Halloween Decorations
Nov. 1st, 2009 | 02:21 am
location: Tradewinds Drive
mood:
tired
music: "Resistance," Muse


Not bad for a last-minute idea. Here's a last one that I ran through Photoshop a bit, for that old-faded-photo-taken-by-a-film-camera-w

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Why I think Lovecraft is worth reading
Oct. 25th, 2009 | 07:42 pm
location: Tradewinds Drive
mood:
a little bit exhausted
I didn't speak up at the time - in part because we were still playing the game and also because I didn't feel like getting into it - but I do disagree with her. I do think Lovecraft is worth reading, and would even describe myself - with certain reservations - as a fan. (I even spent an afternoon in Providence with my dad hunting down all the places Lovecraft lived, ending at his grave*. Admittedly, it was more just an excuse to go explore Providence, but still.)
Let me start, though, by saying that I understand why my friend reached the conclusion she did, and I even agree with most of her points. Lovecraft's writing is generally pretty terrible. He uses big vocabulary because he can (as opposed for reasons of communication), characterization is non-existent, women as a whole barely seem to exist in his universe, and - as someone else mentioned last night - he can't seem to kick the habit of saying something was indescribable, then describing it anyway. As a person, his flaws are legendary. Lovecraft was a virulent racist even for his time. His works abound with Asian, black and even Irish stereotypes - all inevitably threatening, dangerous and barbaric - to the point that, should I ever meet him in person in the afterlife, I might feel compelled to gut-punch him. A lot of his stories revolve around a fear of miscegenation and "racial decay." I get the feeling he bought in fully to the eugenics movement and the pseudo-scientific racism prevalent at the time, and then some. (And don't think I didn't notice that Shadow Over Innsmouth begins with a whole lot of people being rounded up into concentration camps. I even believe he uses that term.)
So why could I possibly say - with all of the aforementioned flaws - that Lovecraft is worth reading? Actually, in a lot of ways, I think that it's because of his flaws that his work is critical.
My concept of Lovecraft is of a man who spent his life terrified of the world around him. Terrified of other people, terrified of other cultures, terrified of the direction the world was going in at the time - in short, terrified of anything that wasn't the New England and White Anglo-Saxon culture of his youth**. In part, this was because he really always felt like an outsider - I believe I once read that he mentioned in a letter to a friend that he often felt like he'd been born a century too late. It was this neurotic, paranoid, almost acrophobic sense of a hostile and destructive world that I think made Lovecraft's fiction so innovative - and, oddly enough, made his work resonate with something that I think is part of human nature. I think we all have had that sense, at least once in our lives (if not more) that the entire universe is out to destroy us. In Lovecraft's fiction, it really is***.
I said Lovecraft was innovative, and he was. Unless I'm mistaken, he was the first horror writer to imagine what one might call the "natural order" as something deeply horrific. In the Gothic fiction he drew off of, the vampire or werewolf or whatever was the exception to nature, something temporary that was anathema to the divine plan, and is eventually repressed. (The cross repelled Dracula, didn't it?) Or maybe the horror is the terrible justice of God, the supernatural avenging some moral slight. Lovecraft, who might have been an atheist, was the first to turn that completely around - in his work, it's the normal that's the aberration, a brief blip or bubble of safety, that could be over in an eyeblink, destroyed in an instant by incomparably greater and incomprehensibly alien beings with the same kind of thoughtlessness with which a human might crush an anthill. It's not Cthulhu who's the aberration - it's us -- and sooner or later, we'll all be inevitably... corrected.
All horror, or at least the best horror, taps into basic human fears that we all share. What I got from reading Lovecraft is that basic sense of a hostile, horrific universe - and one where rationality, instead of banishing such catastrophic thoughts, reinforces the sense of how utterly screwed we are. And that's something powerful, something I think humans have always felt from the first time we were smart enough to think about a thunderstorm and what it meant.
Reactionary? Yes. Racist? Yep. Bad writing? Quite a bit, yes. But also the nugget of something that I'd argue is invaluable - at least if you want to write horror.
