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Current Entertainment:
Books Lying
Open
Soul-Devouring
Worry
Life's
Too Short For:
Curse of the Day:
Phrase
of the Moment: It can also be used for other future plans that one or the other of us don't really want to deal with, such as full time work, dog ownership, getting a home loan, and more. -- November 17, 2003 |
Friday November 28, 2003 |
| Quote
of the Day -- QotD Archives
Asking a writer what he thinks about criticism is like asking a lamppost what it feels about dogs. --John Osborne |
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Daily Blog To repeat something from yesterday, since no one responded to it: I'm looking to get a deep fryer, since Malaya and I do love them FFs. We're looking for any reader feedback on using them, good/bad features, brand recommendations or curses, and so on. If anyone has experience with such devices, please share.
So, it's Thanksgiving. At least for another fifteen minutes or so (as of 11:45pm, when I'm writing this. Well, it's Thanksgiving in the US, anyway; I'm not so sure about other countries and their versions of this sort of holiday. In the US the whole thing is just a modified harvest festival, dressed up with an almost entirely fictional "Peaceful Indians dine with Pilgrims" legend. (Or you might prefer this sort of fairy tale of the T-day origins. It's a lot funnier, anyway, assuming you consider incredibly blatant lies humorous.) They also have a Thanksgiving in Canada, but it's weeks earlier, probably since winter snows (and wolves) come earlier that much further north. And bears. Always the bears. Anyway, Malaya went over and spent some time with various relatives, where they ate nothing even faintly-resembling the classic turkey/stuffing/cranberry sauce/etc. I stayed home and at almost nothing at all, subsisting upon Quaker natural cereal and a couple of fried eggs over toast. However once she got home in the evening we did have turkey burgers with French Fries. I've never really celebrated T-day, for no particular reason. Perhaps since I'm such a selfish and evil person that I don't think anyone but me deserves thanks? I'm sure that's part of it, but there's also the fact that I'm very uneasy, sort of claustrophobic, in medium-sized gatherings of people in small spaces. I'm fine with 4 or 5 or 8 in a house, or 50,000 in a stadium, if it's just for a few hours, but when I get up around 10 or 12 or more crammed into a small house, I get hella-itchy and need to go outside and walk around alone just to get some personal space. Which is why I've always categorically turned down any invitations to go anywhere for a T-day meal, knowing the sort of crowding and human interaction such events inevitably require. This year T-day was also the day before Malaya's B-day, and oddly enough, she never does much to celebrate that day either. I'm not big on B-day celebrations myself, but I do like presents and perhaps going out to dinner with my parents. It's mostly an excuse to spend time with people I care about and score some new loot, but now that I'm in love and all brainwashed and such, a B-day suddenly seems like a really great thing, since it's like a chance to celebrate the existence of the person I care more about than anyone else on earth. God damn but love is corrupting of my formerly pure values. I hadn't planned anything all that clever for her B-day, mostly since that sort of thing never occurs to me in advance. I'll do better next year. I had been planning on taking her out and spending some time with her, but I hadn't checked the calendar to notice that her B-day was the day after Thanksgiving. And as you probably know, the Friday after T-day is traditionally the busiest shopping day of the entire year in the US. Sort of puts a bullet in the head of my "we'll take a quiet stroll around the mall and I'll buy her something she desires" idea, eh?
In other holiday news, I wrote an epilogue to my five-part ongoing Diablo II humorous holiday tales, one set on Thanksgiving. I'd describe it in more detail but this is the last part of the blog I'm writing today and I'm very ready for bed. So more on that tomorrow, along with comments on the reader feedback for the story, and all that happy shit. |
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used to read Lileks
all the time.
