Resumé Item

For anyone who's interested, there's a little taste of what I do over at MTV.com (apologies for the ridiculous fact that you have to sit through an ad for one movie before you watch an ad for another). That behind-the-scenes piece was cut by one of our editors, and I did the online - adding final graphics and doing the color correction, cutting in the audio mix, and delivering the final tape.

More of our work will start hitting the web as the summer gets going, so there may be ore as the weather gets warmer...

[link courtesy of io9]

Wow

Holy Jesus.

This woman's octuplet-containg belly looks like a Stan Winston special effect or something. And yet, it is real.

On Ideas & Writing

Some solid advice from John August:

You’re not going to become best friends with every nice person you meet. You’re not going to write every good idea you have.

I've made this very decision myself in the past week or two, after I consciously "allowed" a few gems escape without writing them down.

A-Rod Juiced

Surprise! Yankee "star" player Alex Rodriguez just got outed for using steroids! He tested positive in 2003, the year he won the M.V.P. award which gave him the leverage to, as Will put it, "get the big contract with the Yanks AND TAKE THEM NOWHERE." That contract runs until 2019 (!), giving A-Fraud a possible net of $300 million.

Universe 16, Yankees 0. Karma's a bitch.

New Year: Status in Brief

It's rather obvious that TWGB has been on a bit of an, ah, hiatus, of late.

That will likely continue for a little longer yet. I've got some serious Life Projects that need attention, in addition to work and social time. So updates are going to be especially spotty for a while.

I am NOT stopping, I am NOT going away, but officially marking this as a slow period. Regular, worthwhile postings will resume on some sort of schedule once I get some of my personal backlog sorted out. In the meantime, I appreciate your patience, and please bear with me.

For those of you so inclined, I've started experimenting with Twitter, and may have some brief tidbits up there to supplement this site; you can find and follow me here.

On Making Art

Willard Wigan, who creates microsculptures:

I enjoy it when I finish it. Not working on it, no. It's misery, it's painstaking.

I can think of several artists who would agree...

Happy Thanksgiving

The turkey is out of the brine and into the oven; my parents are in Mexico with my Uncle John and Aunt Susie; Ian is hosting a dinner with Liz's family and Caitlin and Ash; Adam's sister Maya has flown down from San Fran, Mike is driving in, and the LA orphan crew will be assembling shortly. We're healthy and happy and in good company.

Plus, our president-elect has given us a message of hope and thankfulness.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Breaks And Paragraphs

[WARNING: Here be web nerdery]

Yikes.

Turns out, I've been writing some crappy code these past years. I haven't been using paragraph tags; instead, I've just been inserting line breaks between paragraphs as I type. Now, initially, this looks the same when converted to HTML for display, as the default paragraph tag setting is almost the same as a line break.

No, the problem appears when you start trying to customize your code.

So, for example, the post prior to this looks funky, with way too much space between paragraphs. This one looks just as lame. It happens because I've recently started using the <p> tag, because it'll let my (eventual) full-site redesign be more powerful. But, because everything old was done with line breaks, I need the blog to perform an action where it displays "returns" as line breaks. So, as I do have returns between <p> tags, suddenly the space is getting doubled between paragraphs anywhere the <p> tag is used.

I am lame. I know. I admit it.

My plan is this: I'm going to let the <p> tag posts look ugly for another week or two. Then, I'll disable the line break setting, making everything old look bad. At that point, I'll begin going back through my old posts and formatting them correctly; it will take a long time, so please be patient.

I'm sorry it has to be like this. I guess it's just my growing pains as a web designer. And, since I am not a web designer, I guess it could have been worse...

Michael Crichton R.I.P.

Michael Crichton died at the beginning of the month, and I feel bad that I haven't gotten to it until now. Other than Tolkien and (recently) Orson Scott Card, he's the modern writer I've read the most of. Jurassic Park, Congo, Sphere, and Eaters of the Dead are books I re-read regularly. I can't claim I do this for sparkling prose or thought-provoking narratives – my motive to return to these wells is pure entertainment.

That I am a science fiction geek is no surprise; the fact that I've read most of Crichton's work follows logically. For all of his weaknesses as a writer (and he had his share), he excelled at blending intriguing narratives with technological questions and dilemmas – those most basic "What if?" questions at the heart of good science fiction. Sometimes the premise was simple and primal – what if scientists cloned dinosaurs – while other times he went for a more specific story – what if a society of anciently trained gorillas came head-to-head with a late-twentieth century tech-heavy search party. But at his best, it was always intriguing, and kept me turning the pages.

One of my first memories of a "new" book is from the early nineties, probably March of 1992. My mom had orchestrated me giving my dad the Jurassic Park paperback as a Christmas or birthday gift, though I had barely glanced at the cover before it got wrapped. So a few weeks later, when my dad handed me some book open to a particular page.

"Read this, from here to here," he said.

So I did.

A narrow path wound down the hill. The air was chilly and damp. As they moved lower, the mist around them thinned, and Grant could see the landscape better. It looked, he thought, rather like the Pacific Northwest, the Olympic Peninsula.

"That's right," Regis said. "Primary ecology is deciduous rain forest. Rather different from the vegetation on the mainland, which is more classical rain forest. But this is a microclimate that only occurs at elevation, on the slopes of the northern hills. The majority of the island is tropical."

