Posts tagged as “We Call It Living”

Not Dead, Just Working

Published February 27, 2016 by centaur

I haven’t given up on blogging once a day - I just got overwhelmed at work and life and, more importantly, at friendship - hanging out with some of my best buddies and catching up, something I’ve been far too busy to do recently. But this week I put in time with a few good buddies - one from high school, one from the writing group, even one day when I was a bit under the weather working remotely with my laptop in the backyard, which was appreciated by our aging, inappropriately urinating, formerly-indoor cats.

I was real stressed this week, but, objectively, things are going very well. I saved my threatened project from last year’s craziness and it’s now in use; I started a great new project with my team; even something that we thought was dead long ago got used in a great demo at work. I sent a novel to a publisher; we planned a high school friends trip to Tahoe; things are going well.

One friend noted I’d been living my life the way I do - overstuffed with work, a full time software job; plus as much as a full time novelist as I can be reading over lunch and dinner, writing over coffee and occasional breakfasts; plus helping manage a small press; plus doing comics - for a while now, and he was worried the stress was getting worse. I see that, but didn’t quite agree.

I’ve been this stressed before, particularly in the middle of my PhD, when I was two or three years in and thought I had two or three years more to get out … and then found out after three years of work I had several more years to go. I’ve done it to myself, taking on an 80% time job to spend time writing, but then spending a whole year filling my life with karate, improv, and weekly roundtables which filled my whole schedule to the point weeks just disappeared. As the stress builds, you just want to take a break - and if you don’t, as my friend pointed out, things may break anyway.

Those periods of my life sucked, and in a way this one does too, but in another way, it’s more manageable. My crunch now is not being trapped just by doing too much to myself; it’s like being trapped by my PhD, which got delayed because I had an opportunity to work on a robotics project. Now, while I have a few things to deal with like a wrecked floor at the house, I’m mostly trapped by opportunity: the opportunity to do a great project at work, to write great books, to help bring other books to life.

Screenshot 2016-02-27 14.36.11.png

I can see an exit strategy - a couple years of work at work, three years of work on my next novels, plus maintenance of the small press and continued practice at comics, and once I get through those things, if they’re even moderately successful, I’ll be in a position of much more creative freedom. So I think it's important to not lose these opportunities - but on the other hand, it’s pointless to let your opportunities kill you. That’s why today, after I finished booking my next trip, after I finished more readings which hit the intersection of my robotics work and my urban fantasy research, but before I did any more serious work, including this blog entry … I took time out to be creative. To just draw.

Well, drawing practice because I want to do comic books, but you get the idea.

-the Centaur

Back to Basics

Published February 22, 2016 by centaur

As a guilt-motivated ex-Catholic with a perfectionist streak, I’m constantly trying to be a better person than I am - religiously, ethically, personally, even at the level of my skills. And one of the best ways I’ve found to improve my skills is not simply to practice, or to push the bounds of your knowledge, but to step back and look again at the basics.

Screenshot 2016-02-22 20.56.24.png

For some areas of knowledge, this is obvious. We wouldn’t have gotten anywhere with number theory if we hadn’t been willing to go back, again and again, to the definitions of numbers. But it seems less obvious for skills, where our perception often is that first you are a novice, then you become skilled, then an expert, then a master.

But that road can become a blind alley. Learning from a teacher can channel you into their style; self-taught artistry can create works of great power, but it can also leave you with deficiencies which no amount of further training can improve. Sometimes the only way to get better is to step back, reassess, start over.

That’s why I like periodically coming back to beginning art instruction books. I find the older references somewhat more informative than the newer ones, perhaps because they’re more methodical, or perhaps because there was a greater concern for representational art - or simply because I’ve read a lot of newer references, making the old ones seem fresh.

Now, I once heard an artist suggest that you should buy a pile of art instruction books, wrap them in a trash bag, and bury them in your back yard, get a big thick sketchbook and sketch people in coffeehouses until you filled the whole thing, and then, after a year or so, dig them up to start drawing. My wife, however, an accomplished artist, agrees and disagrees with this plan.

She agrees with the latter two thirds - but not the start. She argues, there are so many things to learn about art that if you tried to start from just sketching, you might end up never making certain discoveries and instead get trapped in rookie mistakes. Your art might have emotional power, but you’d be handicapped if you were aiming for mastery of your tools or representational accuracy.

