The first illusion of expertise is the most common by far: narrowness. Someone with narrow tastes, especially narrow and expensive tastes, often misinterprets this narrowness for expertise. Their narrow opinion will be commonly offered up as "expert advice" when it is, in fact, largely a function of personal preferences or even brand loyalty. Their larger-than-average knowledge-base enables them to out class most interlocutors; however, their weakness is apparent to people with a smaller but broader knowledge-base and broader taste or, at least, interest. When engaging people under the first illusion, it is helpful to keep an open mind about products, techniques or even places while assessing your own knowledge about the issue. You should be able to shut down any argument using your insights into the multiple factors that went into the various options in the topic space.

Common examples of illusion number one are:

(1) Insistence on the superiority of one brand of complex device like cars, airplanes, computers, housing or business structure. Generally, the exemplar will have misdiagnosed a single facet of these devices as the sine qua non of the class and has expanded this observation to exclude all but one member.

(2) The firm belief that one place is superior to all others. The most common example is the student returning from Europe or, really, nearly anyone returning from a vacation at an exotic location. Strategies to keep in mind are: many things which are good for tourists are continuous petty nuisances for locals or downright obnoxious for their quality of life (think, for example, of ordnances preventing buildings higher than the cathedral and its necessary impact on urban density); third world countries are marvelous for first world travelers because everything is cheap, as it happens life and labor is cheap thereby and hence not quite so enjoyable for the locals; often this is the only place they have been to abroad; they have no serious plans to move there, so it cannot be that superior as people move to many places under trying conditions ("trabajo en esta pais").

This is a very easy illusion to fall prey to and many factors from culture to marketing will work to encourage it. Your best bet for overcoming it is not to argue over the Internet and to cultivate self-honesty and perspective. Generally this illusion will be born out of a desire both to have your own preferences rule over all others and a sometimes willful ignorance of the complicated choices involved in building a product, forming an institution or crafting a place. Arguing over the Internet is, usually, about personal preference and tends to exacerbate these foundational issues.

^_^ Yay! I can't wait for his next film ^^.

http://www.nanowrimo.org/eng/user/417477

I did it! *collapses*

Now I just need to finish the story, edit the heck out of it and actually post it.

For now, I should probably die a little until I can recover from that writing mad dash ^^;;.

I'm writing an essay, and I am supposed to pick three words that describe myself. Since I'm studying three languages right now and foreign languages are a big part of who I am, I decided to use one word from each language. I want to use something to the effect of "inquisitive" from ASL, and the sign I'm thinking of is wiggling the index finger many times (QUESTION-QUESTION-QUESTION).

I feel like this is a very bizarre question, but I'm curious whether to a native signer there would be any significance in moving my finger sort of in the shape of a question mark while I do sign it.

Thank you very much!

x-posted to signing

With the holiday season happening and all, why not consider gift shopping at the Couscous Collective Store? Not only can you purchase Narbonic and Skin Horse collections (and if you order all six volumes of Narbonic together, I'll sign and sketch in each one), but the store includes a wide selection of comics and minicomics by the other members in good standing of the Couscous Collective. Some of my personal recommendations:

( Read more... )

This happened just now! For the first time ever, I've written a story the length of a whole novel. I've written down hundreds of short stories, but writing one this long is one heck of a momentous landmark for me. For the first time ever, I've won NaNoWriMo! Hooray! I won something! Look, I won a badge, too.



My novel is very much a first draft. It's a non-chronological mess that jumps around from era to era and sometimes lapses into just recording a stream of thought. There are a few parts where I changed my mind about something, but the rule for NaNoWriMo is that you just keep writing, and you never turn back, and never edit before you're all done, so I just carry on into the next paragraph, saying "I changed my mind: it didn't go like that, it went like this instead." My novel is big and it's ugly and I am SO PROUD of it, because that's exactly what a first draft has got to be like. It's got just the right kind of ugly! What's so important is that it's all here, written down, even though it's going to need one heck of a makeover before it's presentable.

