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Sunday, August 30th, 2009
8:43 pm	Sarek I recently saw the new Star Trek movie, and had mixed feelings, especially regarding the treatment of Vulcans and of Trek continuity. And frankly it didn't seem all that "off" until the entry of old Spock, who reminded me of the deliberate pacing and conversation-driven nature of the original two series, especially the Next Generation episode "Sarek," which has the single best exploration of Vulcan emotion that I know of in the entire franchise. Actually, when you get down to it, "Sarek" is my personal favorite episode of Next Gen, which is in turn my favorite Star Trek series. I mean, I understand that "The Best of Both Worlds" is the episode that is most emblazoned in the hearts of fans everywhere, which holds the standard for the Enterprise D just as firmly as "The Trouble With Tribbles" does for the original ship. And frankly, I love every single second of TBOBW, it just has less of a cumulative effect on me. So the things I love about "Sarek" are multifold. And it's really rather weird that I loved the episode so much, given that it came out before I really started appreciating things beyond the scope and coolness of a given crisis. It's a very down-to-earth plot, about a Great Man (er, Vulcan) who is trying for one final success before retirement. His minor psychic abilities exist for greater complication, but this mostly leads to some really interesting character interactions among the main cast. But really, the entire rest of the episode plays a distant second fiddle to the climax. Instead of a plot resolved by photon torpedoes, it was resolved by a mind-meld with Captain Picard, which allowed the titular ambassador to borrow some of his self-control, and transfer his teeming emotions to the captain. Normally, this would be a rather silly end to a show. Except...Patrick Stewart is a MAJORLY good actor. And although science fiction is a genre that is generally less rewarding to good actors than, say, Shakespeare or Oscar-bait movies, this episode is a marvelous exception. Even as a kid who knew little about the deep emotions brought out by regret and years of life, the few minutes in which Picard took Sarek's mind sent shivers down my spine that I recall to this day. And it's not the only episode that had a great emotional effect on me. I almost couldn't finish watching the episode where Data creates a daughter for himself, heartbroken about her coming death...but my parents convinced me that the closure given by the last act of the episode would help my sadness--and, of course, they were right. Anyway, I decided to go to YouTube and search out the episode. I hoped for a clip of Picard's emotional breakdown. Instead, I found a 5-part upload of the show. And then I had to weigh a decision--would something I liked so much as a child wind up being sadly disappointing on growing up? But of course, I knew that I would end up deciding to watch the episode, so skipped out on the actual debate. And in the end...the show is chilling. I realized, on watching it, that I really *wasn't* fully appreciating the show. It was excellently put together; the exposition was mostly unforced and quite reasonable. Everything fit perfectly into the mythos of Vulcans established earlier in the show--and in fact was driven by the "pride" the Vulcans feel on their control over their emotions. All without going in depth about how this fits into the various things we know about the most popular alien race of Star Trek. In the end, I guess it's just good to find out that the things you loved as a child don't always suck twenty years later... (Comment on this)
Saturday, August 29th, 2009
10:27 pm	A F.A.T.A.L. Experience Roleplaying games: perhaps the gold standard in nerdiness. A bunch of people spend their Friday nights sitting in a basement, rolling dice, and talking about how the dice tell them they're winning a battle against an evil wizard. That was the basis for a large percent of my undergraduate friendships... I enjoy RPG's, even though I don't actually get to play them very often (they require a decent-sized group with similar time constraints). In fact, I have a small collection of sourcebooks that I've kept since my college days. Some of them, such as Werewolf: the Apocalypse, I've never actually played, but I like looking through the books and thinking about how such a game might go, or I used them for extra characters in games I ran beforehand, or I just wanted to read the book. Hey, I've already admitted to nerdiness. Anyway, in my meanderings on this worldwide web we love so dearly, I came across a review of a game called FATAL (From Another Time, Another Land, although alternate acronyms have been suggested). The review is...scathing. It's a one-sided flame war. Tremendously fun to read (and, sadly, I can't find it now), and it pretty much says that the game is worse than stabbing out your own eyeballs--which you're likely to do when reading the sourcebook. The biggest discussion was in how incredibly perverted the authors were, and the sheer nonsense of some of the rules. Well, naturally I looked it up. And there was a lot of discussion online about this game. Mostly people putting in their own two cents about how horrible the game was (a favorite was bringing up the fact that your average speech rate can be higher than your maximal speech rate), but there was also a crowd who insisted that, okay, the book was fairly childish, but if you left out all the sexual stuff, the system was actually a really good one to play. These latter reviews reminded me of something...I used to have fun at parties by defending Yoko Ono's music by telling people "well she's not a great singer, but she writes good melodies." This made me seem deep, and no one could refute me because they hadn't actually listened to any of her music. Oh, and actually her melodies are worse than her singing, just FYI. Anyway, I decided to take a gander at this infamous rulebook (I found a .pdf online) and see for myself. And yes, it's very childish, misanthropic, and frankly it's poorly organized. But you can't use that for the strength or weakness of the system. So I decided to try my hand at using the system to create a character, and, as a roleplayer, decide if I'm at least excited about the directions the game's taking me in. I started one night at midnight--and promptly broke the rules. You see, there's a huge range of races you can play, and I couldn't be bothered to learn about any of them. Also, I'm only really going to have a "feel" for human characters, so I'm going to go specifically against the advice of the rulebook and choose. I also will choose to be a man, because frankly a look through the book more or less tells you you DON'T want to be stuck as a female (if nothing else, the detailed rules on how often there are gang rapes pushes me against that particular direction). Also, by far the biggest stat change in the game is a 30% increase to strength for men...and a 30% loss for women. The next biggest stat change for gender is 5%. Regardless of whether or not I should have made these choices (the books says to leave everything to chance), I did. Pay attention, because they're the last choices I'll make for a while. So immediately on choosing my sex there are bunch of stat changes I have to note for later. Strength goes up 30%, Reflection goes down 4%...lots of nickel-and-diming, but there are 12 things to note for later. Yes, changes to twelve different stats, many of which will be very small changes in the end, but I have to remember them all. All right, time to start rolling up a character. And I do mean rolling--there will be an absurd number of dice thrown about in this process. I start out by rolling 4d100/4-30 to get my starting age (taking absolute value, so no negative numbers, but it's possible to have to play a 2-year-old). The dice come down and I'm playing...a twelve-year-old. This puts me in the age category of Puberty, which has effects on height and weight, which in turn have effects on things like strength and attractiveness...holy mother of God, what have I gotten myself into? Next we roll height, then weight. This little tyke is going to grow up to be 6'1" and 181 pounds, but is currently 5'5 and 144lbs. From here I can (and must) calculate my BMI, but I have no idea how much of it is fat versus muscle, because I haven't rolled strength yet. Still, a picture is slowly coming into focus for this fellow. Now I will refine it further by finding out my most attractive and repulsive features. Most repulsive: voice. That dings my vocal charisma 8%. Most attractive: crotch. This...wait, what? I'm playing a twelve-year-old who's got a very lovely crotch? Yup. And this roll has attached bonuses. Quick aside--in many games, height, weight, and features are left to the player. Here, that would be bad, because these inconsequential details have substantial effects on the real stats, especially strength (which, as every roleplayer knows, is the God Stat). And there's no justification for what I'm about to do, which is roll all sorts of purely cosmetic features. With no choices made on my part, I find out that I have dirty blond hair to the middle of my back, which is medium thickness wavy, and oily. I also have tanned skin, recessed brown eyes, and perfect vision. I know multiple dimensions of my nipples, and my tongue length. It's now 12:25, the time being taken by finding things in the rulebook and rolling lots of dice. The next five minutes of my life are devoted to finding out that my twelve-year-old character has an eight inch penis, with a 5.9 inch circumference. Also, he can take an object of 5-6 inches up the ass without ripping, and the rulebook helpfully points out that that's the thickness of a "normal manhood." FUCK THIS SHIT. I just spent five minutes of my life rolling dice to find out that this twelve-year-old character has a schlong as big as many porn stars. And no, this isn't a case of the rules not taking age into account--when he reaches adulthood, he can look forward to almost nine inches of studliness, and 6.5 around, because "manhood" is based on height, which in turn was affected by age. And it takes FIVE WHOLE MINUTES to get this bit of lechery out of the way, because BOTH length AND girth require--deep breath--rolling (10d100)/5-1 (the minus one still cracks me up). A d100 is really two dice, so this is FORTY ROLLS OF THE FUCKING DICE SO I CAN TELL HOW WELL HUNG A TWELVE YEAR OLD IS. Not counting the height and age rolls. At this point, it was 12:32 in the morning, and I got fed up. I'd spent half an hour rolling up a bunch of things that most games let you just choose, and I still have NO IDEA what this pubescent lad is capable of doing, because I haven't gotten to a SINGLE ONE of his actual stats. I shut off my computer, and decided to sleep it off. I almost left it at that, but I decided to persevere and finish making my character. Who knows, maybe it'll all pay off... There are twenty stats in the game. Yes, twenty. Each one is rolled separately, and lots of them have modifiers. They nominally lie on a scale of 1-200, although modifiers can theoretically push you out of this range. And the authors decided that these stats should, if you make a small army of characters, hit a distribution that fits a bell curve. I'm not extrapolating here: they have a lengthy footnote on how they're fitting all stats to the IQ bell curve. And the way they do this uses some theorem that's really big in actuarial math, which says that if you average a bunch of uniform probabilities, you get a bell curve. Can you guess what that means when you translate it to game terms? It means that we get to roll (10d100)/5-1 for EVERY SINGLE STAT! Did I mention there are twenty stats? In the end, this comes out to 200 rolls of the dice to finish getting my stats. And, because I'm being the Gamer Who Follows the Book, I'm rolling them all, tabulating the results, plugging into my calculator, and then trying to figure out all the additions and subtractions from my prior rolls (such as the twelve stats affected by my being male). These stats are also rolled in order, so you don't get to push them around to make it so your character would be a good warrior, or a good mage, or whatever. If your strength sucks and you want to play a fighting character...tough. It takes an hour, but I get my list of stats. They range from 83 to 144, and most of the sex-based stat differences amount to adding or subtracting about three points, in a nominal range of 0-199. Soo glad I kept track of them... In the process, I find out I'm basically average in physical fitness, body attractiveness, vocal charisma, facial charisma, agility, reaction time, and common sense. I'm quite good at kinetic movement (and thus sexual performance...