2019 January❮❮prevnext❯❯

I have mixed feelings about New Year' Resolutions. Looking back, a few good things have come from them for me, but not many.

Here's what I'd like to do:

1. On a DAILY basis I'd like to do at least one thing for Mind (like read a chapter of a book), Body (there are some exercises I've been neglecting that might help get past a recurring but minor arm ache) or Spirit (there's a meditation app I've had languishing on my phone for months)
2. On a WEEKLY basis I'd like to revive my 2001 resolution of "catch up with one person I'd like to stay in contact with a week". This might have been too ambitious when I thought it meant "in person", but if I include email or call contact, it might be good.

(For both of those it helps to have a good Todo app with recurring items - my favorite being "2Do", which handles multiple sublists better than any I've seen.)

Finally:

3. Continue being less angsty and procrastinatory when tasks are triggering insecurity. I tried to make this comic panel with an appropriate quote:


(I'd like to make a sequel of sorts to, or maybe rather an anthology including So, You're Going to Die, with all the best ideas I've encountered in my 40-odd years here, though I wish I had an advisor/editor whose taste I trusted, to help me how to make best use of the tools I have available (both intrinsic and external) and to figure out if I should commission an illustrator who has worked at honing their craft, or if there is enough charm in my doodle style to carry the day - and if the latter, which of my gimmick styles works best.)

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Worth reposting:
Heh, I was trying to figure out why I couldn't find notes on my procedure to take stuff from my media log database and make the annual writeup, but then I realized I had turned it into a one-button process on the database page. Thanks past self!

Disappointing stuff in gray, great stuff in red, really great stuff in red and bold. The +- after the number is how it compared to 2017.

Still feels weird to think about how I am sort of gamifying my media consumption - plowing through a book I'm not digging just so I can put in a notch as "done", but hey.

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Olives are the perfect snack for anyone who loves the taste of drowning at sea

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Jerry Falwell Jr:

There's two kingdoms. There's the earthly kingdom and the heavenly kingdom. In the heavenly kingdom the responsibility is to treat others as you'd like to be treated. In the earthly kingdom, the responsibility is to choose leaders who will do what's best for your country. Think about it. Why have Americans been able to do more to help people in need around the world than any other country in history? It's because of free enterprise, freedom, ingenuity, entrepreneurism and wealth. A poor person never gave anyone a job. A poor person never gave anybody charity, not of any real volume. It's just common sense to me.

Jesus:

You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions!

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A Hippo is faster than a human both on land and in water, so the bicycle is your only chance to beat it in triathlon

4-star in red.

• Take Your Mama (Radio Edit) (Scissor Sisters) Like with "The Killers" I'm kind of amazed at how this 2010 song sounds like a different era - in this case a lot of George Michael (for the guitar intro) and Elton John (vocals)
• HUMBLE. (Kendrick Lamar) Like the last one ran into this at a pub jukebox... like the sound, less crazy about the chorus.
• Schüttel deinen Speck (Peter Fox) Super fun dance hall stuff, forget what soundtrack it's from - very hard to track down, I had to have a German friend buy me the mp3.
• Blank Frank (2004 Remaster) (Brian Eno) For a long time Bill the Splut's comments page has been titled "Blank Frank is the Siren, He's the Air-raid, He's the Crater" which is a hell of a lyric.
• Bella Ciao (Marc Ribot & Tom Waits) Honk bands play this song, but I think sometimes we don't take it seriously enough.
• come out and play (Billie Eilish) Apple ads have some of the finest musical selections
• You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby (Megan Lynch) From a great collection of covers "Songs The Brothers Warner Taught Me" - pieces Lynch was introduced to via the cartoons.
• The Latin Quarter (Megan Lynch) For some reason a few years ago I started singing this but with the lyrics "Come along with me / We'll go to gay Pa-ree / Which is why I perspire when we polka / Come on and take a chance / Don't wait for circumstance! / Which is why I perspire when we polka!"
• Viva Las Vegas (Elvis Presley & The Jordanaires) I had Shawn Colvin's cover but never the original - great energy.
• Baby It's Me (Diana Ross) Random youtube recommendation was Raquel Welch dancing to this on the Muppet Show...
• Someone Just Like You (Beni) Found this when I was searching for the previous song artist - turns out the video has been mislabeled. Kind of neat dance hall stuff.
• Hard Time Killing Floor Blues (Chris Thomas King) Rewatched "O Brother Where Are Thou" - realized I had been too miserly with what songs I had ripped from my CD of the soundtrack
• O Death (Ralph Stanley) In "O Brother Where Art Thou" it's kind of of weird that they put such a deep song into the mouth of the KKK leader / politician.
• I'll Fly Away (Gillian Welch & Alison Krauss) Finally from "O Brother" -- I think it caught my eye because some Honk bands play it.
• Baby, It's Cold Outside (Four Point Restraints) I think in general I am of the "the singers are collaborating to get to what they both what despite social conventions" explanation for this song, but this minor-key interpretation is a bit darker than that...
• Another One Bites the Dust (Queen) Another catch-up after watching the biopic.
• Memphis Mail (Scott Dunbar) Not sure where I ran into this bit, still some slapping folk music.
• Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (feat. Billy F Gibbons) (William Shatner) Shat keeps the spoken word cover genre alive.
• Snoopy's Christmas (The Royal Guardsmen) I grew up with this on a album single.
• I Am Santa Claus (Bob Rivers & Twisted Radio) Parody Holiday song... kind of a staple of 80s/90s morning zoo radio, I think.

