Moments ago I took a few hot items out of the dryer (draping them around me, enjoying the crisp hot clean linens, mmm yes) and then restarted it with some dampish things left inside. Moments later it stopped. That was fast. I got up to check on it (procrastinating about work) and found the dryer door open, two socks neatly tumbled out onto the surface below. I guess that’s an automatic feature I never noticed, or I checked on it so absent-mindedly that I didn’t even remember it. The socks are warmish instead of hot now. Hmm.

Following a period of mindfulness and intention, lately I’ve been faffing about in a lot of social media apps that I half-shunned previously (namely foursquare, tumblr, facebook too in small amounts) and I’ve also changed my work email notifications back on.

I call this “The Scattering.” which is both a reference to the period of chaos and unrest in Frank Herbert’s Dune saga following Leto’s death, and to the sort of energy I’m feeling at the moment. There’s a number of ways I could look at this but essentially I got some pent up creativity that I wanted to release. Hmm!

Some of it got turned into undesired outcomes, such as checking out an old facebook app. Some of it was fruitful, using tumblr to collect things from various corners of the web. Some of it I’m still ambivalent about, like “playing” foursquare.

Time to hone it all back down to essentials though. It’s a bit messy using identi.ca/twitter, AND a tumblelog, AND a blog. Deciding what content falls into where is a bit hazy for me. I also share articles with Google Reader, which overlaps with the tumblelog but feedly seriously lacks with the distinguishing-by-type bit.

Or do I even need that at all?

Email notifications are sort of essential when I work at home, though now that my boss got me a cellphone I could probably safely turn it back off.

Hmm!

I have a bunch of these cheap movie tickets that I bought from a friend, so I am watching more movies in cinemas than usual, which is something I am growing to dread.

The most recent film I saw was Percy Jackson and the Olympians: the Lightning Thief, toted by many reviewers so far as a Harry Potter knock-off — both feature a teenager with hitherto-unknown special powers, both are awkwardly going through puberty, both are composed of many books, each of which describe one year of the protagonist’s growth.

The comparison pretty much breaks down here. Why? Because Percy Jackson… really doesn’t compare to the world created by J. K. Rowling.

Roger Ebert once described a poor movie by its “clangs” — when a film asks for one too many suspensions of disbelief due to shitty scripting or acting or sometimes, as in this case, when the plot holes gape so wide they threaten to swallow Poseidon’s fat mother whole:

• Why are all the demigods trained only in combat? No “Athena’s school of battle strategy”? What about Aphrodite’s partyin’ sorority girls — do they fight in steel-plated bikini? Why are sons of Hephaestus fighting instead of manning the smith? What about something along the lines of, oh, Percy naming the seven seas over which his father is dominion? Gee, all the power and might of the Greek gods have just been flattened to a single-dimensional group of teenagers with a single skill-set — how to play capture the flag while waving swords, sitting in leather armour.
• The armour and weaponry need a bit upgrading, methinks. Leather’s pretty crap unless it’s magically imbued. Magically imbued cloth armour would probably provide better resistance. And probably make them blend in a bit better with the rest of society.
• Okay, I get that the children of the gods are supposed to have superpowers related to their parent, and I’ll look aside the fact that nowhere in the old myths were there any suggestion of demigod heroes having any fancy powers like… spontaneous healing, or manipulation of water. I’ll suspend that. But why on earth do they have to like the stuff that their parents liked? How many of us like the stuff that our parents liked? Bellbottoms… no. Celine Dion… no. Affinity for the stuff, yes, but there was not a single character in Percy that deviated from that. It was all… mother’s Demeter? Ok grass sod roof. Dad’s Hermes? Ok thief. Mother’s Athena? Architect prodigy. Right.
• There is strong evidence supporting the theory that brains are not “hardwired” for languages. All the teenage demigods having “dyslexia” because they’re all “hardwired for ancient Greek” reeks of the author shoehorning something in without doing his homework.
• Where are the adult demigods? Why are all the important demigods annoying teenagers? Their existence was sort of alluded to, and they’re all off doing important things, but the world coming to an end and they’re sitting around doing fuck-all. Clang.
• What about new gods? Given the prolific pantheon created in the first couple hundred years of its inception, I doubt the gods have stopped shagging each other in their free time. I mean, they had this serious-sounding pact to not procreate and two of them still broke it within years. At this rate they must have created at least a dozen new full-fledged gods.
• What about demigods from other countries? Why not, you know, Greece, or is that too obvious? Why’s their stronghold in the fucking United States? Surely places under less scrutiny, such as, say China, are pretty sweet breeding ground for all sorts of wacky stuff. Here’s a brilliant chance for the author to show off any trace of worldliness that isn’t so typical of North American culture, and he did fuck-all with it.