*sigh*), hand-eye coordination, and intuition, and poor at enunciation, math, and health (which the book specifies means I'm not good at peeing). More to the point, because stats are rolled independently, I have a few really silly conclusions. The hardest math I can master is fractions, but I'm good at analytic thinking. I'm a standard deviation or so above the mean in strength, but most men are at "genius" level (taking the IQ analogy). And yes, my average rate of speech is in fact slightly higher than my maximum. But you know what? There's no point in quibbling about these minor inconsistencies. It's amusing, but hardly an essential part of the discussion. It's really overshadowed by a few significant factors. 1-I have now spent an hour and a half on rolling up this character. 2-In this time frame, I have made a grand total of two decisions, both of which the rule book suggested against the player getting to make. 3-After all this rolling, after all these stats, I have a statistically ordinary guy. You take the claw over the town, hit the button at random, and it scoops up a random person, and that's your character. Someone who was thrown at the bell curve for twenty statistics. The first person you bump into on the street in the morning is the hero of your campaign. In case this isn't clear enough: YOUR CHARACTER IS ORDINARY. D&D started out like this. You rolled 3d6 for your stats, in order, and 10 was "ordinary." Then people realized that ordinary characters made for boring heroes, so they let players swap their stats around, and implemented Roll 4, Keep 3. Call of Chthulhu does it as well, but there the POINT is that you're both weak against the wonders of the universe and generally screwed anyway. The other thing is, there are a lot of stats which are either useless or which overlap another stat quite heavily. What parts of Physical Fitness aren't covered by Strength and Health? Who cares when my character's first memory was? How do I describe the movements of a character with great agility, but terrible kinetics and hand-eye coordination? Of course, the bell curve tells us that all these questions are unlikely to come up, because most stats are going to be in the range of 85-115. *sigh* At least the horrible flaws do a little to cover each other up. Anyway, I'm actually still not done. I still have to find out that I'm a peasant, illiterate, was born in town, 3rd in a family with 2 brothers and 4 sisters (and no, I still haven't made any choices of my own). Then comes the roll I HATE. It's even worse than finding out a pubescent boy's anal circumference. I rolled my character's sexuality. I'm playing a breeder. Full stop. Which is fairly bad. And frankly, I think it'd be even worse for a straight guy to be told he HAS to play a fag...especially given that the next roll is Debauchery, which tells you what your character will and won't do as far as kink goes. No, it's not a player decision either. My character WILL, by the official rules of the game, get a handjob, get oral, have vaginal sex, will finger, dive in some muff, participate in an orgy, give anal, give or take pain, give or take urine, or be bound. He's just that freaky. Or, if you want to play a nice game that doesn't involve worrying about the cops, he *will be* that freaky when he reaches adulthood and gets his ninth inch of manhood. Egads. Finally, after all this, you pick a job and start distributing your skill points. Yes, after an HOUR AND A HALF OF ROLLING DICE you get to make a few minor decisions. And as if to make up for lost time, there's a dizzying number of jobs and skills available, so there's lots of reading...and at this point, I gave up. Especially because there's a dizzying number of types of magic users, each of which gets access to completely different spells, but they're all in the same list, so you can't easily tell which ones you're choosing when you pick your class...but none of them are exciting. Actually, just a note on looking through the spell list. Most of it sucks--lots of riffs on boring themes, such as "bestow dislocation," "bestow fatigue," "bestow earache." (I kid you not). Although there is a small sequence of gems--the "bestow [unit of time] family. They're a sequence of spells that age a target, from a decade to an aeon. Now these are certainly of limited application, but there's a certain amount of coolness. You could use the former to make my character creation process immediately much less "icky," because he'd suddenly be a 22-year-old stud instead of...well, let's not get into that again. But the same family of spells becomes a powerful offensive weapon towards the end, killing even the long-lived such as elves. And I can think of some other interesting uses for aging someone a decade. I will give them credit for this line of spells being rather cool, even though almost everything else is unweildy and doesn't spark the imagination. Verdict: the game is trash. The only way of making a character in any reasonable amount of time is to program the algorithm into a computer, which involves LOTS of tables. Once you've done this, character creation is largely a matter of pushing one single button, which gives you an unremarkable member of the population--down to eye color. And your stats might well not work for the kind of character you really want to play. And even if they do...there's just not much of a sense of awesomeness about the things you get to do. It's great for a realistic game...in which unextraordinary people do unextraordinary things. And have lots of sex in the bargain. (Comment on this)
Monday, March 23rd, 2009
10:41 pm	Returns I rather doubt anyone (except maybe Susan) will see this, but I've decided to return to my journal, for now at least. It's been quite a break, and one I'm not totally sure why I needed, or why I now feel the need to return to my digital pages. To put my thoughts up for the world to see (or, more likely, ignore). Ennui. That's a concept that's been on my mind a lot lately. The ennui of the self...how everyone more or less categorizes their own life as routine. It really struck me about a week ago, when I was at "math boot camp" with a lot of people I'd never met before. At one point, this guy and I were walking into the sunset, so he held up a hand to block out the sun. I held up my book (Dreams of the Solo Trapeze) and joked about how the "consecration" hold was appropriate for me and a book about the trapeze. And, well, circus training wasn't a twice-a-week part of life for him...it ended up even making the gossip train (okay, so it was in a group of mathematicians). Or, this got me to thinking, the same thing happened in my aerial fabrics classes. I think back a few years ago, and I was impressed by even the most banal of things so long as they were on that beautiful stretch of tissu swathed from the sky. Then I started taking classes on the fabrics (and became briefly even more impressed, because learning to climb/wrap/etc. is HARD), and eventually got to the level where I was encouraged to create my own solo piece. I started putting it together, and came up with something that fit me. The only thing was, I thought it was a bit simplistic--I could perhaps do trickier moves and... And then, looking at how it went...it was great. Sure, I know trickier moves, but the piece I put together was pretty darn nifty by any nonprofessional standards, and might even eke some respect in a medium-level circus show. The thing was, these were almost all moves I really knew, so there was nothing "special" about them. Or at nerd camp, I was working on some math and thought that everything I was doing was really quite mundane and easy. Then I realized that most of the concepts and techniques had been totally alien to me when I got my Master's degree. Ennui is a strange concept. It's really strange that things which so befuddle you at one point in your life lose their noteworthiness eventually. Sometimes it's a good thing--I'm glad I don't have to give any conscious thought to driving anymore!--but sometimes it's less so. Like when a special person, a loved one, becomes just another part of the day. Like getting used to doing something wrong, so it no longer feels bad to do it. Like falling into a routine, where everything is painted in ennui gray. It would be interesting, someday, to live a day in recognition of just how special life is. Not how special it would be to Joe Blow, or the starving children in China who apparently want my vegetables, but to myself. To the me I was back in college. The amazement he has with my facility with rings of integers, or aerial works. Who envies my practiced contortions just as I envy his large circle of friends he spent time with every day. That poor schmuck, he probably still has to find friends to buy alcohol for him... Current Music: "Yesterday," the Beatles (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, December 7th, 2007
