99 and 44/100 % Walaka-free!

This is mostly a link-farm today; I'm thinking about a number of things, but not ready to write about any of them yet.

"There are two novels that can change a bookish fourteen-year old's life: The Lord of the Rings and Atlas Shrugged. One is a childish fantasy that often engenders a lifelong obsession with its unbelievable heroes, leading to an emotionally stunted, socially crippled adulthood, unable to deal with the real world. The other, of course, involves orcs."

Stolen from Journalista who got it from Kung Fu Monkey.

Somebody I know would just love a tall glass of flaming water. Check out the story and be sure to watch the video.

Justine Lai has a very challenging art project; I'm not quite sure how I feel about it. Link goes to the artist's statement; the "works" page is very NSFW.

Well, whaddaya you know - there's finally a search engine that seems to have improved upon the mighty Google: Clusty clusters your search results three different ways to make sorting through the hits easier. It's cool to find something new that isn't part of the GooglePlex; how long do you think it will be before they assimilate it?

West side story

Sometimes the road takes you to unexpected places. This afternoon, I transported NatDog and TomCat down to SeaTac; they were flying out to San Diego for a little bit of spring break sunshine. Otis had an afternoon appointment scheduled and I had tentative plans to hook up with Ned, but she didn't answer the phone when I called. So, I came back north via the west side - up 509 to 99 - wanting to keep in easy striking distance of West Seattle in case she called back. Well, she didn't, so I found myself working my way back via the waterfront and Ballard and like that, and so I am now here killing time at Makeda Coffee on Phinney Ridge, since by the time I got home Otis would have been getting into the zone for her session anyway.

This has been a wandering and indolent break anyway. I have done the minimum amount of prep work necessary for the next quarter, and allowed myself suitable time for naps and other affairs of state. It's been nice just to be off the clock, even though we didn't go to San Diego (or Hawaii or Japan or Colorado) like my colleagues. I haven't been able to sleep in, though; I wanted to start switching to swing shift, but the cats still say the day starts at 6:30 am.

There has been a new distraction this break: Otis and I decided to beat the clock and get a new TV before the projector lamp burned out. So, we trundled around for an afternoon last week and picked up one of those new-fangled flat screen jobs and a table to put it on. We've been running off one of the laptops for now, but I have plans to pick up a used Mac Mini and use that as our media player. In addition to the DVDs and Hulu and iTunes and all that, we have actually been watching some of the new DTV channels, mostly for the novelty. RTH, the Retro Televison Network, shows stuff like Simon & Simon and Kate & Allie; it's amazing how dated that stuff is.

Here's some stuff that's not dated:

This one is for O:

Credit.

This one is for Soapy, in the spirit of creativity that he has recently exhibited:

Credit.

And this one is just cool:

Credit.

A fit of Peaks

Nu, after a yummy dinner of Ho Chi Minh (fried rice with soy sausage), Otis and I decided to head down the block to Peaks, the new dessert place so recently praised by Lon and Jules. The idea was to get a cuppa and a little custard to go with, and to do some laptopping.

Well, the coffee was good (it's Lighthouse, a local micro-roaster). Otis's chocolate custard was good (although I would have foregone the Snickers topping). But my vanilla custard was meh at best and weird at worst; I only ate a few bites, the part that had chocolate syrup on it (which was for the better, anyway). And worst of all, the wireless internet wasn't working, and whatever the staff did after we told them didn't help.

So, even though I took a picture there, no snaps of Peaks until they straighten up and fly right!

---

The Post I Had Actually Planned to Write

Spring break, as in something is breaking off or breaking away and something else is gushing in to fill the crack.

This epigram was appended, apropos of nothing in particular, to an email I received from a colleague a few days ago. Well, spring has started, at least officially; the equinox was Friday. And the break is also here, I guess, since I went into campus today and finished off all my grading of papers and posting of grades for winter quarter. So now I'm just waiting for the gushing in to begin.

