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Start with the concept that blood is basically seawater and move on from there...

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Video about the Army Corps of Engineers building a scale model of all of San Francisco Bay to decide if damming it would be a good idea (SPOILER: it would not be a good idea.)

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figuring out Roman concrete - its longevity is because it's self-healing! I've been thinking about this concept, additive vs subtractive nutrition. This nutritionist dismissing some food myths had a similar energy.

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A FB friend posted the Joshua Bell experiment where one of the finest musicians in the world goes nearly unnoticed during a busy DC commute. (One of the original authors objects to some of its memification but still I think the core idea stands through)

My response was this:
one take away for me is that context matters. things aren't always beautiful in and of themselves in a self-contained way, it's set and setting and how they connect- that matters too.

(among my fellow programmers i find this reductionist vs holism thing comes up a lot, this drive to ignore context and deal with things as self contained units)

but also, yeah, good to keep our eyes open for innocuous things we can make a beautiful connection to.

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Insurrection: the musical. For all you musical fans. Or anyone who doesn't think orderly change of government should be overseen by rando dudes in buffalo outfits invading our capitol and looking for political enemies to hurt.

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RIP Sidney Poitier (also... bell hooks, Betty White, John Madden, et al...)

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Danish Kids TV is pretty dope - I love the idea of having a loop of the characters sleeping running overnight, so parents can say to their kids "see? the people on TV are sleeping too!". Plus they create a thing great for kids that doesn't bow down to the rightwing.

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LBJ - he of the legendary endowment that he would use to intimidate folks with - was known for quoting the consensus-building statement that starts Isaiah 1:18: "Come now, and let us reason together".

But the secret of that was he was probably thinking a verse or two down as well:
"If ye be willing and obedient, ye shall eat the good of the land: But if ye refuse and rebel, ye shall be devoured with the sword: for the mouth of the Lord hath spoken it."

Being very interested in consensus, I would use "Come now and let us reason together" more if I wasn't aware of the verses that follow! (For comparison, my list from 2010...)

1. Her - really great, low-key Scifi about the future of Siri, with a semi-serious attempt to think about what it might be like for a virtual person. Also I love the speculation on what future fashion might be, how Joaquin Phoenix isn't a nerd-y dweeb, he's a hot dude of his era!
2. Mad Max: Fury Road - the intense spectacle of it all, and the bad-ass heroine who always holds her own. Plus a great blend of mostly practical effects with just a dab of CGI.
3. I ♥ Huckabees - from the previous decade but new to me, I just love the patter of competing philosophies. "How am I not myself?"
4. Inception - the decade kicked off amazingly, the surreal image of the earth being folded into itself - overall this movie really represents an excellent maturation of directors being able to do whatever the hell they want with CGI.
5. Doctor Strange - I think the "Inception"-like alternate reality vision of this film made it my favorite Marvel film (just edging out that Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse cartoon)
6. Gravity - between this film in IMAX and treating myself to one of those zero-G "vomit-comet" flights, I don't feel so bad about not making it up to orbit.
7. Black Mirror: Bandersnatch - a beautiful sci-fi musing on free-will, along with some amazing experimentation with letting the audience make choices about the narrative. Technically not even my favorite episode of Black Mirror (The "Eternal Sunshine"-like "Hang the DJ") but still, great, and with a weird attention to UK 80s home computer detail!
8. Speed Racer - another from the previous decade, but I rented a small cinema and played it at my 40th Birthday - it's just so vibrant and kinetic
9. Perfect Sense - sad and scary and melancholy romantic epidemic horror, I'm sort of afraid to ever watch it again.
10. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story - I'm going to say this is my most favorite of the post-Lucas Star Wars films; doomed but beautiful.

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Things are so much smaller and bigger than we can really grasp...

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Ooh, and this came up as a recommendation:

the title is a little misleading, it's more a deep dive into the practical FX of Star Wars and Empire Strikes Back (and some RotJ)

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Isis is a fascist death cult that sought to genocide Shias. The group was an existential threat to the region. Soleimani is viewed as a superhero for leading the fight against the Middle East version of Nazis. That's who Trump assassinated. https://t.co/AEy2lsvj7z

— Rania Khalek (@RaniaKhalek) January 5, 2020

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.