I think the lesson that I've learned from this project is that any kind of work has to be a first draft to begin with. Otherwise, I can get distracted by trying to make it perfectly polished and minimalistic all the way from the beginning, when really what I need to be doing is just trying to "get black on white," as some author called Guy de Maupassant says (which was one of the quotes on the NaNoWriMo calendars that I put up for this month and have been staring at for all this time). I've been finding out that there are zillions of story ideas that I think of while preparing a meal or taking a shower or whatever, and the trick is that I just have to write them all down before I forget them.

Not letting a first draft just be a first draft... that was one of the big mistakes that I made with my earlier attempt at NaNoWriMo in 2006. That time, I was trying to edit it and make it pretty at the same time as I was writing it, when I really should have been jotting down every idea to try it out, including different ways that certain tricky parts of the story could have played out.

This has been a really amazing experience, and I've learned a lot from it. It was nice to have some respect from other people when I talked to them about my novel, too. (One relative exclaimed, "Your NOVEL!?" in the same over-the-top astonished tones that they might have used if they'd just discovered that I'd had an elephant.) I think respect might be one of the issues here. Maybe I haven't been able to push myself to do creative work lately because I'm not respecting my own work enough to think that it's worth doing. If every creative work just looks like yet another hare-brained scheme that'll never make any money, never get finished, and do nothing but distract a person from working on practical matters, of course a person would get creative block. I think doing NaNoWriMo has helped me find the key to fixing the blues that I've been having for so long now.

Well people are starting to come back, yay.

Now times to try and be on being set would be nice.

But what we really need is fresh blood, so if you know anyone that might like PBX invite them over.

(Mod's feel free to delete and scold if this is inappropriate)

I just wanted to share the deal I got on an Nvidia GTX 260 at Microcenter today. The list price is $189.99 but when I got to the store, it was only $159.99 with an additional $20 mail in rebate. One word of caution, the one in the link is the EVGA version. The one I purchased in store was BFG Technologies.

Not sure if folks are planning on upgrades for xmas, but hey this was a pretty sweet deal and much less than I expected to pay.

It's a HUGE card, if you get one of these puppies, make sure you have plenty of room in your case and at least a 600W power supply.

Ever since I started playing CoH, I've wanted a little metal Sprocket or Cog or Tesla Prince to stand on my desk and be adorable. Sadly, they don't make them as real statues, and I've never seen any fan-made, so I went about making my own. The head ended up too small and the weight of the ... winder thingy on its back overbalances it too much to stand up on its own, but overall, I'm actually pretty impressed with myself.



( Five Pictures! )

Just... three thousand... more... words! Almost... there!

Here's what I've posted to Twitter over the past 24 hours:

• 00:46 Quoth @usernamenumber: "I only use the clit when my fingers are greasy and I'm going to stop talking now." #

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I really enjoy hearing this. I just wish it was longer. It really gets me in the right writing mood right now ^^. I like epic and especially kinda tense themes with a tinge of darkness.

A week and a half ago, our computer, P.B., crashed. P.B. is a seven-year-old desktop Mac, one of the white gooseneck models. I usually call him Plastic Baby, but his formal name for company is Pangur Bán, Irish for "White Pangur." It's the title of a medieval poem written by an Irish monk to his cat some 1,200 years ago. (Wikipedia says that pangur means "waulker," but I've also come across the theory that "Pangur" was an Irish pronunciation of "Peter." Either way, it was apparently a common cat name.) When I first read the poem as a college student at Trinity, I was struck by its sweet simplicity. The last verse opens a little slit in time to that monk, hunched over an illuminated Gospel, patiently nursing his tiny light against the darkness. With his white cat by his side.

I'd like to say it's even better in the original Irish, but I've forgotten how to do anything in Irish beyond count to ten, and now I can't pronounce the original verses without getting my tongue caught in my larynx.

P.B. came back from the Powerbook Guy this afternoon, brand-new hard drive, data fully restored. Here's the poem for him.


Pangur Bán

I and Pangur Bán my cat,
Tis a like task we are at:
Hunting mice is his delight,
Hunting words I sit all night.

Better far than praise of men
Tis to sit with book and pen;
Pangur bears me no ill will,
He too plies his simple skill.

Tis a merry thing to see
At our tasks how glad are we,
When at home we sit and find
Entertainment to our mind.

