kip/bot/blog

Following a blog post from Collision Detection I downloaded my entire twitter history (I think it was entire . . . I seem to have fewer sober tweets than I remember). For the most part, I am every bit as banal as the recent twitter spoof, but I like to think it’s my own banality. Some highlights . . .

My first tweet, apparently: “frustrated about not being able to start assassin’s creed in earnest. next weekend perhaps.”

a revelation: after 20 years, I am finally grokking Potato Head Blues
one of many WoW tweets: nohing says xmas like fireworks @ Ironforge

literary pretentions: bought the new “war and peace” will start tonight, if I can get it home

spending superbowl weekend with the XO instead of the US male population: dissecting the XO, deep dive into design
almost healthy: XO, piano, . . . gym??!?!
intrigued by the XO, getting ready to muck with wordpress theme-dom
my first hour or so with the XO http://flickr.com/photos/ki… dig it. i want a new career

first session with XO very rewarding: http://flickr.com/photos/ki…

upside of not watching the superbowl: i will be four hours ahead of the rest o the world. an advantage that will fade quickly

a string of quoting Yogi tea when I had pneumonia: Your breath is the voice of your soul — Yogi Tea

literary pretentia that brought out some very supportive friends @chapinc: experiencing the worst ache: wanting to read part of a favorite book and then not being able to find it. in this case, The Information

literary pretentia . . . a-GAIN: fiction rocks. i forgot

gadgetry and photography: apple tv + iphoto + hdtv makes me a great photographer

office humor: Toby makes me want to act like less nessman

my obsession with t-shaped people: getting ready to read Sennett’s The Craftsman. I smell the winds of a generalist backlash (interestingly the book wound up being thoroughly unquotable and yielded no powerpoint slides

all manner of pretentia: worried that i have the cpu but not the ram for real literature

at least, powerful social commentary: watching a prominent neurologist justify a catscan to an insurance hack.

quick reversion to form: I am homesick for Elwynn Forest. It’s been months. (That’s a WoW reference. My main came up in Elwynn Forest)

and staying on form: someone just asked my about the XO in a casual email. poor woman got inundated with my xo rants http://tinyurl.com/4vcoh8

lemming-like literary pretentia, disguised as self-effacement: dilemma: McSweeneys is a cliche in Juno, but Eggers won the TED prize. What do I do? Think for myself? :-0

ooh, daring: i no longer do the Sunday NYT crossword zippily . . . which of us is out of touch?

i love my kindle jokes: doh!: my book ran out of battery power on the train

see?: turning off my book before takeoff! (I will never tire of this gag)

election sickness, with a touch of Batman dialogue: spending way too much morning time looking at voting maps. must. stop. obsessing.

I also enjoy stupid facebook friend jokes: feeling proud: neither Mahler nor Kundera are willing to face me at the chessboard

generic pretentia: porch with dog, chess board, cigar and scotch

get over it already: for the record: flushing out == hunting term (bird dogs FLUSH out birds)(discovery), fleshing out == adding to a skeleton (additive)

I get my flying mount inWoW: at long last, I can fly! http://tinyurl.com/3sj4yp

word love (aka pretentia): Amazon Nownow reminds: one is a real troUper when one perseveres in the face of difficulty, not a real trooper. But common usage will win

doing something illegal: bluesy, blousy, baked, and bopping

double layer of pop culture influence: thinkin on the “difference between the professional and the dilettante” . . . — character from NCIS, gods help me

strange concatenation, but you gotta admit the food thing is annoying: digging jenny holzer tweets and wondering why TV eating continuity is so bad . . . I mean why bother having them eat if it’s gonna be bad

long-standing theme of white boy who really wants to understand, but only if he can quickly buy his way to it: looking for a support group for people who buy embarassing iTunes essential lists (and don’t hide them well)

musical counter pretentia, which is its own pretentia: “everybody’s dancing in the headlights, and in the headlights you can hear them singing” I miss mojo nixon

this is as close to true self-awareness as I achieve on twitter: “the beat goes on/and I’m so wrong”. I miss Zappa

jealous of other men’s good looks: hastens to remind people that don draper wet himself in the war

still compensating four tweets later: With kindle you can read jane Austen otw to work, and sabermetrics on way to shea

the inner queen comes out: .. so long ‘La Vie Boheme’

just like this one: “insatiable vicariousness” - haven’t grokked it yet, but seems valuable.

a series of tweets about the stupid grin on my face after election day that left my face sore: Scratch that. I’m smiling like an idiot at everything.

impromptu work party on the Acela (and third reference to booze in this post): Echolon and jim beam bottles on the acela.

more pop culture references: “we call it ‘embracing the suck’” — The Unit

and, lastly, my own version of is there anything more sublime?: cohiba habano + walker blue + big dog + shcubert + backyard garden == la w00t^2

HSCU == “hot sake cold unagi”

From someone who recently re-read Politics and the English Language:

In reference to the not unknown work by Orwell that you had previously referenced, I felt it incumbent in this particular instance to not as we might say - toe the line - and relay my experience of the aforementioned work despite the fact of not having been previously unaware of it’s contents, I found the value of it to not be particularly non-valuable; Indeed, it was a work that I might consider to share with colleagues, given ample opportunity to do so, as well, and indeed, one that I am already implementing in my daily work experience, as this email of which you are reading, I think can testify, in and of itself.

