Due mainly to my love for those concise nuggets of human thought we call quotations, I am starting a site called quipsmart whose subject will be famous quotes and quotations. The challenge is to do something different than the fifteen or so main quotation compiling websites. Initially, I will focus on tracking down an exhaustive and comprehensive selection of quotations by a few select individuals and build out from there. I may need some volunteers if anyone is interested in helping. My other goal is to provide definitive sources for each quotations, which is something I have always appreciated when searching for a specific quotation. Other ideas include: the automatic linking of words to quotation authors and subjects, and hard to find quotations.
Literature
Seeking Dick Artists
Detour Seeks Dick Artists Dept.: 
Flat Black Films (Waking Life) has sent out word that they’re seeking fine artists and illustrators to work on Richard Linklater’s adaptation of Philip K. Dick’s A Scanner Darkly. Says the press releases: “Applicants need to be highly skilled in fine drawing, particularly of the human face … experience with computer animation such as Flash is a plus but not required.” Send portfolios or examples of artwork to: Scanner Darkly, c/o Sara Johnson, Detour FilmProduction, 3109 N. I-35, Austin, TX 78722. Or, e-mail online portfolio info to bob@@flatblackfilms.com.
On a related noted, here are some photos from the set of A Scanner Darkly.
Brown-out
This old place is plagued by brown-outs. Any time it’s just the least bit nasty outside the power hiccups for a split-second and down go all the clocks and computers, all appliances flashing midnight. During the last bout a few hours ago I was in the middle of writing down another one of my navel-gazing, micro-epiphanies for this humble website. Losing everything I wrote didn’t bug me so much since I was writing on a subject I’ve almost got beat to death…me, and how I fit into the universe. It was specifically about fear, security, and habit. It’s not that what I was writing was bad or boring, just that I knew I didn’t have to worry about covering the same ground again later.
The thing that is bothering me is that my computer doesn’t want to boot up completely. It gets to a certain point and seems to just black out again. That’s frustrating, but I don’t have time to dick around with it now.
I’ve been reading The Prince of Tides off and on all day today. When I have a book that grabs me I will keep a vigil of reading until I finish it. I did finish it, twenty minutes ago. When I finished reading, I closed the book and sat there for a while feeling all the emotions and people I had experienced in some small way, feeling also a mixture of happiness and longing. When you get involved in a story that touches you down deep, a part of you hopes that the story and characters are somehow real because then everything can live on even after the small part you shared has been played out. Realizing that the story was created by another person diminishes its magic.
This may sound arrogant and overly exhuberant, but I think this is the book the more talented version of myself would write. So many feelings about childhood, love, and family rang true. This is the kind of book I would give to someone who wanted to understand me better. I have rarely felt so much like an author has captured so much of the person I am. In many places I felt like it would be impossible for the author to fabricate these experiences he was describing because they reminded me so perfectly of insights and experiences from my own life. So much so that I would have been able to detect the slightest hint of artifice. It’s amazing to me that powerful books have this knack of coming along just when you needed them.
Philip K. Dick interview
Somehow I missed this yesterday/last night, but BoingBoing linked to some mp3’s of taped interviews with Philip K. Dick. Subjects range from God to Vonnegut to Mussolini. Should be good. I’m going to try to burn them to a cd so I can listen to them on the way to work tomorrow.