2:11 pm	Save the Cheerleader... Whose job is it to save the world? And how do you go about doing so? It's a rather frivolous-seeming question in some lights, but it's definitely a question that's in some way lodged in peoples' minds. I mean, it's the ultimate call to action: to try and SAVE THE WORLD--it's hard to imagine a threat to something bigger where human agency is even relevant. So how does it happen? That's of course the big concern. Seldom if ever is someone given a situation in life where there's a clearcut threat to humanity's existence which they can specifically thwart: we're talking maybe high office-holders during the cold war, if that. But the idea of being responsible for the wellbeing of the race is still fairly prevalent with people--they just work at it in a smaller context, adding up tiny percentages to get anywhere. But without a clear Armageddon on the way, what do you *do*? Well, at times people have focused on different ideas for spending their efforts. In the sixties, for instance, The Man was beating people down. The Authorities gave us bloody and useless wars, took away our civil rights and pot, and had The Bomb. Standing up and protesting was the way to go. The great good, the way you knew you were doing your part, was to be a martyr to the cause--beaten down, or arrested, or even to drive home a symbolic point (by, say, putting a flower in a gun). Love could save us all. The eighties, on the other hand, were all about environmentalism. People were just starting to come to terms with the fact that the planet wouldn't stay clean unless people picked up after themselves. Everyone was familiar with the book "50 Simple Things YOU Can Do to Save the Earth," and the point was further driven home by Captain Planet and the Planeteers. People did their share, but the major emphasis was on making big business literally clean up their act--because they did so very much of the actual polluting. This kind of leads us to what brought the subject up in my mind. Georgia, where I currently live, is undergoing a severe drought. Record-breaking. And how it's being handled is...interesting, to say the least. The first I heard about it was the hosepipe ban. Then things got more severe, and there's a major movement everywhere for people to conserve water. And not just in cutting random water loss--we're not talking just making sure taps aren't dripping and everything. No, people are being encouraged to stop the shower while they're applying soap. "If it's yellow, let it mellow" was an enforced rule at a football game. A girl who wrote in to the school paper about how she thought the rules were getting ridiculous and she just flushed when she wanted to was smacked down as being selfish and shortsighted. How does this relate to the above? Well, the hosepipe ban is *it* as far as legal matters related to water use. For instance, the car wash I live near is still running exactly as it always has. It's just private lives that are disrupted, apparently (admittedly, many restaurants are switching to disposable plates to save dishwater, etc, but it's out of the goodness of their own hearts). The thing is, even these increments people do--turning off the faucet while brushing their teeth, using only one glass a day for drinking--simply amount to a rounding error against the Big Users. Like when an accident involves rupturing a water main and spilling 1.5 million gallons--that's a lot of flushes. Or maybe requiring the paper mills to come up with a way of reducing water use by even a few percentage points. But no, the responsibility lies in the private sector. It's our responsibility--to the point where flushing a toilet unnecessarily is a sin. Somehow the idea of pitching in and doing your share has become everything...how? Why? (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, November 16th, 2007
10:25 pm	Beowulf I just got back from Beowulf as I type this opening. I'm about to go to a party, so I'm not going to finish the post here and now, but I want to start while everything's fresh in my mind. It's a fairly well-promoted Hollywood movie based on a great ancient epic, with big name stars. Sounds horrible, doesn't it? Sounds like a major butchering of a classic. Even if Neil Gaiman *did* do a major share of the screenwriting, I had enough faith in the machinations of the movie industry to not be all a-quiver in the belief that it was going to be a great movie. The biggest thing was, I was afraid that it was going to get swallowed up in changed premises, new sideplots, and changed scenes, which are often the bane of works based on the classics. God, I love being wrong. Beowulf is a very...different movie from most you see. For one thing, it's the first mainstream movie I've ever seen in 3-D. I saw a Terminator-based clip at Universal studios, and they have lots of (mostly nature-themed) shows at IMAX, but the only brush-in I've had with 3-D mainstream movies before was a pair of red/blue glasses I saw at my aunt's house (they had a gargoyle picture on them, and I'm sure it was for a horror movie that ACTUALLY JUMPS OUT AT YOU). Total aside: the glasses brought back wonderful and vivid memories--of the show at Universal Studios, where I figured out that the sunglasses did their magic by opposite polarizations--and of a strange coloring book. And because no one can stop me, I'm going to have a self-indulgent digression about that book. It was one my parents got me, for New Year's Eve at Grandma's. It came with red/blue glasses. And all the lines were double lines--one in red, one in blue (and I think even a set in black). There were careful instructions about what colors to use in which outlines in order to get a pleasing picture, but it was a book for kids, so guess how well that worked. And if you looked at the pictures in the glasses, they looked like shimmeringly multicolored but somehow three dimensional pictures. Except that it was impossible to color in them and get anything vaguely good-looking (at least for the nonartist kid with only dark markers). Still, the only coloring book I actually remember, and it's a pretty darn awesome memory. So um, yeah, it's a 3-D movie. And in the beginning, they play around a lot with the dimensionality--things fly at you, or appear right in front of your face. A spearhead is supposed to seem like it's about to point you in the eye, because you're looking from Beowulf's POV, etc. Gimmicky, but still pretty cool. Also, the CGI is pretty good--at times, it was pretty easy to suspend disbelief and imagine that they were just very-slightly-over-Botox'd actors. Again, I seldom advocate something based solely on the technical mastery (I loathed LOVE, for instance (what an ironic turn of phrase)), but when it's on something with real content it can be utterly stunning. And then we get to the actual epic of Beowulf. You know, that silly little plot thing. And...my god, a movie actually followed the original plot VERY CLOSELY (at least, by adaptation standards). In fact, one of the biggest changes fixed a problem I had with the original: Beowulf fights three major enemies; Grendel, Grendel's mother, and then, many years later, a dragon that has absolutely nothing to do with the story. Now...let's just say that the dragon has become plot relevant, and it's all based off of one major plot change (which spurred many small ones) which I don't *particularly* mind. Purists will necessarily disagree, but I have to admit to being impressed by the fact that they kept all the original nemeses and didn't completely take a crap over the original accounts of the battles. Now, there are definitely quibbles about how different things were treated (the dragon, for instance, was so obviously cribbed from Shadow of the Colossus that it's kind of silly to watch). In fact, if anyone remembers my rant about Bible stories--all plot details, no development whatsoever--that's actually my beef with a lot of ancient writings, and this movie brought everything to modern day sensibilities without *horribly* compromising the ideals of the original work. Even better--and harder to specify *exactly* what I mean--the movie kept the sense of being an "epic" work. And I have no idea how to explain the quotes around "epic." I mean...well, think about a lot of modern movies. There's a lot of movies out that just *aren't* epic, even though they try to be. Great heroes don't have deep, iconic lines. The music is far too mainstream and not at all timeless. Plot details are hopelessly mired in modern sensibilities. I can't properly explain it, but somehow this movie is one where the lines really seem like words that great heroes would speak, the music has that "One Winged Angel" vibe of modern sensibility with timeless foundations, the plot is something that we can relate to but which also would have made sense back around 500 AD. Christianity is mentioned, even possibly given its due, but the Christian god doesn't suddenly make everything right--it's all about the people, the characters we see (kind of like the major flaw that "1408" neatly sidestepped). As a quick summary, I just think it worth saying that "Beowulf" is a more-than-usually faithful adaptation of a great work, which makes a piece that is worth the time and money to see in the theatres. Everyone I went with agreed: it's a movie that's far better than it has any right to be in today's cinema climate. Heck, it's got a classically-themed soundtrack with catchy melodies--how long has it been since we've had one of those? This is really a movie where it pays to shelve your doubts and just let yourself have a great time, no matter how well you know the original epic. Current Music: Holding Out For Hero (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 7th, 2007
12:13 am	Quarter Century Last Friday, I reached a meaningless-yet-somehow-important milestone in life: I turned 25. A quarter century. Drinking age plus four. Whatever. Just a number, but a nice round one, that makes you sit up and take notice. Birthdays kind of get me down. Well, sort of. I don't much mind getting older, and probably won't for at least another decade. What gets me down about birthdays is the fact that they're a milestone, a place to sit down and look at where you really are, at exactly what you are and aren't accomplishing. To me, a birthday is oftentimes a bit like being single on Valentine's day: it just kind of makes me sit down and think about what's good and what's not... Of course, *objectively* I should have no problems. I've accomplished a whole hell of a lot this year: gone from novice to strong student in both trapeze and fabrics, passed several qualifying exams, had a nondisastrous relationship, made great friends...but also mishandled situations, which led to turning an important friend into an enemy. Lots of friends have moved out of Athens, and keeping in touch is fairly minimal. I keep flaking out on my dream of directing a small circus-type show. Mostly fairly minor things like these, but nevertheless things that prey on my mind, take away from the satisfaction I should have after such a year. Add in the fact that I was given a fiendishly difficult takehome midterm in Analysis, due on Monday, and you have a recipe for me being quite moody all weekend, right? But there was something else going on over the weekend as well...a show at Canopy, for which I had volunteered to do the rigging (egads! less time to work on the test!). And that somehow made the difference: some of my friends came to see the show, which really meant a lot to me: the fact that it was important to me (and possibly the fact that it *was* my birthday) got them to go--a sort of inclusion I seldom really feel. And as the weekend progressed, I didn't have much time to sit and mope about what'd gone wrong in the past, because the shows and test took up so much of my time, and the people in the show were so darned nice. Little things: being thanked for giving them some of my time to help get the trapezes in the air, insisting that I couldn't completely skip the cast party, even just offering to pick me up some dinner between the Saturday shows. Saturday night I even got multiple people to show up to a movie night at my place, which may be a first since I moved here. And so this year, I got what may be the nicest birthday present I've ever gotten: a feeling of belonging. Right when (for various reasons I won't go into now) I'd been feeling especially out of place. And so to pretty much everyone I interacted with over last weekend: thank you so much. Just for being yourselves. Current Music: Ageless (Nitza) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, November 6th, 2007