Let’s regroup, turbanize, and proceed forward.

Cheers,

I just bought a silly iPhone app (it’s been a while, I suppose) that will teach me the 100 words I need to use to make me sound smart. Pretty disappointing list:

accolade
acrimony
angst
anomaly
antidote
avant-garde
baroque
bona-fide
boondoggle
bourgeois
bravado
brogue
brusque
byzantine
cacophony
camaraderie
capricious
carte blanche
Catch-22
caustic
charisma
cloying
deja vu
dichotomy
dilettante
disheveled
elan
ennui
epitome
equanimity
equivocate
esoteric
euphemism
fait accompli
fastidious
faux pas
fiasco
finagle
Freudian slip
glib
gregarious
harbinger
hedonist
heresy
idiosyncratic
idyllic
indelicate
infinitesimal
insidious
junket
kitsch
litany
lurid
Machiavellian
malaise
malinger
mantra
maudlin
mercenary
minimalist
misnomer
narcissist
nirvana
non sequitur
nouvea riche
oblivion
ogle
ostentatious
ostracize
panacea
paradox
peevish
perfunctory
philistine
precocious
propriety
quid pro quo
quintessential
red herring
revel
rhetoric
scintillating
spartan
stigma
stoic
suave
Svengali
sycophant
teetotaler
tete-a-tete
tirade
tryst
ubiquitous
unrequited
untenable
vicarious
vile
waft
white elephant
zealous

I didn’t get a whole lot out of the list — brusque is pronounced brusk not broosk, malinger is the faking of an illness rather than a general lassitude (see how I compensate?) — though I suppose the two items I got justifies the cost.

More, though, I’m tempted to come up with a series of lists of words that make one look: douchey, nerdy, over their head professionally, like they’re trying too hard. Two, three, four things come to mind under the general douchey or annoying: sans (hate that), from a _____ perspective or standpoint (hate that too), semifortnightly (gods, that makes me mad), and _______-esque (that one doesn’t bug me so much, really, but I was so mad from the first three that I forgot the fourth and it didn’t seem as funny to have only two strikethroughs in the list.

Working through a presentation with a co-worker recently and found myself referring to Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language“. I downloaded it for my Kindle, read it on the subway ride home. I forgot how funny and cutting Orwell is and how much passion there is behind his plain language. One passage covers it all:

Now that I have made this catalogue of swindles and perversions, let me give another example of the kind of writing that they lead to. This time it must of its nature be an imaginary one. I am going to translate a passage of good English into modern English of the worst sort. Here is a well-known verse from Ecclesiastes:

I returned and saw under the sun, that the race is not to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, neither yet bread to the wise, nor yet riches to men of understanding, nor yet favour to men of skill; but time and chance happeneth to them all.

Here it is in modern English:

Objective considerations of contemporary phenomena compel the conclusion that success or failure in competitive activities exhibits no tendency to be commensurate with innate capacity, but that a considerable element of the unpredictable must invariably be taken into account.

This is a parody, but not a very gross one.

How many times have we seen writing like this in business documents — a simple, elegant thought smothered in bloated verbiage until it loses all of its energy and ability to stimulate even a single nerve ending? At a later point, he distills all of his complaints to two problems:

Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or he is almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not.

And . . .

What is above all needed is to let the meaning choose the word, and not the other way around. In prose, the worst thing one can do with words is surrender to them. Probably it is better to put off using words as long as possible and get one’s meaning as clear as one can through pictures and sensations. Afterward one can choose — not simply accept — the phrases that will best cover the meaning, and then switch round and decide what impressions one’s words are likely to make on another person.

This must be the 20th time I’ve read this in as many years and it still blows me away. Orwell should be among our sacred texts.

I only watched this cuz Presentation Zen told me to. Half-way through, I was bored and wondering if Zen had lost his touch, then wow …

Reminds me of the Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow the story of concentration camp butcher/doctor told in reverse — where by simply changing the direction of a narrative, not only is holocaust undone, but Europe is enriched with a whole new people.

I’ve been realizing just how grateful to McSweeney’s I am. The Joke Book and Book Jokes, Mountain Man Dance Moves, and collections have had me laughing on the subway, at the gym, in restaurants. Then I get this email this morning:

How can you not love being part of this crowd.