Sawyer Paul's Blog, page 65
February 6, 2014
The Heart is Raw: Empire by the Sea
I don’t mean to be opaque; take that as an apology. When I first wrote this essay, I opted for plain speaking and clear understanding1, and what I saw was a dry truth. Laid bare, easily understood and comprehended, it was forgettable. Obvious. This is the kind if thing that breathes the muddiness of metaphor, whose truth us only comprehended when the reader has to peak their head into the thrush, straining to hear.
I do not have the energy to argue directly. I am a hairy husk in minutes, emptied of ammunition and covered in tears. But because there is an argument, there is the threat of losing, and this is unacceptable because I am a male and she isn’t. I do not grasp that this isn’t against me, a with-us-or-against us. I do not see that she argues for us, because I understand only dichotomies. So I argue against us, even though that’s not what I want. A desperate man with nothing fair to wield will fling the dirty earth. I’ll use my strength, and my guilt, and my silence, and all three hurt her. I will get drunk and accuse. I will feel sorry for himself at her.
I’ve been in enough arguments to know when I’m building walls. My opponent argues with logic and reason, and so I find myself in a barracks full of dynamite, gunpowder, and gasoline.2 I kick sand in her face and run away. I tell her she has hurt me when she hasn’t. I grab her arm, which is strong but not like my arm, and tell her to come along. I have had enough with her argument and I am putting my foot down, as if that’s a thing I can do, as if I’m not a weak and feeble abuser with no spine or scruples. As if every single little thing is about me. I use the dynamite. It wipes out a year in our life.
The walls are built with institutions. Have you ever thought, for a single solitary moment about my responsibilities to my employers?3 I grab for history. I hold onto what I can. It’s movies, sometimes. A clip with an example. It’s how a man acts. It’s how we are supposed to be. I am better than the last guy. I am an improvement. I am nicer and more understanding and when times are good she finally feels like she’s with someone who gets her. But then I exhaust myself trying to keep up. I stay awake too long. I don’t sleep. There are not enough hours in the day to remain my best self and continue to be the man that once impressed her, might continue to impress her.
She was once a girl behind a counter. Then she was a girl sitting one seat ahead of me on a streetcar, looking back, asking me where I’ve travelled. We have both been to California and so we keep talking, and then one day she’s a girl sitting on my bed, leafing through the books on my nightstand. Then, she is a girl in my photographs, and on my couch, and in my bed, but now her fingers are in my hair. She is a girl in my life, increasingly, overwhelmingly, completely. I am in her life too. I am a boy she wants more of. I am a boy she wants to make plans around.
Except now I’m a boy who sometimes makes her afraid. I have a temper and I am not as imaginative or alive as I used to be. My jeans are marked with the things I pocket. I am not new to her, but also myself. I used to surprise myself with what I could do with an evening and fifty lousy bucks. She has to try more and more to see through my walls. She is the wave crashing. She wants to get through.
I am describing a decaying. With every argument I lose, I feel less like myself and more the man she has to settle for. One day she will see me and know it is time to go. I will not have it in me to see the sun. And then she will leave.
I want meditation and medication and Mary Shelley to help temper the monster in me. It is wound tight from a mixture of perceived and real failures from the past, and how I fear the perceived and real failures of my future. It winds tighter because I have no belief system. I have a lot of trouble accepting the meaningless of the universe, and I’m exhausted by hope. I fear the next liar to come into my life might get the better of me. You’re right, I will say. You were always right.4
I fight with my love for ground that doesn’t exist. I don’t know what I hope to gain by being so obstructive. A win is a win. It shouldn’t matter who was in the right. But it does, in the moment anyway. All I can hope is I’m in the right place at the right time, and I am mindful that she wants what is best for us, and that is essentially what most relationship arguments are about. But this is not a summation that comes easy, or at all. It is an unrealized truth that has to emerge slowly, after more mistakes, more hurt feelings, more leaps from high places. I hope this realization doesn’t come after one too many.
Because as of today, my walls are too high. I have built my empire next to the sea, so I can laugh from my throne as my enemy drowns.5 I come into arguments with a battle plan now, and I see her as an invading army. She’s coming to tear me down. She’s coming to tame me and fix me and make me better. She’s coming to improve and change and alter, to pick away. To simplify and remove. To curate. To organize my life until it works. But she’s not winning. I am getting worse.
This is a thing that befalls men. It is not that there is a monster in us waiting to get out, but rather a cloying for a past that never existed. With every argument for our future, we step further from our own expectations, and feel the tug of loss. It isn’t rational, and it isn’t fair, and it isn’t easy to explain. This isn’t even about men and women, and my struggle here isn’t real but imagined and exaggerated. Half of these things were lies, but they helped. I’m sorry if this was difficult, but it let me get to a crystalizing moment that wouldn’t have occurred without writing it out the way it is. I had to pull together a raft of lies in order to arrive at something outstandingly true about myself. But it’s something I can’t tell you. I’ll need a whole other raft for that.
