Today is a skills half-life day. The specific skill is illustration, more specifically portrait drawing.

I used to be able to draw with a half-decent competence. I've never been serious about expanding the skill the way I have my writing or coding, but it's a skill I think every human being ought to have, it activates portions of the brain that don't get a lot of exercise, and as I get older I become more convinced that exercising the odder corners of my brain is just as important to my long-term mental health as exercising my body is to my physical health.

Monday night, Kouryou-chan and I spent about an hour drawing together. I managed a half-decent picture of a kitten's head, followed by a much rougher outline of a man in armor. As is often the case in exercises like this, I could feel my brain growing around the skills being practiced.

And today, I can likewise feel my brain slowly unlocking its hooks around that skill. This is one of those cases where I know, if I refresh the skill before I go to sleep tonight, I'll have a much higher chance of retaining it; if I don't, I'll be back to the beginning again.

Tags: study
Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Porcupine Tree, Hate Song

I bought a new laptop recently, a Lenovo Yoga.  It’s the top-of-the line current generation: 13.3″ touchscreen, 8GB RAM, 256GB SSD, quad-core Intel i7 CPU.  Buying it was a fun moment: after shopping around the various retailers, I discovered that the cheapest ones available were from The Microsoft Store.  So I drove over there, walked in, and asked for the laptop.  The salesman was professional, but he kept trying to (a) upsell me on Office and a customer service package, both of which I repeatedly said I didn’t want, and (b) reassure me time and again that I would enjoy Windows 8 on a laptop with a touchscreen.  Finally, after I had paid for it, he handed it to me and said, “Enjoy Windows 8.”

“Not for long,” I told him.

I got it home and decided that I was going to forgo the Gentoo song & dance.  I will miss Gentoo, but only a little.  Instead, I installed the “user-friendliest” of all Linux distro, Linux Mint.  Mint is even better than Ubuntu in a lot of ways, with its nice mix of high-end, “your mom can use it” window managers as well as the Gnome 2.0 maintenance branch known as Mate.  I installed Mate, then rehacked the core manager to give me wrap-around keyboard navigation of the multi-desktop handler.  (This is a feature that I first encountered in Solaris Motif, and am absolutely confuzzled as to why Metacity, the Gnome/Mate window manager, doesn’t support it.)

Installing Mint was a bit of a dance: first, you have to tell Windows you want to use “Legacy mode.”  This unlocks the security features designed to prevent you from installing anything over the base OS.  That’s painful enough, but then I put in the Mint USB stick and everything went smoothly– until I needed wireless.  The wireless for this laptop isn’t stable yet; I had to install a third-party driver from Github, but there was enough of an environment on the USB stick to support doing so, and then I had wireless.

Mint Just Works.  Suspend to disk, automatic media detection, the camera, the sound.  There are a few bugs related to the laptop being so new– brightness DOWN works from the keyboard, brightness UP doesn’t.  There’s a menu option to control brightness, so it’s not a fatal problem.   Most of the problems relate to Yoga’s famous “tablet mode”: The touchscreen isn’t in Grails yet so gesture support isn’t there.  I can find in the kernel the endpoints for the motion sensors and gyroscope, but there are no drivers to interpret the signals coming from those hardware components yet, so they don’t emit anything.  Screen rotation 180° works fine for movie-watching mode, but 90° in either direction and the touchscreen doesn’t track correctly with finger touches.  The system emits the same signal for “transition to/from tablet mode”, so it’s not possible (yet) to detect which mode you’re in.  The Windows key in tablet mode is mapped to the same one on the keyboard, so remapping it for other purposes in tablet mode depends on my being able to detect tablet mode.

But those are challenges, not merely problems.

Still, choosing Mint over Gentoo feels like I’m giving up something.  Some deep understanding of how all the parts are put together.  I found myself chasing down new runlevel operations and other things most people aren’t concerned with, and solving them, so I’m not hopelessly lost.  But if I’m deep-diving into writing a new Linux kernel driver to get at the gyroscope and new Grails packages for the touchscreen, pushing aside my understanding of all those other components feels a little disloyal to the tradition of difficult programming from which I come.

Still, as a writing tool, this machine is unbeatable.  Instant-on and six hours of battery life are nothing to complain about.

