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I was a very nervous kid, I was anxious all the time when I was younger, but what's nice is that some of the things I was anxious about don't bother me at all anymore. Like, uh, I always thought that quicksand was going to be a much bigger problem than it turned out to be. Because if you watch cartoons, quicksand is like the third biggest thing you have to worry about in adult life behind real sticks of dynamite and giant anvils falling on you from the sky.

Hot take: youthful Mulaney wasn't wrong. But it turns out the quicksand is your email inbox.

(Also didn't realize he was one the main sources of this quote... we saw him and Jon Stewart and Pete Davidson last night!) Happy would-be 73rd Birthday to my dad....4 needleworks by him, up at my mom and aunt's house.

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SHOTS, SHOTS, SHOTS SHOTS SHOTS

(namely the 2022 FluLaval Quadrivalent vs Flu and the Pfizer-BioNTech Bivalent vs COVID-19)



So far I've dodged COVID, and haven't had anything flu like for a long while...

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happy birthday dad, I know this dilemma is why you named me Kirk

Nearly an entire generation doesn't know what the back cover of their favourite albums look like

(course I missed the golden age of album art. Small CDs (also the weird long box eta)... and before that the serious dark ages of cassette tape fold outs.)

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Also it reminds me when I once pondered being a writer for video game manuals. There's another form that seems to be falling by the wayside, both because distribution is so often digital (and publishers were cheaping out even before that) and the trend is either for in game tutorials, or genre instances that need less explaining. though super early games sometimes needed the manual along with the color art to better supplement the sparse graphics and sound.
via

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While Mowing
A thought occurred in my front lawn,
and I paused my heated mow.
"Wouldn't dandelions be so lovely
if they were only hard to grow?"
--published in Eucuyo '91, Euclid High School's literary magazine

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Of course, the second part of this storyline won't be written now. It's a shame I don't get to see what happens. But everybody dies, and there will always be places and experiences missing from anyone's life – the world has too much beauty and adventure for one person to see. I will miss marriage or children, blossoming careers and lives moving on. But I'm not alone in my life being cut short, and I think my time has been pretty good.

Truly inspiring article from a person who won't live to see the end of quarantine. He also expounds on these five points:

1. the importance of gratitude
2. a life, if lived well, is long enough
3. be vulnerable and connect to others
4. do something for others
5. protect the planet

I know I have trouble with "be vulnerable", there's no shame in it but I don't deeply grok its value.

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via My dad woulda been 70 today! (he died in the late 80s).

Over the years I've learned how to calculate milestones, so over the years I've made entries on some of his birthdays, his death date anniversaries, and the other odd milestones like "I'm exactly twice as old as I was when he died, so as long without him as I had been with him" and "I'm as old as he was when he died." Some of those days I made little tribute-y essays - (he was a really interesting guy, champagne on a beer budget where I'm sometimes the opposite) - kirk.is/tag/dad

Bummer he wasn't around doing needlepoint when I figured out about pixel art, and could make tools to help convert images or otherwise find source material like retro video games, woulda been interesting to collaborate with him!
UPDATE: Deb, a woman who knew my dad in Salamanca, replied on FB:

I remember him well and I never laughed so hard until he was boiling hotdogs and he said the hot dogs are having an erection they must be done. I was kind of shocked he said that and then again not. He was a good man.

Funnier to remember he was her pastor! And her brother worked with my folks and became a Salvation Army minister himself.

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--Donkey King by Jason Edmiston via

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Prime Minister, negotiating FTAs with the EU and the US and securing their ratification in less than three years, I think is going to be a Herculean task for you. But we do want to be your friend, and your ally; your Athena in doing so. And I think the manner in which you leave the European Union will determine whether that's possible.

That's a brilliant burn - Athena helped Hercules on many of his tasks, but most famously, knocking him out after he went tragically went mad and had killed his own children but before he could kill his own father... A few days ago I posted the Paul Simon lyric ""You know life is what you make of it / So beautiful, or so what..."

Recently on kottke I saw this quote from Andy Warhol's autobiography:

Sometimes people let the same problem make them miserable for years when they could just say, "So what." That's one of my favorite things to say. "So what." "My mother didn't love me." So what. "My husband won't ball me." So what. "I'm a success but I'm still alone." So what. I don't know how I made it through all the years before I learned how to do that trick. It took a long time for me to learn it, but once you do, you never forget.