7:07 pm	Once and Again The echoes of your face still haunt me A smile, given just to me-- To only, rather, those of certain... Qualities, or things we do-- I know that he received it too. The echoes of your touch still thrill me Though I'll touch you nevermore For joy has somehow left for loathing Angst or jealousy, no forgiving, Incompatible ways of living My memories, so oft idyllic: Do they echo what was there? Life with you was not so perfect...      I hold myself to what's still true      But dream imperfect dreams of you (Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007
10:04 pm	Mirrors Humanity: such a strange creature are we. A tribe built all of individuals, a strange anomaly of negative entropy, bestowing unheard-of order unto the world in which we live. A network of minds, each of which is more complicated than the most phenomenal computer any of them can dream of. Six billion existences spread across the globe, each living a totally unique story, but at the same time falling into patterns that were old when history was young. Patterns of hope, of love, of ambition, of despair, of doldrum, of accomplishment...the expressions have changed, but the yearnings--to be great, to be magnificently damned--anything, these are old yearnings indeed. Even in our own lives, we see patterns. Certainly my journal has had entries where I fell for someone, things didn't work, and I bled emo all about the place...and never mentioned the fact that several years before the exact same thing happened, but a few years passed and I moved away, and it was no longer an issue...just as happened with my bad situation in Raleigh. The details differ, of course, but the stories match on almost all the major areas. But enough of drama gone past. We live our lives through patterns: this is our blessing and this is our curse. We can see groups and understand ourselves: entire disciplines of knowledge spring from this concept (psychology and sociology, much as I bash them both). Of course, some of the patterns are that we trap ourselves in death-spirals, and can't get ourselves to accept that we fit the mold perfectly ("No! He's *different!*"). I would just like to point out that, entirely by accident, I just had FIVE distinct punctuation marks in a row to write that sentence in line with my convention about using asterisks. One pattern that I feel an especial need to point out is the near-universal praise of intelligence, accompanied by a hatred of the actual thing just as prevalent. Which of course sounds absurd: everyone wants to be smarter, right? Well, sort of. People certainly wouldn't mind a more functional brain when they're sweating over a hard test question or trying to finish the design of their prototype whatchamajigger. But on the other hand, when you think about how people deal with their intelligence when they want to have fun, the answer is generally that they trash it. Really, in the vast majority of cases, when you want to hang out and have fun with your friends, want to really unwind, is it more common to get out a book of ordinary differential equations or a bottle of alcohol? Proust or weed? It's not that there's no fun in cerebral activities, but for visceral enjoyment, people (ranging from high-school dropouts to tenured professors) tend to like dumbing themselves down a little. Or even just have not-so-heavy-thinking conversations. Regardless of what anybody says about gems of wisdom or the unexamined life not being worth living, people generally have fun when their brains aren't working to full capacity. Of course, the reason I'm amused by that fact is a very cerebral reason. Irony anyone? The sad thing, of course, is that noticing the patterns doesn't always give you power to do anything about them. For instance, a good friend of mine just posted a very short, very cryptic message to an anonymous reader on his blog. Having done this exact thing myself in the past, I have a pretty good idea of what he's going through even though I have no idea the specifics of the situation...and I know that about all I can do is say here that I really do hope it all ends well for him. This is of course the point in the game where I find out I completely misinterpreted and the whole point of the post comes crashing down around me, but you have to live out your pretensions every now and again, yes? Current Music: Ordinary Pain (Stevie Wonder) (Comment on this)
Friday, October 19th, 2007
12:37 am	Rites of Passage The other day, I was reading and came across a reference to temple prostitution. This is a practice reportedly practiced long ago at the temples of Ishtar, which involved a woman being required to go to the temple and wait for a man to give her a coin (I *think* a special coin just used for the purpose), at which point she would "have to" go with him and they would...do the nasty, as it were. A venture into the unknown, something completely outside everyday life, a time of personal understanding and growth. Or, for something less apocryphal, let's consider bungee jumping. Now it's considered mostly an extreme sport, but originally it was a time when a boy would undergo a primal fear in hopes of proving himself a man. Of course, in the *original* form, it didn't involve a jump into mostly empty space but meant coming within a few feet of the ground, but that's because New Zealand coming-of-age rituals weren't encumbered by liability insurance. Coming of age...it's an interesting concept. Some sort of boundary past which someone is no longer a child but a full-fledged person. Unsurprisingly, they generally happen around puberty. Unsurprisingly, they generally involve confronting a primal fear, or a look into the unknown. The idea, of course, is a moment which truly separates childhood from adulthood. And what I have to notice is that today, we have no true coming of age rituals. I mean, you can make a very weak case for things like menarche (which happens to almost all women, and is more or less automatic), or first sexual experience (not a public event...at least usually). But there's no point in life these days when a person really has to step away from their everyday routine and do something special. And I think that's sad. Of course, it's also rather necessary. The trouble is, no great secrets can be reasonably kept in the day of the internet: you can find all sorts of inside info on pretty much any secret society you might care to name, with only a few minutes' work on Google. So any sort of "secret passed on" scheme just wouldn't work very well, you know? Any trip into the unknown would, by virtue of tort lawyers, be nerfed to the point of not *actually* taking anyone out of their element. Aside--I was a member of the Order of the Arrow at scout camp. One thing that happened as part of the initiation was that we all stood in a clearing in the woods and were looked over by other members...what they were looking for, we never knew. Then, once I was in the order, I got recruited to be one of the "other members" who oversaw the initiation--but we were told that one of the new members was a bit skittish, so we couldn't do the "staredown." In fact, it rather bugs me that the only real "initiation ritual" I've ever taken place in is in the moronically homophobic world of the Boy Scouts (where, of course, I got a *lot* of my masturbation fantasies growing up). Joining the Order involved the Mystery Night in the Clearing, a day of service and no spoken communication, even a secret area near the camp...a real ritual (no, I'm actually not breaking any of my "vows" by revealing any of this). Other groups I've joined have mostly been "hey, sign here." Why all the fuss? Well, I think that a real problem with my life in particular is the homogenization of days. One day, even a "special" day, tends to be much like any other...and I cherish "iconic" moments, moments that really stick out in the memory, individual moments that really represent more than the few seconds in time they occupy. Moments which stand out in the memory... I've made a few special moments for myself: the time I first decided I could take a vacation to see a show just because I wanted to see it, the time I first came out to a friend, the-- Ah yes, coming out...the only real "coming of age" ritual it seems we have left. And it really does divide the men from the boys...but only some of us get it. Nevertheless, because we've had to go through it, had to reach out of our comfort zone into that world of horror stories we're always hearing about publicly gay people and the many kinds of homophobia that some have to endure...I think we're stronger and (dare I say it?) better people for it. I have faced the fear the world put upon me, and I remain. And that's something. That's a part of the *me* that faces the world. And that, my friends, may be the most important lesson I've ever learned. Current Music: Desert (Cirque du Soleil) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, October 13th, 2007
4:44 pm	ADD Porn Ah, the joys of technology...it's actually come to the point where you can have your computer read books for you, thus saving you the trouble of reading them yourself. Instead, it'll just kick out a nice summary for you: it's the AutoSummarize feature of Microsoft Word. It's a pretty nifty tool for cutting to the meat of a work, taking away all those extra words which are oftentimes there to tickle the writer's ego--why do you think my journal posts are ten pages apiece? AutoSummarize has various settings, ranging from a set percentage of the original work to set lengths of summaries. For this, I chose 100-word summaries, because they're quick and easy. You can just go online and download public domain texts, put them into Word, and get a simple 100 words detailing all about "The Brothers Karamazov," or whatever your fancy. Well...there's a problem. Usually when you copy and paste from online (at least the sites I found), it doesn't format properly: you get an "enter" between all the line breaks, and so sentences that run over two lines get broken up in the eyes of your computer, which really screws up the summary. Poetry works much better: usually the breaks *are* sentence breaks, so you've got less worry: certainly I'm not going to reformat an entire work of Dostoevsky! Then THE IDEA struck me: summarize erotic stories! They're short enough that reformatting is a chore instead of an epic battle, and it simply can't help but be awesome to see such a short summary of sex and lust. The question, of course, is to decide which story to transcribe. Many gay erotic stories suck (pardon the pun). It had to be a good one. I thought about doing "Tommy the Quarterback," which is a very old one, and one which straddles (hehe) the line between "Iconic" and "Cliched." Unfortunately, it's a long multi-part story, so it'd be hard to format it (long and hard--hehe), and the first part wasn't really up to snuff to be chosen. I didn't want to do any stories that had a particular fetish theme, and the science fiction/fantasy seemed like doing too much at once. I finally settled on another old favorite, the charmingly-titled "Nick the Fratboy" as a good summary to both get and post online--partially because I'm not going to make people squirm too much with the summary (I have no plans on making this one of *those* blogs).  I'm also going to use a LiveJournal Cut, for my first time ever. ( Naughty Stuff ) There you go.  Quick porn for the ADD in all of us, even though there's only a sentence or two during the actual sex... And, of course, I need to give an AutoSummary of this post, so here you go: AutoSummarize has various settings, ranging from a set percentage of the original work to set lengths of summaries. For this, I chose 100-word summaries, because they're quick and easy. Well...there's a problem. Poetry works much better: usually the breaks *are* sentence breaks, so you've got less worry: certainly I'm not going to reformat an entire work of Dostoevsky! Then THE IDEA struck me: summarize erotic stories! Many gay erotic stories suck (pardon the pun). This boy was cute.  Nick :)." The cutest pair of black boxer briefs with white waistband.  Now Nick was really moaning.  Current Music: Big Time Sensuality (Bjork) (Comment on this)
