The Default State Is Broken

I used to joke, as recently as last month, that I knew I needed to be healthier but the choice of getting that way involved a lifestyle change to which I was not prepared to commit. I think, though, that the last trip to the ER where I was *content redacted* from my *content redacted* sealed the deal. I can't continue to live my life as if I were 25 and assume that my body will always recover from anything I put it through. I have real, chronic health problems that continue to affect my day-to-day situation, that have real, deleterious effects on my ability to function as a person. Note that it's not like I have anything serious like Crohn's Disease or Lupus or anything that many, many others that I know suffer through every day. In my case these are low-level, annoying-but-not-ultimately-fatal things like Kidneystones and Intermittent Benign Positional Vertigo and a bad back and weak knees. These are all things that with a proper diet, a good workout structure, and c...

Someone decided to hijack my jeromecomeau.com domain. Which is a pain in the ass. So, I went in, blew away all of the content, dropped a new redirect to here, changed the password to something significantly harder to crack, and hopefully that will prevent this from happening again in the future, at least for a little while. In the meantime, I expect my traffic to this blog won't, in fact, increase significantly...

So, last night I went to see Jonathan Coulton fronting a new band, playing new music, and with a new opening act. It was... disappointing. First, the good: -- Mark Phirman, the opening act and 1/2 of Hard and Phirm, a.k.a "The West-Coast Paul and Storm", was excellent. His standup was funny, if rather scattershot (it's clear that he's an "alternative" comedian, that is that his idea of comedy is to stand and tell a bunch of jokes, as opposed to Louie CK or Janeane Garofalo who have jokes throughout a themed set with a throughline tying everything together), and his music is quite good if a little gimmicky. It's clear that he has much talent in both comedy and music, and I'd love to see him in longer form. In fact, I'm probably going to get tickets to "Nerds and Music" so I can see him again, this time with Paul and Storm. -- The New Music was pretty good. There are some issues with it, which I'll cover in a later point, but on ...

"There are no events but thoughts and the heart’s turning, the heart’s slow learning where to love and whom. The rest is merely gossip, and tales for other times."-Annie Dillard The single greatest distance I have ever been from someone was the length of a loveseat. In theory, the farthest you can be from another human being is about thirteen thousand miles, give or take; if one accepts that the circumference of the Earth is roughly twenty-six thousand miles, then you can only ever be opposite them. In truth, in the sixties, it was possible to be upwards of three hundred thousand miles from another person, for a very brief period of time; the moonshots were a pinnacle of just how far you had to go to get distance and perspective. But nowadays, I’m closer to the folks in the International Space Station, orbiting at two hundred forty miles up and circling the Earth every hour or so, than I am to most of my friends (if you take the average of the distance from me, over time). Bu...

It's been a rough couple of days. The toilet broke, requiring a plumber and a gigantic hole in my bank account (and the bathroom floor). Then I had a medical problem that sent me to the Emergency Department at 9:30 on a Friday, and I was there until 3AM on Saturday. Then today the game I was going to play in was cancelled, and then the power went out for my block, and then the Internet was out until 10PM. So I spent most of the day either hunched over in pain, reading, or staring at the flickering of candles in the dark. And because I wasn't feeling well, I wasn't really at liberty to get out of the house and drown my sorrows in profligate behaviours. It's strange what runs through my head sometimes when I'm not paying attention. I thought, for the first time in a long time, about Sarah. I'm not really sure I've ever gotten over my first real honest to goodness love. She was brilliant and beautiful and funny and honest and I could never figure out w...

There are a number of places that I just can't seem to stay away from. Most of them are online, and one of them in particular is where I actually met a ton of people whom I later became friends with in real life. The thing is, places, especially online-places, are volatile. They change with time, and the makeup of the community itself changes, sometimes in ways that aren't always agreeable to, well, me. But the power of nostalgia, the impulse to believe with a little bit of effort the places that I remember will become those places again, is like gravity for emotions. It can be enormously powerful, despite the very real truth that the place that you remember will never, in fact, exist again. And so, if you're me, you get incredibly frustrated by the fact that, as an old and cranky bastard, the new population of these places I used to remember are now different, and I don't really want them to be different, but they are. So it's time to try and take another bre...

Score one for DRM making me a pirate. I had bought a blu-ray player for my new computer so I could watch hi-def movies on my entertainment-center projector. Apparently, despite paying extra for the hardware, I needed software to play the blurays. OK, fine, I said, and the person who helped me build the machine downloaded some software that would play the blurays. Then, tonight, I went to watch my copy of Inception, and it played for 4 minutes, at which point the software stopped working and insisted that the bluray disc wasn't valid, unless I ponied up $60 (59.95, 25% off for the new year!) to "upgrade" to the latest, licensed version of the software. So, not only did I have to pay extra for the hardware, and extra for the media, I now have to pay extra for the software. Pardon my language, but FUCK THAT SHIT. So, now I'm working on finding a less-expensive way to watch the movie (well, actually, the extra content) that I ALREADY BOUGHT. I've also uninstalled th...