As someone who’s tried to create worlds, I have boundless respect for Rowling’s nice, thoughtful fantastical world requiring really only a single suspension of disbelief: “normal folks lack some special likely-genetically-linked trait and would never see magic”. Most everything is built from that premise and it never really falls apart. Rowling’s no Frank Herbert, but her stuff’s pretty good. Her characters grew from the world. In contrast, the story of Percy Jackson can be told with their magical abilities substituted with, say, special gun abilities. The story would still, basically, work. Sometimes that’s the mark of an immature world, sometimes it’s shitty character development. In Percy’s case, it’s a bit of both.

Don’t get me wrong — I totally admire the effort that’s gone into writing the Percy series (here’s me, who’s never written anything longer than a 10-page short story), and I love me my Greek mythical stories so this was a great refresher. Modernifying Greek myths isn’t easy. But for the love of… Zeus, don’t compare it to Harry Potter. Harry’s actually a pretty decent piece of contemporary literature that dares to explore the darker sides of adolescence and humanity in general, not some fluffy bedtime stories that was ad libbed and then made into a movie.

The only reason I enjoyed it in the theatre was because there was no one telling me they were sure I would love it. Which brings me to the next object of my wrath: Avatar.

Just about everyone who’s seen the movie before me told me not only that it was amazing and awesome and groundbreaking but that I would certainly love it. Usually when this happens alarm bells go off in my head (unless it was a film made by Pixar), but I’m sure my prejudice was only part of the reason I came out seething with more hatred for James Cameron than ever.

Let’s get the good stuff out of the way. I liked the 3D effects. The planet Pandora looked pretty, ooh, ahh. My puny brain appreciates the greatness of the technology. Ok, let’s move on then…

• American army type people being the ugly bullies are a yawn. Tell me something new. And not real.
• The evolutionary biologist in me screams for an explanation as to why the whole world of Pandora turns into a Dance Dance Revolution gamepad at night. Yes it’s pretty. But why? What advantage does it serve itself, or Eywa? To be frank, this is a small clang that I could’ve ignored if only they didn’t try to stuff science into everything else. Neurons in plant matter? Connected to everything so organisms can potentially upload their memory and communicate to each other? Seriously neat stuff! But DDR? Clang.
• Eywa being the mother goddess thing was really cool up until it was revealed that she was real. Then it was only sort of cool, because that is awfully simplistic. Basically Eywa is what us hippies already believe in, except concretified on a different world and given a different name. That’s just fucking plagiarism.

The plot was pretty shallow, but that’s not the worst part. What I hate is the fact people love this shallow, unchallenging movie and call it “deep” and “revolutionary.” Disney is not revolutionary. James Cameron retold a story already retold by Walt DIsney, except he didn’t even have the balls to kill off the main guy at the end. Oh and the morons who want to kill themselves so they might reincarnate on Pandora? How about they open their fucking eyes and look at this beautiful world?

For bonus points, read Charlie Stross’ Star Trek-hatin’ explanation and you’ll see why I hold Frank Herbert and G. R. R. Martin and such high regard.

The day after we arrived at M’s mum’s house the tension was thicker than the sweetest oxygen. I left the room crying on Christmas morning. After that, I kept my head low and dared not speak unless spoken to.

The same thing happened last Christmas too, M’s mum confided later, and she was the one who left crying. She went shopping for hours afterward so she might heal. So this year’s impulse for a getaway, though sudden, made all the sense in the world.

Five of us crammed into M’s car and drove to the hot springs nearby — we are quite lucky to be near so many here — and we soaked for several hours in the sulphurous pools. It was good to float. (Well, I tended more to sink.) I love water. I suspect I would wilt and die if I could not live near a large body of water.

