A t-shirt for Kevin

Of course, he never reads my blog, so he'll never see it.

Alas!

I love Scott Kurtz

Today's (yesterday's) strip is hilarious, but the rant is what really got me. I hope he doesn't delete it. Here it is, regardless:

God appeared to me in a dream...told me I'm hilarious
Posted on Tuesday, February 15, 2005

Contrary to what some might think, I'm not a godless man. I'm really not. I believe in a higher power and I hope to become one with the intelligence that created the universe someday. I tend to be critical and guarded about organized religion because, in my opinion, the bad aspects outweigh the good. Well... "critical and guarded" may be inaccurate...I'm actually quite cynical about the whole mess.

To me, God is pure and religion is flawed. God is born into us. Take any person; remove all outside influence and that person will ultimately seek a higher power, a reason for existence. People will always try to find god. Not everyone comes to the same conclusion, however, and it bothers me that religion tends to punish those who come to a conclusion that conflicts with dogma.

Anyway, I'm telling you all this because I used the word "Christ" in Monday's strip and a very small number of you are very upset about it. Apparently by taking their lord's name in vain, I've taken away some of their "power" and I'll have to repent. I'll need to apologize to God, say a prayer or something equally as ridiculous to put things right again.

But everything's going to be okay because last night, God appeared to me in a dream and told me not to worry about it. He said that he created my sense of humor. He knows everything, so he saw that bit of dialogue a-comin'. He also told me that since he created me and I created the strip then vicariously he wrote it anyway. So if there's anyone to blame...it's him.

He also told me that the only way to really offend him at this point would be by second guessing myself due to some fundamentalists (who were going to get upset about SOMETHING on Monday, regardless), and that he was very proud to see that I was reaching out and connecting with people. In the end, he told me, that's all that really matters anyway.

He then told me to get off my ass and start updating on time again before turning into a dove and flying away.

I woke up after that so....

That is so totally great!

Site upgrade status update!

...yeah.

So, WordPress 1.5 is out. It's a good thing I didn't get very far with my CSS style, because everything has changed! Now the styles are called "Themes", and they incorporate different looks for different aspects of the blog. All in all it appears to be a good change, but as everything is very new I am having trouble finding a decent theme to base mine on. Very few of the themes people have made so far are even aesthetically pleasing. Some of the ones that are do not render correctly, or have little bugs in them that make Baby Jesus cry. Make my theme from scratch, you say? I may very well have to, but it wouldn't be my first choice...

I haven't looked into how the upgrade may or may not affect my Blogger import tool. (I'm afraid!)

In a bit of good news, I discovered today that smugmug has added a "keyword" or "tag" area to its photos, alongside the preexisting "caption" box. Now I have absolutely no reason to use Flickr, which is something of a relief because I didn't want to pay for two image hosting services!

Three unrelated stories

"Frank" is dead!

David Dingman-Grover had most of his tumor removed Feb. 2 at the Skull Base Institute at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. The family learned the results of a biopsy on the tumor at midnight Monday. The family was crowded around the phone on "pins and needles" waiting for the call from David's surgeon, his mother said.

"(David) is so mellow - he's so easygoing. He was just like, 'Really? Great! Cool!'" Dingman-Grover said of her son's reaction to the good news. "It's like, 'Honey, is that all?' He says, 'Did you ever think it wouldn't be gone?'"

That great attitude is why he beat the cancer. Children are so wise...

A pastor is asking his congregation to act out the Parable of the Talents.

A pastor handed out $14,000 to congregation members to invest for seven weeks, after which they are to bring the money and profits back to the church to be used in missionary work.

As Robert says, you gotta spend money to make money.

And lastly, in a story sent my way by Sam (thanks...I think): Japanese women are giving their sons sexual favors in order to de-stress them at exam time! (No wonder men in Japan are so fucked up...)

"Mom," he said, shyly but firmly, "I wanna do it with you."

"With me!" What to do? Be shocked and angry, or calm and understanding? "Let's see what your father says."

Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaahhh...

I finally uploaded some pictures

Here is another set of photographs from the Augusta Canal Historic Trail. I took these at the end of December.

I'm thinking of creating a blog template using this image:

Hopefully soon I'll get back over there, but my bike rack is slowly breaking into pieces, so I may have to buy a new one before I'm willing to cart my bike anywhere.

