I was thinking about posting something fictional about my trip to Google. Didn’t happen. Why? It seems that the dreaded blog apathy has stricken me yet again. Well, there is this one thing I’ve been blogging about elsewhere, but it requires some explanation.

I was briefly caught up in the drama of the 90 Day Jane phenomenon. Here’s a copy of her profile information which detailed her imminent plans:

I am going to kill myself in 90 days. What else should i say? This blog is not a cry for help or even to get attention. It’s simply a public record of my last 90 days in existence. I’m not depressed and nothing extremely horrible has lead me to this decision. But, does it really have to? I mean, as an atheist I feel life has no greater purpose. My generation has had no great depression, no great war and our biggest obstacle is beating Halo 3. So, if I feel like saying “game over”, why can’t I? Anyway, I hope you enjoy my thoughts as the clock runs out. Please don’t attempt to “help” me. If you want to truly help, please send me ideas on how to do the deed. thx-Jane

As you can imagine a *LOT* of people freaked out at the suggestion — which is completely understandable given the serious nature of suicide. The topic is not a matter to be taken lightly. However, I was able to determine through fairly rudimentary internet forensics (i.e. timestamps and filenames) that the entire Jane story was all a lame attention grabbing hoax that was never going to happen. Risky assessment? Not really as my analysis was quickly proven correct. By Day 84 (she was counting backwards to 0), Jane was receiving so much attention from the internet, the media, and presumably her local law enforcement, that she decided to take down her site. She posted a respite for the fictional Jane along with an explanation of why she did it:

90DayJane is a personal art piece about me. It was meant for me and (what I ignorantly thought would be) a small number of people who might find it on BlogSpot. It is the result of me tapping into the darkest part of myself and seeing where it led. […] I feel a massive sense of responsibility to my art, but more importantly the readers of this blog. My closeness to this project must have made art seem like reality to many people. That is not a reaction that I expected nor can I morally justify. This is why my project, 90DayJane, will be taken down in the next few hours.

Duh. The people who were serious about trying to find help for Jane were furious. I, on the other hand, declined to become furious and instead created a parody blog called 90 Day Jayne — which I’m behind on updating (no surprise there). You see, after my aforementioned forensics confirmed Jane’s plot was all a sham, I decided to take the character Jayne Cobb from the FIREFLY series and have him count down 90 days to a dangerous mission where he was going to kill all the Reavers. The idea of a countdown is ingenious in that it guarantees you a returning audience within a specific window of time. As far as the topic… I would have preferred that Jayne Cobb kill all the Ravers instead, but Ravers are so cute with their little pacifiers and glowing light sticks in their mouths and fluorescent body jewelry. No friends, this was the Reavers he planned to off. They are the fictional zombie-like characters that are fully explained in the film SERENITY. I could easily post a link to Wikipedia that gives a detailed public domain description of the characters, but I’d rather you go log into NETFLIX and request FIREFLY and SERENITY instead. It’s really well done and you will laugh more than once.

Yes, I do feel somewhat uncomfortable that I took a bamboozlement meant to illicit emotional distress from the reader and turned it into a parody involving a fictional science fiction character that farts and likes to shoot his guns because he likes the sounds of weapon discharge. However, it turns out that I have a lot of fans of FIREFLY who are enjoying my fictional rants as Jayne, so I’ve decided to forge on ahead and have Jayne complete his mission of non-mercy. Good times.

Briefly in other super genius related news, I’m considering moving my blog over to BlogSpot instead of MovableType after having discovered how easy it is to use and customize. It will also allow me to post photos from my phone and user commenting can be enabled with some level of spam protection. We shall see. I’m converting SuperHeather.com to blogspot format currently but at a snail’s pace. Sorry. I’ll work on scheduling my bursts of semi-creativity.

If you really want to know what happened at the Google event, Read Wade’s blog around the late January 2008 time line.