C.A. Lang's Blog, page 5

Random Observation.

 

Seems like “art” is a word used to define stuff that a certain group of people want to see or stuff they already know. Just like “activism.”

Beautiful Soul academics and kids.

Is a second-coming of Schoenberg possible?

I doubt it.

Slide rules–retro yes, but hipsters don’t do math so I’m okay.

 

So yes, I’m kind of struggling with math right now. I wouldn’t even say struggling, since that would imply that I didn’t grasp the concepts. I do that just fine, but just kind of suck at actually performing the calculations. This is probably due to the fact that early on I was discouraged from math and from the age of about fifteen onward, didn’t pay any attention beyond what would get me a C-. Given that, I have the basic comfort with numbers less than that of a child, and as such I’m looking for ways to improve that. And for some reason, I’ve decided that learning how to use a slide rule is going to make numbers more intuitive for me.

I grew up reading Heinlein, and it seemed every smart person (which, kind of like Rand, was always the protagonist since people who don’t agree with you are never smart and have ability, but I digress . . .) was always using a slide rule. I realized that yes, back when he wrote those books there was nothing else to use and it probably didn’t make anyone think twice at the time. But anyway, the things always seemed so fascinating to me. The guy had people flying starships and solving all sorts of complicated problems with a slide rule. Since I didn’t care about what math actually was until now though, I didn’t really get what that meant. Now that I’m doing math and physics, it seems pretty damn cool.

One must always guard against hipsterism, however. But I think this is safe: this is not an affectation, for one. You could argue that slide rules are still practical. If you crash your starship on some awful planet and your calculator gets crushed under a chair or something, how the hell are you ever going to sort out your shit? How are you ever going to deal with triangles? And we all know how triangles save lives. Triangles and survival knives, if you follow Heinlein. I think the logical evolution here would be a slide rule that was also a knife.

Also, hipsters are only concerned with “arts” or “media.” I don’t think they have the wherewithal to learn an antiquated system for the sake of doing trigonometry. You don’t need any serious math to publish your own underground magazine that’s all about your balls.

But seriously, I remember a couple months ago watching a news piece about some schools here getting kids to learn on the abacus. After a while the kids wouldn’t even need the abacus and just visualize it and be able to carry out calculations out of thin air. At first I thought this was one of those stupid new teaching fads that are going to ruin kids even more, kind of like “new math,” but now it seems like a great idea. I’m thinking analog, tactile devices make more sense to the human brain (at least for the purposes of learning) than memorizing stuff out of a book, then punching it in a calculator. Not that I’m even considering actually ditching the calculator for a ruler, but for where my brain is at, analog is going to make the connections in my brain a lot better.

It looks like these things have a bit of a cult following, which is neat. A major seller of new slide rules just happens to be a short drive from me, and their website is adorable.

I just can’t decide which one to get at this point. I didn’t know they were this complicated!

Anyway, besides that I have a short story coming up, and yes, it’s of course a prequel-ish Blightcross-related piece. And that’s all, really.

I wish I had more time to write. The projects in my notebook are piling up at an alarming rate.

 

 

Gear Review: Adidas Adizero Tempo 4 . . . after 756kms.

 

Is there a point in reviewing an outdated model of anything? Meh. I hope the current version of these shoes hasn’t been changed much.

Anyway, It’s that time when I stop drinking coffee in the morning and take a shitload of caffeine pills before my runs instead, which means that I’m obsessed with running again. This leads me to the shoes I’ve been using for the last year, and probably way past their intended life. I figured after 756kms I should have a good feel for them.

I remember buying these in October 2011. I’d had plans to do the BMO Okanagan marathon and had recently read Born To Run. While I avoided that general bandwagon, it did get me to think more about the gear I was using and I realized that both Asics models I’d been using had way too much heel and arch support. So I set out to find a zero-drop shoe. At first I wanted one of the hipsterish “minimalist” shoes that were pretty popular at the time. They may still be but I haven’t paid attention to gear, having no need or cash for new stuff for a while.

