Tablesaw!

As Always, There Is Much Happening

Wed, 07 Jan 2026 03:08:03 GMT

And my desire to condense it into an update prevents the update itself.

Since it's the last thing I wrote about here, inbox zero, combined with a switch from Google to Proton for mail services has increased my enjoyment of mail and made newsletters more readable. I'd been following some good writers, now I actually read them. And the reading is inspiring, moreso than microblogging.

Along the lines of microblogging, I am more rigorous about writing on my Letterboxd, even though I was delinquent for the beginning of the year. I'm trying to get together various retrospectives for 2025, including my top new releases.

I also recently participated in a music mix/swap where I took inspiration from my movie-going. There's a youtube playlist and explanation list.

I'm trying not to commit to too much in the new year where I am full of restless energy, but some other thoughts for 2026:

Accept the poor image
Dispel the illusion of explanatory depth
Barf forth apocalyptica

comments

Vid Con

Sun, 07 Sep 2025 23:26:28 GMT

Following up on the last post, Inbox Zero has been working well. I cleared out my main inbox back to about mid 2019, which appears to be the time that I arbitrarily marked everything in my inbox as read. When I started I had over twenty thousand unread conversations, and I finished with a Trash folder containing over twenty-seven thousand items. I'm now undertaking the same process on my real-name account, and it's going well.

And it's been a pretty good low-effort project to work on while dealing with my first case of COVID-19.

Last Thursday night (August 28), I was feeling unusually antsy regarding my sinuses so I decided to take a COVID test to put my mind at ease. It did not do that. Instead, I woke up Psyche and we figured out how we were going to deal with isolation. I logged into work to tell them that I'd tested positive, but the symptoms were minor, and I would not be working on Friday. I then proceeded to develop a raging fever for the next 24 hours or so. A few days later, Psyche tested positive despite our best efforts, and we have spent the rest of the week muddling through major fatigue coupled with relatively minor flu symptoms.

There is, of course, no good time to be laid out for over a week, but it was particularly rough because we had been the main people organizing the logistics for the 74th wedding anniversary of Psyche's grandparents, an event scheduled to take place last Sunday. So she had to spend a frantic few days collecting all of the remaining tasks and assigning them to various members of her family, all while having to sit at home while everyone enjoyed the party we threw.

As for contact-tracing, I believe I was exposed when visiting with Psyche's other grandmother, who had been sick (untested) earlier that week; and then I exposed Psyche before testing positive myself. Given the way our positive test results seem to be hanging on longer than our main symptoms, it's not too hard to believe that Grammy was still shedding virus when I visited. I didn't spend much time with her directly, but the windows were generally closed in the house.

It's been a week and a half of sleeping and hydrating and then doing it again but reversed.

In less plaguey developments, I'm looking forward to this year's Beyond Fest which will be announcing its full slate this week. So far, the only screenings announced or for a retrospective of Guillermo del Toro, and I have tickets to see his early works (Cronos, The Devil's Backbone, and Mimic) and a screening of Pan's Labyrinth. I will also be in New York at the beginning of October for a work trip and am making the time to see Reeves and Winters in Waiting for Godot before flying back home.

I just need a negative test soon...

comments

Zeroing In

Thu, 28 Aug 2025 08:13:28 GMT

I'm idly trying to do an Inbox Zero type of thing, which is rough after something like two decades of ignoring it. But as terrible as it email is, it is at least reliable, with the ability to build one's own algorithms in even the most hostile of programs. It'll work, if I can work it.

So many of the writers who could have been bloggers are turning to email-list congregators as their post-Twitter platform. Much of it is for ease of use, but I've seen at least one person turn to a no-cost Patreon subscription primarily as a way to prevent AI scrapers from finding their writing.

I'm willing to consider an RSS reader, I guess, but every time I look into it, I still see other people looking for something that'll do what they want. And in my heart, I know that this is something that can probably help me greatly at this point. My inbox is a locus for attention that I do believe I can master, and I want my attention to be my own.

comments

The Usual

Wed, 20 Aug 2025 02:40:15 GMT

Sometimes I think about "Earl Grey, hot."

When TNG was airing, I wasn't drinking or ordering tea yet. Now that I do, I find myself having to make clarifications about tea that I wouldn't usually expect, like clarifying that I want a chai latte in the morning to be hot, even if it's summer. But I mostly think about it, because when I make tea for Psyche, she does not want it hot, just warm.