Maltese Falcon, 1941.↩
The Dark Knight, 2008.↩
The Shining, 1980.↩
Daniel Bryan, Raw, December 2013.↩
Bray Wyatt, Raw, February 2014↩
January 31, 2014
THE GAP by Ira Glass on Vimeo
I watched it over and over again, listened to Ira Glass' voice and told myself, that I am not the only person who is constantly disappointed about the gap between ones taste and ones skills.
I've seen a few videos made with this piece from Ira Glass, but this is the best so far.
January 28, 2014
Wacom Intuous S
I know there are better Wacom pads you can buy. You can get bigger ones with screens and higher points of pressure sensitivity and I'm sure one day I'll get to the point where I feel like it'll really help my work to have. But for now, my favourite new tool is the Wacom Intuous S.
I don't know enough about this technology to even compare them, or say why it's special. Basically, the pen feels perfect, and it moves along the surface of the tablet with a balance of friction and smoothness that's leagues better than my old tablet. I guess this is a poor review, but I really just wanted to gush a little.
January 20, 2014
Dick Van Dyke with lots of money
I recently watched "What a Way to Go," and the scene where Dick Van Dyke counts all of his money (and then promptly dies, sorry, spoiler), killed me. So I made some gifs.
January 17, 2014
More Things
Image: The Wolf by Patrick Seymour
“Audio never goes viral,” writes radio and podcast producer Nate DiMeo. “If you posted the most incredible story — literally, the most incredible story that has ever been told since people have had the ability to tell stories, it will never, ever get as many hits as a video of a cat with a moustache.”
Why choose a female protagonist? Is it more difficult to believe that a male would be slowly manipulated as Mae is by The Circle? Or simply more natural to imagine a woman happily giving ratings to hundreds of brands, products and moods throughout the day?
As someone who grew up without a lot of money in a rich town, skiing was the kind of activity that I had never even considered, because of its cost. But, under the influence love, and my innate desire to fit in with peers, I joined my boyfriend on a trip to Tahoe, where I would finally put the past behind me and conquer this weird thing once and for all.
The ideal run kept morphing as more secrets were discovered. The Door of Time skip, one of the most famous sequence breaks in gaming, involved a series of hops and backflips that allowed Link to pass through a wall and skip many of the game's levels. In other areas, Link can use bombs to levitate or other camera tricks to bypass barriers, breaking the linear adventure into a dizzying romp.
Penélope Cruz telling Michael Fassbender how to please her? Cameron Diaz making love to the windshield of a sports car? Brad Pitt in a cheap suit? Maybe the killing and humping and glorious vulgarity were too much. Maybe it was badly sold.
But does anyone write just for the money? Laurence Sterne, the plagiarist author of Tristram Shandy, said he wrote “not to be fed but to be famous.” Now, of course, he is. It worked.
Humans sit around all day, consciously or unconsciously, wondering if they're doing everything right, or if what they like in any realm is weird comparatively. Clothes, books, music, food, lifestyle, everything.
The underground exists, but it's on the Internet and nobody can figure out a way to make money from it. I'm on the Internet, but it did ruin every business I'm in.
January 15, 2014
Re: Why Tech Podcasts Bother Me
Ben Brooks:
The goal of a podcast should not be that the podcasters enjoy the show, but that the listeners enjoy the show. I think that’s lost on most podcast hosts.Who is talking should be less important than what’s being said — just like writing a blog — and yet that’s not the case.
I'm linking to Brooks because he's brought up a problem with podcasts that I fear will quickly become the de facto opinion the majority of people will have. Podcasts are a weird medium, and their relationship with radio is confusing. That Brooks praises This American Life as the best podcast around is telling, because This American Life is a radio program that's simply available to download. That makes it a podcast, but it isn't produced to be one, nor is its original or current purpose to be one. It's a podcast in the same way a movie becomes a TV show after it's been cut up for commercials.
The International Object Podcast is guilty of every single thing Brooks hates about podcasts: subject-jumping, inside jokes, somewhat shoddy production quality, and the sense that you're eaves-dropping on a conversation instead of being part of it. Finally, it's guilty of the most major grievance: the hosts appear to be the largest fans of the show. I love the IO podcast. And I do, honestly, do it mostly for me. I wonder if most other podcast producers feel the same way: that what they're having is a great conversation with a friend or colleague about a shared cultural artifact or experience, and if other people like it, great.
I agree with Brooks about every single criticism about podcasting, and I know far more people with his mindset than my own. Oddly enough, I don't mind these things in other shows. I listen to something like On Taking Pictures and don't get some of the jokes (or, frankly, much of the technical parts of photography), but there is something there I do enjoy. It's a bit like a director's commentary track on a DVD: certainly not for everyone—and not even particularly for the subject enthusiasts—but perhaps for people who enjoy a new layer in a palimpsest, the writings of an amateur in the margins of a more official work.