As an erotica writer who's always attempted to portray both men and women as realistically as possible (yes, even my dragons, centaurs, and so on), I have a deep sympathy with the crisis Kameron Hurley shows in her brilliant essay, We Have Always Fought: Challenging the Women, Cattle and Slaves Narrative. The essay is about how stories have always been wrapped around the narratives of men, and how she's trying, harder than ever, to depict women faithfully, to slough off the cultural baggage of women constrained to romantic, sexual, or subservient roles in any given story, and show women as just as capable of action as men.

In a paragraph toward the end of the essay, though, she struggles to re-write her women characters so that they're explicitly not depicted in one of those roles-- even when those roles might be appropriate.

I thought about that because I just finished a story where Ken is mourning the death of a beloved friend from a relatively rare (for the Pendorian Corridor) species, and how he encounters another fem from the same species. She plays the role of confidant while he sorts himself out. It is a stereotypically "feminine" role-- but all she is is confidant. The love scenes are all male/male, starting as a dive into explicitly drunken abandon, and ending as something more romantic and holistic. Which was sorta the point of the story. It's a nice arc, not at all challenging. (To me, at any rate: I understand that male/male romance is challenging for some people.)

I thought about Hurley's struggle, and applied it to the paragraphs when Ken and Evane are talking. After a few iterations I found myself back at the beginning. Confidant is a fine role for just about anyone. Evane is not explicitly locked into anything in particular. She has understandable and humane reasons for her interest in Ken. The story doesn't pass the Bechdel test, but that's hard to achieve when you have a first-person narrative from a male character.

So I reverted back to the original. It's good as is. Another story done.

[This post is also posted at: The Woodshed and the Story's End @ Pendorwright. Feel free to comment here or there.]

Tags: writing
Current Mood: thoughtful

Ungh. Other than a lovely lunch, I think I spent all of Saturday with my butt in the car, driving Kouryou-chan to two different dance practices, Storm to one, Omaha to office supply place and finally down to a big auction she MC'd for the local Democratic party. With all the to-ing and fro-ing, I was driving everywhere and being driven insane.

After five or so, though, Kouryou-chan and I were left alone. I made us roasted burgers and fries, and we spent the next two hours drawing together. My art skills are so f'ing rusty it's not funny.

After Omaha and Storm got home, and everyone was in bed, I managed another 400 words. So I am writing again. That's healthy.

Sunday was a little better. Other than grocery shopping and the routine weekly accounting phase, we had a D&D game with the lovely LisaKit and Paul, and we spent the time kicking Orc butt and taking names. Sadly, there wasn't enough of it. I think we're into the massive boss battle now, hopefully the end of the adventure.

I'm going to have to come up with a new adventure. I think they want me to run next. Still, I'm glad to be at work.

Tags: life
Current Mood: happy

Kouryou-chan, Omaha and I went to see Iron Man 3 for Mother's Day. It was an awesome movie, and the choice of Ben Kingsley as the villain was inspired and amazing. Robert Downey Jr. is in it to win it, and he's as good as always.

But here's the thing: Several times in the movie, Tony talks about "that thing that happened in New York." It's in the trailer, so I don't think I'm giving it away. There's a brief dialogue about the aliens and so forth.

Never are any other Marvel properties mentioned. Not once. The words "Avengers," "Shield," "Nick Fury," "Captain America," "Thor," and "The Hulk" are never mentioned throughout the film. "The big guy with the hammer" gets one mention. It's as if Iron Man 3 were following the conventions a parody porn film and never to using actual trademarks to avoid getting sued.

Does anyone have any good ideas why? It's like this strange vacuum in the middle of the script, like they were trying to cut Iron Man loose from the Marvel Universe for some strange reason.

Tags: movies
Current Mood: confused

Introduction

Two months ago I was complaining that I didn’t have a job, and then suddenly I had one. I work for Splunk now, an enterprise-level machine data analysis company. Their core product is pretty magical: you can shove just about any logfile, real-time stream, script-generated datasource, or anything else at it, and then interrogate the data to understand and monitor your networks, server farms, client connections, whatever. It does an amazing job of correlating data through little more than keyword observation. There’s even a free version, which, while limited to a half-gig of data, is a good way to start off taking apart your weblog files.