I tend to agree. As a scientist, though, I try another approach - not just practice, but "scientific” analysis, at least the initial, data collection part of science: not just doing the practice, but carefully examining how it went, looking for successes and failures, and trying to generalize from them. I can’t double-blind A/B test myself, but I can be mindful about how I practice.

I pray it’s helping! I have a lot of art I want to do.

-the Centaur

Pictured: Exercises from Andrew Loomis’ DRAWING THE HEAD AND HANDS, folk art from the U.S. Mint in New Orleans, art books in Dauphine Street Books also in New Orleans, and various drawings I’ve done over the years, from long ago (the highly detailed centaur and the copy of the Hemingway cover) to yesterday (the basic circles and analysis of problems with my line).

It was N’awlins, y’all

Published February 21, 2016 by centaur

As if it wasn’t obvious. Sandi and I spent the week there in New Orleans' French Quarter - we never left it, never even rented a car, but just walked around, soaking in history and food. It was awesome, I have much to talk about, but, following the rules we’ve established, it wasn’t a business trip, so the details had to wait until my return.

I have returned. Expect a post on Vegan New Orleans soon. (Not a contradiction in terms!)

-the Centaur

I Think I’m Calling It

Published February 20, 2016 by centaur

Screenshot 2016-02-20 09.40.27.png

Welp, looks like I’m not going to Comic-Con this year. My fault - I had a Professional registration, but received my renewal email when I was working to get a novel to the publisher and read the REGISTRATION DUE email as NOT DUE. Found out like the day after the professional registration closed. And then, even though I was reading the Toucan blog that announces such things, I was so busy working on another project that I missed Attendee Preregistration. And, as of now, even though I’m in line … it’s sold out:

Screenshot 2016-02-20 09.42.40.png

That happened while I was typing the above paragraph. At this point, three of the five days are sold out. My favorite night, preview night, sold out first:

Screenshot 2016-02-20 09.28.09.png

Comic-Con is awesome and overwhelming. I’d wondered if I would go back this year, but if I was not to go back, I’d prefer not to go back, like, on purpose, not through oversight, accident and bad luck. I look forward to going again next year. But perhaps I should focus less on going like a fan and more on doing the work that will get me invited there as a guest.

As my wife would say, focusing on making my next creative project spectacular.

-the Centaur

Update: while posting this …

Screenshot 2016-02-20 09.51.27.png

O.M.G. While TYPING that …

Screenshot 2016-02-20 09.52.01.png

Yeah, this ain’t Cave Johnson, but we’re done here.

Disruption

Published February 20, 2016 by centaur

Nothing lasts forever. Appreciate things while they’re there, because one day they’ll be gone. You will too.

-the Centaur

Oh no, someone’s wrong on the Internet!

Published February 15, 2016 by centaur

What I’ve discovered is that even if you definitively know something, that won’t stop someone online from snapping back with stupid, every step of the way. What’s worse, my rule of threes says that in any discussion, one third of their points will be wrong, one third of your points will be wrong, and the middle third will remain an area of durable disagreement.

There’s no cure for online idiots, but, fortunately, your own ignorance is correctable. Get into an argument with someone? Don’t try to get the last word - go look up the truth. (Or do the work to prove it, if it isn’t known). And be satisfied with your own answers.

Because if you found the truth and told them, that particular person isn’t likely to listen anyway.

-the Centaur

That Damn Wolf

Published February 11, 2016 by centaur

Blog Postings Jan-Feb.png

Welp, while I’ve missed a few days, I have overall kept ahead of the blog wolf. By a hair. My lovely plans to build a buffer have resulted in one backlogged article, which I’ll post tomorrow to keep myself honest (and keep it from becoming stale) and basically no buffer. I’m only ahead because I sometimes post several articles per day, like today.

Sigh. No wonder I’m so stressed out - I make even being a dilettante a chore.

-the Centaur

Effective Beverages

Published February 11, 2016 by centaur

So after a gut punch, one of the most important things to do is to take time out to recuperate.

