Take that, Alton Brown!

Ok, so I'm not really feuding with some television food personality.

But, having felt guilty not following THE RULES about cooking pasta, well, ever, this Harold McGee column about pasta prep made me feel a bit better.

More so, it reminded me both of the importance of questioning authority and the possibility of small changes across large scale.

That, and I hadn't posted in a couple days, so I was feeling guilty about that, because I'm weird that way.

Happy.

Sometimes, after a hellacious week like this one, it helps to redefine what it takes to be happy.

Just spoke on the phone with my nice lady friend. Got a fluffy cat snoring away next to me. Improvised a casserole out of leftovers, now cooking away in the oven. Watching Bill Plympton animated shorts.

Funny Videos | Funny Cartoons | More Video Clips

A quiet evening, but good things are good.

My Job Here Is Done

Yeah, I think I'm taking a break for a bit.



There's so much promotion, I can't keep up.

I'm sorry. I hope your vlogs and blogs and projects and memes and ideas keep flourishing and thriving and running their course and being bigger than you would've expected or smaller than you'd have hoped.

I just need a break. I need to internalize for a bit. I need to think about unpacking (been here 8 months now) before its time to move again. I need to be able to put my time in at work without thinking I'm letting anyone down if I squander my free time. I need to focus on personal issues.

Happy trails.

Wikipedia

I made my first wikipedia edit tonight.

I don't know how long it will last, as Wikipedia goes, so I took a screenshot of it.

Some of you might recognize my writing style.

Argh (part 2)

Wow. Mac's Photobooth takes pictures backward. iPhoto can't even handle a simple flip.

Argh.

Fine, The Gimp can fix that. *grumble* *grumble*

Anyhow, I stumbled upon this last weekend. It cost me a couple bucks at a store that people don't like to hear about, but holy cow, not only a "Little Golden Book", but one I remember my mother reading to me. I remember the voices she'd make expressing the exasperation of the narrative.

It's amazing and a little terrifying getting to repurchase a tiny bit of my disconnected youth.

My mother and those artifacts of days gone by have been gone for years. It was nice to find an echo of it.

Argh.

You know what I dislike?

No, it isn't random test posts finding their way into my RSS feed.


It's the stupid error message that my Mac gives me when I dare take a screen capture while the DVD player app is open.

Make

As I said last night: "Whomever came up with the idea of making valentine gifts as the more personal option clearly did not account for my sense of procrastination"

So it took me a week or so, a fistful of wire coathangers, 144 yards of 24 gauge wire, 24 yards of 32 gauge wire, two empty Diet Coke cans, and a lot of time, but I finished my Valentine's present for my nice lady friend.

The colors aren't quite right in this picture, and it doesn't look quite so "garland explosion!" in person, and it isn't quite how I saw it in my head.

But it pleases her, and so it is what I wanted.

And then this evening I made her dinner. Grilled scallops, grilled bacon-wrapped asparagus, and improvised a recipe for potatoes au gratin (could use some improvement, but having never made 'em from scratch and not having a recipe handy, came out ok.)

I have nothing more to do this weekend, so I think I'll go back to not making stuff for a bit.

Trader Joe's

You've probably seen this elsewhere by now, but I still got a kick out of it.

Herding Cats

The next time somebody uses the analogy of "herding cats" as a way to describe leading a group of independent or difficult individuals, I think I shall remind them of the motivating qualities of a firehose.

Herding cats is easy. They just won't like you for it.

ugh.

24 hours has not improved my mood much.

But, I'm not ready to go down the road of self-censoring and removing last night's post just yet.

I'm bitter, I'm angry, and I dropped enough hints amongst the twaddle that I knew I was disconnected at the time.

I am reserving a lot right now, because I don't want to think that a statement like "I may not be original, but I am genuine" could be filled with the implied barbs that I am perceiving.

Enough of all this drama. I'll go back to reposting links or youtube videos with no added value soon enough, I'm sure.

Failure.

A guy I listened to for a long time once said something along the lines of "even if you do a thing a few times and fail at it, you still have that much more experience than someone who never did." (heavily paraphrased, but I'm hardly in the mood to look up the direct quotation right now. Those familiar with the guy will have the idea jogged loose enough to know what I'm referring to, and the exact wording isn't really important to this anyway.)

The thing is that I've spent the last year discovering that that man was either deluded, or a liar.

Nobody cares about how many ways you've discovered to fail, and most of the time, it's next to impossible to learn anything from them anyhow. There's just too many times where things go to crap due to circumstances outside your control, how do you learn from those?

Or are we supposed to have this eternal optimism that the next time will be better if we just haul ourselves back up by the bootstraps, don a fresh shit-eating grin, and try to convince the world of whatever?

It's why I'm not in sales. I hate marketing my ideas. I'm tired of having to sell them to people. I do enough of that at work every day just in bullshit office politics to have to go through the same routine when I come home at the end of the day.

I have never claimed to be a good leader, and I know I'm not one. It's rather well-known that I admit to being at least as clueless as everyone else, and the nature of my character is to try to keep everyone happy. Anyone that's tried leading a group for any length of time might recognize what a trap this is. Except in exceedingly rare circumstances, there's just not enough of a shared vision that a group can naturally point the same way. (No great sponge migrations, if you catch my meaning.) Even when the goals are the same, there's almost always certainly someone that doesn't agree with the means to reaching that end. Try to keep a disparate group like that "happy" and you've got a recipe for paralysis. You don't make decisions. You juggle addressing one person's gripes to the next trying to keep everyone happy.