* which I can confirm was in much the same state as described by this comic.
** though he married a Jewish woman at one point and had a thing for Arabic culture, or at least The Arabian Nights. Let it never be said that the man did not have his contradictions.
*** I've wondered in the past what would happen if someone like Walter Mosley - who loves him some pulp fiction, and is incredibly good at it - someone, in short, from a culture who it might be said objectively understands what it's like being an outsider a lot more than Lovecraft probably ever did - were to take up some of Lovecraft's ideas and run with them. Possibly with a dash of The X-Files - which took the next logical step that Lovecraft himself was unable to take and make The Powers That Be - the government, the press, the police - willing accomplices in our destruction, rather than protectors. Yeah. I could really see Mosley being able to go places with that.
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It's a working model. On the plus side, if you turn it on its side, it becomes a Transmogrifier.
Oct. 12th, 2009 | 05:10 pm
location: no comment
mood:
a little weary
music: "Supermassive Black Hole," Muse
Sorry to everyone I haven't replied or responded to. That's why, basically.
orangetango recently mentioned on her LJ that she's working on her NaNoWriMo outline already. Sigh. Ryan's been bugging me to give it another shot this year... I have something that's sort of heading in the direction of being an idea, but until I really get it worked out, I can't exactly say I'm in the running myself.
Nothing much else to say. Here's something people might find amusing, though - the one little bit of personalization I've had the chance to bring into my workspace:

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The Palestinians and Patton's Dilemma
Sep. 27th, 2009 | 12:59 pm
location: Tradewinds Drive
mood:
stressed
Friday, finally got down to Tri-C to return two books that I had out. They were only overdue, err, by about two months. The fines were, uh, hefty, but better than I had expected. Since I never like returning a book without at least trying to read it, I spent part of this week working my way through After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives by Edward Said.
I only managed to get about halfway through before I hit the point of no return on Friday. I've been meaning to read something by Said for a long time, being the most well-known figure of Palestinian academia. I chose this book in particular - as opposed to, for instance, his most famous work, Orientalism - because I thought that as a personal/poetic photo-essay, it might give me a more direct answer to a question I've been trying to figure out for a while*: who are the Palestinians when they're not fighting Israel?
It's a pretty big question - and one that I think might be key to the whole balagan that is the endless conflict/peace process. I'll discuss why in a moment.
So who are the Palestinians? Again, I only got partway through. Thus far, though, it seemed that Said didn't have any more answers than I do. He mentioned one or two details in passing that stuck out to me - that karate and martial arts were extremely popular among the Palestinians "in the interior" - i.e. in West Bank and Gaza - as I've heard they also are in Israel; and the overabundance of photographs and decorative objects Said noticed in Palestinian homes, which he suggested was an attempt to make up for a void in their lives (i.e. one caused by their dispossession, I assume).
Other than that, though, Said talked a lot about how fragmented, inconsistent and impermanent Palestinian identity is. He made their history sound like a series of disasters, or maybe the same disaster reenacted over and over again, to the point that he describes the ramshackle buildings in a refugee camp as 'ruins waiting to happen.' He also commented that the major form of Palestinian literature is (as I understand it) basically Post-Modernist in mode. A few lines I copied down:
The striking thing about Palestinian prose and prose fiction is its formal instability... our characteristic mode, then, is not a narrative, in which scenes take place seriatum, but rather broken narratives, fragmentary compositions, and self-consciously staged testimonials in which the narrative voice keeps stumbling over itself, its obligations and its limitations (38)
I guess none of this should surprise me, given what a mess the politics and the history of the region has been for the past hundred years. Especially in the period where Said was writing the book (the first edition was published in 1986, around the same time as the War of the Camps. I'm still trying to wrap my head around that incident.) I don't know. Maybe that's just the nature of trauma - once experienced or in progress, it doesn't tend to leave room in one's life for much else.