I could scratch off this item on the list but, to be frank, I was a little disappointed. The hot springs I grew up knowing about were not mere swimming pools filled with steamy hot water that smelt funny. In the manga I read as I was growing up the hot springs had stone steps and stone walls and was mostly a wild place, except for the little bathhouse that neatly blocks its entryway. There were no spas or restaurants that gouge you simply because there’s nothing else within reasonable driving distance.

So I’m amending this goal to be “visit a (more) natural hot spring” because damn, this kinda sucked.

My mum complained the other day that papa’s tropical fish hobby is very expensive. Grandma joking calls him a bai ga zai, (literally “the little son who wastes away the family fortune). I laughed at the time, but soon I was struck by an important revelation: my hobbies are not any cheaper.

One of my favourite past-times is checking out photographs of beautiful interior design. Design*sponge has a neat little section of “sneak-peeks” which are typically galleries showcasing the homes or workplaces of designers, and I have a whole section in my feedly dedicated to fancy houses.

Fancy houses and furniture doesn’t come cheaply, though. Especially pricey is the stuff I love: mid-century modern pieces made from wood, metal and leather. I bought this coffee table (from MCMF) just now for a whopping 300 Canadian Dollars and that’s considered “cheap”:

For comparison, consider that a good dining room set — table with six chairs — sets you back $10k.

Of course, I can get and have gotten IKEA furniture, which often has that similar minimalist Scandinavian feel. And I love IKEA. I really believe it has its place. Many (though, fewer and fewer over time now) of its pieces boast excellent modularity and can work with other IKEA or designer pieces, and is great for, say, a low-budget household with a bit of student debt. But if you’re after good quality (e.g. solid wood), the price point often goes way up, even in IKEA.

Some time ago I was trying to elaborate to a male friend what, in terms of fashion, I found attractive. At the start of the conversation, I stated that I didn’t like “mainstream fashion” because it is too “effortless.”

But, he interjected, it takes them hours to do it! We clarified that to mean “lack of creativity.” If I had hours to get ready every morning or a bottomless wallet, I could look just like them too. Another friend has a deathly fear of looking mainstream (though really, barring a lobotomy, she has nothing to fear) — because they all look the same. If I sound snobbish… well, I am.

I came to realise that I despise it because of the thoughtless embrace by a large subset of the population. And the fashion of the day isn’t all bad. The ladies on magazine covers tend to look pretty OK, if a little thin. And a roomful of mid century pieces thrown haphazardly together makes me feel the same way. So it’s not the look, but the lack of intent on those who thoughtlessly dress in this way. I call this zombie fashion.

I think I actually despise any action committed without thought, but I suppose purchasing decisions come up most often due to the nature of your purchases sticking around. The objects I acquire are a reflection of my values and ethical code. Whether I want to or not, and whether they know it or not, other people view me accordingly.

I’m not fashionable. But I do have my own style. It took me some effort to develop, and it’ll take me some more effort to describe it.

In robotics and computer animation, the term “uncanny valley” refers to the creepiness of a creature that is very life-like but not life-like-enough. When we see an object that very closely resembles a human-being, we become acutely aware of anomalies which signal to us that the object isn’t entirely human. Most of us can tell pretty quick if we’re looking at a human corpse, and soon thereafter we feel kinda weird looking at it.

When I first began looking at interior design photos to get ideas for myself, I was a bit concerned with my own ability to create these rooms. I mean, I knew my creations wouldn’t be as awesome, but I’m also aware that there is often an uncanny valley somewhere between being a noob and being awesome. I guess you can call it the trying-too-hard valley.

Over the holidays I’ve gotten tired of just looking at photos of furniture, though. I’m delving into the section of DIY “befores & afters”. One day, I tell myself, I’m going to totally remake something I’ll keep forever. It’ll have lots of character and my kids will fight over who gets to keep it when I die.

Looking at my purchases this way is a wholly new experience. Is this item fit to re-gift to the next generation? What, in my household, would my children or grandchildren covet?