The electric kettle heats the water to a good steeping point, just below boiling, and after a few minutes that's where I expect it too be. It's probably too hot for my own good, but I still take a few sips, quickly, to get the first taste. Then as I work, and periodically forget it, it cools more and more, and my sips get larger and larger. If I get absorbed too much, and it reaches near room temperature, I usually just shotgun the remainder so I can make another cup.

Psyche will wait for the tea to cool down to warm before she starts drinking. And that can take a while. I've taken to steeping her tea a little short of ideal, then dropping some ice after removing the leaves, so that she can get a head start.

In Star Trek's future, I imagine that tea is replicated the way Psyche likes it. Imagine it brewed hot, but then already cooled down to a pleasant warmth, for easy drinking. By default, then Starfleet officers are picking up their cups of tea brewed several minutes before it was even desired.

Picard doesn't brew his own tea (where we regularly see him onscreen), but he clearly already has a history with tea that starts too hot to drink. Why else would anyone think to order their tea hotter than drinkable, in a time where pizza never burns the roof of your mouth either? It suggests some of the family history, that in his past, at least, he was party to the manual steeping of tea and still moves to its rhythms.

comments

Weekend

Tue, 29 Apr 2025 07:12:08 GMT

I don't have time to write fully about last weekend, because I still need to catch up on sleep from the same busy weekend. We saw seven different friends groups, a comedy show, a wedding, a historic building, and rain. All told, we drove around 700 miles down and up the Pacific Coast.

I'd particularly like to write about the show, House of Gains. We've been seeing some very high-quality improv recently, and I'd like to do better at pinning that butterfly after the fact.

One small joy was that we managed to transport the pink-champagne cupcakes all the way from SLO to Los Angeles. The frosting typically doesn't travel well outside of refrigeration, but we used a system of cold packs around inverted quart-sized mason jars to make the trip. (We put a cupcake on the lid, then screwed the jar on top of it, giving the frosting and pink chocolate shaving protection for the entire car ride.) Luckily we only had to move three this way, though we might try more in the future.

I also managed to give a Christmas gift I neglected to ship last year: The first issue of a Cenobium, a Hellraiser zine from the 80s(?) which I found unexpectedly in the used section of a comic book store. (See, writing more blog posts probably would have encouraged me to do more research about it while I still had it in my possession, because I can't find much about it now.)

comments

Oh Good

Thu, 10 Apr 2025 08:03:32 GMT

I found the mobile-friendly new-entry page again. I didn't think this would be possible without it.

One grandparent-in-law is in town, with the other arriving tomorrow, so we should be getting visitors.

comments

Old Things Brought Home

Tue, 08 Apr 2025 09:02:00 GMT

Record cabinet.
Big tool chest.
Boxes of Psyche's ex's things
CRT television.
A nearly fifty-year-old pickup truck.

Things coming home in the next trip include VCR, Psyche's grandfather's paintings, and a Remington.

comments

Micro

Sat, 05 Apr 2025 23:27:01 GMT

Going to commit to microblogging here for a bit. I need to write more, with lower stakes. And Dreamwidth holdouts, these here are the lowest stakes there are. Mastodon is close, but it still seems like broadcasting.

I've gotten worse at expressing my thoughts, so I'm trying to write down more dumb thoughts. Work my way up to thoughtful.

Packing up grandparents-in-law's House this weekend. Dust allergies suck.

comments

Lesson from Work

Sat, 05 Apr 2025 08:48:25 GMT

When debugging, trust the logs. A few times recently, I've tried to understand the broken code first, and it never goes how I think it should. Only the evidence of what actually happened helps.

And thanks to the past coffee who wrote the logs!

comments

An Unexpected Weekend

Sun, 16 Jun 2024 03:07:13 GMT

Psyche and I hoped that this weekend would be a relaxing one of sleeping in, resting, eating good food, and maybe putting together a bookcase or two. That is not what is happening.

On Friday morning, Psyche got a call that her step-grandfather had died. We knew he'd gone to the hospital the day before and we assumed that it was related, but that turned out not to be the case. He had gone to the ER, because of elevated white blood cells, but after several tests, everything seemed to be fine and he was sent home. He spent the morning in high spirits, and collapsed quietly from something sudden.

Part of moving to Santa Maria was to be closer to Psyche's family, but we didn't expect to be called for something so dire so soon. When we arrived, we relieved one of her aunts to take care of some more business, and Psyche and I were there when the undertakers arrived to remove the body, and we spent most of the day there with her grandmother. Today, more aunts and Psyche's mother arrived.