But funny thing is, the highly effective sangria above wasn’t the thing that broke me out of my funk. When something bad happens, I try one of the following strategies to feel better:

Take a nap. Or just go to bed. Sleeping can sometimes reset your emotional state. When I had my big crisis of faith in the 90’s, converting from Catholicism to Episcopalianism, I slept for like a day and a half, rethinking my whole life. Of course, if you can’t fall asleep, that’s no good - I was up to 5:50AM this morning, so blech.
Take a walk. This can also provide metaphorical distance from your problems. During my crisis of faith, I walked around my apartment complex again and again, taking an inventory of my whole life, weighing and evaluating everything I could think of. Today, when I tried the same strategy, I was snarling at the air, so blech.
Change your scene. Talking to uninvolved humans, not connected with your dramas, really can help. I had an interview with a candidate, a technical conversation about deep learning with a TL, and, later, after my mood was lifted, another technical conversation with my waitress at Opa! about the econometrics of developing nations.

As for why that last conversation happened …

Which goes to the next item on the list ...

Try shopping therapy. Doesn’t work for everyone, but I’m a bookhound. I ended up going to the Stanford Bookstore to try to pick up a book on large scale machine learning (it had sold out). The books themselves weren’t the solution, but I’m getting to that - but it did involve the books in a tangential way.
Get some coffee. The inventor of the idea of separation of powers, Montesquieu, reportedly once said “coffee renders many foolish people temporarily capable of wise actions” and I’ve found that to be true - which perhaps suggests that we should install a Starbucks in the Congress and change the structure of our political debates, but nevermind. It helped.

You’ll note that nowhere in here is “get a drink.” That’s a terrible idea - if you think you need a drink, you probably shouldn’t have one, as needing a drink is the road to alcoholism. For that reason, and many others, I always stop at one drink per day - period. No matter how strong the drink, it’s almost impossible for a one hundred and eighty pound male to get drunk on just one.

Having a drink after you feel better, on the other hand, can be a great relaxer. But how do you get to that relaxed state? Well, one thing I try is, well, trying to resolve the problem.

Talk to the people involved. I have a theory that if you have a problem with a person and leave it alone, your emotional reaction will be frozen, even intensified over time - a theory based on my personal experience, but backed by cognitive emotional theories which say your emotions are derived from your stance, your relationship to the people, actions and events in the world - which doesn’t change if you don’t give yourself the chance to have new experiences with those people. Thanks to the fact that it’s the twenty-first century, this can be done via text, even when people don’t have time to talk.

But the point at which it turned wasn’t when I got a drink. It wasn’t after I took a nap, took a walk, talked to people, changed the scene, got a book on political economy, got coffee, or texted the involved parties to finalize the resolution of yesterday evening’s gut punch. It happened at very strange place, as I was drinking coffee, as I was reading, as I was texting with my friends to resolve the problem, I got sucked in to the problem that prompted me to get the book, a question I heard in an unrelated political debate from last night. As is usual in these cases, I found that the debate followed the rule of thirds: on a third of the topics, my buddy was definitively wrong, on a third, I was definitively wrong, and on the middle third, there were open unresolved questions worthy of debate. And as I started to look at those questions … I had a brainflash on how to solve them.

And then on a meta-brain-flash, as I realized what tacking the problem was doing to my mental state: it was fixing it.

Do the work. Find something you love, and cultivate the ability to throw yourself into it. If you’ve had a gut punch, you might have a bad taste in your mouth about a lot of the projects you were working on … but get your brain into a new space, and all those behavior programs will execute … and give you something new to fall (intellectually) in love with.

The particular question I was tracking - how to evaluate economic policies - is something I’m going to be working on for a while, but I can give you a flavor for it: how do you know whether a political candidate’s economic policies will work? Sometimes that’s easy: for example, Democrats like to spend when the economy’s doing well, and Republicans like to cut when the economy is doing poorly - and both sides are dead wrong. An economy is not a household - cutting spending in a slump will cut the state’s tax revenues and cause an austerity spiral and increased debt; spending in a boom incurs obligations that the state can’t sustain in the next slump and increased risk. These are pretty close to ironclad laws, that operate whether you believe in big government or small or low taxes or high; those are just the dynamics of economies whether you like it or not - whether you believe it or not, suck it up.

But looking long term, some policies promote growth, and some don’t; and it isn’t always clear which is which. What’s worse, exogenous factors - those pesky world events like wars and plagues and wardrobe malfunctions - throw an unavoidable amount of static on top of whatever we’re trying to measure.

