lil gave me the nudge... I better come clean. The short version of a long story is that I got the job offer. I'm in the middle of negotiating the exit from my current employer... and if all goes well, I will have an even better story to tell after Thanksgiving.
30 days living sober in sober living. lil Wrote my chapbook in non photo blue. Need to do it in pen and get it printed. Then do fuck if I know with it. I'm just kinda drifting around aimlessly. Forgetting all sorts of shit. Accomplishing minor goals and going to unimportant functions. ………yay………
—blergh—
BOOJIE ALERT Last tuesday night I had a tickle in my throat. Didn't feel good. Wednesday I took it easy and flew down to LA. Thursday I picked up Frau Grau, then put a $500 iPhone/Android-compatible stereo in. Friday we cheated north to Santa Barbara, then the coast to Pismo, then the 101 to San Fran, then the coast clear to Jenner before being forced to cut in clear to Guerneville in order to find somewhere to stay. The Porsche 996 is such a sublime little car that it will let you do LA at rush hour, then 400 miles of spirited twisty-turny driving, then San Fran at rush hour, then 400 miles of spirited twisty-turny driving before you collapse with a cold in Guerneville. Saturday we headed back to the coast and took it clear to Crescent City before cutting inland to the 5 at Grant's Pass, then blitzed up the 5 until we got home at 3:30am. The Porsche 996 is such a sublime little car it will let you do 500 miles of spirited twisty-turny driving, then 300 miles of freeway bombing before you collapse with a worse cold at home. I have no voice yet I must scream. I owe all of Stuttgart an apology for 30 years of badmouthing. That car is a revelation. There's no way in hell I would have spent $90k on it new but it is a true privilege to pay Prius prices for such an uncompromisingly minimalist little driving machine. And it has been driven so little that the two days I spent driving it up here is more mileage than it has accrued since 2009. I bought it with a pair of P-zero Asymmetricos on it with less than a hundred miles since new... in 2012. The oil was changed 3000 miles ago... in 2009. We ran into some fog and turned on the wipers in Norcal... for the first time in the vehicle's life. To no one's surprise the wipers were a lot like balsa wood. And the front tires are dry-rotted. Every time we stopped it smelled like I'd done a burn-out. They got us here without drama but in taking my buddy to the airport and back they were telegraphing "we're done" signals like the Benelli does when it's deciding whether to kill you or not. Fortunately Porsches won't fall over in a turn but the front is skippier than I'd like (which is a lot less skippy than a Dodge Stealth with good tires). The previous owner had a Lexus SUV with 300k miles on it. He drove the Porsche when he "needed to think." Apparently he didn't need to think a whole lot. He mentioned he was thinking of buying a Turbo S. I told him I was going to be sending him christmas cards every year because when he decides he's done with his Turbo S at 10k miles 15 years from now, I wanna be first in line. For the money, I could have bought a V6 Mustang Fastback. LOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOL
Yes. yes I do. That said, the friends who desperately wanted me to buy an AMG ("one of us, one of us, one of us") have a commercial shop with lifts up in Lynden and they are itching to demonstrate its mechanical inferiority through maintenance. I also purchased the vehicle in no small part because it has experienced over $17k in maintenance in the past 18 months, during which time it has driven less than 100 miles (not including the 900 miles the dealership put on the dyno so they could fill its ECM with history for emissions testing). Said dealership actually charged the guy an hour labor to put on the tires, then billed him per tire weight. I also accidentally downloaded the shop manual to my phone while looking to see if it was available on the Internet. Finally, I don't drive much. I really don't. For work I ride a bike and when I'm not working, I basically drive to pick up my daughter or run errands. The 1500 miles I put on it last week will likely not be exceeded again through 2019. The car basically exists because I can't pick up my kid on a motorcycle. I'm exactly the guy to take on the care and feeding of a 15-year-old Porsche.
I would make one practical argument and one impractical one: 1) They weigh a fuckton. Which means that yeah - you can make them go just as fast and handle just as well but you have to try twice as hard. A p/w ratio in a 6000lb car comparable to a 3000lb car requires twice as much power. That means twice as much engine. Horsing it around a corner requires twice as much tire. These are solved problems, obviously - there's many a Bentley with no difficulty and an f'n Maserati Granturismo tips the scales at an astonishing 4300lbs - but a CLS55 at 4300 lbs is simply 1.5x the car of a Porsche convertible at 3000. The AMG has the advantage of spiriting you and your three buddies around in total comfort but really - fuck my three buddies. I need room for a companion and a toddler. 2) While neither of my two friends are members of the Armenian mafia, their cars most assuredly are. Anyone who has spent any time in Los Angeles has formed an indelible association between AMG and Brand Blvd. in Glendale. Which is not AMG's fault, which is wholly irrational, but there it is.
Just got back from Gogol Bordello. It was a 2 1/2 hour show, plus the opener. We were on the outer cusp of wine-spitting-distance. The entire venue was. Cost us like $20. It was awesome. Pre Edit Edit: I'm starting to suspect the local venue has a deal where the doors open at 7pm, but the band can't start before 9pm. Gotta milk those bar sales. Edit: It's midnight. Who wants grilled cheese? Edit: Edit: I've got half of a 3d printer printed. Most of the outsourced parts are in the mail. Hitting some walls getting the right metric fasteners locally, though.