Sunday, October 7th, 2007
5:56 pm	Witnessing Everyone's heard the wonderful quantum physics statement of "the act of observing changes the thing observed" in some form or another--it's the kind of sentence that writers and pseudointellectuals can really get behind. And, to be fair, there are moderately interesting philosophical ramifications to this...I just don't care. In the part of the world I'm concerning myself with, the effects of photons on the various flavors of quarks don't have a very noticeable role: instead, I'm going to think more on some various other associations with the concept of witnessing. First, imagine two lovers having "pillow talk." You know, a private conversation in bed, possibly just before or after sex. It's a charming, honest moment (at least in the charming fairy-tale world where neither falls asleep and both people actually want to discuss the same thing), with a kind of openness that people rarely allow themselves. Now, imagine a play in which two lovers are having "pillow talk." Suddenly the nature of the game has changed: it's something that's relevant and somehow contributes to a story, even though a decent playwright should still make it charming and open. The privacy is gone, but in the world of the show, it's the same delicate moment. Now consider the same thing, but with someone listening in--say, from a closet, or through a window...the moment is as delicate, but the scene has changed from a sweet look into a private moment to an expose (with an accent on the last e...stupid typesetting makes it look like the wrong word) on a voyeuristic character. Or, for an extreme example, imagine the same scene *yet again* but where the characters know they're being listened in on--and are either having the discussion for the purpose of talking, or trying to make it seem like they don't know they're being watched. Suddenly every sentence of the conversation is likely to change meaning and resonance--no longer is it a private sharing between two close people. This thought experiment was kind of what made me start thinking about the idea of observation--actually, I was thinking about staging scenes, and how different levels of observation could completely change the staging. But then my mind started to wander...er, continued its constant meanderings from this starting point...and it occurred to me that even outside of conveniently staged fictions, this concept really hits our lives. The central idea, unfortunately, is so obvious I almost feel dumb for stating it baldly: who we think is watching colors our actions incredibly. Were this a philosophy paper, I would probably cite Foucault, probably "Discipline and Punish" and his longwinded discussion on the "Panopticon" model of prison/school. As is, I'll leave that particular line open and instead discuss examples from life. For instance, one of my Facebook friends started a blog, and kept updating his status with "Blog entry #n published. Go read it" or the like, and I decided to do so. It was pretty well-written and the posts were much less wordy than my own are (as just about anything besides...well, Foucalt, generally is), so I started reading his posts as they came out. One interesting thing about them was that they occasionally mentioned an anonymous cute guy in the math department: I didn't read anything in particular to this because we actually have a pretty decent-looking department here...until he mentioned a very specific incident that happened right in front of me, and mentioned that it was right in front of said math boy. And you just *know* he wouldn't have said that if he knew I was going to be reading those same words later that day. In an even more extreme case, another friend of mine once linked me to his blog so I could read a poem he'd read...but in the dusty old archives of things he'd posted more than a year before, there was his entry for the day we'd met, and his exact thoughts (good and bad) about me, referenced by first and last name. Oops. Now, in both of these situations, there was no harm done: I was flattered both times, and the embarrassment the guys felt when I pointed out that I read their words was minimal. But anyone who's seen a teen movie knows that there are plenty of personal recollections that, if released, can really hurt the people involved. Or, you know, there's students talking about a professor of the class just after he leaves the room. I guess a common theme to all of this is the idea of honesty: you're more likely to be honest and thorough if you don't think the person it's about will know. Which, of course, can be a good thing or a bad thing--yes, I throw out the blanket maxim of "honesty is the best policy," because I don't believe it is. "Lying for personal gain tends to bite you on the ass" is probably more accurate, if less snappy...and yet again I digress... Anyway, the culminating idea I have about the effect of observation on how people act goes back to Facebook, to an application called the "Honesty Box." You turn on the application, you get a little box on your profile that people can type stuff in, and you get it as an anonymous message when you log on. You can reply, and even have a conversation, but it never tells you who the other person is. I think it's a brilliant idea, even though my experience with it is limited (having had only *one* person put anything in mine). Still, think about it: you're able to say what you want someone to hear, but without them feeling the horror of knowing that it was you that said it if they end up not wanting to have known. Being able to let someone know they're being a twit without putting your neck on the line. The excitement of being a Scarlet Pimpernel. But of course, knowing how people actually act, it's more likely that it'll all wind up as being variations on "I think you're hot but you'd think I'm a stalker if I said it directly, so I'm going to say it from the shadows instead so you won't know who the stalker is." It is, after all, on a social network. Hm...my cynicism meter just exploded, so I think it's time to sign off for now. Current Music: Who Are You? (The Who) (Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 26th, 2007
12:50 am	ART I'm drunk right now, and listening to "Progressive Rock." Progressive Rock is the "highbrow" form of rock'n'roll music, which incorporates various classical influences, and involves lots of "nontrivial" music forms...so why is it that it's even more fun when I'm not in complete command of my mental facilities? I bring this up not because I want to talk about progressive rock (although it's a fascinating concept, and one which I should probably talk about eventually), but instead because I saw what probably counts as the beginning of artsy circus last weekend. "Saltimbanco," by my love paramour Le Cirque du Soleil, is historically as important as all get out. As best as can be told from my Cirque boxset, Saltimbanco is the first Cirque show that we would today recognize as being *really* Cirque du Soleil: earlier shows didn't have nonsense vocals on all the songs (or even much vocals at all), didn't have lots of spandex-clad acrobats doing inexplicable-yet-wonderful acts (they were dressed in human clothes, just in weird colors and fits!), and didn't really have the standard of phenomenal acts. "Nouvelle Experience" was obviously a step in the "right" direction, but all the earlier Cirque shows really seem like Barnum & Bailey without the elephants. Tellingly, "Nouvelle Experience" was the first show that the uberphenomenal director Franco Dragone was given full artistic freedom on, and he started finding his path that led to a worldwide entertainment superstar with that one show...perfected on the next show (next being "Saltimbanco, of course). Yes, I believe that "Saltimbanco" is very near perfection for a traveling Circus show--and was probably even more phenomenal when it first came out, against a background of successful circus involving cheesier music and barkers overemphasizing the dangers of various acts. Before I even go into the wonders of the show, I do want to take an aside and vilify the video of the show. The video is, frankly, horrible. Whoever put it together took out entire acts (the pantomime act, which I've been informed has been in since the beginning, the opening sequence, the entire "evil" character, many transitions) and even worse, butchered some of the best acts in the show. For instance, in the Boleadoros act (a rare South American dance involving hitting balls on the end of a string against the floor) the entire focus is on the performers' faces and you hardly get to see their marvelous manipulations of the bolos...I even despaired on seeing the show that they'd replaced it with a drum act, until they put down the drum and started their rare and wonderful dance (and the drums certainly didn't make the video). As such, I can only say to avoid this video like the plague, and find a way of telling le Cirque that they really need to get a halfway-decent video of the show together. Actually, Saltimbanco is a great show, despite its mediocre video. And what do you really expect? It was put on by the masterful director of "O" and "Alegria," and was his first real escapade into evoking pure wonder with his show. I won't deny that it shows that it's his first real effort in the direction--the stage and costumes are very primitive, as though no one was quite sure what direction they wanted to go in. The music is in every style imaginable, which kind of points to not knowing where to go. And yet...the show itself is miraculous. It was apparently created as an antidote to "urban despair," and this is definitely a feeling I get from it. Imagine, if you will, a show that doesn't resolve around doomed mythological characters like Icarus. Doesn't involve major heartstring-pulling concepts like countries at war and separated families. Instead, it's all about a silly little-boy character who's raised by a wonderfully-together family (the act "Adagio") who dreams of beauty and the wonder of the world. And imagine a director who can pull this all off. Make the boy a fantastic pantomime, who can convey stories with only his actions. Put in lots of great acts--including the single best trapeze act I (an avid trapeze student) have ever seen. And storytellers. And great music. And beautiful-even-though-abstract costumes. Put it all together, and with the genius of Franco Dragone supporting it, you have a show that takes all your worry and angst aside, and replaces it with a warm feeling in the possibilities inherent in humanity. The show is, quite simply, amazing. I love it without reservation. Some of the acts were possibly recycled (I think the poles act and hand-to-hand were put into Mystere, while the trapeze act was majorly recycled for "O"), but they were here first