I thought he was a good writer and was funny and I liked his humorous captions about hideous nostalgic crap. Yet over time I found him less and less amusing and more and more smarmy, and began to not read his blog daily, and began to be more and more insulted by his relentless shilling via weird over-personalizing of the neocon agenda (always some poor theoretical oppressed Iraqi, yearning for the US to come and set him free, while oddly enough, no Lileks-rendered Palestinian ever felt that way about Israel). Eventually I had to give up on his blog entirely, since it just annoyed me, yet I still can't quite figure out why. He's funny, some of the time, and he's snarky and borderline heart-warming much of the time, but somehow, even if he's not writing about or I can overlook his politics, I just have this feeling of dread when I contemplate reading his blog, and haven't actually done so for at least 3 or 4 months. Considering that I used to look forward to midnight so that I could go and read his new daily update, this is a strange state of affairs. And it's hard for me to figure out why I no longer tolerate him and what went wrong. Somehow, while I was looking, he just grew dreary. Reading him feels like a chore now, and every couple of weeks when I've got a bored minute and I'm looking at my blogs bookmarks, I consider clicking over, but can't quite bring myself to do it. Fortunately, I saw some discussion of him on another blog just a couple of days ago, and they had a link to lilekswatch.blogspot.com. It takes approximately forever to load and it hasn't been updated in almost a year, but reading the comments there really did help he figure out just what it is about him that finally lost me as a reader. I was annoyed by his ridiculously efforts to personalize the neocon agenda of Middle East domination, and his relentlessly apologistic nature when it came time to defend the latest idiocy from Bush, but there was something more about him that curdled even the most banal commentary. And some of the posts on the lilekswatch site encapsulated it nicely.
I'd say it's more like the man begins picking his nose, or flows smoothly from a hilarious story about collecting antiques to one about his great great grandfather buying slaves fresh off the boat in Baton Rouge with seemingly no appreciation (or tolerance) for why that story is going to offend many of the listeners. Of course the irony of it all is that anything I criticize Lileks for is something I could easily be criticized for myself. In a general sense, at least. We're obviously very different in political views, life experience, location, etc. But ignoring the specific details; we both write long opinionated blogs about whatever strikes our fancy, focusing far too much on our own lives and the essentially-meaningless minutia of them, and we both think we're far more clever than everyone else. If there's a major difference it's that I can actually admit this, without doing it in a snarky, "aren't I so much more clever that I can actually admit I think I'm more clever" sort of way. And I'm much more in touch with my self-loathing and less in denial about the world than he is. I of course think he's hopelessly naive and full of wishful thinking about the world and politics, and think I'm more firmly grounded in reality. But getting back to what I said in the previous paragraph, I'm sure he'd say just the same thing about himself. Whether that would prove my point, or prove that I'm just as self-delusional as he is remains open to debate.
While thinking about Lileks I kept trying to remember another site that I at one time loved, but that I eventually lost all interest in, perhaps to the point of even deleting the bookmark. Andrew Sullivan is a good example; he's another blogger and a pretty famous one. I like his writing, much of the time, and he's very good talking about gay issues (he's gay) or Catholic church issues (he's a Catholic) but most of the time he covers politics, and his relentlessly right wing point of view bores me terribly. I often read right wing blogs or comments and sometimes even agree with them. Or I disagree, but I can see that the person writing the comment really believes it and has something valid to base it on, other than his opinion of how the world should be. Sullivan used to do that, or perhaps I was just fooling myself, but since 9/11, when the ever-increasingly-partizan Republican movement in America seized upon terrorism as their excuse for everything, he's just become unreadable. He spends nearly every update defending anything and everything that Bush has done or is considering doing, no matter how insane, but more than that it's his style of doing it that is so loathsome. I'll correct that; it's not loathsome, it's lacking in integrity, which I find dishonest. Sullivan lives to make ridiculous arguments (like the one about how BushCo didn't imply in every way that Iraq was an imminent threat just because Bush never actually used the word "imminent") and he makes them in ridiculous ways. He parses quotes and takes things out of context and just generally engages in every sort of intellectual and journalistic dishonesty in an effort to make his pre-determined point. But that's not a good example of a site I've lost interest in, since it partially overlaps my reason for no longer reading Lileks.
