At C2E2. Got my GLNG #16 signed by Arron Kuder. Had lunch at a really great new food vendor at the con, called Ambrosia. It was quite good if not a little expensive. At least I won’t be starving by dinner time.
61° Mostly Cloudy
2401 S Indiana Ave, Chicago, Illinois, United States
I’ve attended a few church services in my days, I go mostly at others requests or because it’s important to go to be kind to others – like funerals and such. Every time I go, it always appears to be a catholic service that I end up attending. As a pagan in a candy-flavored protestant shell the catholic services are hilarious. Mostly I equate catholics with aerobics. Get up, sit down, back up, back down, now kneel! kneel! kneel! Back up! Back down! Quick quick! It’s good for my joints.
I do pay attention to the sermons and to a lot of the crufty stuffings that surround these rituals. The church has a kind of fantastic structure – it’s like ossification. What at one point was very flexible has over time accumulated the calcium of dogma and habit and hardened into an almost mindless progression. It’s structured so durably to argue that if you go frequently, you probably have a church-going reflex established in your nervous system. You hear a certain turn of phrasing and bam, you’re standing upright. That sort of thing.
The sermons however still give a hint of that old flexibility. But even still, much of the sermons I hear orbit the same dull white dwarf star. They seem stuck, constantly beating on a dead horse – the dead horse of sin. It’s something that’s remarkable and fills me with uncomfortable awkward feelings. It’s a preoccupation that has been hashed so much that it’s way beyond cliché. What if the sermon wasn’t about sin but about everything else. Everything but being evil and bad and worthy of only gods punishment. How about a sermon on grace. On tolerance. On feeding a starving person because being a good person feels good. How about if we give satan, hell, sin, and judgement a vacation?
I’ve noticed this and it concerns me, but I keep my mouth shut because the last thing anyone wants when soaking in their dogma is some chatterbox asking awkward questions. There is a problem here though, and it touches on such bombastically goofy concepts like original sin. We are born corrupt and evil, sinful, right from the get-go. Infant sinners. How can anyone win? There is no win condition! There is just this dreadful plodding through life. There is no chance to lose anything because you’re doomed from the start. The catholics and the christians in general would now reflexively vomit up Jesus Christ as their big-red-mystery-button. He died to deliver us all from evil and sin and blah blah blah. I doubt the entire crucifixion story as a inaccurate batch of hokum. Yeah, he got nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be if we all just got along, but then he died – then they put him away and then he was resurrected and went off in a blaze of glory. That seems too convenient and tidy to me. It’s too neat, too tied up and packaged with the delightful brown-paper wrapper of hope. Dead as a doornail, laid out, prayed over by a handful of believers and then poof! Back to life!
Even medically that seems silly. What’s more accurate? How about if he was in shock from blood loss, maybe in a coma? To someone 2000 years ago, with the medical skills of a sea sponge someone who didn’t move and looked all pale and tragic was obviously dead. He popped back to life, it was his miracle. His last miracle in fact. So, worship this fellow who utterly failed to stay dead. Or, he recovered from shock, recovered from his coma, got up in the middle of the night, and wandered off. I bet he wandered off, claimed he was someone else, and led an entire full life and died of old age with someone he loved, and here’s something that really will freak out christians – he might just as well have had kids. Daddy Christ. Why not? What’s more plausible? That a man dies and then pops back to life and is God on Earth or rather recovers from shock and a coma, wakes up, wanders off, has more of his life story play out and dies of old age?
