In the Not Too Distant Future

October 31st, 2007Blog0 comments

Happy Halloween, people! I’ll be celebrating the old fashioned way: Summoning demons in the woods. If you have a spare ram’s head you can join me.

Joel Hodgson of Mystery Science Theater 3000 fame is starting a new project with a bunch of old hands from the show. This project is called Cinematic Titanic and promises to be big. BIG! I’m very excited to see what these folks come up with.

I watched MST3k fanatically in high school. It was one of the things that taught me how to be funny. And I mean modern, adult funny. Before then I was all about the fart jokes. Afterwards: Pop culture references and observational humor. Now: Character-based funny. In the future: Fart jokes again. It’s the circle of life.

Since most of our cultural holidays are about appreciating someone or something, I like to take the time to think over that thing which we’re all celebrating. What is Halloween? What’s it all about? Is it about worshipping the dark lord satan and tending the incubus? I do that every day, so what makes Halloween special?

In my analysis, I think that Halloween is about the celebration of our triumph over fear. There are a lot of things to be afraid of in this world, from evil paintings to evil clowns. In fact it blows my mind that evil clowns have their own Wikipedia entry. Who on earth wrote that? Wikipedia just lost some credibility points in my mind. But that’s a digression.

Anyway, fear and Halloween. On this day society sends its children out into the night to knock on strangers’ doors to collect candy. Normally this is the last thing you want to do. This is like having a holiday where everyone wears underwear made out of bacon and runs through a lion preserve. But on Halloween it’s okay — we are flaunting our power over fear. The War on Terror is literally being won on this very special day.

And the costume bit: If I remember correctly, in the long-ago people would wear costumes to outwit the devil and his minions; now we wear costumes to evoke a part of our personality (usually the sexy part) normally hidden. It’s a day when we can finally dress like a slut (even though we clearly don’t have the bod for it, but hey — it’s Halloween). Also closeted gay men can dress fabulously and once again make us wonder why they just don’t come out of the closet already.

It’s a magical night. Fear can be a great thing — it’s a powerful motivator for wanting to become stronger or wanting to get stuff done. But what other holiday celebrates fear in this way? The only other one I can think of is Thanksgiving, which is all about pure, unadulterated fear. And turkey.

BSOD

October 30th, 2007Blog0 comments

So one of the interesting things about Leopard is that machines running Windows show up on your network as old school CRTs showing the BSOD (Blue Screen of Death):

Some people are crying into their soup about how this is very smug and mean of Apple. Big salty tears are pouring from their faces as they weep about the unfairness of a joke in an operating system. Kudos to them for expressing their displeasure; the world is a cruel place.

But I prefer action over complaining. To restore a delicious lack of bias to your Mac OS X installation, you can follow these instructions at Engadget. They show you how to replace the BSOD CRT icon with something more neutral.

However, the icon they suggest as a replacement is lame. You should use mine instead, which is a bazillion times more awesome.

A Red Letter Day

October 29th, 2007Blog0 comments

I picked our good friend Lloyd up from the airport yesterday. Then we went to 3rd Street Promenade to get him a new computer and watch people.

3rd Street is a great place to watch people. It’s crowded and there are buskers and plenty of weirdoes. Weirdoes are my favorite sort of people to watch. Folks wearing three pairs of glasses simultaneously and helmets. We saw a sad clown with withered balloon animals. Weirdoes have the best stories to tell. They’re like the quotation from Anna Karenina about unhappy families being unhappy in their own particular way. Weirdoes are all distinctly unique in their weirdness.

Then we went to Versailles and were there for roughly three hours. Hieu was there, Monica, Deb. I like fried plantains. I also like when my food is smothered in onions. This is the place to be for both of these things.

I think I need to spend more time weirdo-watching and eating Cuban food. If I can make both of those things happen more often, I think my youth will have been well spent.

I’m racing to finish this new thing in the next couple of weeks. It’s really fun writing this thing — when I’m pacing, thinking about it, I’m smiling.

Every story has to be defined in its distance away from the classic mythical hero. Realism, slice of life stuff, moral gray areas — these sorts of stories are pretty far from that hero mythology, though you can often pick out pieces of it in the choices made (or made in the wrong direction). Life is grayer than the hero myth — real, absolute heroes are are pretty rare. This can make them more extraordinary in a lot of ways.

But this project is pretty darned close to mythical heroism. And it’s fun to play with those ideas, change them around, present them in interesting ways. BEND and break stereotypes, but clothe the familiar in different costumes. That’s what I’m trying to do here.

Anyway, it’s fun. But it’s hard fun, which is my favorite kind.