Looking at my bookmarks now, I'll throw out a few other examples. Overboard: This comic strip is in lots of newspapers and I loved it about 2 or 3 years go when it first started running in the San Diego paper. They eventually canned it in SD early in 2003, and I missed it and hunted it up online, and kept reading it as one of the dozen or so comics I read online once I moved up north to live with Malaya, since we don't get the paper here. Sadly, I've pretty much given up on it since about September or so, for a simple reason. It's never funny anymore. Several years ago it was great, very dark and cruel in the humor and peopled with amusing characters. Unfortunately, it's since lost all of the edge it once had and has become a predictable, poorly-drawn, three panel sitcom with the same jokes repeated endlessly. The dog is probably the worst element of the strip now, with his one-note early-Garfield antics. He either lies down on the watch dog job, steals food, or makes a mess in 95% of the strips he's featured in, and he gets into at least 2 or 3 a week. This strip has so completely jumped the shark that I almost want to get a collection of early strips and read them again now, to see if it really used to be good, or if I was just fooling myself somehow.
CAP Alerts: I used to love this site for the comedic value of the uber-Christian PoV of the reviews, but as I look there now I realize I haven't visited it in months. I'm not sure why; there wasn't any conscious decision to stop reading it, and I can still fondly remember some of the old reviews. The South Park review is one of the funniest things I've ever read in my life, and is about the best promotion for it possible. I can't see anyone reading that and not wanting to see the movie. While not an amusing review (too much of the "tut tut" type commentary), I still think of the bullet-listed "cohabitation" and laugh every time I see any mention of The Bourne Identity. But for whatever reason, I never seem to check that site anymore. I'm taking a look now, and whaddya know, I'm getting a bit of that old magic back. His Haunted Mansion review is pretty good, and I laughed out loud at a few remarks. All humor in the CAP reviews is entirely unintentional on the part of the author, of course:
I suppose that for me, the novelty of this guy's worldview has worn off. After you read a couple of dozen reviews they all begin to sound the same, and it takes an especially outrageous comment to break through my boredom to reach my funnybone. Here's a typically wandering excerpt from his Brother Bear review that had me yawning until the end, when I cracked up.
God he is such a douche bag. So pompous, like if someone doesn't respect him when he's old it's entirely their fault for being a bad person, and in no way might reflect upon the fact that Mr. CAP Alerts was an idiot when he was young, and nothing has changed now that he's old. Some of his writing depresses me as well, I suppose since I'm always bothered by a person who is so willfully ignorant. I can't watch those Jackass type shows, where some stupid kids set themselves on fire or fall down stairs since it's depressing. This guy is basically engaging in a life long Jackassian act of self destruction, but with philosophy and belief, rather than physical pratfalls.
I'm trying to only mention ones that I've stopped viewing for site-related reasons, rather than changes in my personal tastes. I never look at any gaming sites anymore, other than the one I work on, since I'm not spending any time gaming or following upcoming games any longer. So while it's true that I haven't visited gamespot or gamespy or others in months and months, it's not due to them sucking (any harder than they used to). And on a related topic, I view Penny Arcade about once a week now, and just skim over the news updates while viewing the comics. And it's not that they suck now, it's that I don't care about the console gaming they mostly talk about. If not for the frequently-funny cartoons, I wouldn't visit just for the blog-style updates, even though Tycho does write pretty well at times, when he's not obviously trying so hard to be clever with a simile or metaphor that you can almost see his keyboard bleeding. I may continue this topic some time in the future, if the urge strikes me, since it leads me to self-analysis, and I enjoy that. Any of you guys/girls have a site you used to love, but no longer visit very much/at all, and want to tell me why not? (And yes, this opens the door to snide remarks about how you never read this site anymore. Go for it, if it'll make you happy.) |
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