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Friday, December 26  

xmas in sdiego

rain instead of snow; presents opened starting at 12 noon; turkey dinner etcetera. good day, restful. good loot. a rousing game of scrabble, british rules. lost, though - pity. but the post-game haiku was quite decent. in some ways, xmas is a funny concept.

Wednesday, December 10  

TWAS

Glenn MacDonald is some kind of genius, or so I contend, and some day I hope to grow up to write as well as he does: TWAS 460: Mandy Moore (and the iTunes Music Store).

p.s. It has a lot more to do with the store than Moore. Safe read for pop-music cynics.

Monday, December 8  

Firing History

Since I've been thinking statistically lately -- which is to say, doing my obsessive counting thing -- it occured to me on this firing day to see how many times I've taken this particular kiln up to cone 10. The records are sketchy before 2001, but I've got proof of 20, and it could be as much as 30 times. So one might expect that by now I'd have seen the whole range of possibilities, all its quirks and tendencies and flaws. But nope - each time there are things that surprise me, force me to make adjustments, and cause me to consider how the outcome will be different.

I certainly learn more about the process by firing a range of glazes - usually about 6 glaze batches in each kiln. Even though these remain fairly stable, and some of them I've used for years, collectively they reflect all the minor variations of each firing. I probably learn most from the glazes I know like old friends, because when they do something new, its a sign that something changed on their way to melting and cooling again. I learn a lot from the new glazes, and glazes I'm currently testing too, but usually with less of a basis for comparison. More surprises, but less wisdom.

The whole process is far more uncertain and somewhat out of control than I think people would expect; the only constant is that something odd will happen every time. I think of how much more reliable firing pottery has become with all the mechanical advances of the 20th century, but how much is still left unknown - at least for the individual studio potter.

And I guess, given the option to push a microwave button of sorts and just have the pots come out exactly as planned (high tech!), or to keep things as they are, that I'd choose all the variety and wondering and uncertainty, even at the expense of the pots that are a bust, a disappointment, my contribution to the landfill outside of town. For every one of these, there's far more life to the process, more discovery, and a satisfaction -- on those rare days when it all goes right -- that can't be had any other way.

Saturday, December 6  

Baroque

I'm reading Neal Stephenson's massive novel Quicksilver and really enjoying it. Everything about it is epic, and he seems to have deliberately given himself space for a grand scope and obsessive detail all in one. It's not an action story, the plot is slowly evolving and takes many casual digressions, but the man knows how to write and his characters are real and I think it's fascinating to explore all the topics that he's interested in enough to write about. A good writer is by definition a good thinker, right?

I can see why some of the Snowcrash/Cryptonomicon faithful are jumping ship, as the trend of the reviews at Amazon seems to suggest; this is the same writer, but a very different approach and subject. Actually, the "good, but not for everyone" opinion is the one I'd adhere to so far, but isn't that the case for anything that's actually good, as opposed to just generic enough that no one objects?

I like the focus on Alchemy, and the revelation that it was an ongoing pursuit with what evolved into our modern notion of Science; almost like the Neaderthal competing with Homo Sapiens and losing out. Especially that Newton and others of extreme prominence in the science area were also seriously exploring alchemy, and that this was downplayed by later scientists and scholars who couldn't comfortably reconcile the two. History is written by the winners, no matter what the subject is, I guess.

The idea of Alchemy reminds me of making pots - a modern day version. If ceramics ain't alchemy, then I don't know what is. Stephenson's descriptions of the Society members working in the lab, furnaces and tools and vials of strange materials... that's it!

Apparently though, the three parts are each separate and feature different characters, so I'm just scratching the surface thus far. Future reports forthcoming.

Thursday, December 4  

Anniversary[s]

I've been thinking about the yearly cycles that make up the anniversary for various events lately, in particular the fact that I've now been working on the DePauw website for 4 years... a lot longer than I'd ever expected, and much more happily as well (in general). I know an astoundingly larger amount of stuff about the web, computers, design and digital tech now than I did, and probably more than I ever thought I would. It's interesting to not so much watch myself learn, as to look back and see how much learning happened when I wasn't really paying attention to it. A lot.

It's also just recently been the 3 year mark for this website - my first and only - started way back when the web boom looked like it still had some legs, Oct. 2000. Not that that's why I started it, or that subsequent events have mattered at all, to me. That first month, my stats show that I tallied 81 visits -- most of them undoubtably mine. This past month, Nov. '03, that's improved to 2164 visits -- most of them certainly not mine, and likely from people I'll never meet. The power of the web continues undisturbed.

On a related topic, the aforementioned DePauw site that I'm nominally responsible for just had it's first month of 10 million hits (that's 438,144 visits, to put things in perspective). Where do we go from here? Up, but slower?

Tuesday, December 2  

The Matrix Revisited

So I'm aware that I never returned to the topic of the Matrix triliogy after seeing the third movie a few weeks back, and I think this falloff in enthusiasm for the topic mirrors my feelings about the conclusion -- not greatly disastified or dissapointed, per se, but just sort of like the whole thing slowed to a stop of it's own volition and requires extra motivation to getting it rolling again.

As my previous post of predictions and etcetera would suggest, I could easily make a list of things that didn't live up to my hopes. But I won't -- that's just carping. Criticism shouldn't take the place of creative contribution.

I will say that my primary grudge lives at the meta level, the place where the intent and aesthetic of the film was decided, and that I can't understand why many of these decisions were made by people who I'd come to expect so much more from.
It includes these issues:

1. The philosophical depth of the series ends early on in Revolutions and is never mentioned again. Almost as if these scences were cut from the end in favor of action sequences or (horrors!) were seen as disposable. This undercuts their worth and purpose in the first two films.

2. Ditto with the action inside the matrix. Unlike the first two films, Revolutions takes place almost entirely outside the virtual world, so that it loses the tension and ying/yang between the two worlds that was so compelling.

3. This results in a movie too similar to so many others, especially with its heavy reliance on action, long long long fight scenes, and special effects. Even when these were good, which is less often than previously, they make the whole thing feel like an amped up Starship Troopers, not the final installment of something infinitely better. this is baaaaad.

4. Many of the big questions from Reloaded (see my previous post) were resolved too quickly (such as if Zion is real) or seemingly never even considered. A real missed opportunity to keep some of the intellectual suspense alive. Even more critical given #3 above, since the formulaic action movie stuff was a predictable as dirt.

The real consequence of the letdown in Revolutions is that as the conclusion of all that had come before, it dilutes the significance of the previous films. That's exactly what I, and I suspect so many others, were fearful of and I think it goes beyond the usual problem of just heightened expectations. Certainly it's a lot to expect a creative work to continue at such a high level, or conclude in a way that satisfies the most viewers; but it's also the responsibilty of the people who succeeded so well and created those expectations in the first place. It's hard not to see the trilogy in a much-diminished way now, and that's sad because it's so typical of hollywood sequels. Way too pedestrian a finish for something that started so brilliantly.