25dec2023

Merry Christmas to those of you who celebrate it:) Providentially for me, the holiday falls on a monday this year, so perhaps I can do 12 days of gift wrapping on the traditional 12 days of xmas:)

To start, my favourite out of the first four I've wrapped so far for the holidays, along with a link that notes that sloppily wrapped gifts are more likely to please their recipients, because their expectations are lower.

Unless you're giving the gift to an acquaintance, in which case the decorations imply how much you hold the person in esteem. Of course, I've always made it clear the fancier the outside, the duller the inside is likely to be, and in fact I sometimes flatly state the contents are merely an excuse for me to decorate, which is in fact the main gift—a handmade piece of art that is pretty, disposable, and, I hope, without expectations. (So, unlike a hand-knit scarf or a sweater, it doesn't matter if the colour scheme or design isn't to their taste, since it's so ephemeral...)

In this case I tried to do a nice job because a) I was wrapping for someone else too busy to do so and b) I hadn't gotten the recipient anything, so fancy wrapping was to stand in.

And if xmas isn't your thing, well, I'd say this gift would do for any winter holiday, and in fact it was a solstice gift.

22dec2023

Here ’tis Saturday morning, and Friday's page is still not up, tch, tch, tch...though for some reason opaque to me, neither are the previous two days’. So lessee if I can get this show on the road...

This article on Politico about a mixed race family that moved into Warren, Michigan back in 1967 looks fascinating to me, not least because I was a just-barely-grade-school aged kid confined to the backyard that summer when the tanks, on their way to quell the infamous riots, rumbled down Woodward: the main street (literally) just three blocks away from my parents’ house in its weird little Detroit inurb. Later, as a young married, I did craft shows in Warren (a suburb of Detroit), some 30 years ago. So this has resonance for me, because this history intertwined with my own.

And here we have another mouse to round out the week.

21dec2023

Celebrating the solstice today, so once again, short and sweet:

I did sun salutations (& the sun actually shone). I made food. I wrapped and decorated gifts. I helped put ornaments on the tree.

Most of all, I spent time with family and friends, and that is a gift I deeply treasure.

And what does that have to do with dead mice (aka keychain charms)? Well, not much, though I'll note an extended family member made some & sent me pix today, which was pretty cool.

So, wishing you a Happy Solstice and a dead mouse. Enjoy.

20dec2023

Here we are midweek, so three quickies:

1. some six percent of drivers swerve to the side of the road to hit animals too small to harm them—we're talking snakes, turtles, even frogs here—and an appalling 9 out of 10 (89%) of those are driving SUVs. The mind boggles. I'm always deeply saddened to see garter snakes squashed in the middle of the dirt roads where I ride on Sundays; I can't imagine going out of one's way to hurt these poor animals. Awful.

2. If it wasn't obvious, I'm ganking the 日本語　titles, character names that I don't remember, etc from wikipedia about the various anime I've been blathering on about. So, I happen to like 君たちはどう生きるか The Boy and the Heron, but I haven't a great deal to say about it, except:

1. I like the Japanese title better, because it refers to the classic 1937 children's book of the same title ( How do you live?) and just makes more sense in the context of the film; however, the book is unknown in the US, so I understood why they changed it;
2. the film has a number of classic Miyazaki tropes—the humourous grandmothers, trickster characters, round, benign spirits;
3. it took 7 years to make and is evidently the most expensive Japanese film ever, so, astonishing as Akira was, there are indeed still animated films being made of the same technical caliber;
4. the plot has not got the same ‘through-line’ of, say, Spirited Away or Princess Mononoke; it does have that somewhat darker tone; it does jerk, with a dream-like feel, though if you're paying attention, you will be able to keep up. That said, there were some components I had to read up on (the pelicans’ symbolism, frex).
5. My understanding is that both the subbed and dubbed versions are good. I happened to see the subbed version, of course, but this is good news for people who can't or don't wish to read subtitles;
6. finally, so far as criticism goes, I would say my biggest one was the lack of access to the protagonist's thoughts—he seemed to have an unerring knowledge for navigating his fantastical world, and perhaps this was obvious to Japanese audiences more familiar with its yokai/faerytale tropes, but I admit to wanting to know how he knew what to do.

3. I keep checking out these cozy mysteries and sweet little romances because I want something undemanding to read, and then getting frustrated with their unbelievable protagonists and improbable plots. That's on me, but at least I'm not the only one. Take this latest mystery, something called The Broken Spine, set in the Carolinas, SC, IIRC.

South Carolina is a red state, and republicans have not exactly been branding themselves as friends to libraries and the diversity they traditionally represent. (I heard about one red county in Michigan that was so incensed that their library included books on queer themes that they just completely defunded it.) And it's true that our library, as well as the one in the next town over, have expanded their traditional resources of books to books on tape, then DVDs, then computer/internet access and currently ebooks in several formats.

They also have meeting rooms and sponsor get-togethers on all kinds of topics, a few book or reading related, many not. (I belonged to the comic drawing club for awhile, even though it was nominally for teens, and I was several decades older than that.) In fact I taught french beaded flower making and did henna art through the local library's programs. Libraries really do serve communities, especially poor communities; they are a resource to be treasured.

Sooooo, much as I'd rather read on paper, even I have been checking out stuff through hoopla. Yes, it's problematic. (Libraries are, thank dog, still allowed to check out dead-tree books until they fall apart or some awful publisher manages to implement RFID chips or the like on library copies of physical books that count how often they're checked out.) Electronic checkouts have a count, and then the library has to repurchase whatever it is. Ugh!

And, I gather there really is a bookless library somewhere in Texas.