I am the very model of a Very Stable Genius.
I have a mighty button and no problems with my penius.
I have no time for television, golf, or social media
Since my brain is way way better than the best encyclopedia.

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In matters that are so obscure and far beyond our vision, we find in Holy Scripture passages which can be interpreted in very different ways without prejudice to the faith we have received. In such cases, we should not rush in headlong and so firmly take our stand on one side that, if further progress in the search for truth justly undermines this position, we too fall with it.

Francis S. Collins, who was big in the human genome project, cites this, saying it's Augustine sorting through the seeming self-contradiction when Genesis 1 and Genesis 2 are taken together and more-or-less literally. (Did humans or plants arrive first?)

I think it points to a major problem of religion in this country: some strains of Christianity hitched their wagon to science a long while back, and a in world after Newton but before Darwin, that kind of explanation made more sense. But when science started veering away from things that Christians clung to as "this must be true, and not just in a poetic and moral sense", some flavors of Christianity decided to double down and claim a validation in the scientific view of empirically observable facts on the ground that becomes harder and harder to justify. Augustine shows that it doesn't have to be that way.

The path isn't against you. It's just the path.

I saw the quote before the movie, and it's been stuck in my head since. It's a much more eloquent and more widely applicable version of that "it is absurd to take traffic personally" idea I mentioned the other week.

I can't figure out if it's complementary to or opposed to "Amor Fati", deeply loving this fate we find ourselves in, because there is no other.

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Trigger warning: The saddest anti-smoking commercial I've ever seen - and a real heartwrencher for anyone who's had a loved one in a hospice-care kind of situation at home - the hospital bed in the dining room scenario.

Also, the most beautiful version of Que Sera Sera I've heard. They say it's an artist named Marita Dyson, but it seems like a full version of song hasn't been released anywhere

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Blender of Love

I confess I enjoy democracy immensely. It is incomparably idiotic, and hence incomparably amusing.

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My Dad Worked at the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge, and He Knows What Happens When Ranchers Get Their Way Interesting. With all the talk about Vanilla ISIS, there's been relatively talk about what they're actually looking for - I thought it was much a protest about the arson arrests than pressure to let them that cows runst wild n free...

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This is by my online buddy Scott Morrison (who also did the art for the classic arcade game "Tapper")

It's an "El Hombre Cato" for mythicalbeastwars.com

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Astoundingly religious ad by Marco Rubio. Holy crap. We are not a theocracy, jerk-o. So, congrats terror dudes. On the one hand, organizations are going to be less likely to show images of Mohammed - but companies were already censoring that, out of politeness or fear. But millions and millions of people are going to google up those Charlie Hebdo covers and have a good look... people who had never heard of the magazine before.

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Nerf slow-motion fun at work! Love the sound of it:

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So, played a little rough with my bike this morning - I think the fact that yesterday's powdery snow wasn't slippery over the dirt path made me fail to think about it on the wooden bridge near Alewife, you know, the one with that 90 degree turn... no visible injuries but tenderness and a bit of pain on deep breaths on the side I landed on. I assume this is a "wait and see" kind of thing, like if it doesn't get better after a day or two or what not. (Man I'm such a delicate flower ;-) So here is all but the first part of January of my 2013.

I don't know if people will find this interesting or not, but it really let me relive a year that had a lot of ups and downs.

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'Daddy, I had a bad dream.'
You blink your eyes and pull up on your elbows. Your clock glows red in the darkness -- it's 3:23. 'Do you want to climb into bed and tell me about it?'
'No, Daddy.'
The oddness of the situation wakes you up more fully. You can barely make out your daughter's pale form in the darkness of your room. 'Why not, sweetie?'
'Because in my dream, when I told you about the dream, the thing wearing Mommy's skin sat up.'
For a moment, you feel paralysed; you can't take your eyes off of your daughter. The covers behind you begin to shift.

I think I'm giving up on ThisIsMyJam for going through my "All Time Top 50". No "Soul Man"? Really?
--from 21 fantastically rare Star Wars behind-the-scenes photos

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int main(){
  if(Danger(Human)){
    Save(Human);
  } else if(Ordered(Human)){
    Do(Order);
  }
  else if(Danger(Self)){
    Save(Self);
  }
  cout << "Hello World!";
}

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Just semi-impulse bought a Sousaphone. Tuned to Eb and has a valve that needs fixing but hey- cheap tuba! First I've ever owned. Time for my 11th annual summary of the books, movies, and games I took in over the past year.