Anyway the girl at the store knew her stuff and steered me to the Adidas Adizero Tempo 4 instead of a real zero-drop. I think it was the right choice.

I wasn’t just changing my gear, but also technique. Before these shoes I did end up with ankle issues a lot, and sometimes knee issues. You know how it is (if you’re a runner)–people shake their head at you and just assume it’s because running is bad for you and that you’re a dillhole for doing it so much. And if you don’t know any better, you believe it and think it’s normal.

Not so.

With a 10.6mm heel drop, I was worried that it wouldn’t be the fast, almost-nothing shoe I’d wanted. But it felt pretty fast in the store, and for some reason felt lighter than it really is, so I ignored the numbers and bought them.

I used these for everything from interval training on mountains to 20k runs and the way it’s built was the perfect setup for getting someone off of running on their heels and onto their forefoot. The heel is still kind of stiff, but the rest of it is pretty ductile and makes it feel crazy fast compared to, say, the Asics Gel Pulse I’d been using before. Doing that almost eliminated knee pain entirely, and significantly reduced the ankle issues I always have. And the best part was actually being faster.

The thing is, after over 750km you’d think they’d be done. I’m not so sure. I’m still using them and soles lack the conspicuous, concentrated wear-patterns that over-correcting shoes always get. My Asics ones have the weirdest spots worn down as much as a shoe can be worn, which make you want to diagnose yourself with all sorts of imaginary foot-strike abnormalities. These, however, are really worn, sure . . . but not in such a strange way, since, I assume, the foot has more ability to move as it needs to instead of being forced into static little box and told to strike in a perfect straight line every time, regardless of the forces hitting it.

So I’m not going to rush out to get another pair, since they’re still working they way they ought to . . . which seems to be not working much at all and standing aside to let the body do what it needs to. It pretty much just stops me from stepping on hepatitis when I run through Rutland without being ridiculous and unfortunate like Vibrams.

I do still wonder about zero-drop racing shoes and might go for the Asics Piranha though. Tough call.

Groupthink.

 

I don’t know if people in the US have this thing going on today, but here it’s all about the pink shirts. It’s a viral collective action directed against “bullying.”

This leads me to the topic of the psychotic actions of groups in general, and is probably going to snowball into an anti-collectivist rant. Ah well.

I write about this a lot in my fiction, I realize. For sure Blightcross went there in a few ways–from the general insanity of an entire nation willfully living under fascism, to blind military obedience, to the extreme example of a demon-possessed horde.

I have a certain amount of hostility towards groupthink. And to me, groupthink is at the root of the social problems kids deal with right now.  The very same social issues that sparked this pink shirt thing. And, according to some, a few suicides, but I won’t touch that one right now.

The way I remember it, it was pretty rare to have a lone bully capable of chronic abuse. Often those wouldn’t survive socially for very long, because strong “good” kids will inevitably put them in their place. The real social problems come when a kid butts against the herd mentality. And the herd is comprised of normal people, not bullies. Only they don’t seem like bullies because they’re on sports teams and smoke cigars and drive Mustangs.

It sounds far-fetched, but hold on. Kids don’t know how to think. That’s why they’re in school and that’s why they can’t vote. The overemphasized importance of team sports basically cuts their “learning how to think” short before it’s had any time to develop. Why? Well, let’s see. You’re in a situation in which you’re conditioned to respond to a whistle, you repeat phrases en masse on command (where else have we seen that? hmmm), and where your individuality is dissolved under the blurry flapping banner of a sports team, because there’s no “I” in team, right?

So given that the most valued aspect of the adolescent world is that particular situation, is it a wonder that certain kids get picked on?

Now, of course nothing stays the same. In a wonderful Hegelian twist, it’s the same old story again, only now it’s “wear a pink shirt . . . or else.” Not literally. I hope not, anyway. But in reality, an “awareness campaign” and mass symbolic gesture just amount to more groupthink, more pressure to do what everyone else is doing, and probably doesn’t help anyone very much in the end. The anti-bullying campaign ends up as just the same morality-by-committee as what happens with hazing and so on, only with an ever so slight adjustment of subjective coordinates.