Now now, don’t upset the christians. They don’t like this sort of talk. What do they like? They like pain. They like doom. They like agony. Talk talk talk all about sin and death and doom and hate and God being disgusted with us and how we should be ashamed for our sentience. What a head trip. And yes, Adam eating the Apple from the Tree of Knowledge and being cast out of the Garden of Eden. If that isn’t a thinly veiled allegory for developing enough awareness to become sentient I don’t know what is. So what’s the point? Stay stupid. Stay asleep. Be ashamed of your sentience. Really, do your level best to bury the fact that you are a vital thinking knowing being and remain in your half-asleep permanent walking slumber. Eat, breed, worship, die. In the end, feel like a wretch for living your life and being told that you won’t ever be worthy – except that if you accept some stranger (yay for Jesus!) into your life, you’ve got that Golden Ticket to Willy Wonkas great chocolate factory in the sky. Talk about endless constant reinforcement. Your only hope is the fellow selling hope by the seashore, he’s Jesus, and he’s everywhere. Except you know, when you are living your life, you act like a beast because that’s what is expected of you. Be mean, brutish, hateful and spiteful. You might as well since you’re a sinner. If there is no talk about being good, no talk about maybe being honestly worthy of God’s love, no freedom from the endless oppression of original sin which is dumped on you at Chruch every Sunday, and the really warped part? You feel guilty for not going! What a knotted pair of knickers this is. You go to be reminded just how awful you truly are, and if you don’t go, you feel guilty for not going – to hear what an awful person you were born as!
Imagine what Church could be like without all this heavy baggage. No hocus pocus, no fairy tales, just a weekly reminder that we are born good, born pure, born innocent. That we should celebrate our sentience and that we should champion enlightenment and seek ascension. That we have an innate ability to transcend wretchedness and awfulness – we can be good people, we can be good to each other, we. can. be. good.
Then before you know it, if you aren’t paying too close attention to how things are unfolding you look up and see that you’ve become a buddhist, or even worse, a jain.
I think the world could use less christianity, less Jesus, less of this oppressive spiritual baggage and more of what comes naturally from within each of us. We don’t have to be awful.
We can be good.
If you were to judge your favorite book by its cover, would you still read it?
My favorite book is “What Dreams May Come” by Richard Matheson. The cover art for the book is muted and features a man standing before a doorway in the sky. The words, the art, it’s hard for me to answer this prompt because I’ve read this book and I know I love it. I think that it would engage me even if I had never read it before. It would be better to judge a book I haven’t read and then read it and see if the judgement of the cover matched the experience.
I will say that a book that I saw by the cover, which was George Nader’s Chrome did intrigue me and I judged the book by the cover, at least positively and after I read it I was rewarded with a great experience. So in that case, judging a book by it’s cover, even if it wasn’t my favorite worked out for the best.
There are book covers that, lets face it, are awful. If I had to judge the Wheel of TIme series by it’s cover art I would just yawn myself to sleep. I wouldn’t be interested in any of it because I’d think it was a time travel story told by steampunk amish. Thankfully I was exposed to the books before I got a look at the covers and found myself loving the series despite it’s rather lame cover art.
I hate that books sell by their shiny cover art and not as much by their merits. Perhaps that’s something that eBooks can address as those, like the ones gathered from Project Gutenberg lack cover art, letting the text stand on it’s own for good or ill.
I really would like Apple to come out with a iPad Mini with Retina display. I’m quite tired of this Nook HD. It’s not very user-friendly and definitely not me-friendly. I don’t want to take a hammer to the device but when I use it, I sort of do.
So I was online to a site that lets you browse various fan-written fiction stories and they have a feature where you can download epub files, so I did so and saved it to my Dropbox. Then I went into Dropbox app on my Nook HD and went to go look for it. The Wifi on the Nook HD is a flaky pile of junk so that took way longer than it should have. Once I found the file I wanted I downloaded it to my Nook because the only other way to get it in there is to pop the MicroSD card, root around for a universal adapter and then put it in that way. That’s annoying, I’d much rather just be able to tap and download, like I would with an iPad Mini.
I downloaded it from my Dropbox and it ended up somewhere in my Nook’s own storage, which I hate to use, I much prefer my MicroSD plugged into the Nook instead, but there is no way to tell it where you want it to store the files. So I had to find another app called OpenExplorer which has an awful interface but lets you move files around the Nook.
Then the Nook library was confused about where I put that file. Every time I went to go look for it and tap on what it found, I’d be sent to the Wifi activation screen, where I would turn it on (why?) and then nothing. Nothing more than that. When I went back to the search and tapped on my file, it told me “File is not present.” and that was that.