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"Coco" is a really fun Día de Muertos film. Always remember: hide in the tuba. A year late but making good time...

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[I] am rarely happier than when spending an entire day programming my computer to perform automatically a task that would otherwise take me a good ten seconds to do by hand.

Reminded of that quote after posting this devblog entry talk about a day late and a dollar short - the second best photos I took in 2017...

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You don't own the atoms in your body. It's just your turn to use them.

(reminds me of the quote from the movie Avatar: "She said all energy is only borrowed, and one day you have to give it back" ) My favorite dozen photos from 2018. Some I find visually compelling, others are a bit more about what the content is.

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you: hey
them: what's happening
you: everything
them: cool
you: literally everything is happening
them: cool cool
you: somethings, like stones, are happening slowly
them: ok
you: other things like love or weather are happening faster
them: well, good to see you
you:

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Melissa and I have "Iron Man 3" on in the background on SyFy. Commercials are a weird alternation: Pizza, Fitness, Pizza, Fitness, Pizza, Fitness....

The author writes about renunciation, says that when you give something up--alcohol, drug, person--it leaves a void inside of you that something else will rush in to fill. Augustine's God-shaped hole. But some people, she says, realize the emptiness itself is God. That a Zen master once described enlightenment as Lots of space and nothing holy.

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Brain scans show believers react with less stress to their mistakes than atheists. Regardless of where one is on the metaphysical vs supernatural feeling of what God is, feeling like something is in control seems to be a useful point of view.

Louis CK is a good reminder that when people with power ask for respect it's called "civility" and is sacred, but when people without power ask for respect it's called "political correctness" and is the butt of jokes

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all wireless headphones look kind of goofy to me... Normal headphones end up looking like earmuffs, and AirPods have that weird Star Trek Uhura vibe. I favor BeatsX- the behind the neck loop is kinda like what a librarian would use to keep glasses dangling from her neck, which is a slightly better look IMO. But wireless somehow lacks dignity. All these random things with USB charging cables are coasting on a decade of smartphone upgrades leaving the little "wall outlet power to USB" cubes behind

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Backing a tanker truck up to my house and pumping 80,000 litres of custard into the loungeroom because it sparks joy

that was in response to @figgled's

Start of cleaning: I am a calm minimalist earth goddess
10 minutes later: Marie Kondo can suck my left titty I love my numerous towers of dusty junk that have given me depression

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TIL: my 20-something coworkers are unfamiliar with the phrase "jumped the shark". How old am I? That's like a... 90s reference, right? (though to a 70s show, but I knew "jump the shark" before I knew it was a Happy Days reference...)

Grief, I’ve learned, is really love. It’s all the love you want to give but cannot give. The more you loved someone, the more you grieve. All of that unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes and in that part of your chest that gets empty and hollow feeling. The happiness of love turns to sadness when unspent. Grief is just love with no place to go.

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I'm probably late to the party on this, but Monster Factory (as recommended by Movies with Mikey) is so far up my alley it has its own onramp - LOL funny in the original sense.

Basically, slam the best of Mystery Science Theater together with video games (ideally open-worldish ones with extensive 'build your own characters') and this the result - where MST3K is limited to being a frame for a static piece of work, Monster Factory leverages the inherit feedback loop of games where the player can interact with and change the course of the action, beyond merely interpreting.

The only one I've fully watched is Saints Row 3:

Part of the shtick there is their monster child creation is against crimes, so they play a bit of that "try to do the game obeying all laws" thing, but Saints Row, even more so than GTA, really isn't that kind of game...

In general I love "make your own game within the game" My favorite personal example was in Mario Double Dash, where the Dry Dry Desert has a wandering tornado hazard. One time my estranged buddy EB and I decided not to finish, but instead invented a game where you get as close as possible to the twister without being sucked in. Of course, parking just outside the danger zone was just an invitation to be nudged in by the other player... I should make that idea into a multiplayer game.

