Now we are 39

I've long hated the ambush of the passage of time. In high school, I tried to memorize my class schedule every year, period, subject, and teacher, so I would have a solid framework for reference. I wanted nothing to hang loosely in memory, to surprise or escape attention.

I don't think I retained it fully past college, but even in my early 20s, I would occasionally give it another turn, just to try to rebuild the frame. I haven't tried it in a while. Wonder if I can still pull it up?

Period	Subject	Teacher
1	Latin	??
2	P.E.	Brown
3	Band	Hood/Webb
4	English	Pearson
5	Earth Science	Coe
6	Geometry	Martin

Freshman year is enough to prove a point, I think. Not bad for a few minutes of thought and a quick refresher on HTML tables.
This is relevant because I recently turned 39. And it reminded me of when I turned 29.

At 29, I was wary of letting 30 sneak up on me. I refused to hit that milestone and reel from unexpected realization. So I spent the entire year pretending I was 30. I practiced with thoughts of deferred ambition and mortality.

It worked flawlessly. One year later, I passed the three-decade mark brow unfurrowed by existential consequence.

I was proud of my foresight and small success. Some time later though, it occurred to me that the price for my practice was a year of my life. Essentially, I had two 30s and no 29s -- I hadn't bothered to remember my class schedule for the last year of my 20s.
This is relevant because, as you may recall, I recently turned 39. And this time I've decided to let my 9er be a 9er. A time to look back and forward, but reside only in the time I have.

I am loathe to announce projects here, because most of them never happen. Nonetheless, the limb I shimmy onto now is a project for the remainder of my fast-vanishing 30s: reflection, anticipation, and appreciation for where I am. And as well as I am able, I'll post it here at QT.

It is, as I often say these days, a good time to be me. I hope to be able to talk about why that's true.

Blogaday: A break with tradition

Not committing to my usual tradition of Blogaday this year onaccounta all the stuff I gots to do. I do intend to try to post more often in November than I have in other months of this year though. 

I have tried to increase postings year-over-year here, but 2010 will kill that trend. A little sad about that, but I'm sure valuable lessons will be learned from this, whatever those are.

Blue Like Jazz movie: the hail mary works

A few months ago, I posted about Steve Taylor doing a Blue Like Jazz movie. Gonna do some sudden follow-up on this.

Today, while procrastinating on a freelance gig, I found this article at the Atlantic, Blue Like Jazz: The Quest to Get Christians to Laugh at Themselves. The article compares the Evangelical Christian community's pugilistically earnest film attempts with Jewish and Catholic films, and portrayals in said films. So, ok, interesting.

It also tipped me off to the late breaking news on the Blue Like Jazz movie. I don't really have the time to build this up like this story deserves, but it's a good story, so I'll just cut and paste from the Atlantic article:

After a year of fundraising, Miller—who's written a total of five Christian-themed books and is part of an Obama task force on absentee fathers—was still $125,000 short. He decided to give up. Last month, he wrote a post on his blog declaring the project dead. Blue Like Jazz would not be made into a movie.

But it didn't stay dead for long. Two 24-year-old Miller fans launched a page on the crowdfunding website Kickstarter to solicit donations, and within a week and a half, they'd raised enough money to make the movie. Miller and his supporters then set a new fundraising goal: $200,642, so the film would beat wannabe Facebook-killer Diaspora as the highest-grossing project in the history of Kickstarter. Late this week, with just three days to go before fundraising ends and filming begins, the movie surpassed this milestone—as of Friday morning, backers had given a total of more than $203,000.

Holy shit. $200k isn't a huge number in movie-making terms, but the solid gold nugget in the middle of this interesting bit comes later in the article:

The movie's inability to fit into a pre-existing category helps explain why Miller and his collaborators had so much trouble coming up with the money to make the film. "You're sort of pissing off both sides," Miller says. "Hollywood hates it because we don't have our head up our ass, and the church hates it because we don't have our head up our ass."

200k+ worth of Christian-owned dollars said they're tired of movies made by people with heads in asses. That's news, friend. The real test will be how many Christian-owned dollars show up at the theater/DVD outlet. But this is a fine score for a pre-test.

Reminds me that there's an audience for my projects too.

There's one day left to donate at this point. You can still get in on the fun. Only $3000 gets you dinner with Steve Taylor and Don Miller. As a lifelong cheapass, I'd fork out that money if I had it.

Also, just go visit Don Miller's blog because there's some interesting stuff there.

Efficiency is inefficient

If you're going to be efficient about efficiency, you need to be willing to be inefficient about it.

The readiest, most efficient people you know are the ones who live it, efficient at all times, in the smallest things, even when it comes to things that no one but that person will see or interact with. Organizing spice racks and watch collections and papers in stacks and such.

These small organization efforts are secretly, quietly done from force of habit, or, (more gently) for the pleasure of order. They're not done for any serious attempt at precontemplated efficiency gains. And these small efforts take an extraordinary amount of time.

The payoff for putting that much effort into practicing efficiency is that you're ready to organize larger things at any time, appearing very efficient in front of other people. But so much is spent being efficient in matters that don't really matter. There's a diminishing returns, a Planck's Constant of efficiency, below which, any more efficiency actually becomes less efficient.

But efficient people do it anyway.

P.S. This principle also works to anything else you want to be good at.

Movies September 2010

30 Rock
Watched a lot of scattered episodes this month from all three seasons, thanks to Netflix on demand. This show is so weird and funny and wonderful, and Netflix tells me it is going away from on-demand at the end of the month. I'm a little asea at the thought of it.

Yojimbo
Had a Kurosawa day this month. I think I had seen Yojimbo before, but I didn't absorb it like I did this time. Seems like the first time I watched, it late at night, and slept through some of it. That seems to happen to me a lot. Anyway -- great movie. I recommend it, awake OR asleep.

Sanjuro
I watched this a few years ago, thinking it was Yojimbo and not understanding it. I read up on Akira Kurosawa's career after this viewing, and discovered that this was a script he had already written, but adapted to put Sanjuro in after Yojimbo was a big success. That makes sense to me, because Sanjuro feels like a different kind of movie, more of a caper flick than the wily anti-heroism of Yojimbo.

Jericho, season 1, disc 2
The compelling:annoying ratio drops on this disc as compared to previous efforts. But we'll keep watching, probably.

Popotan
A short anime series about three girls who live in a teleporting house for some reason? And every episode, they find some way to show a girl's naked anime boobs. The primary compulsion to keep watching is the mystery of why these women live in a teleporting house, but I'm probably not going to finish watching before I just look on the Internet and find the conclusion to the story myself.

