Kevin Pease's Journal

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Fool's Journey
Okay, I'm cutting it close, but I'd better test the joints and check for leaks on this plan before it compiles and runs. Beyond the people I have already contacted, how many friends, acquaintances, and heck, fans if I still have fans,* do I have in the greater Boston area who would like to say hi, grab a bite, et cetera during the first week of September? I don't fully keep track of where everybody I like lives.

Also, who among the more familiar of you, if there are enough to even use the word "among", would consider extending "et cetera" to a night or two on their couch so that I can keep my hotel bill for the week below four digits?

*(the "Misery" scenario will not hasten the return of Absurd Notions)

stunning hypocrisy
My first exposure to political columnist William Safire was (through Douglas Hofstadter and his "William Satire") about his pet issue of language purity, particularly his early opposition of "Ms." and such constructions as "chairperson". So I was amazed to learn (in the midst of this article) that William Safire invented the reprehensible suffix "-gate".

Prelude...
Ants? In my refrigerator?
It's more likely than I thought.

Bérenger
If you find yourself saying or thinking the phrase "like normal people" by way of contrast to your own way of living, this isn't too unusual, and the world hasn't necessarily yet worn you down to the point where you would surrender if only you knew how.

If, instead, the phrase that occasionally appears in your mind is "like real people", this may be cause for concern.

car
I've renewed my driver's license, replaced the missing registration that possibly was never sent to me, and passed inspection. Now that the pressing mandatory aspects are done, I guess it's time to look into repairing the car's air conditioner, which stopped conditioning air rather suddenly a few days ago. It doesn't look like it's going to start working again, and today's errands have convinced me it's not a good time of year to just leave it be.

Type
( To give you some idea of what I'm dealing with... )

Imagine six of those grids. The regular, seen here, is complete, as is the black weight. The bold was created by interpolating between them and then searching for glitches to fix. The italic (no mere oblique this) is filled in, but the sidebearings and kerning for it have to be redone. The black italic? I have the top three lines.

Parrotfish
A term needs to be found, or coined.

You can usually identify a really stupid person by the way they indiscriminately call everyone and everything they don't understand "stupid". Rude people accuse everyone they interact with of being "rude", and any other more colorfully precise terms they level at undeserving targets tend to be remarkably apt descriptions of themselves. Christian figureheads complain of "persecution" and "hate crime" when whoever is under their boot squirms and makes too much noise for their liking.

Two terms may already have come to your mind, hypocrisy and projection. Hypocrisy is the condemnation of a behavior in others while feeling no need to correct it in oneself (see also tu quoque, pot/kettle), and projection is the assumption/accusation of the motivations and plans of others based on one's own motivations and methods. What I'm thinking of is related to but distinct from both of these.

This is the idea: A person can live so fully within an attribute, like a fish in water, seeing it as simply the natural way of existence and unable to imagine the lack of it, that when the word for it is used on them, they are fundamentally incapable of truly understanding what the word even means. All they know is that is an insult that is often leveled against them, and that it is a strangely effective one because it always sticks, but they don't know why. Sometimes they even see other people getting things they want by saying certain things. So they try to use it themselves. They aim it at everyone they don't like, thinking this weapon should work just as well for them. Like a cargo cult, they're imitating the ritual without knowing what makes it work. They don't really have any clue what it is they're saying.

This is so common in all kinds of discourse that I feel it needs a clear name of its own, but I haven't been able to think of one.

Update:
parrotfish: a person who, to disparage others, indiscriminately uses a descriptor "x" because it has frequently been aimed at them, being so immersed in x as their normal way of living that they don't see what it means to be or not be x. (parrotfishy, parrotfishiness)

foxxored
Since I upgraded to Firefox 3, I've noticed that occasionally a little box with "FFFD" inside it will appear in text. This I understand, as that is the Unicode hex designation of the "unknown character" character, which usually takes the form of a simple narrow rectangle and/or a question mark. I can appreciate the weird specificity of representing it thus. What I don't understand is why I'm seeing it in places where the character I'm obviously supposed to be seeing is, for example, a dash, or proper quotation marks: characters that are in the basic Latin-1 set and really should not give Firefox any trouble, and never did before. In fact, I can paste them in here, and look —“–” They look fine. So maybe it's some dynamic auto-replace thing on certain sites that's not working with it anymore. Whatever it is, I can't find a setting that corrects it.

Now, just today, some whole websites manifest for me entirely as a solid stream of random kanji and little boxes with other hex values in them. What crescent-fresh hell is this? I know the pages are still there because IE shows them as they should be. The few settings I'd tried changing, I've put back the way they were, to no effect.

I did get a "Windows Update" yesterday...

I went out and saw Wall-E tonight before any more stealth spoilers cropped up.

Really inspiring. The message I took away from it is exactly what I've needed:
Building everything back up again from ruin and stagnation is a thing to look forward to, a thing to relish. The alternative is having nothing to do.

There's a simple perfection about this little game. It's not new, but revisiting it bears out how classically well-conceived it is. Even though the starting condition does not change and the play is technically pure skill, no two games are ever quite the same. I just happened to reach my all-time high score of 26. You'll find that number impressive after you've played a few times.

