fine whine

there just is no pleasing me when it comes to fiction

2014-09-15T14:44:29-04:00

I'm in the middle of several books at the moment. I've always been a voracious reader, but as of late I've been savoring the time I spend reading that little bit more, perhaps because I can't spend as much time doing it as I could when I was younger.

Fortunately I have a wealth of opportunities to fit in some reading time every day, assuming I can count listening to an audiobook as reading*.

The majority of my reading these days happens on my beloved Nook Touch, which I consider to be just about perfect for an e-reader, for its size, comfortable and grippable case, easy-to-read and clear screen, generous battery life, and reasonably easy navigation. Having not expanded it with a MicroSD card, nor rooted it, I can't quite fill it to capacity, and it has some metadata limitations, but I nevertheless have over a hundred books at hand anytime I have the device handy.

I think of when I first started using it, reading Neal Stephenson's Reamde with one hand while giving my baby daughter a bottle with the other arm. While I'm fairly adept at reading, there's little chance I would have been able to hold that thousand-plus page, several pound behemoth, let alone read it one-handed. I'll always be fond of the book for finally breaking me free of my former stubbornness that missing the binding, cover, and paper pages would keep me from enjoying reading somehow. Happily, I was wrong and have read seemingly a couple hundred books since then.

While I may be fond of the book, I often cite a specific complaint when I talk about it. To oversimplify things considerably, and yet protect spoiler-averse readers who may yet want to enjoy it, I'll be vague. In part the book is about a virtual world, a massive multiplayer online game which, discussed in detail, brings up many interesting aspects one wouldn't initially think to be part of a game, touching on psychology, economics, and spun-off technology. Among the digressions in the book is a several page account of how in-game enemies in particular zones are actually generated in part using security cameras in airports, allowing unwitting users to actually help secure physical areas and help keep real people safe. The explanation goes on to infer that there would be other potential uses for this technology and its distributed, willing workforce, and then the narrative goes elsewhere.

Later, though, when the protagonists face a situation that would certainly be solvable by a similar mapping of the real world task to the gamers, nobody even seems to consider it a possibility. I don't know why this seems to bug me so much, but I find myself bringing it up much of the time I talk about the book. I nevertheless would not dissuade anyone from reading it. I certainly enjoyed it at the time, and overall liked it.

Two of the books I'm reading right now are Lock in by John Scalzi and Exo by Stephen Gould. Scalzi is an author I've enjoyed, and the Gould book is yet another sequel in a series I have liked since I read the first one, Jumper, a long time ago.

At the beginning of Lock in, while Scalzi is setting the stage for the story, he explains a number of things but one term in particular he doesn't. In context it works, since he's ostensibly reproducing an information dump that wouldn't need to explain what an "integrator" would be, since it's something everybody would already know in-universe while they might otherwise not be familiar with all the details of the rest of the disease plaguing the world at the time. A few chapters in, though, two characters are having a discussion, and the integrator concept comes up naturally in conversation, and without even a line of direct explanation, it becomes clear to the reader what that means (and it soon is quite relevant to the story).

I'm actually hearing this, not reading it, and while the narration continued I got distracted, smiling and thinking about how cleverly Scalzi had avoided the typical science fiction exposition dump that can otherwise derail a good story or at least be distracting (think, perhaps, of criticisms about Tom Clancy and his descriptions of louvers on helicopters or some such). Well written, that part, and I've been enjoying the rest of the book as well, fifteen chapters in out of some twenty or thirty.

Another thing I noticed, early in the text, was a seemingly irrelevant aside about a particular facility. Since the book just came out I'm going to be vague, but suffice to say I've read enough books to recognize "Chekhov's gun":

"If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there."
Anton Chekhov, from S. Shchukin, Memoirs. 1911

I have my suspicions about what might end up happening to this place that would otherwise barely merit a footnote. I can't help but notice it, I suppose, and it's only because I know that things are going to get worse in the book that I would even have suspicions that it could come into play. It's only a slight distraction, but again, one that catches my attention.

At the same time, (on the reader) I'm quite a bit further into Exo. It has been a while since I read the last proper Jumper-series book (the novelization and tie-ins of the less-than-great movie adaptation are best left out of this discussion), and while I may have forgotten the particulars of some events from past books, I recognize the characters well enough and am delighted by what they're up to these days. Sometimes I have even laughed out loud. With just forty virtual pages left, I'm not quite sure how things will end up, but I look forward to reading it in the next day or two.

Once again I think I know where particular things (well, people) are going, though, and it doesn't seem like the characters in the book have made the connections yet. I think what bugs me is when, whilst reading about genius-level characters, I can put the pieces together before they do. It doesn't make me feel smart; instead it makes me feel like the author is giving away too much.

So did it bug me when particular characters in Exo ended up where I "just knew" they would, seemingly well before they figured it out? I think it does a little bit, or I wouldn't be writing this. Is it something I'll complain about like the Reamde thing? Will I groan with the same sort of recognition when the same sort of thing happens in Lock in? Only time will tell.

* The idea for this post occurred to me while I was out walking in my neighborhood, listening to Amber Benson reading the aforementioned Lock in. I can't safely read and walk at the same time, even on a treadmill, and to be perfectly honest was getting too dark to read anyway.

popping off to sleep

2014-09-13T22:48:43-04:00

Over a year ago I started writing this post. I'm lazy, I suppose you could say, or I'm just not spending time the way I used to do so.

There was a time I'd sit up and type things like this when I wasn't sleeping (or couldn't). As I get older, though, I seem to want to get more sleep, and I've found a workable routine to get it (at least, for what I can control).

In short, I fall asleep to music*.

This is no ground-shaking revelation, I realize. Lots of people do it, and I really just felt like sharing how it works for me. In excruciating detail, so maybe if you need to fall asleep, read on.

When I get situated in bed, I put in one earbud, hit a button to get my mp3 player started, and usually I'll be asleep in twelve minutes or less.

I know it's twelve, because I almost never hear Lou Reed's "Perfect day", which kicks in just after Frente! finishes their rendition of "Let the sunshine in".

As an experiment I have embedded a video playlist of the tracks I use at the end of this post, but before that let me tell you a little more about them and how I settled on this (play)list. The idea is to provide me a consistent, repeatable thing to give my attention so that I am not otherwise distracted by stuff that isn't the same, night to night or room to room.

My requirements are somewhat specific. While in my youth I have at times fallen asleep at times to heavy metal (and once even Marilyn Manson's cover of "Sweet dreams", ironically – appropriately – enough), I find music that is too complicated (whether it be by samples or wild dynamic changes or other things) too distracting. Music that is too repetitive, on the other hand, isn't interesting enough and my mind can wander. So much for all of my Philip Glass and Brooklyn Bounce, I guess.

The sweet spot for music that is simple, but still interesting enough to keep me engaged as I nod off would seem to be pop songs, but not the mainstream, danceable autotuned garbage that no doubt fills the charts and radio stations I avoid**.