I have a tendency to look at the Palestinians' situation through the lens of what I know about the history of my own people (though I'm sure neither of them would really appreciate the comparison). Like Palestinian culture, Jewish culture across the past two thousand years has been fragmentary, contradictory and inconsistent, a mishmash of different influences at different times, as one would expect when the participants are spread out over thousands of miles. What's weird is that, in a strange way, I think we somehow made it work for us; even if the formal definition of our identity is famously complicated, even if we believe completely different things at times, there's always been something there that can't quite be put into words. I think we had a few things going for us, though, that the Palestinians didn't. First up was a central tradition of some sort - the Tanakh, the Talmud and the Mishnah - that no one ever quite really broke with entirely. The Palestinians don't; unlike the Jews, they don't have one single religious tradition or philosophy (Said, for instance, came from a Palestinian Christian background, unless I'm mistaken). The second was a sense of narrative, of our particular place in the story - where we were from, what we were about, (for some) even a sense of where we're going. The Palestinians don't have that either, at least from what I can tell so far. If they have a central narrative, it's the narrative of their dispossession by the Israelis.
Getting to the point, though - why is this a massive issue, at least in my mind? Imagine for a second that your entire identity - who you are as a person - was more or less entirely tied to resistance (peaceful or otherwise) and continuation of a particular conflict. How would you ever be able to stop? Call it Patton's Dilemma - who are you once the war is over?
It's something I'm worry about - both about the Palestinians and the Israelis, to be honest. I guess that's the thing about wars and conflicts this long. In the case of the Israelis, though, there's at least theoretically a tradition and a culture to fall back on when and if the bullets ever stop flying; some place to go back to. What do the Palestinians have to define themselves if they do wind up making peace with Israel? Or even if they actually do win? Even Said admitted at one point that he wasn't sure if getting the land back would be enough to get what the Palestinians truly want - I believe the way he put it was 'restoring ourselves to ourselves.'
I think one of the reasons the peace process has failed so far is that it keeps trying to address the real, tangible facts of peace - who gets what land, water rights, who holds what military power and how much - without looking into the problems like these - the ones that are much, much harder to really affect, but which are, I suspect, equally important to the conflict and why it keeps on continuing. All I can really say for sure is, I really hope there's someone Palestinian out there who's at least trying to work on this.
* yes, as a cultural outsider, yes, without knowing how to speak or read Arabic -- two things that I'm sure doom any efforts on my part to futility, I just thought I'd try anyway.
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The West Temple.com
Sep. 13th, 2009 | 03:43 am
location: Tradewinds Drive
mood: accomplished
Remember way back when I mentioned I was doing a website for my synagogue? Oh, say, *over a year ago*? Well, it's finally online, just in time for the start of Religious School.
Mind you, it's still not quite finished. Man oh man, is there a ton of content to fill out, though I can hopefully leave that up to others. And I'd still like to finish the plugin for the Donation page I started (but wasn't able to finish in time). Also, I keep running into these weird permission problems on the live server that I should probably do something about, and then there's the matter of pictures on the bio pages...
Anyway. Point is, though - it's up. It's visible. Hallelujah.
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Job Update
Sep. 12th, 2009 | 03:39 pm
location: Tradewinds Drive
mood:
grateful
So. Uh. All of a sudden, I have a job. Just got it yesterday. I start a week from Monday
Also, that gig that I've been talking about vaguely on Facebook? It came through.
:D
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Random Strangeness
Sep. 1st, 2009 | 05:08 pm
location: Tradewinds Drive
mood:
puzzled
music: "The Few That Remain," Set Your Goals
So I'm sitting on a bench outside of Borders at Crocker Park about an hour ago, writing some stuff down, when this middle-aged/50's woman I've never seen before in my life abruptly pulls up in a blue Ford Focus with her windows lowered. "Hey," she says. "Hey. I've got something to say to you."
There wasn't anyone else around. "Yes?" I say, sort of automatically.
"Fuck you," she says.
"I'm sorry?" But she had already started to drive off.
Uh. Okay. Come to think of it now, I might have seen her when I'd been in Brueggers' a little while before, getting a refill. She was over in the corner reading a book; I glanced over to see what the title was. "American Massacre," I think. Maybe she thought I was staring, or something?
Anyway. People are weird sometimes.
