Category: Pulverbatch

Emblematism

November 5, 2008 /
Barack Obama can do more pullups than me.

“Two staffers had just passed this site and done two pull-ups. Not to be outdone, Obama did three with ease, dropped and walked out to make a speech.”

–Callie Shell

In August of 2005 I added two keywords to my personalized Google News page: “creative commons” and “obama.” It had been a year since his convention address, and it had become clear that the man simply wasn’t fading. I also wrote a journal entry, never posted, about the fact that plans to assassinate his character had already begun. “Opposition research” has a long lead time; there are folders stuffed with scandal about people who never even receive nominations, but we saw every last scrap from the file on Obama, real and imaginary.

I woke up this morning with sarcastic headlines at the ready: “Relieved Obama dons headscarf, ululates, brandishes AK-47.” “Secret Service orders pre-emptive strike against Atlanta.” “Iraq declares victory.” Cynicism is playing catchup with the unrepentant joy of last night (though even that was tempered by disappointment at Mitch McConnell and Prop 8). But at least, for once, it’s not the other way around.

In April, I drove almost literally from coast to coast across the United States–from Winston-Salem, North Carolina to San Francisco, California–in nine days and a tiny car, packed up to my eyes. I was alone for most of each day, between eight and fourteen hours on the road. I listened to podcasts for company, and music when I wanted to sing, but in between I listened to Dreams from my Father.

That kind of trip would be a transformative experience for anyone. I’d only even been a licensed driver for six months. I’m sure I’m displaying any number of issues here that tie into my own lost father, my long-delayed exit from adolescence, and the way we approach elections as the process of choosing new parents. But if nothing else, I can at last say that I chose this President, and he is a writer who does voices when he reads aloud.

I wonder what that will be like?

Anyone? Anyone?

October 1, 2008 /

The other day I ripped off a 2007 Lyttle Lytton winner and wrote Rooney, a vision of the latter days of a movie which I always thought held sinister undertones. After I posted it, I realized that the premise really could probably stand further explanation, and I was not wrong! First Peter wrote Cameron Frye, and then William followed up with Rooney again:

Rooney is on the run.

It had started as a careful stroll by the river to dump the rifle: then a quiet ride home to find some people in ‘Save Ferris’ shirts quietly breaking into his house as he pulled up.

But Rooney was nothing if not prepared. Six months later and they’re still looking for the ‘Man who killed Chicago’. Meanwhile, Rooney’s shaved his moustache, pays in cash, and has a California Driver’s License that proclaims him to be

“Edward Rooney?”

He turns, halfway to his car, to find Sloane Peterson with a ‘Save Ferris’ lapel pin. And a gun.

Sometimes I really am tempted to turn on WordPress comments on Anacrusis, but come on, the LJ community is already so much fun!

Somebody Comes to Google

September 21, 2008 /

When I first heard that Cory Doctorow had published a book called Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town, I thought, aha! I get that reference! It points to a list of archetypal story plots that I have seen on the Internet. How clever.

Now I actually need to find that list again and it appears to have been Googlebombed out of existence, thanks to the aforementioned Mr. Doctorow. Even with his surname eliminated from the search results, my google kwon do is failing me. Does anybody remember what I’m talking about?

September 1, 2008 /

Google’s making their own browser! Golly! Neat! Another goddamn rendering engine for me to test my CSS in!

Whee.

(I’ll probably like it.)

“It’s actually Jacobean rather than Shakespearean.”

August 22, 2008 /

Ian and I are a bit obsessed with Brian Cox, and I was very happy to notice that the AV Club had done a Random Roles bit with him (an excellent interview schema, which takes the annoying bolded reporter-voice almost entirely out of it and just leaves the meat of the subject rambling about cool stuff). I was not disappointed. You might say I was reappointed. I mean, read this stunningly clear and concise evaluation of American film versus British theatre, prompted by a little question about his career arc post-Rob Roy:

“If you grow up in these islands—especially where I grew up in these islands—the theatre is very powerful, very potent. It’s a part of our heritage. Our culture is really a theatrical culture, not a cinematic culture. Feudal societies don’t create great cinema; we have great theatre. The egalitarian societies create great cinema. The Americans, the French. Because equality is sort of what the cinema deals with. It deals with stories which don’t fall into ‘Everybody in their place and who’s who,’ and all that. But the theatre’s full of that. Especially in Shakespeare. So in a way, it behooves you as a British actor to try and master the classics and become a classical player. I got caught up in it. It wasn’t something I wanted to do, but I was too late.

“You see, the free cinema, the cinema of Albert Finney, Peter O’Toole, Alan Bates, Tom Courtenay… That all ended by the time I came along. So I went to work in the Royal Court, because they weren’t going to be making any more of those movies.”

Tech Tip!® Minute

August 22, 2008 /

Remember, dear reader and also future Brendan, an attribute that’s hyphenated in CSS is camelCapped in Javascript! So background-image becomes style.backgroundImage. For no real reason except psychotic, alias-hating adherence to meaningless language conventions.

While I’m at it, ROLLOVER HIGHLIGHT IMAGES ARE GODDAMN POINTLESS. Nobody cares about them except graphic designers who have never written a web page, and even they ignore them on every site but the ones they themselves mocked up.

(Yes, I know rollovers need not make use of Javascript. These two blurts are only sort of related.)

Punch line!