I’m not saying all team sports are bad. But they’re unfortunately far too important in our culture. It’s strange because back when I was a stupid ultra-leftist in my early twenties, I whined about how far too individualistic and “autistic” and selfish western society was, just like any raging leftist douche would. But it’s the opposite–the bad things in our culture happen because people simply aren’t thinking and are incapable of defining themselves regardless of what any one group around them is doing.

Let’s look at the dreaded phys-ed situation in high school. At least when I was in school, almost no emphasis was placed on becoming a strong, healthy individual. They taught nothing about actual fitness! What did they try to instill in us then? Well, one teacher had a heartfelt speech for us about how if we didn’t learn team sports, we’d be “sitting on the sidelines, missing out.” Really?

That speech made me feel extremely uncomfortable, but I did give it a try anyway. It was awful and I didn’t last long. The part that pissed me off the most was that they still pumped you up when you sucked, just because you were on “the team.” It’s so bizarre that these teams are responsible for a lot of torment outsisde their group, but within, like I mentioned, they have no identity or personal responsibility or expectations.

After that, I may have been “on the sidelines,” but I didn’t miss out on much. Those sidelines were actually the out-of-bounds markings of stuff that mattered to me.

And about that teacher who tried so hard to get misfits like myself to just join in and be part of the group? I actually ran a 16k race a year ago and happened to pass the guy on a hill. Never saw him again.

Now, I didn’t suffer any bullying, despite having failed at fitting in. I think it was because I just didn’t care about the people who might have otherwise bullied me. They weren’t on my radar at all, and if anyone said anything hurtful, it made about as much sense to me as “cheese” and “wednesday.” But other people did, and I think it might have been because they actually cared about the group.

I’m unfairly targeting sports teams, and people I know are going to hate me, for sure. Where else is this nonsense perpetuated? The corporate world. Especially this myth that Steve Jobs became a millionaire by encouraging groupthink.

This is a pretty good article that goes into how individual thought is increasingly being unfairly curtailed in favour of groupthink, and it delves into the example I just mentioned.

I could rant on and on about this subject but what I really mean to address is the real cure for a lot of problems like this. The real cure is simply for people to be taught to think independently. That’s all. And while a lot of people mistake that for precious-snowflake-syndrome, that’s not it at all. It is not an encouragement of contrived idiosyncratic personalities or being intentionally argumentative. The reality is that any kind of group activity suspends critical thinking skills, and we’re increasingly giving more and more of our lives to the group.

Group actions will degenerate, regardless of how great its original intentions are. The way to combat widespread (insert problem here) is to be an indepenent, critical thinker. And you can’t teach that in a group or with a campaign.

 

More on dieselpunk definitions

So the smart kids at the day job showed me this thing called “reddit” that apparently has everything everyone would ever want on the internets. I figured it was something to check out, since I suck at promoting my book and hardly ever interact with people who have the same interests as I do.

There was a dieselpunk discussion about how if steampunk was the intersection of romance and science (I think, anyway), what would dieselpunk be?

This is a pretty nifty question. At least to me. And let’s be real–I find boring things interesting. I get excited about being able to apply some physics comment by an instructor to Bill Bruford’s drumming. By contrast, I find the idea of people dancing to be absolutely horrifying. Yes, engineering school is exactly where I need to be.

To me this is a hell of a lot easier to figure out than any math. I’ve read pieces about high modernism that drop the phrase “function and form.” It seems like a good way to define it in two terms, if we need to play that game.

The answer I wrote  was “art and reason.” Somehow I feel like this might have burrowed out of the Randroid partition of my subconscious. It sounds like something she had probably written once. Again I have to mention that whatever her mistakes, tons of the things she wrote totally reflect what I think dieselpunk is about.