They have me niftying up the third-party web framework, the thing large companies use to integrate the data we collect with their own network intelligence dashboards, visualization systems, whatever. It’s all my kind of thing: Python back-end, Javascript/Backbone/jQuery front-end stuff, lots of clever closures and event handling.

But I decided, for entertainment purposes only, to learn more about a part of the system I know almost nothing about: the Java SDK. And it wasn’t enough to work in a language I don’t know (since I don’t know Java) with SDK’s I’ve never seen before. I had to go make it work with a language that, to the best of my knowledge, no one has ever demonstrated compatibility with Splunk before. I had to make it work in Clojure.

Yes, I’m a Hipster Hacker. I mean, come on, if you’re not making it difficult for yourself, what is education for, anyway?

The complete source code for this project is available at Github.

Disclaimer

I am a newbie to all of this. Clojure, Splunk, even Java. This is entirely raw and beginner level stuff. I did this for my own edification. This code in no way represents the state of the art at Splunk. It’s definitely not warranted in any way by me or anyone else, and it’s licensed under the Apache Public License, V2. Use at your own risk. Don’t make me go ALL CAPS on you.

( It's big, let's put it someplace kind.Collapse )

Now you know how to talk to the basic Splunk service using Clojure. I’m sure if you’re comfortable with Clojure none of the Java access weirdness surprised you at all, but for me this was a pretty good exercise. At times I felt like I was writing in a “fantasy LISP”, a Lisp that actually, you know, had real world applicability, and that should have done the things I would have expected of a LISP. That fantasy LISP was pretty close to the real deal; it only took me a few hours of lein run sessions to knock out all the bugs.

The older meaning of philosophy, "love of wisdom," was meant to encourage the followers of any one given school of wisdom to put that wisdom into daily use. Cynicism, Epicureanism, Stoicism, Skepticism, and Neoplatonism all started with premises, but ultimately pushed their students to express the consequences of those premises in their daily lives. The word "ethics" originally meant the study and development of excellence in one's character. Ultimately, all of these things come down to one idea: daily practice.

There is daily practice in most successful philosophies. Buddhism's includes daily meditation, mindfulness in each act, the the mantras of no ego and no permanence. Islam has the adhan. Christiantiy has daily prayer, as well as The Contemplation of the Christ in all its stations. Stoicism, the longest-surviving of all the non-theistic (or perhaps pantheistic) philosophies, has its own, and I'm most familiar with those: the morning contemplation of one's place in the world and its affirmation of fate willing, I will accomplish the work the world has brought me; the evening contemplation of one's work, three times and contra fate, and how closely it aligned with your morning affirmation, the regular assessments of impermanence, value, mindfulness, and self-discipline. Stoicism, especially, has a tradtion of psychological self-care that I find both demanding and valuable.

Christianity, Buddhism, and Stoicism might seem wildly different, but underneath, at the personal level, they have their similarities, especially the counter-tribal varieties that most people find admirable. All three have comprehensive daily regimes that assist you in maintaining your mental health in the full face of the truly despairing state of human existence.

I have yet to see a book at a Pagan bookstore or hear of daily practice at a Pagan gathering that imposes the same sorts of self-discipline and self-care on pagan practitioners. Do Pagans have these sorts of teachings? Or are they attached, willy-nilly, from other philosophical bases?

Tags: paganism, philosophy, stoicism
Current Music: Linkin Park, Runaway

This morning as I drove into work (yes, sigh, one of those days), I tumbled through the radio channels and stumbled onto local conservative talk show host Mike Gallagher. Mike was ranting about how he recently was diagnosed with a needed hip replacement and got a handicapped sticker, and "You wouldn't believe how many times I've gone to the mall and seen a perfectly healthy person park in one of those blue zones, leap out of their cars and run into the mall."

Well, actually, yes I would. I'm sure there are a few who have abused the system, but not hardly the numbers Mike's topic would suggest from his segment title, "Disability Nation." Because I've been "that guy." What most people don't realize is that most handicapped people have assistants, friends, and spouses who help them get about: who drive them places, drop them off at the front door, and go to find parking. Sometimes, the entire point of using the blue zone is so we can get the handicapped person back to the car after the exhaustion of trying to navigate a busy shopping center or other facility with a cane, a walker, or a wheelchair.

