Twitter and Tumblr.

I guess that is all I have for now, I need to work harder!

Many of the people who come on JoCoCruiseCrazy are the sort of people who want to do more with their lives. They are inspired by Jonathan Coulton’s “quit software job to become internet rockstar” story, or the message of his song A Talk With George resonates with them. So by bringing all of these people together in one place, the ones who are already very motivated will inspire the others, which creates a positive feedback loop so large that it encompasses even the performers. Everyone wants to see people succeed, and so they withhold judgement or snark and are encouraging instead.

This year many of the performers went out on a limb and tried out brand new material for the Seamonkey audience because JCCC is a safe space for fostering new creativity. Wil Wheaton tried doing stand-up comedy for the first time, John Roderick wrote and performed a new song just for the cruise. Nevermind the numerous seamonkeys who are performing or trying new things for the first time because nobody is going to point and laugh. Over the course of three cruises people have quit their jobs to pursue their dreams.

So that is all well and good, but why does it work so well at this one event? The more I think about it, the more I realize that the fact that the event is on a cruise has so much to do with it.

Consider that it is a closed environment, meaning intimacy can grow easily without external factors to stop it. There is very little internet access or contact with the outside world to distract people, meaning we have to talk to one another. It is only a week long, meaning we barely have time to get sick of one another by the end, and being on a cruise means all the dumb little life things that normally distract us are taken care of. Without having to cook meals or do chores we have time to be together and foster creativity.

Which basically means that this sort of environment is impossible, or at least very difficult, to replicate elsewhere. For one week out of the year, we create a floating utopia that cannot easily exist in any other place (which is not to say the cruise is easy to put on, Lord knows it is so much work and the organizers work incredibly hard). It is Hogwarts, or Narnia, and you cannot stay forever. It is unsustainable.

I think that means that those of us who participate and want to get more out of it have to work especially hard to keep the sentiment going while not on the cruise. It is very easy to fall back to our old routines now that the real world has ripped us from paradise, and maybe it will only be a pale imitation of the love and support you can feel during JoCoCruiseCrazy, but I think we have to try.

I am still trying to figure out what this all means and if there are any ways we, as a subset of the community, can do more (especially to be inclusive for those of who going on a luxury cruise is not feasible) but I wanted to maybe start this discussion while the event is still fresh in people’s minds. Because I do believe that JoCoCruiseCrazy is more than just hot tubs and a constant flow of alcohol, and since I feel like being on JCCC2 has helped me grow as a creative person so much I can only want to give that gift to as many people as I possibly can.

Being a Helper Monkey

This year I was picked to be a volunteer (Helper monkey) and I loved doing it, maybe a little too much. It was a real pleasure to help make the cruise run smoothly and volunteering gave me a chance to meet so many new seamonkeys I may never have otherwise had a chance to speak to. I found I enjoyed even the mundane tasks like delivering the nightly newsletter to cabins that I was just jumping at the chance to help out wherever.

In addition it meant I got to hang out with the rest of the Helper Monkey group who all were super cool and very fun to spend time with. The whole experience was way more meaningful than I expected when I got the call to join them and I was honored to do my part.

The Ukulele Melee

On last year’s cruise we had an impromptu ukulele group formed by Molly Lewis. Because I had so much fun playing in those sessions I declared myself the Non-elected Volunteer Coordinator for Molly’s Ukulele Melee on JCCC3. I commissioned a logo from Jade Gordon and had a bunch of swag made up including buttons and embroidered patches. I felt like I was in over my head at times, I am still not that great at uke and barely know anything about organizing a music group, but I think the whole thing went off swimmingly.

We had 24 ukes at our first meetup where Molly and I taught everyone how to play Christmastime is Wunnerful (redubbed JoCo Cruise is Wunnerful) and the sights and sounds of that many people who showed up to play almost made me cry (though I held it together). All told there were probably 30 or more people with ukes who came to one or more of the sessions, much more than I expected, and the idea that I could organize a group that large was crazy.

During the second meetup I taught everyone to play Clever Girl by the Doubleclicks and we got a video:

Then at the Open Mic we did our song. Author (and awesome dude) John Scalzi did a verse in voice of William Shatner and we totally rocked it.

Last year at the JCCC2 Open Mic I did a song on uke and it was the first time I ever performed in public. I like to think that this year I brought the motherfucking ruckus.

The Amazing Shows

Sometimes it feels like the entertainment, to me anyway, can take a backseat to all the seamonkey organized stuff on JCCC. That said, the entertainment this year was not slacking off. Every single one of the shows was top-of-their-game with so many incredible things I cannot recount them all.