The book I’m reading gives me, so far, the impression that individual outcomes are, roughly, helped by a country’s growth, and a country’s growth is affected by things it can't control, like the luck of history and geography, and things it can, like culture and institutions, with evidence strongly suggesting that institutions matter more than culture, since some countries have kept their cultures but changed their institutions and shown amazing growth. The factors that seem to affect this most are protecting private property, having enforceable contracts, reducing barriers for investment, having a level playing field for businesses, and creating equality of opportunity for citizens … but …

But how much of this is noise, and how much is reality?

And that got me thinking: if you assumed some randomness affecting growth, could you tell apart policies that caused 1 percent growth, or 2 percent growth, or 3 percent growth?

Turns out ... you can.

The Promise of Growth v1.png

The central red line is 2% growth, projected out over 20 years. The dotted lines above and below it are 1% and 3% growth … and the grey range is the max and min of a stochastic simulation of ten different histories, each with 5% random variation from year to year, which looks something like this:

The Alternatives to Growth v1.png

The point is, if you get a gut punch - like in the bottom trajectory above - it can look like you’re running a bad policy on a time range of a decade or more before things start to get back on track. On twenty year time horizons, however, you really can start to see an affect. On even longer time horizons, having the right polices can be the difference between a country like Nigeria - rich with oil wealth, yet having a flat growth range - versus a country like the US or Japan or even Botswana or South Korea.

This doesn’t show whether I or my buddy is right - in fact, this model, even as an abstract model, would need to be augmented greatly, to get a proper range of growth rates, of randomness, of the types of exogenous influences and their timescales. But even in its current state, it shows that under a very broad set of assumptions … I and my buddy were right to wrestle over this problem.

What we do now matters, not just in the next election, but twenty years down the road.

And doing that work took me out of my slump. It connected me to an earlier conversation, to earlier problem solving skills not engaged with what I’d been doing just prior to the gut punch. The gut punch still needs to be dealt with - but now it’s just an event, not a thing that causes random spikes of rage and anger when I’m trying to drink my coffee.

And that’s how I learned a new way to deal with a gut punch.

-the Centaur

Appendix. The graphs above were generated via the following Mathematica code:

RandomGrowth[initial_, rate_, fuzz_] :=
initial (1 + rate) (1 + RandomReal[{-fuzz, fuzz}])

ProjectGrowth[initial_, rate_, fuzz_, years_] :=
NestList[RandomGrowth[#, rate, fuzz] &, initial, years]

InterpolateGrowth[initial_, rate_, fuzz_, years_] :=

Interpolation[ProjectGrowth[initial, rate, fuzz, years]]

FuzzyGrowth[initial_, rate_, fuzz_, years_] :=
Table[InterpolateGrowth[initial, rate, fuzz, years], {iterations, 10}]

fuzzyTwoPercent = FuzzyGrowth[1, 0.02, 0.05, 100]

Plot[{
Min[Map[#[x] &, fuzzyTwoPercent]], Max[Map[#[x] &, fuzzyTwoPercent]],
InterpolateGrowth[1.0, 0.02, 0.0, 100][x],
InterpolateGrowth[1.0, 0.01, 0.0, 100][x],
InterpolateGrowth[1.0, 0.03, 0.0, 100][x]},
{x, 1, 20},
Filling -> {1 -> {2}},
AxesOrigin -> {1, 1},
AxesLabel -> {"Years Downrange", "Growth Rate"},
PlotStyle -> {Thin, Thin, Thick,
Directive[Thick, Dashed],
Directive[Thick, Dashed]}]

and

Plot[{InterpolateGrowth[1.0, 0.02, 0.0, 100][x], Map[#[x] &, fuzzyTwoPercent]},
{x, 1, 20},
AxesOrigin -> {1, 1},
AxesLabel -> {"Years Downrange", "Growth Rate"},
PlotStyle ->
{Thick,
Thin, Thin, Thin, Thin, Thin,
Thin, Thin, Thin, Thin, Thin}]

I hope you enjoyed this exercise in computational therapy.