3D print a 3D scanner and you've got yourself a replicator.
Spotify really doesn't do them justice. It's kinda like what I've imagined Pfunk shows being like. George Clinton & co. have played here twice in the past five years and we've missed them both times because of family. If they swing through a third time, we won't be missing them.
Dude I had a hard time finding metric fasteners for the Benelli when I was in Los Angeles.
I'll probably end up going that route for some of this. :| I hate buying shit online. Especially when it gets shipped via my work. I've seen so many boxes of fasteners get destroyed during shipping. Hardly anyone packages them stout enough. As it is, I've already got an air shipment that's Late By Day because it sat for 20~ish hours in our flagship facility thanks to "operational conditions". My 1 meter aluminum extrusions are coming in a different shipment via fucking ground service, so I give it 50/50 odds that they're bent. On the other hand, I had one package come via amazon's private vehicle delivery drivers. Took less than six hours to reach me, shipping was free, the box was pristine, and the lady was stressed as fuck.
I am amused that wine-spitting-distance is a term that people use.
I am amused that wine-spitting-distance is a term that people use.
Super early Pubski. I did some spring (fall) cleaning around the site tonight. veen that draft bug is resolved. Devac that prev thing, much too belated. There are a couple of other small things I'd like to do. Halloween was a success, but cold. My daughter had a great time with her cousins. I'm actually not slated to travel for almost three weeks, but that could change tomorrow. I am reading Jane Eyre; it is good. lil this month's poem is Emerson's Rhodora.
It's one of the shitty things about working brunch. Church folk come in with largish parties, same group every week. They leave pamphlets and no or a meager tip. They end up getting a reputation and bad service. Not all of them leave bad tips but lots of wait staff are biggoted assholes who play the average. A new party shows up in their Church best on a Sunday and get written off as bad tippers, receive bad service and leave a bad tip and a pamphlet because their eternal soul is in peril and they were terrible waiters. Both sides end up thinking less if the other. Parents with young kids and black or brown people often get the same treatment. I've heard some horrible shit, "I don't want to wait on those nigs." Tell my shitty coworker to give me the table and no I'm not giving them my next table in return. Treat people decent and usually pull at at least a 15% top in return, often more when they receive shockingly decent service.
Rhodora: nice choice. That would be lovely to recite should one come across a flower in the woods. I'm still working on becoming more acquainted with the night (Robert Frost), but this Rhodora seems also memorizable. I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods, Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook, To please the desert and the sluggish brook. The purple petals, fallen in the pool, Made the black water with their beauty gay; Here might the red-bird come his plumes to cool, And court the flower that cheapens his array. Rhodora! if the sages ask thee why This charm is wasted on the earth and sky, Tell them, dear, that if eyes were made for seeing, Then Beauty is its own excuse for being: Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose! I never thought to ask, I never knew: But, in my simple ignorance, suppose The self-same Power that brought me there brought you. In May, when sea-winds pierced our solitudes,
"And better?" "And better - so much better as pure ore is than foul dross. You seem to doubt me; I don't doubt myself: I know what my aim is, what my motives are; and at this moment I pass a law, unalterable as that of the Medes and Persians, that both are right." "They cannot be, sir, if they require a new statute to legalise them." "They are, Miss Eyre, though they absolutely require a new statute: unheard-of combinations of circumstances demand unheard-of rules." "That sounds a dangerous maxim, sir; because one can see at once that it is liable to abuse." "Sententious sage! so it is: but I swear by my household gods not to abuse it." "You are human and fallible." "I am: so are you - what then?" "The human and fallible should not arrogate a power with which the divine and perfect alone can be safely intrusted." "What power?" "That of saying of any strange, unsanctioned line of action, - 'Let it be right.'" "'Let it be right' - the very words: you have pronounced them.""I am laying down good intentions, which I believe durable as flint. Certainly, my associates and pursuits shall be other than they have been."
I'm trying to excise "Man, I'm so [BUSY or TIRED]" from my vocabulary. It's a weak hello. Some Cool Updates I'm on the gymnastics club at my school. I'm 26 on a team with a median age of 19. My nickname is grandpa. We have our first meet this Saturday and I'm going to perform the high bar and floor events. I haven't done gymnastics in 15 years but I've spent the last two months practicing and it's a little bit like riding a bike. I've more or less caught up to the technical difficulty that I was last capable of, sans the flexibility. I had my first round interview with Morgan Stanley's compliance division yesterday. I think I rather nailed it, but I have no idea how many people wound up applying. I should find out in the next day or two if I made the last round. Egads! My writing skills are getting a lot of practice as a result of one particularly particular grader. He's an economics professor that I adore--his enthusiasm is so infectious--but he's an enormous stickler for precision and clarity in writing. He assigns weekly two-page papers that I spend more time on than almost any other homework. But I've come to appreciate the class more than any other. He started the semester off with this passage from Dierdre McCloskey, an economist who also wrote a usage guide for writers called Economical Writing: AmenThe one genuine rule, a golden one, is Be Clear. In the first century after Christ a Roman professor of writing and speaking put it this way (Quintilian, Book VIII, ii, 24): "Therefore one ought to take care to write not merely so that the reader can understand but so that he cannot possibly misunderstand." Clarity is a social matter, not something to be decided unilaterally by the writer. The reader like the consumer is sovereign. If the reader thinks something you write is unclear then it is, by definition. Quit arguing. Karl Popper, a philosopher with a good style and a correspondingly wide influence, wrote:
I... learned never to defend anything I had written against the accusation that it is not clear enough. If a conscientious reader finds a passage unclear, it has to be rewritten .... I write, as it were, with somebody constantly looking over my shoulder and constantly pointing out to me passages that are not clear. (1976, p.83).
