Category: Obsessions

The warning “does not relate to an imminent or specific threat.”

July 6, 2011 /

I lied about Eminem being my spirit animal. Cleo is my spirit animal.

June 6, 2011 /

My favorite comic strips always go away! I am very sad about Bobwhite ending; it will leave a sore and empty socket in the jawbox of my daily comics list. For years it has been the funniest, smartest, most personal two minutes of my morning, and it was a privilege to read.

Unlike the bad old days, though, now when comic creators stop doing one strip they start another! I don’t know if Magnolia’s new Monster Pulse will ever replace Bobwhite in my heart, but I will pretty much follow her work anywhere at this point. The same goes for Kris Straub, of course, and F Chords has suddenly sprinted up to become my favorite outlet of his, with a distinctly more personal tone that echoes a little of what he used to do in Checkerboard Nightmare. So fucking go there already, I’m tired of telling you dicks.

And re-read Bobwhite!

Been meaning to write this for three months

June 3, 2011 /

A while back Stephen was telling me about those Patrick Rothfuss books for which all nerds have hard dicks. “What’s the best part?” I asked.

“This guy Kvothe gets up on stage and plays his lute, and it’s really moving,” said Stephen. “But not gay, because he has magic powers that make every woman want to bone him.”

“Uh huh,” I said.

“Fine,” he said, “what are YOU reading about?”

“Gun-toting bug-eating Muslim lesbians in space,” I said.

Okay, that isn’t strictly accurate. The primary protagonist is agnostic and the secondary one is a dude. But there are lots of guns, lots of bugs, lots of brutality (eg women throwing punches), lots of Koran-analogs, and lots of great characters who aren’t white even on the cover. It is not gentle in introducing its weird setting, and is very mean to everyone you like, and there is torture in it! So avoid it if that’s going to bother you. But while everyone’s sputtering over how many darlings die in George R. R. Martin, I’m going to be over here trying to wave you toward God’s War, easily my favorite book this year.

Here’s some data!

May 26, 2011 /

It’s a list of all the songs I’ve listened to at fifty or more times on my computer or an iDevice, since I started keeping track a little over four years ago:

  • “David,” The Radio Dept.
  • “The Police And The Private,” Metric
  • “Too Young,” Phoenix
  • “Good Morning, Hypocrite,” Electric President
  • “Daylight Savings Time,” Josh Rouse
  • “Dance Anthem of the 80’s,” Regina Spektor
  • “Adventures In Solitude,” The New Pornographers
  • “Lisztomania,” Phoenix
  • “Citrus,” The Hold Steady
  • “If I Ever Feel Better,” Phoenix
  • “Like She’ll Always Be,” Jimmy Eat World
  • “Hold On, Hold On,” Neko Case
  • “This Tornado Loves You,” Neko Case
  • “La Costa Brava,” Ted Leo and the Pharmacists
  • “Powerstripe,” Tigercity
  • “My Love Has Gone,” Josh Rouse
  • “Alone in Kyoto ,” Air
  • “You Stopped Making Sense,” The Radio Dept.
  • “Cars And History,” Strays Don’t Sleep
  • “Summer,” General Fuzz
  • “June,” RJD2 ft. Copywrite

A lot of these actually date back to 2007, when my music collection was constrained by hard drive size and I did a lot more walking around with my iPod. On the whole, though, it’s a pretty accurate list of every song that has obsessed me in recent memory, for better or worse. (It doesn’t include soundtrack songs, which I often loop without really hearing when I’m working or writing.)

I find it interesting that there’s a pretty standard distribution evident in the playcounts: the top three songs have been played as many times as the next six put together, etc. If you want to get a sense of how easily I succumb to certain musical tricks, I made a Grooveshark playlist called The Fifty Club.

“Nobody expects to be punched in the face by a man’s beard.”

May 22, 2011 /

This is linked on his guest post but it needs additional emphasis! After years of my pestering him about it, Bill O’Neil has FUCKING FINALLY gotten around to setting up a dedicated story blog. Bill/William/whoever was making me want to shred everything I ever wrote and set it on fire in a toilet while he was still in high school, so I’m (mostly) glad to finally be able to slot him into Google Reader. If you don’t do the same then you’ll just have to accept that you and I have different tastes!

Anacrusis

May 3, 2011 /

Anacrusis/Ommatidia is done! I started it in July of 2003, wrote 2003 stories, and now it is my 30th birthday and my present to myself is, I don’t have to do it anymore. (Landing on this date is only sort of a coincidence: I calculated the timing versus post count last summer, and you have probably noticed some bonus stories appearing on weekends since.)

The website won’t go away, but the every-weekday part of the project is over. You will probably see the occasional story pop up in future, if you keep the feed in your reader, and I’ll try to do a bit of curation and shuffling. I may end up keeping Anacrusis as the chronological record and Ommatidia as more of a categorized library. Or: not.

Now follows a list of things I got out of this deal.

  • About 266 subscribers on Google Reader, which is to say, by my estimate, 133 total readers
  • Some useful characters
  • A lot more confidence about my word choice
  • Very little confidence about my plotting
  • A great deal of evidence that I thought stupid things were clever at 1:30 in the morning
  • A name-drop in a doctoral dissertation that I’m not allowed to read
  • A gig writing for one of my favorite comic artists
  • Some really nice letters from cool people
  • Approximately 2003 fewer hours of free time

If you read and enjoyed this thing, thanks, and I’m glad. I owe a debt to Holly Gramazio, Sumana Harihareswara, Leonard Richardson, Andrew Cole, John Dixon, Stephen Heintz, William O’Neil, Kevan Davis, Ben Wray, Riana Pfefferkorn, Joe McDaldno, Tim Coe, Dave Michalak, Ben Carson, the indefatigable Geoffrey Pieper, Christin Clatterbuck, Kris Straub, Penny Arcade, and all the regulars from the LJ/FB feeds for putting the occasional gleam on my raw monument to doggedness. Many of these people have done me the additional kindness of writing guest stories! I’ll be posting them over the next couple of weeks.

I look forward to having my evenings back so I can devote more time to writing code and also homoerotic fanfiction about Inception characters. You think that’s a joke but it’s not.

It’s a threat.