Kottke goes on to compare that to Marcus Aurelius' stoicism (on how we have don't power over many outside events but we have power for our interpretation of them) and says

Not having control over some outside events was a source of despair and anxiety for me. These happenings were facts, they had a "truth" that I perceived as immutable; everyone knows you can't change facts! But human brains don't work like that. Your perception of and emotional reaction to events *is* your reality. Sure, those things happened, that person is that way, the system will do its thing, but you don't have to feel a certain way about any of it.

I've been toying with using this idea a bit. (While thinking of the Miles Davis' song So What) I guess though, I have reservations that it's incomplete; like it's not a technique you'd want to apply to everything in life, and so misses Kant's idea "Act only in accordance with that maxim through which you can at the same time will that it become a universal law". If I used "So What" all the time, or for everything, I would be callous and apathetic - by itself, "So What" does provide a positive motive force. And there's no outside authority or yardstick telling me when I should and shouldn't apply it; I have to grow up and use judgment and take my lumps.

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Stores that offer their own credit cards, with a large discount on the current purchase. Doesn't that just set off everyone's spidey sense? As many issues as I have with Scott Adams now, 25 years ago he really nailed one of the big weirdnesses of neuroscience, and of being a thinking thing in general...
Mister Rogers Plays The Tuba:

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It's a clip from this video:

(Interesting, I hadn't seen a tubist do so much fiddling with their tuning valves as they play (used to make small corrections for pitch on various notes)) This past spring I had an online dialog with Chris Federico, keeper of Orphaned Computers & Game Systems and author of The Classic-Gaming Bookcast - $0.99 well spent for any fan of old games.

One way he adds to his enjoyment of games is to make up his own backstory for them - for a great example of this kind of thing, see his co-author's Adam Trionfo's "Before Reading the Manual" on their review of the obscure Spectravision game "Gas Hog". At one point in our conversation I explained my own reasons for why that seemed kind of alien to me. Recently he mentioned some of my ideas had stuck with him and he asked if I would explicate, possibly for partial inclusion in a future edition of his "Bookcast"... this is what I came up with.


There are two ways to think about the story behind specific retro videogames... for some players, the pixels and bleeps and blurps of an older game are like the shadows in Plato's Cave, technology used to crudely reveal a bigger, "more real" story going on. (The manual might give one explanation of the reality thus represented, but there's nothing stopping players from constructing their own, as you've demonstrated in your bookcast...) The screen for Intellivision's "AD&D: Cloudy Mountain" may just be showing some green and yellow squares (like a kid might have made with graph paper and some markers) but this type of player can see the slime-covered stonework, hear the echo from some unseen dripping water, smell the smoke of the flickering torches lining the walls in their metal holders. And these players' experience is probably the richer for it.

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A damn stylus, thanks Apple! To quote Gruber: "Finally" Haha, just bought a cd from some buskers and now I don't know if I have anything to rip it with! (Come to think of it, I just installed one of those cd-slot phone mounts for my car, so I can't even easily play it there either...) I like having a courier bag with an open outer pocket. I pull out an e-reader from behind my back and feel like a gunslinger.

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Bought this as a tape-delayed impulse buy at Bed Bath and Beyond-- I'm totally infatuated with the rubberized design of it-- iHome has really stepped up its game (they have a larger even more Boom-Box-y model http://www.ihomeaudio.com/iBT44GC/ in the same design language) Also, it sounds great, is rechargable, and I'm starting to see the light of Bluetooth connections... also it was 20 bucks off there.
--I have a weird sense of pride that the tuba couldn't really be in that mix. And some of what they're doing isn't QUITE as hard as it looks... but still pretty impressive!

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My last ten semi-daily weigh-ins have been five different weights ending in ".6". Increasingly convinced bathroom scale is exhibiting primitive, digital sense of pranksterish humor.

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http://www.thisismyjam.com/kirkjerk - Cole brings a sensual sweetness to an early Beatles song...

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In many ways, a lot of porn is comparable to junk food. It's a highly distilled and concentrated formulation that is engineered to tap into some of our most basic urges. As a culture, we're really good at taking something that's good for us or fun and distilling it to the point of toxicity. In the case of food, it's salt, sugar, and fat. In the case of porn, it's formulaic, unrealistic sex that follows predictable conventions and neglects genuine pleasure. In both cases, real diversity and variety is removed and instead, superficial differences are promoted. When it comes down to it, what's the difference between Cheetos, Doritos, Fritos, etc? They're all corn products, with salt, fat, and variations in flavoring additives. Their purpose isn't to nourish- their purpose is to get people to buy their products so the producers can get as much money as possible.

--Mr. Roger's lifetime achievement Emmy sppech. You might want to skip to 1:25 or so. Via kottke that has more info including a link to an Esquire article.