Oh man. Clarity in writing is a lost art. (Or the practitioners of it are being replaced by blogger-quality writers.) If they give you an open assignment some day, write five different interpretations of the 2nd Amendment that are clear, unambiguous, and each take a different stance. They really fucked that one up.
Stein on Writing. Fiction, non-fiction, don't matter. The guy was the senior editor at Voice of America and then ran his own imprint for 25 years. In between he helped take down McCarthy, apprenticed to Thornton Wilder, helped found The Actor's Studio and edited James Baldwin, Elia Kazan and Lionel Trilling.
It’s this little book. And I would read kb’s suggestion. I actually find the usage manual or style guide genre to be eminently readable and thought-provoking, so I can’t get enough of them.
Things are moving fast.. Turns out it's a lot of work to move halfway across the world. Who would've thought? I had my stem cells pulled by forever labs yesterday. None other then thenewgreen himself appeared before the procedure! Unsurprisingly he's an astoundingly awesome guy. I don't think I've ever seen anyone so enthusiastic at 645 in the morning(especially after I mentioned finding FL through hubski). We very briefly talked about FL, hubski, and ethereum. I don't think the conversation could have been any more hubski. In other news I finished up my skydiving A license. Are there any skydivers around this site? I may start trying to convince people. Seriously, it's amazing.
Thank you for the kind words! You have no idea how amazing it was to have my two loves, Hubski and Forever Labs collide like this. It made a 6:45am appointment the most exciting procedure I have been at. It was a pleasure to meet you. It's always cool to meet Hubskiers. I have yet to meet one I didn't like. With the exception of mk. Welcome to the future of science and medicine! Save travels and congratulations on getting out of that hole of a town you were living in :)
Been a few weeks, get ready for a lot of words. But first: My partner is using she/her pronouns again, a fact which could not be more insignificant to basically anyone on here. I only mention it so that there's less confusion if I say "my girlfriend" - still the same person I've been dating for 6-ish years (give or take a few months), just using female pronouns again. Anyway. I've been doing an insane amount of knitting recently. I bought a small garbage bag full of yarn from a Goodwill recently, and have been working my way through it. I've also been doing a little bit of bookbindin, which I haven't done since college. I've decided that it's just not possible to sew in my tiny apartment with my neurotic dog around, so i'm keeping busy making other things. ---------- I'm moving back east again in June. Portland is great, and I may very well end up in Oregon again later on, but there's a lot I need to deal with on the other coast. I'm staying here through the end of the school year, then going home. I'm going to try and fix the Shakespeare program my parents run, save some money, and move to VT or Maine with my partner, puppy, and a roommate from college. We're hoping to move to a suburb of a smaller city and rent an actual house. I need more than 500 sq. ft right now. I'm gonna try really hard not to move again for a few years after this. We'll see.
Sure! I grew up right next to a Shakesperean theater in CT. It's massive, I think it housed about 2000 or so audience members in its prime. Its shows starred Katherine Hepburn, Kelsey Grammer, Christopher Walken, and a whole bunch of other folks throughout its many years of theater. As a side note, the house my family lives in now used to be an inn that the actors at the theater would stay at during their residency. Probably some interesting ghosts futzing about. The theater shut down for good the week after my family moved next door to it. It's been closed ever since. There's always been a big community push to try and have it re-opened, or at least to have theater done on its premises. My brother's big passion in life was acting, and my parents (and some real rich friends) made a memorial non-profit theater academy in his honor a few years ago, and have been doing theater every summer on the grounds [EDIT FOR CLARITY: the literal grounds. as in the grass outside] of the theater. This summer will be the 5th year it's been around. The gist of it is that 14 or so college-aged actors live in our house for 6 weeks, go through an intensive series of classes on theater-making and put up 2 shakespeare shows in repertory at the end of the program. Other buzz-words include "site-specific" (meaning we usually put up shows in the woods) and "ensemble-based". Basically, the goal is, by the end of the program, to teach students how to go out and make theater on their own, from acting and directing to booking spaces and getting publicity. As you can imagine, putting 14 college-aged students into one house for 6 weeks can lead to some problems. My job, for the first three summers, was to take care of those problems. I was the cook, cleaner, therapist, bike-fixer, and general handyman for the company. Additionally, I was asked to write, perform, and record music for the shows (which I actually had a lot of fun with), and helped construct the stages and do whatever general work needed doing. Last year was the first summer I wasn't around to help. It was a slight disaster. The shows went up, but the students were constantly fighting and discontent, and spent almost every night getting completely trashed. We rely pretty heavily on previous students' word of mouth to get prospective new students interested, but I suspect that may not work so well this year. I'm coming back this summer in part to make sure things get back on track, and also to figure out what exactly my job was, and how to hire another person to do it permanently. I'd be happy to PM you a link to the program's site if you're interested!