Eventually we got the chance to show many of them around the house. This is earlier than we'd expected. We are still sans couches and other entertainment furniture, but we did get to show everyone around, and they loved to our tiny pets. It also gave them a space to gather and discuss things away from Psyche's grandmother, which I think was a welcome break.

Right now, I think we're all trying to keep Psyche's grandmother socially occupied so the home doesn't feel empty, but I imagine it's worse at night as more people leave. We'll see how things go in the coming weeks.

comments

Cat-Approved

Sun, 09 Jun 2024 03:59:38 GMT

Between evacuating the old house and getting into the new house, pet restrictions on our housing options meant that we didn't have our pets with us when we initially moved in. Our dog Bark Lee was with us for most of the month before that, but our cat Pyewacket had to stay with relatives.

Bark Lee settled in pretty fast, bu Pye has had a harder time. She spent most of her first day hiding behind the door in the upstairs bathroom, then spent most of the past two days in the closet of my wife's office. But she's finally taking some time to explore the house, and was perching on the edge of my table just now, surveying the remaining boxes in my office.

There's still a lot to do in this office. I directed a lot of boxes here with plans of showing a lot of books and CDs that had languished in the garage in our last house. But we're low on shelving, so right now they're just sitting in the closet in boxes. The rest of these boxes are the accretions of old tech that we have carried with us. I'm hoping to take some time to carefully scrub them for disposal if I can't repurpose them.

Tomorrow is Pride in the new city, and we're hoping to meet some new friends.

comments

Moving on North

Thu, 06 Jun 2024 06:33:57 GMT

With a desk, Wi-Fi, and a bed, I guess it's safe to say that I'm moved into my new house.

Sorry if this is news to you (whether because you didn't know I was moving or you didn't know I was updating this blog).

I've moved outside of L.A. for the first time since college, into a new larger house on the Central Coast of California. It's making me feel isolated, but moreso it's putting into stark relief an isolation I've been feeling since the pandemic. It's rough thinking about being so far away from my friends in the city, but I was already seeing them in person only rarely. It's making me think consciously about creating new social ties, and strengthening old ones.

Hopefully a few things stick. Maybe blogging will be one of them.

comments

Nitrate

Sun, 03 Mar 2024 04:08:09 GMT

The last two weeks, Psyche and I visited the Egyptian Theater in Hollywood to take part in their Nitrate Festival. The Egyptian is one of very few theaters that is allowed to project nitrate prints, and they haven't done so for a few years because they were closed for renovations before and after the pandemic. We saw two Hitchcock films, Rebecca and SpellboundRebecca, an archivist from the George Eastman Museum talked about nitrate prints. There were some things I already knew. I learned how vivid the images can be when I saw Casablanca, and I learned how the silver emulsion can catch the light when I saw Laura. The archivist stressed how because nitrate prints are generally stronger, the images on the print are usually closer to the negative retaining subtler "colors," while later printings start to develop higher and higher contrast. This was incredibly apparent when watching Rebecca on what was one of the first printings of the film, previous in the private collection of producer David O. Selznic. It was unbelievable how good it looked for preserved (not restored) film that was about 80 years old.

Spellbound wasn't as impressive, either in the print or the content, but the Dali sequences looked really good, as did Gregory Peck. I try to get the preview screen whenever I see something at the American Cinematheque, but I missed the one for Rebecca. Here's the screen for Spellbound.

(I needed to post an image hosted on DW in preparation of talking about it with dedalus_1947 before seeing Dune: Part Two at the Chinese Theater.)

comments

Updates

Mon, 22 May 2023 23:40:21 GMT

I just came back from a memorial for another lost friend, which is something that tends to remind me that blogs exist. and I should type into them. But frankly, I don't want to make this an aperiodic record of the grief of my life, and frankly there's enough going on to talk about first.

I was laid off with less than a week's notice and no severance back in February. We had enough savings to last the stretch between Psyche's job and unemployment, but I'm glad I have a new position starting in June. It's going to be more full-stack web development at a healthcare startup, so the transition should be easy.

I've been playing Tears of the Kingdom since it came out. I've been moving slowly on my own game, though I've stepped in to play lots of Psyche's game. I'm really enjoying being back in this careful game design. I've played a lot of Genshin Impact since finishing Breath of the Wild, and it's easier to forget how much more subtle the design of the Zelda games are.