Oftentimes a mouse will stray
In the hero Pangur's way;
Oftentimes my keen thought set
Takes a meaning in its net.

'Gainst the wall he sets his eye
Full and fierce and sharp and sly;
'Gainst the wall of knowledge I
All my little wisdom try.

When a mouse darts from its den
O how glad is Pangur then!
O what gladness do I prove
When I solve the doubts I love!

So in peace our tasks we ply,
Pangur Bán, my cat, and I;
In our arts we find our bliss,
I have mine and he has his.

Practice every day has made
Pangur perfect in his trade;
I get wisdom day and night
Turning darkness into light.

Late birthday present.

( NSFW )

So there I was in Michael's, listening to a fake Chuck Berry song about a department store mascot, when I saw that they'd shorted all the boxes of ornaments this year. The boxes were the same size, but the big ornaments had eight instead of nine, and the little ornaments had ten instead of twelve. Do they think people are too stupid to notice this? Oh wait, this is scrapbooking headquarters... never mind.

I wonder if Mikuru of "The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya" puts up with Haruhi's abuse because:

A) She's just that devoted to her job as a time cop or whatever

B) She's got some sort of homosexual submission/cosplay fetish

C) All of the above.

Just a little warm-up, and an experiment with something different from my usual look. Based fairly closely on what I see in some frames of this blurry, decaying copy of Dr. John performing his song of the same name.

I've been listening to a lot of Dr. John these past few weeks; I'm not sure why. I just snagged a few of his early psychedelic albums off of the net. Really, this stuff was just sort of... the background of my youth, in a way that I never really noticed it. That particular New Orleans variety of funk was all around me growing up, in local commercials and tv shows.

I do not know enough hoodoo to know how inappropriate the title of the song is for this image I plucked from that decrepid video. All Wikipedia tells me is that there's a town way the hell out in the sticks of LA called Mamou, currently billing itself as "The Cajun Music Capital Of The World"; Dr. John is many things but he sure ain't "cajun" - that's a different mix; he's distinctly a New Orleans brew.

Yesterday, on the bus, I halfway listened to a couple of college kids flirting by discussing what music they listened to. And I had this sudden realization: the Art of Noise, one of those acts that changed my idea about what music could be, is now further in the past than the Beatles were when I was introduced to them in my teens.

This made me feel old. Not horrible about being old, just... amazed at where the time's gone.

And nowadays, if you haven't heard either of those acts, it's trivial to hit up the torrents to find a collection of all their albums. You can have the complete career of almost any moderately popular recording artist in a matter of days. We're just swimming in this stuff, and I really look forwards to the eclectic music that'll be produced by some kid who's absorbing all kinds of crazy corners of music right now.

You can do the same with other media, too. I'm watching a progress bar crawl as I copy a huge pile of Matt Howarth's comics to my own machine; I'll get to re-read some of this stuff for the first time in years - my collection of Savage Henry is one of the things I still miss out of my hurricane-destroyed library. I snagged a torrent of every single Asterix album a while back when I was playing with reskinning a card game. Just about anything from the past sixty years or so is out there on the net, somewhere. Maybe not in pristine condition, maybe not in the resolution you'd get if you found a physical copy - but it's good enough to have a real taste of it, and for the ideas and influence to persist.

There's still the moral issue of properly reimbursing creators for the time they spent, of course. I'm on both sides of the fence here. But, geeze, we swim in this ocean of culture and it gets thicker and thicker all the time. What can we build out of it? Where can we go next?

From the All-Seeing-I of the Triple E, Rebuilding the IBM 1401. The computer equivalent of rebuilding that Model-A Hot Rod Lincoln from Mr. Ryan's back lot. n.n

So I noticed this event being hosted tonight: RV Badge Grab on Infinity.

I teamed with the host last weekend on a couple SFs; great player.

Anyhoo, instead of Saturday Night SF, how about Saturday Night Event! I wouldn't mind picking up the signature defeat badges on Dark-stream, and the host already has at least one team set up. The more the better, really.

