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.