I’ve never been happy with the Nook HD user interface. I bought it because it was cheap and supported Barnes & Nobles but really I think I would have been better off getting an iPad Mini. I regret this Nook HD. It could be so much better if only the B&N User Interface wasn’t so fascist. That’s what it really is. B&N doesn’t trust anyone with anything so they make it impossible to use beyond the B&N Book Experience. I don’t want all my ebooks at B&N, I’ve got thousands of ePub files all on my own – could I upload them and locker them at B&N? Of course not. That’s what the MicroSD card is for. So what value does the B&N store have for me? Little.
So is there any way I could get ePubs from Project Guternberg? Nope. I have to find some other way to get them, like on my iPad and then use Dropbox and OpenExplorer to… it’s way too much work. I’m tired even thinking about it.
So, if and when Apple decides to sell a iPad Mini Retina I’ll put all my Nook stuff on eBay and save up for the iPad Mini Retina. At least iOS respects me and I don’t feel like a criminal trying to cajole Android to give an inch.
I still don’t know why people think Android is any good. Wretched system.
“What role does music play in your life?”
There is two kinds of music for me. The first kind is filler music. The clever hooks and poppy nothingness that I play all the time on my Spotify account while I’m at work. I keep it low and quiet and it helps to pass the time. The music is good, just because it’s meaningless doesn’t mean it’s not pleasant. It would do a disservice to declare who and what is “poppy nothingness” so I just won’t. If you think your art is deep and moving and transcendental then so do I. Whatever floats your boat. But…
There is another kind of music. The fundamental delight that it brings is beyond description. You just have to sit back and let it wash over you, changing you, as the tingles rage along your body when you hear the music that changes your life. I don’t know what thematic musical styles do it for me, but I know it when I feel it. If I’m listening to music and I feel that tingle – it doesn’t happen a lot, but when it does it’s unmistakable, then I know. I place all of this sort of music into a special playlist on Spotify and when I want to be agape with musical wonder I double-click on the playlist and shuffle. It doesn’t matter what track comes up first, they all do it for me, each and every time they play.
I used to think of music as the frilly doilies of life. Easily ignored and really compelling for doily collectors, for which I am not one. But over time, and since I discovered that some music brings the tingle, some music is more than others. I would say, much like books, going fishing for good music can lead you some truly excellent catches.
“This week’s Mind the Gap: How do you prefer to read, with an eReader like a Kindle or Nook, or with an old school paperback in hand?”
Ever since I laid my hands on my first tablet, which was my first generation iPad from Apple I’ve been a fan of digital reading. I’ve moved on as my preferences shifted. The iPad is still a great platform for comic books but not really so much for long-form reading of eBooks. I used to use a Nook Simple Touch but the side buttons started to fail and it lacked the backlight that I like to have at night when I read so I don’t have to upset Scott with stray lights so I can read. I’ve since switched to a Nook HD, using the money I got as a gift last Christmas. I have to admit that the Nook HD is a wonderful device for reading. I don’t really use the Nook service from B&N because I have all the books I want to read as not-online ePub files, and B&N doesn’t let you put your own files in their system so I load everything into the MicroSD card and then open the books from that memory device instead, all on the Nook HD. The key for me is the weight. The iPad is just too heavy to keep a hold of for an extended period of time. I thought I would be up for the iPad Mini, but my original idea that I could be fine using my iPad 3 with its Retina display and be okay with an iPad Mini which doesn’t have Retina turned out to be the stumbling block for me. The Nook HD has a Retina-like display and is only a few percent heavier than the iPad Mini.
I recently had a bit of irritation about books. I wanted to read “A Memory Of Light” by Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson and TOR only released the book as a hardcover. I understand why they did that, but I didn’t like it. I want to read books on my Nook HD and I don’t appreciate being meaninglessly inconvenienced just to satisfy the publishers designs. So I just dealt with it and hauled around the giant block of wood until I was done reading it. I do not like big books like that, they are heavy, bulky, and their bindings always take a beating when I’m reading and I just don’t know why. I’m not mean to books, but almost invariably they will become frayed or damaged. None of that happens on my Nook HD. I can carry it easily anywhere I like, it keeps my place, I can use highlighting and set bookmarks and I don’t have to haul around a heavy chunk of wood to do it. I think what upsets me most about the last Wheel Of Time book is that it was such a meaningless bit of inconvenience. That book started out being on a word processor. It started life as a digital file, then it was printed and bound and sold. So, the wood came out first, but in reality they could have if they really wanted to just dress the file that went to the printer up as an ePub and sold that instead. But no, they insisted that the wood beat the eBook. I don’t think the eBook will even go on sale until April, while the wood has been out since January. It pays honor and respect to wood, but irritates the consumer. I vowed that after Wheel of Time I wouldn’t read another book that wasn’t available as an eBook edition. I don’t need pictures or any of the surrounding miscellany, just give me the text. I’ll set my own font and font size and margins and page backgrounds.
