Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in K. Pease's LiveJournal:

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Tuesday, May 15th, 2012
10:40 pm	I accidentally a year. So. There was this commission I took on, to digitize two of someone else's old typeface designs, thinking it should only take about a month. He kept thinking of more and more things he wanted, and eventually it unfolded into a total of ten fonts, most with a substantial complement of alternate characters, and the last of which I pretty much had to design myself based only on a sample of the lowercase. It helped me learn some stuff about properly compiling, debugging, and finishing font files, but I got sick of the whole thing pretty quickly, to the point that I would (1) procrastinate on it often, because some days I just couldn't stand to look at it, and yet (2) increasingly resolve to avoid (a) any of my own projects and (b) any social contact whatsoever, because of the feeling that if I diverted brainpower to anything else, I would never be finished with this thing. My sleep patterns found every way to be unhelpful, naturally. Even in the best of scenarios, again and again I find that working for anyone but myself is just a massive problem. I have been in evidence on the internet, offering the odd comment or opinion, but mostly in places where I wouldn't expect anyone to know or care who I am. To be safe from any premature ideas of my being "back", I guess. Remarkably enough, it has been a year to the day since I wrote, "I think the whole thing is finally off my hands." Now that at last it actually is, I sort of don't know where to begin with my proper life again, and am churning on The Everything Thing turned up to eleven. Updating my websites still seems to be contingent on teaching myself a few markup and programming languages. I probably need to dump a pile of documents into a big box and label it "desk 2012" so that I have a place to draw. Among the things I am discovering, of course, is that if I want to catch up with people, I'm going to have to see about signing onto some of the currently acceptable arbitrary platforms for writing words on the internet, because LJ has truly become cyber New Jersey at this point. It's Lew Jersey. And his boomerang fish act. That would make a decent first "tweet" I suppose. We'll have to see. (9 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, October 29th, 2011
2:21 pm	Glad to see the back of this. The perennial leak in the corner of my apartment, long thought unfixable, is fixed, as is the wall that took its abuse over the years. ( Before, During, After ) The wood section of the wall was rotten all the way through, and yes, there's some sky showing through there. So this was my week: Slamming my sleep pattern, which really didn't want to be where it needed to be, just so I could be there all day while the workers did their thing. Sitting at my computer and trying to look busy while not really having the brainpower to get work done. It reminded me a lot of what it was like to go to a legitimate workplace, and I know normal people do it every day, but I wonder how I had ever managed it at all. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 11th, 2011
6:47 am	Going Hollywood Hi LJ. Perhaps I will exposit a little later about how this year of my life has generally not been in evidence because I seem to have unwittingly sold it for a rather modest price. At the moment, I would like to focus on the near future, as regards how closely I should follow the potentially salutary policy of "whenever there's somewhere to go, go." Do I know anyone in LA? I ask because Pulp Shakespeare, born of my passing fancy and set loose on the internet to grow, is again being brought to life at Theater Asylum in Hollywood from October 14 through November 13. A sense of narrative would demand I should see it. I could make it a thing and really see LA, or I could fly out for just one night to watch this one show and go right back home (The closest hotels to the venue are plagued with unpleasant reviews, and the hope that they were written by Black Hat seems slim), or I could better save my travel money for the company of friends and just be content that it's out there, and that every bit I actually had a hand in writing happens to be right here for you and I to see. But gosh, it looks good, doesn't it? A more practical and certain mark on my calendar is Philcon. Philcon used to be a really big deal. I attended it year after year until it moved out of the Adam's Mark hotel, and then attended Anthrocon until the Adam's Mark was razed to be replaced with a Target, and in that time I lost track of Philcon entirely, but apparently it has landed on my doorstep. I assume that it has been brought low because, in my experience, conventions come to Cherry Hill to die, but I may as well see what it's like now, considering I literally have walked farther for lunch. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 12th, 2011
5:36 pm	There's nothing quite like spending the afternoon at the Motor Vehicles Commission the day after their systems were down statewide. But I can think of several things better. Anyway, bye teal Neon, hi white Saturn. Only a few years newer, and with more miles on it, but there's air conditioning. And a cassette player! MY TAPES ARE STILL USEFUL. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, June 19th, 2011