For a while I thought I'd found near perfection with the lighter songs of Paul Simon. In my opinion he is a great pop singer, possessing a simple, pure singing voice, with pleasant but fun songs to sing with it. For a while I used his Graceland to get to sleep, but as the weeks went on I found myself deleting one song after another, whether it was for the layered exotic instruments of "The boy in the bubble" or the distinctive percussion of "You can call me Al". I was particularly disappointed to let that one go, since I rather like that song, but hey, a guy's gotta sleep.

Last to go were the tracks he did with Ladysmith Black Mambazo, "Diamonds on the soles of her shoes" and "Homeless", which I had to remove since I really wanted to hear them, and apparently would stay awake to do so.

Now that I've not listened to it for long enough, I can level a few other complaints against the album. It's definitely a product of its time, with an often artificial sound from the synthesized instruments (and others that probably were the genuine article, but somehow post-produced into sounding so fake) that I just don't like that much. I think if I could find recordings of just him playing a guitar and singing by himself (or maybe with the African choir) that'd be just about perfect.

Older songs he recorded with Art Garfunkel didn't make my cut for how they were produced, I think. Or maybe they were too recognizable and catchy. Sadly it has been a long time since I made my selections that I've forgotten more specific reasons for what I don't use. The only other song I remember trying, and rejecting, was "The scar that never heals" by Jeremy Fisher, an artist I found on the old thesixtyone website (RIP). That song in particular sounds like something Simon might've put out if he were younger, and a bit edgier these days (I realize he's still making music, but falls into that indescribable trap all aging musicians seem to encounter, where their music gets slower and duller, somehow).

From thesixtyone (and for some reason, removed since) came something I'd otherwise not likely stumble across, "Fomba" by Modeste, one of a few musicians in the Malagasy genre. I looked up a translation of the lyrics once, but have long since forgotten what the song is about, but I think it's happy, since it's hard to get through the song without grinning a bit. I had it bookmarked on the site so I could cue it up when I wanted to brighten up my day, with just this singer and his guitar.

The beginning of my sleepytime playlist, though, is another song I probably wouldn't have encountered if not for the web, "Tomorrow" by Gianluca Bezzina from Malta. He was an entrant in the 2013 Eurovision song contest, an annual music contest the likes of which we just don't have here in the States, but is easy enough to find representative bits of it streaming here and there. "Tomorrow" may have gotten my attention for its insipid-sounding beginning rhyme (after the "oh oh"s) of "His name is Jeremy/Working in I.T..." but there's just something delightful about it that doesn't seem to overstay its welcome in just over three minutes for me, night after night.

I follow "Fomba" up with Frente's saccharine-sweet version of "Let the sunshine in", popularized first by Pebbles and Bam-Bam on The Flintstones and then covered among a bunch of cartoon themes and songs back when that was the cool, alternative thing to do in the mid 1990s. It's an old folk song and there may even be better versions of it for my purposes, but I've been fond of this one probably since the first time I heard it (having found the compilation in the discount bin at the used CD store).

Likewise I have long liked Lou Reed's "Perfect day", bringing back memories of watching Trainspotting in high school and playing the soundtrack CD over and over. I'm usually asleep by the time this comes on, though.

And I almost never hear Maxence Cyrin's piano take on The Pixies song "Where is my mind?", best known for finishing out the film Fight club, as well as its otherwise electronic soundtrack. Well, the Pixies version, that is. Maxence's was one I found on youtube among a few of his other impressive covers, and one that's probably the most innocuous-sounding. He does a version of Justice's "D.A.N.C.E." that is downright haunting.

Anyway, here's a playlist of the songs, in videos of varying quality that may or may not still exist when you read this.

And now, technical notes. I use a generic 256mb mp3 player I ordered from Hong Kong in the days before the iPod. It has an SD card slot, and I could easily put a lot more music on it, but its shuffle features aren't great, and it has no sleep timer. I have other devices that would work better to randomize a bunch of music, but the advantage of this one is its reasonable battery life, simplicity to get started in the dark (I just need to hit the same button three times to start it, and it shuts off a minute or two after finishing the last song), and easy to operate controls for volume adjustments.

I've manually tweaked the volume of each track to be fairly consistent, and tuned all of them way down such that I need to strain to hear them slightly. Without anything to back it up scientifically, I assume that needing to make the extra effort to hear the quiet music helps keep my brain on task for listening, and prevents me from getting bogged down thinking. I'm no insomniac, but I have a tendency to be unable to fall asleep if there's something on my mind. Overall, what I've been doing with the music has been working well for me.

Now if only I could get the kids to let me go to sleep, and stay asleep, consistently. That's not so easy to fix...

* I think my dad has been doing this for years, but what works for him and what works for me are a little different. I think he changes up what he hears much more often than I do, and sometimes mixes in some talking stuff. My playlist has been the same for apparently at least a year and a couple months, if what I put in the draft for this was accurate then...

** At least, I assume it is. To my knowledge I have yet to hear any songs by Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, Rebecca Black, or Miley Cyrus, and I really don't want to learn otherwise.

at the top

2013-04-29T14:15:14-04:00

There was a time when I could remember the name of the game, and even one when I could pinpoint the location, if not the tree in question. That time has passed.

As I walked outside today, I briefly considered tree climbing. Not that I would climb a tree today, since a recent rain had dampened things considerably and I am wearing work clothes I would like to keep clean; but instead my tree climbing in general. Have I spent enough time and effort on my gym's climbing walls that I could, again, climb a tree.

I didn't ponder that for long, instead thinking back to my teenage years, when, once, I played a game outside that involved running and chasing and hiding and was probably a thinly-veiled variant of freeze tag just interesting enough to catch the fancy of teenagers. The group was divided in two, some manner of roles were doled out (one player was a code-keeper, and 'capturing' him or her would gain eventual victory points, or something), and then we were left to run out into the plains and woods to elude each other and score points somehow.

Within minutes I was alone, and decided to hide out in a tree. I climbed higher and higher, probably about two or three stories up, and was within an arm's reach of the treetop*. There I sat, surveying the park around me, occasionally seeing other teens running around in pursuit or otherwise, and even had a pair of them (I assumed from the other team, but did not climb down to check) hiding on lower branches of my tree without them noticing me.

Eventually dusk began falling, and it was apparent the game was over. I descended, and returned to base camp to find whether we had won or lost. Since I had myself not been captured, it was easy to consider this to be a victory for me if not for the team.

I forget if "we" won. At the time, I certainly thought I was triumphant.

Thinking about it today, though, I wonder if maybe I hadn't won that day, after all. Not whether my team was victorious -- that I've long since forgotten. Instead, did I lose by not engaging with the other players? I was a decent sprinter at the time (at least, when aided by adrenaline), and probably would have evaded capture in a chase, and had been just as beneficial to my team's success as to my own enjoyment (and, I suppose, done a little bit of exercise for fitness, too).

Was the "victory" of climbing so high worth the cost of not playing with the others? I'm not sure it was, anymore. But the win or loss is all in the telling of the tale.