I realized I changed the meaning of one of my categorizations. This year marked a continuation of me not really watching movies on broadcast or cable TV along with the rediscovery of Netflix streaming, and the ability it provides to catch up on entire tv series. So my "tv" category switched from "movie on HBO or Pay-Per-View" to "one season of an entire series".

Also, rather than using my old "recommended" checkbox, I switched to a rating of 1-4 stars. 1 means I resent the time it took from me (marked here in gray), 2 is pleasantly neutral, 3 is I'd recommend it (marked with italics), 4 is it should count as one of my favorites of this and any year (marked in red).

Movies at the Cinema (14)
It's Complicated, Alice in Wonderland, An Education, More Joel on Software, Bridget Jones 2: The Edge of Reason, How to Train Your Dragon, Iron Man 2, Inception, Despicable Me, The Other Guys, Scott Pilgrim vs The World, The Social Network, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Tron: Legacy

No 4-stars in theaters, but some decent films. "Scott Pilgrim" was probably the standout.

Movies on Video (57)
Year One, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Amelie, The Brothers Bloom, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen:, Paper Heart, Better Than Sex, Boogie Nights, Meaning of Life, Voices of a Distant Star , Sex and Lucia, Clerks, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, Temple Grandin, Tron, Whip It, Adam, Twilight, Push, Kinsey, Cashback, Fired Up, The Girlfriend Experience, Mary and Max, The Fifth Element, Intimate Strangers, Annie Hall, 9 Songs, Secretary, XXY, Wall*E, Saved!, Coraline, Leon:The Professional, The Big Chill, Spirited Away, Strictly Sexual, Mean Girls, Sculpture, Chloe, Hard Candy, Clash of the Titans, 300, Twilight: New Moon (RiffTrax), Superstar, Delta of Venus, Dead Snow, TiMER, Eyes Wide Shut, Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince, Valmont, The Italian Job, The Fast and the Furious, Match Point, Speed Racer, Real Genius, Ten Things I Hate About You

"The Unbearable Lightness of Being" and "Amelie" were well-known favorites. "Temple Grandin" was an awesome HBO documentary about an amazing woman. "Cashback" was sweet and sexy if a tad creepy, a fun and romantic "what if" about science fictional powers. "Speed Racer" was just a perfect kinetic visual feast. (Thanks for recommending it Bill!

TV Shows (11)
Caprica, Lost Season 6, Office Season 1, The Office: Season 2, Futurama Season 1, Top Chef Season 7, The IT Crowd: Season 2, The Office Season 3, The Office Season 4, The Office Season 5, Tipping the Velvet

Again no 4-stars, but I've really been enjoying catching up with "The Office" with Amber.

Books (59)
How to be Idle, A Long Way Down, F My Life, Made in America, The Gospel According to Science Fiction, Me of Little Faith, Memories of My Melancholy Whores, Mindscan, The World I Live In, Fluke, Coders at Work, The Ape in Me, Look Me in the Eye, Born Standing Up, Tough, Tough Toys For Tough, Tough Boys, Intimate Adventures of an Office Girl, Peterman Rides Again, You Are Not a Gadget, Waiting, Come to Me, In the Merde for Love, Buddhism Without Beliefs, Little Brother, Time: Secret Societies, 100 Best Beatles Song, I Shouldn't Even Be Doing This, The McSweeney's Joke Book of Book Jokes, The Glen Rock Book of the Dead, Too Cool to Get Married, Permutation City, Danny: The Champion of the World, Designing Interactions, Island of the Sequined Love Nun, HTML5 for Web Designers, Anathem, Disquiet, Please!, The Playboy Book, No One Belongs Here More Than You, How the Mind Works, Guys & Dolls, The Subterraneans, One-Night Stands with American History, Look at the Birdie, Sh*t My Dad Says, Pontoon, Casual Game Design: Designing Play for the Gamer in ALL of Us, Things I've Learned from Women Who've Dumped Me, Retro Gamer Collection Vol.4, jQuery Cookbok, How To Be Inappropriate, Predictably Irrational, Constellation Games, A Guide To The Good Life. {the ancient art of stoic joy), Self-Therapy, Dr. C. Wacko's Miracle Guide to Designing and Programming Atari Computer Arcade Games, Dr. C. Wacko Presents: Atari BASIC & The Whiz-Bang Miracle Machine, Vintage Games, Room, Dear Friends: American Photographs of Men Together, 1840-1918

