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At some point my six year old is going to fall over. The others will follow soon after, tiny hands relaxing as their bodies tumble to the ground they were walking on moments before. Bystanders will walk around them at first, some offering shocked or chagrined expressions as they watch me watching them and trying to figure out what to do. After a while the crowd will decide to walk over them. Maybe later someone will come along and scoop them up and slide them against a wall where their sleep will be more acceptable. I won’t be able to do it myself because a few minutes after the last child cascades into slumber I too will fall knees first into a heap on the new Phoenix Convention Center carpet and lay there into a wheelbarrow is procured to cart my away.

It occurs to me that it has always been this way. I remember days where I walked nearly the entire length of Manhattan and returned home with little or no fatigue to show for my effort. Yet a day at Comicon and we are all so heavily fatigued that the passing out scenario actually sounds like a good way to go–at least we’d still be at Comicon.

The fatigue appears to be a byproduct of mental exhaustion. Walking around Manhattan doesn’t drain the mind the way wrangling three kids at a comic book convention does…

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Not much to say about 1850. Tennyson took his turn as British poet Laurate. It’s kind of a big deal.

Today I was surrounded by a large number of extremely happy people. Geekdom unfurled itself and the proud ran free in their element. This is Comicon. For the first time I took my three boy tribe to the ‘con for a chance to experience the people who I generally write for and the side of me they don’t know. The event draws together elements from sci-fi geekdom, gaming, role playing gaming, tabletop, cosplay, and of course, comics.

This is the first day of the 2015 convention. Most of the stuff opened late in the afternoon, giving us time to hang out in a handful of under visited areas and tables where we could really learn about the convention and what it has to offer. By 3:56 we were down in front of the main ballroom with hundreds of people pressed in around us waiting for the doors to open. Here’s the thing: everyone was happy and energized. The gaggle of people wanted nothing but to enjoy each other like some alternate universe borg collective that numbered each other as friends and not pods. I struck up conversations with everyone and felt once again in my element. It reminded me of who I write for and why.

It also turned my clan into a bunch of sniggering fanboys. More on that later…

 

Some Thoughts:

1. I struggle with the apparent divergence between objectivism and christianity. The two are often at odds, so why then is Ayn Rand often thought of as a leader of conservative thought when conservative thought is so clearly tied to the tenets of christianity?

Back in 1848 a series of European peoples launched into open revolt against their monarchies. Fed up by the ruling class and the rules put forth by that class they all finally snapped and went after their leadership. Somewhere around 50 nations underwent the turmoil. The revolution became the namesake for the recent Arab Spring (because we can’t ever make new names–I mean how many whatever-gates have there been since Nixon?). I think of I, Robot, robopocalypse, Terminator, and countless shorter works about the eventual rise of the machines. I think at this point I am prepared to call it a Machine Spring, because it is basically the same concept in play in all of these circumstances:

Cold machine logic dictates that human intelligence, while beautiful, is an anathema to the planet. I respectfully agree with the assessment if only because we don’t think about the planet for the most part. We do and damage whatever is necessary to continue to profit and to ease our social burden that much more. I recently watched the film Transcendence, which wasn’t great but it did have very smart moments, several of which swirled around this idea of humans being abnormally destructive to the planet. I think by now everyone sees it even if we can’t agree on the science or legally find someone to blame. On the other hand most of us can get behind the idea that machines are smarter than we are and will recognize these problems we tend to ignore. Ask the stories above what happens and you get a woe-stricken tale of humans being phased out.

It is a scary thought to no longer be at the top of the food chain.

One of my all time best movie moments is when Jack Nicholson barges into a psychiatrists office, leans into a crowd of waiting patients and asks, ‘What if this is as good as it gets?’ I’m certain it is a question we all avoid thinking about until the point where it cannot be ignored. I heard it back when I was in college and wondering about what I could possibly make of my life. I was about girls and DJ’ng parties and being a college-town entrepreneur and writing it all down in composition notebooks and maybe, just maybe waiting for a woman to make me want to be a better man.

I asked myself that question that day, head held high in the sunlight. I’d ask it again, years later, in the darkness. Every time the answer shifted–with maturity, situation, state of mind. It led me to an inexorable conclusion: We are slaves to our emotion and circumstance, suffering the indignities inherent in both.  As Buddha writes, suffering is life. It sounds dark on the surface, but just below it reads like a hint of salvation through the promise that suffering is not all there is but an aspect of life that reflects back as joy.

Life is also change and trying to avoid change is how you end up in a psych doc’s office asking random patients to consider if this is as good as it gets.

I know the answer now… It isn’t.

Some Thoughts:

1. Not much to say about ’46. We are still a hundred years away from the brunt of the good stuff. It is worth noting that this was the year Neptune was discovered. There’s that.