* I briefly searched for a more "botanical" name for the top of a tree, almost settling on "capitulum", before finding a certain satisfaction in the apparent fact that there is no better word for "top of a tree" than "treetop".

anticipation

2013-03-26T14:08:35-04:00

Sometime a while ago I stopped paying so much attention to movie trailers. In fact, I more or less now ignore any available information (you might call it "hype" or "previews") prior to watching a great many of them, and believe me, it's less easy to do that in these days of social media and instant connectivity. I can think of at least three movies I paid good money to see (as opposed to the many, many, many I borrow from libraries or stream online) without knowing more than the very sketchiest background about them. This is unusual for me, since I usually expend a fair amount of effort into decisions about the things I buy, whether they be shoes or laptops or cars*.

Just today I watched Chronicle, on DVD. The movie was enjoyable enough, but I was surprised (and a little disappointed) to find the only special features included were a handful of trailers and previews, Prometheus among them.

I haven't watched that yet, and would prefer not to do so, despite hearing and reading interesting conversations about that film which most people have already seen (and formed an opinion regarding). While this does exclude me from no doubt enjoyable discussions and discourse about films, I don't think I'm missing out more than I gain from my (for lack of a better word) ignorance of movies before I watch them.

Two of the bigger, and more "recent" (I don't get to the cinema much these days) films I knew little to nothing about, were also two relatively successful blockbusters. Other than knowing from childhood that Iron man was a flawed hero (often mentioned as having a drinking problem) from comic books I didn't read, and knowing what his suit looked like, I didn't know anything about the film, but enjoyed it thoroughly. For most of its fans, watching the movie was more like the culmination of months of preview photo leaks, and canon arguments, and no doubt rumor mongering about star Robert Downey Jr's (Tony Stark-like) foibles on and off the set. Did they enjoy it more or less for having encountered that stuff? I don't know. The same goes for The Dark Knight, which I knew was about Batman, and I had seen did not carry over the logo from the (otherwise presumably dead) last iteration of the movie franchise. I still haven't watched Batman & Robin, and frankly have no intention of doing so, based on what I have heard about it. But when my father-in-law visited and wanted to watch it (apparently his wife didn't particularly want to see the film) I went with him anyway.

And wouldn't you know it, it was a great movie. Everything I saw was a surprise, down to the new Batmobile (I'd doodled the 90s version in many a school notebook) and all the other neat stuff. No doubt there were pages after pages and videos of the chases and other cool scenes, probably even in the trailer, but I hadn't seen any of it. And liked the movie all the same.

Prerelease movie content isn't always that easy to avoid. I block online ads, don't watch broadcast television or commercial radio, and I frequent movie discussion sites, but there are some times it's nearly unavoidable. I went to see John Carter recently, and actually closed my eyes (and considered humming too) to deliberately miss the trailers, one of which I believe was for The Avengers, which I won't be seeing for quite some time.

People have been discussing how good (or bad) John Carter was shaping up to be, and how well (or terribly) it came out, for a long time now, and I've opted out of reading most of those first because I've never read the old Burroughs novels, and thus have no major preconceptions of the stories or characters, and second because I'd rather not prejudge what some people have said is rather quite a fun movie.

And you know what? I liked it. When I get around to watching The Avengers I'll probably enjoy that too, but I'm in no hurry to see any of it before I actually sit down and watch it.

* The only other categorical exceptions are books and music. Typically I only buy a book well after I've already read it, and only then as, I suppose, some sort of trophy. Similarly the only time I buy an album anymore is well after I've already sampled it online (or borrowed it from the library) and know for certain that I like it. I buy so little music and so few books as a fraction of all the things I buy, so I wouldn't say they count.

memory fault

2013-03-26T13:42:40-04:00

This morning I sang along to Rammstein's "Heirate mich" for the first time in quite some time. I remember listening to it on a borrowed CD of the Lost highway soundtrack back in high school. I remember seeking out other music by Rammstein throughout college, scouring the globe (imported bootlegs) and even seeing them in concert*. I remember listening to it a lot, about a decade ago.

That said, I probably haven't listened to that song in over a year or more - not since trying to finally watch Lost highway, which I have yet to manage to do, yet I had no difficulty with the lyrics. Or at least, my phonetic parroting of them, since despite all the time I play games against them online, the language of the German people is not one I have mastered. Nevertheless, verse after verse it all came back to me, and I must say my drive was more enjoyable for it.

Less enjoyable is doing my own taxes, but not so terrible that I'd rather pay somebody else to do it. I bring this up because I'm stymied by a particular schedule that I have filled out, twice, in the last couple years. The forms don't change much, so I can't say they shouldn't look familiar to me. Yet, and I can't recall if this was the case last year, I am a little lost without last year's iterations of them in front of me. Once I read over my PDFs (or printouts) I should be fine, but until then I'd rather do other things than try to bumble my way through Schedule C again.

I did once look up the German lyrics of "Heirate mich", and probably have them in some CD's liner notes, but I don't think I ever used them as a reference to try to sing the song. It could perhaps be said that phonetically learning a song's lyrics in another language, and following convoluted directions and calculations to fill in a bunch of numbers, in a form are two completely different things. They probably tap into different portions of the brain, but I would think there would be a memory component of both.

So why is it so much easier for me to recall a decade-old, and rarely-heard, song that I can only understand in translation, than to type in a bunch of numbers connected to real money (and potential hassle from government employees) every spring?

For that matter, why do I need to look up my kids' social security numbers every year? I've had little difficulty memorizing credit card numbers, library card numbers, and even the occasional phone number that I almost never use, yet these very important numbers (that I almost never use) elude my recollection.

I suppose this is a case for memorization by rote. My library card numbers come to mind so quickly because I use them every week. Presumably back when I was a bigger fan of Rammstein I listened to the song, over and over, until the words were just as emblazoned in my head as the digits I type weekly now.

It's just a shame that there's no way to shortcut the process to "learn" something like filling out tax forms, without needing to do them more frequently.

* In Europe, and probably elsewhere outside of Chicago, Rammstein is known for a lively, pyrotechnics-fueled stage show. This sort of thing does not go over well, apparently, in a city that burned to the ground.

on the emotional treadmill

2011-05-04T10:53:17-04:00

Around a month ago I renewed my gym membership, and I meant to write about it then.

Canny readers may realize that would put the original intended post date to be April Fool's Day, a day I thought would be somewhat accurate given how unlikely something about this would have seemed even to me not too long ago.

How I've managed to incorporate regular exercise (and some not so regular, too*) into my daily routine isn't really the focus of this, though, and at the risk of turning this into yet another rambling pile of nonsense going nowhere I'm not going to talk about that at all.

Instead, I intend to ramble on and on about a cancelled TV show I've been watching while walking and running on the treadmill. Thanks to wireless networking, while I exercise I can view streaming video, which is good because without some sort of distraction using a treadmill is really, really boring (I don't know about you, but whenever I'm on there I get the sense I'm getting nowhere).

So I've been working my way through the entire run of the American Life on Mars. I'd enjoyed the BBC series and had long been curious how successfully it might be translated across the pond. Only a few episodes remain (it only lasted one season) and so far I've rather enjoyed it.

A discussion about why good television shows such as this barely make it a season when poorly written, bland looking programming survives year after year is not something I'm interested in discussing, as such always ends with the wistful listing of shows cancelled before their time more than any sort of useful, actionable solution to the problem.

