Digital Alterity

I finally finished reading Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows this morning. I actually called in a bit late to work to finish it up. In the end, what can I say about the book? I enjoyed it. I thought that the whole series was remarkably consistent. There were no low points, no patchy spots. The writing captured me, and I cared about all the characters.

I actually read the last chapter, the epilogue, last week when it leaked. I’m not the type that cares shield myself from spoilers. I like knowing where the story is going because it helps me to widen my focus as I’m reading through the book. If I don’t know where I’m going, I can focus only on absorbing plot points at breakneck speed. Knowing in the end who was going to live and what their resolution would be helped me pull myself back from the work emotionally just enough that I could truly enjoy the work.

I’m an absurdly emotional person. I always have been. My rather extreme introversion tends to keep this safely hidden away from the general public, but I’m driven almost exclusively by abstract emotions and concepts. I have had a favorite character all throughout the series, and I was content to get through the work with critical distance safely in place knowing that he had turned out alright—or at least alright as far as I was concerned.

Now it’s Allyson’s turn to read through the book. Hopefully, she’ll enjoy it as much as I did.

Technorati Tags: Harry Potter, Deathly Hallows

Some of you may have noticed that the Bactroid.net Sorting Hat was out of commission since the conversion to WordPress. I have corrected the problem and returned the Sorting Hat to its former glory.

I was interested to find out that the Sorting Hat Quiz has been taken by over 5000 folks. The geek in me is really tempted to start doing some statistical analysis on the data to see how everyone is testing.

Technorati Tags: Harry Potter, Sorting Hat, Quiz

Way back when I started working through Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, I did a self-portrait as part of the initial course exercises. As instructed, I put it away until now. Here’s what I came up with back then:

Not very good, but still way better than some of the initial example sketches from first-time students as indicated in the book.

Today, at lunch, however, I just finished this self-portrait:

Now I see clear problems in this sketch even still. As an aspiring comic book artist and writer, this desire to keep improving is a Really Good Thing™. Nonetheless, I have to stop for a moment each time I look at today’s sketch to acknowledge just how far I’ve come in a really short amount of time actually working on the course material. Heck, in the past month since I’ve acknowledged my desire to make my own comic books, I’ve made a mind-blowing amount of progress.

The keys as I’ve learned them boil down to these simple guidelines:

• Draw something every day. Don’t make excuses. Even if you just scribble on a piece of paper for ten minutes, you can produce something.
• Allow yourself to acknowledge the success of failure. The mere fact that you can identify failure means that you can see places where you can improve. The key to getting better is to give yourself permission to suck.
• When in doubt, measure the damn thing. Don’t trust what you know because you’ll only screw up the whole perspective of your drawing with one wrong but seemingly logical decision. Learn to sight objects with your pencil instead of just guessing when you’re unsure.
• It’s okay to leave your drawing and come back to it. There’s no rule that says that you have to finish a drawing in one sitting. Getting away for a while gives you a new set of eyes to see details that you would have otherwise missed.
• It’s easy to assume that there are lines when the reality is that there is only degrees of shadow. Contrasting areas of light and dark form boundaries just as surely as edges.

I’m not Steve McNiven or Jack Kirby yet, but I’m happy with the change in my ability. Here’s hoping I can sustain this rate of improvement until DC and Marvel are knocking on my door.

Technorati Tags: Art, Books, Drawing

I’ve been thinking about The Lord of the Rings a fair bit lately. This is probably due in part to playing Battle for Middle Earth II at Jason’s house and then buying my own copy along with a fresh new Xbox 360 the very next weekend. My pondering, though, hasn’t been tactical or adventurous in nature. No, I’ve been pondering the climax of the series at Mount Doom.

Frodo, in the end, is unable to save Middle Earth of his own accord. In the final confrontation between good and evil, he is powerless to act. But his prior good works, his right actions, create the conditions in which salvation can occur. No character in the book saves Middle Earth. Rather, it is saved in the passive voice—by the invisible hand of Providence, the ghost of an empty antecedent.

Technorati Tags: Salvation, Lord of the Rings

Isa from the Post Punk Kitchen never seems to let me down. Every recipe or even basic idea for a recipe that I have taken from her and shamelessly used and/or abused has been nothing short of extraordinary. Quite frankly her book, Vegan with a Vengeance, is the first book I look to when I need ideas of what to cook when I’m not feeling particularly creative.