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Initiative Tracker
Aug. 27th, 2009 | 01:02 am
location: Tradewinds Drive
mood:
tired
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On what I've been up to recently
Aug. 22nd, 2009 | 08:47 pm
location: Tradewinds Drive
mood:
calm
Other than that, I just finished up some contract work for a local temp agency. I'm hopeful that I'll get some more offers through them. In the meantime, the plan is to just keep putting up flyers, keep applying for jobs, and hope that something comes through.
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Blog Update Saturday
Aug. 22nd, 2009 | 08:42 pm
location: Tradewinds Drive
mood: writing
(On a related note, I found this to be a little too real. At least I can hold my beer better than that.)
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In Which I Am Somewhat Glad I Am Not The Only One Who Has Had This Experience
Aug. 10th, 2009 | 02:39 am
location: Tradewinds Drive
mood:
tired
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Why Web Designers Hate Internet Explorer 6
Aug. 7th, 2009 | 12:52 am
location: Tradewinds Drive
mood:
grumpy
This is akin to telling people they can't drive on a public road unless their car cars are 2005 or later models. Programmers who add bells and whistles just to prove they can,without asking whether consumers perceive any value, are on ego trips...
I'm going to explain this as clearly and as simply as I possibly can. You know what you're looking at? The page right in front of you? -- It looks the way that it does because, somewhere a mile to a thousand miles away, there is a piece of code somewhere that tells your browser what exactly the page says and how that page is supposed to look. With me so far? Okay.
The problem with IE6 is that it doesn't read the code that tells the browser how the page should look in the same way as all the other browsers do. Its layout engine is completely different from every single other browser in use at the moment - yes, up to and including Internet Explorer 7. And that makes supporting IE6 a massive headache for every web designer and developer out there. It doesn't matter whether you're trying to do something simple or something flashy - it gives everything an added layer of complexity. It's like sending an Indian fifth-grader who's just started to learn English to an Oxford literature conference - no, it's not impossible to deal with, but do you really want to spend half of your time translating stuff into Hindi? Not to mention making sure the poor kid understands exactly what's going on?
Or let's go with your metaphor - it's not really like requiring all cars on the highway are of a certain model year. It's more like requiring that all cars have, say, wheels. (Or maybe seat belts, if you want to go into IE6's various security flaws.)
My house is 30 years old. My wife of 45 years is 65 years old. I have an electric saw that is 40 years old. Got a 965 El Camino that has run all its life on propane. All of these items work fine.
Sure, but I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that you're not writing that little missive on a Macintosh Classic, or on a Commodore 64. I'm sure we'd all like to live in a world where one computer every twenty years works just fine. Unfortunately, that's just not the way technology works. Just as soon as you've got something out of the door, someone's figured out something better - or figured out that you've just made a really horrible mistake, and there's really a much better and easier way of doing something. That's just the way it is.
In conclusion - for the love of cheese, everyone, will you please just give Firefox a shot?
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We are gathered together / to witness the union / of Stewart Martin and Karen Singerman...
Aug. 5th, 2009 | 05:48 pm
location: Tradewinds Drive
mood:
content
music: What do ya think?
Now, most of you reading this will probably have already seen this video or would have been there in person. For the rest of you, my friends Stewart Martin and Karen Singerman were married about two weeks ago. I was fortunate enough to be there - and to be there to see a live performance of this song by my good friend Peter Catlin, who composed this song just for the occasion. As for the subject of the song... well... why don't you just listen for yourself. Words can do the genius of this thing no justice:
Needless to say, both the couple themselves as well as most of the audience are big Jonathan Coulton fans. Not that a song that features references to mad science and Calvin & Hobbes needs much of a pedigree to get into my good graces. Give it a listen, everyone. You won't be disappointed, trust me.
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Just for the heck of it...
Jul. 13th, 2009 | 08:26 pm
location: Tri-C West, Parma, OH
mood: accomplished

I imagine that most people reading this probably would have already spotted this on Facebook... all the same, what the heck.