Life on Mars grabbed me from its first moments--I felt emotional investment with Sam and his plight almost from the beginning--and hasn't let go of me since. That said, I can but wonder if it is as much a result of good writing and production as it is of my viewing circumstances.

Namely that I am exclusively watching this show while I'm exercising. My understanding of physiology and psychology are limited to what I've read or overheard (and not managed to forget), but I believe I've heard that the mind can be tricked into "feeling" emotions if the body's already exhibiting characteristics of said emotions. Which is to say if you smile long enough, genuinely smiling, you can elevate your mood, though not necessarily to actual happiness. My hypothesis, then, is that the elevated heart rate, quicker breathing, and the rest of things that happen to me while running on the treadmill combined with the emotional beats in the show makes them pack that extra punch, so that triumphant moments trigger feelings of exuberance and the sad stuff hits me that little bit harder.

I have no real facts to back this up, other than when recently I read Jane McGonigal's Reality is broken which, among many topics, discusses the "dancer's high" which, probably much like the so-called "runner's high", is an endorphin release tied to some degree to physical exertion. While the dancer's high, as she describes it, correlates to synchronization in group activities, I suspect there might be something to it when I'm on the treadmill by myself or running next to somebody on the adjacent one.

It's all suspicion at this point, though, since I lack a proper test environment (I don't recall thinking the episodes I watched of The Larry Sanders show on the treadmill struck me as funnier as the ones I watched when sedentary, but I don't think that would count as a true control). Likewise I am reluctant to watch Life on Mars when not exercising as doing so would almost undoubtedly result in me finishing out the series in one fell swoop instead of a half hour here and there.

While it would be no doubt satisfying to watch it all through to the end, knowing I have more of it queued up to watch while I exercise helps me look forward to exercising that little bit more.

After all, despite me doing it almost every day now, exercise is still not something I really enjoy. I don't think we can ever truly change, and not liking exercising would not be out of character of me as I think of myself from years ago. As long as I keep distracting myself with quality entertainment, though, I'm finally getting myself into shape. And enjoying what I'm watching along the way, perhaps that little bit more.

* A topic for another post someday will be about my (nearly) nightly exercise with a sledgehammer. For now, check out (terribly named) Shovelglove.

three pairs of shoes?

2011-05-01T01:24:07-04:00

The other day I was describing what I do at work to somebody skeptical that I might genuinely enjoy my job.

I'm not going to write about that for now. Instead, I'm going to share a little vignette about one little part of how I found myself in this situation.

I interviewed for a job, and, out of character for me, I got it. That's more than a little paraphrased, though.

In preparing for interviews, one question I'd been coached to answer was (the always dreaded) "What is your biggest flaw?"

Though I can never recall actually being asked it and answering it, I had not one but several potential answers lined up, ostensibly to show what would at first sound to be a flaw, but with a little explanation I could turn into some great advantage that would make a me a top candidate. Such as:

"When I'm working on something I need to be careful to focus on the big picture, since I easily get caught up in the smallest details..."*

This is something I've recognized in myself over the years - not only do I tend to sweat the small stuff at times, but I often take great pains (and find great satisfaction) perfecting things that don't matter in the end.

Let me illustrate: When my employers contacted me to schedule an interview, all of the possible times were, of course, during the working day. I was at the time working as a temp IT guy in the basement of a large company, but working nonetheless. It wasn't glamorous, but it was a paycheck, and I didn't want to tip my hand that I had my sights on better prospects. The dress code wasn't overly formal, and I knew that my khakis and polo shirt were not appropriate attire for an interview. Since I'd be leaving work and taking a long lunch to meet with the prospective managers, I'd need to find somewhere in between to switch outfits to one more suitable.

So, I'd need to wear one of my suits. I picked the blackest one (both of my suits appear black, one not having looked even the slightest bit blue since I bought it) and hid it under some stuff in the back seat of my car. Also back there I threw a couple pairs of shoes, and the leather folio I use both as a cheat sheet for remembering my research on the employer as well as to give the appearance of taking good notes during the interview.

None of that its really out of the ordinary except for the extra shoes. You see, despite working in the fashion industry for half a decade, I've never really quite gotten the hang of accessories (by which I mean belts, socks, shoes, etc). I've long had a personal sensibility that black shoes do not go well with tan pants, so I began the day wearing brown shoes. My plan to re-attire myself along the way to the interview involved me changing into my suit in a Panera bathroom midway between work and downtown.

I didn't particularly want to to change completely into my suit in the bathroom, however. Though I'd get a certain degree of enjoyment out of possibly befuddling the observant spectator seeing me go into the bathroom casually attired and emerging looking prepared for a black tie affair, I decided to only change my pants and shirt in the restaurant rest room. So I strolled into Panera, headed straight for the bathroom, changed my shirt and pants, put the casual ones into my backpack (carefully rolled, as I'd be putting them back on soon thereafter), and swapped my shoes before heading to the counter to grab a snack for the rest of the trip.

That's where the additional pair of shoes enters into the picture. Self-conscious and focusing on things that nobody would notice, I didn't want to wear my black dress shoes with what I thought would be a less than formal outfit, since I was planning to add my tie and suit coat at the last possible moment. Naturally I'd need to wear a less than formal pair of black shoes out of the bathroom, brown shoes not matching black pants. As crazy as this line of thinking may sound, I can only wonder what the other people in the bathroom while I was doing this would think of what I was doing in there. So, for about five or ten minutes I wore a pair of black sneakers, and nobody was the wiser, nearest I could tell.

And that's it, really. I planned my subterfuge down to the smallest detail, and in the end it was one other bit of preparation that actually mattered, one I'd done nearly as an afterthought. I'd grabbed a roll of quarters, thinking I might possibly encounter metered parking, and that turned out to be the case. I rolled up to a meter somewhere near the building, finished changing my clothes (swapping my windbreaker for a suit coat, tie, and overcoat), fed the meter the maximum coins it would take, and made it up to the interview with a few minutes to spare.

My notes served me well; I was dressed for the part, and established a quick rapport with the interviewers. Having eaten a bagel, I didn't even need to worry about a rumbling stomach. The interview took almost the entire time I'd banked at the meter, but felt like it went quickly and easily. I returned to work and finished out the day, giving no indication anything had been out of the ordinary.

I was happy the interview seemed to have gone well, and I had that certain satisfaction of switching my clothes completely (and my shoes twice) without anybody really noticing. Having let this draft languish for over three years, though, I can't help but wonder, at the time, which part pleased me more.

*There follows quite a tale when I would answer with this one, though my father tells it better than I do. Back when I was in seventh or eighth grade, I was assigned to turn a 3"x5" photograph into a 2'x3' pencil drawing. The photo I was enlarging was of a brick building behind a concrete fountain (here it is from above) and I went about it with the wrong approach entirely. Before even sketching out the barest outlines of the large building that wasn't just filling the background, but more or less looming over this impressive fountain, I was drawing the individual rocks in the fountain (the water had been turned off when the photo was taken). Now, I wasn't drawing the actual rocks, just something that would approximate them. I couldn't make out that sort of detail even if I had wanted to do so.