What makes her book different? Isa writes for people who are already vegan. I admit that when I first became vegan I found all the general advice and descriptions of veganism inevitably in the introduction for a vegan cookbook to be helpful and informative. After reading the same information a dozen times, however, I’ve found that it’s much less helpful the more often I hear it. I already know how to substitute eggs. I’ve already bookmarked sites with that information on the Internet, and I already have a handful of books on my shelf explaining my options. There’s officially no need for this in new cookbooks.

Isa strikes just the right balance between being informative and being entertaining. Any cookbook can just list recipes. Make me care about your book by making it unique. Isa allows her voice to come through in the interstitial blurbs and recipe introductions. It made me read the book in the first place, and it encouraged me to actually try the recipes (something I almost never do verbatim).

If you’re a vegan, you need this book. If you know a vegan and you want to cook something that he’ll love, you can’t go wrong with any recipe in the book. I can’t fathom a reason why this book isn’t on everyone’s shelf.

Technorati Tags: Food, Cooking, Vegetarian, Vegan, Post Punk Kitchen

Think your children aren’t reading some heavy stuff in the books they check out from the elementary school library? I’m re-reading Sideways Stories from Wayside School, a favorite from my childhood, and I came across this gem:

You need a reason to be sad. You don’t need a reason to be happy.

This statement is spoken by DJ who has spent half the day smiling so brilliantly that he’s making others smile without saying a word in reply. Everyone has spent the whole day trying to guess why he’s smiling before he lays this rather profound statement on Louis, the PE teacher.

The whole chapter has echoes of the Buddha’s flower sermon wherein he walked to the front of a crowd he was to speak to and just head up a flower and smiled. The dharma was there in the Buddha’s smile, and it was likewise there in DJ’s. The only thing missing from the story is Mahakashyapa’s understanding smile in return.

Technorati Tags: Zen, Buddhism, Louis Sachar, Sideways Stories from Wayside School

I must admit some measure of resistance in my heart about this week’s directives in The Artist’s Way. You see, I’m not allowed to read anything. I’ve followed this to a ridiculous degree since I read it on Friday morning in the middle of Panera, but I have what I perceive to be a very real dilemma. Thierry Henry sounded like he was ready to put his signature on the dotted line after an entire season of hemming and hawing. Rumours were flying yesterday that he was going to sign a new contract on Friday…and I can’t find out anything about it. If I lived in England, I would just strike up a conversation with my mates. Here? I have no way of knowing really. I desperately want Allyson to just research it and tell me. Or just a quick Google News search for his name. Thierry Henry. And there would be dozens of articles describing to me everything I need to know just in the effing headline.

What horseshit. Doesn’t this woman understand how important football is? Doesn’t she understand how critical to Arsenal’s hopes next year Thierry Henry is? Doesn’t she know how critically important it is that someone other than Chelsea should win the league next year?

Thank God I didn’t do this chapter during the season proper. I think I would have exploded in a puff of dammit.

Do you know how foreign it is to not read something while eating? Or taking a dump? My whole life is structured around reading. I have been voraciously reading since I was two. Even when I was too poor to eat properly, I still bought a book or two nearly every paycheck. This is some sort of Orwellian nightmare, I tell you. I’m in Farenheit 451. Welcome to my personal distopia. Welcome to Hell.

Technorati Tags: Football, Soccer, Arsenal, TH14, The Artist’s Way

While reading through the introduction to The Artist’s Way, I read Julia Cameron’s notion that creativity in our spark that connects us with a creative God, and I was immediately reminded of my numerous assertions that being created in God’s own image meant being born with the urge to create. Discovering that someone had already thought of something I thought of independently used to bother me a great deal. After all, if someone had already discovered and written about what I had just spent my time considering, wasn’t I just wasting my time?

I’ve discovered however that there is a joy that comes from the realization that you’ve connected to someone you’ve never met just by sharing a thought independently of each other. When someone else has thought of something similar to something you thought of, it’s rather like peer review confirmation in the realm of science and academia. It lends credence that you have discovered a universal truth.