Gut Punch

Published February 11, 2016 by centaur

Welp, that took a nasty turn. The week leading up to my birthday went great: a surprise business trip to Atlanta, a great research talk, a wonderful visit with friends, a nice cake and gift from my teammates on the occasion of my tenth Google anniversary, a great card from my Mom, calls from my Mom and friends, a wonderful birthday dinner with my wife, and then an outpouring of well wishes online - half a dozen via email, and over 70 on Facebook. I was riding high. What a great birthday! A few hours later, I was seriously considering deleting my Facebook account. And this blog. For context, the original title of this post was “worst birthday of my life.” The particulars are, sorry, not your business. But just so you know, no-one involved did anything wrong. It was all a simple series of misunderstandings. And everyone involved managed to fix the problem with a couple of hours of work. But, still, a sequence of simple thank-yous online and the cascading reactions that followed on from that quickly turned a glorious day into a life-changing gut-punch. Facebook itself isn’t the problem, but deleting my Facebook account would help. But as I step back, I now find myself needing to reconsider, well, everything - not just Facebook, but whether I should have an online presence at all, and my involvement with every single job, relationship and project. I know a few other people going through similar things right now - a close friend is rethinking their life, and it’s happened to a few bloggers I follow. I know, rationally, that artists have these impulses, I’ve had them since I was a kid, and it’s just a pointless self-destructive exercise. You feel like the particular events that have happened are the cause, but they’re really not. You’ve entered a mood, or a depression, and while it has a trigger, it’s the emotional state that feels forever. Still, for a moment, I felt like deleting my Facebook account, smashing my computer, and loading the library up into a Dumpster. To give you a scale of the seriousness of the problem, I am actually still thinking about getting a PODS unit and loading up much of the stuff in the library to get it out of the way and putting all my projects on hiatus while we deal with the shattered windows, the damaged floors, and all the other crap going on at the house. Now, while all that other crap is real, I said it the way I just did to exaggerate the problem. That crap has nothing to do with the gut punch, is all ongoing - the shattered window was from a ladder that fell during some work, the damaged floor behind the fridge was a discovery by my wife when she was doing cleaning. But when the gut punch happened, it made me step back and look and everything to ask, "is this working?” So I don’t know what I’m going to do. I might put this blog on hiatus. I might declare a mulligan on some projects. I might rework some habits, make some changes, do things differently. Or I might just draw a breath, take the gut punch, and move on - the way I did in the shower this morning, at which it all hit me again, hard enough to make me draw a breath; then I thought of the Avengers movie, that quote from Bruce Banner, the thing he just said before going green and tearing off to kick ass and take names: “That’s my secret. I’m always angry.” Anger is an alarm, a sign of a problem. And the first thing you do with an alarm is to turn it off. Then deal with the problem. So, this morning, when I felt the gut punch, I drew a breath, straightened up, killed the shower, got dressed, and left for work to go do my fucking job. I had an onsite interview to conduct, I have deep learning techniques to research, I’ve got to reinvent the foundations of mathematics for my latest urban fantasy novel, and I have eighteen more books to write in my main series. Time to get cracking. -the Centaur Pictured: me on my birthday, Photoshopped to illustrate my state of mind when the gut punch arrived.

Okay, now that was a birthday cake …

Published February 10, 2016 by centaur

Well, I spoke too soon: as a surprise during my team’s offsite yesterday, they gave me a real Googleversary birthday cake. And a gift card to Cafe Romanza, one of my favorite coffeehouses (the other two top faves being Coupa Cafe and Cafe Intermezzo). I don’t think I could have been happier at that moment:

But I was sure happier today, having a nice dinner with my wife at our mutual favorite restaurant. We could have gone somewhere “special”, but I wanted to go to Aqui, the place that has the best memories of eating for me, not because of all the time I spend there writing, but of all the wonderful conversations I’ve had there with the love of my life, my wife.

She didn’t let me take a good picture of her, but she certainly got good pictures of me.

20160210_202231(0).jpg

Now off to Facebook - I got over 50 well wishes from people on the occasion of my birthday, so as far as I am concerned the people who think that computers are making us less connected to other people can just go Like themselves. Gotta dash - the longer I spend saying thank you, the longer I put off my birthday spanking. (Actually, I already got that, but it’s the principle of the thing).

-the Centaur

Ten Years, Man!

Published February 8, 2016 by centaur

Oh yeah, I almost forgot: I’ve been at Google ten years as of this Saturday. Hooray!

Now, I make it a policy not to mention my employer, with two exceptions: coincidentally, as a consumer, such as my recent article about running Google’s TensorFlow deep learning package on my MacBook Air; and concurrently, as an employee, when my employer’s just announced something I’ve worked on.