So count me in as team lead 2. This event starts at 8pm EDT/5pm PDT, however; that's an hour earlier than my norm (which is fine). If the event is a bust I'll host a quick SF/TF to make up for it afterward, depending on time and based upon team feedback.

Let's meet at the statue of Lord Recluse beginning about 10mins before start time. Hope to see you there!

Mom is in the old wing of the hospital. She's really sleepy but otherwise seems okay. She likes the food better in this hospital and the area seems better. She'll get a triangle for therapy and some other stuff too. I guess we'll see how it goes soon. I dunno. But she's in decent spirits.

Today it was sunny and the air was chilly. When I got off work it promptly sleeted so I shrugged off the offense with pho. I survived and I have strep throat (thank you for the well wishes!).

But that's okay because look at this gold mine of reference:



The internet is a bountiful resource and all you have to do is stumble around. It just falls into your lap. I nearly dread removing its influence, but I'm also terribly curious on the effects. The hardest thing about packing for a journey is that you never know what you'll really need (and in the end, you didn't need any of it anyways).


The line that brightened my entire day (after promptly passing out in exhaustion) was stumbling on this: "Khan punishes Crabb by assigning him to be a chef for a band of Acrocanthosaurus Shaolin-monks"

Acrocanthosaurus Shaolin-monks guys. Word combination mental fuel.

PS: The floor is made of lava.

1. Block out fifteen minutes of your life without distraction.
2. Queue up all three of these videos in their entirety.
3. Start watching the first one. Go on to the second and third one as they end. Enjoy.

Lazy roleplaying: Kalinda, my serpent character, delivers a lecture on How Magic Works.

Kalinda exhales slowly, smoke swirling out in strange sigils, and smiles. "Half of it is simply gaining and keeping that narrative trust. I sit around pulling things out of the air - and that establishes me as a sorceress, without me ever stating, baldfacedly, 'Kalinda is a powerful sorceress'." She licks her lips with a pointed tongue. "So disbelief loosens around me, and I can... get things done."

Kalinda waves a hand carelessly, and your chair rises into the air. "Edit too much, take too many liberties, and it all comes crashing down." The walls fall away, like stage flats losing their props, revealing a black, empty space behind; off in the distance, things flicker fugitively. "When do you stop believing my story?" And quicksilver rains down from the midnight sky. "How far can I go? How far can I weave my words?" Columns of light burst all around, coalescing into strange angelic beings, their countless arms swirling and drifting; they precess clockwise, singing. "And can I break my own spell?" Pickles fall out of the angel's mouths, shimmering with notes.

How much this applies to reality, in less ostentatious ways, is left as an exercise for the reader. Experiment!

The Far Away
Stacey and I made it up to Portland okay and had Thanksgiving with her family yesterday. I'm working some today but decided to log in and spend some time in SecondLife while I was working. A habit I should perhaps do more.
( Read more... )

Mom had to go with the ambulance because she's still too weak. She can't even stand for a moment even with all the help we can provide. Different hospital. Hopefully this time they'll give her some fucking therapy before releasing her. Her legs look so atrophied and unbalanced she can't support herself. I need to go along to the hospital after dad in a bit. I'll turn off the computer and I might look on with PSP or something later. We'll see.

I'm worried because picking her up they kinda turned her sore foot and I hope they didn't sprain it or anything painful...

+ Waited about 5 hours at the hospital for mom's release.

+ She has oxygen tanks around the house and oxygen maker.

+ She's very weak so I need to watch when she gets up for the bathroom because of that (no therapy or help of any kind...naturally)

+ I had hospital cafeteria turkey dinner

+I'm quite tired naturally...and will only be on fleetingly and as need for me dictates on IM (so a lot of afk watching out for mom)

So it's the meme where you get five questions is someone. If you want some from me, the first five people to reply saying "Resistance is futile" will get five questions. Given how spacey I am they may or not actually have something to do with you so be warned. (Normally the meme doesn't limit the requests but I think it sounds sensible.)

These came from paka.

1. I pretty much think of your art as being synonymous with Illustrator especially, so I'm curious if you've worked much with traditional media for colors - and if so, which you really enjoyed, preferred, or found interfaced best with your computer work.