"Permutation City" is an old favorite, an out of print but brilliant set of thought experiments about what a virtual life could really mean... "How To Be Inappropriate" is just plain funny, "Constellation Games" is a book by Leonard I got the rare privilege or reviewing a draft of and making suggestions on. I've already expounded on the stoic treatise "A Guide to the Good Life" and my love of "Atari BASIC & The Whiz-Bang Miracle Machine".

Comics (21)
Exit Wounds, The Fart Party Vol. 2, Y: The Last Man, The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For, Delayed Replays, 1001 Mad Pages You Must Read Before You Die, Students for a democratic Society: a graphic history, XXXenophile Vol.5, Lego Star Wars: The Visual Dictionary, GI Joe vs The Transformers, Logicomix, The Force Unleashed, MAD about Star Wars, Memories, It Is Folly To Assume My Awesome Lies Dormant, The Three Paradoxes, Empowered 6, The Lodger, Tron: Betrayal, Inbound 4: History of Boston, Inbound 5: The Food Issue

"It Is Folly To Assume My Awesome Lies Dormant", Mincing Mockingbird's odd juxtaposition of well-done bird paintings and odd captions, was something I found at The Decordova. "The Lodger" is by Karl Stevens - I love his realistic style and slice-of-life approach, even if his way of drawing thought balloons makes me think people are farting.

Video Game (11)
Redder, Redder, eBoy FixPix, Transformers: War for Cybertron, Red Remover, Tron, Starfox 64, Tron, Peggle, Peggle Nights, Super Scribblenauts

I got to playtest Auntie Pixelante's Redder and it is great retro play with intriguing philosophical overtones. "Tron" for the iPhone is the best tank game I've played in a long while. "Super Scribblenauts" is just crazily empowering... being able to write almost anything you can think of and have it appear, adjectives and all, is just a pinnacle of gaming.

Honorable Mention: Since we only play like one level at a time, I never offically record Left for Dead 2 but I'm pretty sure I've gotten through all the levels with my buds online...

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http://www.slate.com/id/2280249/ -it's easier to wrap yourself in the Constitution when you get to pick and choose which parts you like, eh?

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A static document is a fossil of thought.

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Just learned shift-Win-M reverses Win-M ('M'inimize All). But I was using Win-D (Show 'D'esktop) which doesn't shift reverse. Grr. (That's one of the fewish UI things OSX does better - its "Show Desktop" key is a toggle, just hit it again to get your windows back.) Hmm- I'm surprised at how much less involved I felt with this list than yesterday's list of books. Anyway, the best ten movies I discovered over the last decade...

1. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind - this movie never fails to knock me over. Such a great fantasy/sci-fi exploration that poses some really important questions about loss and heartbreak.
2. Vanilla Sky This movie plays with some of the same themes of broken romance and untrustworthy memory and alternate realities as does Eternal Sunshine... not quite as satisfying, and the Spanish original might be a tad better, but this is the one I saw first.
3. Amélie - I might just be rewatching this tonight, or at least soon. Such a visually rich movie, and such a pretty idea...
4. The Cell - another super-saturated, visually stunning work of art, and I'm not just talking J-Lo's backside in a weird muscle-y bodysuit.
5. True Romance - I admit from here on in, my choices get more uncertain and arbitrary. This film had a lot of sweetness and swagger. My Blender review mentioned how "You're so cool" may just be the modern substitute for "I love you".
6. Shaun of the Dead - jeez, how doesn't love a good zombie comedy?
7. Secretary - another romantic film, albeit with some kink thrown in. There's a real tenderness here though.
8. Voices of a Distant Star an amazing but little-known piece of anime, written, directed and produced entirely by one person. Full of that peculiary Japanese sense of empty space and desolation - despite, or because of, the giant robots.
9. Juno - alright, I'm running out of truly great films here, but Juno was sweet, quirky, and a lot of fun, with the highschool girlfriend everyone wishes they had had.
10. Matrix Reloaded and Matrix Revolutions - alright, I'm cheating and putting in two, but they were basically one movie, and not as crappy as everyone says. Once upon a time there was a great piece "Matrix: Resolutions" that pointed out how unworkable most of the fan boy preferred explanations were (like, "the Matrix is actually in another Matrix, and so on and so on") but all I can find is this site that takes it all too seriously.