I don’t even LIKE jeans

August 6, 2008 /

Yesterday, for my job, I implemented some web-marketing stuff that included me actually typing out the following text, which... well, I don't want to reproduce it for fear of google, but I've rot13ed it below; click the button to read it.


Where was I entering this marketing text, you ask?

A MySpace page.

It's not like I was pretending I hadn't sold my soul long ago. I just hadn't realized it was going so cheap.

White pepper is awesome. Also, this is sort of about faith

July 30, 2008 /

I’ve reached the point, in my autoeducation as a cook, where I no longer really measure spices or indeed many liquids. This is great for saving time and for not having to rinse a measuring cup every time I need a quarter-unit of something. It is less great when something I make turns out well and I want to write down the recipe for the future. “A bunch of white pepper,” I find myself writing. “Like, as much as a good cook would put in but then also some more.”

If I could always trust myself to make the same judgments based on words like that I wouldn’t have any problems, but I have no faith in Locke and therefore I am not even sure I’m the same person who started this post, much less the one who cooked a pretty good spaghetti nonbolognese earlier tonight. Also it is probably going to be unhelpful in my inevitable cooking blog.

The (thoroughly hidden) point I wanted to record here is that I’m kind of a good cook now? I’m still working in a very small range, but I keep trying new things and they keep turning out pretty okay. I think cooking is, like kissing and biking, essentially a matter of confidence. The food will believe you’re in charge if you act like it.

I learned to cook spaghetti in ten-gallon vats, almost exactly ten years ago, when Jeremy Sissle got me a job at Fazoli’s. He was also the one who trained me on pasta-cooking rotation. We got to the end, and he hauled out the hose, sponges and soap. “Turn on the hot water,” he said, “and fill the bucket, add about this much soap, and… I mean, you know how to clean stuff.”

I still recite that sentence to myself in scary and uncertain places. It sounds stupid, but I did know how to clean stuff, and remembering that snapped me out of the standard lost-and-seasick feeling that everybody gets from new jobs. (At least, I assume everybody else gets it too.)

The other half of my cook-with-confidence mantra was posted by Kevan, years ago, in a comment on Leonard’s site: “I’ve only recently stopped… expecting food to be an inedible, inert, black lump of Syntax Error if I get something slightly wrong.” It’s so true, and such a perfect encapsulation of the way programmers approach other disciplines: raised by severe machines and math problems with one answer, we expect frustration as a punishment for the smallest mistakes (and indeed, with computers, that often remains the case). But once you realize that the notion of discrete measurement is a consensual hallucination, you find the world a more interesting place. Screw Locke. I’m glad I’m not the same person I used to be.

Ersatz blogrolling

July 8, 2008 /

The main side effect of the Penny Arcade bump for Ommatidia has been a notification avalanche–via email or Technorati–of other people who have started (or were already doing) tiny story blogs in a similar vein. I think this is awesome, but honestly I lose track of which site is which, and even I can only read so much blink fiction in a day.

So here’s an offer: if you’re doing tiny stories on some sort of schedule, email me with a link and a little summary and I’ll add you to the directory page I’m putting together now. I am not promising to subscribe to all of them, for the aforementioned reasons, but I will go through once a month to check them all, maybe make a recommendation, and clean out the dead ones. (If you have emailed me about your story blog, and it’s still going, and you want it to be on the list, I would appreciate it if you’d email me again.)

Besides the obvious, I’ll start it off with just such a recommendation: The Two Minutes Project, comprising Two Minutes Less a Third and Chasing Concordia. Very short stories and very short songs! Read The Eternal Question if you need convincing, which you shouldn’t, dammit you have got to start TRUSTING me someday.

Selfism

July 7, 2008 /

Sumana has managed to combine almost all the reasons I read her blog–inspiration, clarity, critical appraisal of systems and examination of self–into one spectacular post. You should read it.

There’s a quote from Count Zero about being taken up from a low place, rotated through “invisible stresses,” and emerging changed. It’s actually kind of negative in context so I’m not going to reproduce it here. But at some point I have to write about how my interaction with propelled and propulsive people has changed me: how my internship at Dixon Design, followed by meeting Leonard and Sumana, followed by living with Kevan and Holly, reshaped me into someone who no longer fits anywhere outside the self-determined life.

I would have to actually achieve that life first, so I’m not writing it yet. But Sumana’s post brings up another connected point: work that matters for its own sake is superior to work that matters by fiat, which is to say that academic work is worthless in the short or long term, which is to say that I think the lecture-test educational system used in the United States (and, in my understanding, most of the rest of the world) is a sham, a wreck and a hindrance. I graduated with awards and honors from a large public high school and an elite private college, and I still say the system failed me. The intersection of what I learned in classes and my work, play and continuing interests is almost nonexistent; meanwhile, I’m still dealing with the fear and shame endemic to those institutions, and the ways they damaged me.

Under all that I continue to grow more absorbed with the idea of having children someday. I’m starting to consider my life choices in terms of where they’ll grow up, how I’ll support them and how they will learn. (How I’ll actually go about having them is almost secondary.) Could I in good conscience send them down the path less traveled, without having checked it for perils myself? Could I ever prepare them enough for the perils of the path I did take? Sumana again: isn’t it possible to sidestep the bad parts, with enough planning? Well, no, Brendan. Don’t deny the imaginary kids their own invisible stresses.

But if I start seriously working on my own propulsion, maybe my example can reshape someone else.