| Digg is fruxtrating... why do I still read it? |
[Dec. 29th, 2007|06:35 pm] |
Yet another obnoxiously stupid article got dugg up today. Here's what irritates me...
(1) The presentation of the elementary-school version of the scientific method. Hypothesis, experiment, model, etc. Wow. That's so amazing, you're so thoughtful. All it's really revealing is that the author himself didn't actually understand until he was, like, 26, and now he thinks he can shit gold.
(2) Using the word "Faith" when one means "Ignorance." Faith is a refusal to dismiss an idea just because you can't understand or comprehend it. From that standpoint, Faith is a lot more similar to scientific inquiry than different. At its heart, it's antithetical to the idea being labelled as faith in the article.
The whole "Faith vs Science" bifurcation is artificial - the two are parallel modes of thought, not contradictions. The concerted effort of ignorant people to construe this as a legitimate debate is frustrating and destructive. Why is it the only narrative ever floated in the mainstream discourse? What's the agenda? |
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| sketchblog and twitter |
[Dec. 16th, 2007|11:24 pm] |
I've set up some other blogs.
Sketchblog: for random artwork and comix posts
Twitter: for personal max-related trivia
I'm going to keep my LJ around so that I can read my friends pages, and I'll occasionally but some Big Life Updates here for people who want to keep up, generally.
I am soooo web2.0 ;P |
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| halloween |
[Oct. 28th, 2007|08:40 pm] |
( three more photos under the cut )
Went to Reagen and 5teve's Halloween Extravaganza last night. Notables:
- Hyperactive Fog Machine
- Puzzle Bobble Machine
- Matt Mahon in a mustache
- Carly's hybrid VikingPirate costume
- Discovering another masonic member of the secret kids-who-had-sega-CDs-and-played-Lunar society
- Won Best Costume and got the coveted Olive Garden prize
- Matt Mahon in a mustache (important enough to mention twice)
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| chain |
[Oct. 25th, 2007|10:31 pm] |
For the first three people that reply to this post, and who re-post this challenge: you win!
* For your prize, I will send you a handmade gift.
* Whatever it is, I promise I will get it to you in 365 days of your posted comment or less, and I will need your snail mail [unless you're a local].
[Tho I'm going to do my best to send it to you before the end of the year.]
* The only thing you need to do to receive your gift is PARTICIPATE.
* be one of the first three journalers to reply to this, and post this very same thing in your journal, and YOU are the lucky giftee.
(The gift will probably be something baked or doodled, though if creativity takes me it could really be aything. Feel free to make requests) |
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[Oct. 22nd, 2007|08:39 pm] |
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| seoul searching |
[Oct. 15th, 2007|05:58 am] |
Happy Birthday to me! Because of the international dateline, I got to celebrate a day early. Korea's amazing, though, I'm spending my whole trip working. Le sigh. I have many photos, but I'll get to posting them when I get back. Tomorrow's going to be a long day, because we have to change up the wiring to accomidate the lighting scheme they should have had set up in the first place. Work, work, work. Rar!
I miss you all.
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| Book of the New Sun |
[Oct. 2nd, 2007|12:13 am] |
Argh... I finished Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun this evening, but couldn't find anyone to really talk to about it. It's like... reading House of Leaves or Infinite Jest and having only your imagination buzzing deafeningly in your head with no outlet. I'm just now starting to make the connections, but I feel like there's a whole subsurface story just waiting to be decrypted.
The series is the most sophisticated fantasy I've ever encountered. It somehow gracefully weaves dying earth fantasy, cthulian mythology, Primer-level treatment of time travel, spensorian allegory, and a style as rich in detail as Mervyn Peake's. Wow. |
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| From Ithaca |
[Oct. 2nd, 2007|12:10 am] |
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| Reflections from a Kid Otaku |
[Sep. 24th, 2007|01:03 am] |
 Recently I've been spending more time alone, and as an effect I've become more reflective. The other day, for no real reason, I started reflecting on my childhood fascination with anime, and my subsequent complete loss of interest.
This isn't really about anime, though. It's about the culture of my friends when I was a kid. That's the headfake.
 I first became acquainted with anime in the forth grade. I'd always been a little sensitive of the fact that the cartoons I'd been watching all my, then not very long, life had a sort of common foreign style and iconography to it that didn't permeate into comics or movies, and when someone (I don't even remember who) told me that it was "manga-style" I was enabled, by having the name, to recognize it.