The Girl from Monday
The Internet suggests that director Hal Hartley is an indie movie bigshot. This near future sci-fi dystopia ditty is maybe sort of a misfire. Sabrina Lloyd is pretty though.

Iron Man
What a fun superhero movie. Just a lot of fun.

Batman: Mystery of the Batwoman
Not a Timm/Dini/Radomski Batman story, and it shows.

SEPTA does something right

I know, I'm excited too!

People give the Nutter administration crap, but sensible, lawful things are happening on his watch. That's not saying this SEPTA thing is something he can take credit for, but it is under his administration.

What is it? As revealed in this Technology Review article, SEPTA's installing batteries at a subway substation to cash in on regenerative braking:

A massive battery installed at one of the authority's substations will store electricity generated by the braking systems on trains (as the trains slow down the wheels drive generators). The battery will help trains accelerate, cutting power consumption, and will also provide extra power that can be sold back to the regional power grid. The pilot project, which involves one of 38 substations in the transit system, is expected to bring in $500,000 a year. This figure would multiply if the batteries are installed at other substations.

Philadelphia, there's hope for us yet.

Vatican astronomer speaks out

This has been making the rounds recently. I usually avoid that, but I like this one.

The pope's astronomer, Brother Guy J. Consolmagno (wikipedia), made statements lately revealing once again that he is basically a cool dude. (In support, observe that the man looks like a cross between Stephen King and Jason Blood.)

Brother Consolmagno drops a smattering of choice ideas and statements in this short Guardian article which I will let you read on your own time.

The clever soundbite, which is seriously not even the lede, concerned Stephen Hawking's recent pronouncements regarding God's role in creation:

"Steven Hawking is a brilliant physicist and when it comes to theology I can say he's a brilliant physicist."

I took away the subscription box

I don't want you to read this on RSS. I don't like the feeling of sitting at my command center and watching all the info drain down the pipe toward me. I want to go get it. I want to visit the content, not have the content visit me. I know you (and by "you" I mean most savvy Internet users) are different. But like any artist, I prefer to exert control over the art's delivery.

That's how I think of what I'm writing. I'm broadcasting art over an Internet channel. You must choose to tune in, to aim your attention at what I'm transmitting. It is not meant to be read amid the lolcats and foursquare squirts and other people's tweets. It has its own space, requires a separate effort.

My blog design is sparse, and not far from its original template. But still, I made it look like this on purpose. The white and the orange and the different fonts, they are meant to convey too. You miss part of the message when these words shoot down the pneumatic tube of your feed reader.


I don't think I can stop QT from appearing in existing feeds, and I don't plan to spend any time trying to figure it out. I'm not even sure that having removed the subscribe option means anything. You might be able to snag it with or without my permission.

And if that's the case, why dig my heels in? I don't know. This is something I haven't got named yet. There's an idea behind it I'm still excavating.

But if you're curious, that's what's happening.

Tales of meta-change

Tomorrow I start my new job.

I've been working at Circle Thrift for six or seven weeks part-time as a way to stave off unemployed anxiety. I sorted clothes and ran the register and behaved cheerfully toward customers.

I loved it. The situation was unsustainable, but if it hadn't been, I would consider making a career of it. There were colorful characters and bizarre goings-on every day I worked. I could have told a story every day.*

So at first it seems strange to me that I didn't. Didn't write or draw or sew during this time. I composed blog entries some days, but they never left my neurons. I didn't even track the movies I watched last month. (Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and some other stuff.)

Instead, I volunteered. Since July, I've further embedded myself in responsibilities among my church. It's been surprisingly non-creative. Attending meetings, returning phone calls, head down, concrete, task-oriented, unreflective. Combined with a hang-clothes-handle-money retail job, there was lots of do, little doo-dah. Not my style or strength, but there kept being one more thing that needed doing. So I kept doing it.

Now I'm starting a new job, a shift from anything I've ever done professionally. Not writing. Not editing. It involves mental health clients, so I don't know how much I'll even talk about it here. Probably lots of stories, but discretion will be at a premium.

I'm also starting to read tips and lists and crap that I won't link to about blog posting. I'm spontaneously looking at new ideas for monsters. The YA novel I lost track of a couple months ago has wandered back in. Creative ventures seem to be re-emerging.

Things are changing around here. That's probably the takeaway. I'm excited by recent prospects, yet for all the change, it seems like no relief from the pinball life. The categories of change seem to be the things changing now. My change is changing.

I think I'll have more to say about that soon.

*Slumming it is underrated. A job you exceed grants a marvelous attention surplus.

Monster shirts

Man, I need about 10 of these. Wish I'd thought of this.

Movies July 2010

Chocolate
Maudlin, but the final fight scene was worth the price of admission. I don't even know how you'd plan a fight scene on the side of a building... it was fantastic to watch, and eminently stealable for D&D.

Battlestar Galactica (2003 miniseries)
This has ageda little? But it's still quite good. Looking forward to watching the first couple of seasons again with M,

Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths
Dwane McDuffie keeps knocking these out of the park, scriptwise. Every other aspect is also quite good!

The Last Airbender
"Your exposition is here, Mr. Shyamalan. Where d'ja want it?"
"Oh, just put it anywhere."

Shiri

A Korean action movie that was pretty good! Recommended.

Superman Doomsday
Pretty disappointing.

Inception

Christopher Nolan does movies I want to see, so I wanted to see this. I enjoyed it, but I didn't just loooove it. It was a smidge too intricate for movies, too much expository work. That level of plot intricacy works in novels, but movies have a ceiling, I think. Also, Lady or the Tiger endings have been frustrating since immediately after "The Lady, or the Tiger?". I think Cobb never made it back out. But maybe... maybe he did?

Jericho, season 1, disc 1

A short-lived, pretty good TV drama about life post-nuke attack in the U.S. of A.

Observations:

• Jericho is far too racially integrated to truly exist in Kansas.
• The black guy's character is so aggressively mysterious I want to punch him through the television.
• This show seems to have the same curious hiccup that other genre-esque dramas have: The writing staff appears to have more show to fill than quality to spend. Some storylines and arcs are suspenseful and challenging, while others in the very same episode are dumb as doorknobs.

We'll keep watching though.

Helvetica

I like fonts, but this documentary failed to hold my interest. This seemed pitched more at insiders than outsiders. Every once in a while, a moment of "oh, that's interesting," would take you off guard, but then it would switch to some aged German or Swiss man saying something dry.