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Man, Rodney's Bookstore at Central Square in Boston is a real gem; good cheap used books, nice supply of graphic novels upstairs...

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Just cashed in my mason jar full of change. I took a survey, and everyone except myself badly underestimated how much it held-- I put it at $50, the total was $45.37, other guesses ranged from $13-$27. (If the jar had been full up, I would have been right on.) I think people are generally bad at volumetric -> linear conversions.

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Awesome Atlantic Piece: What People Don't Get About My Job: From A(rmy Soldier) to Z(ookeeper)

Tempus II from Philip Heron on Vimeo.

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Of course they have ponies in Heaven, kid. What do you think the angels eat? Ha ha. Kidding. Angels eat other angels.

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http://www.esquire.com/blogs/mens-fashion/pants-size-chart-090710 - JEEZ I thought pants' waists being, you know, real units of measure saved men from "dress size deflation" type games!

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CSS design wonks, take your "padding-bottom: 32767px" and stuff it up your "table layouts suck!"-ass.

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Walking to Inman for a farewell to a friend/gamer moving to Atlanta. Sad to realize 1998-2006ish was goldenage of my gaming get togethers. Today my dad would have turned 60.

6 years ago (six! wow, what a number - college plus half of high school! The speeding raceway of time reminds me why I was so anxious to start dropping these daily bread crumbs for later leisurely perusal!) I had noted I had lived as many days with him as without him, and wrote a kind of tribute that I probably shouldn't try to top here. In 4 years, May Day 2013 (assuming the 2012 doomsayers prove as wrong as every date-based doomsayer has been thus far) I will be as old as he was when he died. I guess I should get over it some time? Or maybe parents are just that kind of thing you never have to get over - maybe especially if you haven't had kids of your own.

(Again, you can calculate your own happy or sad little milestones with that date toy tool I threw together in 2001.)

I've tended to express my regret in terms of be being a graceless adolescent when he died, that so much of the becoming I've done, that I'm most proud of because of its deliberate nature -- I think before you're a teen, you kind of just are -- happened after he passed. But now, coming up to the ages I have memories of him being at, I can think too about how many interesting paths could have been before him... I listed a bunch of things he'd done in that essay, and sometimes I'm still in a bit in awe. One interpretation I tend not to over-emphasize is that of all the people who've been in my life since his passing, I think I most saw echoes of a kind of insecure, maybe-compensating but still admirable use of books and diligent study to achieve various expertise in Mo. And their style is in contrast to my own too-smart-too-young, ego-protecting comfort zone I drift in when left unattended. I mean, there's a lot to be said for low-hanging-fruit, but over the past few years I've been working on putting up more of a fight for "stretch goals" that seem worthwhile.

Heh, it's another dumb little milestone today - the tenth anniversary of the 9/9/99 release date of the Dreamcast, a video game system beloved in the hearts of fanboys, but ultimately walloped by the DVD-playing, somewhat-more-powerful Playstation 2. I wonder what my dad would have thought of me and video games - not that it's such a big, time-consuming thing for me these days, but over the years I've sunk a lot of dollars and a lot of hours into them - but they were pretty primitive back when he was watching my early fascination with them. Lately I've been pleased by one thought though... here's a (pooorly photographed) example of some of his cross stitch (an inuit design I believe)

Man, what is cross stitch and needlepoint if not a crazy kind of folksy pixel art? So our interests maybe weren't as far apart as all that. (Hell, we might've collaborated on some of this stuff, I'm sure modern stitchers use all sorts of scanning and conversion high tech tools, rather than being solely reliant on the type of pattern books my dad had (and I remember being kind of fascinated by as a kid.))

Sigh. Guess today I'll fire up the old Dreamcast and... I dunno, try to have some place that cooks hot dogs in beer or something, like I think my Dad said they did in Ohio...

Miss you, Dad, Happy Birthday.

JZ got some charity tickets to the Sox/Rays game last night.

It was a record-setting game for consecutive MLB sell-outs (sorry Cleveland). I was kind of chuffed 'til my coworker pointed out that, hey, Tuesday's game will then set a new record. Ditto Wednesday. Etc. Still, they had some nice "Thank You Fan" stuff.

So, mildly obstructed view:


Going down to get a "beer an' a hot dog" (one of EB's daughter's first phrases, thanks to her gramma) I realized how different the game looks from, like, right next to the field. I dunno if I've ever had really great seats to a ballgame, maybe sometime I should aim to fix that. It's kind of like the difference between an old 20" TV and an HD projector...

