March 6, 2024
What is one question you hate to be asked? Explain.
“Where are you from?”
I never understood why this question might rankle some people…until I moved to Japan.
I’ve been in Japan since 1999. “Where are you from?” was one of the first questions people asked me at the time, when I was teaching in junior and senior high schools.
No problem, I thought. I’m from Upstate.
“I’m from New York.”
Nods of understanding. “Ohhh, the Big Apple.”
Uh, no. Upstate.
“New York is a state?”
🤦♂️
February 25, 2024
If you could permanently ban a word from general usage, which one would it be? Why?
I would not ban any words from any language, ever. I am not a Language Nazi.
People should learn that words have power, words hurt, and words heal. People should learn when to say or write what to whom, when and where. Banning language does not prevent people from using language, and in fact simply adds to language power.
Only Nazis ban language. Think for yourself. Grow up!
February 23, 2024
A robotic spacecraft made history Thursday becoming the first privately built craft to touch down on the lunar surface, as well as the first American vehicle to accomplish the feat in more than 50 years.
https://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/moon-landing-odysseus-touches-down-lunar-surface-n1308924
Congratulations! 🎉
You now have one week before shutting down permanently.
Jeez. Really? That’s a very expensive week at $118,000,000. Glad the taxpayers approve (?)
February 22, 2024
What bores you?
What doesn’t?
OK, I guess I’ll play along…
February 21, 2024
Coffee. Hot and keep it coming.
February 13, 2024
“I’ll take ‘Barely Surviving’ for $100, Alec.”
February 1, 2024
My father got a Commodore 64 (“C64”) in the early ’80s and I learned how to type on it. Not sure exactly when, but at some point in probably 1986 or 1987 I had saved up enough to get one of my own.
Green monitor. No color. The only computer wherein the disc drive would argue with the CPU (bc the disc drive also had a CPU of sorts). 5 1/4″ floppies. Constantly switching discs in and out to load programs.
I created music (a maximum of four different sounds at a time). Learned BASIC and “machine language” and created very simple programs by copying endless pages of code from a magazine my father subscribed to (he also joined Commodore Users Group, or CUG, and got software to teach us how to type, how to write prose, and how to create family newsletters, all of which led me to eventually run my college newspaper in the early ’90s).
I played endless hours of Bard’s Tale, “Summer/Winter/World Olympic Games” (so old that there isn’t even a Wikipedia page for this series), “Sid Meier’s Pirates!,” and Strat-o-Matic baseball games (I had played the 1983 season with my father on paper, then got the 1985 season and input all the data by hand into the C64 program).
Having used my mom’s (and grandfather’s) manual typewriter for junior high school essays, I found it much easier to use the C64 to typed all my high school essays, which were printed out on my dad’s dot-matrix printer with the connected paper sheets. (I had a lot of fun separating the sheets and tearing off the hole feed strips on either side of the papers.)
I later got a C128 in college before borrowing a friend’s Mac Plus to write my senior project (our version of an undergraduate thesis).
And of course wasted hours and hours on the first version of Civilization (any Civ fans out there?).
See, back then, people like me were endlessly mocked as “computer nerds” and “geeks.”
And now you all have a tiny handheld computer that you carry around and play with 24/7.
Welcome, fellow nerds! We took over the world! Hah!
September 23, 2023
[Note to self – it’s probably not a coincidence that so many of my better diary entries were written in August. I obviously have more time to think and write at that time of year!]
What strange turns my life has taken. Never would I have in a million years expected to be here, now, in this apartment, typing on an extended keyboard into a Japanese computer, in a Japanese city, listening to the same Cure tape I was listening to back in 1996. Has it actually been 8 years?
Ten years ago I was playing role playing games and drinking in Robbins lounge, getting ready to pack everything I owned into a moving van to move to Ann Arbor. A city I didn’t know, with no money for deposit or rent, or a job. Without a clue. Totally hopeless. Instead of exploring the city, I stayed in my bedroom and played games or typed. What was I thinking? I can’t even get in touch with the few people I met there. Even the ones I knew at ND are either gone back where they came from or no longer answer my emails.
I can still picture them all in my mind. I can still see the rooms I lived in, all the way back home. Even the freshman dorm room which no longer exists, since they tore the building down. How can that be?
It must be this which makes us human; the ability to take the visual and turn it into mental. The capacity to make emotional connections between the world outside and the world inside. The belief that there are two worlds. This makes us human, and at the same time it makes us separate. It is a false belief, that we are not of the outside. Yet there is no returning. Once we start, we can never stop. Even changing languages doesn’t help. We merely start over again from a new perspective, still outside the outside.
September 15, 2023
A story must be more than merely a story. It must be an examination, of the human heart, of the mind, of the spirit. Of experience and existence. A simple recapitulation of one’s personal past or the delusional suffering of a dysfunctional suburban American family have no merit. Overcoming the reality we believe we live in, debunking fiction and elevating the truth, that is worthwhile.
September 14, 2023
“Ad pulchritudinem tria requirunter:
integritas, consonantia, claritas”
“Three things are needed for beauty: wholeness, harmony, radiance.”
(as translated by “Stephen,” i.e., James Joyce.)
Or more simply integrity, consonance, clarity.
Note that the original is a bit longer, in St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica:
Ad pulchritudinem tria requiruntur: Primo quidem integritas sive perfectio: quae enim diminuta sunt, hoc ipso turpia sunt. Et debita proportio sive consonantia. Et iterum claritas.
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