Surrogates

Relentlessly mediocre. I was sort of interested in seeing this last year in the theater, but not interested enough to do anything about it. Now I know why. This movie spent all its money on Bruce Willis and marketing, not necessarily in that order. It had scenes that in all senses -- script, acting, lighting, camera work, scenery, and more -- looked like were lifted from the "how to shoot an '80s action TV series" handbook. The story was workmanlike in its conventionality.

Pillow talk

Over the last few weeks I have found new fire to start a new product line. I am making pillows.

For a couple of years now, I've had boxes of Karlstad sofa covers from Ikea sitting around my office. They were on sale for like, $1 each, and I bought a couple on spec. I assumed I would make monsters from them at some point, but the fabric is sort of upholstery-grade, tricky business on the 6-12 inch scale I usually work in.

I made a round back pillow out of a t-shirt for a show a few weeks back, and it set my mind to thinking about pillows. Then I went to Shanghai to visit a friend, and saw some cool pillow/monsters with a certain shape. I sketched it in my notebook and brought the idea home.

After modifications and trials with fabric and various shapes, I hit upon this design, which I'm pretty happy with. We've had a prototype on our sofa for a few weeks now, and we both really enjoy it. It's not just weird looking, it's comfortable. I'm leaning on it now as I write this.

The production units are going up on Etsy as I get them done and photographed. Check 'em out while they last!

I also have vague plans to try to advertise this batch around crafty places the Web. That's new territory for me, but last time I put up a bunch of stuff on Etsy, nothing moved for 3 months. I also barely told anyone it was there, so I have to consider that I could be partly responsible.

Bynamite idea!

This New York Times link about a start-up that proposes to pay users for their personal information might be hidden by tomorrow, so I'm cherry-picking quotes here:

“Our view is that it’s not about privacy protection but about giving users control over this valuable resource — their information,” Mr. Yoon said.

...

Every search on Google, Mr. Acquisti notes, is implicitly such a transaction, involving a person “selling” personal information and “buying” search results. But people do not think about, or are unaware of, the notion that typed search requests help determine the ads that Google displays and what its ad network knows about them.

Bynamite, Mr. Acquisti said, is “simply trying to make these kinds of transactions explicit, more transparent to the user."

...

In essence, the company has a libertarian, free-market ethos. If consumers have more power and control, it says, personal information should flow more efficiently to the benefit of both consumers and advertisers, who will be able to more accurately aim their ads.

...

IF Bynamite gains momentum, Mr. Yoon predicts that individuals will be able to use their portfolios of interests as virtual currency. He calls the idea a “consumer’s preference wallet.

I've said several times that Facebook can have, resell, and use my personal info for the low, low price of $20. Let's make it $25 because I'm a good capitalist.

That number should be way higher, because Zuckerberg knows they're making way more than $25 off each user. But I like to play nice, and thanks to scarcity rules, I don't have a lot of bargaining power. So 25 bucks for my name, email address, and marketable interests. I've never heard or read on the whole wide Internet anyone else making that kind of claim, and I'm surprised about it.

I normally acquiesce to charges of curmudgeonly behavior. I'm not proud of it, but sometimes it's accurate. But this quirk doesn't belong in that category. This is one of those rare instances where I'm right and everyone else is wrong for some reason.

You should expect a cut of the money when someone uses a resource you provide. I doubt this will be a pure, beautiful, cash-based transaction that I want. But it shows me I'm not completely alone in my thinking.

Where smart fails

Why Intelligent People Fail is a succint catalog of failure.

As Kottke points out, it's pretty much the same reasons everyone else fails.

Intelligence is wildly overrated. Smart is great. But smart has practically no correlation with success, however you define it.

Smart people need to be told this, and they need to continue to see the statistics that back this truth. Because smart people think they're super-special by virtue of an inborn trait. And everyone wants to be smart, and to be considered smart, to the point of self-deception. That's cultish behavior centered around a trait that has recently decided to look down on religion.

I find it personally galling when people use intelligence as a bulwark against theism. Although no one has ever said to me, "I thought you were too smart to believe in God," the surprised looks I've received when I talk about Jesus say it just fine. (On the flip side, a woman once assumed I was an atheist because I "looked so smart.")

Malcontent intelligentsia for the last 150 years or so have tried to con us into thinking that intelligence implies humanism. As in so many other instances though, intelligence corresponds with one thing: Intelligence. MENSA is a disappointing epicenter of this self-congratulatory canard.

You can mix and match intelligence with any other human trait. Anxious. Beautiful. Racist. Musical. Spiritual. Good, bad, silly, it doesn't matter. Intelligence doesn't make you better or worse. It just makes you smart.

The crux of the problem is that people confuse intelligence with wisdom. Wisdom takes you to good and lofty places. Smart just knows how to read the map. It don't know nothing about picking a good route or a good destination.

Movies June 2009

Legend of the Drunken Master
Early Jackie Chan. He hasn't hit his stride yet here, but he's still fun to watch.

Avatar: The Last Airbender, season 3
While working on the A:tLA card game a few years ago for Upper Deck, I watched all of season 1 and part of season 2 to get up to speed on the show. I liked it for the rich setting, well-written characters, comedy, and unexpected twists. So I jumped at finishing the series on Netflix, finishing season 2 and watching all of season 3.

I love this show more than ever now. It transcended children's entertainment, and the love its creators invested in it shows. Plus, the M. Night Shymalan version comes out next month, and it's nice to be reacquainted with the characters before that hits.

Master of the Flying Guillotine
More kung fu classic cinema.

Mystery Team
This movie about boy detectives who solve a real adult crime was pretty fun. I watched it because I'm becoming a fan of Donald Glover, who wrote for 30 Rock, stars in Community, and is part of the Derrick Comedy group. Maybe not a great movie, but a fun movie.

Death Note
The Japanese movie base on the manga about a guy who finds a notebook with the power to kill whoever's name is written in it. And the cat and mouse to find him once the police figure out it's weird murder. I've never read the manga, but the movie was good diversion. Above average. Kept me interested.

Death Note: Last Name
The second part? I guess? See above.

Connected
A short film about people after some apocalypse. Tense and well done. You can watch it now.

JCVD
Jean-Claude Van Damme is the Rodney Dangerfield of the action movie star set. Some pathos. Some comedy. Pretty fun.

Steel Magnolias
Nice dialogue.

The Karate Kid (2010)
And we close with modern Jackie Chan. You know, this was fine. The best part was Jackie Chan beating the mean kids up. The rest was nice enough.

