Mykala converted my idiosyncratic and decidedly gentle ill-will towards some selfish strangers to something called “Unlikely Retribution”, and here’s how it works. First, a stranger must do something bad, wrong, or otherwise morally repugnant to you. They might cut you off in traffic, spend 5 minutes ordering coffee, or take your parking spot. The offense usually occurs in an incidental way where you don’t directly interact with this person, though that isn’t a requirement.
The stage has been set, then: someone slighted you. To participate in the game, you describe the most unlikely misfortune that you hope your subject faces:
“I hope that they develop a slow leak in their tire, which forces them to drive slightly slower than normal for the rest of the day.”
“I hope their microwave malfunctions, so that it makes noise for 2 minutes, but their food still comes out cold.”
“I hope their remote control batteries die and the replacement batteries are hard to find.”
“I hope they patch the scratches in their car’s paint, and someone dings their door right after they’re done.”
“I hope they ask for extra ketchup packets, and only receive the normal amount of ketchup packets.”
“I hope the handle on their briefcase loosens so that it has only one questionable attachment point and they have to hug it for the rest of the day.”
“I hope they think there is one more stair, but they’re really on the floor and they awkwardly push their foot into nothing.”
Brainstorming such mishaps makes the whole event feel silly, trivializing the slight against you. The game pulls your thoughts out of anger and into humor.
I wish somebody would figure out how to disrupt the car buying process. It’s unimaginable how bad things must have been before you could easily find the models of a certain type in your area — you would’ve been completely at the mercy of the dealer at which you ended up. In this day and age, we can narrow our search from home with CarSoup, reference safety and reliability using hard data rather than here-say, and can make decisions outside the pressures of car price negotiation. But, it’s still bad out there.
We found a Honda Element in our price range that looked like it could work, so we went to see it. “Oh, the car was really dirty! We’re cleaning it up.” We drove up the road to the other lot that the dealer owned, where the car was supposed to be. Wasn’t there. Back to the original dealer — OH — there it is, in the ‘detailing’ department of the original location.
‘Really dirty’ was now downrated to this: “The folks who sold this owned two dogs and we noticed some things in there that we wanted to clean up.” We looked at the car for a while. The front seat was still wet from… shampooing. We wondered what was so dirty. “I guess they took their dogs in the car sometimes—no stains from them or anything.” It smelled like dog and some shampoo. Why do you list a car for sale when it’s not ready to be sold? What has been covered up in the cars where we haven’t seen this process?
We said we’d stop back later. Which we won’t. Their lies mean one things, ours another. “I noticed a list of things to clean on the dash,” said Mykala. “It said ‘disgusting shit stain on seat.’” No matter how reliable, we’ll let someone else buy this just-cleaned, gnawed plastic, shit-stained Honda Element.
For my whole life, school is what has given me meaning. Now, starting my job, I realize that I have to find that meaning on my own. This has been unexpectedly terrifying; the framework in which I lived has melted away. For those accustomed to such existential freedom (to which most have unconsciously adapted), this is nothing — they just… live life, you know? Their adaptation happened gradually since their high school or college careers ended. So, I guess I’m not alone… but I do feel adrift sometimes. I shouldn’t expect too much since it has only been 4 weeks since graduation. Typing it out in black and white, i realize that, wow, it HAS only been 4 weeks since graduation. Life feels a LOT different in the rhythm of a job than it ever did in the rhythm of school. While I struggle to figure this out, I’m going to be a better husband to my wife, spend time with my family, and be better friends with my friends. I’ve been so goal-oriented, that I can’t decide if I should set more of them, or learn to focus my life without them. Probably, as is almost always the answer, a little bit of both.
Sometime in 2003, when this online space was only 4 years old, I thought: “I would love to be a dentist.” The journey is the destination and all that, but the destination is pretty great. So, it’s time to start as a dentist tomorrow. My weeks off since graduation have been wonderful, but what’s even better is that I don’t fear the years ahead the way I did the years of dental school. Somewhere, deep down, you know when what you are doing isn’t sustainable. Like 4 hour nights of sleep or back-to-back hotdog eating contests, you know that this is a pace you can’t sustain. This isn’t that. This is an opportunity to learn, to treat patients, and to grow my relationship with my wife.
“Your 1920x1080 TV takes a 1920x1080 signal, chops the edges off it and then stretches the rest to fit the screen because of decisions made in the 1930s.”
— Matthew Garrett
“120Hz and 240Hz TVs have the potential to show you each 24p frame for exactly 1/24th of a second, perfectly replicating The Way Movies Look, and that’s great. The problem is, it’s hard to make them do that, because of awful motion-smoothing settings that are On by default.”
— Stu Maschwitz
“‘Can I choose?’, Beatrix asks. She’s still confused. She thinks this is like home where one can choose from a selection of things to watch. A well organized list of suggestions and options with clear box cover shots of all of her favorites. I have to explain again that it does not work that way on television. That we have to watch whatever is on and, if there is nothing you want to watch that is on then you just have to turn it off. Which we do.”
— Patrick Rhone
“You know those [unskippable] FBI warning messages that appear at the beginning of DVDs and Blu-ray discs? They’re getting an upgrade—and they’re multiplying.