my kid got himself an inexpensive 3D printer. He just about broke it on the first night. We've since gotten it roughly dialed in, and he's printing like a madman. It's really fun to work on it with him. I'll post some pics at some point. Happy Wednesday Ya'll
If he runs out of stuff to do, print me a couple of these. #11 blade holders that actually protect the blade apparently don't exist. I literally almost bought a $800 3D printer to print some of these up. Tell him he gets a ride in a Porsche.
SEE HOW TRICKY THEY ARE? read the comments: X-Acto came out with this knife so that they could sell you proprietary blades. The #11s that you buy $5 for 100 don't fit in the damn things. They never do.1) It is important to note that I get the blades that I can order from my suppliers, granted they are never X-acto brand but... MANY manufactures of no.11 blades don't fit in the holder. There is a small part of the blade that goes outside of the width of the "tang" of the blade (part that goes in the holder.) The opening on the knife is ONLY the width of the tang, so any bigger and you cant close it without forcing it, which damages it.
if you're serious about wanting/needing these, I'll get started on it. I'll need to verify the sizes to make sure his printer is big enough to handle the pieces (I think it can do 120mm x120mm x120mm). It would also have to come in bright green or glow in the dark at the moment, because those are the only colors of PLA we've got. The ABS is proving a bit tricky (which we have in black or orange). EDIT: and no ride in a Porsche required...
I'll keep you posted. I just stepped over to the home machine and checked the sizes - they should fit TOTALLY fine. Right now you're in line behind some D&D miniatures that he's pretty excited about (they're printing now while he's at school) and a few replacement parts that previous owners have recommending printing (kind of a cool concept to print parts before they break). Anyway - I'll give it a shot tonight. If it works well, I'll print up a few for you and for Dala!
I accepted a 3 month internship in Montreal, Canada, for a group of livestreaming professional chess players called the Chessbrahs. I've watched these guys for a year and a half and it's mesmerizing that I get to meet them in person, nevertheless bunk with them. I get room, food, and enough time to work on my freelance stuff, and it seems really good for the workload I'll be doing for them. I'm imagining it like a social vacation in Canada that I'm pretty much only able to do right now. Life is bizarre, I hope I'm not being overly cavalier. Leaving November 14th. ===== I did an innovation sprint spanning the length of October, and I thought I was shitty, overly critical and avoidant, but I ended up winning two leadership awards and now I feel, even shittier? Especially because I didn't follow through on my teams fucking powerpoint presentation, my team just scrapped by with a previous draft that someone else made. I'm good at bullshitting, but I can't bullshit myself. One of the awards bought me a ticket to a weekend startup innovation sprint that's happening the weekend before I leave, so I'm getting further suckered into the Alaskan yCombinator world. The best thing I learned from the innovation sprint is that I'm really realizing is that it's nearly impossible for me to work by myself now. I have to deal with some self-imposed existential crisis before I can even answer emails at the beginning of the day. I let the procrastination monkey get too good at handling deadline stress, and I'm starting to feel nothing when deadlines pass over me. I'm hoping that my internship will help me out of this learned helplessness funk.
Eyy! Uh, I'm staying at their apartment, but I should find out what part of the city.
I'll message you afterwards! Apparently I'm staying in the plateau area, close to McGill. I'm so excited
The Plateau has been overrun by French immigrants because while it’s one of the most expensive neighborhoods, the rent price is super cheap compared to Europe. On the plus side, there will probably be a nice bakery not far from your p’ace. It’s a fun neighborhood, one of my favorites (but that’s my inner hispster taking). Shoot me a message when you’re here!
The Wooded Kingdom music is so good, I was looping it all day yesterday.
I am extremely hungover (or rather was around 6 AM but now mending satisfactorily) and now 28. I can't think of any sage advice to hand out, but maybe if you guys have any specific pressing questions I can take a whack at it. Also, now sporting an extremely skinned knee. Wanna see? Remembering now how last night I saw a girl I sort of know and told her I thought she was really cool and I thought I annoyed her last time I saw her but I hoped not because I thought she was a neat person. And so on. She told me that was definitely not the case, and we did two back-to-back shots. woof
Yeah, I sat down and graded all my recent years like a month ago, I admit it. I gave 25 a C. It wasn't bad but it did tend to go downhill. There were a lot of changes that proved more stressful than positive. I think I started out 25 pretty optimistic but by the end of the year felt kind of caught. Since I just turned 28, I don't know. I gave 27 an A and I stand by it. It was a year of personal challenge and growth. I've done very well at work this year. I'm very positive about 28, considering this foundation and all. There's a lot of promise and I feel well poised to make the most of it. I guess I'm finally maybe embracing being a grown up.
