chris t

Wrote a sentence for the Bulwer-Lytton bad fiction contest:

It is generally reckoned an incontrovertible truth that hot dogs remain safe and wholesome in their packaging long past the sell-by date, but we four intrepid men and women -- Harry the brave, Jane the eloquent, Charles the indomitable, and myself of no particular qualities -- have set out to prove the matter, one way or the other.

As commentators on the contest have often mentioned, writing deliberately bad work is hard. It's got to be ostensibly bad, but at the same time well-crafted enough to be funny, and, for this contest, there's the additional handicap of needing to seem unintentionally bad. That is, this has to be a plausible opening sentence for a genuine and sincere overwrought novel.

So yeah. It's not great, but I labor under substantial constraints. I think it's already barely keeping its bathos in check as is. Making it any sillier would destroy the entire effect. (On the other hand, this is a rule that the contest winners seem to ignore, and I think they come off better for it. Ah well, maybe next time.)

I seem to have been adopted.

It's not that I actually have a cat; I just buy catfood once in a while. She's learned this, and so waits by my door until I get home after work.

I have decided to call her "Von Clawsewitz", in recognition of her sublime operational awareness.

(Stop groaning, goddamnit.)

At a fast-food place recently, my comrade made the mistake of ordering a "medium" drink, which turned out to be some kind of gigantic basin, after the accustomed fashion of American fast food.

"What, you weren't expecting that? Always order the small."
"But these places don't even have "small" anymore."
"I think, if you say small, they'll give you the smallest available size."

Of course, today I received my comeuppance. Got told, "We don't have small. Is medium okay?" I think the guy took my studied pause, dismissive gesture, and comment of, "Yes, I would like the smallest available size" as an insult -- but really I was just struggling to assimilate this new evidence that the universe is a giant engine directed toward keeping me humble.

Noticed today that they've changed the penny. If you haven't seen it, it might be worth a quick glance.

I think it's really quite good -- a nice 3/4 rendition of a log cabin, several layers, some nice detail work on the ends of the beams and pile of wood. Stylistically, the decision to include the ground and incise the "E Pluribus Unum" into it lends the coin a bit of a rustic look that works well with the log cabin motif. I also kind of like that they've updated their fonts a little -- sans-serif all the way, with the "ONE CENT" markedly bolder. It's not a huge change, but I approve of that sort of little shift, just for change's sake. I do think the Lincoln Memorial was better, but not so much as to make me outraged or even unhappy at the change.

I'm grateful, though, that they didn't change the profile of Lincoln. That profile might be as good as anything the mint has ever put out -- it has an almost Roman quality -- and it would have been a travesty if it were replaced by something like the "zombie Adams" on the new (at least new-ish) nickels.

"Imagine the smell of a feed store. That's how this tastes."

And he's right, I think to myself after I've poured a bit down my throat and gotten over the retching. It starts with a fairly strong scent of corn. Taste of corn, machine oil, faintly minty, or is that the acetone? Long, earthy and bready aftertaste, but there's something a bit off about that too. Mouth feel is light and thin, like spring water over corroded metal.

In other words, I still think the still is awesome, but cutting out more of the heads and tails and maybe some charcoal filtration would go some way towards improved drinkability.

I've always had trouble recognizing faces. Let me put this in context by talking about the movie Adaptation. Not only did I not recognize that Nicholas Cage played the main character -- I didn't realize that he also played the main character's identical twin brother. The same problem shows up in my day-to-day life, but I usually get enough other cues to muddle my way though. Sometimes I mess up, and it's quite embarrassing.

So anyway. People have always kind of all looked the same to me, there's an element of existential horror to it, let's move on. Today I took the Cambridge face perception / facial memory test, available freely online, and I'm kind of curious to see how other people do. It's not a meme in the classic style, but it's close enough.

As it develops, my score was 69% -- average is 80%, 65% "may indicate face recognition difficulties." So, yeah. I have some trouble, but it's not exactly disabling. About as expected.

Bought and read Warren Ellis' Crooked Little Vein.

It doesn't quite live up to its opening line. Nothing would live up to that. Nothing with plot, anyway. Nothing you could read and parse more than a page at a time. But it's pretty damned good. The thing basically opens with the main character attending the "only genuine and authentic Godzilla Bukkake night in America" and goes from there. (Same page: "The door guy entered the room, carrying cages of thirsty-looking monitor lizards, long tongues flickering.") It's obscene, gleeful -- and most of it is actually stuff that is familiar to us depraved denizens of the intertron. I actually find that kind of scary.

If you want to sample that atmosphere, the best place I know to start is with Ellis' The Dinner of Cathcart Zen.

Today I had a strong sense that the word "sabotage" was visibly fading from the language, becoming as dead as the term "sans-culottism". As dead, indeed, as the wooden shoes from which the word is said to have sprung.

"Terrorist", however, which I believe dates from the same time and place, is alive and well.

Got one of those irritating cellphone spams today, for the umpteenth time. "This is the second notice that the manufacturer warranty on your vehicle is about to expire." Particularly funny, of course, in that I don't own a car and never have.

I've seen other livejournal posts on the subject, but they center on legal remedies -- complaining at the FCC, using the federal "do not call" list, etc. I don't think that legislation is the best approach here. As Gaiman points out, the law is a blunt stick, and a very dangerous first-line treatment.