I’ve abided by this policy for years, even before my current employer, because you really do have no protection from your employer for anything you write: you can get fired for it. Even if you run your writing past your employer for legal approval, your company could be acquired tomorrow, and the new owners’ legal team could review what you’ve done and decide to fire you for it.

So I don’t talk about my current employer on my blog. I disclose both my writing to my employer when I’m hired, and my plan not to write about them, and then I go blog about my own damn business.

But Google’s been awesome to me for the last ten years, so it deserves an exception. It’s been awesome. Even the stuff that comparatively sucked was better than the average at most jobs I’ve held - and most of it didn’t suck. I get to work with awesome people, on awesome problems, with awesome resources, and have eaten a lot of awesome food while doing it.

So, thanks, Google, for all the awesome.

-the Centaur

Pictured: not my birthday cake, not from Google; just a great slice from Cafe Intermezzo.

Yeah, that Superbowl.

Published February 8, 2016 by centaur

A repost here from Facebook … I caught the opening of the Superbowl in a Gordon Biersch waiting for my flight back from Atlanta, and damn, that was patriotic. I shed a tear when Lady Gaga sung the national anthem - straight up, no antics - and then they showed troops watching from Afghanistan, and fighter jets buzzed the stadium. God bless America.

And in case anyone’s wondering, I mean this completely non-ironically. Yes, the Superbowl is the epitome of commercialism, but it need not be crass, and it’s by choice that they’re making it patriotic. I’m not a sports guy, but I love watching football with my family whenever I go home; it gives us something to bond over.

And isn’t that what the Superbowl did for us this Sunday? A third of America watched it, everyone from football jocks to computer nerds. A whole spectrum of people participated in it, from the first Superbowl MVP to Lady Gaga to makers of two minute jingles to troops serving their second tour overseas. They even piped it into the plane, and people cheered and jeered at the outcome.

The Superbowl could just be a game, but it’s an institution that brings America together.

Thanks, guys, for a job well done.

-the Centaur

Zonked

Published February 6, 2016 by centaur

Welp, there went a day. I had a lot of plans for this extra day that I had before my flight back, but mysteriously I woke up around 3pm after almost 13 hours of sleep, with my whole body feeling … I dunno … pummeled.

I was a bit mystified, until I remembered what happened at around 5 in the morning: I woke up with a vicious cough, took some NyQuil, and went back to sleep.

Now my nose is clear, and my time is gone. Apparently that NyQuil shit works.

But! As a bonus, I (and now you) get this reflected sunset, which appeared late this afternoon as I was sitting down to get some writing done. Enjoy!

-the Centaur

The Spectacle of the Silver Screen

Published February 6, 2016 by centaur

So I’m continuing my adventures at my undisclosed location *cough* Atlanta *cough* and reporting my activities after they happen, as is my habit when off adventuring when I’m not making a public appearance. And one of the things I enjoy doing when on a trip is, after all the work is done, catching a late night movie. Like, at the theater, on a big screen with a comfy seat and a soda, not on your phone.

I was watching the conclusion of The Hunger Games, and I’m glad I did. The first one was OK, but the second one grabbed me in a way that no movie has since The Empire Strikes Back - not that I haven’t seen better movies, like, oh, I dunno, Mad Max: Fury Road or my favorite movie, Kiki’s Delivery Service - but I felt hooked into a series in a way I haven’t felt in a long time.

Each kind of medium emphasizes different elements - pure audio in radio plays; pure text in novels; an actor’s expressions in theater - and even within the medium of moving pictures, some are better suited to some stories than others. Animation emphasizes the impossible with the tools of graphic design, for example; while It’s possible to make a live action movie of Kiki’s Delivery Service - they did - but they had to work enormously hard to create the imagery that the animation made effortless, and it still doesn’t quite have the same resonance. Even within a particular type of movie, the type of imagery has its own demands. Some images work at any size, others are best left as animated gifs or vines to be played on your phone … and some demand the big screen.

Movies are about spectacle; about imagery that can fill an entire theater. And, in one spectacular moment in The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2, in which an enormous tidal wave of oil fills the whole screen and roars down upon our heroes, my breath was briefly taken away — followed by the thought: yes, this should appear on the silver screen.