Thought Experiment: I wonder if I can figure out what 25 was for me... Checked LinkedIn. Apparently I was working as a Multimedia Designer at NASA's Ames Research Center in California. Therefore I was still married. Living in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco. Probably riding either a BMW R90/6 or Yamaha XS1100 to work down highway 280 every day. I had long hair. I generally brought my lunch to work and ate it in this hangar, which was empty at the time. What else? Shaggy was singing Oh Carolina and Cypress Hill were Insane In The Brain, Radiohead were Creeps, and Nirvana was singing about their Heart Shaped Box. Big year for movies.... Jurassic Park, Sleepless in Seattle, Groundhog Day, Ms. Doubtfire, Cool Runnings, Robin Hood - Men in Tights, and Dazed and Confused, to name a few... Hm. Other than that, I don't remember a lot about 25 years ago.
It's so weird how memory distorts time and erases all the boring parts. I clearly remember my time abroad in Canada feeling like an incredibly long time, while simultaneously having forgotten most of the parts that made it long. And that was only three years ago. Now that I think of it, I'm pretty sure I kept a simple diary for a few months in Evernote back in 2012. I wonder if I can dig that up... edit: I found it, and I kept it up for almost two years! Glad I did, lots of small memories that I vaguely remember.
I just wanted to say that I still have your "When Did You Begin To Become A Real Person?" thread stickied from the first day I joined pubski. It's been super helpful for me to read pretty often.
I...actually wasn't expecting that kind of response. From your more recent Pubski-isms, it does seems like you've been doing really well for yourself! It's been good to read those kind of things.
I rarely lose whole memories while drinking. Whether that means I don't drink quite enough to get there, or if it's a gift, I don't know. But I like the ability. I was walking my (even-more) drunk friend back to her house where we had started the evening. She was not walking very well. I had an arm around her. It was a clumsy affair. Right after we crossed a street I could kind of see her start to go down. If you've ever had a slow fall where you have the time to think "Oh, shit, I'm falling" but just don't manage to catch yourself or do anything to prevent it - it was like that except I saw it start with her, and then she went down, and I went down with her. She does not remember this but she only has bumps and bruises. I'm pretty sure she managed to fall on her side or butt; she twisted in front of me. This was about 10:30; we'd started early. And the shots. shudders It wasn't too bad, being drunk helps with that. It hurt but I walked quite a bit after any.way. When we fell some people on the balcony of the bar across the street made fun of us, so I flicked them off and told them to eat it. They didn't say anything back. D:
Driving through San Francisco at rush hour. Needed to change lanes. Guy in a VW very aggressively wouldn't let me do it. Fun fact about driving a 911: an astonishing percentage of the traffic you interact with hates you on sight. I thought it was just me. So okay, get behind him, things are fine. Proceed to watch him cut off two people in a hundred yards changing lanes. he still ends up behind us. Proceed to watch him cut off two more people in another 200 yards. Pulls up next to me, tries to cut in. Can't. We make it to a light. He and his buddy are staring at me, very proud of themselves in their volkswagen. "Excuse me," I say. "Does your mom know what a bad driver you are?" Fucker blanches like an almond in boiling water. "Uh, what?" "Does your mom. Know what a bad driver you are." "Uhh.., what do you mean?" "I'll let her know next time I see her." Proceed to leave the light at exactly the speed limit. Watch him nearly rear-end a garbage truck. THAT is 25: vulnerability to "your mom" insults.When we fell some people on the balcony of the bar across the street made fun of us, so I flicked them off and told them to eat it. They didn't say anything back. D:
I started my training for the Marathon, it feels good to run ! I don't really know if I'm capable to target a sub-4-hour Marathon as I've never really run anything that long. But here are the times I made: 10.19 kms (6.33 miles) in 59 mins 20.04 kms (12.45 miles) in 1h57 mins I will have to learn more about colories intake and when should I drink during the race.
How was the 20 km run calorie-wise? Did you feel like you were out of energy toward the end or pretty good?
I felt pretty good, I needed to drink some more water but I would have been able to continue. I didn't eat anything during the 20 kms, but I think the lack of calories intake might be a problem in a longer race. Today I tried a shorter distance but tried to go faster, I did 5 kms in 24 mins & 21 secs (My target was below 25 mins so I'm happy with it!)
God damn, Pubski. It's not even Wednesday for those of us on the West Coast. I feel filled with resentment these past couple of days. It could be this nasty cold/flu bullshit that's kept me out of just about everything this past week, or whatever week throat/gland issues are going on and having a lot of anxiety about getting imaging done to check it out, but I'm kind of angry. Resentful. I don't really enjoy music much anymore. Used to a lot. But there are a lot of things I've done and said that have taken the enjoyment away from me. A lot of things others have done and said that have assisted with taking that away from me. Living in a place where the scene is actually really lame and self-indulgent, and not wanting to go to Seattle every other week to catch a show, makes it hard to give a shit. And I miss giving a shit, just a little bit. Just enough to think about it too much. Feeling resentful expands past just this, I think, but that's the only part of it I really feel like sharing. Reclaiming Conversation is also making me freak-the-fuck-out about the way we interact with each other and hoooooooly shit does it make me even more aggravated at the way people try and make plans with each other. I'm getting better with calling people, trying to see them face-to-face. But it's a constant, uphill, sisyphean struggle when nobody else gives a shit about the way they interact with another human being.