and fit here perfectly. I got a relatively weak bicycle act instead of the amazing wirewalker act on the video...but didn't mind overly because of all the great acts I did see, and the tightroper was definitely less exciting than the Chinese Poles, or the trapeze, or the Russian Swing, or...well, many of the acts, come to think of it...heck, I even loved the bungee act, even though it's a lot of stuff I generally don't appreciate in Cirque shows (mostly choreography instead of impossible stunts, lots of stuff that "blends together" in the common eye, etc). "Saltimbanco" is a great show: catch it if it comes to your city and you have any interest in the circus, and if you're disappointed then I have to conclude that the trapezists were sick, the Russian swing broke down, and the arena you're in won't physically support the Chinese poles. Oh, and that you have no appreciation for a good pantomime act (I actually bent over laughing during a Dragone show--call a priest, the Rapture is obviously imminent). Or even Adagio--one of the standout acts of the show, but which gets the shaft simply because it isn't quite as jawdropping as some of the others. Hell, acts just seem more freakishly impossible in a Dragone show than technically harder ones do in a show by a lesser director like Champagne--perhaps Dragone simply does a better job of setting up tension? Certainly there are fewer "stunts" by direct count in a Dragone show, but it's still a hell of a lot better to watch even for an impossibility junkie like me...go figure. Unfortunately, for all the memories of the great acts in the show, of the great unifying concepts that Dragone somehow injected into the show without distracting from the acts, I'm always going to see this show in my memory with mixed emotions. The fact is, a cast member was supposed to meet me after the show but didn't--in actual fact because he hurt his ankle doing Russian Swings (or so he claims--and I'm giving him benefit of the doubt). Regardless, my friends and I waited after the show for him to show up, and got increasingly skeptical queries from the stage crew as to what we were still doing in the theatre, until we were told that said cast member had left, so we really ought NOT TO BE THERE. This was a bit uncomfortable. On the other hand, while waiting for the prodigal diva, a group was brought onstage to be told about how the show was put together. Not knowing that the size of the group was strictly limited (and a special exception was even made for this specific group), I naively decided to join them, and got to stand on the stage for about a minute before I was recognized as being outside the group and thus asked to please leave so I didn't get the tour-director in trouble. While this may seem like a bad thing, being chased off the stage and all, I'm counting it as a fantastic even because I GOT TO STAND ON A CIRQUE STAGE FOR ABOUT A MINUTE! WOO-HOO! And heck, I also got to hang out with two of my very best friends from Raleigh (Becky and Nick...a roommate and a friendly ex) and see a phenomenal show with them--and Becky gave me a beautiful oil painting as part of her ticket repayment. Really, if you can't enjoy a setup like that--regardless of the other possibilities of the night--what business do you have living? (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 28th, 2007
11:36 pm	Delma Irene Dumler Near the beginning of summer, my maternal grandmother died. I haven't written about it yet, partially because I haven't written much at all recently, partially because it takes time to really put into perspective the life of someone so near and dear to my heart. I never cried when Grandma died, and that surprised me. I love her dearly, and miss her greatly even though I wouldn't have gone home in the time between then and now were it not the trip for her funeral--somehow, deep in my psyche is an empty place matching the bed in which she no longer sleeps. I was sad to see her go, it still sobers me to think of her absence--but I do not cry, because Grandma Dumler and I have no unfinished business. I've never had a fight with my grandmother. I never did anything to her that she didn't know about. Most especially, I can not remember a single conversation we had that didn't end with me telling her I loved her. I can't remember a single moment we spent together that didn't reflect how wonderful a person she is to me, from the shallow days of my youth when she showed her love with home-baked cookies and I reciprocated by gobbling them down, to the later days when we made an event of going out to Wendy's for a meal, just to spend a few hours with each other. Regret, not sadness, not absence, is the true reason that we cry for lost loved ones. Regret for things left unsaid, for the times when we didn't show our love. And with all of my grandparents, I have no regrets. When my mother dies, I know that I'll hardly be able to contain myself--with regrets of the times we've argued, or the petty things I've said to her, or the advice I've disregarded, or...well, almost anything from my teenage years. But with my grandparents, the vagaries of daily life have never gotten in the way of love and its expression. How does one remember such a figure? What words can I possibly say to preserve the memories of the woman who was my grandmother? Can I talk about her boundless energy, or her joyful humor? Or would it be better to focus on more mundane yet personable details, like her sharp bridge game or wonderful cooking skill? It all comes down to memories. The associations that come up when I think of that sonorous name, Delma Irene Dumler. Her beautiful pressed-flower arrangements. Playing "Rook" at her dining room table, and her telling me her middle name when she wrote her initials on the scorecard. Her unfathomably wonderful cookie tins that she always sent us away with. Funny moments. When I'd hug her too closely, her hearing aid would start whining and she'd always tell me "Ohhhh, you turn me on." (Good God, have you ever had your grandmother tell you that?) When she said that my cousin Renee's fiancee had a "sexy" telephone voice (and actually, upon further investigation, only meant to say "professional"). Her story about accidentally dropping my wagon and letting me roll down the driveway and across the street (to which my entire reply was "That was a bad trip, Grandma."). Inspirational memories. Her artistic abilities--from flower arrangements to the gold-and-diamond necklace she always wore that she herself had made while working at a jeweler's. The love she had for her husband, even after more than sixty years. The beautiful quilts and cardigans she made. Moments. Her finding a mouse in the lint screen of the dryer. Going to the Russell library and getting a few wonderful childrens' books I'd never heard of before. Teaching me to make her specialty Kase noodle recipe. The way she said "Ohhhh." The glass lamp I bought her when I was very young as a Christmas present: it never went with her decor but she never threw it away. It was still on a shelf the last time I ever went to her apartment... That lamp is perhaps the best symbol of love between a grandchild and grandmother. The grandchild goes out and, in a fit of exuberance, gets something probably more expensive than he ought to afford and which is hardly a "good" present by adult standards. And yet when his grandmother moves and strips her possessions down to the minimum for her new and smaller home, she makes sure to save a space for the ridiculous gewgaw. I can't fix my grandmother's memory in a short essay, no matter how hard I should try. In fact, I would be disappointed should I be able to easily summarize anyone important in my life. Instead, I try to give glimpses, a way of possibly recreating a single moment with this remarkable woman within my own mind, in hopes that this might communicate a fragment of who this person was to anyone who might happen upon this essay. So long...that was a great trip, Grandma. Current Music: Real Love (The Beatles) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, July 27th, 2007
4:07 pm	NOW Oftentimes in my life, I've found myself asking the nonsensical question of "why is it now?" Then after a moment I try to ponder about it, but immediately realize that it's silly--the question was asked *then,* not *now,* so why should it have been now back then in the first place? You know it's a good question if you get a minor headache this early on. No really, what I'm talking about is how strangely this "time" thing acts on us, and how blithely we ignore it--but we have to, because our entire concept of existence is molded on our experience of time. But fortunately, there are a few mundane items we see every day that can help us to think about time more clearly. Let's consider a record. I realize it's no longer an everyday item, but it's a wee bit more convenient an object of discussion than a CD or DVD is. Mainly, the information on a record can be captured by something not much more sensitive than the naked eye: there exists software that will let you scan in your records on an optical scanner and which will then play the appropriate music for you. Okay...but what does this have to do with time? Well...pretend you have a lovely old vinyl copy of "The Wall," to pick an album at random. When you think about the album, you think of something like 80 minutes of music, detailing the isolation and power fantasies of a disillusioned anti-hero...but in some very real sense, all the "information" of the album can be absorbed by glancing at the four record sides that get placed on the turntable. And if you just think about the album, reminiscing about what you do and don't like, you can come up with a pretty detailed description in only a few moments, instead of replaying all 80-some minutes in your head and keeping notes as you do so. Clearly, memory bypasses realtime in a convenient manner, and it's sometimes possible to view an extended event with a frozen artifact. Memory is also something that kind of stymies me. While it's quite clear to me that some form of memory is necessary for intelligence, and that memory-like patterns crop up naturally in the strangest of places, it's still a philosophical bugaboo. Back when I was a kid, I reflected on the fact that I could never remember going to sleep, although I clearly did...and I wondered what I did, what I thought, just before I nodded off...and was that person really me? Or even, how can you know you weren't just a directed automaton if you don't remember your decision process? This disturbed me greatly. Today this is less disturbing, although I instead have to wonder sometimes if I'm really doing something "now" or if what I'm experiencing is just my memory of having done something--made an especially pickling question by the fact that I can remember with utter clarity other times when I've asked myself that same question. Also, "time vectors" all go in the same direction--to the future (duh?). And this is rather hard to rationalize with any other experience we have as people--even though the concept of moving in some other time direction is bizarre (heck, just moving at a different "rate" in time bothered physicists greatly when Einstein originally proposed the idea), but...well, we have lots of choices we can make at any given instant, but time marches on pretty much the same way regardless (unless we choose something that accelerates us to a sizable fraction of the speed of light, of course). It's as though you're always at the North pole--no matter which way you turn, your next step's always due South. Are we always at a cusp of time? What the hell does that question even mean? ...and of course, no one noticed that I accidentally forgot to submit this post, and so this last line is being written (was being written) half an hour after the rest... (Comment on this)