Down below, they could see the white roofs of large buildings, nestled among the planting. Grant was surprised: the construction was elaborate. They moved lower, out of the mist, and now he could see the full extent of the island, stretching away to the south. As Regis had said, it was mostly covered in tropical forest.

To the south, rising above the palm trees, Grant saw a single trunk with no leaves at all, just a big curving stump. Then the stump moved, and twisted around to face the new arrivals. Grant realized that he was not seeing a tree at all.

He was looking at the graceful, curving neck of an enormous creature, rising fifty feet into the air.

He was looking at a dinosaur.

And then I was hooked.

I read Jurassic Park over three days, reading almost every moment I could, staying up until 3 or 4 in the morning to keep on going. Sure, the story was a survival adventure about dinosaurs, but it also tied into technology and science,; it was hard to imagine a single story tying into more of my interests.

When watching the news with my parents, we heard a report on Hurricane Iniki, which had just hit the Hawaiian island Kaua'i "disrupting the filming of Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park." My dad and I looked at each other – our favorite director, making the movie of a book about cloning dinosaurs? It's hard to imagine a time before the internet, when we would have had no way of knowing about it, aside from a lucky newscast, but there we were, and we were excited.

We saw the movie as a family – I'll never forget my mom jumping and screaming when a velociraptor stuck its head through the piping in the maintenance shed. Just two weeks after it's June 3, 1993 opening, I took my dad back as a father's gift, just the two of us.¹ Clearly, an impression was made.

And so my love affair with Crichton was born; soon, I was reading Disclosure, Rising Sun, Sphere, and Congo. Our copy of Jurassic Park starting falling apart, so I got another one. The Lost World is the first book I remember looking forward to; everything else I was excited about, literarily, was either long since published, or a new find. In this case, I got to anticipate, which was a fun all its own.²

I've read most of his books, some bad, most good. I've studied him in class, watched his movies, and enjoyed his TV shows. He may have been a right-wing nutjob (with his "global warming is a myth" book State of Fear which I have not finished), and he may not have written the greatest prose, but the man had a knack for storytelling, and more than the normal share of imagination. Plus, he was a big time Mac user.

And now I'm speaking of him in the past tense.

Thanks for everything, Mr. Crichton.

---

1. Embarassingly, I remember taking him to McDonald's (!) for dinner, and I think he paid for the movie, but hey, it's the thought that counts! [⇪]




2. That this book, as well as the two film sequels, were somewhat disappointing didn't matter; my dad and I saw both of the films together, and found plenty to like in the book (as well as the first sequel). [⇪]

The Secret Lives of Ants

We've all seen ant farms; however, like Khan, they betray a bit of two-dimensional thinking. Eager for a better look at a real colony, a group of scientists scrounged together 10 tons (!) of cement and poured it into a leaf-cutter ant colony.

The results are, in a word, breathtaking. The complexity of the resulting structure, as well as its obvious logic and seeming design, must be seen to be believed. Yes, it looks like they buried a living colony in cement, but it's hard to be upset once the colony is unearthed.

Enthusiasm Beyond Reason

Linked below is a feat that is American down to its core.

Dedication to a seemingly impossible task; refusal to accept defeat; willingness to experience utter humiliation in pursuit of a dream.

Oh – and it's totally, completely pointless. Ridiculous, in fact. Done only because maybe it can be. Not for any benefit to mankind or personal gain. The mountain is climbed because it is there.

O beautiful, for spacious skies...

Primer: Where The Money Went

I don't know many financial pros (Hi Sahra!), but I do know my fair share of smart people. And the only consensus I've seen among them is that the financial mess the United States finds itself in is really hard to figure out. I guess that once you have billions of dollars being traded daily, a government policy designed to obfuscate and enable, and greedy people and corporations who don't care about consequences, chaos sets in really fast.

So it's nice to find a few easily-digestible breakdowns of what exactly went wrong. Most recently, Daily Kos published an organized, succinct, and funny explanation:

Wait a second. Swaps are unregulated. No one says I have to have enough resources to cover the swap, and even better, no one says I have to offer the swap to the person who actually made the loan! Hey buddy, see that loan over there? You may think it's iffy, but I think it'll hold up. In fact, I'm so sure it will, I'll sell you a credit default swap on it that pays off if it fails. You don't make the loan, you don't have to pay off on the loan, you don't have anything to do with the loan. You just pay me the fee. And if that guy loses his money, you collect. How sweet is that!

…At this point, credit default swaps have become completely divorced from the original function. A single loan can be covered by multiple swaps. There's a complicated fiscal term for this. It's called gambling, and at this stage, that's all that remains of those little "insurance" policies. They no longer protect anyone from anything, they just offer a chance to place enormous overlapping side bets on everything.

For the record, the article is overly partisan, and overlooks the role of many Democrats who enabled this mess, but fairly targets the total failure of deruglation, and the role it played in getting us into this mess.

This American Life and Ira Glass have visited this well himself; first in May, he devoted the entirety of episode 355, "The Giant Pool of Money" to the initial mortgage collapse, and again with a follow up a few weeks ago called, appropriately, "Another Frightening Show About the Economy," which is exactly what it sounds like.

I've listened to each program twice, and they're both incredible illuminating. Highly recommended.