Movies May 2009

The Office, season 4

The Office, season 5

Once Upon a Time in the West
A great western. I just watched it and I already think I probably need to see it again.

The Empire Strikes Back

The Twilight Samurai
5 Stars. Not a martial arts movie in a Bruce Lee sense. Very little swordplay. But moving and sweet.

The Return of the Jedi

The new free lunch

Yesterday at my favorite burrito chain, Qdoba, I was musing to M about whether a completely ad-run restaurant could work. I'm paying $6 for a burrito. I don't know much about restaurant margins... they're thin I hear... but how expensive is it to make that burrito? Ingredients, hired help, rent, blah blah... what are we talking, an amortized three bucks each? Let's say $3.

This particular Qdoba is located near a bunch of expensive universities. Haverford and St. Joe's kids are in there all the time; Penn isn't too far away as the crow flies. That is juicy marketing target -- young AND moneyed.

If you could guarantee delivery of rich college eyeballs, how much would a well-targeted advertiser pay? Would they pay $3 per impression? Would five advertisers pay $.60 each?

What if you made your customer fill out a survey for their free food too? Wouldn't some marketing firm love to have that steady stream of data? They'll pay more than $3 a pop to get these peoples' opinions in other venues, right?

Then sell space on some tasteful wall posters, sell the tray liner space... as long as you don't get greedy and sell every ceiling tile, you could make this work.

The food would have to be good. You couldn't ever let food quality drop. But otherwise, this seems like it would make at least as much profit as a regular burrito joint. There must be some reason why this hasn't been tried yet, right?

Then, that very same day, I see this: Panera: Pay What You Can Afford.

“Take what you need, leave your fair share,” says a sign at the entrance of the Saint Louis Bread Company Cares Café. Patrons who can’t pay are asked to volunteer their time.

The café, which reopened Sunday as a nonprofit, has cashiers who provide receipts with suggested prices and direct customers to the store’s five donation boxes. The menu is the same, except for the day-old baked goods brought in from sister stores in the area.

“I’m trying to find out what human nature is all about,” Ron Shaich, who stepped down as Panera’s CEO last week but remains as chairman, told USA Today. “My hope is that we can eventually do this in every community where there’s a Panera.”

Not quite the same thing, but maybe one better.

The continued work of awakening

I dreamed last night that I heard Steve Taylor died, so I Googled him to find out if it was true, and to my horror -- surprise twist! -- there was no mention of Roland Steven Taylor on the Internet at all.

Now that I'm up, I don't know why that was horrific, but in dreamworld, this was like taking the final exam for the class you forgot you signed up for. OMG serious.

On awaking, I immediately went downstairs and let the dog out and checked my email. Sometime later in the morning, I checked on Steve. Nobody panic.

If you knew me well in college, you knew I was pretty into Steve Taylor. He was funny, clever, pro-Jesus, and he could do it all in song. My personal ambition sleepwalked through college... I couldn't say I wanted to do what he did. But Steve Taylor was a noise the direction of wakefulness.

Around the time I graduated, he released his best album, Squint, and then traded performing for producing. It was the mid-90s, we were all becoming different people at that point. I started working on Dungeons & Dragons for a living then. We've all been there.

In the mid-aughts I checked in on Steve again, and found he'd gone to movie making. He made a flick starring Michael W. Smith of all people, called The Second Chance. It's a buddy movie about a white suburban pastor and a black inner-city pastor. It's in my Netflix queue now, I'll let you know what I think at the end of the month after I watch it.

And today? Now? He's in Portland working on a Blue Like Jazz movie.

BLJ's author, Donald Miller, is someone else I would have wanted to emulate if his books had been around in college. I'm sort of glad they weren't. They could have misled a sleepwalker.

These days, I get a prickly feeling on my neck when I consider trying to create some piece of art for an explicitly Christian audience. It seems as though it would be easy for me. And financially rewarding. I could do funny, touching memoir for the saved set. I could do a passable Don Miller.

But as I start down that road, I think of Jesus talking:

If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that?

A whole chunk of text there, Matthew 5:43-48, has kept me up nights. That bite's got a lot of hard-to-swallow. Jesus tells you to be "perfect" in there. He tells you the rough truth that God makes the rain fall on the righteous and the unrighteous. And to me, he says that writing books for my brothers and sisters is not particularly what I'm called to do.

Look, God has a whole lot of things for a whole lot of people to be doing. I still love Steve Taylor's music and wit, and Don Miller is a decent writer. Don't hear me saying that what they've chosen to do is wrong or subpar or Not In God's Will.

But as my personal ambition rubs away eye boogers and stares into the bathroom mirror wondering when it shaved last, those noises... they're not for me to follow. I don't want to greet my brothers for a living. There's too many other people out there who need introductions.

I am glad Steve is alive, though. Check out his movie blog.

I am two metaphors for the economy

I am the canary in the coal mine of American jobs. As a serial freelancer and contract worker, I am the first one down when unemployment gas leaks out.

Happily, lately, I've been finding jobs again. If you're not clear how the economy's doing, ask me if I've got a job. It's a telling pixel of what's on the bigger screen.

Movies April 2010

The Men Who Stare at Goats
This movie could have been funny, but somehow... maybe in the editing? The jokes just fell flat. It was like comedy archaeology: You could see the bones of jokes. The set up, the punchline, the reaction, they were all there, but the meat was gone. Not funny. I don't understand what went wrong. All those great actors were doing decent work. But then the movie fell flat. Weird.

Whip It
If I were a girl, I guess I'd feel lightly empowered or something after this.

Fringe, season 1, disc 1

This is ok, I guess. The X-Files-y sci-fi of it is pretty cool, but the characters don't do much for me.

The Office, season 2

Netflix on Xbox lets us stream whole seasons of this show. So during protracted illness and unemployment, we watched a hella lot of Office. It's pretty good, although I am thankful that the show becomes less excruciating as it goes on. I had anxiety dreams starring Michael Scott halfway through the season I'm not eager to reproduce.

The Office, season 3
More of this.

Zombieland
This was fun. Pretty fun.

Transformers Animated
The animation here was weird, like, either the Koreans went off-model with impunity, or somebody was trying something "new" that didn't work when it comes to character elasticity. Especially the little girl, who seemed to change shape and proportions at random.

The story was ok though, especially for a G1 man such as myself.

Movies March 2010

30 Rock, season 3, disc 2
"Did Cranston give you my messages?"

Super Size Me

The third in the trifecta of fast food horror documentaries.