The US government yesterday rolled out not one but two copyright notices, one to “warn” and one to “educate.” Six major movie studios will begin using the new notices this week.”
— Nate Anderson
“We’ve learned and struggled for a few years here figuring out how to make a decent [television],” he said. “[Apple is] not going to just figure this out. They’re not going to just walk in.”
— (Inspired by) Ed Colligan
So if you take Wikipedia as a
kind of unit, all of Wikipedia, the whole project—every
page, every edit, every talk page, every line of code, in
every language that Wikipedia exists in—that represents
something like the cumulation of 100 million hours of
human thought. I worked this out with Martin Wattenberg
at IBM; it’s a back-of-the-envelope calculation, but it’s
the right order of magnitude, about 100 million hours of
thought.
And television watching? Two hundred billion
hours, in the U.S. alone, every year. Put another way,
now that we have a unit, that’s 2,000 Wikipedia projects
a year spent watching television. Or put still another
way, in the U.S., we spend 100 million hours every
weekend, just watching the ads.
Two years ago, Mykala and I ate a life alteringly great watermelon. The darn thing made you ask questions like “What is truth?” and “Have I known beauty until now?” Ever since, we’ve been on a watermelon quest. Today, we have matched that previously awe-inspiring watermelon: we just had a (part of a gigantic) “Little Bear” brand seedless watermelon (#4032). I didn’t ask any big life questions, but did ask where it was from. Target. Hmm.
“So what exactly hurts?” Mykala asked, trying to get at the root of my non-specific complaints.
“Well, the joints in my hands and feet feel really sore… like from a virus.”
I took 400mg ibuprofen, which got me through yesterday evening’s delicious and exciting visits to Marvel and Masu — then, around 8:30pm, I called Nils to confirm our Big Bike Ride™ to Stillwater tomorrow. After that, bad things began to happen.
I frequently treat my extraction patients to this little lecture: “Don’t take your pain medication when you need it; instead, take it by the clock; that maintains the necessary serum concentrations of the drug and keeps you from experiencing big swings in pain.” Obviously, I hadn’t taken my own advice, and the soreness that resulted took my breath away. I call this the ol’ “hurts to exist” pain, where your best hope is to move your limbs constantly to distract them from the fact that all the muscles in them are screaming.
Then came nausea and fever shivers. 600mg of ibuprofen, sweatpants, sweatshirt, and two comforters were the last I remember of last night. Woke up at quarter to 3 and sent Nils a text which basically said I think my limbs are going to fall off, which will prevent me from biking.
All I could think about was a protein whose name I couldn’t remember and which I have since looked up: collagenase. Elevated production of specific cytokines occur during the immune response, which can result in production of a lot of collagenase… which means your body is chewing through its own tissue in order to make space to fight the infection. Hence, the aches.
At some point last night, the fever finally broke, and after 13 hours of sleep, I’m starting to feel human again. The whole thing seems to coincide with me receiving my license — these severe, short-lived illnesses used to happen when I got my final exam results. Now, it seems my mind finally relaxed when I got my dental license number (I’ve definitively put dental school in my past!), and I quickly got sick. When I was really stressed in dental school, the constant elevated cortisol meant I never got symptoms… I think it’s healthier to be relaxed enough now to have a normal (symptomatic) response to common viruses. It is, however, dumb and I would’ve liked nothing more than to go biking today.
Someday, I hope to have a place with a bookcase like this:
However, I’d be fine if I had these cool suspended bookcases like this:
Or, much more reasonably and realistically, there’s this lovely, cozy little space:
The thing I love about books has nothing to do with nostalgia, but the fact that, when I have a book, I can’t do anything with it other than read. I have this computer here, and I can do any number of things — email, calendar, weather, Wikipedia, and on and on. And on. I should define the context switch — that’s what happens when you’re reading a book, get tripped up by a word, look it up in a dictionary, then return to your original book. The fact that you have to actually put down one book, pick up another, and look for a word focuses your attention and keeps you doing one task. For the entire duration of that physical action, the picking up and setting down, your brain is going dirigible… dirigible… d-i-r-i… have I seen that somewhere before? However, when you have a computer, you just twitch on the alt-tab keyboard shortcut, and suddenly you see your Twitter stream, rather than your thesis. While your computer is pulling up the entry for dirigible, you’re checking the weather forecast for tomorrow.
So, with this awesome, powerful machine, you can keep a bunch of balls up in the air. Your brain becomes accustomed to focusing on tiny bits for short bursts of time, rather than focusing on big chunks for long stretches of time. When I read a long article on a computer, I switch out of it more than I would like, distracting my mind with other (useless, pointless) things.
But when you pick up a book, you’ve just got the book. I find that my mind calms down, knowing there’s nothing else going on — it’s not like my friend posted the funniest picture I’ve ever seen, and I can see it by going 42 pages back from my current page. People are curious… they’ve GOT to see if someone posted that picture. What if, in the past 5 minutes, someone posted something even funnier? And you’re on the road to addiction. But, not so with your book. It’s just the book. This is incredibly calming to my brain. In fact, I remember things more when I read them in a book or magazine. By contrast, on the computer, I have to switch to another program and make notes, just so I remember what I’m supposed to remember.
