Category: People

This is the least useful blog entry I have ever posted

April 6, 2010 /

I finally figured out what delineates the podcasts I like from ones I completely can’t stand and want to punch in the mouth! SHUT UP I HAVE BEEN THINKING REALLY HARD ABOUT THIS FOR YEARS

Okay, here it is. The first podcast I listened to regularly was the Daily Affirmation, Kris Straub and Scott Kurtz’s little morning chatter that they would record off the cuff while starting work in their studio. I am a Kris Straub superfan, as is well established, and I like Scott Kurtz too (actually, I like Scott Kurtz more than I like PvP). I really liked it, and that led me to the Penny Arcade podcast, probably my favorite collection of nonmusical audio ever. I listened to both of those corpuses repeatedly; they kept me sane and amused during long, boring days of working from home or driving across the country. They’re much of the reason I started doing a podcast of my own.

Here’s the thing: Scott and Kris did another podcast called the Power Hour, which was also them just talking, taking callers, like a radio show. I tried listening to it a couple times, and I never liked it. This is much the same setup as the podcast Kris and David Malki ! have now, called Tweet Me Harder, which I listen to out of loyalty and don’t mind, but of which I’m still not particularly fond.

This contradiction repeats: I love Dan Savage, both in writing and persona, but the Savage Lovecast turns me off. I don’t read the webcomics Sheldon or Evil Inc., but when their creators (Dave Kellett and Brad Guigar) show up with Kris and Scott on Webcomics Weekly, I really enjoy it. I can’t stand any of that hip snarky bullshit on Jordan Jesse Go or You Look Nice Today (they engender the aforementioned desire for mouth-punching). I have a well-known affection for Mr. Glass and This American Life, but actually listening to that show is too much mental work on podcast time, which is almost always during work hours.

So maybe I just like podcasts about webcomics? Yet I love listening to some creator commentary on movies and TV shows, and in particular, I’ve listened to one episode of the old Battlestar Galactica podcast–where the creator, his wife and a large chunk of the cast got together and just talked about the show for hours–again and again. But when the commentary is just the director talking to himself (or when the BSG podcast was just Ron Moore) I don’t care.

This is my working theory right now: I like listening to people who care about their work talking to each other about how they make it. It’s fascinating, funny, educational and sometimes thrilling. But I can’t stand listening to people talk for the sole purpose of being listened to, even people whose work I admire. The fact that people who are talking about the things they make tend to be unself-conscious when they get into a dialogue helps avoid the potential overlap between those paradigms.

Anyway, this is why if you mention Jesse Thorn to me in any context I will throw something at you. I have a rant for another day about how much Put This On sucks compared to the late, lamented Manual of Style.

Raising the level of discourse

April 2, 2010 /

The other day Erika got a request to do up a Penny Arcade guest comic and made the mistake of saying so on LJ–and, worse, confessing that she was a little nervous about it–at which opportunity I leapt like a jaguar in a trebuchet. I believe my exact words were “ERIKA ERIKA LEMME HELP I WANNA HELP ERIKA LEMME HEEEELP.” Out of some unknown and misplaced emotion, she acquiesced.

Anyway, it’s up now, so that’s pretty neat! That gag was Erika’s (and Matt’s?), I just helped tweak the dialogue (and, shamefully, truncated Professor Snugglesworth’s name). I did write the little bonus strip mentioned in the post.

This marks the second time in two years that my work has made some kind of appearance on PA. Based on linear progression, the plan is working, and by 2240 my takeover will be complete.

March 15, 2010 /

Kara took about eighteen pictures of Lou Ferrigno at Emerald City this year because she was fascinated (not in a good way) with his biceps. I urged her to stop, having heard tales of Ferrigno’s anger at people who took his picture without paying–it is his only job, after all–but honestly, I think now I see what she was saying.

Looks roided, really.

Credit for that picture to Josh Trujillo; you should click through to check out the gallery, which has cute kids in costumes.

February 27, 2010 /

One of my favorite things of the many, many I’ve stolen from Sumana is the notion that blogs get a “house style.” This, for the record, is the reason long works (novels, movies, etc) get capitalized but not italicized on NFD.

That’s no battle station

February 27, 2010 /

A few weeks ago, Kara and I went out to dinner at a fancy restaurant for her stepdad’s birthday, and I got to meet several members of her extended family for the first time. It was a really nice dinner and we all enjoyed ourselves. Then we walked out to the car, got in, started the engine, glanced backwards and realized that someone had smashed in the rear passenger window and stolen my bag, containing books and my laptop, and a couple hundred dollars’ worth of new clothes Kara had just had delivered by UPS. Have I mentioned that it was raining?

