Some Words

I saw today’s Three Panel Soul (Titled “On Monster Manuals,” I couldn’t quickly find a permanent link) and got nostalgic for a hobby that I simultaneously must stay the hell away from. No time right now, but it does remind me pleasantly of my wasted, and maybe not as wayward as it could have been, youth.

It was with some sense of pride that I got to see Franken win. It wasn’t that I loved Franken as a candidate, I wanted one of his primary opponents to win, but he was there to unseat Coleman and he did it. Last week there was a nice little article on Minnesota politics that managed to not be condescending, much to my surprise, given that this was the NY Times.

A while ago I changed my email notification settings with the New York Times. One of the things I signed up for, after having dropped several of their digest notices of articles, was breaking news. Now, I expected this would be the really big stuff and I’d get one ever few days, tops. Instead I get them all the damn time, usually about celebrity deaths. Okay… well then, at least I heard it first? No. In yet another sign of the decay of the newspaper industry. I usually get the notice about 8-12 hours after I saw it everywhere else, including the NYTimes front page.

The NYTimes today has an article about an aspiring lawyer who amassed over four hundred thousand dollars of debt. The New York state bar denied him admission based, essentially, on the size of his debt. The story is itself sad, as reading it entails playing witness to a man who did what might not have been sensible, but was definitely determined and inspiring, in pursuit of his dream.

But it is my continuing obsession with comment threads that causes me to write. This article already has over three hundred comments on it. Now many of them are about the absurdity of his being denied, in light of the other transgressions that practicing members of the New York bar have gotten away with. Well, that seems like a pretty good point. But there are two other dominant types, the first being of the “this proves lawyers and judges are evil” variety, all too common I’m afraid. Lawyers and cops always get judged by their worst members, and both professions have a spotty record for policing their own.

The other group attack the student loan program and the cost of education. Now, I’ll be the first to say that the cost of education has gotten too high. We’re in a situation where other countries have arguably better secondary education, and the one real advantage the American educational system had was its colleges. Now we’re putting those out of reach, and the ones that remain in reach are often places where you have to get a good education in spite of those around you. I’m not saying a good education is impossible at a lower tier state school, but it’s going to be a hell of a lot harder to get it.

So people take out loans to afford it, and then many have trouble paying it back, because you have to take out the same damn loans whether you major in accounting or social work. We do want social workers, right? We don’t all want to live in some warped Ayn Rand nuthouse, do we? So we need the loans, and we should really consider how much we charge the people who will be working lower paying jobs that we really need done. (Also, anyone reading this who’s going to be doing social work or other public interest work, there is a public service loan repayment program. Check it out.) But who in the hell are these posters talking about when they refer to lawyers getting quarter million dollar loans and then expecting to pay them back? Are these K-J.D. people? Because I have no idea how it would get up that high. If this is a mix of Stafford and Plus loans, you’re looking at around 7.5% interest averaged out over all of them. That’s going to be just under $20,000 a year to hold even. Sure, you can pay it pre-tax, but it’s still a big pill to swallow.

I’m going to save some more rant for later though. First off, I want to talk a bit about undergrad. Second, for some reason every time I’ve tried to save this draft the past three times I’ve written it, I got cut off at 440 words.

Edit: And it turns out to be the connection on campus.

Aside from liking the graphics in this video, I’m a sucker for that old Super Nintendo era side scroller look, I’m testing out my ability to post. I’ve been getting connection loses for posts over 359 words, now I’m checking to see if under fifty will cause a problem.

Edit: It’s always the littlest spelling errors that make you look the dumbest.

For a day now I’ve been singing bits of this song everywhere I go.

I’m not even sure I like it. There isn’t much of a payoff for me. I’ve always had a weird feeling with Animal Collective. I like bits of their songs, but sometimes they drag a little too much for me. Also sometimes they carry nonsense lyrics to a point I had not even considered possible. I can’t decide if I like that or not either. This song actually makes sense all the way through, but when he sings “I just want: four walls and adobe slabs, for my girls,” I crack up.

Edit: Also, I cannot help thinking of H.P. Lovecraft while watching this video.

I discovered today that Quicksilver, a program I had once dismissed but have now become addicted to, was in continued development. I had been using an old version for a long time, and it crashed a fair amount these days. Updating did not work at all, and after reinstalling, there were all manner of problems. I’ve gotten it back to where I want it, more or less. The problem is that the visual interface I had for it, BezelHUD, no longer works on this version. The program doesn’t crash, it just doesn’t open either. It’s a sad statement about how ingrained some of my computer habits are, but I almost wish I hadn’t updated, because I lost that interface.

A while back this song came up on The Current and I couldn’t help nodding along. I’m a sucker for a certain kind of guitar lick, it’s true.

The future, now with violent centaurs.