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Caffeine is the healthiest substance on Earth. Not only will it not kill you, it'll make ME not kill you.

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Cool, hip editors (Notepad++, IntelliJ IDEA) prefer "ctrl-w" to "ctrl-f4" to close windows. Is it more a multiplatform or browser thing?

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Hello, Samaritans ... I've had enough, I'm going to end it all ... I'm going to overdose on these homeopathic painkillers ... I'm going to take one fiftieth of the recommended dose.

Wednesday. What a dumb way of spelling a day.

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Userpics of the Moment

--For some reason the other day I woke up thinking of a few ideas for LiveJournal-ish userpics. I'm not sure if they're very good, plus they might be a bit hard to read. (Also they're all either attacking or praising, which is also more "macro-y" and less LJ-ish.)

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Quote of the Moment

By the 1960s, the average American was producing twice as much as only fifteen years before. In theory at least, people could now afford to work a four-hour day, or two-and-a-half-day week, or six-month year and still maintain a standard of living equivalent to that enjoyed by people in 1950 when life was already pretty good--and arguably, in terms of stress and distraction and sense of urgency, in many respects much better. Instead, and almost uniquely among developed nations, Americans took none of the productivity gains in additional leisure. We decided to work and buy and have instead.

I wonder if that "almost uniquely among developed nations" is true. If so... yeesh, I dunno. The Puritan Work Ethic is gettin' me down.

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When I turn 35, I'm gonna let myself have a grand old midlife crisis... tattoo, bungee jump, skydive...

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loresjoberg Same here... but I'm still kneejerk suspicious of AAC vs MP3s, and not enough of an audiophile to be worried about quality,

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masukomi Money is the medium for transforming your time into things. I'd suggest it's more about rethinking your relationship with things.

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Jill Sobule's "I Kissed A Girl"- so much better than Katy Perry's. (Plus Fabio!) Only the "Cherry Chapstick" line redeems the latter, almost I don't know if this is a legitimate economic bellwether but I was kind of bummed to notice that the billboards on the Red Line platform at Park Street were "house ads" for the MBTA, when last week they were Apple. (One semi-PSA about not using cellphones etc, one suggesting that the T is a pleasant way to get to Logan airport.)

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Quote of the Moment

We tend to overlay grown-up wisdoms across the blanker selves that the young actually proffer. (When my son was born, I remember staring into his blue, wondering eyes, then asking the obstetrical nurse what he might be thinking. "You know the static channel on your TV?")

Ah, my annual narcissistic tradition: a review of the media I consumed over the last year.

FoSO and FoSOSO actually suggested I should have a permanent part of the front page dedicated to microreviews of this stuff, with a thumbnail, etc. I can't believe it would be interesting enough (or generate enough Amazon kickback) to make it worth while, but I did decide to write a little bit about the titles I put into italics, the "Strong Recommends". I mean, what's personal website like this for if not to try and plug things found to be worth plugging?

Movies at the Cinema: (9)
Night Watch, Block Party, The DaVinci Code, Prairie Home Companion, Click, Clerks II, The Devil Wore Prada, Superman Returns 2D/3D, Ant Bully

Ugh... no strong recommends. This seems to confirm my theory that going out the movies is usually more hassle than it's worth (especially if you've forked out for a happy A/V setup at home.) Prairie Home Companion was decent enough, but even that was at the second-run place.