1:27 pm	So now I'm forty. That's as many as four tens. And that's terrible. * (24 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, June 18th, 2011
4:21 pm	The fuel leak in my car that I got fixed about eleven months ago has come back. I went out one night and discovered that my full tank was empty. At first I thought it might be a lapse of my memory, since the $10 worth I then put in didn't drain away again over the next few days (you can probably figure out for yourself why that is). So I filled it again, and then I went to the oil change place since that needed doing too. Right away, the leak was evident, being rather a steady dribble. There's this cap on the fuel line, the part that was replaced last year, which unaccountably is made of rubber that fuel can just eat through. While the guy was showing it to me, he prodded it, and the dribbling immediately promoted to spewing. The oil change guy managed to rig up a temporary solution that lets me drive around like it's all fixed, but it's not really meant to last longer than the few days it takes to take it somewhere to be properly repaired. I certainly shouldn't drive it to Pittsburgh before doing so, for instance. The auto shop will have the time to look at it sometime in the middle of next week. I can't be sure whether I'll have my car back by Thursday. If they can take some time to find a better quality version of the part, I would like them to. So, it looks like I'm skipping Anthrocon. I looked at the train schedules, but I didn't like what I saw. Honestly, I can't say I was looking forward to going anyway. The experience has lost its novelty, and I would have to have prepared much more to hope to get anything out of Applejacking through another convention in the Artist Alley. I've got work do as it is. But I should probably start thinking about planning another personal trip to make up for it, just to keep New Jersey from suffocating my sanity. Current Mood: tired (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, June 17th, 2011
11:17 pm	Dyschronic It's not that I lose track of time. No. I stay aware of how much time is passing. I'm intently watching the cycles of time whirl around like fan blades. To do anything of substance requires reaching between them without getting hit. It's a trick that gets harder to do the more times it fails. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 21st, 2011
1:28 pm	A frivolous complaint I may have held forth on this before. Perhaps frequently. I don't quite remember, because I usually try to suppress my reaction for the sake of the people who are discussing something more important and really are not interested in an irrelevant tangent. The following is quoted from an article about the latest thing that deserves no attention whatsoever, so I don't mind hijacking the subject at all: “Mr. Harold Camping predicts apocalypses (apocali?).” Stop this shit, please. Yes, it is nice that most people have at least gotten over the "-ii" confusion, but this is not, at its core, a grammar complaint. It is a humor complaint. Here's how to have fun with irregular plural endings. Step 1: Learn some. us→i, is→es, ex/ix→ices, um→a, a→ae, these are a good start. Step 2: Apply one to a word based on its spelling, possibly flouting its actual language roots on purpose. Step 3: Drop it into what you're saying, own it, and keep going. Your feigned uncertainty is not worth a beat. It is weak and overdone. Do not stop to make me, the reader, think about how you're sitting in front of an interface that can instantly search all the shared information in the world, but instead you're pretending to ask me because you don't really care. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, May 15th, 2011
1:56 pm	Oh, yes, of note: I've transferred my home number from the landline to a nice new cell phone from Credo, since I determined that it would actually be cheaper. I like the phone I chose; it does not require a data plan for me to use it as a telephone (as "smartphones" do), but is capable of using the web etc. if I ever decide it's worth the extra charges. It is a quasi-floam. (Everything is hybrid and liminal with me, isn't it?) Unlike the prepaid brick, it is slim enough for me to put in my pocket without making me constantly think "I wish I weren't carrying this damn thing around in my pocket." And, by Vectron, it still has keys. Someday our culture has got to get over its fascination with touchscreens and rediscover the value of tactile feedback. We get it, you enjoy feeling like you're in Star Trek. But nothing will ever be more convenient than pressing a button. You know you've pressed it when it moves and it clicks. You can rest your finger on it without pressing it, so you can look away from it and press it exactly when you want to. A touchscreen gives you an interface you can only perceive visually and makes you put your hand in front of it. You have to hover your finger in the air, touching nothing, until you are ready to execute a swift whispery caress with your half-inch-wide fingertip in approximately the correct place. A wonder of technology, sure, but how handy is it, really? (12 Comments |Comment on this)
7:01 am	Okay, let's see if I can shed some light on the past month or two. ( This got long. ) (11 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, March 26th, 2011