Checking in on me, my dad noticed what I was doing, and told me, in wiser words than I can remember well, that I needed to work on the big stuff first before worrying about the pebbles. Subsequently he would refer to this lesson by admonishing me, "You're drawing the rocks again," (or something sager; my memory's not that great). So I figured it would be a great answer for that ridiculously cliched question.

And speaking of focusing on the little details, I wouldn't even have remembered about the titular footwear for this post had I not mentioned their number specifically in the draft I created back in January of 2008. At the time (probably the day of, or just thereafter, the interview in question) I'd also noted "Overall I think it went well." which, as it turns out, it basically had.

collected thoughts about movies

2009-10-16T23:26:58-04:00

Looking up at my shelves of DVDs, I see the results of a lot of poor decision making, misjudgment, and silly impulsiveness. And the occasional good film.

I could count them now, but what would be the point? At last count they numbered close to two hundred, but there's really no need to quantify them exactly. We're talking about art here, right? It should be a matter of quality, not quantity.

I didn't always think that way, I suspect. For a long time I was important to me in some way to know, to a single digit's precision, how many movies I owned on optical discs*. That, in itself, wouldn't be so significant if I hadn't spent so much time, and to some degree, money on acquiring so many of them with such frequency as to need websites and a Palm Pilot to accurately count my collection.

My rationale for buying many of them, collected together on the same shelf, oddly enough, was that I couldn't otherwise see the movies easily. I speak primarily of my thirty-odd Criterion Collection DVDs, which, back in the early years of the twenty-first century, were rare and exotic, but primarily rare enough, such that a person could conceivably be able to own, or at least watch, every one of them. Back in those days I aspired to be such a person.

Prior to college, I'd watched movies, but more or less in the same fashion as any teenager with little else to do than opt for the easy out when looking for something to do with friends. My friends weren't the sort to regularly see things opening weekend, so I'm sure to have missed out on some briefly popular turkeys, but at the same time I do recall seeing more than a few movies in an otherwise empty theater.

For some reason, a year after I'd started college I started taking a greater interest in movies. Part of it may have been that I was a projectionist in the student center, but I approached that more as a social opportunity and a job than as some gateway to becoming a cinephile. The beginnings of my DVD question had nowhere near as lofty a goal, to be sure. An avid bargain-hunter, I stumbled across an un-refusable deal to buy movies for a quarter apiece... from the notorious low-rent film studio Troma Entertainment, well known to fans of messy splatterfests and cheesecake exploitation flicks, and entirely unfamiliar to me. Not knowing anything about the movies (though I'd heard of The Toxic avenger, the cornerstone of their catalog) I picked some twenty of them, more or less at random, paid a higher-than-necessary shipping charge, and patiently waited two to three weeks for the box filled with movies I had no way to watch.

I didn't have a DVD player, you see. My dorm didn't even have a DVD player, though I think some of the more students with more well-to-do parents did. I certainly wasn't going to hang out in somebody else's room to experience Rabid grannies for the first time.

This was a bit before I was known, by some, for having a taste for bad movies.

The Troma movies were bad movies. I may well have overpaid, even without considering the shipping. But they were more than just eighteen randomly selected movies (two had been out of stock and they sent VHS tapes I quickly traded away as substitutes). They were an excuse to buy myself a DVD-ROM drive, so I could at least play movies on one of my computers.

There was a brief time when I had more computers in my dorm room than DVDs. And such was still the case when first my eighteen discs arrived, unfortunately. The only one that mattered, though, was the one inside which I installed my first-ever DVD drive and its accompanying hardware decoder--computers not being powerful enough to decode the digital movies on their own back then--and could consider such a shrewd move because the real players were still hundreds of dollars more.

Also, I had no television, so I saved the money not buying that too.

Once I bought the drive, I was able to finally watch the movies, and it wasn't long before I realized I needed some better movies in my collection. A co-worker of mine did me the favor of having a couple of the discs stolen while he borrowed them, and I replaced those with a few "real" movies I bought on eBay.

The online auction site quickly became my primary source for new and used DVDs. My early purchases were less than consistent - I bought The Matrix and Contact around the same time, even though I was less than impressed with the former and didn't particularly need to watch the latter another time. I think I bought The Matrix because everybody who had a DVD player owned it. I'm fairly certain I bought Contact because it was an early example of a studio's labor of love, as it contains considerable supplemental features including an unprecedented three commentary tracks.

I was a sucker for supplemental features. I think it was their appeal that prompted me to buy my first Criterion Collection movie. It was Terry Gilliam's Brazil, about which I'd only read, and generally the DVD set itself was lauded more than the film. So I bought it, the first of many movies I bought hoping I'd like them, and as with almost all of them I was quite right.

I did love the movie. The attention Criterion had lavished on it, providing not only Gilliam's cut, but also the butchered studio version, struck me as very promising for the future of DVDs, and quite possibly set me on my path of seeking films that ended up a little outside of the mainstream.

More immediately, though, it made me want to make more of the Criterion Collection part of my collection.

In retrospect, had I known I could watch pretty much any of them, as well as a whole lot more important movies, by visiting the school library, I might've saved a lot of trouble.

For that matter, had I not been too cheap to pay the buck or two the town library charged for borrowing their discs, I might not have 'needed' to spend twenty bucks a pop (on sale) to buy my Criterion discs from Borders.

Seems a bit silly, that, when I think about it now. Especially for how many of them I bought without having seen the movies first. I'll never know if I'd consider myself a fan of the movies of Luis Buñuel if I hadn't bought Criterion's Discreet charm of the bourgeoisie for its interesting cover art and good price (considering it was a double disc).

I did the same, more or less, with the movies of Jacques Tati, when I bought Mon oncle, though I can't recall quite why I had done so, though I am of course now quite happy I did so.

Those were not the only films I bought for less than rational reasons. I bought several movies (Repo man and the original Wicker man among them) because they came in unique cases.

That's how I ended up seeing Akira for the first time, in fact. I'm almost suprised now that I never picked up other limited edition tin-cased movies like Supergirl, attributing that to either sheer chance, or perhaps some tiny bit of common sense.

Shiny collections also caught my eye. I bought Fox's collections of the Die hard and French connection films, and was yet again pleasantly surprised to enjoy them.

For every French connection or Conversation (also purchased unseen!) I own, though, I've got an Antitrust or a Swordfish.

Along the way I picked up about ten movies from BMG, picked as much based on value for the money as for me wanting to own (or see) them. That's how I finally got to see most of the movies of Kevin Smith (Chasing Amy being a Criterion disc, and one of the most widely available, I already owned it). BMG also fortuitously introduced me to the TV series The Prisoner, a series I am proud to own even now as it is available for free to watch online.

As I write this I keep glancing back up at the shelf. I can only wonder how many other collections feature The Prisoner alongside Knight Rider and Boston legal. When I started writing this I meant it to be a rumination on what I could possibly do to begin culling the collection of stuff I don't really need to own (like the forgotten Killer elite pitting rival hitmen Robert Duvall and James Caan against each other, or my Dutch imported Raging Bull (special edition) or Things to do in Denver when you're dead, neither of which really do much for me, but neither of which are playable to most normal people here in the US). I meant to touch a little on how I ended up with multiple editions of Highlander and Starship troopers and The meaning of life, but somewhere along the way I seem to have lost track of what I was doing.