I just summoned Reclaiming Conversation from library. Sounds like it should be required reading for everyone. Ironically I'm writing this in an online forum. But, Lil, it's Hubski- the haunted house of all your hopeful homies. I have to leave and go to another city and look people in the eye. But I'll check back into the pub later. I hope you kill that cold.
Yes, and you love bfx and hate to see him sinking into negativity. Yes, I know, but bfx is full of resentment and congestion today, and isn't finding joy in music.
Turkle doesn't have a whole lot of truck with places like Hubski. Life on the Screen, the 2nd in the trilogy, is all about identity play and how important it is to discovering self. Her primary beef is with the short-term, context-free missives one gets from places like Facebook, MySpace etc. Lil - you have the patience and the insight to enjoy the books in their publication order. The Second Self was written in '84 and revised in 2013. It largely deals with "huh. Computers are something new on this earth and we react to them differently." Life on the Screen is basically "we have created a new way to interact with each other and it is not like the way we have always interacted." Alone Together is basically "this new technology we created is a poor substitute for what we used to have but because of how it's designed, we use it as if it's just as good" while Reclaiming Conversation is basically "so the end is here, there's nothing we can do about it, except there sort of is, try this." EDIT: It occurs to me that you teach comp sci people to communicate for a living, meaning Turkle is someone you should be able to quote to me, not the other way 'round. She's basically made a career at MIT studying the basis for your career. She was one of the people behind Kismet, for example:
It occurs to me that you teach comp sci people to communicate for a living, meaning Turkle is someone you should be able to quote to me, not the other way 'round.
While perhaps I should be able to quote Turkle to you, I'm glad that, for now, it's the other way around. Thank you for the summary. I'm NYT Book Review familiar with the books, but haven't read them. I imagine there's a TED talk somewhere I should watch.
Thanks for your comment, lil. I think you'll enjoy that book quite a bit, Hubski avoids a lot of the issues brought up in it. Feeling a bit better spiritually and physically today. Funny that I make that initial comment and then get invited to a concert that's this weekend.
So I've decided to participate in National Solo Album Month, (or NaSoAlMo, one of the worst acronyms ever). For real this time. Whatever I get I'm gonna publish on youtube at the least. I grabbed a solo moniker for this specifically (so I don't have to be stuck with it if the end product sucks). So all progress and bits go up on the Elk Bird Stone soundcloud page. I actually started working on bits last night (totally cheating) and there's some stuff up there now. Also went camping with the lady. Along the way there was a pit stop where all the fancy cars and motorcycles going up the 2 take a rest. There were Porsches, Skylines, Ducatis and all sorts of cool stuff. I was most intrigued by the mint Saab Sonett III though:
I, too, am often intrigued by Saab Sonetts. My father has one. he bought it off a friend of mine when I was in high school. There are a few things you should consider about Saab Sonetts. 1) They have all the chassis rigidity you would expect from a fiberglass car. 2) Due to the mechanical nature of the headlight retractor, people over 5'10 have a choice between "seeing at night" and "shifting at night." The lever pulls out far enough that it captures your left knee after dark, making it difficult to actuate the clutch. 3) It's powered by a Taunus V4. Worse, it's powered by V1.0 Taunus V4, which were leftover engines from the failed Ford Cardinal project, which were sold to Saab when Ford Industrial decided they would make shitty tractor engines. 4) I mean, it's powered by a failed tractor engine. It's also a 60 degree V4, which any fan of engines will tell you is going to require one mammer-jammer of a counterbalance shaft to keep the fucker from rattling itself apart. You may notice in this example that the counterbalance shaft gear has no teeth on it. This is due to the fact that Ford, in their infinite wisdom, determined that a tractor engine was not likely to experience many abrupt throttle changes and that the best isolation would be provided by making the counterbalance shaft gear out of phenolic. 5) Which, okay, on a tractor it probably doesn't. On a 1700lb 2-seater sports car? I personally have stripped the teeth off that gear with one spirited stoplight launch. It feels a lot like all of a sudden you're driving an unbalanced V4. Because you are. 6) We acquired the Sonett when we already had 2 96s with 5 spare engines because you nuke that gear so often that it's easier to pull an engine, put a freshy in, tear down the old engine and get it ready for the next time you cook off that gear. Which is so hard to come by it's easier to buy four or five dead Saabs at a time. 7) except getting the mill out of a Sonett means pulling the entire front clip, which takes the better part of the morning. At least with a 96 the hood comes off in 10 minutes. We could get the engines out of a 96 and back in again in a couple hours. Sonett? That was a weekend, minimum, and if you stopped to watch Star Trek and drink a beer you were finishing in the dark. 8) and if you start considering engine swaps, remember that your only real choice is Subaru, which is too wide for the engine bay, but you can get away with a Mazda 13B, but now you need a new transmission because that ridiculous little 4-on-the-column freewheeler they stole from the 96 is going to nuke at the first application of horsepower so now you're looking at a Subaru transmission and a Mazda rotary and with the amount of effort you're putting forth you could just, you know, buy something that doesn't suck. Go with god.