In the first few minutes of Snowpiercer we are presented with a new take on the global warming situation. The science world decides to fight back, launching some sort of compound called C-7 into the atmosphere inadvertently trigger a major ice age that wipes out all life on the planet–well most of it. It turns out a number of people wind up on a train called the rattling ark, moving seemingly aimlessly. Within moments of screen time the train is revealed as a marxist case study of the have’s and have nots. Suddenly there is potential. It isn’t original yet, but there is hope that starts with the initial treatment of the global warming debate. But what happens next?

The show quickly devolves into standard post-apacolyptic flare in the vein of later parts of the Hunger Games or Divergent or the Road, etc. Basically it winds up being about a handful of people who have lost access to soap try to get their hands around the throats of those who have soap and battling through the minions standing in their way. I gotta say, I am not impressed with the film and though my judgement reflects only 17 minutes of film time, it still points to a film that has failed to surprise or inspire thought beyond the initial philosophical debate about how to respond to global phenomena.

I’m not ready to turn it off yet, but I’m not expecting to be impressed.

Some Thoughts:

1. Since we are talking about trains (where the heck is the rattling ark going anyhow?) 1845 marked the end of construction of the oldest rail tunnel in North America. The Cobble Hill Tunnel is no longer in use, long since taken back by the rats and roaches and grafitti artists and. Tours still run through the tunnels if you’re fortunate enough to catch this darkened corridor of history.

Engels and Marx.

Few years have the lasting significance of 1844 because that is the year that the two thinkers met and started developing/preaching their ideas about governance and socialization. It also happens to be the year that ended the 2300 year prophecy and for told of the return of Jesus Christ. That second part presumably didn’t take place but did harken a new age of religions such as Seventh Day adventists and the followers of Bahá’í.

While some religions, such as seventh day, flourished under the rule of their  founding member , others came to be relegated to back pages and side streets.

Change happens on a lot of fronts. You cannot become acquainted with one without considering the others. 1844 was about change on multiple fronts.

With yesterday being the last day of school, this is officially the first day of summer and I have a slew of home projects (daddy-do list) to attend to. Lets ignore for a minute the utter revocation of my man card at the site of my pinterest board and obvious submission to the creation of a daddy-do list and stick to the beauty of creation. I get to plan and organize a garage and an initial bills and storage area and a downstairs closet and a pantry and, well, there is the matter of the boysroom superbed (3d rendering is underway).

I enjoy these projects and really enjoy building and organizing. I wonder if I will actually enjoy being done with the work as much as I enjoy preparing to do it?

 

Some Thoughts:

1. Part of being a good friend is staying in contact. I’m going to get better at that. Really.
2. Part of being a good writer is establishing goals and working on your craft every day. I’m going to get better at that, and I mean more than the 10 minutes kind of better.
3. Part of self actualization is setting goals and visions for who you can be and who you want to be as an individual in all aspects of your life. It comes down to focusing on the things that you can control, which are attitude and effort. Nothing else is entirely in your control, so those two must be allotted at a level fit to your desire to succeed less you will not succeed.
4. Gilmore Girls is really good. I feel like there are a number of series that happened over the years that I need to tackle to have a more completely understanding of generations of people. Dr. Who is next followed by the British version of Sherlock Holmes.
5. After that I’m going to research anything and everything produced by Jennifer Lence. She seems to live at the epicenter of cultural phenomena. A lot of her work is translated from foreign shows especially spanish language shows, which brings me to 1843, which was the birth year of uber influential spanish realist Benito Perez Galdos who helped keep Spain on the map throughout the 19th century, eventual turning his literary eye to the stage. He’s had major works adapted to the big screen over the year and is in part responsible for the mass market acceptance of some of the works that Lence has brought over from Spanish-speaking nations such as The Mysteries of Laura. Oh, she does Flash, Arrow, and the rest of those upcoming shows (Supergirl, Legends of Tomorrow) too.

The way I see it, the human brain is capable of calculating millions of tasks in those 100 billion neurons floating around in that grey sac. Unfortunately, a great deal of those tasks are designated as maintaining body functionality. That leaves considerably less processing power for non-essential tasks. This number shrinks even further when your mind is consumed by an idea you don’t quite know how to bring to fruition. The idea bouncing across those remaining neurons is a bedroom rebuild for my three boys.

I’m going to share a photo for the first time in.. ever? It comes from this article I found via pintrest.

This photo ruined me. It was such a brilliant and relevant idea for my gaggle of dudes that I wondered how the heck it never occurred to me. I went crazy doing measurements and researching products to make a boy-version of this heavenly bedset. I thought through every possibility except for the part where one of three boys say, how come I get bottom bunk. That happened once I shared the picture and they started a screaming match over who got what spot in a bed that was still at this point imaginary. I almost quit right then. I should have, but I’m that dad: the pleaser. Instead I doubled down and tried to figure out a way to make the thing work.

