28th overall (out of 100), 4th in my age group (out of 16).
Not as bad [as I felt]… which was… I want to puke my guts out right now.
http://www.xdogevents.com/2014%20Results/WRSNOWSHOE2014%202.HTM
I’m good with those results. I won a massage in the raffle too 🙂
It was a good day.
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVWeqAPQUXc]
“If what’s always distinguished bad writing–flat characters, a narrative world that’s clichéd and not recognizably human, etc.–is also a description of today’s world, then bad writing becomes an ingenious mimesis of a bad world. If readers simply believe the world is stupid and shallow and mean, then [Bret] Ellis can write a mean shallow stupid novel that becomes a mordant deadpan commentary on the badness of everything. Look man, we’d probably most of us agree that these are dark times, and stupid ones, but do we need fiction that does nothing but dramatize how dark and stupid everything is? In dark times, the definition of good art would seem to be art that locates and applies CPR to those elements of what’s human and magical that still live and glow despite the times’ darkness. Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and human in it.
Postmodern irony and cynicism’s become an end in itself, a measure of hip sophistication and literary savvy. Few artists dare to try to talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong, because they’ll look sentimental and naive to all the weary ironists. Irony’s gone from liberating to enslaving. There’s some great essay somewhere that has a line about irony being the song of the prisoner who’s come to love his cage… The postmodern founders’ patricidal work was great, but patricide produces orphans, and no amount of revelry can make up for the fact that writers my age have been literary orphans throughout our formative years.
We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté. Sentiment equals naïveté on this continent.
You burn with hunger for food that does not exist.
A U. S. of modern A. where the State is not a team or a code, but a sort of sloppy intersection of desires and fears, where the only public consensus a boy must surrender to is the acknowledged primacy of straight-line pursuing this flat and short-sighted idea of personal happiness.”
― David Foster Wallace
I was thinking the other day… if anyone (gentlemen) think they’ll *ever* impress the opposite sex with DFW quotes – forget it. *That’s* fiction. It will never happen. Ever.
I got my ass kicked.
http://www.strava.com/activities/107633439
Up a mile, down a mile, up a mile, down a mile, up, finish.
No excuses other than that was the first time I’ve run in snowshoes in … 6 years?
I forgot how brutal trying to go really fast in snowshoes can be… a little altitude thrown in too – though I’m not sure that was a factor – 4200ft to 4800ft. Up, down, up down, up down. Super fun letting loose on the downhill though – it’s more stable on the snow than on singletrack trail. Just kind of let the snowshoes slide – ease back a bit.
Beautiful day, temp maybe mid-40’s.
Ran in thin tech top, running cap and thin gloves – and was cooking in the sun.
Super super bonus: I didn’t get hurt… which I was most worried about.
(A taxonomy)
Make art and live like a pauper – maybe your art will make your progeny rich after you die.
Make other people really (really) happy… and have them pay you for that.
Make other people richer than you yourself require (I think most of us do this).
I finished Bleeding Edge today.
Recommended. I’ll go back and read some more Pynchon later. Or not.
Here are some choice passages:
“Yep, and your Internet was their invention, this magical convenience that creeps now like a smell through the smallest details of our lives, the shopping, the housework, the homework, the taxes, absorbing our energy, eating up our precious time. And there’s no innocence. Anywhere. Never was. It was conceived in sin, the worst possible. As it kept growing, it never stopped carrying in its heart a bitter-cold death wish for the planet, and don’t think anything has changed, kid.”
And another:
“Beaming at her with that vacant, perhaps only Californian, the-Universe-is-a-joke-but-you-don’t-get-it smile which so often drives her to un-Buddhist daydreams seething with rage.”
Another:
“Refugees from the sunless half of the cycle. Whatever it was they thought they needed, coffee, a cheeseburger, a kind word, the light of dawn, they’ve kept watch, stayed awake and caught sight of it at least, or nodded off and missed it again.”
American poetry. Damn. Recommended.
Not sure what’s next, on deck are:
I think it might be Multipliers first… and then I’ll skip to something fun… like Ambient Commons.
Last 2 read before Bleeding Edge:
Design is a Job (Mike Monteiro)
Daily Rituals (Mason Currey) [holy shit people used to take a lot of Benzedrine…]
[vimeo 83728153 w=500 h=281]
WES from Alejandro Prullansky on Vimeo.
I do my best thinking when I’m running and never remember what I was thinking about when I get back or ever write it down. Today I mostly remembered, here is the list:
Seriously – if you’re trying to curb a raging appetite – eat some soup. If you’re still hungry – eat a banana (unless you have issues with the carbon footprint of shipping bananas from south america… if so… eat more soup).
Here’s a starter recipe (one of my faves):
http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Potato-Soup-with-Kale-and-Chorizo-241646
More heat? This is your answer:
http://www.huyfong.com/no_frames/sriracha.htm
Dang.
My proposal for IASummit14 didn’t get accepted. I submitted my presentation from EuroIA, but the talk on “Uncle Ralph, Threadjacking and LolHolla” would have been really really fun to give. The gist is mostly around the behaviors that emerge in big social networks as users try to navigate social interactions with no …. like … physical cues or feedback. What happens ultimately is that another culture emerges – with its own rules and language and customs. Fascinating stuff. It exists at Jive and it’s super evolved primarily b/c we’ve been around so long and every weird or awkward social interaction that can happen in a community… has already happened.
I think it’s best that it wasn’t accepted. I was on the fence of whether or not to bail if it was accepted. I had a great time in Edinburgh at EuroIA, but truth be told – me and conferences don’t mesh.
I used to get a power up going to IASummits or IxDA conferences … <shrug>. As I’ve gotten further along in my career, I guess the idealism of the “right” way to do things gives me the yawns.
File this under “top secret tips that no one really talks about”. One thing that I’ve learned over the years is to be really nice to your feet. Like really nice. I don’t get blisters anymore and rarely if ever have hot spots on long runs. Couple of things that work for me – ymmv:
And now for a fun story.
One winter T and I drove up from D.C. and planned a climb in the Presidential range of New Hampshire. From Pinkham Notch the climb goes up Mt. Washington and then you climb Jefferson and Adams going north, drop back into the valley and hump it back to Pinkham notch. We decided that fast and light was the way to go. We sat in his truck and ate dinner and then hiked to Hermit Lake shelters around 8pm … slept a little bit and then got up at midnight and started climbing. No stove, no sleeping bags … not much margin of error. Amazing what you can do when really committed.
So it went..summit… summit… summit. Then things got shitty.
Descending snow covered rocks – my crampon kept popping off my boot slowing me down. We were both wearing plastic boots and vapor barrier liners – essentially creating a little micro climate around your feet – totally works… just not so good for your feet after being on the move for so long. We were exhausted. We ran out of water back in the valley, it was dark… we were drinking water from creeks.
When we got back to the climber’s room at Pinkham it was a bit cathartic to say the least. And when I took my boots off… I saw what wearing vapor barriers and plastic boots for 20 hours will do to your feet … I’ll spare you the image. But it was the worse my feet have ever been.
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