There does seem to be a slight disconnect here with a big chunk of dieselpunkers though. A lot of them don’t go into such philosophical detail and make it about noir stuff and detectives and costumes. I mean that’s okay and fun, don’t get me wrong. I guess as with anything, there’s always going to be a split between pop culture and stuff that’s…not pop culture. This is getting dangerously close to a kitsch-not-kitsch piece, which I’d like to avoid. But seriously, do you get the same vibe from Dick Tracy as you do from The Fountainhead?

Both of those are dieselpunk to me. But in the end they’re worlds apart.

Then again, the pulp detective story does sort of reflect an industrial approach to fiction. Sort of. I mean it’s efficient, makes money, and wasn’t complicated by the pompousness of the previous era. That’s probably why I borrow some aspects of it, but my writing far from tries to bring back the same old dated stories but from a 21st century viewpoint.

Back to the original question–art and reason is the intersection of dieselpunk.  It was a brief, very unique period where shit got done and really well. Given that even some scientists are turning reason into intellectual vomit in this era (like those scientists who are trying to prove that we’re actually a computer simulation), it’s probably going to remain a high point for us hu-mahns.

The art was difficult at times but it still did make sense, and art can make sense. Yes, I’m going to say that Joyce actually makes sense. It makes a hell of a lot more sense than vampire sex novels, that’s for sure.

So what do we have now, then?

I have no idea. If we wanted to ask what the postmodern intersection is, the answer we’d get is probably just something like “Huh? You can’t like, make people stand at an intersection, dude. We’re all just dancing, man.”

That’s all I have. And I just realized after writing this that I actually had a spare 30 minutes to write this post. 30 minutes during which I could have worked on real writing.

Fml.

Bomb Girls.

 

 

Yes I’m actually going to write about dieselpunk for once!

By a pure scheduling coincidence, one of the few shows I get to catch half-assedly while I do other stuff is Bomb Girls. If you’re American or just a Canadian who only buys HBO shows and watches them at your leisure, this is a dieselpunk drama made/set in Canada. Of course, it takes place during the second world war and focuses on the military-industrial changes on the home front instead of the war itself. Awesome angle on a tired genre. It’s a bit like Pan Am because of the anachronistic nature of it, but it’s a lot more realistic, and clearly more interesting to the audience, since the latter didn’t survive.

I was saving this topic for when I had the time to construct a rant against the show for glamourizing the English while ignoring the nasty details like the internment of Ukrainians and so on. An episode I caught today changed how I view the series, since it dealt with that very issue. So sometimes it really is good to hold off on condemning stuff right away.

Honestly though, since this show does at times approach the line separating a good historical show from a boring exploration of current values in the context of that era, I think I had reason to be suspicious. By that I mean that when it deals with issues like, say, abortion, you almost get the feeling that it’s injecting neoliberalism into a time when such an attitude didn’t exist. And that’s not a political statement–it’s just dumb no matter what the slant is to dirty a historical show with contemporary values. It would be easy for this to slide into embarrassing contemporary feminism when it attempts to explore the changing roles in society at the time. I don’t get that vibe from the show yet, but I could see moments where it almost happens.

I guess postmodernists would argue here with me that it doesn’t matter what it was actually like back then and that we should only consider it in our own little context, but that would be boring.

What I think is most interesting is that in the same area of the country where the show takes place, industry is dying in the present day. It’s cool to see a show actually portray industrialization and remind us of what we’re losing. And that is one of the main aspects of dieselpunk, at least to me–industrial arts.

It’s also surprising that this is coming from people who are not the CBC. It seems like the kind of thing they’d do, and it’s actually done in a smart way, which I wouldn’t expect from this network. Every so often, someone in this country makes a really smart show, and it’s so sad when they’re cancelled, as is often the case. Not only is it smart–it’s still an entertaining show above all. That CBC series about the Titanic? It was really neat but I couldn’t get into it. Entertainment value still trumps all.

You can get away with anything except being boring. But it doesn’t hurt to be smart while you’re at it. Check out this dieselpunk series!

 

How to actually get the Aurora nomination.

Now that my brain is functioning a little better (despite having been to the gym at 5:30am, gone to school at 8, then work day job nonsense from 12:30 until 9), I’ll explain a bit about what it actually will take to get a shot at that Aurora award.