Perhaps not a major motion picture. Perhaps more of a small documentary with interesting personalities. I had not realized, up until watching Helvetica, a documentary about the typeface of the same name, that there were people who viewed typeface as the forefront of modern culture war. They exist.

While I was in college several of my friends majored in graphic design. I would see them over the summer, while the grumbled about having to go to class to learn about typefaces. But slowly their hatred of the subject seemed to turn into something else, perhaps awe, it has been a long time, and I don’t want to speak for them.

And that is where my knowledge of typefaces ended, until recently. I had a preference for garamond, which I could not explain, but caused me to pick it for a very long time for all of my drafts of anything. Then I read a cutting comment about creative writing majors always using garamond, and I became leery of it, though I did not know where else to turn. My to do list on the computer was in futura for a long time, probably because I was watching a lot of Wes Anderson in the same period.

Beyond the pleasure of hearing people get way too passionate about fonts (one person claims [only half joking] that helvetica caused the Vietnam war), watching this documentary was very visually satisfying. There were all sorts of interesting uses of fonts, and the footage did a little work explicating the various styles at work by designers. I find I notice them more now, though not as much as the interviewees do. I also have a little better sense of why I like this or that font. I haven’t switched to helvetica though. After watching the film, I almost feel that it is a dangerous tool, fit only for the hands of those capable of using it properly.

But I still don’t know what font I want to see when I’m typing something out.

I don’t watch a ton of sports, nor do I tend to read much about it, the exception being hockey. I’ll read some NBA stuff from time to time, and I’ll check to make sure the Lions still suck, but hockey is what I follow. Last night was a very relaxing game for me, and while I was watching it, I found myself thinking about how people talk about stars in sports. In this aspect, hockey is one of the worst. The slow degeneration of the language caused by hockey announcers on national television is amazingly depressing.

First off, I am sorry Chicago, it’s great that you’re a reemerging marking in hockey. I’m glad the Blackhawks are good again, but you do not have two super stars right now, you don’t even have one. You have a very good team, and one that I look forward to watching many times in the future, but the announcers were wrong when they said that you had two super stars. Kane and Toews might get there one day, but they aren’t there yet. This over glorification of the athletes who are merely, and I don’t want that word to be too prejudicial, are stars, is ridiculous. This happens in other sports, but perhaps because hockey is trying to mount a comeback on the U.S. sporting scene, it is much worse with the hockey announcers.

Not every team can have two superstars. The very nature of a super star is that they stand out from the other stars. They aren’t just stars, they stand out from the rest of the stars. It’s ridiculous that I have to say this. I’m not sure I’d say Detroit has a single superstar, and they are likely to win back to back cups.

This shouldn’t surprise me though. Every time you draw a linguistic Maginot Line, the sports announcers are just going to run through the Ardennes of human speech in their quest to render the English language comical through superlatives. Do you really need to say that an athlete “owns” a hard shot? Basketball was bad on that one for a while too. I understand that the job of sports reporting is a constant struggle against repeating your cliches too quickly, but it has to be better than that. Also, ESPN should hire some more editorial assistants to check the writing. It’s amazing how many mistakes get through. You know there are plenty of people available with the way that the publishing industry is these days.

This has been another “Get Off My Lawn Moment” with Ian Macleod.

Call me old fashioned, but large portions of the Google Wave presentation left me thinking that I could have done that ten years ago. Not all of it mind you, but there was a protocol on boxes back in the day, oh wait, you can still get to it on the command line in Os X. It’s called ‘talk.’

There was some new stuff in there, and the technology used to gussy it all up is no doubt processor intensive and very impressively implemented. But at some point we are going to have to declare chat ‘the wheel.’ You can no longer reinvent it. It’s been simultaneous for a while, and making sure I don’t have to wait while the other person types really doesn’t do much for me. Yes yes, I can share pictures faster now. At some point I want a killer app, not this. I’m not sure that getting used to this new system even nets me time long haul. My mother used to always get frustrated that every two years there was a new search and indexing system at the university library she worked for. At some point, learning the new system actually doesn’t save you time. It’s why people drop out of the inevitable rush of technology. But killer apps draw you in. You can’t avoid them.

Twitter does nothing for me. It is the condensed definition of worthless communication. If you can express it in 144, it’s probably trite. Maybe I just don’t like my friends enough to really see how banal their lives are, but that is another post. This is Wave, and Wave is better than that, but it still, after an hour of watching people talk about how it’s going to change the world, feels like exactly what I’m doing now, with a different interface. Maybe it’s all one interface, but it’s not what I need right now. Call me back when it does something new.

Since last paying significant attention to this blog, I had forgotten how much blog spam accumulates in the filters. I just scan them to see if there is anything that looks like it isn’t a blog of crap. However, even shorter comments get tossed if the email address looks odd. On the off chance that I’ve actually thrown out a good comment: “I’m sorry whoever you were.”