I started reading The Book of the New Sun on the plane while traveling to the aforementioned memorial, and I made it pretty far into The Shadow of the Torturer already. The first few chapters had a really gentle prose voice that I enjoyed. Of course, the reason I picked it up is because it's going to be the next subject of the podcast Homestuck Made This World, so I know there's going to be some . . . shenanigans; and I think they are starting to manifest more strongly. I'm hoping I stay in the groove as the novels continue.

comments

A Vigil for Psyche

Sat, 27 Jun 2020 12:38:10 GMT

Forgive me another extended interval. Obviously, a great many things have been happening that I have not written about here, but I found myself staring at the Twitter app and knowing that it was not the appropriate place for how I was feeling. And so I return, because in a few hours, we are saying good bye to our dear cat Psyche.*

I met Psyche eight years ago, when when I still didn't like cats. I moved in with Psyche five years ago, when I tolerated cats (and had a better allergy solution). I don't know when I'd say I started loving cats, but it was somewhere before Psyche got permission to sleep in the bedroom, reversing my demands for a dander-free sleeping area. I've gotten so used to it that I'm not even cranky when I wake up to pick one of her whiskers from my whiskers.

I've known Psyche for a while now, but my wife has known her for twenty years, more than half her life, since before college and through several relationships. I'm barely a blip in her life compared to Psyche. Before I knew her, Psyche had a life as an outdoor cat on a farm, hunting birds and other critters. Psyche was friends (maybe frenemies) with Boo, whom my wife adopted one year after Psyche, and who passed away herself last year.

I take it back, I do know when I realized I loved cats. I came home from work one day, and Psyche came up to me immediately and started crying out stressed, and I instantly knew exactly what she was saying. We'd had contractors in earlier that day, and though we'd told them to mind the cats, one of them was careless and Boo had wandered into the hall of the apartment building. Psyche knew she was out, and we looked for her that night. We found her in a staircase not that long after, and everything felt right again.

It wasn't long after Boo passed that Psyche would start crying out when she was alone. And around then is when we made sure she wasn't alone at night any more.

I knew Psyche as a cat who liked to do things her way, on her schedule. She'd have a few spots she liked to stay for hours: on our bed, on the guest bed, on the northernmost seat at the kitchen table, and on the back of the couch (almost always on top of the remote control). And she loved laps. There were times when I'd work from home with my computer in my lap, and she'd sit on both of my wrists. And we'd stay like that as long as all I had to do was keep typing.

We've known that her kidneys weren't doing well for over a year, and she had a battle with pancreatitis where we were giving her subcutaneous fluids every day. But she rallied strongly, and was as stubborn and talkative as ever. ( CW: animal sickness ) We've arranged for a vet to make a housecall so that we can say goodbye to her where she's comfortable.

Tonight, we opened a can of tuna just for her, and she lapped up the water inside. We took her into the backyard and let her wander a few steps, then my wife held her in the red and blue floodlights
until she got cold. My wife and Psyche are in bed together now, sharing a final night together. I'm going to join soon, but I won't sleep. I'm going to let the sun rise and finish the vigil and handle the arrangements. And I'm going to miss her so much.

* A while back, my wife (temptingcuriosity) chose the pseudonym "Psyche" for this blog, but all references in this post are to the cat Psyche (who was the inspiration for the nym).

comments

Covideology

Mon, 23 Mar 2020 10:09:12 GMT

Pretty boring month, right?

OK, so let's see what's been happening.

Well, I voted in the Democratic Primary on Super Tuesday. That was three weeks ago; it's the same month. I don't even have time to get into that whole mess.

On March 5, I was already starting to get anxious about what I was hearing about COVID-19. I work in a coworking space, and while I had my own office (shared with one other person), I spent a lot of time in the community kitchen, and I was starting to feel uncomfortable. I told my boss I was going to work from home starting the next day. I work at a small startup, where a few people already work remotely, but my CTO and I have tended to work closely in person. At the time, I had planned to work from home on Friday and Monday, then return for the staff meeting on Tuesday on site, to make further decisions there.

On Sunday, March 8, I saw my parents, sister, and nieces in person, for what may be the last time in a while. My oldest niece had a basketball game, and I watched with the family. Afterward, we went to Olive Garden, where we we had an alcove to ourselves and washed our hands. Later that day, I got an email from work, the CEO and CTO had decided that the whole company would be working from home. It felt good to get a head start on social distancing.