Transformers
Didn't care for this movie much, but we all knew that would happen, so let's move on to the interesting part: The way I watched it. Normally, I like to remove all distraction, sit down, and watch a movie in one sitting. I didn't do that here, and I blame 30 Rock. Watching 22-minute TV episodes is delightful. Watch one, you're done, a nice bedtime story or a responsible half-hour filler. Watch two, it's an hour with an intermission. I've gotten used to it. I like it.

So I watched this movie that way too, without pressure. When I wanted to stop, I got up and did something else. I expect most films to have an emotional arc best experienced in one sitting, but I didn't feel robbed, because it was just a lousy Michael Bay Transformers movie. Go team Jeff!

The Invention of Lying
I love alternate reality, and I love high concept. Even if it turned out to be antithetical to some of my own beliefs, I was ready to be amused and challenged on a long plane flight to Rome by The Invention of Lying. However, this movie had a big, stupid flaw, namely, an inherent unreality that drives a truck over suspension of disbelief. Killed this movie dead for me.

Here's the thing: religion is a part of human existence. Let's start secular and empirical: Religion has shaped culture, history, art, government, and language in every part of the world for every human, everywhere. This is not wispy poetry-and-flowers talk, this is way shit is. Even if you think religion is bogus, it has MADE you in ways you can't control.

So it will be understandably difficult to envision a world without it. You have to rethink everything, including, literally, how you think. What is justice? What is evil? Why wear clothes?

I don't expect Ricky Gervais to have a philosophically defensible rubric here, but some sense that he'd spent some time on the implications would help me like the movie. Genetic advancement? That's your highest imperative? How does anything get done then? Why isn't everyone living in huts? (Because a whole lot of architecture got done because of religion. Architects and engineers are not, historically, renowned for genetic excellence.)

That's the big one. That's the problem I can't get past, intellectually. But then there's another horrible flaw this movie purports: that honesty is cruel. That kindness is only "invented" when someone has the genius idea to lie.

The only reason honesty is ever harsh is because people cherish lies. If you did not, for instance, silently and invisibly nurture the lie that you are OK with losing your hair, then no one could hurt you by calling you "baldy." And in a world where no one lies, there would be no reason to try hurting you. Your deficiencies are fact, not barb. The cruelty that Gervais's character, Mark, endures at his work is dishonest.

Yes, it was played for larfs, but the emotional premise of the movie, one of the reasons we're supposed to empathize with Mark, is that in this world of no lies, people are hurtful to each other with honesty. That kind of internal illogic punches you in the face over and over.

Furthermore, this movie does truthfulness a disservice by suggesting that lies make the world a kinder, richer place. The colors, the lighting, the set design, all suggest a bland, homogeneous, simplistic place. But if you think about the consequences of the absence of deception for even a few minutes, when everything and everyone can only be itself and nothing else -- that would have to be the most varied, colorful, wiggy world you can imagine. Telling lies forces us into being boring, safe, and predictable, not the other way around.

Then of course, there is the poetry-and-flowers kind of stuff that you can't reason around. Love. Art. Feelings. Those things are real and powerful, and impervious to justification. A society that could not lie would understand this implicitly. I suspect a concept as dodgy as "genetic imperative" would be inconsequential as well.

And so, see, I'm putting more thought into this than Gervais seems to have, and the thought I put into it tells me that the movie itself is fundamentally a lie. The setting and premise are so divorced from reality, so bedrock fictional, that it doesn't possess the capacity to enlighten us about the reality we do live in.

I know it's a silly, cheap movie. But I want more. In fiction, we tell wonderful lies to get at wonderful truths. The Invention of Lying doesn't have the capacity to do or be either one.

The Michael Bay of the Gospels

We've been reading the Gospel of Mark in cell meeting lately. Mark is like the Michael Bay* of the Gospel writers, all action, quick cuts, and immediacy.

Verse 13 through 20 are where Jesus explains his parable of the sower:

¹³Then Jesus said to them, "Don't you understand this parable? How then will you understand any parable? ¹⁴The farmer sows the word. ¹⁵Some people are like seed along the path, where the word is sown. As soon as they hear it, Satan comes and takes away the word that was sown in them. ¹⁶Others, like seed sown on rocky places, hear the word and at once receive it with joy. ¹⁷But since they have no root, they last only a short time. When trouble or persecution comes because of the word, they quickly fall away. ¹⁸Still others, like seed sown among thorns, hear the word; ¹⁹but the worries of this life, the deceitfulness of wealth and the desires for other things come in and choke the word, making it unfruitful. ²⁰Others, like seed sown on good soil, hear the word, accept it, and produce a crop—thirty, sixty or even a hundred times what was sown."

Lots of my brothers and sisters in Christ like to blame Satan for the things that go wrong in he world. I prefer to avoid such talk. I'm not too "modern" to buy into the idea that evil spirits exist and want to fuck me up. But I don't like giving credit to the Devil for two reasons:

1. God is infinitely more powerful than any evil spirit. So while spirits may have some power over my life, they are ultimately non-issues. I prefer to treat them that way.
2. I don't have a reliable way to differentiate among acts of the Adversary, self-inflicted problems, and unaccountable crap in life. So I don't try.

Tonight I found some Biblical reinforcement for reason #2.

Sometimes Satan eats the word. Sometimes things outside your control do you in. Sometimes you're weak and shallow and you kill yourself. And sometimes your soil is ready to take the seed in.




*Also like a Michael Bay joint, sometimes it's a little disjointed.

Trust your intuition: Bogus advice

That's not quite right; I think trusting your intuition is a great idea, after say, age 35 or so.

More and more as I live it, I like the idea of "logging the miles." We used to be able to use the word "experience" and that would be meaningful enough, but when the word gets applied to theme park rides and expensive dinners, we've lost some of the punch. Logging the miles is accruing enough time in the pilot chair to get a feel for how things go. You don't have to be flying loop-de-loops. You just have to show up and log the miles.

Back to my original point: Intuition is a subtle collection of observations. You don't have to be old or experienced to be intuitive, but you do have to be observant in inobvious ways. The way a person talks and twitches, what doesn't get said as much as what does get said. It's not conscious, but neither is it magic.

Regardless of your naturally-gleaned subtle observation skills, the one thing that ups your intuitive ability for sure is more opportunities to make those subtle observations and have them confirmed or denied, i.e., learning.

When old people offer advice to young people and tell them to "listen to your heart" or "trust your intuition" that is dangerous advice. It's decent advice for those who've been listening to their hearts for 40 years. But someone who's only had a heart for 20 years barely knows what that sounds like.