 I became a real fan, then, in fifth grade. So we're in 1994 now. Damn I'm old. Anyway, the only vectors of finding anime was to tape the sci-fi channel's saturday night anime program, and to connive my parents into driving me to the other side of Cleveland where a comic shop also rented anime (which I subsequently dubbed). The difficulty in acquiring the media made it that much more precious.
 I retrospect, I suppose what was really attractive about anime for me, as opposed to other media targetted at adolescent boys, is that anime in the early 90s was targetted at geeky adolescent boys. My same friends who were into anime were also into books, Dungeons and Dragons, Monty Python, Douglas Adams, Star Wars, text-adventure computer games, and all the other timeless elements of nerdus arcana. Nobody noticed anime, so we felt like we and we alone owned it. It was like having a secret. I honestly never explained to my mother what anime was exactly or why I liked it. That would be like giving away the masonic handshake. The level of personal intimacy with the media was intoxicating.
 Here we get to the heart of my disenchantment: the audience has changed. Culture's changed. Anime's mainstream. It's preciousness earned by the obstacles to acquiring it? Nil, it's on tv and at the rental place around the corner. The intimacy of feeling an ownership of an otherwise unnoticed genre? None; all the idiots you hate are into it, now.
 What's worse, the anime that's most public are the shows that pass through the mass-media filter, and are basically either blatant marketing for toys, or aimed at an "edgier" college-age demographic.
That tripe doesn't appeal to your (a)typical 12-year-old nerd. It makes me a little sad that they don't have the context to experience anime the way I did, but it's not the end of the world. There's always some other neglected niche for them to take for themselves. I mean, everyone hates reading, right? So there always going to be books.
 Adieu, noble saucer-eyed storytellers of my adolescence. May you and my Sega CD and my X-Force comics rest in peace. The culture that gave you meaning has past. You're artifacts now.
Whoa, deja vu, I feel like I've written this post, before (>O__O)> |
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| Blank & Foil :0) |
[Sep. 20th, 2007|12:51 am] |
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| So Many Fucking Pumpkins! |
[Sep. 18th, 2007|01:53 am] |
I have so many pumpkins growing in my front-yard patch. Today I take a look and there's four new ones I hadn't seen before! That makes, like, ten pumpkins! They're growing out of control! Pumpkins everywhere!
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| OH SHIT ZOMBIES |
[Sep. 13th, 2007|11:52 pm] |
Riding my bike home down Carsen Street this evening, *of course*, I get attacked by ZOMBIES!
( 7 More )
Y'know, for all that I complain about Pittsburgh, it does have it's charms :0) |
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| LJ says I've been away for 7 weeks |
[Sep. 9th, 2007|06:05 pm] |
I've been working on a personal art project called (tentatively) "Bubble Tree." For it, I need these kinds of "active shapes" that you can move around, rotate, and scale uniformly.
It's not a new problem or anything. However, to my pleasant surprise, when I coded it up, I discovered that even simple, well-known interactions, when designed with an attention to detail, yield an unexpectedly fun, novel result.
a demo of the "active shapes" |
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| pgh |
[Jun. 11th, 2007|09:27 pm] |
One the plus side, in pittsburgh, painting your bike black and yellow actually earns you some courtesy points from drivers :0) |
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| illustration practice continues |
[Jun. 10th, 2007|10:16 pm] |
How my 100%-digital illustration skill has progressed:
Still not as good as my sketchbook drawings, but I'm getting there. |
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| 16,000 words. |
[May. 24th, 2007|01:28 am] |
I haven't posted anything comprehensive or informative in a while. Then today I finally found my lost camera cable. So here's a choice cross-section of interesting images from recent memory.
I'm weird-lookin'.
Crazy people at Ithaca. Crazy, I tell you!
Sleepy people the morning of the wedding.
A long time since I've seen that shirt.
The perfect shot of a really special girl.
He left for Los Angeles sunday and I miss him already.
Congratulations again, Alligory. I would've gotten betters shot if not for someone's big, bald head ;0)
Since John's got the savory stuff covered, and Lisa's got the sweet stuff, I've started baking bread. This is my first solo attempt.
You know how sometimes you read something at just the right time for it to make a whole lot of sense?
Nonprofessionally, I've just been drawing a Blank.
I still think about Victoria everyday. As soon as I wake up in the morning, I'm thinking about the what-ifs all over again. God, isn't she just so beautiful?
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| el jay |
[May. 2nd, 2007|07:42 pm] |
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Doesn't it drive you crazy when you read your friends page and think "is this about me?" |
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| from the MSDN blogs... |
[Apr. 15th, 2007|03:56 pm] |
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A cute entry from the QA guys at microsoft who are tasked to respond to those "send an error report?" messages. |
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