Spectacular.

The "A Bit Of Grass-Stain Does Not A Ruined Pair Of Jeans Make" tour is the best name for a tour ever.  Thank you, The Decemberists, for once again proving you are awesome.

Low Key Lyesmith

I recently got two new (to me) Decemberists albums: Her Majesty and The Hazards of Love.  I've been listening to the latter quite a bit the past few days, and it's quite lovely.  They have such a wonderful, beautiful sound.  Shara Worden, who makes an appearance on some of the songs, has this beautiful, rich, luxurious voice.  At first I thought, somehow, that Fiona Apple was singing on some of the tracks, as she has sort of a similar, smoky sound.  Gorgeous.  I'm currently getting into Her Majesty at the moment - I've only heard a few tracks.  It's clearly an album by a less experienced band; simpler and lighter.  So far so good, though.

Today Jason and I went to a Magic prerelease out at the Knights of Columbus hall in Charlestown.  We didn't actually register for any flights - we just got there wicked early and perused the cheap rares that one of the vendors was hocking.  That's all we really go to these things for, it seems: cards for casual.  Neither of us are tournament players - we just don't care.  I ended up picking up approximately 100 cards on the cheap.  Rockin'.

After that, we went back to his place, bummed around, watched a few movies, played cards, and had calzones delivered from Thyago's pizza in Belmont.  This, I think, is a suitably relaxing Saturday.  Now I just need to plan something for us to do at our Ars game tomorrow.  I seem to be in charge of providing something for that the next few weeks.  I think Loki will make an appearance.

Characters, characters, mulling, and (un)mulled wine.

There were several events of note today:

One, I went to Characters in Kendall Square for the first time.  Daniel, Erik, and Tim were in attendance.  It seems like a nice enough place - very after-work-drinks oriented, it seems.  They have free popcorn.  That I can get behind.  I was sorta feeling crappy because of a headache, so I didn't really have a drink or anything, but it was good to see Tim again.  We all stood around and shot ye olde shit for a while.  Good times.

After leaving Characters, not really feeling up to going to the gym, I headed over to Dado in Harvard Square instead.  I sent Julia a text to see if she wanted to join me after her trip to the gym - turns out she was on her way to Harvard Square anyway to see a store about some textbooks.  So we hung out, had green tea (Dragon Well!), a bit of a scone, and I had (prior to her arrival) a delicious sesame bagel sandwich with roasted red pepper hummus, swiss, greens, tomato, cucumber, and red onion.  Awesome.

When Dado closed at 8:00 PM, I walked her home rather than take the T, then walked myself up through the zig-zagging neighborhoods of West Cambridge back home.  By the time I got there, both my feet and hands were thoroughly cold.  What a freezing night!  My lovely Weather.com iPhone app tells me that it's currently... 12 degrees!  Holy crap!  Less than I expected!

Crazy.

As is evidenced by my last post, I've spent the rest of my evening mulling over some writing in one form or another.  I'm also mulling over some wine, which is, however, not mulled itself.  It's a bottle of 2006 Merlot from Ali, which she gifted me for Christmas.  Thanks, Ali!  It's delicious, and as one might expect, it's making me an excellently introspective, happy, slightly-more-articulate lush for the evening.

Woo!

Time Capsules

I have been writing about the same set of characters since I was approximately thirteen years old.  From the age when I first started reading fantasy novels and playing role playing games, I've been enthralled by the idea of detailed, deep imaginary worlds.

It is the case, unfortunately, that in recent years, I seem to have fallen off the literary wagon (if such scribblings could be considered literature), in that these people inhabiting my head have received little of my attention.

As has been noted here, I recently picked up a story that I started a number of years ago.  Perhaps 2004 or so, I can't be sure.  I don't have records of when I started it.  It might be as early as 2002, in some form or another.  Maybe I could find out when I started it if I dug through my old LiveJournal - that's a possibility.

But anyway, I picked this story up again.  It's approximately thirty to forty pages at the moment.  It currently involves, either through direct exposure in writing or implication of plot, around six or seven of these people.

Occasionally I re-read some other, unrelated snippet of story that I found on my hard drive and realize that it fits in this story somewhere.  I just did.

I was just reading through a several page description of some woman - when I started reading I didn't know who it was - sitting in a bar with her feet propped up on the table, writing out a list of pseudo-Latin sounding names: Bellarus, Pandema, Iuridicus, Rheis, Hoares.  She leaves the bar and wanders down the street to an acquaintance's, walks in past his servant, and finds him in his sitting room, entertaining some other woman.

That's all there is to it.  But until I got to the last two sentences describing the second woman, I didn't realize that they are two of the my central characters.  I didn't know who the first was until I found her in the company of the second.

Little things like that make me smile.  I wrote this years ago, and it somehow just fits, and makes me think. Why was she writing out names?  I know what one of those names means, but I hadn't considered the others in the context of my current story.  It's wonderful!  It's like I've written notes to myself, put them in a time capsule, and I'm only now piecing them all together into a coherent letter.

Muppets Scat Singing

I was listening to Neutral Milk Hotel on the way home from my lesson down in Brookline.  In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, in fact.  What an amazing album.  It was way ahead of its time, I think.  It'd fit right in if it had been recorded now, but it was over a decade ago (1998) that they put it together.  Crazy.

