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Having a bit of a lie-in reading Sally Rooney's new novel "Intermezzo".

Funny how some novels or maybe novelists just grab you? I suspect, as with my tastes in music, there are a few specific styles that easily draw me in; in music it's a song being bass heavy and with a funk-tinged, high-contrast beat. With a novel, I guess it's just a few notes of interior life framing moods and times that remind me of my own romantic travails.

I contrast that to what the book club I was in at work was choosing; the democratic choices leaned into middle-brow action-y murder mystery things. (There was one other person in the group who mirrored some of my own geeky preferences but the two of us were out numbered.) Like, at first I thought a scheduled monthly half-hour to discuss the book we just finished was ridiculously small, but given the heft of we were reading, it kinda made sense.

It seems like these books always have ex-military men and nurses. When I was at the gift shop of Shady Maple (the "US's Largest Smorgasbord") I saw a lot of military- and nurse- themed swag, like more so than for ther careers, and it kind of hit me that those were the heavily "most acceptable" prestige careers for men and women to respectively have as in terms of certain demographics.

Anyway, novels are a nice indulgence of funemployment, I wonder if I should branch out more. After Intermezzo I'm half tempted to reread "The Unbearable Lightness of Being", which I purchased recently just to quote a passage that has stuck in my head for a few decades.

I guess it's a question if reading fully deserves all it's vibe of being more rewarding than, say, swimming through social media. (And always fun to think back to when novels were seen as kind of a scandalous frivolity.)

I do find my patience for TV series to be thin. I'm not used to being quite that picky about things. I am half tempted to start a regimen of watching well-regarded movies I missed. (I carry the assumption that a good 2 hour movie will have a better "cool idea to time spent ratio" than even the best TV series, but I'm not sure if that's entirely true.)

Of course, I can't let myself get TOO used to this, and I should turn my attention and energies to doubling down on the job hunt. "Pretirement" - is that a word? - is just too seductive at times.

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also still Iove the iPad mini (2019/5th gen) as a reader. can read in a dim room, it's very responsive, I can do color highlights, easy to hold, and it's a drawing tablet as well

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Today's naval gazing thought - not entirely new material, but a new extension:

One of my most defining characteristics is this: I *need* to be as close to 100% reliable as humanly possible, for the sake of my sense of personal integrity. Arguably I might have a bit of OCD about it, in a clinical sense.

But here's a weird side effect of that: my need to be reliable, to be utterly dependable, means I generally *don't allow myself to be dependent on others*. Not that I assume that no one is reliable but me, but I can't KNOW they're reliable in the way that I think I am; and so I can't rest my reliability on theirs, and that generates a certain distance.

That's a challenge for relationships. For their own sense of security, people want to feel not just *wanted* but *needed*. (But they also want to feel that they're wanted, and my consistency towards them, say, isn't just an artifact of my need to reliable.) But if you're needed in a "crazy in love" kind of way, that's a strong way of knowing you're not subject to any kind of romantic market forces if "something better" comes along, and maybe for some people that feels more solid than the explanation of how a heart is faithful and true because that heart's owner is overwhelmingly a reliable, dependable person.

(And I don't judge other folks that when they can't be as reliable as I try to be - everyone's got their own battles and may or may not prioritize what's shared in importance between us. But I won't make my own dependability contingent on theirs.)

I mean, overall I think my reliability is a good trait, but it's also behind some of my own self-sabotage. "Under-promise and over-deliver" makes some sense, but it means I tend to make limits about how critical path I become at work, say; the thought of being solely responsible for a large crash-and-burn is just too painful.

Heh, even as far back as sixth grade I can remember refusing my mom's request to commit to getting a certain minimum set of grades; it wasn't that the grades that seemed out of reach, but the danger of that kind of unreliability makes goal setting seem like a fool's errand.

(And of course a few years later my dad died - a weird object lesson on the ultimate unreliability of other people, despite their love for you.)