Zoe Keating’s performance was probably the pinnacle of that, having been familiar with her music but never having seen her perform live it looked like she was conjuring magic on stage with her cello and computer. Every time I thought I had a little understanding she would trigger a new module and I would say “When did she even record that bit?” while trying to remember before it would happen again. I know she was the dark horse for many seamonkeys and I really hope everyone realizes that not many people can do what Zoe does, and that the show we saw was World-class.

I knew going in that Celebrity Artemis was going to be fun, but I was not expecting how much the performers who participated were into it. There was no ironic detachment or “can you believe we are pretending to be on Star Trek?” bullshit, everyone who was on the stage was fully engaged in the reality of the starship they were piloting and it only made the show that much more awesome. While I am not sure the magic could be replicated again next year, it seemed like maybe the special JCCC3 event that would stick out amongst the memories.

The JoCo Live Band Karaoke was both an awesome idea and way more fun than I expected it to be. I think I speak for some contingent of Coulton fans when I say that maybe I have heard some of the hits a few too many times, but getting to watch fans sing along with Coulton’s excellent band really made me enjoy songs I was otherwise a little sick of. In particular I was super thrilled that Colleen(ky) got picked to sing Still Alive with the band and spent most of her performance crying out of joy at the whole experience (and I was just in the audience).

I feel lucky to be able to say that I am friends with The Doubleclicks and their concert was especially great. They played their song Imposter with Zoe Keating, and though I had listened to it before it really resonated with me during this performance. As I was not on the original JCCC and therefore not present for the original performance of The Commander Thinks Aloud (that in some ways I feel all cruise events are trying to live up to), at least for me this song was the same sort of moment and it really moved me.

John and the Hodgmen

(Photo by Simalot)

Hours before our show I posted to Twitt-arr saying:

Do you have a dream? Mine is to be in a rock band and play a show. Please come watch me live my dream.

We did so and it was glorious. I will be eternally grateful for the opportunity to do something so crazy and the help that the organizers of JCCC provided in accommodating our plan.

At the risk of major cop-out, I wrote a Probably Never all about this show and my feelings about it that you will need to subscribe to read.

Being a creative person

Which brings me to my next point. I sort of botched the question I asked at the Writers Panel and ended up plugging my writing project, Probably Never and then getting shamed by Bill Corbett and John Scalzi. I deserved it, but they told me that if I want more people to read my thing then I need to stop being so precious and start asking people to read it (see last paragraph).

That said, throughout the cruise people were introducing themselves and saying they liked my writing or like my work on Ladysplaining which was really lovely. I do watch the subscriber/download stats for all the things I work on, but those are just numbers and sometimes I forget that they represent real people who are taking their time to look at the things I make. Which is not to say that people were not saying nice things about these projects before the cruise to me online, but when faced with people who are relating to my work it means I have to rethink my whole self-deprecating stance. In this way, I really did need to hear what Corbett and Scalzi said to me and take it to heart.

All of these projects came about because the last cruise made me really need to get off my butt and start fulfilling the creative parts of my brain, so in a way JCCC3 felt like I was coming full-circle in that regard. And it means that I need to work twice as hard before next year to pay off all the good karma that I built up.

My beautiful friends

Going on the cruise last year meant that I gained access to this amazing social group of people that I absolutely love. If you follow me on Twitter you know that I was screaming about my dumb troubles getting to Florida thanks to the snow storm, but within an hour or two of being at the hotel with all my friends I completely forgot about all of that. For the duration of the week the outside world disappeared and I could just spend every minute surrounded by the people that I love so much. This is the only week of the year I could get to see them all in the same place and as the week went on the impending doom of the real world calling us back bothered me more and more.

In general, but especially before the second formal night I decided I would take pictures of as many of my friends as I could and I am really glad I did. It is not much compared to their company, but I am happy that I thought to do so before our time was up.

Sara

The absolute best part of the week was getting to spend a lot of time with my collaborator and friend Sara Chicazul. Getting to know her before JCCC2 made the idea that you could transcend being just a fan of a musician into something more seem really possible, and I got to spend all week talking and hanging out with her either during our late-night Hodgmen practices or doing Helper Monkey stuff or recording Ladysplaining. It is an honor (and frankly still seems crazy) that Sara considers me an inspiration because I feel the same way about her.

All right Alice, wrap it up already

My absolute favorite moment of the cruise was when Sara and I were heading to the Skylight chapel at around 11pm to practice for the Hodgmen show, her with her cello and me with my guitar. We get to the elevator and when it opens only one person is inside: Jonathan Coulton, who gives us a look of “what the fuck are you two up to now?”