Everyone has their own winter rituals. Either you make them or you follow what has come before, or you choose to ignore them all together, we're all acutely aware that it's something that a lot of us do every year. Figuratively, symbolically, or astrologically, everything in the human condition is a cycle of some sort, like a series of a million different Venn diagrams creating infinite combinations of various overlapping factors, perpetually in motion like celestial gears; these cycles dictate a number of things related to our lives. Or, the cycles at least preside an influence over our perceptions, emotions, and actions during certain times of the year, or periods in our lives over the course of several years.
Not sure what's taking me so much time to finish my Nation of Victims review. I keep coming back to it though. Hopefully I'll be done changing things around and rearranging paragraphs enough to post a fairly decent overview and recommendation for the book soon. Right now though, I'd like to talk a little about life and get into some personal knowledge management (or, “pkm”) software that I've been using.
So, this book has its ups and downs. It started off strong. About half-way through I wasn't feeling it, but pushed through. By the end I was satisfied with the book, but I'm not overly enthusiastic about getting other people to read it. If you like what he has to say in interviews, then I would recommend the book though. He goes into some depth regarding his philosophy on how markets should be governed.
The other night I was looking for something to watch. Specifically I wanted a movie where I could smoke a joint and really just sit back and relax, and get a lot of enjoyment out of the movie. I started off the search looking for a wuxia film. I came across The Assassin which stars Shu Qi, who I recognized from The Transporter... Maybe I should have smoked before checking out the first 10 minutes, but I wanted to make sure it was going to be worth it. While it might be a good movie, it was a bit too artsy for the GLP Tango I would be smoking.
After that I decided to go back to an older movie that I hadn't seen in a while that I knew would match the metal space. I found Planet Terror on Tubi. The opening sequence includes a trailer for a movie that Robert Rodriguez hadn't made at that time, Machete. I remembered very distinctly watching the movie with director commentary and listening to Rodriguez say that he wanted to do a trailer for a movie that didn't exist. When I went looking for the trailer from the beginning of Planet Terror to share with my friends, I found out that Rodriguez had in fact made not only Machete but a second one as well! I was sold at that point, and Machete was the movie I watched. I immediately knew it would get added to my list of favorite movies of all time. Thus, this list was born.
This is a common question that I feel a lot of people face every day, from season vets to newbies looking to learn something that might be useful elsewhere.
One thing I can say, from what I've learned, is that the framework isn't really all that important, it's the fundamentals that matter. When I was younger and and the commercial internet was still in its infancy, the big saying was “RTFM,” read the fucking manual. Which is still true to this day. If it doesn't have good documentation, move on.
As far as a language, I'm sticking to JavaScript. I like it. I was never hardcore into programming like all of the Rust and Go people out there. I just want to be able to do stuff. If I ever hit a point where JavaScript isn't doing what I need it to do, then I'll move on.
Thought I would try something a little different. I never noticed that GoodReads gives you the option to copy and paste your book reviews (until now), so I figured I would take advantage of that.
I've been working on a project that I'll get online relatively soon... I don't think it's really ready for primetime right now. It's just more of a “yeah that's cool.” It's not really a full app yet, and I've been playing around with some different ideas. Technically it is already online if you follow my github commits you can probably guess what I've been cooking. Needless to say, it's tarot-related.
Not too long ago, one of the members of the Pixel Pints shared with us a simple webapp that he found for building top-whatever lists, called Topsters.
I decided to play around with it a bit, and, as I mentioned in the last post—which was itself a top 20 list—I wanted to have an overlay for links on top of the image, so it was more like a widget instead of just an image. The power of Topsters is not the image that it generates necessarily, but how easily you can generate the image by querying a bunch of APIs based on your media selection (books, albums, movies, or games). So, in that regard adding a little flare to the image seemed appropriate, and why not give it some interactivity? Topsters itself utilizes a canvas element to arrange the pictures of the book, album, movie, or game covers. I could always consider maybe doing that myself, or
Charley Crockett's new album Live From the Ryman has been on repeat the past couple of days for me. I absolutely love it. Which got me thinking about whether or not I should, or even could, compile a TOP something-or-other list of the greatest live albums of all-time.
Driving home from my Dad's this past Sunday, I thought I would only be able to put together maybe 10 albums at most, and I thought there wouldn't be any that I would need to cut, but as I started digging through favorite artists of mine and whether or not they've released any live albums... I realized there are quite a few live albums worthy of being on a Greatest of All-Time list, and I don't think I've ever done a list like this before. Earlier incarnations of my website I used to do fantasy super groups of musicians, or playlists like I was doing with the last incarnation of the website. I might do more of those types of posts, but TOP (insert number here) lists are going to be a new thing going forward.
You may notice the numbers floating on top of the album covers, well, I'm using Topsters to generate the image, but I've also spent the past 3 or so days noodling around in JavaScript to come up with some reusable code that will slap numbers on top of a Topsters generated image, and since I've gone to the trouble of coding it, I may as well use it a few more times. Maybe I can refine it and add some more functionality to it down the road, will probably even do a separate post talking about the code (though, pushing it to github would probably be better). In any case...
As the quality of televised and digital entertainment has degraded over the years, and not wanting to be bombarded by the sheer negativity of it all, I've found myself spending more time listening to music and reading comics. It's been a gradual transition for me... That isn't to say that I don't spend entirely way too much time watching garbage on YouTube or mindlessly surfing, looking at things I'll never buy, or researching video games, or learning things that have no real practical purpose in my life other than to be interesting topics for cocktail parties that I'll never attend, etc.
Something happened though... A tipping point? I did attempt doing a web comic maybe a year or so ago, but I never stuck with it. I have revisited the idea though, and this time I sat and thought about the story ahead of putting pencil to paper, I drew a few outlines and sketches first.
Just from my 9-to-5 and thinking about the type of comic that I wanted to read, I came upon the idea of an insurance company in the relatively near future. But it's going to evolve beyond that, because, fuck it, I have a story universe where people live on Europa and Titan, and giant monsters are a real thing. So I'm going to play with the surreal and the supernatural, the pragmatic and the practical, and I want to put it together to highlight the absurdity of life and the human condition.
Not sure if this will technically be a review of the album... But it's the one album that I've been listening to a lot lately. I only had a mild fascination with Pierce the Veil when they first came out. After I'm done ranting about music today, I'll talk a little bit about MTK Ultra tomorrow, which is a web comic I'm working on and developing.
#life #personal #updates #esoteric #arcane #holidays #eggnog #xmen #comics #comicbooks