I wish I knew some of those details when I saw that thing; I would have asked more about it. The owner (first and only) was there: She's the old lady checking out the engine. I seem to recall her saying it was all OG, but I wonder about that counterbalance shaft gear now. I saw her launch it from the lot. There seemed to be some pretty respectable pep in that car. Going downhill at least.
We kept meaning to get some c-shaft gears cut out of 4130, fully knowing they'd be buzzy, heinous, loud little things. I'm pretty sure we looked at sneaking a Capri V6 into it as well, but we would have had to completely revise the radiator mounts. I think my dad lost all interest in doing anything with the car about the time he bought a Saturn SL2, which says a lot about the driving experience. Nonetheless, I know where a traffic cone orange one is, that doesn't work at the moment. I have no idea if my dad would be willing to part with the stupid thing, though.
Birds A friend made halloween costumes for our birds. The birds hated them but they were patient with us for a little while at least. My wife started a tumblr for our chickens: https://chick-it-out.tumblr.com/ Life Research progresses inexorably. I've given 4 variations of the "what is research/grad school" talk/conversation in the last week, which is always fun, although it's sometimes tricky to be honest without sounding too negative. Online dating is kinda weird. This is a good town if you're into single moms...
#Ventski, activate. one month ago: "Hey veen, do you remember that Esri GIS prize you won two years ago? We're getting a bunch of the winners together to talk about their experiences. Free lunch included, Nov. 6th. Can you come? Our great leader Kim Jack-Un might be there too!" Me: Sure, why not! I'll put it in my calendar. a month of silence later: "Heyy, so we haven't received your slides and the deadline was last Friday. The programme is that every winner will do a presentation for Jack. Can you send your presentation ASAP?" Me, being polite: I don't know anything about a presentation! And sorry, I'm super duper busy with my thesis so no I don't have time to make something that wouldn't be embarrassingly bad. "But all the other winners will present and show Jack how great their experience was! And you won't have to and a good question for Jack!" Me, realizing this is not about me nor in any way beneficial to me: I said I don't have time. You guys didn't communicate, so this isn't my problem, and frankly if that presentation is my only useful contribution I have better things to do. "I get what you're saying but I still want you to make a presentation like the others because I don't respect or value your time at all and we want to have everyone present to Jack." What I wanted to say was go die in a self-congratulatory fire, but I decided that they don't deserve a good comeback so I broke off contact. In other news, I've been writing and writing and writing and I'm on track to the deadline but it's gonna be a long two weeks. But I'm really starting to like what I'm making so that's good.
Guten morgen meine kinder! Watched The Shining last night out in the yard of the pub on a huge projector. Good craic with a few pints and a bit of chat. Currently my lungs feel like they're ensconced in iron, and I'm hacking up stuff. I think it's time to quit smoking...
I should probably call you "Devac, The Vacuum" because you're really good at knocking the wind out of opponents. White's position looked so constrained and uncomfortable, and stayed that way as that game went on. Also, what is their move 27? Why not just resign at that point?
The first get-together for my punk band project is tomorrow evening, and I am pretty much over-the-moon excited about it. I like the people who responded to my call for musicians. They are friends who are interesting people with cool perspectives. Men and women. White and not. So I put out the call for people to play punk, and the people who responded were all NOT cis-white-middle-aged-men! Talk about a promising beginning! Also got a friend who is gonna be John Perry-Barlow to my Jerry Garcia... he has ideas for lyrics, song concepts, etc, that harmonize with mine, and we have been riffing off each other's ideas for about two weeks now. Got a long thread of partial song lyrics, topics we want to write about (meaningful shit, too), and the new Telecaster just has all kinds of amazing punk riffs pouring out of it! Good times. I hope.
First gotta get some humans in the room together, strap on some noisemakers, and see what kinds of noise we make. If my past 30+ years of playing in bands is any indication to go on, I expect we will have stuff to share pretty quickly, if we click at all as a band. Tonight it's gonna be just me and one other person, but she plays guitar, bass, and drums - in that order - and I play guitar and bass. She and I have produced rave-like events together in the past, so I expect we will vibe pretty well together, and something will come out of this evening. Looking forward to next week, when two others are interested in participating, as well. If we can get a 3-piece together, I think we can start writing original material pretty quickly.
Finished the first race in a long time on Sunday and placed in the top 1/3 of my age group for a short 2-mile run. Woot! Both then and today I haven't gotten a wink of sleep, but on the whole been hella productive before crashing. Lawd bless the good professors out there. On a shuttle ride back from office hours. Planning to pass the fuck out before class in hopes for the information I got to sink into more permanent memory. Very late response, yet relevant here, _refugee_ the problem I have with completely flipping my sleep cycle for class/work is how much more limit I am when it comes to daily tasks when it comes to business hours of study spots, groceries, etc. May have missed the mark in understanding your question at this rate, but hope it was close. Pretty sure the syntax is off on that last sentence... 🤔 Anywho, part of my road to healing out of isolation is reaching out to others, and making some plans for connecting with some people I enjoy being around throughout the weekend - starting early with tomorrow and Friday. So long as my internal clock knows exactly what day it is, we should be in for a more soothing weekend than a month ago this time. Here's to progress. Seeing the pub open early this morning was neat alongside the early birds and the stories I'm catching up on.