On Monday, March 9, I had tickets to see House of Games with David Mamet in person. I was pretty anxious about going, it would probably be a crowded space, but it wasn't a thing I really wanted to miss. A mishap with our cars meant that I ultimately couldn't make it, which was a bit of a relief.

My five-year wedding anniversary was on Saturday, March 14, and we'd planned a small weekend trip to Catalina. If you don't know, Catalina is a small island 26 miles off the coast of Los Angeles, easy to see when the air is clear. But it's a little isolated, the only way on or off the island is via ferry. And in the week leading up to the trip, I was increasingly anxious. Psyche wanted to go, practicing social distancing and cleaning/sanitizing as we go. I wanted to cancel, increasingly convinced that I had been exposed, and worried that symptoms would manifest while we were on the island, cutting off access to the ferry and stranding us away from our well-stocked home.

Psyche won out. She finds it easier to relax while out of the house and was more confident in our ability to stay responsibly isolated. And a somewhat rainy weekend meant the village was pretty empty, making it easy to give everyone a wide berth. On Saturday, we did a golf-cart rental to drive around the island for an hour taking in the views looking toward Long Beach. We spent a lot of time making plans for the next time we go and can do things that require closer quarters, like the mini submarine for reef viewing.

In the last week, restrictions have gotten progressively tighter, and we've avoided going out. We ordered delivery on Tuesday, which was a wonderful moment of normalcy, even if we had to tell the delivery person to leave the bag outside the door, and wait for him to leave. On a trip to our post-office box to pick up some delivered supplies, I grabbed In-N-Out on the way home (they've had a sock-day policy since before the pandemic). The PO service is going through some changes too. They're an essential business, so the can (and according to service agreements, must) stay open to receive mail, but they have contingency plans for progressively worse scenarios. I signed up for a "virtual mailbox" service, where they email pictures of all mail and packages, so we can avoid trips to pick them up unless they are critical.

We also went to Psyche's office to pick up some supplies as she's working from home now too, and on the way back, we tried to find a place along the way home to get out and breathe. But as you may have heard Angelenos who had been told that social distancing in nature was okay all headed out at the same time to many of the same places, defeating the purpose. At a usually quiet beach, we saw a small crowd of people (and possibly the remnants of a classic car show that had decided not cancel?), and as we drove along the coast, most of the vista points had a few dozen people. We did eventually find a spot with only a handful, where we could stay several yards away from the others, and the views were incredible. The rain, combined with reduced car use has kept the air cleaner than I think I've ever seen, and from Rancho Palos Verdes, I could not only see downtown Los Angeles, I could pick out individual buildings.

Today, we made a trip out to bolster our grocery supplies, particularly our fresh vegetables. We went to a local Japanese market, because there have generally been reports that businesses run by and geared towards Asian Americans have been hit with the extra damage of racism. They still seemed well stocked, but most of the stores around here seem to be doing well. Regardless, it was quiet, and it was easy to keep distance from other patrons.

For dinner, we made minestrone, and paired it with bread that Psyche baked yesterday. Both were delicious.

Some other things I've been doing:

( Movies, TV, Music, Puzzles )

Phew. What's next?

comments

Sara and the Dope

Mon, 02 Mar 2020 01:51:40 GMT

Last week I was feeling pretty terrible at the end of the week, and I was trying to figure out how to describe it to Psyche.

It was tied up a lot with the energy I invested into preparing the talk for Gallifrey One. Getting ready for a public presentation (performance) was exciting, and it got a lot of creative engines running that had been rusting for a while. For all the self-doubt and anxiety that came from putting myself on the line, it felt good to research something I found interesting, shape it into a script, iterate it, and finally present (perform) for an audience.

But afterward, I was feeling both amped up and let down. My brain was often in overdrive, and I found it hard to focus, and it was tiring. My own self-doubt crept in, and I felt at wits end to follow up the excitement from the week before. It didn't feel like a similar convention experience a few months earlier, when I ran some games at Big Bad Con, which also took preparation, but left me feeling energized and excited to do more. It felt more like the end of my time in college, when every play I directed or acted in felt like a lifeline out of despair. It was making me wonder if public performance might be hazardous to my happiness.