Don't trust your intuition if you're young. Test your intuition. It's a great tool, but you don't have a magical voice inside of you that knows truth when you don't. An untrained intuition is as helpful as a coin flip. You have to break it in with a few upsets and victories, and learn what to listen for. Then it starts clicking for you.

Open-heart surgery

Discovering how abnormal you are is both a relief and and a frustration. For years, I assumed I was normal enough, and by some definitions I guess I was and am. I seem to be able to put on clothes and walk around and groom myself and participate in meaningful conversations with other humans. I had quirks, but everyone has quirks.

Eventually, and this is a realization I'm not done having, I realized that I'm actually pretty messed up, it's just that I'm an operative messed up. Like a secret alcoholic, I suspect everyone around me knew something was off. But I was good enough at concealment, and the off-ness was subtle enough, and people were polite enough to avoid embarrassing me. So it didn't come up much.

A signal that I'm messed up is the still-dawning realization that I don't like my family. My family is the same operative crazy that I am. I resisted this notion at first, assuming that I was the problem, or that other people were the problem. 

Then I dedicated myself to changing relationships by visiting my family more, trying to communicate, trying to become an active problem-solver. In the last couple of years, I've given up. Because no one else seemed to want to work on the problem, and this is not the sort of thing you can fix solo.

My basic assumption, which I think is solid, is that fundamentally well people like being around their families... or at least have no problem with it. Your relationships don't need to be perfect, but you want to basically like your family. Family behavior sets your assumptions for life, and these relationships are templates for all your other relationships. If you don't have ok family, you start life in a deep hole. While people around you are ascending heights, you 're clawing your way to sea level.

My templates oscillated awfully between needy and aloof. Angry and disinterested. They were not aware of this, but those are primary readings on the dashboard of my childhood. That is a horrible, toxic way to teach new humans what is important and how to behave. The fact that my brother and I are operative nonetheless is a testament to civilizing principles and divine grace.

I haven't spoken to my parents in over two years, and I think I'm supposed to feel bad about that, but mostly I feel relieved. A week ago my mother broke radio silence to tell me she's going to have open-heart surgery soon, and I didn't know what to do about that. I hear that she's pulled through ok, but mainly I'd rather not have to deal with it.

I think that might make me monstrous. But if I can find some peace and rest, I'll need to ask if monstrosity is an acceptable price.

Closing my eyes

I'm done using the words "see" and "listen" to describe attempts to interact with God. I get mad that God won't participate in the literal, empirical senses of those words, and that Christendom bent them for me through careless overuse.

God doesn't "talk" to me. I suspect God communicates with me, but he's never said a word to me in the common, concrete understanding of what "words" are. So I'm taking time off from that particular metaphor.

I've long been a reader of Real Live Preacher, a pastor at a small Baptist church nearabouts San Antonio, Texas. (His blog link is also in my sidebar.) Very recently, RLP left the pastorate. He's never been an orthodox pastor, but he wrote something that I'm not sure he could say occupying the pulpit. Goes like this:

I’m 48 years old. I have been a Christian since I was 9. I’ve been to seminary. I’ve been a conservative, then a liberal, then kind of a conservative again, then even more of a liberal, and finally I don’t know if there’s a label that even fits me. I’ve been all over the map. I’ve been looking for God in the scriptures, in the heavens, in the world, in my mind, and in thousands of conversations with as many people.
And I don’t know anything about God.
I don’t mean that in the good way, like when people say that someone is wise because he admits that he doesn’t know something. No. Seriously. I just don’t know shit about God. Period.
I don’t know if God exists or not.
I don’t know what the Bible says about God. The more I read and study those books, the more confused I become.
I don’t know how much God cares about how we live our lives.
I don’t know if God answers prayers or what it would even mean for a prayer to be answered.
I don’t know how we should worship God. I don’t know if sticking to ancient traditions is good because they have survived some kind of religious natural selection process, or if we should just sit in silence like the Quakers. Maybe we should get guitars and cookies and sing prayers that 5-year-olds can understand. I don’t know.
I just don’t know.

I've been down a less rigorous road than his, and he's farther along. But I can see him from here. And I mean "see" in a metaphorical sense.

I've recently signed on for a pretty advanced leadership gig in my church, Circle of Hope. I'm on the Compassion Core Team, which is part of the higher leadership function of our whole group. I was chosen because I've been around for a while, and keep showing up, and, at just the right time, demonstrated a bias for action over slacking.

I'm also about to become a cell leader in the next few months. My leader, Brian, picked me because of what he called my "flirtations with atheism." He's done the reading and the thinking and the reasoning and the guesswork just like me. And he says that the thinking is good, but that in spiritual matters, you learn by doing. I think I believe him.

It seems propitious for my investment in my church to crank up as my skepticism waxes. I'm expectantly interested in seeing what happens. In the literal and figurative senses.

Frogmarch

For over a year, I've been trying to get hired to write for computer games professionally. This is one of the harder things I've ever tried to intentionally do. There are many people vying for a very few jobs, and I'm not ideally situated to act on it.

I'm doing it anyway.

I've dithered on whether to include my "game professional" blog link here, because these sorts of new ventures are fragile, and can be killed by premature exposure.

However, my definition of "premature" is often equivalent to someone else's "adolescent." I don't like revealing things until they're basically done. The elephantine problem with that schema is that I seldom have the resources to do something completely by myself. So the half-baked thing is either revealed as half-baked, or worse, never revealed. So I'm kicking this one out while it's still young. It's rough, but I'll try polishing in public and see how that works out.

To further my streak of mixed metaphors, let me add: My good, old friend Tom Briscoe used to say, "If you don't execute your ideas, they die." Most of my best ideas expire before they make it to the executioner's stand.

This is one more halting attempt to get one up to the guillotine.

At your leisure, peruse Dire Curious, my "breaking into the game biz -- again" blog. DC serves several purposes for me.

1. Professional development: You don't have to have a gaming blog to get hired on gaming, but I'm not knowledgeable or well-connected enough (yet) to skip it.
2. Personal marketing: I'm terrible at this, and I need the practice.
3. Experimentation with Wordpress: So far, I prefer Blogger, but everybody says it's great. I need to find out if it is or ain't first-hand.
4. Disciplined writing: I know I'm a more capable writer than I ever show anyone. I can be better. I have to do it more to make it real.
5. Another try: This attempt to "do something" may get left by the curb in a few weeks like so many other projects in my life, and I'll feel the same sort of sickly shame I always feel if that happens. But I'm pretty sure I believe the truism that you have to try a bunch of things and see which one sticks. So this is the next one of the bunch.