Which, now that I think about it, is as good an explanation as any for many of the discs being up there on those shelves.

* For the sake of sticking to close to a single line of reasoning, I'm not going to even mention my large laserdisc collection.

cue the training montage music, please

2009-08-20T12:02:17-04:00

I realize the last entry was pretty bad. You may have noticed something of a slower pace to the entries published here, if you still drop by at all. It's true, I'm writing less, and apparently when I do, in fact, write something, it's a bloody mess.

Yesterday's rambling, well, whatever it was (read it here, if you haven't already) was written over the course of something like four months, and I no longer have a real idea of when I first considered tackling the topic of movies ripping off other movies. It was the top draft on a pile that is getting smaller, due more to me deleting the ones I either can't remember* or no longer feel as strongly compelled to write. There may still be others, dredged out of the past (I do have this charming story, partially written, about losing my mobile phone in New York City from December 2005) but the pickings are getting leaner.

The entries directly preceding yesterday's also aren't samples of my best writing. I'm beginning to suspect that in order to really produce something of quality, consistently, I'd need to produce a much greater quantity.

Well, when I think about it like that, it just makes sense.

I'm out of practice. November marks the annual National Novel Writing Month and, as usual, I have that deep-seated desire to give it another go, to finally 'win' it by writing a 50,000 word book in 30 days.

I don't even recall if I wrote more than a paragraph last year, and barely more than that the year before. Back in 2004 or 2005 I actually made it to the thousands, not by much, but I think I ended up starting a second story entirely to do so. As much as reading my 50,000+ words from 2003 amuses me, I cannot in good conscience call it a novel, or even a book, in any conventional sense, though I do still hope, someday, to settle on a title and cover for it, and send it to a print-on-demand shop, just so I can own something that at least looks like a book I've authored. So the great American NaNoWriMo novel still eludes me.

And see, I've rambled again. Given my recent output here, I can't even delude myself into thinking I'd be capable of starting a novel, let alone finishing one worth reading. What I need to do is get back in shape, as it were. If there were a writer's equivalent of the retired boxer, atrophied and tired, needing more than just the determination and a rediscovered hunger for victory for one last bout against a seemingly unbeatable challenger, well, maybe somebody could finish out this extended metaphor in some satisfactory way.

It's too early for me to give up on this year's novel. It'll take some effort to get myself to the mindset to try to tackle writing it, but if I try a little harder around here, I may just have a fighting chance.

Of course, I need to think up a story first.

* I still have many an unpublished entry where I recorded merely the date and the system ID of the post that would've been published that day (and likely written several days or weeks later), though I've deleted over a hundred such drafts over the last year or so. Someday I'd like to have the number of drafts back at zero. That's probably a more realistic goal than writing a novel, and an attainable one at that, since all I'd need do is select them all and delete them, in a fit of defeatism at not finishing them properly.

on theft and stealing

2009-08-19T16:28:52-04:00

Three months ago* I watched two foreign films, though they were not totally unfamiliar to me. They shared a title, Ghajini, and a plot.

You see, they're both about a guy. He's the CEO of a growing telecom company, but finds himself thinking less about business and more about love when he meets a wonderful, outgoing girl who constantly surprises and delights him. She's a model-slash-actress who hasn't taken on any substantial roles, and he's letting her believe that he's also trying to break into show business or modeling. She's not the only person being fooled - in fact she's lying to the whole country, claiming that some telecom CEO has fallen in love with her, and the two are dating, even as she's more or less dating, unknowingly, that very same guy.

So, we can tick a few things off already - mistaken identity and a love story, love under false pretenses, even. Given we're talking about a Bollywood and a Tollywood movie, here, there are a few song and dance numbers, too.

But I neglected to mention something in the plot. The girl gets into some trouble. You see, she's got a heart of gold. she goes out of her way to help people, and incurs the wrath of some gangsters when she helps out some women on a train who would otherwise be headed for a life of slavery or worse. They come after her, murder her, and almost kill the guy, who happened to be nearby when the thugs show up. He was about to come clean about his deception, too. So the guy's beat up pretty bad, and the blow to his head left him with a terrible malady: he can't hold any new memories in his head for more than fifteen minutes. In order to keep track of anything he carries around a Polaroid camera that beeps every fifteen minutes for him to take a picture and record what's going on, who he's with, and what's he's doing. He has covered his body with tattoos with all the important details he knows about the girl's killer, and he's working on tracking him down for vengeance.

Oh yes, I know what you're saying. Polaroid didn't make a camera with an alarm, that's just ridiculous!

Or were you thinking the plot sounds awfully familiar. It's obvious that this Ghajini is inspired by Chris Nolan's Memento. Both of them are - remember there are two films here.

The one I watched first was the Bollywood one, starring Aamir Khan (better known for his starring turn in the period cricket blockbuster Lagaan). It dispenses with some of the more clever mechanics of Nolan's film, namely, showing scenes in reverse order, and adds cliche Bollywood touches like the songs and extra hour of love story, but the result is nonetheless enjoyable. With all its similarities, some would consider it a complete rip-off, even with those differences. It's more accurately considered a remake.

But it's not a remake of Memento. It's a remake of a remake of Memento. It was remade first in Telugu (Tollywood instead of Bollywood), and up until the ending, the two films are very, very close.

Without giving anything away, the two endings are different enough to make seeing both of them worthwhile.

But it's a fair assumption many people outside of the India wouldn't watch one of them, let alone both, due in no small part to the connection to Memento.

What brought this to mind, though, was something I read, about Warner Brothers taking out a full page ad in The Times of India. They were threatening legal action against any movies made "either in English or Hindi or other language, having a similar script, screenplay or story line or character sketches or interplay of characters or sequence of events" to Benjamin Button.

That struck me as a little bit odd. I know it's fairly common for there to be Bollywood movies borrowing pieces, or plots, or sequences of events from popular Hollywood movies (and, heck, some that aren't so popular*. I remember watching Partner and wondering how they could've gotten away with such a close ripoff of Hitch.

Well, it turns out in that case some legal action was threatened, and there may well have been some sort of settlement. But it made for some interesting quotes:

Producer Parag Sanghvi:

Seven hundred films are made every year. Can all of them be original?

Director David Dhawan:

It’s rubbish. How many producers can they sue? Five hundred films are made here that are inspired by Hollywood films.

I can't imagine Sony and Will Smith lost out on too many rupees from Indians paying for a version of their movie, in the local language, rather than buying the DVD of Hitch. But what do I know?

I do know that Hollywood producers work through official channels to secure the rights to remake popular foreign movies, and can get in trouble when they don't.

But, from an artistic standpoint, what's the harm? Is the original film somehow damaged by the existence of the copy? Did Johnny Cash's excellent rendition of "Hurt" in any way diminish the artistic merit of the Nine inch nails original?