Psyche, noted that what I was describing was very like (in very broad terms) the actions of dopamine and serotonin. The high and drop I was describing from performance was like how dopamine acts for thrill-seekers. In contrast, serotonin was more like community and contentment. This definitely struck a chord with me. I'd felt unable to take a breath that week and relax and enjoy the sky as I often do. And I was already thinking back to my 20s, a darkness I ultimately emerged from by taking SSRIs (which keep serotonin in the system).

It's been a helpful framing for me. And something to think about as I try to do things like get in the habit of writing a blog again. The extreme highs of performance are not something that's going to go away, but having a less magical way of confronting them helps. And it helps to keep things like that in mind while trying to keep writing a blog.

comments

Gally 2020 (In the Time It Takes Me to Drink a Cup of Tea)

Fri, 21 Feb 2020 08:55:44 GMT

Last weekend, I attended the Doctor Who convention Gallifrey One for the sixth year. It was loads of fun, and I'd love to write all about it, but it's a big topic, and I've been bad at updating, so I'm going to post this blog the moment I'm done with my tea, regardless of what I left out. Maybe I'll make another post with more info, maybe not!

Gally is kind of a big deal in the Doctor Who fan world, but it's always been a little weird for Psyche and me, because it's also a local convention. On Twitter, I'm following people preparing a week in advance for intercontinental flights to spend a week in Los Angeles on vacation, but for me it's just half of my commute. In fact, for the first few years, we didn't even take Friday off to attend all three days of events.

This is also the first year that I was a part of the programming. A feature for the last few years has been a block of TARDIS talks. They're structured like academic talks, though that refers more to the approach to a topic than the occupation of the presenter. At some point the organizers described as something like a chance to talk about your favorite Doctor Who subject for fifteen minutes uninterrupted, and I took that to heart. For almost two years now, I've been obsessed with the connections between the ancient story of the Trojan War (which most people know about), the medieval story of Troilus and Cressida (which most people don't know about), and the Doctor Who story "The Myth Makers" (which pretty much no Who fans have actually seen because the BBC lost all the tapes). It's a superstorm of niche obsessions, and I finally had a chance to unleash it on the unsuspecting world (at least, the world that decided to skip the interview with Tosin Cole.

I'm hoping to put it online in some form, but the version I ended up with was mostly notes, so I need to reconstruct it. I'm thinking of putting it together as a video on YouTube, because I did some PowerPoint humor that I don't really want to give up on. Maybe set a goal to have that done by the end of the month.

The big guest was Christopher Eccleston, who was the Doctor in the first season of the rebooted show. I have big feelings about his performance, and it was really great to see him talking about his life, his art, masculinity, and vulnerability. We'd hoped to get an autograph, but the convention was overwhelmed, and we ultimately didn't want to give up most of our day to see him. But it seemed like he had a good time, so hopefully we'll get a chance to see him again.

And that's the honey-thick end of this mug of tea. Have a good night!

comments

2019 Book Resolution: Reaper Man, Dungeon Crawl Classics, Three Hearts and Three Lions

Tue, 18 Feb 2020 01:59:13 GMT

[This post has been living in my saved draft for a year, so I'm going to finish it up mostly as is.]

At the beginning of February [of 2019], one of our two cats passed away after struggling with suspected lymphoma. It was a sad and stressful time, and I decided that I was going to need to take a sharp turn away from the horror stories I'd been reading. I never put any restrictions on what kind of books to read, so in February I reread one book (Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett), read a nonfiction book (the core rulebook for Dungeon Crawl Classics, a role-playing game from Goodman Games), and read a new-to-me novel (Three Hearts and Three Lions by Poul Anderson).

( Reaper Man )

( Dungeon Crawl Classics )

( Three Hearts and Three Lions )

comments

2019 Movie Resolution: Greta

Mon, 01 Apr 2019 02:27:16 GMT

March is almost over, so, of course, it's time to talk about things I did in February!

To show my commitment to this arbitrary resolution, I went to see a movie alone after work on February 28, mostly selecting the movie by its convenience to my schedule. I knew nothing about Greta going into this movie except the director and the stars.

( Greta )

comments

2019 Book Resolution: The Ballad of Black Tom, The Dream Cycle, The Dream Quest of Vellitt Boe

Sun, 24 Feb 2019 09:00:21 GMT

As mentioned in the last post, the other part of my resolution is to read books. Any books. I haven't been reading, people; it's just been a lot of TV.