Regardless, I'm looking forward to taking more pictures of Augusta in the springtime :)

Expensive!

Eric Burns recently mentioned that he is moving Websnark away from pair over to Talk About Comics, because staying at pair was prohibitively expensive.

pair is expensive. But they are a damn good host, and I don't know that I want to give them up. I don't know what "weird troubles" Eric was having, but my site has barely had so much as a hiccup in the three years I've owned pixelscribbles.com. (Then again, it's not like I get the kind of traffic he does. Still, Keenspot and Sluggy use pair...)

As Sean says, you get what you pay for, and for now, I'm leery of shifting to a less expensive host that might, oh, accidentally lose all my data.

The one thing that bugs me is the database access issue I've mentioned previously. We'll see what happens when I shift to WordPress.

He got a little sidetracked

From Yahoo! News - Oddly Enough:

A 91-year-old northwest Indiana man has been returned home after running an errand and finding himself at the end of a winding private driveway in eastern Iowa.

This reminds me of Grandpa's last years, when he'd just hop into the Subaru (the car I now drive) and go, without telling anyone that he was leaving. Finally Grandma had to hide his keys.

Proposed "pay by the mile" tax a "disincentive to buy fuel-efficient cars"?

Okay, somebody explain this to me.

According to CBS (via Slashdot), California is thinking about eliminating the tax on gasoline in favor of a tax on how much driving you do. This is to make up for the fact that fuel-efficient cars mean people are buying less gas, meaning less taxes are received for road maintenance.

Privacy advocates say it's more like big brother riding on your bumper, not to mention a disincentive to buy fuel-efficient cars.

"It's not fair for people like me who have to commute, and we don't have any choice but take the freeways," says Just. "We shouldn't have to be taxed."

How is this a "disincentive"? You would still be paying for gas. A fuel efficient car would mean you'd have to buy gas less frequently. This means you would save money--the money you would have spent on gas. You just won't save as much, because the tax will add to that. But think of what people who have normal cars will be spending for gas...and they'll be taxed for distance too! How, I ask again, is this a "disincentive to buy fuel-efficient cars"? Would the savings on gas prices be that negligible? How much of California's gas price is tax?

What this tax would do, in my opinion, is encourage people not to drive. Of course, here in America, we don't always have an alternative.

Of greater interest to me is the technology behind the tax. GPS systems in every car that track your distance could eventually be used to, say, automatically give you a speeding ticket. The technology would definitely help if a car was stolen, or if you got lost. But at the same time, do we really want our locations available in real-time to anyone with access to the system?

Something to think about.

Blast from the past

Some businesses on Computex Drive in Jessamine County burned this morning after an explosion. Investigators are still on the scene.

While this in itself is newsworthy, I suppose (I don't actually know where Computex Drive is, nor was I involved in any way with the four businesses that were destroyed in the blaze), the real reason I'm mentioning this is because of the officer mentioned in the article.

John Branscum.

Wasn't he, like, my D.A.R.E. officer back in 5th grade?

(Actually, wasn't he also our next door neighbor for awhile?)

I don't know what's up with all my dreams lately

Just now I awoke from a nap...although it would be more accurate to say that I wrenched myself violently from sleep, and am still not fully awake.

While I slept I had a dream about Cory Doctorow.

He and I were in his small apartment (flat, I suppose) in England. In the dream, I believed him to be married, and to have children. I realized that his family didn't live in England with him.

He was working on a laptop computer at the foot of his bed. The laptop was actually on the bed and he was sitting on a low stool next to it. I didn't want to disturb him, so I said, "Can I ask you a question?"

He was flipping from window to window. I could see that he was creating a BoingBoing post, working out a comment on another blog, writing his next novel, and reading several other sites all at once. He glanced up at me with pretend patience oozing from behind his dark horn-rimmed glasses. "Okay," he said.

"Well," I fumbled, as he did not stop multi-tasking. "I understood that you were married."

"Yeah," he said, raising an eyebrow. He didn't stop working. For a moment I took this to be an acceptance of the rumor, and that he was going to correct it, but then he didn't say anything else. Finally I grasped that he'd answered in the affirmative, and that perhaps he thought I was trying to hit on him. Feeling stupid, I went into the bathroom. (In real life, I had to pee, so I kept going to the bathroom in the dream, and it kept not fulfilling me.)

