Tyler Weaver's Blog, page 26
October 10, 2019
(EarBliss) PHANTOM RHYTHM, by Gong Gong Gong III
Drumless post-punk marriage of Ennio Morricone and Otis Taylor sung in Cantonese. Hooked.
Conquering by Completion / Completion by Conquering
Finished UbiSoft's WATCHDOGS 2 last night: as a fan of the first game, I agree with the critical consensus of the second: an improvement on areas where the first game went wrong (main characters with no personality; Marcus, Sitara, Wrench, and Josh make for a fantastic group) with enough new elements to make the experience worthwhile. Nothing earthshattering or spectacular but at least it gave me my new favorite open-world activity: taunting the populace of San Francisco with my little foul-mouthed Monty Python RC Drone – and subsequently mourning its decimation by kicking.
Fascinating to me how – in my parlance, at least – the words used to describe the completion of a game have shifted: in a gaming nascency spent rescuing the 8-bit princess, my goal was not "to complete" but "to conquer” – to "beat" the game, not "finish" it. Perhaps this is simply a sympton of my own decrease in turtle/mushroom-stomping bloodlust, but speaking in broad generalizations and with wide leaps in logic (and, likely, in the same vein as Christopher Columbus "discovering" America), perhaps it's a signifer of the general transformation of gameplay from a competition/problem-solving one to a narrative one.
Most likely, however, this moment of clarity and reflection is probably of the "No shit, Sherlock" variety produced solely to meet my own requirements for a daily piece here that proves me once again late to the party. Nothing I'm not used to. Happy Thursday.
(Listening): KANKYŌ ONGAKU: JAPANESE AMBIENT, ENVIRONMENTAL, AND NEW AGE MUSIC 1980–1990.
October 9, 2019
To Make an Omelet
The egg bounced from the edge of the bowl and back into my hands before it made a final descent to a shattering meet and greet with the floral linoleum. The Jorkie was intrigued.
Stuck now with three eggs in the styrofoam container to make tomorrow’s two-egg omelet. In my Thanosian need for balance, this third egg will bother me to no end; the solution, clearly, is to grill burgers and fry up that third egg as a topping. Mem: grill burgers, soon.
It took me three months to make the decision to make the previous iteration of The Informalities my primary online expression, to make my site the place where I shared everything. It's taken just three days to decide to do the same here – a balancing act, perhaps, or just an excuse to write about / process a falling egg. Or maybe I flubbed the analogy. Not sure. Don't really care.
Decision based not on my usual battles with anxiety, but the inescapable feeling that Twitter is that third egg: while it is clearly helpful to many, I’m not among them – I can’t shake the feeling that the birdsite isn't making me a better writer but rather a more available author (whose phone number may have been shared with advertisers; thanks, Twitter). And, as I've nothing to sell or to promote and no new release on the horizon, I'd rather focus on being a better writer and on making this site something unique – something uniquely mine, whatever that means; an endless essay collection punctuated with dog pictures and other assorted ephemera, a midwestern zuihitsu.
P.S: My omelet recipe: combine two eggs – not three – with two tablespoons of water, tumeric, kosher salt, pepper, Italian seasoning; add combo to a hot skillet (crank it to ten) with one and a half tablespoons butter, stir a bit and step away. Let the edges solidify, pop in three slices of provolone til it melts, take off the heat and roll from skillet onto plate with metal spatula. Eat.
Listening: GHOSTEEN, by Nick Cave and The Bad Seeds.
October 8, 2019
BloodSugarPterodactyl
Good morning. Critters in the garage, rummaging about. They've yet to breach the office but I'm not taking any chances... Pterry the Pterodactyl must step up their sentry game.
Along with seasonal (temperature – it's tombstone-setting-weather up in the cemetery –, allergies, etc) and scheduling fluctuations come attendant blood sugar acrobatics: a hypo on Sunday (thank you, restaurant, for providing a gratis Coke to re-humanize my clammy, stammering, hypoglycemic ass), another set of adjustments – one unit here, one unit there (wait three days) bolus/basal, leapfrogging all over. Add in a resurgence of familial stress related to 17 January and the recipe for seesawing in a low-ceilinged room is at its most potent.