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Never, ever give up. Don't give up. Don't allow it to happen. If there's a concrete wall in front of you, go through it. Go over it. Go around it. But get to the other side of that wall.

For a second time I sat in for a practice with "Art Crimes Unit", a casual little band my buddy Johnny drums for. It's nice to be able to slot into a group as a suitable replacement for a different bass player - not just in an all brass band or as a novelty "hey it's a tuba!"... I have a way to go but I've built up a certain set of "by ear" skills and can usually put down a decent groove. (It's a bummer there's wasn't more by-ear training when I was growing up, but I've heard the trend is to emphasize is it more, along with traditional "play what's on the chart in front of you" skills.) Kind of beautiful seeing a timelapse of weather over the continental USA-- Like Kottke mentions , try using youtube's "Speed Up Playback" feature...
My response to a "challenge" going around, where people post a picture of themselves from like 10 years ago

In 2008 I liked turkey legs. In 2017 I preferred pickles. Also I have a short beard.

PS what is this challenge all about anyway? it feels like some weird "build raw data to improve our facial recognition algorithms."

My holiday-season product finally reached fruition: Timelines:

Its my best attempt so far to make sense of the decades I've been around, and clear out some of the natural fog of memory.

If anyone wants to make one of these for themselves I'd be happy to help them.

On my devblog I go over all the drafts that lead me to the final design.

One of those cases where I wish I had better channels to get it to even more people - at one point I had pipedreams of making this a product, but I recognize a lot of people don't have the raw dates or photos at hand, and maybe they are less interested in their history as I am in mine. RIP Carol Channing! I got to see her on Broadway in a 90s-era revival of Hello Dolly! - special stuff. I posted this link to the Consolation of Philosophy webcomic two years ago, and then reposted it last year. Maybe I will start a January 16th tradition... "There's so much stuff that matters, but so little of it matters to my well-being!"

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I feel like "Don't Get It Twisted" is a more LGBTQ-friendly way of saying "Get It Straight" RIP Mary Oliver... admittedly I hadn't heard much of her stuff but she seems to be really important to a lot of people--
A while back Kottke wrote on Jason Fried's "I've never had a goal". That's a stance that comes naturally to people with fixed mindset; even back in middle school I was pushing back mightily against my mom's proposal for me setting goals for grades, preferring to promise to put in a good effort and see where I ended up.

I mean, I know that's as much "failure avoidance" as anything positive, but still, interesting work gets done. I still have a lot to learn about leaning into those challenges that are intimidating me and challenging my ego about being wikkid smaht and triggering my fear in feeling incompetent, but I'm not sure "goals" is the answer.

What about you? Where does goal-setting fit in?

trebek: late summer, nighttime, before the internet, giant trees ushering you home, bugs in the porch light

contestant: what was lost

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rally before the Boston Women's March
someone was making a software version of the #10yearchallenge, with the wayback machine I had a little amusement making a 20-year challenge for two of my websites.

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them: follow your heart

your heart: smoke crack, eat little debbies, date coworker, shop online, retaliate, sulk, waste resources, be vague out of fear, look at phone at all times, mistake pity for love, assume everyone feels like you do, seek distinction, rage at generalities

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when you have a bunch of white kids screaming 'build the wall' at indigenous folks it's very apparent that 'the wall' has nothing to do with border security, it's simply a monument to white supremacy Clarification: reports seem to be that there was a scene with those MAGA-wearing kids and some Black Israelites, with the drummer moving to intervene, with chants of the wall being earlier in the story. I think the smirking disrespect is still pretty clear tho. As is the concept that the wall is more of a symbol than a practical response.

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It's possible to have action without emotion, just thinking. Spock was f***in' right as balls.

Melissa and I were talking about any silver linings of anxiety, like buying extra detergent ahead of time because you're worried you might run out...
She wanted me to record my response for posterity, after reminding her that in theory you can plan calmly ahead of time, and maybe that could have the side benefit of reducing the anxiety

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Patriots/Rams Superbowl? Guess it's time to party like it's 2002. James Harvey pointed out Olivia James is killing it on Nancy:

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Unfortunately Tom Brady is the QB Maroon 5 fans deserve

I was on a quick grocery run yesterday when I ran into this in the produce section - on FB I posted this picture and asked "What is this Lovecraftian fruit?"

"Elder Thing Fruit", "Dagon fruit", and "Cthululemon" were all good answers but probably the most accurate was Jessica saying "its citron, also called buddha hand. really good complex citrus flavor."

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Why can't we use Thoughts and Prayers to protect the border?

It's what we use to protect our schools.

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Sigh. Egghead.io's "Learn React like your career depends on it." is certainly a bit of an earworm for me.