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Quote of the Moment

Things just keep getting better. Fewer people in the world are starving. People live longer. More babies survive. The world gets cleaner, less violent, and more comfortable. We have more leisure time and we we know more about ourselves and the universe. If you're sniffing around for a place to live, pick the future. Luckily, we're all going to live at least a little bit into the future, and we'll all live a little longer in the future, thanks to the future.

Besides the optimism I dig the rhetorical repetition, kind of akin to that the Tao is a mysterious female bit from the other week.

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TSA is all about CYA. It's not about making life safer; it's to stop the administrators from looking more idiotic: "why didn't you stop X?"

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Yeah, I've got a sort of visual pun tattooed just below my navel. I thought it was pretty clever the first seven years.

To view this content, you need to install Java from java.com "blockvaders" // source code // built with Processing

Click in the box to play... arrow keys move, space or ctrl fires. Stop the box invaders from touching down.

This requires a note of explanation... it's a case of me (probably) missing the point of the THE EMERGENCY 100-IN-1 KLIK AND PLAY PIRATE KART MELTDOWN, one of my 1/100ths of an entry for TIGSource B-game Competition. Basically, it's supposed to be a bad game, but most of the other bad games are bad in the awful clipart and play mechanic sense. This one is just bad by being too simple, too artsy, and without enough sound effects. And with the idea that if if you keep playing, the rotation makes sure it gets harder, for no fair reason.

Went to Trader Joe's last night to stock up for today's party.

Paper bags were more prominently displayed than plastic for doing our own bagging, so we used those.

"Paper or plastic?" is a famous question, but come to think of it I have no idea what criteria to use. Is plastic cheaper for the store? Which one is considered more eco-friendly? Or useful for reuse?

Transcript of the Moment

Tell us about the fight.
I didn't see no fight.
Well, tell us what you did see?
I went to a dance at the Turner house, and as the men swung around and changed partners, they would slap each other, and one fellow hit harder than the other one liked, and so the other hit back and somebody pulled a knife and a rifle that had been hidden under a bed, and the air was filled with yelling and smoke and bullets.

Yay! Patriots are off to a good start.

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Link of the Moment
LAN3 msg'd me last night with the following:

http://www.pandora.com/ A few months ago I heard on NPR's WESat about the Music[al] Genome Project, which was an effort to catalog songs by up to 400 musical attributes, and then use this massive database to find music other songs or other artists that are similar. At the time of that interview, they couldn't or wouldn't say in which form people would get to use the database. But now it's here! Quite cool. You can put in songs or artists you like, and it'll find other stuff you'll probably really like and probably things you haven't heard. The only thing it won't do is play direct requests-- if you put in a song name, it'll eventually get to playing it, but isn't allowed, per license, to do it directly.

I have to admit...this thing is GREAT...superslick presentation, it seems to have its licenses in order...it combines some of the best elements of the old Napster and just hanging around college dorms, talking with people who knew more about pop music than you.

I love the effort to pindown musical genres...my favorite song "Groove is in the Heart" brings me to songs with "pop rock qualities, minor key tonality, a busy horn section, a clear focus on recording studio production and groove based composition, disco influences, rap influences, electronica influences and danceable grooves".

I might well end up subscribing to this. Thanks LAN3!

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Song of the Moment
I'm always on the lookout for pop-culture references to The Salvation Army. They show up more often than you might guess if you're looking for them. So far my favorite is how Nietzsche gripes about them in stuff like "Beyond Good and Evil".

Anyway, the other day I stumbled upon the lyrics to Salvation Army Girl by Jake Thackray. The lyrics are a bit suggestive...mostly they remind me of some of the adolescent romances I had in the church, back in the day. I was mildly impressed by all the little references in the song.

(Another thing I googled recently is The Skeleton Army, a sometimes violent anti-Salvationist group...The Salvation Army has a page about them including the front page of one of a newspaper sheet they put out.)

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Quick Link of the Moment
Looks like it would've been cool to go to this one electronic intreactivity festival in Austria; check out the photogallery.

Quotes of the Moment

'Hello, babies. Welcome to Earth. It's hot in the summer and cold in the winter. It's round and wet and crowded. At the outside, babies, you've got about a hundred years here. There's only one rule that I know of, babies -- :
'God damn it, you've got to be kind.'

What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?

The Vonnegut quote was lurking in KHftCEA for a long time, the Rousseau I saw on a bumbersticker in June.

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Resolution of the Moment
I was having dinner with FoSO and her SO (Hmm, guess that would be FoSOSO) and he mentioned that he thought caffiene had all sorts of sociological effects that people tend not to think about...irritability (especially a quickness to irritation/anger) also maybe stuff like faster speech, etc. Maybe I should try giving it up for a while, long enough to get past the headachey part...all the way back in June 1997 I noticed how irrational I was in lashing out at traffic I was stuck in...