The waitstaff at the restaurant informed us that this was the fourth such smash-and-grab from their parking lot in three weeks. There is no camera or floodlight there. I still need to call up the building owners for a polite discussion about that.

The whole situation sucked a lot, but we got the window replaced and Kara got some of the clothes replaced by a kind friend for her birthday. My car insurance covered the window but not the contents; Kara’s home insurance would have covered them, but in neither instance did the damage meet the deductible. (I had to buy a new windshield after a rock chip incident last summer, too, so I have now replaced about 40% of the glass on my car out of pocket.) The fact is that we are very fortunate to have afforded such luxuries to begin with, and remain both fortunate and luxurious.

I replaced the laptop with a much newer, shinier, more expensive version, but then my boss took the opportunity to buy a nice new Mac Mini for my desk at work (I had been using the aforementioned four-year-old Macbook) and I returned it. The laptopless life is one plagued with tiny inconveniences, so I’ll probably buy it again in a few months when they update the hardware.

The point of this post is to eulogize my old dingy white Macbook, which, for a refurbished computer at the very low end of Apple’s lineup, did me proud for three and a half years. I used it as my only work machine for much of that time; it accompanied me to London, Innsbruck, Winston-Salem, San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, London again, Paris, and Taastrup, where I dumped a glass of water into it and actually managed to grow mold on its hard drive. And then I replaced said drive and used it at the new job for another six months! No one could have asked more.

Thanks, Macbook. You were a good computer.

Geek Note: For reasons I can’t remember now, I named the laptop DEATHSTAR on our home network when I first bought it; after the hard drive resurrection (and, for the first time, the switch out of Boot Camp to native OS X), I rechristened it Fully Operational. Apparently every Death Star gets destroyed, though, so I have moved on to a new naming convention. Kara’s and my iMac is now the Batcave, the Mac Mini is the Batpod, and whenever I get the laptop again, it will be the Tumbler.

Update 2255 hrs: Kara has informed me that the iMac is named Hodge, after John Hodgman, and always will be, and HOW COULD I THINK THAT, and WHAT AM I GOING TO DO TO OUR CHILDREN, RENAME THEM EVERY TIME I READ A BOOK. (I say he’s only Hodge as long as Windows is running. He is a PC.)

February 15, 2010 /

I’ve been meaning to post about this forever! Not forever. Three weeks.

As part of my Christmas present, Kara got tickets for us to see Phoenix on January 24th. It was a really fun show, except for the fact that the people around us did not understand Brendan’s Grand United Concert Zone Theorem with regards to where idiots are allowed to stand. I was really ticked about this at the time, so we started leaving a little early, which meant that we were standing about two feet away when Thomas Mars started wading out through the crowd to climb up on a speaker and declare his love for Portland. Shaky phonecam proof:

Thomas Mars, now in Blurryvision.

He’s an odd-looking dude. But that was pretty cool!

This also makes xkcd more plausible

February 13, 2010 /

Sick Kara is zoning out watching The Lost World on TV. It occurs to me that the moral of all the Jurassic Park movies, as explicitly stated by Jeff Goldblum and borne out by events onscreen, is this: “Quantum physics guarantees that you will be killed by dinosaurs.”

I never really liked the films, but I could get behind that premise.

Attention conservation notice

February 3, 2010 /

I know I’m kind of harping on this, but I remain really upset and angry about the Citizens United decision, and it would appear I am not alone. Public Citizen and three other organizations have launched Free Speech for People, a campaign to fix the problem, constitutionally or otherwise. Even if you don’t feel like signing their petition or throwing some money at them, they’ve got a blog that I hope will be a good clearinghouse for news on the fight.

Uncle John has made the case that requiring full disclosure of corporate campaign spending would be a good compromise solution–that transparency would allow voters to simply turn away from candidates if they didn’t like where their money was coming from. I respect that opinion, but I really couldn’t disagree more.

We already have disclosure requirements that the decision didn’t affect, and they haven’t yet solved anything. Disclosure didn’t keep Max Baucus from getting the tiller on health care reform after taking four million dollars from the health care industry. It didn’t keep Mitch McConnell from taking three hundred thousand from coal and then, coincidentally, fighting to keep mine owners from having to measure mercury discharge. It’s already a shock when an entrenched politician manages to say a few stern words about a regressive, destructive industrial backer; actual voting that way is unheard of. Doesn’t that indicate our ingrained acceptance that our representatives’ ballots are already purchased?

About half the people who voted against Obama didn’t believe he was born in the United States. A quarter of those, in turn, believed that he was born in Hawaii, but that Hawaii was not a state. What does that mean? That people don’t vote on passive facts; they vote on what they hear and see. Money isn’t speech, it’s volume, and when you turn the volume up too high, it distorts.