We made love with a violence and ferocity I had almost forgotten after so much sailing in the ship of the gentle blue silk sea. In that chaos of sheets and pillows, clasped in the living knot of desire, screwed into each other to the point of fainting, I felt I was twenty again, and happy to be holding in my arms this bold, swarthy woman who didn't fall apart when you got on top of her, a strong mare you could ride on without giving it a second thought, who didn't make your hands feel heavy, your voice hard, your feet gigantic, or your beard too scratchy, but someone like yourself, who could take a string of bad words in her ear and didn't need to be rocked with tender arguments or coaxed with flattery. Afterward, sleepy and happy, I rested awhile by her side, admiring the solid curve of her hips and the shudder of her snake.

This passage stuck with me from when I read it in college, but I couldn't find it in Google Books search - (I was trying to search for "horse" not "mare") and so I listened to the audiobook during holiday driving. (FWIW, the "gentle blue silk sea" is his estranged wife's extravagant bed covers, and "her snake" is a serpent tattoo on his lover Tránsito's abdomen.)

An excellent book and its retelling of the atrocities in Chile when a fascist military dictatorship overthrew the democratically elected socialist president reminded me of the fears some of my Latinx activist allies live with. Whoa. WHOA. It is EASY TO FORGET that Mars is THREE LIGHT-MINUTES AWAY from Earth. Here is a scaled-in-space (but 1:1 in time) video of light traveling from Earth to Mars.

That is super mind-blowing. And - if you'll pardon me playing fast and loose with my layman understanding of physics - in some ways, stuff outside your light cone effectively hasn't happened yet. Seemingly common-sense concepts such as "events happened simultaneously" (Fnarr Fnarr) are not well-defined - and even in something as "small" as our solar system (A snapple cap I saw today: "There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on earth") you can "see" the effect of lightspeed not being instantaneous.

Hell - I'm sort of glad we can see relativistic effects, like where atomic clocks orbiting the earth drift in terms of time, because otherwise I'm not sure I'd really believe that time is less of a "thing", more of a byproduct, if you know what I mean. And if you do, please explain it to me.

(Kottke has some more views of light moving and our planet)

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WINGS
It was on the outskirts of this city that she saw the butterfly. A single white butterfly, wings folded on a reed bed, one November morning. No butterflies had been seen since summer, where could this one have been hiding? The air temperature had plummeted in the previous week, and it was perhaps on account of its wings frequently freezing that the white color had been leached from them, leaving certain parts close to transparent. So clear, they shimmer with the black earth's reflection. Only a little time is needed now and the whiteness will leave those wings completely. They will become something other, no longer wings, and the butterfly will be something that is no longer butterfly.

Not sure if this should be my band outfit tonight (theme being 70s/80s) but I have been looking for an excuse to wear my varsity jacket (I lettered in "Band") so maybe I'll try it today. The way its little cape turns into a hood is amazing.

Not shown: my name in block letters on the bottom right border 　

Also "222 Street Jazz" was the name the stage band gave itself, and that's what i decided to put on the back.

Some memories of Papa Sam (grandfather) who bought it for me. Those things weren't cheap! (Warm tho!)

It would be pretty cool if it turned out that amputees can use their phantom limbs to kick and punch ghosts.

I [suspect] that we are throwing more and more of our resources, including the cream of our youth, into financial activities remote from the production of goods and services, into activities that generate high private rewards disproportionate to their social productivity. I suspect that the immense power of the computer is being harnessed to this 'paper economy', not to do the same transactions more economically but to balloon the quantity and variety of financial exchanges

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For a long while I've had this idea that my preference for a "point of humanity" was the creation of "non-trivial novelty" - or categorical novelty, whole types of stuff that wouldn't be in the universe if it wasn't for us.... this smbc gets pretty close to that idea...

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Awesome Interactive Choir Toy (worked better for me in firefox than chrome) - great use of semi-photo-realistic real time art and sound processing. Saw this on pleated-jeans and it made my day 4% happier.

Good site but it may make your laptop sound like it's trying to take off for flight. I realized today that I don't really associate sneezing with being sick. My mom and I share a thing where dairy (or something) might provoke a series of like 5-10 sneezes, but as I think about it, I can't recall a time where I was sick and a predominant symptom was sneezing. Stuffy/clogged nose, sore throat, fever, aches, sure... but not really sneezing.

Do some people's sinus cavities make sneezing more likely? Or something? Or am I an outlier?

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"He's the kind of guy who would listen to his meditation guidance podcasts at 2x speed."

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At Arlington's Capitol Theater to see "Into the Spider-Verse":
[reaches for popcorn]
"For a second I thought you were going to put your arm around me--"
"Can I even reach the popcorn that way?"

Since you are one of the few living creatures your house pet sees daily its entire life, you are likely the star of the majority of its dreams.

Closeness Lines by Oivia de Recat:

2019 January❮❮prevnext❯❯