Where do you draw the line? Innovations get copied. Watch a movie like Citizen Kane or A hard day's night or any number of groundbreaking films (hell, even The matrix. Sure, you can think back on other movies that have copied those techniques. Sure, some of the derivatives are equally as interesting, if not better. But does it make the originals any less great?

Well, maybe not The matrix. Influential and great aren't necessarily always the same.

* At least I think it was over three months ago I had the idea. That's when I'd dated the draft, but sometime in between I lost my train of thought, as well as the motivation to write the article. All that I'd written was "Ghajini, Ghajini, and Memento. Also, Coming to America." and I've tried to remember what I meant to say about them. Looking at the dates, that's when I'd just watched Coming to America, and the other two, two weeks previous.
** There is, from what I have read, a Bollywood remake of Who is Cletis Tout?. I recently also enjoyed Maalamaal Weekly which bore eerie similarities to Waking Ned Divine.

on the buying of books

2009-07-12T19:15:49-04:00

I don't think I've ever bought a book for somebody else*. For that matter, I don't buy myself many books, and generally the only ones I buy I either:

never end up reading, such as Naked lunch or A salute to cheese
have already read, and enjoyed, and entertained the notion of, but never have actually gotten around to loaning them to other people or re-reading them myself, like Jonathan Lethem's Gun, with occasional music or Mark Z. Danielewski's House of leaves

So, cheap or rare children's books for Natalya aside, I don't buy many books. I read a lot of them, however, and what started me thinking about this was a brief aside in Nick Hornby's Shakespeare wrote for money wherein he mentions he recommends a good book to buy for new mothers (Beth Ann Fennelly's Tender hooks: poems). I read that (Hornby's book, not the poetry), and thought for a moment if there were any people I knew that I'd give a book as a gift, and then, thinking back, tried to think if I'd ever given one. Again, I can't think of ever buying a book for somebody I didn't already know liked or wanted that book.

What's wrong with me? Lots of people buy lots of books for people. I read a lot of books, and I know a lot of people who read books, and for some of them I can even reasonably gauge if a book I've read would interest them.

I don't mind recommending books, in fact, after I've enjoyed a book, I rather enjoy telling people about it, like, say, when I mentioned to skippy that Paul Melko's The walls of the universe is a fun read with good characters and a great story, even if the book leaves the possibility of a sequel open.

Come to think of it, I'm the same way with movies. I have no reservations pleading the case for an underrated, or overlooked hidden gem of a film, but I haven't found myself actually giving those movies to people. Perhaps I'm happy to merely point people in the right direction.

Maybe it's the fear of rejection. Merely giving somebody a pointer to something leaves the responsibility for actually obtaining that book or movie, and that transfers some of the negativity onto the person, and off of me, if it turns out to be less than enjoyable. After all, it's not like I'm the one who bought the book.

I do know that I have a weird neurosis about receiving gifts, particularly things such as movies, book, and video games that can be purchased many places. Even though it's somebody else buying it for me, I'm almost always certain it cost too much, that I could've found a much better price.

Maybe that gets to the heart of it, then. Perhaps it's just I'm too cheap to buy books and movies. The other purpose, other than to blather on and on without a point, for this very post is to test out a plugin I'm updating for Habari to insert Amazon Affiliate links for books and movies, so that I can make some small pittance of a commission if people decide to buy something. Or if they want more information.

Maybe they'd reserve it from their local library. To be honest, that's what I'd do.

*Two disclaimers on that:

"I don't think" because I've long known that collectively, the people I know remember more about myself that I ever will, so I've given up on making blanket "I've never ..." declarations.
As mentioned above, I've picked up many a book for other people, either because it was convenient for me to get for them, or because I knew they wanted that specific title. In that regard, it's no different from picking up groceries, the way I see it.

blocking the DiggBar in Habari

2009-04-10T23:38:36-04:00

Challenged by RandyWalker and inspired by John Gruber's post about blocking the DiggBar, I whipped up a quick plugin to do just that for Habari.

After all, why should all the other blog engines have all the fun?

But I'm getting ahead of myself. The DiggBar is a new feature that adds lots of great features to pages and sites linked on Digg. And to do so, it shortens the URL (to one starting with http://digg.com/) and loads the target in a frame.

In a frame?! I thought we were done with frames half a decade ago.

There are myriad reasons why this is a bad thing, and not all of them involve Digg stealing revenue, and other sites have covered it better, but in short, it's a bad thing.

So, how can you avoid it framing your Habari site?

DiggBar Blocker

You can download* it here: Current Version.

Unzip that in your /user/plugins/ directory, and activate it in your admin plugins page.

By default, it will provide a brief message ("This site does not support use of the DiggBar.") and a link to the correct page with your URL on it. I also added an option to bypass the nice message, and just reload the target outside of the bar.

If you have questions, comments, suggestions, please leave them below or submit a ticket on the Habari-extras Trac.

* Or view the source here.

does this make me more, or even less, l33t?

2009-03-30T15:10:32-04:00

Today I heard the word 'pwned'* said aloud, for what will probably be the only non-ironic time. At least, I can only hope it's the only one.

For the curious, it's apparently pronounced in a way that rhymes with 'owned', at least if the one frat boy yelling to the other down a long hallway is any indication of proper usage.

* To be 'pwned' is, well, to be ... pwned. It's so-called leetspeak. I can't hope to explain it, so I'll just link to an authoritative source for more information.

son of a...

2009-03-30T12:16:55-04:00

For a while now I've read Snopes, and enjoyed their tireless work to not only assemble urban legends and myths, but to also debunk them. So when I got this update in my aggregator I had a "D'oh!" moment, as I had been spreading this very legend as truth over the years. It was so unbelievable that I thought it must be true, if I needed to make an excuse. Of course other journals were fooled but still I feel like an ass.

[2009 note: I'd like to think this incident shook my faith in much of the other 'unbelievable' trivia and anecdotes I'd read, and shared, as fact, but no evidence exists whether this is indeed the case.]

peepers

2009-03-30T12:05:31-04:00

For a movie that was likely conceived and scripted backward from a song lyric, Jeepers creepers could have been a lot worse.

It could also have been a lot better.

[2009 note: I'm no longer sure if I had more to say about this or not. Now, of course, I'd just put an update like this on twitter, as it succinctly expresses everything I'd want to say about the film, and in 140 characters or less. There's always the chance that I intended to get into an exploration of other dubious inspirations for movies including those made from songs (the best examples actually contain them, as seen in Peckinpah's Convoy, but I don't recall doing the proper research to back it enough to make a coherent point.]

dusty and bleak

2009-03-30T11:54:53-04:00

I finally finished watching the first season of Carnivàle.

[2009 note: I still am not sure what to make of this show. I started watching the second season and didn't finish it, feeling no real interest in what was going on. I found many characters to be interesting, but the show just didn't grab me. I don't recall having anything more salient to say at the time.]

2008 bullet points

2009-03-30T11:50:31-04:00

This was meant to be a list of accomplishments, but somewhere along the line I got sidetracked*

In 2008, I

survived a tax audit (well, it was only the city, and they told me I didn't need to make up the difference. I already figured out how much it was and how I'd missed it when I got there).
stopped playing MMOs, again.
watched ten Bollywood movies - fifty fewer than 2007. Maybe I got a little burnt out on them after all.