I'll keep a link to DC in the Ventures sidebar, but I'll probably never link back. On this blog, I give myself permission to appear neurotic and lazy and unhireable. Those traits don't belong where I'm trying to behave industriously and professionally.

Movies February 2009

Food Inc.

I think we're trying to shock ourselves into better eating habits. Much more of an unapologetic agenda than King Corn, but not, necessarily, more effective for it.

Oban Star Racers, Alwas Cycle, disc 1
I wasn't sure if this was a children's cartoon when I rented this, but it is. Fortunately, it's a decent one, and very creative. This French/Japanese hybrid produces some lovely images and fun ideas.

Oban Star Racers, Alwas Cycle, disc 2
See above.

Seven Brides for Seven Brothers

I was struck watching this movie by how REAL everything was, more like filmed plays than modern movie making. In the opening credits, when dude was driving a team of horses down a river, he was out there doing it. There was no green screen, and no close-ups and inserts to preserve budget. They got them some horses and a river and they shot it. Later, when the would-be brides were running away from their families at the end, two of them hid under cows. SO REAL.

Dream boat

Couple nights ago I dreamed I was guest starring on a 30 Rock episode, and between takes, I was driving around with Judah Friedlander (who, in the dream, was being played by Seth Rogen) in an old beater car. We were driving along a river, when huge sinkholes opened up in the riverbed, sucking down whorls of water.

It happened twice before one opened large enough to swallow the road and the traffic on it. I had the window rolled down, and as we fell into the river, I saw that we could swim out of the car, grab onto a rock, and climb up from there. Pretty easy. Seth Rogen was freaking out, said he couldn't swim, so I said, "Hang on to me." I grabbed him, and went out the window as water filled the car. Then I woke up.

Normally I don't write about my dreams on my blog, because dreams are boring to read. But it's encouraging to have one where you're clear-minded and confident, so I thought I'd point it out.

Smiles and denials

For years and years, when friends' relationships foundered, I was baffled when one or both halves of a couple would smile and act like they were not just barely holding it together through force of will, even when confronted directly by an outsider.

Sometimes I would be more than baffled. I would take it personally, because crying and breaking things indicated an obvious red-lights-and-bells problem, yet my concerns would be shooed away like those of a beloved, overprotective nanny. "Thanks for being such a good friend," they would say, "We'll work through this. It'll be fine."

I would think, "They have to know how bad things are. They must just want me out of the way."

Today, it finally occurred to me that they weren't intentionally lying to me. They really were just deeply disoriented... so lost that offers of help looked like threats. Smiles and denials was how they had solved their problems before. There was no reason for it not to work this time too.

You can see how this would seem alien to a man who falls apart semi-annually. But all considered, I like my way better. I prefer lots of little break-downs to any number of big ones. That might even be why I do it, come to think of it.

A downer about uppers

It's nice to talk about depression here when I'm not depressed myself. Newsweek features an article, The Depressing News About Antidepressants.

All you really need to read:

Now Kirsch was certain. "The belief that antidepressants can cure depression chemically is simply wrong,"...

Which is not to say that antidepressants don't help. But it might be more accurate to say that, as far as clinical trials can tell us, believing you're doing something about your depression is about as helpful as anything.

Shake cancer off

Normally I save all these science-related links for one post, but, you know, oh well. In this article, the interesting bit is not only buried in the story, it also somehow escaped the headline:

Nanomaterials may help fight cancer

So might regular-size materials. So what? The cool part is here:

A team of scientists... developed a technique that uses gold-plated iron-nickel microdiscs connected to brain-cancer-seeking antibodies to fight cancer.


The discs posses a spin-vortex ground state and sit dormant on the cancer cell until a small alternating magnetic field is applied and the vortices shift, creating an oscillation. The energy from the oscillation is transferred to the cell and triggers apoptosis, or "cell suicide."

 They want to shake cancer cells to death. I hope we get diseases cured before the world ends. Because I'll be all like "In your face, infirmity! Woo!"

Lil dragon picture

Totally not 'shopped.

via Reddit.

The latest in science!

SCIENCE! Every once in a while, I'm reminded that I don't read New Scientist magazine often enough. These articles have fascinated me lately:


Reality might be a hologram
When good science questions fundamental ideas about reality is when I really love science. There's no easy summary pullquote from this article, but try this on:

GEO600 has stumbled upon the fundamental limit of space-time - the point where space-time stops behaving like the smooth continuum Einstein described and instead dissolves into "grains", just as a newspaper photograph dissolves into dots as you zoom in.

 New strategy: Let the wookiee win.


From questioning reality, we move to questions of humanity:


Why you're only half-human
Your other half probably isn't what you thought it was.

The ability of viruses to unite, genome-to-genome, with their hosts has clear evolutionary significance. For the host, it means new material for evolution. If a virus happens to introduce a useful gene, natural selection will act on it and, like a beneficial new mutation, it may spread through the population.

 And as long as we're evoking "natural selection", please see:


Darwinism's limits
As much as I love science, I hate the sloppy equivocation of "Darwinism" with "science." Modern thinkers scrawl Darwin's name on their notebooks inside bubbly hearts. The lack of critical thinking -- and the schoolyard taunt of "ID-iot" for anyone who tries -- undermines the formidable utility of scientific methodology. We need more people criticizing and testing Darwinism and evolution without fear of ridicule or professional reprisal.


From the article:

Much of the vast neo-Darwinian literature is distressingly uncritical. The possibility that anything is seriously amiss with Darwin's account of evolution is hardly considered. Such dissent as there is often relies on theistic premises which Darwinists rightly say have no place in the evaluation of scientific theories. So onlookers are left with the impression that there is little or nothing about Darwin's theory to which a scientific naturalist could reasonably object. The methodological scepticism that characterises most areas of scientific discourse seems strikingly absent when Darwinism is the topic.

While I'm on the topic, there's an article I've saved for years from the Philadelphia Daily News entitled Darwinism: Right, But Beside the Point? The full online text is in a pay archive, but since I've got the paper copy in front of me, here's the money shot:

Darwinian evolution -- whatever its other virtues -- isn't the cause for experimental breakthroughs in biology. ...For students aspiring to benefit society through experimental biology, Darwinism is simply beside the point.

Time's up for Darwinism fetishism. Let's move on, Internet.


Finally, for the apocalypse lover in you:


Digital Doomsday: the end of knowledge
This is the monster in my closet, the reason I keep a copy of the US Army Survival Manual: FM 21-76 on my bookshelf.