But this need to not be dependent on others, I'd say it's not as isolating as it might seem. I still cherish how I can generate joy with Melissa and my bands, and make mighty good times! But I'm probably always going to steer away from staking my sense of wholeness as a person on anything that's extrinsic to me... and my preferred model for relationships is a kind of Inter-independence and mutual reliability, with a focus on the shared overlap of happiness and cool stuff.

Heh, it reminds me of this quote, Sonny Forelli in Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, dripping with understated menace after a failed drug deal:

I AM worrying, Tommy, that's my style, because I seem to have this problem in my life with UNreliable people. Don't be an UNreliable person, Tommy, please -- Do us both a favor...I'm looking forward to hearing from you.

I guess sometimes I feel like I'm my own Sonny Forelli...

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godmybackhurts asked:
Tbh I love when frogs look completely brainless, which is 90% of the time

plaguedocboi answered:
Frogs are a stomach with enough leg to throw themselves at food, they don't have time for this "have thoughts" nonsense

Judd: When we did *Undeclared*, the note from Fox was: You need more eye candy.
Amy: Do you think that's true? Do people really need more eye candy?
Judd: I have thought about that a lot. I don't know. But what if people do want it?
Amy: I'm not above that. I want to look at Jennifer Lawrence eating cereal.

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But you learn more from fucking up than you do from success, unfortunately. And failure, if you don't let it defeat you, is what fuels your future success.

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[Harold Ramis] once said to me, "Life is ridiculous, so why not be a good guy?" That may be the only religion I have to this day.

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As I said to someone recently, I'm trying to fuck my kids up *just* enough so they'll want to get a job.

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We just went in knowing that we might get canceled. And if you're going to go down, you have to go down doing what you like doing and what's fun for you, because I don't ever want to do something painful and then have everyone go, "Hey, that works. Keep doing that painful thing for years."

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I'm glad I didn't get [that shot on Letterman]. I'm glad for every single thing I didn't get.

His name is dropped frequently across many interviews in the book; when I think back to stuff like "shitty ankle"... it really suck that he was so abominable to women. (Later in the interview he says "I like to put myself into fucked-up situations and make mistakes and deal with it. I like to do that over and over again on the show, and maybe I like to do that in my life also."

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I know. The thrill is seeing it communally. Seeing it in a movie house on a big screen. And that's, you know, television is wonderful and DVDs, they're wonderful, but they are really a disservice to movies. I mean, you enjoy somebody cackling from the balcony. You enjoy people around you joining you in the laughter.

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I think all good plays are both. You can't be only funny. And God help any play that is never funny.

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Sarah: It's funny because sometimes I'll get c***y with [my sister the rabbi] and I'll be like, "Oh, so you believe there's a man in the sky?" I just can't get my head around it, you know. And she'll go, "Well, I like to live my life as though there is one." And I'm just like, "Oh, you're beautiful."

Judd: Why can't you get your head around it?

Sarah: I can be cynical. But I don't think of myself, at my core, as cynical. So much of it is location. Like, who is Muslim? Who is a Jew? Who is a Catholic? Who is a Christian? Who's Buddhist? Ninety-nine-point-nine percent of it is where you happen to be born. So how can one be right and another be wrong? It seems pretty clear to me that it's a coping mechanism for people who cannot handle the not knowing of things. I am okay knowing I will never be able to comprehend the world.

That was exactly the same turning point for my spiritual journey, when I was a teen.

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I also really like sleeping. My friends make fun of me because, you know, I love hanging out but I always hit a point in the night where I just want to get home and sleep. I have a very active dream life and I have to be there a lot.

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No tennis player or baseball player has ever directed a good movie. I mean, it is interesting when you think about how many filmmakers and artists come out of skateboard culture and zero come out of football, baseball, tennis, soccer. It's not part of any other sport.

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Judd: I think about my girlfriend from high school and all of our dreams at the time and I almost...You know, a lot of times I'm tempted to reach out to her but I don't because it's almost, it's so *present*. It doesn't feel old. It feels brand-new. I'm always afraid to see exes in front of my wife because I feel like she'll know in my face that I'm as devastated today as I was the day that girl broke up with me.