So the concept isn't completely science fiction, and it's really scary, because it's so much easier to censor ebooks than paper.

So I think this is a great concept; it's just that the author should've written it as SF (or paranormal?) instead, because the setup just isn't believable: where did this broke-ass town get the money to install this ...mainframe hub?!? Wuuuuut? I haven't heard anyone talk about mainframes in years. I mean, I'm a luddite, and even I know this. My father worked on them, back in the 60s and 70s. They were a vestige for the government contractor when the wizard started with them in the early 90s, but wouldn't it be the cloud, or at the very least, a server nowadays?

I mean, I get it: rescue all the beloved old books and secrete them in the basement (that was a WWII bomb shelter) and have this cool secret society! (In a small town, where everyone gossips like crazy? How does that work?) But if enough of the town's residents protest, this idea isn't going anywhere...besides isn't there a library board to protest it?

It's really too bad, because librarians, like teachers, are beacons of knowledge and are being assaulted on all sides by reactionary creeps who want people to be ignorant and afraid. But it's death by a thousand cuts: I would've been more likely to hear that the library had been defunded completely. Anyway. I won't even get into the characterization, which is flatter than cardboard. All my complaints (and many more) are to be found on the goodreads site so it's not just me that's frustrated!

Oooh, this was supposed to be short. I gotta go buy a xmas solstice tree, so enough of that, have a dead mouse.

19dec2023

Welp, I haven't had time to finish the research, half assed trawling of internet history on $topic let alone assemble my thoughts on anime—good, bad or indifferent—though I will say if you want to see the new Miyazaki film The Boy and the Heron (the actual title is based on a famous 1937 YA novel whose title is usually translated in English as How will you live?) in the theatres, you should probably get on that.

So, today I have the latest link in my ongoing series/screeds of cars, especially big SUVs, suck, particularly for pedestrians and cyclists. It's from Slate, and goes into a little more detail than, ‘CAFE standards were way looser for trucks, auto manufacturers exploited this plus USians’ love of big cars’ but it's still the same ole, same ole —for most people, owning these things is morally corrupt.

Annnnd, here's a dead mouse. (I'll refrain from the joke I made last time I paired these topics...)

18dec2023

This week's series is courtesy of the f2tY, who asked me to find pix of our kitchen (in the middle of the night, naturally, given the 12 hour time difference, so I couldn't just take some...perhaps I should've tried) and while I was looking for them I found this old series of dead mice.

Well! Those are easier to do than assembling the floral vessel series that's been on my to-do list for, um, the last six months?

Anyway. Speaking of things Japanese, I promised thoughts about my current fave on Crunchyroll, which I absolutely will get to, but I thought I'd detour, a bit, with thoughts about the one I happen to binging today (i.e. the weekend prior) because there's some interesting conventions that I've not quite decoded.

I wasn't feeling terribly energetic Saturday, but, as I was slowly making my way through Kahneman, one bit that especially resonated—this time, anyway—was the idea of using internal and external POVs (specifically in a organizational context, e.g. a corp or academic department, but it applies to individuals, too). The basic idea is you take on a project, and of course you want some idea of how long it's gonna take, especially if labor is your biggest expense.

Computer programmers, I believe, have a joke about guessing and multiplying by 4. The wizard detests this question with a red-hot passion, responding always with, ‘It takes as long as it takes. I can't predict.’

But, humans being what they are, hope springs eternal.

Why, of course I'm gonna learn 日本語 in six months. Or mebbe a year. Ok, two years. That really was my hope—even expectation—when I started duolingo. This, despite the fact that I'm dreadful at learning languages and the average time to become “fluent” is a decade. That exterior-to-me metric should've been a clue.

I knew this, but I was gonna be different.

Spoiler: I was not different. I was utterly average in this supposition.

The author cites an experience writing a textbook (this is ch 23 of Thinking Fast and Slow if you'd like the deets); he and his team predicted two years, chatting amongst themselves. But one had expert knowledge of how long it typically takes: about a decade. (Hmm....) And that was the 40% of teams who actually finished the project! Or failed to finish it—the point being, only about half manage the task. We should, Kahneman said, given up right there. But they looked at their numbers, shrugged off the fact that their own analysis put them at slightly below average, decided the data of all those other authors didn't apply and proceeded to waste another 6–8 years writing a book that was ultimately never used.

Ouch! 痛いわですよ！

Mebbe it's because I'm taking notes for the book club this time around, or perhaps I've just forgotten, but yeah, just about everything I've ever done in my life, ever, has taken way longer than I thought it would, and while inside of these projects, I've often felt despair because I'm so damned slow. —One of the reasons I go trawling back through old web pages is that I find evidence that—however imperfectly, incompletely, or dilatorily—I have achieved, or at least made progress towards, my goals.

I've now resigned myself to becoming “fluent” (which really should be treated as a spectrum, or a journey, more than a goal) in a decade; but really, given a) my linguistic ineptitude b) my half-assed approach (listening to anime and using duolingo to learn) it's far more likely to take me fifteen years (well, unless I manage to actually live in Japan for 3 or 6 months or so—the immersion thing is awesome for speeding up this process...) Yet, just last night, for the first time ever, a character said something： 確り (shikkari) which is still not a word I really know, but it is one I've studied recently; so, despite having only a vague sense of its meaning, nonetheless when I saw the translation in English, my brain went,

that's not quite right.

IOW, I had an early, very faint experience of thinking in Japanese.

It's only taken about...five years.

I guess my takeaway from this is...be kind. To yourself and others, when things take longer than you feel they ought.

But what about the アニメ？ Eh, there's always tomorrow;) In the meantime, have a pink mouse that incorporates someone else's unfinished project, that nevertheless found a home.