God I piss myself off sometimes.

I have been wanting to post for several days, now, and feeling as though I am dropping the ball by not doing so, and now that I sit down to do so, I'm at loss for something worth typing. There are five online diaries that I read with some regularity, all of them because they are interesting and because I like the people writing them even though I have only ever met one of them. At times, though, I read them and feel like a failure, because I feel like I should be devoting my time and energy to interviewing famous people and writing lots of reviews of new books and films and gaming a lot (well, to be fair, I do spend too much energy on gaming), or making films with Dave McKean, or building a frickin' space robot.

I have to remember that, if I'm going to experience the adventure of life, I have to walk the path before me, and choose my destination. Currently, I'm doing too little of either. It's still all too easy for to pull into my shell, especially if I feel that no one is paying attention. Perhaps this is where my little interest in secrecy comes from.

Anyway, I'm off to take my next three steps (exercise; dispose of Xmas tree and buy groceries; enter more data in my how-do-I-spend my money project) and then run my game tonight. I'm excited to do that, but I'll feel a lot better if I have done enough to 'deserve' some fun. Christian moralism can fuck off with the other hypocrites, but I do like the title "Purpose Driven Life".

The 6.4 Billion Dollar Question

As I may have remarked here, I am disappointed with our current crop of eccentric billionaires. With hundreds of men made ridiculously rich by the rising tide of computers in all walks of life, some of which must be hardcore SF fans, none was willing to step forward and say "hey, Joss Whedon, what say I bank roll this Firefly show of yours? Sure, it'll cost me $30 million I won't see again, but who cares? It's for art!"

It's got me wondering what I would do if I were rich beyond all good sense, and from there wondering what other people would do. So, gentle readers, I put it to you: if you had hundreds, if not thousands, of millions of dollars, what frivolous projects would spend some of them on? Whatever it is, it can't be more than incidentally beneficial to anyone, and you must cheerful expect to never recoup a dime of your money. Also, it probably shouldn't be something horrible, like buying plutonium to dirty bomb the Mall of America, or actually significant, like buying congressmen to vote for laws that you want.

Myself, I would bank roll Joss Whedon to make more Firefly (or, at least I would have) and J. Michael Straczynski to make more Babylon 5. I'd fund my own local gaming/comics/SF con, and put it in a good hotel, and pay for all the cool guests that I want, and then make it so that only people personally approved by me get to come. And I'd totally buy a geiger counter.

Which is actually a pretty boring list, now that I look at it. Perhaps more interesting stuff shall come to me. In the mean time, can you top it?

ADDENDUM: If I really had money to burn, I would start up a national direct market comics distributor to compete with Diamond.