* I'm publishing this in March in an effort to clear up old unpublished material. Why not, I figure, fix up the stuff I started writing and abandoned, rather than trying to create new material from scratch?

the third movie of six, or the last travesty, depending on how you look at it

2009-03-30T11:16:10-04:00

[2009 note: I found fit to make a draft for this back in 2005, but I can't seem to remember why. I wasn't enamored with the film, but on the same note I don't think I hated it enough to say something about it either. I suspect I made the draft out of the same misplaced sense of geek loyalty that prompted me to see it in the first place.]

important and influential aren't always enough

2009-03-30T11:07:17-04:00

Despite its appearance on many a top however-many list of great or influential or most awesomest films, I'd never seen Alfred Hitchhock's Vertigo.

I'm not entirely certain I missed all that much.

[2009 note: Back in 2005 I had no doubt much more to say about this, as I found the need to start a draft. However I remember more my unimpressed reaction and less of that to which it was a response. I suspect the psychological thrilling implications were lost on me at the time, though nothing I've read or heard in the intervening four years has particularly persuaded me to want to watch it again.]

25 things, as seen on facebook

2009-02-04T18:23:11-05:00

Those of you with Facebook accounts likely know what follows.

To everybody else, there's a so-called meme going around to get people to the use Facebook Notes feature that has people writing 25 facts, goals, thoughts, and whatnot about themselves and then 'tagging' 25 people connected to them on Facebook to presumably do the same.

If you happen to be in the former group, feel free to comment there instead of here.

I may have written about some of these things before. None of the below is a boast about my stellar memory.

1. I don't like to pick favorites or rank things in order of personal preference, generally. I wrote this list out without numbers first* and then reordered them several times. To my knowledge, they're not supposed to be in any particular order anyway, but I'd hate to have some sort of preference or priority suggested by them.

2. The backpack I carry every day to work with me is the same one I used in sixth grade. The zipper got replaced once or twice, but that's about it. I now realize that, back in high school, when I used to scrawl slogans and jokes on it atop pieces of masking tape, that doing so was a good thing lest I show up at work with a bag suggesting we "PAVE THE WHALES". Why I also had electrical and gaffer's tape with me as well was not really clear then and even more so now.

3. I once owned the domain name peanutbutterandjelly.info but never got around to doing anything with it before it expired.

4. I've never been entirely satisfied with capitalization. I Really Hate When All The Words Are Capitalized In A Sentence, Or Song Title, Or Headline, Et Cetera. Sentence case, on the other hand, isn't always entirely appropriate either, particularly when it comes to band names. I may go to my grave not knowing exactly how I'd want to capitalize, say, the dysfunctional psychedelic Waltons, or I am the World Trade Center. all lowercase looks immature and unfinished to me, whatsisname cummings be damned.

5. I spend far too much time correcting titles and artists (and capitalization) of my mp3s.

6. Early in my freshman year of college I was threatened with a lawsuit from the RIAA, for operating an mp3 distribution FTP site. At the time the amount being thrown around was $15 million, but fortunately after deleting all of them, giving up my school-provided email for a year, and writing some 'informative' newspaper columns, I was off the hook. They never filed suit. This was before they started cracking down on everybody.

7. Also in college I got in trouble with the computer lab guys for hiding rc5-64bit encryption-cracking programs (for science, and a competition, not hacking) on the workstations with processes named like 'ps' and 'grep'. Apparently their long run times and CPU usage were a dead giveaway. I told them I'd stop doing it, and haven't contributed to any distributed computing effort/contest since then, using my computer or anybody else's.

8. During high school I was on the local YMCA swim team. I wasn't very good at it (the best I think I did, other than garnering a 'most improved' trophy, was winning my heat at regionals, once. Afterward, when picking up my ribbon, I learned that I was 31st of 36. Somehow I managed to be in the same pool with the every single swimmer slower than me), and now when I get into a pool I find myself wondering what I'm supposed to do to pass the time.

9. I know I abuse parentheses in my writing, though I would not consider my use of them to be improper (see above).

10. My only home internet connection was dialup well into early 2008. I even played World of Warcraft over it for quite some time.

11. I don't play World of Warcraft anymore, and haven't for quite some time. It stopped being fun when I couldn't play at the same time as my friends and I wasn't finding a dollar's worth of entertainment in it every day.

12. I've found myself to be fiercely competitive when the stakes are low or nonexistent, even to the point of cheating if I know I can get away with it. This does not apply to playing board and card games with people, though. I don't try to cheat anymore - it's no longer fun to win by cheating. I'd rather play and have a good time, then work to make sure I win at the expense of the fun.

13. There is a great disparity between the number of words I recognize, and the number for which I know the correct definition. It's always a pleasant surprise when I go out on a limb and use one I think is appropriate, and it turns out to be particularly good in context. In a recent conversation I tried this with "austere" and it was just right. More than once I've completely misused a word.

14. I haven't bought anything off of eBay in at least three months. This wouldn't be that surprising except that I've probably won some 200 auctions over the last decade there.

15. I claim to never watch TV but can't say that without many caveats. I am fairly current on a small handful of shows, and would like to be so on a few others, but I only ever watch them online. The last time I deliberately watched a TV show at the same time it was being broadcast was the episode of The Simpsons that followed a SuperBowl and preceded the (horrible) pilot of American Dad. I also watch a great number of shows on DVD, and even own a few.

16. I own a couple laserdisc players, and some 100 laserdiscs or so. I haven't watched one in a while, and the number of them that I can't replace with DVDs dwindles every year. I got into them in the month that everybody but Pioneer stopped making them, and picked up a great many of them for a dollar or two. The rest, primarily Criterion Collection discs, were grabbed here and there at resale shops. I don't recall paying any attention to them in the days when they could be bought new in stores or rented.

17. In 2007, on a lark, I willingly and deliberately watched over 60 Bollywood movies. Apparently this makes me some sort of guru in the eyes of the other white suburbanites.

18. I'd like to drive a classic 70s muscle car or two sometime.

19. On the average, I consider myself to be a better driver than most people who consider themselves better than average.

20. I've had two bikes stolen over the years. The second one was even locked to a rack.

21. I think I got the MVP award for Academic Challenge my senior year of high school out of some sort of misplaced pity - I wasn't really that big a contributor to our (less than stellar) scoring. I've never done anything with the corresponding fabric varsity letter other than file it away.

22. I can't help but proofread the things I read, finding typos and other mistakes. Which is all the more ironic because the first time I published this, having read through it a number of times, both #2 and #22 were exactly the same. It's not like I used an apostrophe wrong, but still...

23. As a kid I loved to doodle. Somewhere in the intervening years I lost the ability to doodle new things, and often find myself drawing the same cars I used to draw back then, other than the odd website layout.

24. My handwriting has not improved one bit since seventh grade.

25. The same may well be true for my writing in general - I was an adequate writer back then, from what I've seen since.

(Thanks, Morydd, for being the tipping point in me finally doing this.)

* I originally planned to put "I put two #8s in this list" in the middle somewhere, but fortunately thought of something else to write for that last salacious factoid.