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Maria Bamford is my favorite comedian ever. Nobody makes me laugh harder. To all my friends who are comedians, I apologize for saying this. I hope it didn't hurt you. But it's just a fact. And deep down, you know I'm right.

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I think I heard someone say, "Nobody has a backup dream."

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But I always felt--I guess I felt like, *The joke's on you*. If somebody was being, like, a dick to me or whatever in school, I would always think, *Your family sucks*. I always felt confident that my family was better than other people's families. It wasn't money or class or anything like that. I just knew that theirs laughed at the wrong things.

If animals - any animal - could vote for itself? It would absolutely do that. Existence is voting for yourself, every day.

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Fail Faster. Follow the Fun.

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That quote from this video:

I'm proud of the little games I've made but sometimes I wish I had fleshed out more of them... most are just barely enough wrappers for playing with a lovely little mechanic.

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toys.alienbill.com/daylight/ - woke up too early this morning. Noticing how it was still dark inspired me to update one of my first infographics, plotting out sunrise/sunset over the course of a year. I added a new overlay showing how much the daylight shifted on a day to day basis, and could see how that around the solstices there isn't much change, but around now, near the equinox, the shift is pretty rapid. I surprised myself this morning by being able to recite this poem that I hadn't thought of in a decade:

Higgledy Piggledy,
Hamlet of Elsinore
Ruffled the critics by
Dropping this bomb:
"Phooey on Freud and his
Psychoanalysis --
Oedipus, Shmoedipus,
I just loved Mom."

Looking around a bit, I probably got it from the old Unix fortune program. I guess it's an example of the double-dactyl form... (I know it's good because almost everything I can google up has a "~" in the URL path) On a whim I bought the MP3 "Froggy's Lament", the second track from Bucker + Garcia's infamous "Pac-Man Fever" album Haven't heard it much since I had the LP as a kid, but it stuck with me.

The song is a very odd mashup with tons of references to Froggy the Gremlin from the old Andy's Gang TV Show - especially "Pluck Your Magic Twanger, Froggy". (The reference isn't quite coherent, since the singer's voice seems to be modelled on Froggy's but that quote is what the human host would say to Froggy...) The reference was almost lost on 80s kids, but now thanks to the Internet, I found this clip where outrageous Italian stereotype Pasta Fazooli is playing, low and behold, the tuba!

"Andy's Gang" is a pretty wacky compilation, full of odd cheap special effects, the squeals of delighted kids, and every ethnic stereotype it can get its hands on. Having just finished Zora Neale Hurston's "Mules and Men" and its study of African American folklore, I'm sort of fascinated by Froggy the Gremlin as a trickster figure. The shtick is him having these hypnotic powers, and he injects a comment or command into the human's story or lesson, and the human has to go with it - but just for a moment, and then they rage at Froggy for throwing a curveball into the narrative.

It's kind of weird that "You didn't think it would be that easy, did you?" is a well-worn turn of phrase. I mean, it way predates "Kill Bill", right (and that "You know, I kind of did" response) and that's why they used it? Do other languages have it? It kind of packs a lot of murphy's law into it.

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Mom sent me Mr. Rogers Plays the Tuba:

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Kottke pointed out how great Dale Hansen's take on Trump's response to the NFL protestors is:

Donald Trump has said he supports a peaceful protest because it's an American's right... But not this protest, and there's the problem: The opinion that any protest you don't agree with is a protest that should be stopped.

Martin Luther King should have marched across a different bridge. Young, black Americans should have gone to a different college and found a different lunch counter. And college kids in the 60's had no right to protest an immoral war.

I served in the military during the Vietnam War... and my foot hurt, too. But I served anyway.

My best friend in high school was killed in Vietnam. Carroll Meir will be 18 years old forever. And he did not die so that you can decide who is a patriot and who loves America more.

