Entropy Was Here Yesterday

Bad things: on Wednesday morning I backed the new car into the post between our garage doors. Damage is minor, at least.

Good things: connectivity in the Volvo dealership is good enough that I was able to play a twenty minute session and win $3.47 at .10/.20 TD. Figuring out how to hold this thing comfortably is going to take some time, but it is nice to know it's workable.

In order to keep people from seeing their free concert commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall, U2 built a two-meter metal wall at the Brandenburg Gate.

Boily, from Quebec City, was among several hundred people who gathered earlier in the day against the new fence, which was draped with a white tarp that blocked the view of the stage from the street. Some fans already were trying to tear down the tarp before the concert.

And my new Viliv S5. I'm having all the fun usually contained in setting up a new computer, with the added fun of trying to figure out a very small and mostly undocumented interface. It's taken a day or so, but I'm finally getting used to using a stylus for everything.

It's a minor adventure, but pretty cool nonetheless. I will probably type more when I have an actual keyboard.

Probably sometime in the next few days I will fire up Stars or Full Tilt and see how that goes. Since that's the main justification for spending $800 on a device that basically does what a smartphone does*, it had better. I'm optimistic; it's surprisingly intuitive.

*Though paying $35/mo should make up the cost differential pretty quickly.

1. I suck at Photoshop.
2. I would like to not suck at Photoshop.
3. I'm not really clear on the proper path to #2.
4. I did put a couple of books on my Amazon list, though.

Anybody have any suggestions/resources/ideas? Switching to GIMP doesn't count. Switching back to PhotoPaint, which I know how to use, is tempting, but still doesn't count. I adore Lightroom so much that I feel the need to understand its companion editor, plus so many cool third party tools are limited to PS.

Bildungsgreek, n.: A style of story featuring an adolescent protagonist who enters adulthood by flailing, having a great deal of sex, and failing to learn anything.

medlargecomic. You know you want to.

Setting out to integrate art and science is like attempting to crossbreed a puma with a mountain lion; it may very well be a fascinating process, but it requires at least one extremely serious misunderstanding.

Who was it who asked me if one could get more than one Nobel Prize a while back? She has two.

They're gonna find intelligent life up there on the moon,
And the Canterbury Tales will shoot up to the top of the bestseller list
And stay there for 27 weeks.
And the Chicago Cubs will beat every team in the league,
And a Mountain Goats crowd will always be unfailingly polite.

It was a very good show. It deserved better.

So I'm three-eighths of the way through the Canadian miniseries Zone of Separation, and I'm a long way from having coherent thoughts about it, but so far I'm pretty blown away. It's a very complex show, and also a very adult one; a step up from The Wire, certainly. It's also very Canadian, in cultural ways that I appreciate (and probably some that I miss), but also in not being aimed squarely at people who are not paying attention like so many American shows are.

It's a show about UN observers and peacekeepers in a fictional Balkan city with serious Christian/Muslin tensions. The main character, Captain Sean Kovacs (Michelle Nolden), is a Canadian observer dealing with trying to keep the peace between Muslims and Christians and also ride herd on the newly-assigned Canadian peacekeeping force, who are a bit too aggressive for the situation. Enrico Colantoni plays the completely crazy head of the Christian paramilitary, while Colm Meaney is the mercenary behind the Muslims, and that by itself was enough to get me watching the show, but it's Kovacs who completely steals the day. For those who are on the strong female characters bandwagon, she's definitely one to see.

I will continue to try to figure out useful things to say about it. But it's worth putting on your radar if you're interested in TV as art, and not disturbed by difficult adult content. (I don't feel like I can be more specific about that without being spoilery, sadly.)

Lots of other information including a couple of trailers at zostv.com.

Further playing around with the S90:



I'm continuing to be very bad at actually getting out of the house, and being stuck on a night schedule is not helping. I obviously need to start doing some more long-exposure work, though I'm having difficulty figuring out where I want to start with that.

As an arborist: what are we doing wrong? Why is the tree not exploding?

--Kari Byron

I am comforting myself with the thought that Hawkeye surely voted no.

Poll #1480141
Open to: All, detailed results viewable to: All, participants: 22

If I were to decorate my new bedroom with photos of tired animals, that would be:

ETA: I should clarify that unlike the current situation, my new bedroom will be a definitively non-work space. I'm expanding from one room to three, and will have a dedicated work space for the first time in my life.

I figured out how to trick my procrastination subroutine; I'm procrastinating by reading about how to stop procrastinating. As usual mostly my productive reading has been where it's provoked me to disagree. Various insights:

0) There exists no state where I will be satisfied with my level of productivity. Nor can I imagine ever looking up and saying "hey, look at all the things I've done, I'm totally awesome." This is insight zero because it is a fundamental and unchanging axiom of the Timproverse. It can only be worked with.

1) My goals tend to be chained. This is probably a problem. Example: right now I want to play poker so that I can make money so that I can buy a new ultrawide lens so that I can take more good photos so that I can have more content for the new blog I keep hoping to get going, so that it will be cool. Everything in there involves both confidence and work, which means that there are a ton of potential failure points building up to put a lot of pressure on a pretty trivial first step.