(For those of you who are curious - he politely declined to read a line from the Zombie OH screenplay. He said that he couldn't really do that without knowing more about the project - fair enough in my mind. For me, having the guts to ask was victory enough.)
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New JonStout.Net
Jun. 29th, 2009 | 08:28 pm
location: Tradewinds Drive
mood:
rushed
music: "Against the Wall," Cage the Elephant
So what else have I been up to? ... Eh. I'm not really ready to talk about that, after all. So that'll have to be a later post.
Next step? Fill in my LinkedIn profile. Get new business cards while picking up equipment at Tri-C on Wednesday. And make flyers. Lots and lots of flyers.
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The Great Firewall of Iran
Jun. 24th, 2009 | 07:33 pm
location: Tradewinds Drive
mood:
stressed
In other news, why the hell are they blaming Britain? I mean, I guess they have to find some kind of scapegoat, but Britain? It just seems so random...
Oh, wait. Maybe not. Still, reaching a little far back in history there, aren't you, Ayatollah?
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Short Opinion on Hellboy II: The Golden Army
Jun. 17th, 2009 | 04:56 pm
location: The Promenade, Crocker Park, Westlake
mood: awake
music: "Come Together," Beatles
That said, while there are some good character moments in the film, man, do they need to find an actual screenwriter to handle this franchise, because the script made a whole lot of no sense. (Wait, Liz is mad at Hellboy, then she isn't? And why does everyone quit the shadowy government agency at the end?)
Final notes: Selma Blair is cute. Ron Perlman still rocks. But man, that script...
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(no subject)
Jun. 14th, 2009 | 01:20 am
location: Tradewinds Drive
mood:
cheerful
A: (Stabs a raider) Got any fives?
B: (Tosses raider off of the deck) Go fish.
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Still grumphing at Apple, though.
Jun. 11th, 2009 | 11:19 pm
location: Tradewinds Drive
mood:
pleased with myself
// these need to be global variables
var req;
var reqTwo;
var xmlContainer;
function loadXMLSafari(xmlLoc, xslLoc, myContainer) {
req = new XMLHttpRequest();
reqTwo = new XMLHttpRequest();
xmlContainer = myContainer; // myContainer = object reference to whatever you want to fill
req.onreadystatechange = loadXMLSafariPartTwo;
req.open("GET",xmlLoc,false);
reqTwo.onreadystatechange = loadXMLSafariPartTwo;
reqTwo.open("GET",xslLoc,false);
req.send();
reqTwo.send();
}
function loadXMLSafariPartTwo() {
if (req.readyState != 4 || reqTwo.readyState != 4) {
return;
}
var xml = req.responseXML;
var xsl = reqTwo.responseXML;
xmlContainer.innerHTML = "";
xsltProcessor = new XSLTProcessor();
xsltProcessor.importStylesheet(xsl);
myXML = xsltProcessor.transformToFragment(xml,do
xmlContainer.appendChild(myXML);
}
Or some variation thereof. You could probably pass myContainer's ID as a string instead, if you prefer, and do a document.getElementById on the line it's assigned to xmlContainer. Whatever.
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Grumph grumph grumph Apple grumph
Jun. 11th, 2009 | 10:08 pm
location: Tradewinds Drive
mood:
grumph.
Today I learned the hard way that neither Safari nor Chrome basically supports importing XML and XSLT stylesheets into a document via JavaScript, the way that Firefox and - yes - even IE7 do. Here's one of the many threads I've come across posted by those who have had the same problem - all apparently working off of the same W3Schools example that I was. I notice with some trepidation that that thread was posted more than a year ago. I'm guessing that it's a feature that comes up so rarely that Apple hasn't bothered fixing it, or at least coming up with something comparable to the load method.
Not sure where to go from here. I may have to combine the XML and the XSLT server-side via PHP, which I've been trying to avoid - I'm trying to avoid refreshing the page in this project. Either that, or I could try one of the code libraries people mentioned in the threads. I also tried figuring out some way to do it with the XMLHttpRequest object, but so far everything I've tried has come up blank.
Grumph. What a nuisance.
Edit: Found a solution. Details here.