Movies on DVD (85)
Triumph of the Will, 9 1/2 Weeks, Story of O, Baraka, Daredevil, The First 9 1/2 Weeks, Another 9 1/2 Weeks, Friday Night Lights, Dodgeball, The Island, Jeffrey, Mother Night, Spun, Jersey Girl, Colossus: The Forbin Project, Visions of Light, True Romance, Bonnie and Clyde, Drawn Together Season 1, Sleeper, From Here To Eternity, Saturday Night Fever, Flashdance, Blues Brothers, Clerks: Animated Series, Batman Begins, Say Anything, The Pillow Book, The Wiz, American Pie: Band Camp, Raging Bull, Sliding Doors, Toy Story, Drumline, Ally on Sex and the Single Life, Hellboy, Tank Girl, Love, Actually, Con Air, The Aristocrats, Kentucky Fried Movie, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang, City of Angels, The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension, Shakespeare in Love, Poison Ivy, Without a Clue, 40 Days and 40 Nights, Aeon Flux, Good of Cookery, The Moral Tales (1+2), Where the Heart Is, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, Paris, Texas, Pretty in Pink, Eraserhead, Poison Ivy 2, Walk the Line, Death Race 2000, Everything is Illuminated, Little Voice, 4 Weddings and a Funeral, Long Kiss Goodnight, Pirates, Green Card, Roughnecks: The Starship Troopers Chronicles: The Pluto Campaign, The Lion The Witch and the Wardrobe, V for Vendetta, The Way We Were, Hulk, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Stick It, Deliverance, Sophie's Choice, Delta of Venus, Boys on the Side, King Kong, Backbeat, The Baxter, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, If these walls could talk 2, Boxing Helena, The Break-Up, The Break-Up, Robot Chicken

I just realized that most of the videos I really enjoyed this year (some are repeats from previous years) are things I reviewed for the Blender, I'll put in the Blender review link when I have it, instead of going straight to Amazon: Backbeat is all that and some great musical performances, Sliding Doors and Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind both put forth some terrific philosophical ideas in highly engaging and emotional ways. True Romance is, in my opinion, great, but violent for some of the folks I watched it with. Love, Actually was very sweet. The Way We Were was of course a bittersweet classic, and The Baxter was a recent find, a formalistic comedy that I really loved and in some ways identified with.

Non-Blendered videos: the classic Raging Bull, the quirky but poignant Ukrainian joint Everything is Illuminated, and of course Blues Brothers has been the inspiration for bad jazz bands for decades. Finally there was Delta of Venus, like the other Blender-ish favorite Henry and June but with more sex and a bit less art.

Movies on TV (8)
Criminal, I, Robot, Dodgeball, Murder by Numbers, Postcards from the Edge, Wimbeldon, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Hide and Seek

Bleh. Movies on TV were about as worth while as the trips to the cinema.

Video Games (7)
Alien Syndrome, The Punisher, Yoshi's Island, GTA: Liberty City Stories, Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, Lego Star Wars 2: The Original Trilogy, Rayman Raving Rabids

These are the games I played all the way through, and not multiplayer games I enjoy so much with friends, but still; I don't think I'm as much of a gamer as my reputation implies. Of what I played The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction was the clear standout, a sandbox-y, mayhem-filled romp that really gave the sense of being this enormously strong, tremendously leaping monster at loose in city and desert settings.

Books (36)
The Cyberiad, The Book of Ratings, What Just Happened, Room Temperature, Smartbomb, Storm Front, Thud, Gun, with Occasional Music, Mortal Engines, Faith Without Certainty, Postsecret, The Discoveries, Be My Guest, Love and Other Near-Death Experiences, JPod, Ask the Pilot, The Minority Report and other classic stories, Robot Visions, Lockpick Pornography, The Polysyllabic Spree, Dungeons and Dreamers, Big Lonesome, Nothing's Sacred, Fool Moon, A Wild Sheep Chase, Living with Books, Anansi Boys, A History of The World in 6 Glasses, Paris in the Twentieth Century, Giggling into the Pillow, Monstrous Regiment, How I Became Stupid, A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again, The Hours, Sex and Other Sacred Games, Sex, Drink, and Fast Cars