So there's that.

However, what made me laugh, hard, was the advertising segment at the bottom of the hour, immediately after Gallagher's long and somewhat ridiculous rant. Having said his piece, he immediately launched into a read-on-the-spot paid advertisement for disability assistants, hired people "who will help your aging and disabled parents and loved ones when they need it."

Absolutely no thought connected the two.

Tags: shrill
Current Mood: amused

Exercise proceeds apace. I'm still dealing with long-term incidental damage to my left shoulder and right knee, but the traffic accident I had back in November also damaged my right hip and makes it difficult to perform the rehabilitation exercises necessary to stabilize the knee completely; this makes doing the full workout difficult, but I have effective therapies for both.

Still, I'm pleased with the progress. I can do 12 sets of 3 reps with 1 minute's rest shoulder dips with 35 pounds in my lap (12x3w1@35), four pull-ups (on a good day, apparently), cable crossings at 35 pounds, 12x3w2@7.5 shoulder rehabs (those hurt).

I can also squat lift 160 lbs, and can almost press that much. So it's not quite my body weight (185 lbs), but it's almost there.

Here's the thing: I can do 36 chairs and 120 second planks, and I still don't have six-pack abs. You know why? Because I have what is, for an American, a "low" bodyfat: 23% or so. For those amazing abs you see on television, those people are 18% or less; a standard usually only seen in third-world countries.

Still, my doc tells me to keep at it. I can still lift my arm above my head; that means I just have to remember to use a warm press on that shoulder, or take a long hot shower, then contort it into a weird position and "flick" at the scarring until it gives way and grows new fiber.

Meanwhile, the weather has turned and I can ride the bike to work. (Well, take the train into downtown and then ride to the office.) It was beautiful today. Maintaining strength and vibrancy is tricky at my age, but I'm working at it. And winning.

Tags: exercise
Current Mood: annoyed

The saddest thing of all about Bioshock Infinite is that I will never be able to play it ever again. I mean, sure, I probably will play it again: there are side-adventures I didn't finish, incomplete (but unnecessary to the central story) mysteries to uncover, and it's an amazing piece of art, but Ken Levine's story has an ending that's right out of The Sixth Sense or Fight Club, and if anyone gives it away, well, they'd better have a damned good reason.

The basic storyline of Bioshock Infinite is understandable: It's 1912 and you're Booker DeWitt, a disgraced member of the Pinkertons, sent by persons unknown to the floating cloud city of Columbia, a "breakaway republic" of the United States, to locate a girl named Elizabeth and bring her back to New York. How and why it floats is as much a mystery as anything else.

There's more than a little of the original Bioshock here, especially in the combat gameplay, but that's not why you should play this game. The combat is just time filler, mostly. This game has a story to tell, and oh, boy, what a story it is telling. Every level has amazing attention to detail; it kicks the Rapture visuals straight in the eyeballs. You could spend hours just looking around at things. Sight-seeing is one of the reasons to play this game. There's just so much to see, to listen to. (No, seriously, listen closely to the music being played. Stop and ask yourself, "Is that...?" And the answer will be, "Yes, yes it is.")

If you go onto youtube and look at the various demos done over the past three years, you see a lot of wonderful demonstrations, some of which, I think, might have been interesting: the 2011 UX demo is especially compelling, and there's dialogue in there that didn't happen in the final release, but Elizabeth's character was move naive then. The 2010 Gameplay Demo is definitely compelling as an in-game movie, but making that work interactively was ambitious; I'm satisfied with what they acheived.

If there's anything off-kilter with the game, it's that some plot details go by so fast that you have to piece their meaning together later by inference. This is especially true of the "Songbird" plot thread; you can tell there's explanatory narrative missing. The character of Elizabeth is somewhat confusing; it's hard to see how the persona she has developed in the space given. In the end there's an explanation that doesn't break the rules, but you have to swallow a lot to get there.

None of that matters. You get the connection Levine wanted. You hope Elizabeth will forgive you for showing her your cruel and violent world. The ending is just amazing. If you're not stunned by it, you might be crying.

Oh, and sit through the credits. All 15 minutes of 'em. It's worth it.

Tags: games, review
Current Mood: satisfied
Current Music: Pure Reason Revolution, Les Malheurs