I haven’t figured out a way. In fact I found several more obstacles ranging from fan placement (I’ll need to add bunk blowers to provide adequate noise and wind while also pulling the ceiling fan) to designing something that needs to grow with these growing boys.

The other day I stumbled across a skylight that would be the perfect beyblade stadium. I was itching to buy it, so I talked it over with a friend who suggested that I might be doing the stadium for me and my idea of what they want and need more than for the boys who are probably over beyblade and would be over the new stadium once the new smell wore off. The bed wall may also be a me thing while being a knee-jerk response to an under represented need.

I’m going to think on it and come back to it soon… It isn’t like my brain gives me much of a choice.

Some Thoughts:

1. The illustrated London news started its run in 1842, marking it as the first illustrated weekly news rag. Today we have a plethora of bloggers doing it weekly and even daily. How times have changed… Its a wonder we don’t run out of things to talk about.

Ramping up for my summer Lit and Film class I’ve been doing a case study of the adaptation of Wayward Pines from the novel to the small screen. Wayward Pines is an important novel in the way that Hugh Howey’s Dust is important. It is written by an independent author and published without the help of the big book companies. The book’s author, Blake Crouch, is presently #6 on Amazon’s top 100 where he remains one of the handful in the top 20 not writing about billionaire bad boys, vampires, or some combination of the two. Crouch approached the book with a vision and sold that vision to Fox. What did they do with it? Well, lets find out.

Authenticity is an important aspect of that translation (adaptation) from book to film. I am the type of person who believes the film ought to be authentic to the text. I define authenticity as carrying forward the literary position (deeper point) of the text and remaining loyal to the general plot. For example, if Game of Thrones the TV show decided that they were going to eliminate whole characters from the chorus–perhaps narrowing the Stark siblings to only two for the purpose of telling a narrative they have the time to tell or the most important (as they see it) aspects of the narrative.

Wayward Pines is literature in the sense of a piece of work tackling larger ideas through a character-driven narrative. My fear of the adaptation is that the sense of the larger ideas is lost in the visual pursuit of suspense-building and misdirection. On the one hand the larger meaning of the town of Wayward Pines is made obvious through quick visuals that give away far more than the novel does at that point in the story. In other words, the book deals with some real issues and the show trades in that conversation for suspense and moments of heightened drama.

The story isn’t over. I’ll continue following along and wondering if the effort is worth the time…

Some Thoughts:

1. Whats crazy is that I thought today was friday and thought I’d somehow missed a night of posting… Not going into the office everyday makes me lose touch with reality quite fast.
2. In 1841 the slaves who freed the Amistad were themselves freed, despite calls for their extradition to spanish authorities. It is an important step towards civil rights, especially considering that the slaves were defended by none other than John Quincy Adams.

With a week off and a mind that is nearly tired of playing WWE 2k15 and other games, I find myself falling into legitimate thinking patterns destined to lead to something productive and worthwhile. This is probably not that post. I recently tore myself away from the console to read an article about ‘winning’ your first week at work. As is my normal thought pattern, I filtered what they had to say through my latest ‘new job’ experience that took place a few years ago. I don’t think I made a wonderful impression. In fact, I think the impression I made then is probably worse than the one I made this year when life punched me in the mouth and followed up with a few kicks to the nethers and said, ‘You want some? Come get some!’

I could’ve used the article then. For all intents and purposes I will use the article now going into the fall semester. I’ll take a few things it says to heart, such as not trying to impress, engaging with the right people, and asking the necessary questions beforehand. More importantly I am going to have this conversation with students about how to ‘do’ their first week of school and critically consider the role early impressions make in the way a person is perceived and ‘handled’ over time.

I don’t believe there is a great amount of meta-thought that happens around the idea of how to be a student by students during the first week. There is just too much going on. They are entering a new world with new responsibilities and likely doing a great deal of partying and worrying and buying of a whole bunch of stuff to be ready, but what does it really means to ‘be ready’ and to make a ‘good impression’ and set yourself up as the student you expect to be from day one. I don’t have a clear answer, but I feel the conversation is one worth having with the students.

Some Thoughts:

1. Back in 1840 William Henry Harrison was named president of these United States. Who? Exactly… It is strange how some presidents slip into obscurity while others–either through things they did, things done to them, or the circumstances of the time end up living in our hearts and on our money forever.
2. Houston proved once again that they don’t belong in the conference finals. Now what is Cleveland going to prove as short handed as they are? Only that LeBron James is kind of an epic basketballer.