The Cyberiad was an amazing blend of thought, scifi, and fantasy... Stanislaw Lem was really amazing. Room Temperature is... well, it's very Nicholson Baker; an intensely detailed, almost fetishistic, study in the minutiae of this life-- for this book, the details of caring for an infant. Gun, with Occasional Music was some nifty scifi noir. Love and Other Near-Death Experiences is by my favorite Mil Millington... I dig his books but the people I give them to (mostly women) don't seem to like the blend of relationship observation and embarrassment comedy. Anansi Boys was mythically brilliant. A History of The World in 6 Glasses and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again are the only bits of non-fiction here; the former is a great study of how you can match phases of human history with what beverages folk had to drink, and the latter are essays so smart that it makes me intensely jealous. Finally, The Hours was a recommend from FoSO, and I liked it... and it had been so long since I'd seen the movie it still seemed pretty new .

Comics/Graphic Novels (26)
Any Easy Intimacy, Be A Man, JLA: New World Order, Mail Order Bride, The Golem's Mighty Swing, Powers: Who Killed Retro Girl?, Lone Wolf 2100 3: Pattern Storm, Transformers Generation 1: War and Peace, Penny Arcade 1: Attack of the Bacon Robots, Star Wars Empire 5: Allies and Adversaries, Strangers In Paradise, Star Wars Tales Vol 6, 99 Ways to Tell a Story : Exercises in Style, Miniature Sulk, Superman: Birthright, The Golem's Mighty Swing, I Am Going to Be Small, Reporter / Little Back, Every Girl is the End of the World for Me, Penny Arcade 2: Epic Legends of the Magic Sword Kings, Lost Girls, WE3, Will You Still Love Me If I Wet The Bed?, The Invisibles: Say You Want a Revolution, League of Extraordinary Gentleman Vol 1, League of Extraordinary Gentleman Vol 2

(Some nice preview links here...) I've always liked Jeffrey Brown, though Any Easy Intimacy is kind of going over some well-worn territory, but I Am Going to Be Small, a series of single panels, was really funny. Will You Still Love Me If I Wet The Bed? by Liz Prince was a bit like some of the Brown stuff, but maybe even sweeter. The Golem's Mighty Swing is a stylistic bit of genius, about a novelty all-Jewish baseball squad from back when baseball leagues were very different. Finally, at the end of the year with two things by Alan Moore: The Lost Girls, which is some of the most interesting and thoughtfully literate pornography I've ever seen, and then League of Extraordinary Gentleman makes me understand why the movie is held in such poor regard. (I thought the movie was dumb, but ok for what it was... but it didn't hold a candle to the graphic novel.) Quote of the Moment

All the illusions of grandeur you have about me are wrong. We're going to sit and talk, but first of all you must disengage your fingers from my thighs.

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Aside of the Moment
Ksenia has re-discoverd the old trick of using coffee grounds as a kind of scrub substance in the shower. It's not such a bad idea I guess, though you can find coffee grounds in odd places from time to time afterwards. Is it the caffeine that might make it feel energizing, or is that more of a placebo effect?

Lyric of the Moment

Cigarettes and whisky and wild, wild women...
They'll drive you crazy, they'll drive you insane!

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Inspiration of the Moment
This is The Junk Woman from the movie Labyrinth (which I watched last night with Ksenia) with her puppeteer peeking out...heh, it kind of makes the puppeteer look like part of the junk! The Junk Woman is a great inspiration for people trying to declutter. Junk Women roam a junkyard landscape with huge packs of stuff hanging on their backs, looking like semi-human snails. In the movie Agnes tries to make Sarah, the heroine, into another Junk Woman herself by bringing Sarah into a model of her bedroom and attaching all the stuff--teddy bears, pencil boxes--to her back, crooning all the while about how lovely each piece of stuff is, wouldn't want to forget that, oh my, no...

The movie is so full of cool stuff...after skimming the "making of" featurette on the DVD, I almost started to feel bad about how everything is all computer generated these days. The other hyper-cool thing was the pit of "Helping" Hands, where 4 or 5 hands would come together to make face that would talk to Sarah. Great flick!

--One side of a hanging french fry-themed triptych in a Connecticut McDonalds. The other two sides were a bit less fraught with Freudian overtones.

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Law Geekery of the Moment
Over the holiday I finally saw LotR: The Return of the King. In celebration, a slightly older link, a law geek looks at the deal Sauron offers Dáin (dwarven king) to get the One Ring back. An amusing interpretation via legalese.