Anyway, I finally got some stuff working today at work, and it makes me very happy.  It's like this whole branding kit thing might actually come together.  It wasn't a matter of it being broken, but of just a long, long process of setting everything up so that it'd work.  Today I put the last major building blocks in, and it all just worked!  Glorious!  Now for all the miscellaneous finishing touches.  It got a cursory blessing from Mr. Marty earlier today - now if I can only get... probably... Misters Daniel and Doug to be okay with it, we should be in pretty good shape for now!

That was the vast majority of my day at work.

Following work, I came home and practiced for about an hour and a half before heading out to my lesson.  Sooner or later, I will be able to play this damn song from beginning to end!  Chords, melody, comping,  I don't care!  I want it all!  Mine!

So woohah.  I had a scone and half a sandwich for lunch today.  They were both delicious and wonderful. I really am a Scone Monster, I think.  Kinda like Cookie Monster, but more red and (hopefully) with less googly eyes.

Storytelling

I'm becoming increasingly interested in the idea of storytelling.  I think it's perhaps the most important facet of human society and culture.  The desire to tell and participate in stories is, fundamentally, in almost everything we do.  Why do we take vacations?  Why do we try to become rich and famous?  Why do we try to find mates and have children?  Why do we play games?  Why are we social?  Why do we have art?  What does all this amount to, in the end?  What is the legacy of our existence?

The only meaning we, as humans, are capable of producing beyond spiritual understanding and inner peace (i.e., in a secular sense) is caught up in our ability to amount to something.  A wasted life is one whose story is not worth telling.

So we try to succeed, prosper, be funny, entertain our friends and invent things.  We try to raise our children well so that they'll look back fondly on our guidance.  There aren't many of us who have a legacy in the collective memory of large portions of society itself, but we can at least create positive, lasting experiences in the minds of those we do know.

I listened to an interesting talk on TED the other day regarding the differences between Indian culture and Western culture.  What I'm currently talking about, this need to carve out some sort of legacy, is not to be confused with the Western preoccupation with what I'll call monoincarnation.  This belief structure (again, predominantly Western) is caught up in the belief that our time on Earth is brief, abutted on both ends by either, a) nothing, or b) eternity spent in some sort of spiritual condominium in the sky (or, alternately, deep underground with poor air conditioning).  During this time, we better do a lot of good, and we better do it fast so we can afford, spiritually, a really sweet condo with a killer view of the cloudscape.

I will not presume to claim intimate knowledge of beliefs with which I am not particularly familiar, but the above stands in stark contrast to a world view in which our time on Earth is one of many, and the process of attaining said rockin' pad involves managing one's finances over a series of lifetimes, accruing enlightenment and over the course of a myriad of mortal existences.  In this sort of model, there is certainly pressure to do good, but not necessarily to accomplish all of your good right here right now.  You have a thousand lifetimes, and what you don't do now can be done in your next reincarnation, so enjoy your time, be good, and we'll see you the next time around.

Neither of these two spiritual models are what I'm talking about.

Again, I'm talking about something more secular; the desire to leave society itself in a better, more enlightened state than you left it.  To create something in it worth remembering and perpetuating by those you leave behind.  This has nothing to do with my own salvation, but, rather, with increasing the knowledge and depth of the collective memory of those of us still chilling on the mortal plane.

So, all that said, I like stories.  I find myself, lately, very enthralled with the notion of finding ways to allow humans to tell stories to each other in new and interesting ways.

I think there is potential in crowd sourced, moderated content and ideas.  Evolution takes place through a series of mutations taking place in a controlled, otherwise stable environment.  Evolution, generally, tends towards advancement (at least I can't think of cases of evolution blatantly creating something less prepared to deal with the constraints under which it has been placed).  Sometimes genetic algorithms can produce answers to problems that are otherwise difficult to solve via traditional means.

Collaborative storytelling and world building led by a benevolent, despotic, principle author.  This happens with teams developing video games and movies already, though that is company-sourced content and ideas, rather than crowd-sourced.

I'd like to see it - either of the two - done with novels.

Vegetable stock photos were not used in the making of this ph(o|ilm)

So I went with Misters Daniel, Erik, Jason Mc and Jason K to "Living in a CG World" today at the Museum of Science.  We saw a presentation by Mr. Terrence Masson, a gentleman with an impressive resume in the world of computer graphics for film and games.  It was a good talk!  Lots of interesting tidbits.  Unfortunately, I think he had too many good things to say, and had to leave out a lot in order to stay within the time he had available.

Following the talk, we all walked to Charles MGH (except for Daniel, who biked) and took the T up to Harvard, where we had a lovely dinner at Le's.  Everyone attempted to get some variation on a theme of pho (noodle soup, for the uninitiated).  Unfortunately for me, they were out of vegetable stock.

I ended up with curry tofu.  Booyah!  Now I can use that label again.  It was, as always, delicious.

On the way over, Jason K and I were talking about storytelling as it relates to technology.

That, I think, will need to be in its own post.

Oh, yeah, and work was fine today.