And you put up with the bullshit people lay upon you for being a bad leader. And you try to account for the fact that most people have an attention span that's shorter than a television commercial break. And you try to account for not even believing in your own leadership.

So why am I writing all this disconnected gibberish now? Well, it's this sort of mental noise that I've had running in the back of my head for the last year. See, back in 2006-2007, that guy mentioned above, one Ze Frank, had this daily videoblog thing, and contributions from the audience were highly encouraged. It built up a sort of a community of creative weirdos around it. Which segued into a site called The ORG, a loosely related website of those same creative weirdos, which suddenly went dark on January 1st 2008. Some of us that felt it was an important time/place/mix of people/whatever decided that sudden shuttering should be accounted for, and while everyone else was busy looking for each other's contact info and making lists and whatever else, I went off and registered PostORG.org, signed up for a monthly hosting plan, and then laid it on the rest of the group as a new space that could serve as a waypoint while something to replace The ORG could be built.

Fun fact: Its highest traffic day was the day that Ze mentioned it in his blog. I was so wrapped up in the cause I didn't even care that Ze credited its creation to someone else. Traffic-wise, it was all downhill from there.

So without making this into a full history lesson, it's been over a year, the site is basically dead, I've spent months beating myself up for feeling like I failed everyone, and you know what, I'm done.

I've been trying to decide for a couple weeks what I should do about it, and the truth is, there's nothing to justify keeping it around. I can save the money I spend hosting it. The couple posts on a busy week in the forum will certainly find a new home elsewhere. I can put it behind me.

What finally pushed me over the edge was an unfortunate idea collision on another website I'd started. A week after I tried to get it going, a friend of mine started up a very similar project. Except he inspires people where I do not, so I know that his would be the one to succeed (I've already had several people ask me if I'm going to participate in his.)

I know I am not the leader to pull something like that off to any level of success, and goddamn if I'm not tired of failing. I don't have the time to do it right. I usually don't have the energy after working all day. Want more excuses? I've got a million of them.

I don't care how much experience I have built up now, it's still failure. The web is littered with websites and forums and things that I got started but couldn't keep people's interest. I'm tired of setting myself in the situation, I've got enough crap all ready for me to fail at.

-transiit

(for what it's worth, postorg will be permanently closed after march 31st, so if there's something on the wiki, the forum, or your personal account there, get it now.)

25 things

Huh. One wonders what it says about the evolution of media when something approximating a traditional media outlet has decided to cover a recent meme on Facebook

Fun with Twitter

Argh.

Some days I am so filled with frustration.

Like I shouldn't bother. Like I should just keep my head down and lead a private life and not sweat everyone else's opinion.

Just go work the job, have my free time to myself and not worry if I'm letting anyone down, or not doing enough, or failing anyone.

I'm thinking a lot about shutting down PostOrg. This isn't drama over something that was said so much as my own personal thing about the quality level I'd hoped to achieve.

Frustrated.

Lost in Translation...

Ever see a dub of US television in another language? It's kinda familiar, but it's just so weird seeing the visuals without being able to quite understand the context.

Somehow, I don't feel quite that way about this:

Oops....BoingBoing fight.

Maybe the guestblogging thing wasn't such a popular idea?

Charles Platt:
Climatic Heresy 1
Climatic Heresy 2
Climatic Heresy 3
Climatic Heresy 4

(a half hour later...)

Cory Doctorow:
Top independent, peer-reviewed research indicating that climate change is real, deadly, and caused by humans
Does the Medieval Warm Period mean that climate change isn't real, dangerous and caused by humans? (No)
Understanding the economics of climate change mitigation
American Institute of Physics' history of the science of climate change

My hat's off to them for not pulling the dissenting articles down (as of the time I write this, about 1:45am PST), but I can't help but feel there's a bit of a bully pulpit at play here.

I'm going to bed. I should've known that post-work nap would keep me up too late.

(psst...the fight continues in the comments. I'm such a dork for paying attention to such things.)

Wait...political ads might be deceptive?!?

Who knew?



(via DailyKOS)

Oh, right.

Good friends Matt and Ruth gave birth to their first daughter (I suspect Ruth did most of the work on that one.) about an hour or so ago.

So, a hearty congratulations and a I'll put a moratorium on filial cannibalism jokes for at least two weeks.

(it'll take that long to get all the "Still calling yourself 'Independent Creator', huh? Kinda ballsy." jokes out of my system.)

Something to think about

Hey, here's a crazy idea. What if we're not all as different ideologically as we seem, we just got mixed up on application of ideas?

For example:

If a thing is too fragile to survive (e.g., might not survive its own inherent flaws, though may be in the greater interest to help it along...meddling, as it were.), given that we have the power to intervene, should we?

Would you answer differently if the topic was "Government Intervention/Regulation v. Free Markets" or "Creationism v. Evolution"?

Finally..

A BoingBoing post that isn't Doctorow hawking Diznee, or Xeni hawking BBTV.

Wal-mart. Not entirely negatively.

Ok, until you get to the comments. They still stay true to form on Wally World.

Yes, I know, they're not pro-union. But like I've said a bunch of times, neither am I: My appreciation of unions is inspired by Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle". Once you keep the workers out of the sausage, I tend to think there's diminishing returns.

-transiit

(and to BB commenter whomever: My bullshit detector went off when you said Wal-Mart deli employees are treading through an inch of grease.)

Review

Reviewers of the world: please read this.