Yet even as we are acquiring ever more extraordinary knowledge, we are storing it in ever more fragile and ephemeral forms. If our civilisation runs into trouble, like all others before it, how much would survive?

None of that helps if my glasses get smashed in the apocalypse though.


Happy science everyone!

A Love Letter for You was an Internet blip last year, but you might have missed it, and it's pretty great, so look again.



The whole thing is a project of the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program masterminded by a dude named Stephen Powers, who I'd really like to meet. He grew up a West Philly graffiti artist, went legit as a sign painter, and has become, like, a dude in the fine art world on New York.

But he remembers his roots like a potato, knowhu'msaying?


If you live in Philly and ride the regional rail, you know how adventurous taggers are. They get some amazing places to put up their names for you to see riding the train. These murals are all along Market street in West Philly, best viewed from the Market-Frankford El (i.e., the train). Seeing these is worth a ride.


In case you don't live in Philly, lookit the Web site. Consider buying the book for your sweetie this Valentine's.

Aliens in rhythmic retrospection

This is a 10-minute encapsulation of why James Cameron has been capable of making great movies, even if Avatar wasn't all that hot.

Even 25 years later, Aliens remains fantastic. It looks a little dated now, but the emotional sting of this movie is as sharp as it ever was -- thrilling and scary. The principals don't do stupid things to create tension, and the machinations are logical and intertwine to create an excellent story.

This novelty rap about the whole thing only highlights these truths.



Thanks to boingboing for the heads-up!

Movies January 2009

Inglourious Basterds
This movie defies my normal liked/didn't like dichotomy. I liked parts of it... Brad Pitt is a fun actor who also got the show-stealing part. But like all Quentin Tarantino movies, the gore seemed gratuitous. The movie would have been less shocking, less visceral without it, but I guess I'm not the dude who thinks that's a bad thing.

The fairy-tale bit was subtle. When I would later think about some over-the-top aspect of it, I would remember its "Once Upon a Time" beginning, which helped contextualize things. Overall, this was a well-executed flick, accompanied by great writing and fine acting.

Avatar (3D)
After hearing the rapturous stories of the wonders of Avatar in 3D, M and I decided to give it another chance. She liked it a little more this time, but I liked it even less, because it wasn't a good enough story to hold my interest a second time. I got bored and fidgety at one point, went to the bathroom mid-movie, which is practically against my religion. It's an OK movie -- it's just not a great movie. Like Titanic, people have swooned and thrown money at it. Unlike Titanic, I don't understand the furor from primary sources, not just from a disinterested distance.

Samurai Champloo, disc 5
OK, taking breaks between SC discs loses the flow for me. I'm watching them in a row from here.

Samurai Champloo, disc 6
Only 3 episodes? Aw man. I really like this series.

Samurai Champloo, disc 7
Oh, endings. How often you are not what we wished. I secretly wanted this to end like the samurai revenge flick this promised to be, i.e., dead principals like a Shakespeare tragedy. Considering how smart and mature some of the individual stories were, I thought it might happen! But it didn't happen. I really enjoyed the series overall though, and would happily watch it again some time.

Gilmore girls, season 7, disc 6
Skipped a couple of intermediate season 7 discs, because I didn't like the way the season was going. Jumped back in for the last two episodes of the series. It was ok.

30 Rock, season 3, disc 1
Still pretty funny!

King Corn
I've read my Michael Pollen; I've done the homework. This documentary was fair and clean. There is just nothing sensible about American corn growing any more. Everyone involved knows it, but no one wants to be the bad guy and put the brakes on.

I'm complicit. I love cheap food too. This is what we've done for ourselves, and you have to admit, cheap food is pretty awesome. I'm glad to live in a place and time where I get the benefit of astonishingly inexpensive food. But what good is cheap food that is also nutritionally vacuous?

I used to wonder what thing we didn't see coming would kill my generation. Previous generations smoked or ingested lead. It seemed safe enough until we learned more, and found out those things had a hidden awful side.

I don't wonder any more. Because now I know it's high fructose corn syrup. It kills us early, and it will still be 10 to 20 years before that shit is properly outlawed. And it's in so many things you buy at the grocery store, that it's bloody hard to escape.

And since we've ceded a lot of our food knowledge to giant agribusiness corporations, we can't fend for ourselves as well as we used to. And good food is expensive. Problems. Problems.

The 40 Year Old Virgin
Especially after watching the DVD extras, I have to wonder: Just how much of this movie was scripted? Because it seemed like there was a whole lot of improv.

Experience is the best torture.

No! Teacher! I meant to say teacher!

Reading: my shame exposed

Today, as I made another stab at organizing my office, I rounded up several books from the atop the computer and in cardboard boxes and two from a pillowcase (worst night's sleep ever). Then then I did a bad thing to a book-in-progress: I put them on bookshelves.

Putting unfinished books on a shelf is naked capitulation. On a shelf, it's camouflaged with all the other ostensibly read books, to be admired en masse, but not individually reconsidered.

Now that I track my book consumption on Goodreads, the proof is even more damning. I finish 5 or 6 books a year (not counting graphic novels). That's all. I stopped tracking in-process books on GR because they sit in stasis so long. But I purchase more books in a year than I read.

Today's most glaring surrender was New Ideas From Dead Economists. I received the book for Christmas two years ago. Every few months I would read the next chapter, having largely forgotten the contents of previous chapters. I've liked what I read, and now I even know what Malthusianism is, why it keeps coming up, and why people use it as a derogatory term. That's come in handy!

But the book ultimately failed to penetrate the atmosphere, and has now settled into far orbit on the shelf, where I'll probably only ever look at it again through a telescope.

This week, I started a strange new enterprise, reading The Tower of the Elephant by Robert E. Howard via Project Gutenberg. I've read very little so far, but I wonder how having a browser window open will fare compared to books piled up. I wonder.

Update: Finally started and finished in one sitting on Feb 3.

Pink Noise

I found SimplyNoise, a site that plays and allows you to download white noise, pink noise, and red/brown noise.

As a result, I also discovered the Wikipedia page for colors of noise, a concept of which I was not even aware, so hooray for learning.

I've been listening to white, pink, and red/brown noise all day, and I've concluded that I'm not a dude who benefits from having these background noises. I can feel my brain pick up speed after I turn the noise off, like turning off the AC in your car--you didn't even know it was a drag it isn't anymore.

But I understand other people are really helped by various colors of noise, so I'm glad they exist!