Currently moving into the the new apartment. It's in my dad's apartment building, and it has a LOT of space (more than we need really) so I think we'll be here for a while. It's just this mental struggle of ranking every little thing between - i'll splurge and buy the good thing new, i'll get the shit version and keep looking at thrift stores for the good thing or i'll live with the shit version until it breaks. For fuking everything from the tablewear to coffee tables to storage bins to younameit. Ideally, I'd buy some 2 000$ art on the walls, fancy shmancy faucets and showerheads, that 200$ lamp fixture etc. But then, i've lived in a crappy bright green studio on a futon and without a table for 5 months in Poland and it was fine. I had more money to spend on booze. Furniture found in the trash is fine by me. I'm just a bit exhausted by constantly having to care about the quality of my curtain rods... My dad gave me the green light to change to front door to something that doesn't let the draft through. Turns out it's a lot more complicated than calling up 3 companies and asking them how much to install your cheapest standard size front door. And to be honest, I don't understand why it is.
Procrastination I finally got all of the necessary paperwork I need to start applying for certain jobs (long story short, keep copies of anything you sign like non-compete agreements and such, because trying to get your hands on things later on down the road is a nightmare) and I have a thing to add to my resume. I was gonna do it yesterday, but I put it off. I was gonna do it this morning, but I put it off. I'm definitely gonna do it tomorrow, because at this point I honestly hate myself for working where I work. I need to kick my ass into gear. I want out. Jean Jackets Getting winter stuff ready, my jean jacket somehow ended up missing. The other week, Dala and I found a really nice one at Target for about $40, but unfortunately we had to return it because the first time I tried it on, I discovered it was missing a button. They didn't have another my size, so exchanging was out of the question, and between then and today Dala found my old one which happens to be a Levi brand and it's kind of cheap and thin and it still holds up but I want a thicker one. Anyone know of any good denim jackets for less than $100? Sub $50 would be even better. Nothing fancy, like lining or anything, just a simple, quality jacket that'll hold up well. flac? arguewithatree? _refugee_? goobster? Users Coming and Going mk predicts we have a chance of having an influx of Redditors in the near future. It's exciting to think about the prospect, who they'll be, what their interests are, what kind of conversations they'll bring, how they'll fit in, etc. New faces are always awesome. In the past month, Hubski seemed to have lost two users who I really enjoyed having around. Neither one of them made any parting statements, I just noticed one day they were here and the next, not, so I'm not gonna name them because I think if they wanted to say "goodbye" they would have. Still, it sucks to see them go, because both of them always had interesting and exciting things to say and they were genuinely neat people. Windows 3.1 Sometimes I wax nostalgic for Windows 3.1 for no reason at all, other than the fact that it was literally the best iteration of Windows ever and anyone who says otherwise either A) knows they're wrong and won't admit it or B) don't have a clear grasp of the facts at hand.
Wait, why are we expecting an influx of Reddit users?
I don't have a fetish, but I do co-ordinate and wish I had more jackets than I do. Mental check off, I have 2 leather jackets (one burnt to a crisp cause irresponsible room mates are irresponsible), one jean jacket, 2 faux wool lined canvas jackets, a faux wool lined hoodie/jacket combo. a sports jacket, and then two hoodies that I wear in combination with my 2 faux wool lined canvas jackets on really cold days. ALL BOUGHT ON CLEARANCE because fuck paying full price for winter clothes when you know you can wait until spring and then cash in. Sometimes, on a day where I have nothing going on, I'll google random jackets to see what I like. My problem? I'm a boring dresser. Mostly earth tones, mostly flannel shirts and jeans. The jackets that I look at and think "neat!" are often way not my style and often, definitely out of my price range. I like Carhartt stuff though. I'm gonna check them out. Thanks for the advice! Edit: Kind of liking their Berwick jacket.I have a jacket fetish. I own far more than I will ever use.
Naming children is hard. I've never had trouble naming cats, but I've never had to do that with a partner. I commend all you parents out there with being able to reach consensus. I still have a couple months, but so far it's been a struggle. Perhaps, like term papers in college, the thing will just come together once time constraints dictate that the thing get done now. We'll see.
That's kind of a fun idea. If there are enough people almost every name can be disqualified from someone's childhood memory. Right now, we're leaning toward Fox, which I think is sick. My wife isn't an X-Files fan, so that name doesn't mean anything to her, fortunately. I had McGeorge picked out from long ago, but it took her about half a second to veto that. Anyway, now that Ken Burns' Vietnam is all over the place, it kind of lost its appeal to me at this place and time. The funny thing is how similar our aesthetic is in almost all things design, and how vastly different it is with respect to names.