So, onwards and upwards with eBooks. It shouldn’t really concern B&N, as I do enjoy reading my Nook HD there and it’s at my local B&N where I would go to talk to people who know books about books. The only thing I wouldn’t do is buy wood from them any longer. I would still buy books though. eBooks. Sometimes people mention that libraries can do eBooks, but that’s a joke. Sure, a library might have eBook editions available for lending, but they only have two “files” to lend out and a waiting list that is months if not years long. So, for the libraries I can wait until they get around to making sense. eBook editions for lending might as well be infinite, it’s not like the files themselves take any actual resources at all – just organized electrons is all. So, much like books themselves, at first they are valuable and rare, but over time the eBook editions will be just as common as their woody counterparts and lending them out through libraries will end up being just as plentiful and easy. Or at least so we can hope. In the meantime I can buy what I want and have the benefit of not having to haul around a big heavy chunk of wood.
“A genie has granted your wish to build your perfect space for reading and writing. What’s it like?”
I’ve got the room, which is the library in the house I currently own. Right now this room is a makeshift guest bedroom with a library that has accumulated along the walls. There is a great design for a modular stackable bookshelf that really intrigues me and I imagine the library would feature this along the walls, improving on the current cheap particle-board bookcases that we currently use. I would also build these into the built-in closet in this room and take the doors off of it. In the center I would place an overstuffed leather chair with an ottoman for the legrests and behind it a floor lamp with multiple lights attached to a central body, much like this lamp. If the room was just a little bit larger I would also like a old-fashioned secretary desk to do writing and composition. I’ve written before about my affection for mixing up the traditional and the technological.
Truth to be told, if I got my hands on a Genie I’d likely not ask for these things, but instead relief from debt.
Influenza is a wildfire that is blazing through this state and my office. Many of my coworkers are out sick and at first what I thought was just the standard Influenza might be a few other things. WMU, through the health center and ultimately through the CDC pushed the 2012 Influenza vaccine shot which we later popularly discovered didn’t apparently take into account the strain that is blazing through Michigan and our office. I have talked to a few people who characterized this new flu as “Flu Type A”and I don’t know where they got that moniker from. I also heard that another virus, the Norovirus was blazing across the US, sourced from Sydney Australia. Are these tag-team illnesses or are we mistaking the Norovirus for the Influenza? For me it’s just idle speculation as the practical upshot is, I’m slowly being surrounded by sick people and eventually my resistance will falter, something will happen – either a surface I thoughtlessly touch or some aerosolized agent that I somehow come into contact with.
This has got me thinking about all the popular culture illnesses. Nothing as awe-inspiring as Captain Trips from Stephen King’s stories, but even movies like Hot Zone all lend themselves certain weight to the idea of control, quarantine, and the eventual lapse in vigilance. I haven’t gotten sick (knock on wood) and for that I’m very thankful, but something is knocking on the door and I don’t know if I’m doing enough to protect myself. Much of what I do is probably just a placebo, taking extra doses of Vitamin C, a dose of Vitamin D-3 (which I need anyways, and it probably doesn’t do anything else) drinking lots of hot tea (hot water can’t hurt) and regular drinks at night. Nothing comically appropriate like getting piss drunk every night, but a wee something regularly, wine, liquor, cider, beer. Does it help? It’s not hurting, so why not?