Truth is truth. When we truly perceive a truth with truthful eyes, it looks the same no matter who is looking at it. Truth is decidedly non-verbal. The creative process is the path of trying to describe the nature of that truth through the use of images that help bridge our current mental state back to the truth in question. While we may choose different words, we must point back to the same truth in the end. Each explanation might make the connection to the truth more transparent for a different set of people. Though I might be describing the same truths of reality that Christ and Buddha taught in their respective regions, my words might reach out to a different set of people, facilitating a connection that we might otherwise not have made. This is why the creative process and art are so important. Through our art, we leave our ego in favor of the transcendent realm of the divine.

Technorati Tags: Art, The Artist’s Way, Creativity, God, Divine

While thumbing through The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron, I came across this excellent bit of advice in the Introduction:

In choosing which half of the tasks to do, use two guidelines. Pick those that appeal to you and those you strongly resist. Leave the more neutral ones for later. Just remember, in choosing, that we often resist what we most need.

This actually isn’t a bad guideline for life. We should be taking on tasks that excite us—whether positively or negatively. Life is too short to waste time on neutral tasks. We should do the tasks we love because they nurture our creativity, and we should do the tasks we hate because we often only think we hate them as some perverse form of self defense that only holds us back from the person we truly dream of being.

This guideline could also be applied to GTD next action lists to great effect. When trying to decide which next actions to do off of your list in a certain context, ask yourself which actions excite you and gravitate toward them first. Listen to your internal still small voice as you move through these next actions and use what you learn in order to take on more projects that will excite you. Learning what type of projects excite you is the gateway to discovering your purpose or mission in life, which just an overly inflated way of referring to the person you truly want to be.

Technorati Tags: GTD, Lifehacks, The Artist’s Way, Choosing Projects

I tried to read them. I really did. I would say that reading the first four books of a twelve-book series seriously counts as giving the authors a chance to get somewhere. I’ve decided that Soul Harvest will be the last book in the Left Behind series that I choose to read. Why?

• The authors’ collective obsession with telecommunications. Nearly every time something happens, the reader is subjected to pages and pages describing all of the main characters’ attempts to call relatives and friends—usually to make travel arrangements.

• Cardboard cutout characters. I really tried to give LaHaye and Jenkins some slack on this one because I know that they’re in essence writing a novel in the tradition of a medieval morality play. Characters are really vehicles for a larger religious exposition. Nonetheless, I can only take so many global tragedies wherein the main characters make a pretense of grieving in the aftermath for a few pages before returning to pragmatic travel arrangements. Why isn’t anyone in the novels ever hysterical or inconsolable? Why doesn’t anyone ever go a little crazy with grief? The characters are inhuman in a particularly creepy way.

• Christian characters behaving in a most unchristian manner. The main characters routinely lie and deceive out of an attempt to protect themselves and their loved ones. Absolutely no one in the first four books took the same path as the Jesus they purport to emulate. No one is helping the sick and the dying (unless they’re related). Precious few of the characters in the novel are even openly Christian. Believers, in LaHaye and Jenkins distopia, only help other believers when crisis hits.

• Lack of technology research. Regarding web-based bulletin boards: “[N]o one knew when technology would be advanced enough to trace such messages.” Wait, wait, wait…I can. If Nicolae “Antichrist” Carpathia has such a stranglehold on the entire world, he almost certainly has tracking software installed at all the ISPs. From there, it would just be a matter of seeing who was connecting to the verboten IP addresses. Now, please don’t misunderstand. I don’t expect the authors to be experts in this field. My expectation can be summed up simply in this statement: Don’t write about things you don’t know about. If you don’t know how the Internet works, don’t go to great pains to write about its inner workings in detail. Your prose will be much more believable when the details are left to imagination.

• Telling rather than showing. Occasionally something very exciting will happen within the plot of the books. Unfortunately, more often than not, the reader isn’t there at the time that it happens. The reader doesn’t get a firsthand description of watching someone vanish right in front of the main characters as they’re talking. Difficult landings get glossed over. Treacherous hikes are summed up ex post facto in a matter of a few sentences. Don’t tell me how difficult something was; show me the difficulties through the actions and words of your characters.

Basically, I don’t think that the books are written very well, and life is simply too short and precious to waste my time with substandard writing.

Technorati Tags: Christianity, Books, Left Behind