The young, black athletes are not disrespecting America or the military by taking a knee during the anthem. They are respecting the best thing about America. It's a dog whistle to the racists among us to say otherwise.

They, and all of us, should protest how black Americans are treated in this country. And if you don't think white privilege is a fact, you don't understand America.

Thoughts about Romeo and Juliet. It's a *lot* more complex than "wait, just two kids whose dumb romance gets everyone killed".

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when you push a pull door and the person behind says 'you need to pull' aye cheers lad sure next plan was to start lifting from the bottom

Why does everything sound better written in UK English?

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Pretty darn fine rebuttal to "male privilege doesn't exist" misthink. Big E, Big E, Can't you see, somehow fried martini petrifies me. I was almost persuaded to buy a PS4 last night, but couldn't justify it - still no killer app, though my buddy tried to pitch their "Playstation Plus" program as a way of getting exposed to some neat indie-ish stuff. Any thoughts? I think the new Saints Row 4 expansion is going to be on 360 too, so... http://kirkdev.blogspot.com/ - my dev blog has been quiet for a bit but a little bit more interesting these days.

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being a programmer is fucked up because a real person shouldn't be skeptical when things just work

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When did Justin Timberlake start looking like Michael Stipe?
Benjamin Franklin Acquires Electricity, via 22words

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Having all the answers just means you've been asking boring questions.

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He wrote to tell me about Krishnamurti, a spiritual leader who died in 1986. Krishnamurti was once asked what is the most appropriate thing to say to a friend who was about to die. He answered 'Tell your friend that in his death, a part of you dies and goes with him. Wherever he goes, you also go. He will not be alone.

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But superstition, like belief, must die,
And what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky,

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People with the best self-control aren't the ones who use it all day long. They're the people who structure their lives so they conserve it.

I swear this guy moves like he's blue screened on the background, and then...

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Weird, scary dreams of a family manor haunted by ghosts, but mostly the just moved my shoes, and I couldn't be sure it wasn't just me.

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Lately I've become a little obsessed with that hairless patch in front of the ear, behind the sideburn. Guess it keeps hearing unmuffled, an evolutionary advantage...

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Wolfram Alpha: it's like Wikipedia for all the crap you don't actually care about.

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After seeing some guy on a bike on an empty baseball diamond scoop up a football, I wondered if there's "bicycle polo" out there- why yes there is!

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Just found out the secret to hooking up my old (240p??) N64 and new 1080p projector - ye olde "TVBOX", VGA out - 4player Dr Mario ahoy!

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Twenty-two astronauts were born in Ohio. What is it about your state that makes people want to flee the Earth?

Photoblog of the Moment
My antepenultimate morning in Portugal! That pretty much stretched right into my penultimate morning in Portugal...

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http://www.universityonyouthanddevelopment.org/ - Marcos set this up, with his role in the Council of Europe (sort of a non-defunct European League of Nations)

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--from a Series of Video Game makeovers. Would be fun to use graphics like this in a real game.

Sometimes I think that the main thing I miss by getting my news online is access to really good weather reports. There really isn't a report in any of the websites on my regular schedule, if I go to weather.boston.com I usually can't be bothered to actually watch the video, and sometimes I forget to listen to the right bits of public radio. So this pseudo-tropical storm was almost a complete surprise to me when I heard about some flood warnings last night.

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Links of the Moment
A parade of reviews for iPhone apps along with a Top 10 "Top 10 iPhone flaws metalist. And the Computer Error Message Hall of Fame.

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Quote of the Moment

You must realize that the computer has it in for you. The irrefutable proof of this is that the computer always does what you tell it to do.

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"This is my skeleton / This is the skin its in / That is, according to light / And gravity"

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"The Postman Always Rings Twice" -- nice, taut read, but... no postmen! Wonder if I should even bother with "The Iceman Cometh".