Beyond the things I eat and drink, vigilance visits me in what I do at work and at home. I often times worry that I’m starting to develop a germ-phobia laced with a touch of obsessive compulsive disorder. I know at least somewhat clinically that this activity of washing my hands before I eat (and sometimes afterwards) is only really a mental illness if I am paralyzed because I cannot proceed without cleaning my hands or it somehow impacts my quality of life. There is a small part of me that is concerned that all this handwashing, in hot water, for twenty seconds using rather aggressive soaps is just hastening my seasonal skin issues on my hands. The colder the weather, the drier the climate the more dry and cracked and bloody my hands get. My hands and my legs bear the worst of it, but my legs get a respite as I have them covered up almost all the time, where my hands don’t and pay the price. All this handwashing is just pushing them even harder. At what point will I have that breakpoint of diminishing returns? When will washing my hands mean nothing if I’m bleeding from the cracks from the angry skin on the back of my hands? What to do to cope? I’ve decided that Dove Soap’s line that caters to men, with their moisturizer as part of the soap may be my best effort. I’ve also got a pump bottle of moisturizing sanitizer however as I discovered tonight, sanitizer doesn’t touch Norovirus. Not that I’m really convinced that Norovirus is chewing through the office, but if it isn’t, then it’s on the heels of Influenza Type A.
This very story has played out before. It plays out whenever there are communicable outbreaks and the natural question pops up – at what point does it make more sense to just not go to work and expose yourself? At what point do you stop leaving the house? I laughingly call it the Decameron moment as the people in that book, in order to pass the time recount stories to each other and remain away from the city to avoid the plague. I can’t deny the pleasure of reading the Decameron back when I was in college and if it weren’t for the two other books that I’m currently hip-deep in reading, I would take it right up as it’s applicability in this particular situation is undeniable.
So tomorrow I’m going to have to come up with ways to protect myself at work. Bringing my own soap maybe to start would be okay, paper towels are still the best way to dry my hands as we don’t have any hot-air blowers at work. As for surfaces, it’s going to have to be Lysol and Isopropyl Alcohol as I can’t risk using Clorox on the surfaces at work. I know that Lysol and Alcohol will not likely damage the things at work, but I’m pretty sure that Clorox, even diluted would likely have unintended consequences. I will have to have faith that what I have, plus my nearly OCD handwashing and keeping my distance from people is enough. I have been dallying with the notion of pushing SupportPress down my clients figurative throats and only rendering help over Apple Remote Desktop in order to zero out the touching-of-surfaces vector of possible sickness. I haven’t gotten there yet, but it is something I am considering. I sometimes wonder if anyone has done a pathology survey in regards to electronic forms of communication and that impact on disease spread? What happens if we all switch to video links, phones, and email and shun contact with each other even more than we already have? In a lot of ways, each office could be it’s own Decameron, with people holed up, trying to avoid getting sick and passing the time.
I feel excellent. There is nothing wrong now, but it’s coming. The worst part is not knowing, or rather suspecting that something you can’t see is lying in wait for you and at the very best could make you miserable and at the very worst, kill you outright. Another bit of consideration is what the break-off point is for workplaces all around when a majority of staff is actually sick. At what point is going to work and accomplishing nothing cost more than just staying at home, claiming that you are sick when really, you’re just holed up waiting for the illness to burn past you?
“If you could read a book containing all that has happened and will ever happen in your life, would you? If you choose to read it, you must read it cover to cover.”
The answer for me is quite simple. I would leave that particular book on the shelf and I would leave it be for years and years while I lived, moved, loved, got sick, got well, and enjoyed a nice long life. Then when I am very old and very tired I will sit back with an obnoxiously expensive drink, put on some Mozart, sit back, pull it off the shelf and make it a page-a-day until I got to the end. Then I would put the book back and enjoy a life well-lived and the serenity that comes with robbing death of his surprise ending.
I wrote about this years ago when I first started reading Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series of books. One of the main characters of the story is Matrim Cauthon and he plays a central role throughout the entire story. I’m currently reading “Memory of Light” and just finished a rather well-written section early in this book featuring Mat.
That section got me to thinking about an old LiveJournal post I wrote all those years ago. Thanks to Spotify I can embed the music right in this post:
After reading the lyrics and thinking about Mat I really think this track from Coldplay has Mat nailed down pretty well. I thought everyone else might enjoy it as well.