7:30 pm	I must say I am impressed with Firefox 4. They've admirably addressed my pet issue, which is screen space. Every little thing doesn't need one more horizontal strip of the screen. The whole menu is tucked in the corner next to the tabs. Mousing over a link makes the url show up in the corner of the window without needing a whole bar of its own. I can turn off the "Add-on Bar" which I don't need to fiddle with and the "Conduit Engine" which I don't expect to ever use, although the latter comes back every time I start Firefox and I have to turn it off again. And I hear that it supports Opentype features, though I expect it will be some time before I see sites using them. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
5:49 pm	So, the trip was a thing. I walked around Atlanta and had a lot of really nice food. Atlanta has very polite and friendly panhandlers, and one even walked me all the way to my hotel, which was a service I figured was worth a twenty considering I'd spent an hour or two lost in the city's awkward public transit system and could easily have been lost in it an hour or two more. The convention itself was kind of a complete waste of time; I sat ignored in Artist Alley. But afterward, I got to hang around with bossgoji at her house with her friend vodka_mutini, and that was fun. We had the most perfectly-made and creative hamburgers ever devised at a new restaurant called "Flip"; if you're in that area you should look it up. For having practiced, I found it somewhat easier to relax and get some sleep on the train home, even while the woman sitting next to me gabbed on her cell phone for the first three hours, and practiced harmonica for the final few hours. On coming home to NJ I am greeted with a massive ragweed pollen count which is hitting me like a brick. I'm picking up on the pattern: I travel to other places, and even though it puts me on guard, I can expose myself to smoke, pets, etc., and it's never nearly as bad as simply being back home again. It's just another thing that makes me suspect that all I would really need for a happier life would be to move away from here. But it's still a solution I don't trust very much because it hasn't panned out too well for most anyone else I know. (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, March 18th, 2011
1:56 pm	fwa Am here in the Atlanta Sheraton, chilling out. Sleeping on the train is not as easy as it sounds. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 9th, 2011
4:30 pm	( An outburst of sorts ) Current Mood: gahhh (8 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, March 2nd, 2011
10:42 pm	Begone and don't write, February. You do the same thing to me every year and I am beginning to catch on. (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, February 4th, 2011
3:59 am	Of note: Not long ago I purchased my membership, hotel room, and train tickets to attend FWA in Atlanta in March. I may even try to make it a working con, though probably just in artist alley, and I haven't yet decided what-all I'll be selling. Relatedly, hotel reservations for Anthrocon just opened. And closed. The main hotel and the other main hotel filled up in ONE DAY. I've tried again and again to beat this level of "plan for Anthrocon" and I think this may be the game's ragequit point for me, because that is unreasonably difficult; I don't have those kind of reflexes. (12 Comments |Comment on this)
2:59 am	the well whatever I checked and discovered I could go out and see The Illusionist immediately, so I did, because I loved the heck out of The Triplets of Belleville. As expected, this too was a masterful film full of vivid caricature and wordless expressiveness, but it is not a wild romp like Belleville. It is simple, beautiful, and sad. Plenty sad. Lore Sjöberg has started a thing that is no more or less than a Cover Crawl of "Smells Like Teen Spirit". Intended for a quick laugh, I imagine, but I've been listening to the offerings so far again and again because it's resonating with my mood. Watching the world wind down, numbly seeking entertainment because it's all we've got. I'd seen this mash-up before, but I was reminded that I had sensed something special about it. I think it is an exemplary representation of our times, and not just because it's a remixed thing from the internet. "The Final Countdown" comes from a time when everyone was looking at the future and waiting for the boom: we were sure we would either triumphantly launch ourselves to the stars or nuke ourselves into oblivion. Something would be different, that was certain. Then the '90s came along, and with it Nirvana and the attitude people (youth particularly) were starting to have about the future: it wasn't coming. There was nothing to look forward to but a perpetual dénouement of sameness, to be weathered with meaningless diversions if you could stand to wait it out. And now: the synthesis. Layer these two artifacts together and we have a soundtrack of how we in this century are starting to realize that the decline of our civilization, in progress, is going to be slow and subtle and cataclysmic and violent. A train wreck in very, very, very slow motion, so slow that we probably won't be around to see how it turns out, but exciting enough, if we choose to notice it, to keep watching it periodically and wonder all the same. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, January 28th, 2011