The answer right now is “very few.” I’ve been wearing and buying zombie fashion and zombie furniture until very recently, so the transferable value of my belongings is fairly meagre. I can see my kids bickering over the Petrof piano or our awesome Yamaha receiver/amplifier, but my mum bought the piano and Matt picked the receiver, so I feel a little like I’m cheating.

I do predict that they will love the cookbooks M and I will write. Which leads to my next expensive hobby.

Unless he’s real animated about some conversation (such as tropical fishes), papa scoffs down his supper of rice and sung (communal plates of foodstuffs that go with rice) and is usually finished when the rest of us are just starting. Grandma says it’s a result of being sent to boarding school when he was a lad; a table of hungry teenagers pecking at limited amounts of rice and sung and they’re all gotta learn to eat real quick. Sometimes it seems he gets impatient with our snail’s pace and would start divvying up the rest of the sung, which makes mum’s blood boil a little and she would ask him why he ate up so quickly? We’re trying to enjoy our food here, and I would nod dutifully, suddenly becoming aware of the flavours of my current mouthful if I wasn’t already. Papa would kind of roll his eyes. Sometime he goes to watch some ballgame on TV for a bit. More often now he goes to feed his fish, since it’s usually about that time of day, and he would talk endlessly, lovingly about them. Or sometimes he criticises with surprising detail the supper he just scoffed down.

I guess foodism has been in my genes like that. M being a great cook helps a lot too.

As an aside: fellas, there are few things that impress a girl more than knowing how to cook a few dishes or fix a broken toilet. Life skills are amazingly attractive.

So, even when we get busy, we like to cook. We cook good food. We like to cook for a lot of people because then we can eat a variety of things. I get depressed looking at an empty fridge. As a result our grocery bill is up in the $700 in a good month.

When I told my mum this, she revealed that she, papa and grandma share a grocery bill of about $450 per month. I chalked it up to buying mostly organics, but there are few excuses for eating three goat legs at $50 a pop. That’s just extravagant.

And then there’s the booze. Since M and I starting having meals together, our bar has rarely ever run dry. Local wines are, thankfully, cheap and good, but I still think of it a a bit of an awful, indulgent thing.

So mum, don’t fret about pops. We’re way worse. Fret about us instead.

I don’t know what we’re going to eat if I lose my job and have to go back to school or have a kid or something. Might be I have to start eating my coffee table.

The kitchen smells of baked apples and creamy clam chowder. The speakers are playing London Philharmonic’s version of Kashmir (thumping timpanis!) and the dog is gnawing on some bone under the chair next to mine. Whirring sounds of the drill comes from a skilled carpenter putting together a shadowbox for me to hang my jewellery.

Rewind two years. I am sitting alone on the balcony, shivering, wondering how long it would take my body to hit the pavement below. A part of me bemusedly tries to do the calculation, a routine question in Physics 12, and then I realise I would never actually make the jump. Not if a part of me can still humour myself.

Either with luck, or perhaps it was inevitable in my course of actions — a few days later, while sitting in a biology lecture, my life unravelled and I saw it in blinding clarity: I needed help.

The revelation came with an incredible sense of empowerment. I axed my unnecessary engagements (“I don’t need to attend the next lectures… or even have these extra credits! Dropped!”) and focused on my happiness, for what felt like the first time in my life, but surely when I was younger I was able to be selfish too.

Selfishness has got quite the bad reputation. But I’ve come to see that, if one is truly selfish, one would understand that one needs others to enrich one’s own life. For me to be truly selfish, I would serve others at least some of the time, in engagements that I deem worthy of everyone’s time. The “bad” sort of selfishness comes not from self-interest but short-sightedness.

So it was with my happiness in mind that I took apart my life and pieced it together again properly. No, life isn’t perfect and I’m not satisfied — I can never be satisfied! — but I am content. With stability of life’s basics, I can afford to look beyond the necessities of emotional security. Beyond necessities, yet still basic — good food, good art, good company. But so much more rich, and so much more enriching.

I see I’ve migrated to the floor some time ago and GIR the dog is curled up on my calves trying to suck the sweet marrow from his prized bone (the delicious basics of life!). The balcony door opens; he lets out two barks before sheepishly realising he barked at the Alpha, settles back down on my calves with a sigh. M comes in with the shadowbox, saw dust covering his shirt and pants, and a big grin.