Another aspect of this resolution is that I asked for and received an e-reader for Christmas, so I want to be sure that I'm actually getting use out of it, and that it doesn't become a toy that I have just to feel more like a person who is actually reading books even when I'm not.

January was dedicated to Lovecraftiana. I read The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor LaValle and The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson (both available as part of the e-book bundle Reimagining Lovecraft: For Tor.com Novellas). In between, I read the Lovecraft stories known as the Dream Cycle, including The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath.

( The Ballad of Black Tom )

( The Dream Cycle )

( The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe )

There are two more novellas in the Tor bundle, but as we got into February, things got very stressful, so I decided to pivot away from Horror. But that'll have to wait until next month (which is, you know, a few days from now).

comments

2019 Movie Resolution: Roma, Stan and Ollie

Sun, 24 Feb 2019 02:26:29 GMT

Sheesh, it's been a year.

Not going to go into too many details right now, because I've wanted to post this specific thing for a while now, but hopefully it'll get the ball rolling (like I was hoping it would for at least three weeks).

My 2019 resolution was to watch one new movie and read one book every month. Throughout 2018, I felt that these were things that I enjoyed, but that were often getting pushed to the side when it came to finding time for things. I set a low bar (one per month) because I'm not trying to rearrange my media input, I just want to get back into building a habit of both.

In January, I saw two new movies: Roma and Stan and Ollie.

( Roma )

( Stan and Ollie )

OK. Books now.

comments

Insomnia Post

Wed, 16 Aug 2017 10:18:46 GMT

I really wish i were better at typing on my phone because i can't sleep but i don't want to get a laptop while I'm in bed.

comments

I Attended Maxine Waters's Town Hall

Thu, 18 May 2017 03:26:35 GMT

I saw Maxine Waters on Saturday, and started a writeup on Sunday, and I came back to finish it on Wednesday, and it all seems so quaint.

It was going to be matter-of-fact and informational, but I can't even deal with that now.

On Friday, I was feeling super stressed about politics, and getting out into the community and hearing my new Congressperson talk frankly about the appalling nature of the current administration, including calls for investigation and impeachment, was heartening.

I was really hoping for that feeling to last for at least a workweek, but nope.

Anyway, the Town Hall was held in Inglewood, representing the core of Waters' district demographic: mostly Black, with some Latino. There were less than a handful of pro-Trump protestors, who got loud and then quickly left, presumably after they got the shot they felt they needed for their YouTube video. The session was mostly informational, with an extremely limited Q&A at the end.

Key points were healthcare, housing, and the incompetence of the administration. Most of the healthcare stuff I knew, but I hadn't been aware of all of the ways federal funding affected local efforts to combat the housing shortage in Los Angeles. Waters also brought a member of the Los Angeles Times editorial board to discuss the paper's recent series Our Dishonest President, and she spent time detailing the unqualifications of several administration members and cabinet appointees, including racism, sexism, inexperience, and foreign influence.

I know that Waters has been getting national attention for having a consistent anti-Trump message since the primaries, as I've been seeing her in tweets and comments from friends far away from the district. In her closing speech, she seemed not only cognizant of the issues facing young Americans of color, but excited to help amplify those concerns.

comments

Things I Did Today

Sun, 30 Apr 2017 07:59:37 GMT

I wanted to get some recreational coding done today, but that didn't happen. A few other things did, though.

Household things: I put up a new curtain rod for the blackout curtains in our bedroom, and did some lawn maintenance in the front yard. After initiating some mowing two weeks ago, last week's trip meant that a lot of progress got wiped away. More weed whacking and mowing have it looking okay, but still not great. In the backyard, temptingcuriosity has asked for the dandelions to be harvested for greens, so I'm going to continue with that tomorrow.

I found my copy of Sad Pictures for Children. It's such a strange artifact now. It's the printing of a webcomic that's been wiped from the web, and which may or may not have narrowly escaped being burned by the author after printing. But it's so beautiful. At this point it's one of the most difficult things to get that I own.

I also grabbed a copy of one of my Doom Patrol TPBs and read a bit of that.

When I settled down to code, I made the mistake of putting Cowboy Bebop on as "background." It was totally not background. It's still an incredible show, and I haven't watched it in a while, so it completely dominated my attention.

We watched the new Doctor Who, which I liked, and the finale of Bates Motel, which I also liked.

My impulse is to try to wrap this up with something I've learned, but striving for meaning in simple communication is one of the things that keeps me from posting anything.

If you don't like it, scroll past!

comments