1:43 am	More snow, more shoveling, more water pouring through the corner of my living room. Less facility to generally deal. Here, have some cool things to watch. The Thomas Beale Cipher. A classy ten-minute animated film that does quite original things with flat textures. Contains cryptography, not only as a subject, but hidden all over the film. Meet Buck. Furries: fine people, but would you let your daughter date one? A fast-paced 3D cartoon with a convincing painterly style. (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, January 6th, 2011
6:18 am	Hi! The holidays, such as they were, have given me a much-needed injection of direct social contact. We may hope this helps me shake off my self-isolation some, as I think a lot of the problem was that I've been so removed from the experience of speaking casually to someone I can see, hear, and touch that trying to simulate it with typing, typing, typing seemed both beyond my ability to manage and fundamentally inadequate to fill the need. You can't just relax with a friend online, because you need to constantly have something to say or else you're not there. On the 26th I met up with craigjclark, back in the neighborhood, and we saw Black Swan, Aronofsky's psychological horror about ballet. On New Year's Eve we drove up to see Tron: Legacy with thegreyeminence. The big snowstorm only swapped the days for these two plans. In both cases, we then had dinner, hung around, and talked. Often we really talked about real stuff. Up through Christmas, the only people I'd had more than a retail transaction's worth of words with in person were my parents, with whom I regrettably cannot say I really talk about real stuff. In between, I finally had the opportunity to introduce myself to my downstairs neighbor and his friends. He invited me to a little party down there on the evening of the 30th. The occasion, as it happens, was that he and his paintings would be moving out the very next day. It was rather a beer and cigarettes sort of crowd, a bit out of the comfort zone of a pure nerd, but the language of artists was spoken, and I got practice in having conversations with strangers. Aaand I guess I won't see any of them again. The counseling center from before is moving back in, and they've made so much damned noise doing so that the first decent full day's sleep I've gotten this year was yesterday. And now, even though I've definitely waited too long to consider trying to attend FC (next weekend, gah), I guess I have to get over my anxiety about long-distance travel again. A year ago I was getting to learn that it isn't so bad, but now there's this extra TSA business with Jack Abramoff's cancerporn machines and the enhanced feel-ups. On principle, I hate it. I feel like this should have been the breaking point where they've gone too far and the airlines have to do something to dismantle the whole security theater scam before they lose all their money. Sure, it shouldn't affect me — I can take a rare bonus dose of human physical contact and get on with it — but that's what they're counting on, for everyone who has somewhere to go to just accept that this is how things are now. What I'm afraid of is being there when they're abusing someone to whom it is a big deal, and I will either be compelled to get myself involved or hate myself forever because I didn't. This stuff isn't going to stop until everyone stops flying, and I feel a sort of duty as one of the few people who really has that choice. Unfortunately, this outlook has been driving me spare; I've spent the latter portion of 2010 feeling trapped in New Jersey forever, to the point that it has been hard for me to see the valid currency in my long-distance relationships with the friends and more-than-friends who fled my entire coast while they could. The task of trying to stay real to people I might not see again for years, using only the internet, was too daunting. So I guess I don't have that choice, after all. For my sanity, I must surrender to the TSA and the airlines and help them keep making it worse for others. I just have to work out when and where to go first. In the meantime, I'll try to reforge those connections so I know I have somewhere to go. (13 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, December 11th, 2010
8:19 pm	Since I imagine some are wondering, I should take a moment to acknowledge that winter has been grinding me down. It's very discouraging when the sun sets at 5 PM, because I feel that much more incapable of keeping up with the world and doing something with my day. And there is a significant portion of my mind that insists that it was July no more than a week ago. I'm feeling very isolated here, but I keep feeling that my sharper moments are better spent getting some kind of work done than grasping for words just to make myself an extra complication in other people's crisis-filled lives. The storefront downstairs, whose history of coincidental mockery under my nose has included a chiropractor's office and a counseling center, is now apparently being used as an artist's studio. The view through the door reveals the legitimacy of traditional media sitting all around the place. I have had the thought that the next time I hear music down there I should go and say "hi, thought I'd say hi, I'm an artist myself," etc., but I have also had the thought that life is not a TV sitcom and real people are not really keen on getting surprise visits from the wacky neighbor. (4 Comments |Comment on this)