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"lost a game I didn't even know I was playing... not the first time in my life for that"-- on being "tricked" into first beer for beer:30 I'm such a fair-weather fan. Sure, I gotta root for the Red Sox, but man, going from 14 ahead to barely keeping the division title is disheartening. But Cleveland is this year's little engine that could. And frankly, the city needs it more, in part because of the awful awful Browns and also... it's Cleveland. (OK, cheap shot, but the city is muddling through tough times.) If either team won it all I'd be pretty happy.

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Video of the Moment

--Flight of the Conchords, "It's Business Time". A little raunchy in the most droll way imaginable. I was introduced to this by some gal at a party who really, really loved it and was duly impressed by my ability to find and play the video on my iPhone. Actually it's partially the memory of her Ethel Merman-ing "It's BIDNESS TIME!" that leads me to post it here.

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Quote of the Moment

Politics -- the gentle art of getting votes from the poor and campaign funds from the rich by promising to protect each from the other.

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Article of the Moment
Disturbingly captivating tale of hanging out with real life pirates in South Asia from National Geographic. So widescreen seems to be all the rage for laptops these days, including the one I use for work. Actually that has inspired me to start putting my Windows task tray on the side, at least when using a screen with that 16x9 proportion or something like it. And I tend to put it on the right side, so it's not in contention with my default "My Computer" icon and what not, pushing those icons around.

<geek>It's weird to say but the distinctive placement has actually helped me to start to bond with this laptop. Also, I isolated why it was running its hard drive all the time: something to do with running Apache. S'funny, I wouldn't think it would provoke that much disk activity on its own, nor does it seem like the "tipping point" of triggering swapping to the hard disk.</geek>

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Video of the Moment

--from "Ma + Pa Kettle" - "Ma + Pa Kettle Do Math" -- How 25% split among 5 people adds up to 14% each, demonstrated via division, multiplication, and even addition. Clever! (Thanks Nick B!)

The division notation is interesting, but I think the version I learned (with the "work in progress" answer on top) probably makes it easier to keep your place.

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Currency of the Moment
Wow... the Yap Islands actually use giant stone disks-- like up to 8 feet tall-- as currency... I thought that that was just something Douglas Adams made up! Cool! The Everything2 page has a bit more information as well.

Quote of the Moment

Nowadays men lead lives of noisy desperation.

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HOWTO of the Moment
Speaking of noisy desperation...I don't know if this will be useful to anyone else, but I was at a site that was generating some CSV (comma seperated value) data...IE kept opening the content up in an embedded excel spreadsheet, but we wanted it as a downloadable file. Unfortunately we had to edit some Windows settings, here's the procedure: How to make sure windows offers to download CSV not open up Excel in same window...

1. In Explorer, Select Tools|Folder Options from menu
2. Go to "File Types" Tab
3. Select "XLS" from long list
4. Click "Advanced"
5. Check "Confirm open after download" and "Always show extension",
6. unclick "Browse in same window"

Now you know! Maybe this will be useful to someone, possibly my future self if it comes up again. Juvenile Humor of the Moment
Ok, this is funny in the tweleve-year-oldest sense of the word possible...the Good Lord How That Stinks! Was That You? of the Rings video. It did make me giggle out loud, so it gets a link...

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Helpful Web Hint of the Moment
So yesterday's grumble about typing "www." inspired some interesting conversation, including the rosser pointing out that in IE, you can type just the "unique" part of a .com URL and it fills in the http://www. and .com for you when you type ctrl-enter.

Makes me wonder if the UK version defaults to .com or .co.uk ...

Photo of the Moment

--Mo went to an acupuncturist the other day, and also had some "cupping" done. Mo now has spots! Actually, they're kind of like giant hickeys... I'm almost suprised that my inner-skeptic isn't dismissive of acupuncture. I'm not sure I buy into all the explanations about why it works, but (even though I haven't researched it much) there does seem to be some empirical, or at the very least strong anecodatal, evidence for what it claims to be able to do.

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Dialog of the Moment

"I learned a lot from that encounter group you sent me to."
"Yes?"
"Everyone was totally honest. We told each other what we really thought of each other. No one was allowed to get away with any falsehood or insincerity"
"You must've learned a lot about yourself."
"Yes, I learned how valuable self-deception can be."