Movies have more value - in particular, having a shared experience with unchosen strangers, but more importantly, a shared narrative experience that builds a common bond - but it was a late-night show of an end-of-run movie, and the only people in the theater were a bunch of yapping effers in the back row, so that one bit was a bit spoiled for me.

But for one brief moment - actually, for many moments - I felt movie magic through the spectacle of the silver screen.

Totally worth it.

-the Centaur

The Spectacle of the Silver Screen

Published February 6, 2016 by centaur

And the movie delivered something else too: big screen cinema. My buddy Jim Davies has a theory that some kinds of stories are best suited for some kinds of media, and I agree. Robert Frost’s “The Road Not Taken” would not work as a miniseries; it relies on the quick sharp punch of poetic language. Babylon 5, with its A and B endings and epic space battles would only work as series TV. The Martian movie was great, but it lacks the electric punch of that crackling opening “Chapter 1: Log Entry SOL 6: I’m pretty much f*****.” It’s possible to make a live action movie of Kiki’s Delivery Service - they did - but they had to work enormously hard to create the imagery that the animation made effortless, and it still doesn’t quite have the same resonance. Some images work at any size, others are best left as animated gifs or vines to be played on your phone … and some demand the big screen.

But for one brief moment - actually, for many moments - I felt movie magic through the spectacle of the silver screen.

Totally worth it.

-the Centaur

The Spectacle of the Silver Screen

Published February 6, 2016 by centaur

Movies have more values - in particular, having a shared experience with unchosen strangers, but more importantly, a shared narrative experience that builds a common bond - but it was a late-night show of an end-of-run movie, and the only people in the theaters were a bunch of yapping effers in the back row, so that one bit was a bit spoiled for me.

But for one brief moment - actually, for many moments - I felt movie magic through the spectacle of the silver screen.

Totally worth it.

-the Centaur

Back in Business

Published February 4, 2016 by centaur

We are back in business. Apparently it was a temporary database glitch. Time to make sure my backups are up to date. Meanwhile, since I’m waiting to find out where my next meeting is, enjoy a picture of a coffeehouse that I am totally not at right now.

-the Centaur

Weeeird…

Published February 4, 2016 by centaur

… the Library of Dresan is letting me add posts, but all other operations are squirrelly. Stand by.

-the Centaur

Respite

Published February 4, 2016 by centaur

So me and my wife are super cool about most of the things we do - I get home late, she stays up later, I travel for conferences, she travels for work, no matter what’s going on, we get along. But one of the rules we’ve established is to not discuss our travel plans in public until after they happen, unless it’s for a public appearance.

One of the reasons is that she’s an artist, and I’m an author, and sometimes the things that we create can irritate people, and if you publicize your schedule it opens you up to attack. So she’s asked me not to publicize our location or our travel plans. That won’t stop Goldfinger, of course, but it makes it less easy for a determined whacko.

So, I’m … somewhere, to give a company talk, but it’s not a public talk, so consider it an undisclosed location. And I took the red-eye, as is my habit for crossing country, because I hate losing a day. Prior to my talk, I’d lined up a whole day full of meetings with people so I could use this time productively … but as of this morning, all have canceled or failed to respond.

I’ve no worries: if my meetings are all canceled, I’ve got a giant stack of papers to read for a brand new project at work, so I’m covered. But I don’t want to drive away from the meeting site in case my last meetings go through. So I’m nearby, in a coffeehouse, chilling out, waiting to either hear back on my meetings or to get the good news that my hotel has a room ready for me to check in.

And you know what? It’s nice to have a respite, a little time to chill. For someone who juggles a job, writing, a small press, and comic book work, it’s easy to get overwhelmed.

A few minutes to chill is a good thing.

-the Centaur

Uh … What the?

Published February 4, 2016 by centaur

So, as you may or may not know, I’m trying to blog every day this year, and just now, taking a brief respite after my red-eye flight, I decided to extend my tracking spreadsheet from just January to cover February. And when I did so … my tracking graphic suddenly turned into … I don’t know … an origami Pac-Man?

I’m not even sure how this particular chart type could make the above graphic, so I’m not sure how to fix it. This probably should get filed under “if you break the assumptions of a piece of software’s inputs, it will break your assumptions about its outputs.” Best thing to do is probably start over with a new graphic.

-the Centaur