But shortly I went out and said, "Could I ask just one more question? Um, so your wife and family, they--"

But before I could finish, he sighed at me as if I were the most annoying person alive. "You know," he said, "you don't have to ask me if you can ask a question."

"Yes," I said quietly, not looking at him. I turned around. "I can see how that would be annoying," I finished, feeling that I kept saying too much. I retreated back into the bathroom.

But again I was unsatisfied, and I poked my head back out. "I only do that because of my husband."

"Mmm-hmm."

"He's a very focused person, so if I didn't break him out of his focus, he wouldn't know that I was talking to him. He would just keep focusing on his computer as if I wasn't even there."

"I see."

I was starting to wonder how I was going to cope with having to be in this apartment with Cory Doctorow. But he was a little nicer after that, getting up from his stool and coming to the door and explaining that he was married but had no children. We kept interrupting each other.

"Can I blog about this conversation?" I asked jokingly. "'The Most Awkward Conversation I've Ever Had'. Well, maybe not the most awkward..."

"I'd rather you didn't, some of that was private," Cory said.

"Can I just blog about the awkward ums and uhs there at the end?"

"Sure," Cory said, brightening slightly. He went back to the other room, to his laptop. "There weren't any details there."

"I don't know if I can remember everything you said..." I trailed off. He was gone.

Then my dream turned into science fiction, in which a person found out that another person was a robot, and another person stole the robot to copy its design. Finally I yanked myself awake, because I really, really had to pee.

Dinosaurs are awesome

For no particular reason (okay, because I'm bored, and in too bad a mood to actually do anything productive), I found myself reading the LiveJournal of J. Jacques, artist of Questionable Content (a webcomic I love [today's rules!], though the name sucks. Unless it is some obscure indie-pop reference I'm not getting), and I came across this hilarious entry (it reminds me of the X-E--god, I haven't read anything over there in ages. I think the evil ads drove me away).

And that, friends, was about as many parentheticals as I am willing to insert into a sentence.

Ambulance "clamped" at Dublin airport

From Yahoo! News - Oddly Enough:

At the airport, police use clamps to enforce a no-parking rule outside the arrivals entrance and instead require cars to use a nearby multistory parking lot. But on Saturday, an ambulance was clamped even though it was parked in a section reserved for emergency crews immediately outside the entrance.

Yeah, good job, Parking Nazis.

The suggestible nature of opinions

Eric Burns threw up some posts from an old(er) journal of his today. It's the kind of stuff that is interesting if you are interested in people and their feelings and thoughts. As I am that kind of person, I'm enjoying reading them.

The first half of the second post, entitled Playlists and Coffeemakers: Recapturing the Personal, thrills at how iTunes (and digital music in general) helps us escape peer pressure and embrace the music that we truly like. The best part of this piece is the bit about Billy Joel:

While we were sitting around one day, I made some innocuous reference to Billy Joel.

"Oh, Christ," Dominic said. "I hate Billy Joel."

"Me too," Bill said. "Ugh."

Now, here I am. I'm an admitted geek. I'm living with geeks and nonconformists and men with Travolta hair. I'm (at that point) in my late twenties, and I'm an intelligent person.

"Oh Jesus," I thought to myself. "I didn't know Billy Joel sucked!" So I stopped listening to Billy Joel.

See, all three of my roommates at that time have musical tastes that appeal to me. They introduced me to hardcore Elvis Costello, to Bare Naked Ladies, to Kirsty Macall, to They Might Be Giants, to Bad Religion, to Oingo Boingo, to Stan Ridgway, to Tom Waits, to Warren Zevon, to the Jazz Butcher and that's just off the top of my head. About the only heavy music influences from my time in Seattle -- one of the music capitals of the world -- not from Bill or Dominic or T was jazz, and that's just because we had KPLU, which has to be the best jazz Public Radio station on Earth.

So, while I had always been a huge Billy Joel fan, I suddenly had doubts. And make no mistake, I was a huge fan. I went to his Bridge tour. I had all his albums. I listened to his greatest hits collection on shuffle.

Flash forward five years. I'm living in New Hampshire. I'm getting my CDs out of storage. I'm revisiting old favorites. I'm revelling a little. And I come across Glass Houses.

"Oh, that," I think. "Forget it. Billy Joel sucks."