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Link of the Moment
Hey Kids! WIN BIG! With REAL! SUPER MARKETING: Ads From The Comic Books! Great for a Quick Browse! Or a Good Long Read!!

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News of the Moment
Europe is about to launch their first moon probe.

"Despite decades of research, we have never fully discovered what the Moon is made of," says Manuel Grande at UK's Rutherford Appleton Laboratory, who built the spacecraft's X-ray spectrometer.

Haha! So my cheese theory has not yet been disproven!

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Update of the Moment
Dang, I was wondering if someone would have something (hopefully nice!) to say about a slightly risque picture of Mo...then again I've always found jeans sexy. And Mo sexy. Despite the acu-hickeys. It's a darkening time.

For starters, of course, there's literally less daylight. I think we've officially turned the corner where it seems to get dark "early", like 7. Most assuredly I live too far north for my own good. And the weather's still holding, but there are some hints that winter is on its cold and ice-laden way.

Then there's the war. Yet again, we are really going to war. Maybe it'll go ok, modulo a spike in oil prices, a worse recession, ever-deepening hatred of the United States, future terrorism, all that, but we don't know what we're gonna do with it after. You know, Iraq is not stupid, once you factor out Saddam's thuggish worldview. Sometimes they play us and International Opinion like a violin. (And you know, I haven't heard much about the fact that Iraq stopped the inspections when it was clearly proven that the inspectors were spies for the US. We're convinced we can get away with anything.)

And the economy...gak. My company had some minor layoffs a few weeks ago. Mostly "junior developers" who had earlier been working on the product that was replaced with a new acquisition and had been retrained for work on our grand march Java product, management thought they weren't pulling their weight or something. But a big core piece of that project is now in the hands of one of them consulting firms from India...never a good sign. My bet is hedged a little bit, I'm the one developer on a conversion bit for the old legacy systems and the new acquisition, but y'know, I'm very jumpy. I dunno what to do. Haven't voluntarily looked for work since the downturn. And I'd even feel guilty, some developers don't even have jobs in the first place. (Ooh, maybe I shouldn't be posting this in public; ah well. I do like it ok there, but I no longer feel I can relax about it. I want to be able to take having a job for granted for a while.)

Sigh.

I'm off to Florida with Mo, for her 10 Year High School Reunion, so there will be filler for the next couple of days.

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One Bright Note
Spirited Away is a bit of a bright point. We saw it with Peterman and Leslee the other day, arguably the best movie I've seen all year, a cross between Alice in Wonderland and...well, a lot of things. One of the characters (the first one to show up in the flash animation on that link, actually) is "No-Face" who wears a simple stylized mask. Peterman pointed out that this is a clever little pun, because the mask is from "Noh", a Japanese performance art. Noh masks are known for their ability to have different expressions depending on the viewing angle, as shown here if you look closely. (I guess the ability to have both happiness and sadness is a pretty obvious metaphor for how I feel right now.) Phenomenology of the Moment
Andre the Giant has a Posse, baby. Stickers and Stencils with this theme used to show up all around Cambridge and Somerville, I think you can still see his visage on lamp posts near Porter Square. There's a really interesting story behind it. And now it's gone even farther. I printed out a poster of this original image and have it in my cubicle. I'm stickin' it to the man!

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Quote of the Moment

My goal in life: Make it as close to a wacky sitcom as possible. So right now I've got the unfinished house, the crazy British girl, the actor/Reservist roommate, and the unseen character of Tom. Close.

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Links of the Moment
A February 1999 interview with bin Laden. Has a seriously ominous close. Contrast this with an essay by Yusuf Islam, the artist formerly known as "Cat Stevens". True Islam is actually one of the better religions, in terms of peace and tolerance...it's almost like it's being misused as a rough form of cultural glue. Finally, it's the face of evil as a geeky lanky teen.