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Rant of the Moment
Googling I stumbled onto this brochureware webpage which has the worst navigation I've seen this year. A circular menu, fine, except it only appears when the mouse is over the narrow clickable band, otherwise it's invisible. So the user experience is mousing around looking for a hot spot, suddenly images randomly appear in the center circle, and you have to figure out cause and effect and how to get to the unusual interface shape without actually seeing it. Genius!

I only mention it because he responded to my relatively polite suggesting for improving it (just have the circular menu visible, even if dimmed out, when the stark "db" logo appears) with lines like "The awards that the design has won contradict your opinion." and "You have successfully proven yourself a nitwit that knows nothing about marketing"--apparently, flickering, unnavigable sites are the cornerstone of a solid marketing strategy.

Anyone agree/disagree with me on this?

Followup: there is some chance it's a browser-specific effect. Still, I wonder about people who don't at least try to glance at their site with the market-dominant browser. FAQ of the Moment
The Lord of the Rings FAQ answers some questions, but avoids others, like what happened to Gandalf exactly, and if a Balrog has wings--but there's a seperate FAQ for that last one.

Actually, looking around, there seems to be a much more complete (meta?-)FAQ, but in a slightly less browsable form.

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Bad News of the Moment

Mass casualties, severe damage to the U.S. economy and maximum psychological trauma

With 9/11 seeming surprisingly far away, with all this talk of a possible draft (probably won't come to anything...though I wonder if Washington would be less Gung Ho if more voters' kids were at risk), troops gathering around Iraq...sometimes I forget how screwed we really are here on the homefront. The CIA wouldn't be surprised by moving on Iraq bringing woes upon us back in the states.

Stupid things include, beyond worrying about my loved ones and masses of civilians getting hurt, the current economic stumbling is going to turn to a full-on implosion. And Bush will somehow come up smelling like a rose, as the nation continues to cower--er, rally behind him, despite how his policies will have made the situation increasingly dangerous for the guy on the streets. Spending money on antimissile systems instead of port inspections? Underfunding "Homeland Security"? 'There was a war on, son, and these terrible, terrible events prove how right we were to attack!' It's the same kind of logic that makes things so happy with Israelis and Arabs.

A few days ago I mentioned my metaconcern about my new apathy about Iraq...that's pretty much gone away now.

Followup: a reasonably balanced Conservative's view of GWB reminded me of an old point: what the hell happened to "humble" foreign policy?

I think the American People--I hope the American--I don't think, let me--I hope the American people trust me.

Please, wise sir, let us trust you to lead us into war!

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Sports News of the Moment
Oh look, Ohio State over Miami for the equivalent of the national championship. Ohio State, 'cause of my time in Cleveland, and Tufts are the only college teams I'm even vaguely interested in. Well, that was a pretty self indulgent weekend, journal-entry-wise. On the other hand, I haven't been finding that many really interesting links lately. (And I did like those photos.)

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Quote of the Moment

And when I say love I mean dizzy, frustrated and sick. Love is just easier to say.

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Link of the Moment
An animation of alcohol warning signs. Kind of funny, not the best thing I've posted here. I coulda used it at Brooke's Party...well, not really, but the pictures I took look like the camera might've been drunk as well (because I was avoiding using the flash, to get that dramatic look. And the ones there are the ones that came out well....) If you didn't see it when it was the hot link a while back, go check out sodaplay now. The sodaconstructor is the coolest java toy ever. It completely epitomizes the "kinetic aesthetic appeal" concept I coined in high school physics (after Mr. Reno showed us a big weight attached to a spring at the end of string (in the form of a pendulum)) They've added the sodazoo with models that I believe are made by users of the site. My inability to come up with a successful original walker or other artistically interesting piece reminds me that I'm not now the genius I assumed I was going to turn into when I was a kid.

You know, Windows Paintbrush is better than Paint Shop Pro for one important reason: if you choose a brush of a certain size or shape, you see a shadow of that size or shape under the mouse pointer, not just a special cursor. It's brilliant! You can see what the heck it is you're going to paint before you paint it. The cow doodle from yesterday benefited from it mightily. Not sure what Photoshop does.