It's past time to wash up and start fresh. The change to daylight time and the lengthening of the daytime light have removed most excuses for winter indolence; if the weather would just cooperate a little bit more, we might even have some actual incentives to activity. And Urd knows I could stand to move around a lot more than I have been lately. I don't know if there will be a B2K this season, but I plan on making a regular bike commute, at least, although I hope to do more than that.

I also need to get in gear metaphorically as well as literally. I've got notes and outlines and lists and all sorts of stuff laying about wanting attention; maybe my new schedule (and a new attitude) will let me make a little more consistent progress on those fronts. Dammit, you'd think they were nasty chores instead of things devoutly to be wished, so little have I had to do with them lately.

The biggest gusher I am hoping for involves my professional stuff rather than the personal. I wonder if, in the next five days, I can completely revise my English 101 syllabus to counter the lack of relevancy I have begun to sense ever since seeing this little video last week:

I know my stock in trade comprises critical thinking and effective communication, and I maintain my faith in the value of those qualities, but somehow I can't help but think that the packages that I currently use to contain these commodities seem at best quaint and at worst immaterial to my students' lives. And part of me wonders if that isn't in fact the case.

Well, there's no time like the present, and no better week than Spring Break, for new beginnings. As I say to my students, let's have at it.

Google me this, boy wonder...

So, expecting my first income tax refund in about four years and wanting to do my part to stimulate the economy (but mostly wanting to keep up with the iPhone-flaunting Gweekers and Dr. Burn*), I went down to the T-Mobile emporium the other week and got myself one of those Android G1 OpenSource GooglePhones.

It's pretty cool, what with its little magic touch screen and all. Since it's a GooglePhone, it has a right-on-top Google Search Bar as well as the iPhone-like slidey tray o' applications (many of which are free, because open source, ya dig?). It's also got what I like: an actual QWERTY thumb-board, instead of just an on-screen virtual keyboard. (Yeah, I know it's not as kewl as the iPhone, but forgive me my sausage fingers.)

The phone functions are easily accessed, with a keypad and favorites and recently-called numbers, all the usual features. It gets really good reception and has great sound, too.

But the coolest of all things that I have on it now is comics! I downloaded Atomic Robo, an indy comic that has been reconfigured for reading on the phone screen. I thought it would be totally lame, but this particular artwork is clean, simple, and straightforward, making the piece a pretty good match for the small display. Of course, I'm reading one panel at a time, which takes out a lot of the pacing and mood delivered by page layout, but for a little waiting-for-the-bus diversion, it's pretty sweet. (Maybe that it's about a wisecracking robot adventurer, built by Tesla, who fights a Nazi mystic in the Himalayas helped, too.)

Ha! Who's old-timey now? Now gett offa my lawn.

*Dr. Burn told me a funny iPhone joke:

You know what's really cool about an iPhone?
What?
Everything!

I watches the Watchmen

Johnbai wouldn't leave me be: he loved it and really wanted to talk about it. So even though I was in no hurry and could easily have waited for the second-run showing at the Crest discount house, a few of us met up at the Neptune so I could watch Watchmen and Johnbai could take in his third showing. After more than twenty years of wishing and two years of waiting, the comics community had finally gotten its masterpiece brought to the screen, and I was going to see it.

Three hours later, we strolled out into the damp, cool Seattle air, my life unchanged.

It would have been nice if it had been a singular experience, either gut-wrenchingly awful or exceptionally good, but it was neither. In the same way that I liked Dark Knight even though it was only nominally a Batman movie, I didn't much care for Watchmen even though it was faithful to the book and in some ways an effective adaptation.

Movies ain't comics; their language is different, more so than many fans (and practitioners) think. In many ways, the film lost my interest when it followed the novel too slavishly; the essential structures and forms didn't carry over. And when the film deviated from the comic, it was to move into the territory of tired tropes: slow-motion hair-tosses and quick-cut fight scenes. Regardless of its source material, I just didn't think it was that engaging a movie. And as with any "literary" novel being turned into a movie, I think a lot of the internal development got lost, as did the meta-reflection on the superhero genre (and certainly on the comics form).

