Monthly Archive for August, 2010

Quick, In Here!

Published on August 30, 2010 in Uncategorized. 4 Comments

So I was painting a picture of a snake today and ended up with a lot of extra brown, so on a lark I grabbed a stray piece of cardboard and produced the following:

Earlier today I sent this article via Google Reader to a guy I know, and he wrote back,

“I try to remember every once in a while how marvelous it is to be relatively normal.

No missing appendages, no horrible speech impediment, normal unremarkable appearance.

Invisible in a crowd and able to move about freely, safely ignored by others.

That being said having a stove pipe hat and an elaborate metal arm would be pretty bad ass.”

And for some reason, my back-brain remembered that and sent it straight to the paintbrush.  And abruptly I wanted to write a short story (or a QUADRILOGY) about these three.

They’re clearly together; where are they going?  Why are they in such an all-fired hurry?

Why didn’t the woman wear sensible shoes?

Why is the middle gentleman using a cane?  Is he elderly?  Is one or both legs perhaps not of flesh and bone?  Does the cane perhaps have a blue glass ball on top spiderwebbed with cracks from repeated use on the skulls of his enemies?

I can smell the middle one’s hat, it smells of fried food and dirty hair and genius.  He’s the brains of the outfit.  Lefty there is the muscle, and the woman is… let’s see… the woman is a mysterious acquaintance, recently made, the subject of a certain amount of paternal disdain from Stovepipe and silent desperation from Lefty, which is a shame, because they’re on the trail of… HER FIANCÉ.  Or no?

Bah, curse this brain of mine.  I need a new one.

At least the painting is keeping me out of trouble in the evenings.

Duddy, F. Reporting For Duty

Published on August 5, 2010 in Uncategorized. 4 Comments

 

I think I’ve talked before about one reason I want to avoid getting a smartphone (see also: Premee isn’t watching for open manholes at the best of times), but here’s another: eggs.

Feeling like I was putting all my gadgetry eggs into one basket freaks me out. Even just thinking about it freaks me out.

To do the things an iPhone does, I need to carry around all of the following:

  • 1. Games – a game emulator
  • 2. Video – game emulator
  • 3. Music – mp3 player (RCA Lyra, purchased in 2005)
  • 4. Camera – Panasonic Lumix
  • 5. Scheduler – a paper planner (ordered from Letts of London every July)
  • 6. Notebook – back of planner, and a pen
  • 7. Phone – actual cell phone
  • 8. Internet – not applicable
  • 9. Books – an actual paperback, generally, or a couple of dozen stored on the emulator
  • 10. Maps – an actual map

And I’m probably missing things off the list, because without owning one I don’t know what else the God Machine actually does.

But will you just look at that list?

It becomes painfully evident that I could lose the bag full of stuff and just carry an iPhone, does it not? (If it makes any difference, 99% of the time, my purse contains only the planner, the phone, and the book.)

Yet I continue to reject the idea of giving up a million separate gadgets, kind of along the lines of, “Well, losing my phone is OK, I’ve only lost my phone; losing my Lyra is OK, I’ve only lost my Lyra.” Etcetera. I split up my army so that the loss of one division doesn’t end the war.

I’m afraid, though, that on my recent trip back east I did come across as a bit of a Luddite. For instance, being lost in 2010 is a very archaic thing to do – practically unheard-of, really, in most of North America. How can you get lost when you can use GPS and Google Maps on your phone? And restaurants too, I think I was the only tourist in Montreal eyeballing the posted menus or using a guidebook. Everyone else was looking up reviews on their phones. Did they get better meals than me? Just check their Twitter feed! I checked into my flight at the airport, not sitting on a bench waiting for my lapdance to start. When I was bored, I walked around and looked at things. When a minor pop-culture dispute came up, I watched as it was resolved in eight seconds flat using someone’s iPhone and the relevant IMDB entry. I felt like a Hutterite who’d taken a wrong turn in his buggy and ended up in a Futurama episode.

Now I say again: are we, as a generation, missing out on things with our faces buried in those little screens? Is it no longer fun to get lost in a new city? Does photograph quality no longer matter except to obssessive amateurs? Isn’t it more entertaining to argue for twenty minutes about who played the original third roommate on Three’s Company, segueing from topic to topic till someone brings up the name of the dog on Fraggle Rock and you know you’ve all gone temporarily mad? Isn’t it more relaxing to be a blissful, anonymous mote in a crowd, instead of simultaneously attempting to broadcast one’s location on Foursquare, activities on Twitter, reviews on Yelp, photos on Flickr, and thoughts on Facebook, as well as keeping up with everyone else who’s trying to do the same thing? Does the battery indicator on a smartphone really indicate the maximum length of time in which we can exist in the modern world?

Or am I just a fuddy-duddy?