(IRL, I tend not to talk about the whole T1D thing as I find it doesn't help –
"In company take care not to speak much and excessively about your own acts or dangers: for as it is pleasant to you to make mention of your dangers, it is not so pleasant to others to hear what has happened to you."
- Epictetus, ENCHIRIDION, XXXIII
– and I only feel worse after bringing it up, as though it's one of the few things I have to talk about, one of my few areas of fascination… but here I am talking about it but then again I'm just talking to myself – a process of processing – anyhow so whatever works, I guess…)
And here we are: Pterodactyls, T1D, and Stoic philosophy… if nothing else, a fascinating combo. On with the day.
October 7, 2019
Of Thoughts Useless and Thoughts Useful, Maybe
The installation of an external brain / variation on the GTD system – AKA Project KaijuBrain – continues.
Since acclimating myself to Allen's work (again – I had used it about ten years ago and let it, along with pretty much everything else at that time, fall by the wayside) and implementing a more functional system of thought/idea capture based on his ideas, an intriguing change in thought-pattern becoming apparent: the nearly-automatic recognition of the difference between a useless thought and a useful one.
Wish I could give you a clear explanation of this, but I can't. Can only liken it to going antique shopping and being asked if I need any help finding anything. My response is always the same: No, thanks – I'll know what I'm looking for when I see it.
Maybe: if it's worth capturing, it's not useless. Might not necessarily be useful, but it's not useless... but that ignores ...
Doesn't matter – whatever the system or the device, the results are clear – and enjoyable: the feeling of anxiety over lost thoughts, over having no place to keep the ones I do manage to capture, has abated; I'm noticing a greater flow of ideas – for these pieces, for The Work, for the other projects around my life –, as though a logjam has been at least somewhat cleared; and a remarkable decline in feeling overwhelmed and hopeless. (Though Imposter Syndrome never goes away.)
Listening: ALL MIRRORS, by Angel Olsen.
October 5, 2019
Rise, (Parenthetical Recluse), Rise
Welcome, me, myself, and I, to (Parenthetical Recluse), the new home of my daily ramblings, the last volume of which, The Informalities, began on 18 March of this year and continued, for 40,021 words, every day right up until yesterday's snail-paced drunken website crawl server blow-out / up and my subsequent blow-up / -out thanks to the inanity of my server company and their uselessness at ameliorating the issue.
From the ashes of The Informalities, a decision: to start new, fresh, away from a Frankensteined site that was a byzantine hodgepodge of cast-off career iterations and run into the arms of another hosting company (Squarespace).
The guiding principle of this site and these daily pieces, reiterated, if only for myself:
"I was watching an artist on my staff working on a painting when I felt a desire to emulate him. The finest place in the middle of a wall he selects for a picture to be executed to the best of his ability; then he fills up the empty spaces all round it with grotesques, which are fantastical paintings whose attractiveness consists merely in variety and novelty. And in truth, what are these Essays if not monstrosities and grotesques botched together from a variety of limbs having no defined shape, with an order sequence and proportion which are purely fortuitous?"
– Michel de Montaigne, "On Affectionate Relationships."
Should note here, perhaps, that this is my second site to bear the (Parenthetical Recluse) name; my first efforts, at what would eventually become The Informalities, dwelled at this URL. Luckily enough, two-plus years after the URL lapsed, that URL was still available and I didn't have to come up with another new name for another new (iteration of an old) site.
So anyhow, here I am – a fresh start, from the ashes of what was: the daily schedule continues, Monday through Saturday postings here, with my weekly newsletter released on Sundays (though it may move here as well). Here's to another 40,021 words – hopefully without the ignominious end.
October 4, 2019
Adjusting frequency…
Giving the mobile app a go (with text and requisite dog picture) before I start rambling on a daily basis.