Anyway, I got to thinking about a scheme to generate and distribute one-time cellphone numbers. Basically, you'd overlay a secondary dialing system that relies on very large phone numbers to uniquely identify links between people.

(slave_to_anime suggested a much more plausible version of everything after this line, which generates random extensions. I'm seriously thinking of building the iphone app and setting up the asterisk server to make it happen. . . except that cellphone spam isn't really a big deal for me.)

As an implementation, you might get a keyspace from the phone company, which is permuted using one of the readily-available cryptographically strong hash functions (to make guessing valid numbers difficult,) use the phone itself to generate and "validate" new numbers, and distribute them via text messages. These text messages would be the totally open side channel used to exchange identifiers. If that became problematic, we could move to more radical methods.

This would have the advantage that, when a number became compromised, you could revoke it -- the UI would say "never accept calls from this number again." (It goes without saying that, until you manually generated a number from your keyspace, it would be useless.)

( And so forth )

Dear sky: Note that the common saying is "Après moi le déluge". Please adjust accordingly.

Regards, ct.

Gentlefolk, I present you The Eye of Argon by Jim Theis.

Scary thing is, I'm about halfway through, it's still just as terrible, and I think it may be doing permanent damage. I'm beginning to doubt the essential validity of words, if they can be made to do these things.

If not for his keen auditory organs and lighting steeled reflexes, Grignr would have been groping through the shadowed hell-pits of the Grim Reaper. He had unknowingly stumbled upon an ancient, long forgotton booby trap; a mistake which would have stunted the perusal of longevity of one less agile.

That is literally a random pair of sentences. They're all that bad.

Read and re-read Nimbus, by Alexander Jablokov.

Jablokov's madness manifested itself in a consuming fascination with the construction and articulation of increasingly-elaborate symbol-systems, which grew until it crowded out all other facets of his work. Several characters in Nimbus communicate by arranging precisely chosen objects in intricate spatial relations -- I think of it as Jablokov's way of expressing frustration with the components of his stock-in-trade.

The moment that hit me most strongly, though, is when one character, whose daughter had suffered brain damage that left her unable to communicate, describes the implant that gave her a measure of speech:

He looked at me, his eyes appraising. "Not everything we deal in is useless."

Even the elves of Santa's feared reindeer cavalry may pause to admire the fall of a snowflake. Merry Christmas, all.

Today in "ludicrous consumption news", I acquired a fur coat. I would rather have a personal demonic milquetoast, but one makes do with what one has.

In my defense, I didn't really mean to. There was an ebay auction, and I put in the minimum bid as a lark, and then I won it, to my chagrin. It's not like I can wear it anywhere. It's dyed rabbit, which I think is the fur equivalent of polyester. But it is very warm, and I don't hold heat well on my own. Also, it makes me feel the very model of decadent monarchy.

(And, yes, it bothers me, but I eat meat and wear leather, and I have never had pretensions to saintliness.)

That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

officialgaiman has a nice thing on free speech qua basic principle. (Originally published as http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/12/why-defend-freedom-of-icky-speech.html .)

I like it especially because -- although I've always felt the same way -- it's tough for me to avoid feeling a bit unwholesome about the whole thing, as if, as jwz said, it were "more than a little disingenuous, just like those Hemp people who present their arguments in terms of their deep and abiding care for the textile industry, when their real motives are... something else entirely." Gaiman's done a good job of both addressing the principle and dispelling those doubts, which really makes me feel a little better about the whole thing.

Finally got a copy of Alina Simone's Yanka cover album, Everyone is Crying out to Me, Beware.

I'm not saying you need it. But it has, as the reviewers have said, a mournful and elegant beauty, and you might need a little of that. I add the comment that these tracks are suffused, at their best, with a claustrophobic low-fi terror that I think everyone should experience periodically. For me, at least, it reminds me of the grandeur that exists beyond the lit bubble of my apartment.

Highly recommended, if a little uneven. I think it's best listened to through cheap desktop computer speakers -- and I don't just say that because that's what I'm using for the foreseeable future.

You can hear the first track at http://www.indyweek.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A261750 . Why wait?

We walked aimlessly, you and I, and found ourselves looking west, over the airport and out to the sea. They'd found out about everything, about the doubles, the forgeries, the counterfeits. Alchemy, you had called it once, with the nervous laughter all bad liars share. It was over now, whatever it was. I made a joke and turned away. Overhead the clouds shone with brass and fire.

When you see this, post in your own journal with your favorite quote from The Princess Bride. Preferably not "As you wish" or the Inigo Montoya speech.

Vizzini: "I smell nothing."

Westley: "What you do not smell is called iocaine powder. It is odorless, tasteless, dissolves instantly in liquid. . . and is among the deadliest poisions known to man."

Vizzini: *shrug*

Actually, after looking at the wikiquote page, I'm not sure it's my favorite favorite. But it's probably the one I quote most often, apart from one-liners like "never get involved in a land war in Asia."

Apparently D. B. Weiss, whom you may know as the author of Lucky Wander Boy, will be writing and executive-producing for George R. R. Martin's upcoming Song of Ice and Fire adaptation.

I don't really know whether or not to frolic. I wasn't really planning on watching it.

(And Weiss also adapted Gibson's Pattern Recognition, which may be the most filmable thing he's ever written, including his screenplays.)