Life is good.

I’m going to change my setup pretty soon, but before I wash my hands of MovableType, I’m going to jot down my setup.

I’ve got MovableType running here with dynamic publishing (sort of), which serves both the epic as well as the e10th blog. The whole thing works quite nicely and supports a whole whack of things out-of-the-box, though the drawbacks make me want to shoot someone. One such drawback is the lack of documentation on how to get it going with anything other than Apache — I guess most peeps only ever use Apache for something as beastly as MT, which adds to my gut feeling that MT is a bit of an overkill.

Add to that the lack of good out-of-the-box themes and “templatesets,” and the last straw of its gross page previews (it makes directories and temp files but doesn’t clean up after itself), I’ve decided to give django a try again, this time with nginx (for no good reason other than to just try out something new). I’ll be trying byteflow as well, to get the epic up. I’ll probably run WordPress for e10th because I need more things running more quickly there.

Anyway, here is my current lighttpd.conf:

server.modules = (
             "mod_access",
             "mod_alias",
             "mod_accesslog",
             "mod_compress",
             "mod_rewrite",
             "mod_redirect",
 #           "mod_status",
 #           "mod_evhost",
 #           "mod_usertrack",
 #           "mod_rrdtool",
 #           "mod_webdav",
 #           "mod_expire",
 #           "mod_flv_streaming",
 #           "mod_evasive",
 "mod_cgi",
 "mod_fastcgi" )


server.document-root       = "/home/fish/public"
server.errorlog            = "/var/log/lighttpd/error.log"
index-file.names           = ( "index.php", "index.html", "index.htm", "default.htm", "index.lighttpd.html" )

accesslog.filename         = "/var/log/lighttpd/access.log"
url.access-deny            = ( "~", ".inc" )
static-file.exclude-extensions = ( ".php", ".pl", ".fcgi" )
server.pid-file            = "/var/run/lighttpd.pid"

server.dir-listing         = "enable"

compress.cache-dir          = "/var/cache/lighttpd/compress/"
compress.filetype           = ("text/plain", "text/html", "application/x-javascript", "text/css")

fastcgi.server = ( ".php" => ((
 "bin-path" => "/usr/bin/php5-cgi",
 "socket"   => "/tmp/php.socket"
 ))
)

cgi.assign = ( ".cgi" => "/usr/bin/perl" )

$HTTP["host"] =~ "(^|.)thefishepic.ca$" {
 server.document-root = "/home/fish/public/tfe"
 server.errorlog = "/var/log/lighttpd/tfe_error.log"
 index-file.names += ( "mtview.php" )
 accesslog.filename = "/var/log/lighttpd/tfe_access.log"
 server.error-handler-403 = "/mtview.php"
 server.error-handler-404 = "/mtview.php" }

$HTTP["host"] =~ "(^|.)nicolb.c(a|o)(m)?$" {
 server.document-root = "/home/nicolb/www/"
 server.errorlog = "/var/log/lighttpd/nicolb_error.log"
 accesslog.filename = "/var/log/lighttpd/nicolb_access.log" }

$HTTP["host"] =~ "(^|.)e10th.ca$" {
 server.document-root = "/home/fish/public/e10th"
 server.errorlog = "/var/log/lighttpd/e10th_error.log"
 index-file.names += ( "mtview.php" )
 accesslog.filename = "/var/log/lighttpd/e10th_access.log"
 server.error-handler-403 = "/mtview.php"
 server.error-handler-404 = "/mtview.php" }

handle Debian Policy Manual, Section 11.5. urls

by default allow them only from localhost

(This must come last due to #445459)

$HTTP["remoteip"] == "127.0.0.1" {
 alias.url += (
  "/doc/" => "/usr/share/doc/",
  "/images/" => "/usr/share/images/"     )
 $HTTP["url"] =~ "^/doc/|^/images/" {
  dir-listing.activate = "enable"
 } } 

To get MT working, I used the error-handlers to serve up mtview.php and let it handle and show any dynamic errors. This was a problem with dir-listing enabled (would list dir instead of showing a category, for example), but I’ve disabled dir-listing for prosperity anyway.