Watchmen in the end was just something like Quantum of Solace with costumes. Which makes me wonder if there is a Daniel Craig action figure...

Cartoon Diva

Otis was working late last night, so I took the opportunity to head over to 826 Seattle* for a writing workshop presented by Ellen Forney. You may remember Forney from my report on last year's Comixtravaganza - she's a local rockstar cartoonist, does a lot of work for The Stranger, worked with Sherman Alexie, has a new book out, and is currently writing a graphic novel. As I have said before, she is da bomb.

It was great night. Forney gave a wonderful workshop, particularly because she approached making comics from the perspective of writing. She mentioned a few times how delighted she was to be seen as a writer, or at least as a writer-artist, instead of just as an artist. The art-pigeonhole cartoonists find themselves slotted into doesn't do justice to the storytelling ability and understanding of narrative form anyone accomplished at the craft must have. This is of especial interest to me, since my comics reading stretches back to a time when the writer was king of the book and comics were more textual and less faux-cinematic than they currently are; the writing has always been the aspect of making comics that appealed to me (viz., the prior post).

Forney was personable, informative, funny, and cool, and the crowd of a dozen or more lapped it up as she walked us through her process on a few different works. After a comprehensive survey of nuts-and-bots approaches, we ended with the now-almost-traditional Making of the Mini-Comic. Here's an except from mine:

(Yes, I went meta.)

Whether you want to make comics or not, any chance to hang with Forney is worth it. Maybe she'll tell you the story about her Cougar.

*By the way, 826 Seattle, located inside the Greenwood Space Travel Supply Co. (a convenient front), is a fantastic non-profit writing center that lets adults attend cool writing workshops only to support all the great FREE work they do with kids week in and week out. It's worth checking out and supporting.

Genius in a minor chord

Young cousins Sammy and Joe have a scheme to cash in on the boom in superheroes following Superman's success in the late thirties. They have contracted to produce an entire sixty-four page comic starring only masked men. Commandeering a neighborhood house and recruiting all their artist friends, the group intends to conceive all the characters and write and draw the entire book over the course of one weekend. Sammy is one of the weaker artists, but...

If I had any wishful figments offered to me, I could do worse than to play the role that Sammy plays here, all the livelong day.

Excerpt from The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
by Michael Chabon,© 2000, published by Picador USA.

99

An ominous warning in nondescript red letters appeared in the lower left-hand corner of the screen as we began to watch what turned out to be an unwatchable science-fiction movie: 99 hours is all it said. Cryptic? Not really. Expected bad news is more like it.

A few years ago, I got a really good deal on an Epson EMP-5500 multimedia projector through eBay, and since then it has been first the primary and then the only "television" in the house. We have a neat little system rigged up in an Ikea shelf unit: an old VCR to act as a television receiver, a DVD player for movies, the sound from everything running through the stereo system, with the projector on top of the stack, casting an 80-inch diagonal image on the wall over the fireplace. It served us well for movies, big-event nights like the Oscars or Election Day. We could even hook a laptop up to the projector for Internet stuff and homegrown graphics.

One of the best features about it, besides the enormous picture, was its relative inconspicuousness: most people didn't notice the projector at all when it was not in use, and there was certainly no big, blank screen dominating the living room all the time.

Well, it looks like the glory days of our jerry-rigged home-theater are coming to an end. We knew that the VCR would soon be a useless as a receiver; we got a four-month reprieve when the government delayed the implementation of digital broadcasting, but June will be here sooner than we know. The stereo is showing signs of decrepitude. The DVD player crapped out last year, and the thirty-buck replacement lasted only a few months, so we have been using my laptop as our DVD player. And now, that 99 hours notice means the lamp in the projector should fail, given average usage, sometime around June as well. Since the lamp runs somewhere around $400, more than I paid for the projector, keeping the old technology running doesn't seem completely attractive.