Five years. Five years after an offhanded comment from a couple of guys who didn't like Billy Joel, and I was still marked.

This really made me think about how our opinions are suggestible. How people will automatically try to like or dislike something based purely on other people's thoughts on the subject. (The trend while I was in college seemed to be "If everyone else likes it, it sucks. If everyone else hates it, it rules.") While I don't know enough about music to really be a music snob or to try and fit a certain musical mold--I like what I like, and if you don't like it, who cares?--I am susceptible in other ways. For example, yesterday Will and I were talking about a certain community, and I mentioned that I thought it was awesome, but that I would probably feel out of place because I wasn't cool enough to really be a part of it. Why? What is that? What is the perception of "coolness"?

Part of the reason I like blogs is because anybody can be a rockstar blogger. You don't even have to pay for your blog if you don't want to. All you have to do is write. The playing field is completely level.

Or is it? What I've noticed is, there are certain rockstar bloggers who are far more famous and read than others. And there are certain types of blogs that are considered "cooler". I've thought about how to reinvent this blog many times, because I've felt that it doesn't have enough general appeal. I always come back to the inescapable conclusion that it's my blog, and I write what I feel I want to write, and if I try to shoehorn myself I'll probably just stop doing it. But making the decision not to change what I write about always makes me feel as if I'm giving up on an opportunity for more. (I have an idea for a side-blog that I've been kicking around for awhile, even. Something that might be more interesting to the blog readers at large.)

So what is this desire to please others, to eschew true originality in favor of the herd? I really think it comes down to community. We're social creatures, and we don't want to alienate people. We want to always know that there are people in our lives, even if we like to spend time alone. Not only that, we want other people to like and respect us, and this can cause us to go so far as lie about our true feelings, in order to alter their perceptions.

I, however, don't like lying, or pretending to be something I'm not. In fact, I am obsessed with making sure that people understand my opinions. In effect, I want them to be able to make a proper judgment of my value. I want them to have as many of the facts as possible.

And that is really why I write, why I chat, why I post. I have always, since I first started writing notes in school, since I made my first post to a BBS, wanted to be understood for who I am. (Eric's got a good snippet about the arrogance of writers here.)

I have a harder time with this in the physical company of people, though. I make lies of omission constantly--if I don't like something, or if I disagree, but I see no point in "rocking the boat". I don't know that this is particularly misguided; if I was completely honest at all times and said everything I was thinking, I would hurt a lot of people, and they would stop being my friends. (And I already say too much as it is.) But when I write, it's absolutely honestly. I write from my gut, from my soul. When you read my words, you are reading me. I can't write any other way. All I can do is make decisions about what to write about--which is hard, because I honestly want to write about everything.

For example: Right now I'm looking through my water glass at my Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles pen and pencil holder. Michaelangelo is skateboarding with his hand out for balance. His pointer finger is extended. Through the glass, I see a reflection of his hand, and by moving my head back and forth, I can make the hands move together until the pointer fingers are touching, just like Michelangelo's ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

These are the sorts of weird things I want to write about constantly.

And I want to write hurtful things, too, and things that could easily get me fired. (I wrote something along the latter lines today, and then deleted it.) I want my opinions to be known. All of them.

But I am nowhere near this brutally honest in person.

So Eric's right, in a way that he didn't intend. The computer, the Internet, is a haven from peer pressure. With a layer of text between me and other people, my reactions change. When something happens between me and someone online, I am more likely to become angry than I am to just roll over and accept it. Being a writer and maintaining friendships through writing forces me to cast off many societal restraints.

I think that somewhere, there must be a balance.

I want this coat.

Not that I've ever been attacked. But the idea of being able to electroshock somebody is just awesome.

Maybe that's just because I'm in a bad mood.

:P

All Japanese women wear makeup!

Or at least, that's the impression I get from this Mainichi article:

Investigators said Okumura dressed himself up in a long hair wig, a miniskirt and boots before entering the women's underwear sales section of the supermarket. After selecting three items of underwear, he allegedly took them into a changing room and hid them in his coat before exiting the store and driving off.

However, Okumura wasn't wearing any makeup, and a security official who realized he was a man and thought he was acting strangely followed him and took note of the license plate of his vehicle.

Poor crossdressing shoplifter...he wasn't much of a transvestite, was he?