To get Blightcross shortlisted, people need to vote. Anyone can vote. The only catch is that you have to sign up as a member of the CSFFA.

And you’re going to want to go here http://www.prixaurorawards.ca/Membership// to do that and vote.

This is really important–if you liked the book and want to see it go against bigshots and other cocky upstarts, don’t assume other people will do it. The reality is that I have so very little exposure that every single vote is worth a thousand batches of cat-shaped ravioli. And cat-shaped ravioli is damn near priceless.

Now is the time to get dieselpunk fantasy out there for real! Just having it stand out in the nominations will be huge for it.

When I wrote this novel years ago, nobody was talking about dieselpunk. Now a few people are talking about it and there are a handful of novels. This is what needs to happen to get it out there.

Book awards.

 

Before I write about book awards, I want to say that “awards season” is probably the most irritating period of television. Luckily I don’t get to watch much television lately, but when I do, often it’s while doing homework, so I intentionally put it on something that blows goats so I get stuff done. The only problem with this is that if it’s too bad, it ends up fascinating, so it must stay in that boring middle zone. Most awards shows fall into this–the jokes are AWFUL. They’re even still awful when they try to pull the You Can’t Fire Me–I Quit bullshit and try to act like it was sarcastic or ironic instead of just not funny. Last night there was one on while I did my homework. There were two women on it who were in fact actually funny. I don’t know for what or whom this was, so I can’t really comment further, but I’m guessing most people will be able to guess exactly what it was that I half-watched and didn’t totally hate.

I guess the point of that was that lots of Hollywood people aren’t funny. And I’m not sure why awards automatically mean people need to drink (or act like they are) and fail at taking the piss out of their peers. They’re just so bad at it. I think awards would be awesome if everyone just sat quietly and clapped reasonably when necessary, but not too loud.

Actually, most situations would be improved by people just sitting quietly.

The other one we saw was some kind of pageantry. Literally. Miss America, maybe? Anyway it was extremely hilarious and satisfying. Much too interesting for doing homework. Bad dancing, completely outrageous singing, and all sorts of things to make fun of.

Anyway, that dieselpunk novel I wrote  will be nominated for the Aurora awards. So if you’re reading this and somehow have a membership with those folks, vote for me because dieselpunk is way better than tapdancing or movies or bad dresses, and I don’t think a lot of dieselpunk novels have been given awards, let alone a Canadian one. And never mind about the secondary-world thing. Jeez.

Also: I’m mildly irritated about Canadians bitching about winter. I saw this great CBC documentary about northern countries, and we’re totally failing at being one. Take away hockey (no really, please take it away) and you’re left with a nation of whinging little girls who want to hide in another hemisphere. Compare that with the average Russian who bathes in frozen lakes on a weekly basis.

In canada, you’re a hip young awesome dude if you wear a hat with ear flaps down. In Russia, if you put down those dumb ear flaps, it’s a public display of personal impotence. And the guy with the ear flaps down in Canada is still going to complain about the cold. Jeez.

That is all. If you’re a voting member of the C-something something something (the people who give out the Aurora Awards), check out Blightcross. It’s definitely going to be different to the books beside it, and that’s got to count for something.

Now I must study math for children because I spent all of my mental energy on writing things that never happened for most of my life instead of developing useful skills. My brain is mush. Am trying phosphatidyl serine, but I’m suspecting that I’m hypercholinergic and that this might backfire. Ah well.

Agh.

 

 

Ask me to write an essay about Finnegans Wake = no problem. I’d do it just for fun, if I had the time.

Ask me to do child-level physics and math = hot mess.

Just sayin’.

The Shamefulness Of The Incomplete Squat . . . and other randomness

 

I’ve been heavily into compound exercises lately, which has simplified my program a lot. At first I thought it was too simple–how could I spend an entire workout doing two or three things and expect to get anywhere? This is where the failure of my own personal training education and most comparable programs seems pretty obvious.