Saturday, July 21st, 2007
10:38 pm	Spoiler-free Potter Musings I just thought I'd take a little time to muse on the phenomenon that is Harry Potter, and how it's touched my life.  I promise to say nothing spoilerific about the last book, because I definitely don't want to ruin anyone's enjoyment of it. As far as HP fandom goes, I fall into what I think is the "usual boat."  I certainly didn't read Rowling's work before it became popular--and actually shied away from it when I heard about how it was sweeping a nation, figuring it to be just a fad.  It was only when talking with an aged professor of mine about the Alice books that he mentioned how he'd had similar doubts but in fact thoroughly enjoyed the Potter books that I gave up and decided to give them a try--meaning that I started in Book 4, along with most people I know.  And, again like most of the others, I got books 5-7 the first day they were available. I feel certain that future generations will read the Potter books and love them--but that we'll never be able to properly explain the magic they've worked on our world.  I feel certain that "horcrux" will go from being a word specially made up to give away nothing to being a not-uncommon fantasy term in the next few years (although I have to stop for a moment and mention that "phylactery" is a word already in some use, one of whose meanings mirrors that of "horcrux").  But it's not just the silly surprises like this that I think will get leeched out--it's the whole concept, the timing, everything... If someone were to start on the books tomorrow, they'd be able to just go through the series start to finish, at whatever pace should please them the most.  Already, they'll have a fundamentally different way of reading the books: for this last installment of the series, speculation has been running wild--I've talked for hours with various friends about what we do and don't expect to see, what the various horcruxes might be, who might live or die...I've put a lot of thought into the various permutations for book 7, and as such got a strangely beautiful sensation from seeing all the pieces fit together--but who would spend months speculating about a book already on the shelves? Actually, one of the draws of Harry Potter is how well Rowling balances the two kinds of foreshadowing: seeing a situation and knowing exactly how it will end up (Gryffindor hasn't won the house cup competition for many years at the beginning of Sorceror's Stone) and dismissing something relevant out of hand (the recurring bug that ends up being Reeta Skeeter). I was waiting in line to get my place in line for the book (that looks so dumb written out), and looked around to notice the most diverse crowd I've seen in Athens--young, old, black, white, hispanic, asian, gay, straight, neohippy, businessman...the girl in front of me was there with her little sister, who at one point said "come on, it's not *that* exciting."  I immediately contradicted her with, "Yes, actually it is."  And I think that the release of the last book is truly an event to remember: the turning of the century was anticlimactic, but this is the other event that the entire world watches as one and it worked out wonderfully.  The stock market crash, the end of WWII, Kennedy was shot, the Beatles broke up, Lennon was killed, the century turned, Indecision 2000--and the end of Harry Potter: what other events in the last century really captured people so much?  I must have missed a few... JK Rowling is one of the very few uberrich people who I think fully deserve their wealth.  I have nothing against inheritance, but I certainly don't think someone's particularly *deserving* of being rich just because their parents did something well.  Many businesses employ lots of sharp tactics to get their lucre.  But Rowling's wealth is self-constructed, and all hinges on the fact that people everywhere just genuinely want to read her work.  No one "needs" the books, or movies, or merchandise--a compatible version of HP4 isn't needed to interface businesses together.  There was no assisting writer who decided to quit and who was legally bound to not use their ideas.  None of the nonsense you often see in the business world applies.  Just someone with a fantastically successful idea that brings joy to millions. It's the end of an era.  I'm sad to see it go, but happy to have been there for it--and I wouldn't have missed this book for anything.  Heck, I could barely put it down for anything. Finally, a rough ranking of how I like the various books. 1- Deathly Hollows: Unbelievable.  Maybe I'm just a sucker for an ending (I still prefer "Return of the Jedi" to "The Empire Strikes Back"), but the pacing is incredible and Rowling manages to do everything she promised without a sense of anticlimax or cheating.  Also, the ground covered in the book is truly amazing (just counting the number of major events is dizzying).  Oddly enough, you'd expect a movie titled something like "Harry Potter 7: battle of the deathly hallows" to suck were it not based on this book. 2- Half-Blood Prince.  I know many people didn't like it as well...but it's the book that starts taking HP away from a classical hero/villan piece without turning Voldemort into an EmoVillan.  It sets up the last book--but does so without being tedius arrangements and long chapters of dry exposition.  A book that both satisfies and tantalizes.  And who here didn't cry at the end?  You're dead to me. 3- Sorceror's Stone.  If this weren't an immaculate example of the fantasy genre, no one would really care about how it all ended up.  You really have to miss the goofiness of this one in the later books--sometimes the only light parts are the references to this one.  Strangely enough, almost nothing in it was flatly contradicted by later elements of the series (almost unheard of in a serial format). 4- Goblet of Fire.  The first really action-packed one, the first one to have a "real" character die.  The first one to make the Death Eaters a group to be reckoned with, instead of *just* Voldemort's backup band.  Really, what can you say about the middle entry on a list?  It's not quite as encompassing as Sorceror's Stone, and less workhorse-oriented than the ones further down the list. 5- Prizoner of Azkaban.  A good story, but there's sooo much talking-style exposition, it makes you really savor the literary device of the Penseive used later.  Also, time travel as a solution to all life's problems always gives me the pip (even though it's handled better here than usual).  Still, the story is great--and it's nice to not have Voldemort on your back the *whole* time. 6- Chamber of Secrets.  I don't know what it is about this one that I don't like so much.  The many coincidences needed to keep the basilisk from being fatal was one, certainly, and I was never captivated by Lockhart.  Finally, the eponymous chamber was a bit of a disappointment, given that it caved in to almost unusability. 7- Order of the Phoenix.  Something's gotta be last, and I guess it's this one.  What can I say?  It's got lots and lots of...talking.  And researching.  And plotlines that had nothing to do with what was going on, but which needed to stay open.  Most of the book seemed non-cohesive, just an account of what was going on at Hogwarts while the true (and of course, avoidable) conflict was being set up.  As this is the only book I start skimming when rereading, it was clearly destined for last place. Current Music: Magic Man (Heart) (Comment on this)
12:29 am	Just a quick post, for reasons soon to be obvious. Just bought HP7! Woohoo! Am still running 100% on meeting really fun hot guys and getting their phone numbers during HP release parties. And this time I got the courage up to talk to him instead of being introduced by a friend. :) Life is good. Must read book cover to cover. Love to the world. Current Music: Ode to Joy (Beethoven) (Comment on this)
Thursday, July 19th, 2007
11:28 pm	How did we get here? It's been a long time since I've posted. The end of the semester was pretty busy, things got in the way, there was a period in the middle of June where I really just had no thoughts worth writing down...and of course, my computer crashed. Crashed HARD. Crashed in a way that I personally call "Quantum Existence Failure." Something about the motherboard itself. For some problems, I'll bull it out or fix it. This time my computer wouldn't reboot and didn't seem to recognize its own existence half the time. The hell with it, I finally decided, I'm buying a new one. I went to Best Buy and got a nifty looking machine, one that'll serve me well so long as it keeps running. And I was informed, after I'd basically committed to the purchase (although I hadn't swiped my card yet, because they wanted to weasel more money out of me), that the reason the prices were so "low" was because my computer would come preloaded with lots of ads and the like, which would slow my computer's performance about 40%, but I can--for the low low price of $150--get them to take it back off for me, and give me virus/spyware protection. Now this is not the topic of my rant. It's unfortunately nothing new/surprising/anything that products come bundled with all sorts of things that get in the way of your enjoyment. TV and radio commercials, anyone? But you can get satellite radio or special channels with no commercials--for a price. No, what bugs me is that the service included all sorts of things to do to your computer--including downloading and installing all software updates. Which is rather nice, even though it's not really what I was paying for (anyone with a mostly-functional brain should be able to let Windows proceed with its many automatic downloads). So I pay for the service and leave the machine with them overnight so they can take care of it. I'm an advocate for giving people money to take care of stuff that might ail me, even if it's probably more worry-mongering than actual problem. I DON'T LIKE WORRYING. ANYway. I finally get the machine home and...it tells me there's at least 18 updates it needs to download, should it start doing so? Also, the CPU monitor I was promised wasn't there--in its place is a digital representation of an analog clock, in case I can't read the handy digits in the lower right corner. And finally, it froze within five minutes of being plugged in (yay Microsoft). I call irately in to Best Buy, and they say all I can do is pack it up, drive across town AGAIN, and they'll look at it. The updates it told me about were just auto-updates from Windows, but if they got those two things wrong, perhaps they didn't finish decluttering my hard drive. Or installing the software. So I lugged it back across town and had them inspect it. Of course, they swore up and down that it had *all* the updates *this* time and I brought it home to have it download ten more, and there were still ads for NetZero and AOL... So my question is, how did we get to this strange attitude we now have as a society? Whence come our priorities? Consider, if you would, the hypothetical situation where I'm trying to make my purchase at the same time as twelve other people, the phones are ringing off the hook, that deadbeat Jeremy is taking a break in the middle of a rush, and when I pester her a fifth time the salesclerk lets go an exasperated "I'm busy here, could you hold your horses for a minute?" Probable result? She gets fired for being rude to a customer, the company apologizes profusely to me, probably including a paper mailing to my apartment full of condolences and coupons. Contrariwise, if the computer people DON'T DO THEIR JOB (do they not know that Windows Updates generally take four or five batches of updating, with resets in between?) and I get a machine that is specifically not what I was promised (and for which I paid a premium), what happens? A few oral apologies, and because they mostly fixed the problem without further charge (but with me doing all the driving) I officially have no complaint. Even though I don't get any sort of compensation for the time and trouble it takes me to get this fixed, and they gave me something not up to spec. Because I don't have to funnel *more* money into the corporation to get it fixed, I'm "good." How did we get to that point? Current Music: The whole album "OK Computer" (Radiohead) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Tuesday, May 29th, 2007