1a) I don't really have any bright ideas for what to do about that. I can't play poker for its own sake; I can't make money for its own sake; most other things require money. It's almost like I've tried too hard to motivate myself in this direction and I'm overthrowing, to use a baseball analogy. It's easy to say "motivate yourself to work by focusing on something you want to do with the money," but that seems to have become pathological.

2) There's not all that much that I actually enjoy that isn't productive, when it comes down to it. I enjoy having smart and funny conversations with people I like. I enjoy traveling, though I expect that to be at least semiproductive these days. I enjoy wandering about in the woods by myself, ditto. I enjoy consuming some forms of entertainment, mostly books, dining out, and concerts, though I consume a great deal more entertainment than I enjoy.

2a) I spend a remarkable amount of time killing time. Part of this is just disability-related and I'm at stuck with it at least for the time being. I can't convince myself that it all is; possibly this is my one point of blind optimism.

3) The one thing I enjoy above everything else is that immediately post-creation moment where I realize that I've made something really awesome.

3a) I have impossibly high standards for myself.

4) The #2 thing is being genuinely helpful to the people I care a great deal about.

4a) I have impossibly high standards for myself.

5) I've had very bad burnout experiences, and would strongly prefer to avoid them in the future. I may be overcompensating.

6) A while ago I lost a long-time friend who had an exceptional talent for preventing me from running headlong in the wrong direction. That's something I have a significant tendency to do, and I relied on her a great deal. Without that safety net, I'm finding myself extremely averse to taking bold action in any way. I've been unsuccessful in finding someone else to do that; a few people are good at it, but no one close to that good. Convincing her to return to that role seems fantastically unlikely, though I can't say I haven't thought of trying. I keep trying to think of a solution that doesn't require putting that responsibility on someone else.

7) I dislike special attention intensely. I'm not sure how to explain this. The things I'm reading seem to tie this sort of behavior into feeling unworthy, but it's not that for me. Worthy almost makes it worse. Oh, I know what it is - I don't despise attention, I despise prestige. That insight may make this whole post worthwhile.

8) Just to end this on a positive note, one of the common threads of everything I read about fear of success is a fear that your friends won't like you if you're successful, that they will be jealous, and in some cases that everyone will abandon you. I have way more confidence in you guys than that.

Sometimes I think my skills ought to be taken from me and given to someone with a work ethic.

A Boy Named Goo
Alice in Chains
Become You
Document
Made in USA
Made in USA
Matters of the Heart
Not Far Now
Tea for the Tillerman
The Sunset Tree
Truth Be Told
World Container

Edit 11/3: it became clear that the two Made in USAs were a mistake; replaced them with Ben Folds Five and Scarlet's Walk.

A completely irrelevant comment is that all of my '90s Angry Woman albums are either a) about sex or b) The Cranberries. It would be nice to have something that was neither, in that genre. Recommendations?

Well, that was the first time I've been to a show where the house lights come up and everyone refuses to leave. Which was kind of fun. Can't say I think the show deserved it, though. In general, I think combining Ben Folds with the MN Orchestra managed to elude the virtuosity of either. A couple of things worked really well - "Smoke" not surprisingly as it was written with strings in the first place, and "Not the Same" was extremely awesome with Sarah Hicks conducting the orchestra and Ben conducting the crowd.

In that last sense I was very impressed with Orchestra Hall's architect. The acoustics work to make it the best singalong venue I've ever been in by about six parsecs, which is not something I expect of an orchestral venue.

Ben played "Rockin' the Suburbs" for the demanded final encore, which meant the show ended with the somewhat surreal experience of everyone* in Orchestra Hall rhythmically chanting "fuck."

* Where by "everyone in" I mean "60% of." Insisting on an extra encore is one thing, but this is still Minnesota.

Someone on my flist made the all-too-common mistake of reading those Recommended Daily Allowance charts and coming away thinking the FDA recommends a 2,000-calorie diet. Of course, this isn't true - unlike WHO with the BMI cart, the FDA is surprisingly smart about such things, and recognizes that not everybody has the same caloric requirements. In the RDA charts, the other numbers are scaled to a 2,000-calorie baseline; it's up to you to scale up or down as necessary.

In the course of looking into that, I discovered this Mayo Clinic widget which gives nice rough estimations of caloric needs to maintain weight. Which I thought was nifty enough to post.

My number? 3100 on a week like this; 3600 when I'm doing well at getting out on photowalks.

Maybe I should make the Helo icon my default icon. I identify with him so often these days. In this post, it's because much like Helo in seasons three and four, I've kind of lost track of what my job is. I'm stalled on just about everything right now: I haven't played poker since before I went to Boston; I can't seem to get momentum going on my photo processing backlog; songwriting is dead in the water right now; so are a couple of other cool artistic projects that I haven't been talking about (and am not yet really skilled enough to pull off).

There is one thing, all of two days old, that seems to be proceeding, but the more people I tell about it the more real it becomes, and if this is going to happen it needs to be done before it's real. I think I've already told two too many people.

I think I'm going to concentrate on making sure I get my walks and workouts restarted over the next week or two and hope they drag something else along. If not, moiread is coming to visit in mid-November and maybe I will ask her to try to help bring perspective.

Edit: got a whole bunch more Helo icons courtesy of hobbitofkobol, who is awesome, though doesn't have a lot of fandom overlap with me other than BSG.