I have not, really. Until I came to Illustrator I really kinda avoided color a lot; most of my old color work was done in Deluxe Paint. I guess I am just a digital artist at heart.

Media I've tried in the past with some modicum of success - or at least I thought so at the time - are watercolor, colored pencil, gouache, acrylic, and cel-vinyl on acetate. The last was the closest I ever came to the flat colors I love without going digital; most of my influences are from people working at the early intersections of art and printing technology, who'd just lay down a flat chunk of rubylith or something to call for a swath of color on the blue plate or whatever. I keep thinking I want to get around to getting a new set of colored pencils; I miss them just enough for quick color comps, and the prospect of picking out details over gouache.

But mostly I am a digital artist. When I work with physical medium I get very different results, a little crude and unskilled from lack of practice, deliberately full of the marks of the tools. Nothing's really quite gelled into a look for me the way AI has.

2. Who're your favorite artists these days?

I don't think they've changed lately; nobody's really come into my world who can override what running into people like Winsor McCay, Walt Kelly, Phil Foglio, Matt Howarth, and Carol Lay at earlier points of my life did.

3. Is there anything in your personality, or worldview, that you think is very specifically New Orleans - stuff you wouldn't have if you were from a different part of the world, or even a different part of the south?

Mm. I've always felt like I'm a bit more laid-back than a lot of people I know. Relax, it's not worth fretting over, we'll work it out sometime. Later, it's hot, let me have a nap first. Sure, there are "type A" personalities around New Orleans, but it's just not a tense, high-speed city. And I took that attitude to LA, and to Boston; I didn't let these more high-speed cities change my ideas of how urgent things are. I don't know if that's a Southern thing or a New Orleans thing; I've never really spent much time in the rest of the South.

I also feel like my attitude towards politicians is shaped by growing up in Louisiana: there, we expect them to be using their position for personal gain to a certain extent. "He's a crook but he's our crook", with a certain sense of obligation and a sense of what's going to far - sure, steal a little off the top and enrich your cronies, but spread the wealth around and do some good for the poorest parts of your constituency, too. Most American politics of the past years gets it the other way around, with a lot of stuff off the top for the wealthy and next to nothing for the people at the bottom.

I suspect being open to weirdness may also be partially due to growing up in a cosmopolitan, crazy, decadent city like New Orleans.

4. What were your favorite books and TV programs as a kid?

...This one draws a blank, at first. I watched an awful lot of awful 1970s Saturday morning cartoons. My parents regularly watched M.A.S.H. I vaguely, vaguely recall loving Captain Kangaroo though not much of it, and I dimly recall tuning in early every Saturday for a version of Mighty Mouse that was a continuing cliff-hanger set in space. Books? Well, the one I learnt to read with was The Little Red Caboose - my mother tells me I made her read that one over and over, and one day she found me with it on the sofa, reading it out loud; she thought I'd memorized it but it turned out I was simply reading it, once she tried getting me to read other things. Favorites, it's hard to pick now that my library is gone; I'd be able to look at it and say "oh, this, and this, and this". There was a lot of Larry Niven on my shelves, later on - my library quickly became mostly fantasy and SF, with a bias more towards the latter than the former.

Mostly what I watched was cartoons. Tiny Toons, the Bakshi Mighty Mouse, stuff like that. 'Star Blazers' intrigued me a little but it was on at a weird hour I could never catch; if I'd seen it regularly my style might have taken a different direction. Or not; I watched 'Speed Racer' regularly too and mostly just found it delightfully weird. Especially its insane end credit sequence. And, damn, I thought of some live-action show for a moment, but now it's gone. Oh! Yes. Of course, Doctor Who on the local PBS station, usually followed by the intense weird of Monty Python. Which is less weird now that I've learnt a bit more about the culture it was in, but...

Also, we had an encyclopedia, and I'd devour chunks of that like any proto-geek. And browse the dictionary looking for Interesting Words.

And I had "The Smithsonian Book Of Newspaper Comics", which was just... amazing. So many beautiful things to look at.