10:28 pm	Gay Media Ah, summer...a time when sheer boredom will sometimes induce me to do things I wouldn't normally do, and then find to my deep embarrassment that they're actually pretty decent things to do. Such as, to pick an example *totally at random,* buying a copy of XY magazine. There's a fair number of self-described gay magazines out there--The Advocate, Out, XY, and plenty of others I'm not going to take the time to describe. And XY gets very little respect in the medium. It's seen as a bit of a "kiddy" magazine, largely due to the vast photo spreads of twinkish boys who somehow aren't quite at *supermodel* levels. Of course, if these were people who belonged in underwear advertisements, it'd be a sign of a mature magazine, but I digress. While I'm digressing, I'm just going to point out the exquisite irony that Out Magazine comes in discrete packaging so your mailman/neighbors don't know what you've subscribed to. ANYway. I was in the bookstore recently and looking through the "Lifestyle" or whatever bunch of magazines, and the XY caught my eye. I won't pretend that the boy flexing on the cover had nothing to do with it, but really what I ended up actually shelling out cash for was the article about "ex-gay camps." It's a subject I'm very interested in, especially the experiences of actual people who've gone through them (I've even read a few "It worked for me! Praise Jesus!" variations, although they're generally not particularly convincing for various reasons). And I was pleasantly surprised at the magazine. There aren't a whole assload of articles, but the ones that are there are contemporary (not exactly groundbreaking, though) and extremely well-written. They're concise, they make a point and support it effectively, and they're on contemporary issues. And there were no stupid pages full of gay-themed drink recipes or the like that you get from the more "mature" magazines. An interesting thought, certainly--although I was a bit disappointed that much of the magazine was taken up with pictures that I'd downloaded off the internet several apartments ago. Regardless, I'm not here to discuss the relative merits of the various gay periodicals. Instead, I actually want to reminisce a moment about another periodical. It's called "OMNI" and was a science magazine that my brother subscribed to when we were growing up. Well, science is a bit misleading--there was plenty of discussion of scientific facts and developments, but there was also a science fiction theme, and wikipedia has informed me that it's actually fairly renowned as a science fiction magazine. Growing up, I started reading the magazine only after my brother had been getting it for several years, probably as a gift from our Aunt. And it was a pretty good magazine: accessible, interesting, informative, all that good stuff. And there the story should end, except that I was looking through the back issues when last I was home, and I found something that rather noodled me: the advertisements. No, I'm not so stupid as to think there wouldn't be advertisements. I was just surprised at how many of them were for gay goods and services. The ad pages near the back were basically a soft-porn cache, talking about all sorts of videos, photo collections, massage parlors, etc. I mean, you have to wonder just why exactly a science magazine spoke so loudly to the gay advertisers, especially in the eighties when gay affiliations were not a particularly effective way of popularizing oneself with the world. Maybe it was issues towards the end, when they were losing credibility and sold ads for cheaper, and so the sex industry fell in. Maybe other science magazines got them too. Maybe gays are just more science-literate than the rest of the world (I'd believe a study that said so). Maybe that was just how the sexual world worked back then. But still, I have to wonder... (Comment on this)
Thursday, May 24th, 2007
6:11 pm	Plays I just finished writing the rough draft of a play--the first real fiction I've written in far too long. Plays and the theatre have always had a prominent role in my life, even from my very earliest memories of Mom taking me to the Theater for Young America. And of course, plays as a written form aren't far behind in the grand scheme of things. After all, I knew from an early age that the greatest miracle worker of the English language was in fact known mostly for his plays--the great SHAKESPEARE. Now, as a kid, I really loved creative writing. I know, big surprise. Actually, I was rather a fanatic about it--I remember one time lying to my mom that I'd gotten the same writing assignment as my older brother because I had a good idea for it and wanted her help writing it out. At six years old I wrote and illustrated a book about S.T. the invincible invisible man (S.T. stood for "See Through"), and sold copies of it around my block for a dollar each. It's quite safe to say that I was bitten by the writing bug early on. So theatre and writing were both coursing around in my veins and...absolutely nothing happened for a while. It's hard to put yourself in that immature state of mind, but there is a time when realizing that writing and plays combine is a nontrivial task. What happened, eventually, was something I'll call "fourth grade." My fourth grade teacher was not exactly someone I'd call a good teacher. She played favorites (and this was a problem because I wasn't one of her preferred kids) and sorted the class into categories. There were the popular people, there were the white trash in training, and there were the social misfits. Unsurprisingly I was seated with the kleptomaniac, the ADD kid, and the guy with one leg. Regardless. I would say that this Mrs. Bergstrom wound up teaching me all about playwriting, but this is only the case for a very liberal interpretation of the words. Her contribution actually ended at the beginning of the year when she was talking about our creative writing time and that we would be learning to write plays by the end of the year. This never *actually* happened, but she said it would anyway. What really ended up happening was that we were given almost no guidance whatsoever during creative writing, but I got impatient with waiting for this vaporware course, and decided to try my hand at writing a play on my own. The eventual result was surprising in many aspects. For the most part, I hit the nail on the head as far as format is concerned. I correctly started by writing the speaker's name, a colon, and the stuff they said. I never put in a "says Susan" and I put all my staging directions in a neat little set of parentheses to indicate that they weren't spoken lines. I think I even remembered to set up the location. It even started with a character receiving an enigmatic package in the mail, and trying to figure out what it was and why it was sent. Really, a perfectly developed play from the first go, right? Well, there was one niggling little detail that I missed. Stagecraft. The ability for the play to be even vaguely possible to put onstage. The plot...well, it started with a girl coming from school and her mother saying that she got a package. The package contains a model of the pyramid on the back of the dollar bill (you know, the one with the floating eyeball--what the heck?), which grew around the characters and in which the rules of physics were severely bent if not utterly broken. I promise, I was not dropping acid as a fourth grader. But whatever. I wrote in the stream-of-consciousness/flight-of-fancy manner that kids always write in, and eventually I went on to write plays that could actually get put up and which made some vague level of sense (not that that's so essential an element of a play: my favorite theatrical movement is probably the absurdists). Actually, this talk about stagecraft reminds me of what prompted a major decision in the play I just wrote. The idea of the play involves the idea of an "elephant in the room." And, this being a play, there's an eccentric millionaire who decides to throw an elephant in the room *party.* One where there's a big pachyderm and no one's allowed to mention it and has to avoid any sort of allusion to it (and the room's filled with peanuts, and political posters, etc). The trouble, of course, is that it's hard to get an elephant onstage, and a mockup just wouldn't have the appropriate *presence.* And this prompted a twist that delights me and which makes everything about five times more effective: due to problems with PETA, there's no actual elephant in the room, and the party-thrower is furious--thus making the biggest elephant in the room the fact that there's no literal elephant. How very very droll. Current Music: Elephants on Parade (Disney) (Comment on this)
Friday, May 18th, 2007
2:13 am	o.O I'm just writing this down on LJ so I'll know that this isn't a dream when I wake up in the morning. Because frankly it's more surreal than many dreams--even mine, which sometimes involve explaining heterosexuality from an engineering point of view. I turned on late-night television for some braindead time before sleep. And the channel I was on had an infomercial playing. Specifically, the product they were hawking was miracle spring water, so you could call in and order God's anointment. And they'd also send you a letter, promising a miracle on a specific date...I'm uncertain as to whether or not the actual miracle was specified, but certainly the exact date was when one woman won the lottery, and another woman's letter informed her that she would receive a miracle (COD?) the very day her friend awoke from a coma. I just wonder...are you supposed to drink the miracle spring water? Do you have holy piss afterward? Or is it for anointing, or bathing, or douching...? Or is it like your tonsils, something you're supposed to keep but not actually do anything with? Finally, if someone goes on vacation and wrongfully entrusts their sacred water with you in the belief that it'll survive their trip, how many years of purgatory do you get for replacing it with tap water? Does a Britta remove a few of those? In fact, how does holiness/miracle property of water interact with filters and purifiers? I think I need more sleep... (1 Comment |Comment on this)