This came up last night because I had just ordered what turned out to be a large green tea smoothy, and FoSO mentioned it would keep me up...I guess I had a little bit of trouble falling asleep, on the other hand I was going to bed at like 9:30, feeling a bit tired. Still, I'm always a little startled when I recognize a mind-body connection like that, sort of like the massage chair/gaming thing I previously wrote about.

What experience have people had with giving up caffeine? How does it go? Do you feel smarter or just more dull-witted?

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Amusement of the Moment
Lee Fastenau is a guy on the [stella] Atari programming list who is working on his own very cool game Reflex...he has a superb sense of visual aesthetics. It turns out his web site has some other really nifty things, a terrific ASCII Pachinko animation toy, and th3 b35t "English-to-l33t" tr4n5l4t0r 1'v3 533n. But the Pachinko is just so cool and clever...

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Passing of the Moment
So, today would've been by dad's 55th birthday. I'm sure if he was around I'd be making the same dumb jokes about the speed limit...

Instead, I'm going to note another passing that I neglected a week or two ago...my Uncle Carl died, husband of my dad's sister. Didn't really take care of himself properly after he was diagnosed with diabetes. He had a tough time of it, raising four sons after his wife died with Lou Gehrig's disease. He did the best he could, but man, Coshocton, Ohio is a pretty weird environment...it was amazing my dad escaped.

So I'll try to have a quiet moment today and think of my Uncle and then my dad.

I remember sitting on the floor back in middle school gym, looking at my feet and thinking they seemed kind of far away. This might have been after my growth spurth, but still, every once in a while I look down and get a twinge of that...we're taller than we think, in that 5 to 6 feet is actually a bit far when put horizontally.

I can see you're all fascinated.

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Quote of the Moment

You can't break a bad habit by throwing it out the window. You've got to walk it slowly down the stairs.

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Link of the Moment
I was looking for an "abandonware" copy of Windows 3.1 to make this one ancient laptop of mine potentially useful again (I had foolishly put Windows 95 on it to make it "easier" for my mom, but that OS overwhelmed its puny 4meg self, whereas 3.1 ran pretty well.) I ended up just getting a (shrinkwrappe, supposedly) copy on Ebay, but in the meanwhile I found Dan's 20th Century Abandonware. No downloads, as far as I can tell, but information and screenshots that makes decent computer-history-geek reading.

In case you're wondering, "potentially useful" would be something I could use to carry around WAV files for my atari supercharger, to video game get-togethers and what not. i often wonder
what exactly is the difference
between "good" poets and "bad" poets
two lines, like a ticket counter--one labeled GOOD
and the
     other BAD
and which one am i in
and if it matters
for while everyone it seems
would like to be "good" it seems
to me
that the "bad" poets
have a better time of it
they can write for
greeting-cards and get money
or write advertisements
for if you measure
a poet's relative ability
by how he can change lives
why
the "bad" poets win
hands down
using little sing-songs
that run through your mind
and that make people BUY!
that is why and how the "bad" poets
change your life
AND "good" poets
usually aren't really good
until they're dead
chilled and rotting
and
what good does
it do you then?
--Kirk Israel, published in my High School's annual literary review, Eucuyo '90. This is the poem that I threatened to use here when I kisrael'd this other one, surprisingly used to open the review. Its only saving graces come from the way it rips o...I mean, reflects the cadence and attitude of Don Marquis and his "archy & mehitabel" works, which I was (and still am) very fond of. AOLIM Chat of the Moment
kirk: Hah, if YOU had tv you could watch Feng Shui: Creating Environments for Success on tv along with me
kirk: that's gonna get me super pumped for my stairmaster workout
lee: thats WRONG dude
lee: feng shui and a stairmaster... yikes
kirk: ARE YOU TOUGH ENOUGH-- TO ARRANGE YOUR FURNITURE IN ACCORDANCE WITH PRINCIPLES OF YING AND YANG??????
kirk: FEEL THE BURN OF PROPER ALIGNMENT OF EARTH AND HEAVEN!!!!!!
kirk: CONFUCIOUS SAY: I'M GONNA KICK YER ASS!

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Link of the Moment
A long time ago, I remember seeing this one very bizarre story about a man who has a girlfriend who has a fetish of farting on cakes. I'm not making this up. In fact, a quick google search shows slight variations of the same sordid tale (this and that) so someone is paying attention to this stuff. And it even has its very own website with a memorable splash page image and little else.