I always knew my squats weren’t great, but only today did I finally become honest with myself and fix it. And as we know with squats especially, fixing it usually involves lowering the weight and doing it right, instead of lying to yourself and the world by packing on more weight that you’re not even moving properly.

So all of the education in personal training I had basically amounted to how to make sure beginners don’t hurt themselves using cable machines, and little else. It seems the only people who really know what’s going on are the power lifters. They are the only people I’ve consistently heard the right advice from. Personal trainers are too prone to fads, misinformation, and sales pitches.

When you start to pick apart your squat, you notice just how all-encompassing the squat is. I never realized it before, and a leg workout to me used to be a dozen or more different exercises. And none of them did anything for hip strength. And that lack of hip strength is what I found is screwing up the squats and deadlifts. The quads are only part of it.

This is obvious simple stuff, but something people tend to overlook. The places where my lower body hurts right now would have needed five different machines to equal what the squat did. Only the machines wouldn’t have necessarily helped much with overall strength.

This reminds me of Henry Rollins’ kickass piece called The Iron.   Mainly the part where I mentioned honesty a moment ago. If you cheat or lie when you’re lifting weights, you’ll either just not get results or hurt yourself. The weights almost provide an impartial, uncompromising moral judgment. Of course you can do steroids and pretend to have strength too, but your body will also betray that lie too, eventually. That might be too dramatic for some, but I love extremism sometimes. Like Ayn Rand:

Drug addiction is the attempt to obliterate one’s consciousness, the quest for a deliberately induced insanity. As such, it is so obscene an evil that any doubt about the moral character of its practitioners is itself an obscenity.

It’s true–nobody who was being honest with themselves could argue with that deep down, but that kind of moral extremism is too much for a society who dedicates a lot of time and money towards increasing its access to drugs as some noble constitutional battle.

The point is that it’s not just about exercise. In the gym, it’s so easy to get sucked into treating weights as makeup, like Rollins says, and get an ego boost out of it. But that doesn’t do anything for actually building strength. I think this aspect is totally missing in the fitness scene. And to be fair, most people who exercise don’t want to complicate it by adding character development into it. Most people couldn’t give a rat’s ass about that. But it absolutely should be something people think about.

While I’m on a moral high horse, I’ll post this awesome song I just heard:

I like it because of the title. Talking about living straight isn’t something anybody should do unless they want to further isolate themselves, but in this rare instance, I’ll do it for a couple lines. Seriously, if James Hetfield can be straight, nobody has an excuse. Not that they did before, but it’s a good reminder of just how fucking easy it is to just not do stupid shit. You just do the same things people always do, only you’re not high. So why do people have to rag on straight edgers so much?

Not that I’m identifying myself as such. I’m just a normal person who doesn’t drink or do drugs. But lately I’ve been listening to some straight edge hardcore bands, and the music is pretty good.

Other randomness:

 

–I heard that if you are trying to conceive and want a male child, all you have to do is ‘hold it in’ for a week. Is this true?

You want week-old sperm to form your firstborn son? The fresher the better, champ. Clear out those pipes daily and make fresh deposits for better results. Forget gender selection.

–How many boxes of 30-capsule probiotics can you stack with reasonable structural integrity?

Sixteen boxes at a maximum height of 1 metre, and this is including structural irregularities added for aesthetic purposes.

–Should I wear a tank top that appears to be ripped halfway down and looks artificially baggy when I go to the gym?

No.

–I wanted to play guitar, but I suck. Should I switch to bass?

No. This is the equivalent of doing a wussy squat. People think bass is easier. It’s not.

–At what temperature should I cook my pork tenderloin?

About 150 degrees fahrenheit.

 

So I don’t know. The moral of this story is apparently to do lots of squats, don’t be a lying sack of shit, and don’t hold it in for the sake of gender selection. Oh, and buy my book.

Speaking of which, there’s a thing over at Long and Short Reviews where  you can win a copy of Blightcross by reading my Christmas guest post and commenting. The winner will be snatched from the comments on the 22nd.