Def Leopard

October 27th, 2007Blog0 comments

So I installed Leopard on my machines. I’m a frequent early adopter. El Jobso comes out with something, I’m there in line.

Speaking of which, I got a free t-shirt.

A word of caution to potential upgraders: BACK UP YOUR STUFF. The upgrade went flawlessly on my laptop, but on my desktop it nerfed my hard drive. If I hadn’t backed up my stuff beforehand, all my precious pictures, iTunes music, and Fraggle Rock fan fiction would have been annihilated.

As it went, Leopard demanded that I zap and reformat my HD for no apparent reason. After doing so the installer went on its merry way. I had to re-install my apps and recopy all my stuff onto my machine, but the speed increase is worth it. Also it makes it easier to organize my pics of Spock visually (using the new cover flow file viewing feature) — now I have folders for: A) Single eyebrow raised, B) Hand sign only, C) Both.

Spaces (the virtual desktop thing) is really great. You know how my screen is often cluttered with twenty applications open at once? Now I can have four screens each with five applications on it. You can also have “The Boss Screen” to make your wife think that you’re busily working on your home budget while you play Civilization IV.

All in all an extremely worthy upgrade. The Finder and Safari feel much faster. Time Machine is very useful (though requires an external hard drive). It all makes me wonder what’s up for Mac OS 10.6.

Short Stories

October 26th, 2007Blog0 comments

Here are some really great short stories you can read online for free. Each of these is either a mind bending gem or says something holy about the human spirit. Enjoy.

The Bet by Anton Chekhov — A man makes a wager over whether he can keep himself imprisoned, trading years of his life for money.

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison — A super computer torments the last surviving humans on planet earth.

The Last Question by Isaac Asimov — Throughout the eons the same question is posed to a computer, finally resulting in an interesting answer.

Three Questions by Leo Tolstoy — A fairly good explanation on what to do with yourself.

What You Pawn I Will Redeem by Sherman Alexie — A homeless Indian loses everything and finds something powerful. One of my favorite short stories of all time.

If you have an addition to make to this list, please send it to me!

Brandy Alexander

October 26th, 2007Blog0 comments

I have gotten word from all the news that’s fit to print that Muji is coming to NYC in full force. This is good news for people that don’t like to be walking advertisements for corporate structures.

I really like the idea of products with no branding on them. From what I gather at their web site, you can construct your own pens. Choose a casing (aluminum, translucent plastic, rubber grip), type of ink, and assemble it yourself. Functionality and quality are a lot more important to me than branding. I think I’d actually pay more for a higher quality brandless item.

I think the older you get, the less you need your identity to be defined by what you’re wearing. This can lead to some serious unintentional fashion slip-ups, but as long as you watch yourself, it can be pretty liberating. Plus a person shouldn’t be defined by what they wear — it should be reversed. Their character should define their style.

But there are also some moments when nothing else will do but a poop hat. (A tie-in here overheard from The Sopranos: “He shits on our heads and then he wants us to thank him for the hat?!”)

American Tectonics

October 25th, 2007Blog0 comments

So the buzz today is all about Mac OS X Leopard. The big thing for me is Time Machine, the back-yo-ass-up application that makes it easy to CYA. I use a timed backup system (.Mac’s appropriately named “Backup”) but it’s a little cumbersome as far as these things go. I have files going back to 1995 and I carry them all with me just in case I find an idea or method for doing something way in the past. The grand total of everything I’ve written and all the supporting materials (emails, backups, previous drafts of documents, graphics, etc.) tops off at about 1 gig. I wonder how big the total will be when I croak.

Goatberg has already given the OS update his stamp of approval; his only big complaint is the translucent menu bar. Hopefully there’ll be a slider added to System Preferences to fix that. As much as I like my desktop image of The She-Hulk in a bikini, I don’t need to be able to see it through the menu.

Here is my new favorite Asian American entertainment analysis blog. BOOM!

I recommend going to this ODC show on Saturday night at the Westside Eclectic in Santa Monica. Some very funny stuff has been coming out of there lately — it is self-described as “hit or miss”, but they hit much more often than they miss. If comedy were a game of Battleship, they would have sunk my battleship. More information here.

ODC is composed of several of my esteemed colleagues: Ray Lai and Matt Hill, who consistently bring it (“it” being something between “the funk” and being “crunked up”) more than any ethnically diverse duo since Michael Jackson paired up with Paul McCartney in 1983; also there is Randall Park (aka “the Randoggy”), and Dwayne Perkins, a black man we can all agree upon — much like Will Smith. In addition there is Rick Lee, a Chinese man we can all agree upon — much like Ming Tsai. God damn can that guy cook. And I’m not talking about Ming. HEY-OHHH!