January 14, 2014
The Road to Geekdom
John Siracusa:
Anyone trying to purposely erect border fences or demanding to see ID upon entry to the land of Geekdom is missing the point. They have no power over you. Ignore them and dive headfirst into the things that interest you. Soak up every experience. Lose yourself in the pursuit of knowledge. When you finally come up for air, you’ll find that the long road to geekdom no longer stretches out before you. No one can deny you entry. You’re already home.
There isn't a metric on the internet to give John Siracusa the credit he deserves for writing this piece.
January 13, 2014
January 7, 2014
What the Kindle Has Over the iPad (and the Kindle Fire)
So instead, the researchers looked at the amount of blinks per second as people read, and found that while reading the LCD screen, people were blinking demonstrably less. This could be drying out the eyes, which could explain the visual fatigue. There wasn’t a difference in blinking between e-ink and paper books, leading the researchers to conclude that “e-ink is indeed very similar to the paper.”
I've always figured as much. I don't want to read on anything but my Kobo Aura HD.
January 6, 2014
My current photography workflow
A recent episode of Mac Power Users inspired me to write this, not only as a way to help other people who are dealing with this problem (which only increases in scope with every new device we buy), but also to pose questions that I’m trying to deal with. How do we store, view, edit, and share our photos? Each one has a vast series of issues. But I think I’m close to cracking it.
So. I don’t have a Mac or an iPhone, but I have owned both in the last 15 months, so I don’t think I’m too out of the loop. I own a Windows 8 laptop (the Acer S7) and a Windows Phone (Lumia 920). My dedicated camera is a Canon G12 from 2010, which I’m using less and less over time, but still on a weekly basis.
Now, I believe the first thing to do with important files (and photos are probably the most important files we have, since they cannot be reshot later) is to adhere to a solid backup plan.[1] My photos are backed up in two online locations, Flickr and Skydrive. Skydrive syncs to my local PC, which is backed up with an external hard drive.
With Windows Phone, you can set your settings to back up any photo you take to Skydrive. It saves it in a “camera roll” folder, which you can then move to any structure you like[2]. It uploads the photos in full resolution (it did not do this with WP7, and doesn’t do with with the Lumia 1020’s 38mp shots), but only when I’m connected to wi-fi.
As well, Windows Phone allows you to pair certain apps to auto-upload photos, so I use 2flicka, which automatically uploads full-res photos to Flickr (I use the private setting, but this can also be done publically). It doesn’t do this right away, instead only when the battery is 90% or higher, plugged in, and connected to my home wi-fi.
As for my Canon G12, the photos I take get plugged into my PC and manually imported into the corresponding folders on Skydrive. I then upload them to flickr. It’s more work, but I take fewer pictures with the Canon, and when I do it’s often either just a one-off or a full event.
I use Skydrive instead of dropbox for both the auto-uploading feature and the storage. Basic Skydrive accounts begin at five gigs instead of Dropbox’s two, and upgrades are easy and plentiful. From Office 365 to Windows Phone’s enthusiast bonuses, I currently have over 60 gigs of Skydrive storage without paying for it. If you want to pay, it costs half of what Dropbox charges.[3]
Now, you might think this is a good workflow for Windows, but nothing I’ve done here can’t be done with just an iPhone. Skydrive’s iPhone app offers the same auto-upload functionality, and I’m sure there are Flickr apps on the iPhone that do as well. If not, there are various IFTTT recipes on the iPhone app that will happily sew together these services.
The upside of this routine is that you can absolutely treat either Skydrive or Flickr as the “home” of your photos, with the other as a nice backup. And because Flickr is free, there’s no reason a family couldn’t do this with multiple accounts.[4] Skydrive also offers the same connected folder setup that Dropbox has, so couples or families could upload to a shared folder (which could sync on multiple computers).
The downside is that there’s no “one” place for photos in this workflow. You could treat either Skydrive or Flickr as such, I suppose, but I sometimes have trouble figuring out which one to turn to for retrieval or sharing. It’s not really a problem of quality so much as duplication. As well, if you’re one to be fussy about meta-data, changing a photo in one service won’t change it automatically in the other, so you’d have to change it twice if you want to keep them at parity.
As for sharing, I have two IFTTT recipes that trigger when I make a photo “public” on Flickr. When I flip that switch, it automatically pushes the photo to Facebook and Twitter with the title. It also saves them on those networks, so instead of the photo showing up as a link, it appears as if I’ve just uploaded it straight to the service.
Even if it has it’s little annoyances, it’s the best workflow I’ve come up with thus far, and leagues better than I had even half a year ago. Hopefully some of you can take what parts you find useful and make something work on your side, too.
Mac Power Users also has a great episode on backups. ↩
I use monthly folders inside a year for daily photos, and a seperate folder inside that year for events. ↩
$50 per year for 100/gigs on Skydrive. $99 for the same on Dropbox. ↩
Flickr allows for a “family” and “friends” privacy setting as well, so your photos could be visible to just those living in your house. ↩