Which means we have to Make a Decision: A new bulb and another makeshift system? A new projector with a built-in DVD player? A flat screen TV? How about a Mac Mini for playing Hulu and Netflix Watch Instantly movies, and for making Otis's iTunes playlist available? Or one of those stations that lets you dock the iPod? Chucking the whole mess out the window?

I really don't want to deal with it; I know that the end result will (a) cost me more money than I want to spend, and (b) require me to get another Thing in the house - like furniture. For someone who is constantly trying to lighten his load, I seem to be acquiring more than I let go.

On the other hand, we do like us our movies in this house, and the Big Wall Spectration nights have been wonderful social events.

Well, at least I have ninety-nine hours to figure it out.

Week-off weekend

Here's an old-school blogging treat:


East and west views from the laptop corral at the remodeled Third Place Books/Ravenna, after the replacement of the Honey Bear Bakery with Vios. It does feel a little confining after the wide-open set-up this place used to have, but it's actually a little more functional.

So, I took about a week off after my blogathon, and it has been a busy week, mostly with school stuff, but that's really not why I have been away. I've been looking at the blog and thinking about Voice, Audience, and Purpose; I've been working on the early stages of some other projects; and mostly I have been trying to pull back the stick of my personal Flying Flapjack to gain some altitude. Winter seems to be hanging on here in Seattle - we have snow showers in the forecast all weekend and into Monday - and I am so ready for spring. I want to get moving again, I want to get back on my bike, I want do spring cleaning, I want to have a massive garage sale and unload a bunch of Things, I want it to be sunny and light out more of the day, I want to wear sandals - the whole shebang.

I know it'll come soon enough - Monday begins Week 10 of the quarter, so we're certainly in the home stretch now. This last bit just seems to be taking too long, like the last ten miles of a hundred-mile drive home when you're tired. So maybe a little radio-silence from the Flapjack is okay for the time being.

Blogging about bogging is still a sin...

... but I'm going to do it anyway.

Without any fanfare, this blog moved into Version 2.0 at the end of January and I started posting more frequently. In fact, I made sure that I posted every day in February. I wanted to see what would happen if I threw myself back into the daily grind that I walked away from last summer, the grind I said I thought might be sapping my creative juices, and which I later thought might be a source of creative mojo. I thought that conscious daily blogging for a month straight (even the shortest one) would let me know the score.

Here's the score, or at least the tally (click to embiggen):


I actually wrote a bunch of things worthy to be called essays - eleven of them, or 39% of the posts. Most of them were around 500 words, although two were twice that long and a few shorter - quite similar to what I assign my students. They all look to be pretty good composition exercises; while they weren't really long form, they did give me an opportunity to play with structure and voice. Not a bad batting average.

The next largest section was diary-blogging at 25%. This is an odd category because entries could actually represent craft, although they are frequently closer to free-writing. A quarter of the posts in this category seems a little high.

I posted four link farms, 14% of the total. This mainstay of blogging seems cheap 'n' easy, but it's harder than it looks to build a coherent post around links. Three posts, 11%, focused on movie reviews, two short ones and one longer one. Any more, and I'll be creeping into LNTAM territory. The same percentage represents pure junk - posts without any structure to them, probably posted late at nght to keep the streak going. That's definitely too high. Bringing up the rear were two creative projects, a video parody and a song parody, for 7%, and one light analysis of a photo.

So, what response to this mix of messages? The posts generated 41 comments over the course of the month (one-and-a-half per post), and here's what the visits looked like:

So, it looks like there's a small coterie of folks who are interested enough in this stuff to keep coming if I produce it. So maybe I will. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon and for the rest of my life.

As for today: here are a couple of links!

Just for Johnbai (click for source):


Click Poppy's picture for the science of kindness: