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Month: November 2013

I’m gonna have a drink, and walk around

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On November 3, 2013

In Blog

This wasn’t a terribly ambitious weekend, but as the only weekend in between two conventions, we hadn’t planned it to be.  Even so, we managed to have some fun.

Friday afternoon after work we trekked up to Bothell to for doctor’s visits.  It’s a bit of a drive from where we live now, but she’s great (runnerwolf referred us to her when we moved out here, and I have no desire to search for another provider.)1  After getting done with our checkups, we headed over to Northgate Mall because seananmcguire was stopping there on her whirlwind book tour up the west coast.  We arrived about 90 minutes prior to the start of the event, so we wandered around the mall to see what kind of food was available.  The wait at Red Robin was longish, so we ended up at a sushi buffet that had a variety of tasty things.  Buffets are fun for trying things you might not ordinarily order.  I had an interesting spicy jellyfish dish, which is something I’d never eaten before.  It wasn’t bad, though I don’t think it’s going to become a favourite.  After eating, we went back to the bookstore and upstairs to where the talk and signing was to occur.  There was a nice crowd of people there, some of whom I knew and many of whom I didn’t, and there was a good discussion and laughter and many, many books being signed by Seanan.

Saturday, I took my guitar over to Dusty Strings to get it checked over.  There wasn’t anything wrong with it, but just like myself, I like at least once a year for someone other than me to give it a good once-over and make sure there’s nothing that requires attention.  Since I’m giving a concert next weekend, it seemed like a good time.  While I waited, I browsed around their shop and played a variety of instruments I can’t immediately afford.  (They had a gorgeous super-jumbo baritone guitar that was tuned in D (so, one full step down from standard) that had a lovely voice, but it costs $8000 so I don’t think it’s coming home with me any time soon.2  They also had a resonator ukulele that I would love to have if I decided I wanted to learn to play the ukulele, and an octave mandolin that looked like it would be fun to pick up too.  Fortunately, they brought my guitar back to me with a clean bill of health, so I was able to get out without incurring unpayable debt.3

Today we strolled over to Seattle Centre for lunch and a quick visit to the EMP Museum.  I had seen the Horror exhibit while happyfunpaul was visiting, but kitanzi had twisted her ankle earlier that norming and bowed out, so we went through it and had fun looking at all the props and watching some of the films.  4 We also went upstairs to the Sound Lab, where they have a variety of instruments you can play around on, in little booths.  I spent some time wailing away on a drum kit, which made me wish I actually knew how to play the drums and lived in a place where I could practice them if I did.  It’s good stress relief. 🙂

Tonight over dinner we watched a History Channel documentary about pre-Columbian “discoverers” of America,5 which traced through various of the potential folks who might have been here before 1492.  The Chinese, Japanese, Vikings and Polynesians, Madoc of Wales and Saint Brendan of Ireland, and the lost tribes of Israel that feature into the Mormon mythos all got examined, and while the narrator was a bit melodramatic at times in the way that History Channel documentaries tend to be, the actual information was fascinating and enjoyable.

How was your weekend? Do anything exciting?

 

  1. It’s not like we’re at the doctor’s office THAT often for it to be a real problem. ↩

  2. For values of soon that include “like, ever.” ↩

  3. This time, at least ↩

  4. I tried out the scream booth, with amusing results. ↩

  5. “This has been on the TiVo for a long time,” I remarked.  “It’s a history channel documentary that’s actually about history. ↩

People Are Strange When You’re A Stranger

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On November 2, 2013

In Blog

In a community I spend a lot of time hanging out over on Facebook, someone posted the other day:

“So you people are cool and hip. right?? Why is Bitstrips a thing????”

For those of you who haven’t seen these, Bitstrips is an app that lets you create a cartoon avatar of yourself, and then caption various one-panel cartoons featuring you and your friends.  It’s basically a digital version of Colorforms 1 crossed with one of those mail order-storybooks you could get with your child’s name printed in them.

As memes go, this one is pretty innocuous2, and easy enough to flip past or even block if you’re not inclined to see them.  A couple of comments in the thread suggested they found them annoying, and one said the ones they had seen were a bit “creepy”, which may reflect their friends more than the app itself3. But one comment really threw me a bit.

I think some of the people that use them think they are funny and the rest are cartoonist wannabes thinking they are being creative and refusing to believe they are premade templates. I blocked them. I hope I am not sounding mean, that’s not my intention, I just think real cartoonists work hard enough as it is.

There’s an awful lot of odd assumptions being made in this comment, each of which is probably worth dissecting on its own, but the one I want to hone in on is the central animus behind it, which is:

There are people having fun in a manner I don’t understand!

This is a pretty common thing lately, and I hate it.  It’s an enormous world with an infinite variety of things to see and do, and not everything appeals to everyone, not least because not everything is FOR everyone.  There’s an element of sour grapes to the whole attitude:  “I don’t like this, and I don’t see why anyone else should have a good time.

A manifestation of this that happens several times a year around big pop culture events that I like to call “Clamouring Indifference.”  You’ll see it on your social media every time the Super Bowl happens, or the Oscars are handed out, or the finale of a show like Breaking Bad is aired.  Amidst all the people excitingly talking about the event, there will be a handful of people who will feel compelled to post about how they don’t care about the event, how terrifically bored by the event they are, and how they wish everyone would stop talking about it.

The truth is, though, that these people do care about the event.  They care deeply and passionately about it.  It’s very important for you to know how much they don’t like it.  It doesn’t take 500 words to say ‘I don’t care.”  I doesn’t even take three.   The real message being communicated is the same as the comment above:  “Hey, stop enjoying that thing I don’t enjoy.”

We live in an incredible age, where we can pick and choose whatever entertainment we want to consume, at any time, on demand.4  If you’re not interested in the college handegg tournament or the Tony Awards or American Idol, then go watch something else. or start up a different conversation in your space and see who comes to participate in it.   But don’t waste your time and everyone else’s by writing an essay about how  you don’t care about the thing everyone else is having a perfectly good time enjoying.

 

  1. They were these little boxed playsets that had a scene on them and little vinyl figures you could arrange on it. It was treated so that the vinyl figures would stick to the backboard, so you could arrange all sorts of little ersatz dioramas. I had a bunch of different ones, mostly comic-book related. ↩

  2. Who knows, maybe it’ll encourage someone to say “I’m really enjoying this, but the limitations of the form frustrate me” and they learn to draw and become the next great cartoonist. Or maybe they just use it to create a lot of corny jokes to amuse themselves and their friends. ↩

  3. And led me to wonder aloud whether they were suggesting that creepy stuff can’t be a “thing” ↩

  4. At least within certain levels of privilege, but I have a feeling the people who aren’t able to access on-demand entertainment are also not loudly professing their profound lack of interest in that entertainment on social media.  I could be wrong. ↩

It’ll Be Just Like Starting Over

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On November 1, 2013

In Blog

It’s November 1st, boys and girls!  And you know what that means!

You don’t know what that means?  Oh.  Well, bear with me.

Once upon a time, I wrote regularly in this space.  Some of it was personal life update rambling, and some of it was musing on this and that, and some of it was just random cool things that I found around the Internet.  when I look back on it, though, it gives me a insight into where I was in my head at the time.

Around late 2008 or so, I stopped writing so much.  There’s a variety of reasons why, but the primary one is that there were things going on that I didn’t want to talk about publicly, but that were taking up a large number of my mental cycles.  And then after going for a while, there was an odd inertia, where I couldn’t post about topic Z because before I write about that, I really should write about topics Y and X, and the next thing you know you’re backed up to topic A and the whole thing feels insurmountable.1

In fits and starts, I’ve tried to relaunch my online blog, most recently in May and June of this year, and I had a good roll until I got derailed by a few unexpected psychic bumps.  But inertia works both ways.  If you can get the momentum, you can sustain it.

November is traditionally NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), where people promise to produce a 50,000 words towards a novel by the end of the month.  It is also NaBloPoMo (National Blog Posting Month), where people pledge to produce at least one blog entry every day for the month of November.  So that is what I intend.

I aim to misbehave.2

I can’t promise every entry will be scintillating.  Perhaps they won’t even be as scintillating as this one.3  But I’m hoping that the inertia of doing this will get me back into the regular habit.

You can help!  I’m absurdly response driven, so if there something that catches your eye and you have something to say about it, please comment.  My posts are mirrored on LJ and Dreamwidth, and linked on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr.  Follow me wherever suits you.  If you want to comment where you see the post/link, do it there.  If you want to comment on the main blog, you should be able to authenticate with whatever service you like in order to leave a note.

In closing, I leave you with a video I return to again and again for inspiration.  Ze Frank sent this out to all his kickstarter backers just before he restarted his online video show.  It’s titled “An Invocation For Beginnings”, and it’s worth watching, no matter what project you’re about to undertake.

“There is no need to sharpen my pencils anymore.  My pencils are sharp enough. Even the dull ones will make a mark. Warts and all, let’s start this shit up.”
–Ze Frank

  1. Yes, you could just skip all that and start where you are, but that’s your brain, not mine. ↩

  2. And by “misbehave”, I mean “write a blog entry every day in November.  And also the other things.  Not because they are easy, but because they are hard. ↩

  3. A friend of mine on LJ has a tag that reads “don’t be interesting just post”. ↩

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