The game, unpretentiously entitled "Gimme Friction Baby," can be learned just by doing, but if you're the sort who really needs to know the instructions before you start: Clicking will shoot a circle out onto the field at the current angle of the turret, fast enough to take it all the way across the field and halfway back. A bank of about 45° is a good starting move. When your projectile comes to rest, it will expand from its center as far as there is room and then become a stationary target/obstacle with 3 HP. Destroy one and you score a point. Points do not come easily. You always have to be careful about what you hit... because if your projectile drifts back across the dotted line before stopping, you're done.

Anthrocon
Can I get away with "you had to be there"?

Sense of belonging: Good, comfortable
Laughs: Pretty plentiful
Profit: Not significant but paid for the trip
Validation as an artist: Tepid

And away!

mmsword and I are off. We should arrive at the Omni in 8 to 9 hours.

I do solemnly swear
One of the most prominent philosophers of our time, George Carlin, has ~~passed on~~ died. In his honor, I feel it's the right time to formally shed a superstition of mine.

( What do you THINK is behind the cut? )

(With comic strips it's a different thing altogether. Self-censorship in a comic is an artistic voluntary rule of consistent structure; breaking it in a long-running comic is like suddenly changing tenses or dropping the meter halfway through an epic poem just because it's too hard.)

Limes are seldom "lime green". Discuss.

Thirty-seven
Yes, in a row.

I'm just hoping to get some work done in peace today. There are a lot of things I was hoping to finish for Anthrocon some time ago, but I can't sit down to paint or sculpt without having the ability to run to the sink now and then, which requires free movement through my hallway. This stupid hallway has been stealing all my time. Monday was the second coat of varnish, and yesterday was the third coat of varnish, for which I opted to banish myself from the apartment and do laundry and stuff. My hallway floor is now a reasonably smooth shiny surface with all the ugliness perfectly preserved underneath, and I guess it looks okay if you don't examine it too closely. At least I persuaded Andrew to chisel up the ancient wad of gum before applying the second coat. Tomorrow is the inspection (fates willing, the LAST for this year).

All the Dude ever wanted was his rug back.
They took my carpet. Not all of it, just what was in the hallway. A whole battery of apartment inspections that has been interrupting my peace at scattered times over a month is scheduled to culminate this afternoon. So, yesterday at 9 AM, I was about to get in the shower, anticipating a visit from my dad at about 11, when the landlord (possibly the first time I've seen him in person since he bought the place) shows up with his son Andrew to tear up the carpet, because one of the inspectors had noted that it was bumpy in places, and this was no good. It was, indeed, an extremely sloppy carpeting job by the Slumlord (previous owner), but not to the extent that the wrinkles would really be a hazard if I needed to flee the building, in my view.

The original thought was that they would replace the carpet, or possibly just stretch the existing one out and lay it down again properly. But as soon as a corner was lifted up— O, joy of joys, there's real hardwood under there! I heard a lot about how great this was, having a good hardwood floor, from Andrew, his father, and my father. Now, I know all about the cultural bias regarding this: "What philistine would cover up a nice hardwood floor with a carpet?" It's as bad as cooking beef.* But know this: a real hardwood floor is not automatically a nice hardwood floor.

Even after Andrew and a fellow worker came back this morning, removed the numerous tacks, each holding down gobs of foam and adhesive, mostly removed the thick mottled layer of soil smeared across half the hall's length that had been under the carpet all this time, sanded the wood down, and applied a layer of varnish, leaving me voluntarily trapped in the living room for a few hours, this floor still looks ugly as virtue.** It is warped with age, very irregularly stained, and still speckled everywhere with stray white paint. The crooked gaps between the boards range up to a pica in width. I'm finding splinters stuck to the varnish. And is that a wad of gum?

Andrew will be coming back Monday to add the second layer of varnish. After that I may look into obtaining something I can throw on top of my "nice hardwood floor" and safely walk barefoot on.

It's now 5:30 PM, and I've worked out that the inspectors are probably coming next Friday afternoon.

*These days everyone from the snootiest foodies to the basest good ol' boys agrees that it's a horrible waste of a good steak to expose it to heat long enough for it to brown; it should only be enjoyed as a bloody, squidgy horror show with all the original germs still on it. Maybe it's a dragon thing, or maybe I just still appreciate what Prometheus did to pull us all up the side of Maslow's pyramid, but I say Fire Good, Ungo. Cook my damn food.

**As anyone who has given it a moment's thought should know, sin is, as a rule, attractive.

The IQ Adventure Test by OkCupid. Kind of fun. The likely reason that I scored best in the social intelligence category is that the tests in all the other categories are timed and the social tests are not timed. But to have something up on my OkCupid profile testifying that I actually have social skills... that can only help.

It's easy to forget he's still in office sometimes
There is something inherently bizarre about a treaty of alliance between two countries that requires that the war between them continue in perpetuity.

Long story short, Bush has been quietly and urgently trying to set up this treaty so that whoever is President in 2009 will not even have the option of bringing troops home (Not without breaking an international treaty, anyway. Suddenly it won't be cool anymore for a US President to do that).

Hey look a birthday ambigram
Happy birthday to

Jessie Tracer

( turn over )

Full of bad ideas
The chiropractor downstairs has moved out. No more will I hear the "thomp" of patients being thrown to the mat like wrestlers. Seeing the space empty and so close at hand makes me wonder to myself what I might do with a storefront.