5. Why do you think your relationship with your mother is that healthy and supportive?

She's told me stories about her relationship with her mother, and it boils down to this: Grandma M. was not a very good mother, and rather than carry the misery along, she made an explicit choice to use her as a bad example. I have a feeling that in many cases, she said to herself "How would Madge react to this?" and then made sure that whatever she did, it wasn't that.

I just have to record this somewhere.

The sky here is overcast, there is a lot of mist in the air. Not quite fog, but it feels like a cloud is hugging the ground.

On the drive back to my house we saw a red glow on the horizon, above the treeline. It looked surreal and unnatural. We soon realized the glow was caused by brake lights, the sheer amount of vehicles turning the sky red. Vehicles waiting for tomorrow.

In five hours I head to work and there is nothing about tomorrow I am looking forward to, except perhaps leaving. Because as added insult, I also work the Saturday nightmare. But enough bitching. For those of you also having to work in retail, stay strong.

And then, Rik and I curled up in front of his computer and watched this strange little movie called "Reiner Brockhoff Loves Los Angeles", in which a professor drives around LA and talks about how wonderful it is. It hit my nostalgia buttons hard; I paused the movie for a discourse on the "Thomas Guide" - the giant book that constitutes a map of LA, so embedded in the culture that people tend to give out addresses with their page and grid reference in the Guide now and then, for a tour of certain parts of Hollywood via Google Maps, and a dig through Street View to find my apartment in Glendale and the anonymous building Spümcø occupied when I first worked there.

It was incredibly, weirdly romantic. Other people watch love stories about people; we watch love stories about cities.

Today, Rik and I slept in until about one. When we finally got out of bed, we decided to go for a walk. The city felt almost empty; almost everyone must have been in various houses doing their family get-togethers. Us? We walked around for a while in the unusually balmy fall weather, looking at trees, and talking.

It was pretty nice. I can even finally see why people like "fall"; so far I've mostly hated it because it's just been a short precursor to the half of the year I spend huddled under the blankets, but it's been lingering a lot this year and it's rather nice. The only thing that would have made it better would have been if Kin had been around as well, but he's off in Seattle having fun with other friends.

Then we came home. I'm going to make some pizza in a little bit, and I finally got around to downloading the source to Adium - I'm giving serious thought to using it as the base for making a Mac muck client that has features like "nice typography", since it already has infrastructure for tabbed windows and HTML views with user-selectable styles. Savitar is stuck in OS9 land, and Atlantis is nice but is really... clearly not designed by a visual person.

( basic muck client features... )

A Thanksgiving thought:

There are a lot of people alive today who were born when the gorilla was largely believed to be a myth, at least by Europeans.

Oops, I forgot to mention! Gonna be mostly out of touch for about a week and a half while I'm away for Thanksgiving. Apologies to the Seattle folks for not making a bigger announcement that I was going to be out here -- I've got the whole week booked solid with the folks I'm staying with.

On the other hand, a good third of my Greyhound trip out here was on buses with outlets and wifi, which is pretty awesome, so I'll probably be easier to find on the trip home... Have a great holiday!

[IC in my personal journal means as Bard. OOC means as, um, someone else, I guess. -bb]

This Cranksgiving I am crankful for:

• Our Evil Alien Overlords of course.
• Having had my life energy extracted by Dr. Liverworst.
• Having been kidnapped by Dr. Morosius and his Misera-Moles.
• Having been shot into outer space by Dr. Orbital.
• Sprouting tentacles out of my nose because of a serum of Dr. Snootmonster.
• Having been shrunk to the size of a pumpkin by Dr. Miniriffic
• Having been converted into a mediocre rock opera by Dr. Musiclicious.
• Having been turned into a pumpkin-golem by Dr. Hallowsgiving.
• Having been dropped into a pool of boiling alligators by the Crocodoctor.
• Having had all my niobium stolen by Dr. Metallograbber
• Having had my tentacles bitten off by Dr. Demonstrator's De-Monsterator.
• Having had my internal organs removed by Dr. Spectre. Dern confusing!
• Our Evil Alien Overlords of course.

April Fool's!

Here's what I've posted to Twitter over the past 24 hours:

• 16:37 I'm working tonight and Friday night, so Rocksgiving Lite will take place Saturday at BCOS. Ping me if you need directions/address. #

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