Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Dave's LiveJournal:

[ << Previous 20 ]

Sunday, December 11th, 2011
12:44 pm	Recently Read An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser. Shallow, weak-willed non-entity driven to commit horrible crime. An American Crime and Punishment with less philosophy and more money-grubbing (so, really, an American Crime and Punishment). Too long; overbearing narration tells you exactly what each character is thinking even when this is very obvious. Sexually frank for the time, but not explicit. Possibly the last Progressive novel. (Comment on this)
Saturday, December 3rd, 2011
6:41 pm	Recently Read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter, Carson McCullers. In 1930s Georgia, a small group of misfits share an odd connection through their friendship with a kindly deaf-mute man. I've avoided reading this for years and I can't remember why, but I was a fool. Features sharp characterization, a brilliant prose style and a compassionate attitude towards all those rejected by society. I've rarely enjoyed a literary book so much. (Posted under duress while suffering kitten-on-keyboard syndrome). (Comment on this)
Wednesday, November 23rd, 2011
12:37 pm	Yes Walter, I Think There Is a Hidden Message Here Reading the Angel and Faith comic....Angel is obsessed with bringing back one of his victims (I think you all know who, but I won't spoil it), and Faith keeps telling him it's a bad idea, but he's just like "Argh guilt recrimination self-hatred marg", and I just have to wonder how he's going to fuck it up. ("Vampire causes nuclear war, film at 11".) Angel's past and probably future victim likely wasn't a Coen Brothers fan, but I think the Dude's line from the post title sums up what this person should say to Angel. (Comment on this)
Sunday, November 20th, 2011
12:40 pm	Recently Read Consciousness Explained, Daniel Dennett A look at how cutting-edge (as of 1991) brain research affects age-old philosophical problems of consciousness. Dennett argues that while no one (except billions of religious people) really believes in mind-body dualism anymore, people still subconsciously cling to the Cartesian idea of a single brain center where everything "comes together". Dennett points out evidence that consciousness is much more fragmented and chaotic than it seems, and the unity of conscious experience is to a large extent an illusion. There is a lot of fascinating research and insight in this book, but Dennett goes too far when he comes to the conclusion that the objects of conscious experience--qualia, like the taste of food or our experience of color--are illusions that cannot be meaningfully discussed. This has led critics to call the book "Consciousness Ignored" or "Consciousness Explained Away"; it seems that the "hard problem of consciousness" (basically, what the fuck is consciousness) remains unsolved and possibly unsolvable. Still a very valuable book. (Comment on this)
Saturday, November 12th, 2011
8:23 am	My niece found a couple of stray kittens, and since they already have cats (and rabbits, and a chinchilla) and my mother still has the rocket scientists called Tootsie and Tipsy, I took them in. I've decided to name them Coco (grey) and Callie (white) in keeping with the family tradition of giving cats fittingly undignified names. I don't plan to use these names much since, well, what's the point of calling a cat? They've adjusted well over the past week, even if they keep attacking my shoes, my knees when I'm sitting down, the blinds, and above all each other. My efforts to educate them have been stymied by their millisecond attention spans and the deadly effects of Cuteness Proximity when they are sitting still. Still I have high hopes for them. They learned to poop in the box pretty quickly. That indicates a willingness to be good global citizens I think. (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, October 14th, 2011
4:41 pm	Recently Read Snuff, Terry Pratchett. Uninspired Discworld; looks like a Vimes family outing until the Watch gets dragged in to not really do that much. Vimes meets a new species,, deputizes one of them. His first contact protocol is more hygenic than James T. Kirk's, but just as predictable. Also, there are too many sentient species on the Disc already. Few jokes, plot very familiar from earlier Watch books, no real advancement. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, October 13th, 2011
6:29 pm	I just got the first two Buffy Season Nine comics, which were alright. They make frequent mention of whatever the hell happened at the end of Season Eight, and I don't know what that is, except that it's Angel's fault somehow. What I really wanted to post about is this: why does Angel keep fucking up so bad? He keeps trying to atone for his crimes, but every few years he either loses his soul or does some new horrible/stupid thing that he needs to atone for. Maybe the fight against evil would go better if Angel sat out a few rounds. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 21st, 2011
7:12 pm	Recently Re-Read Thucydides, History of the Pelopennesian War, trans. Richard Crawley, revised by Donald Lateiner. Being a democracy doesn't mean that people like you. After the Persian Wars, victorious Athens and some smaller cities formed the Delian League, to protect each other from the hated Mede.* But the Delian League soon came to resemble a protection racket run by Athens, so both the unfortunate League members and other cities who feared Athenian power turned to the mighty Spartans, who were too busy keeping the Helots down at home to bother anyone else. Embassies were sent to the Spartans, to convince them to strike a blow for freedom by destroying the world's first democracy... Thucydides famously presents a cynical view of history, in which "the strong do what they can and the poor suffer what they must". Depressing, but...prove him wrong. The Sicilian Expedition was like a blueprint for Vietnam and Iraq. The actual narrative is long and (due to the structure of the war itself) disjointed and repetitive, but the maps and footnotes in this edition help. It also ends in the middle of the war, in the middle of a sentence, due to Thucydides' death. Many ancient works continued the story from this point, but none had the same importance. *Lousy Mede. I hate that guy. Always with the Zoroastrianism. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 20th, 2011
6:06 am	I Am Losing Faith In the Onion AV Club Outside of the two main actresses, who manage to rise above the material somewhat, 2 Broke Girls was a bag of suck. All the minor characters are ethnic stereotypes, and the jokes are terrible. "You wear knit hats because of Coldplay?" WTF? I laughed more when I was re-reading Thucydides last week. At least Garrett Morris is still employed. (Comment on this)
Thursday, August 25th, 2011
7:22 pm	Anybody See the Moon Lately? Did it Look Pissed Off? I survived the great Quake of 2011. It was really not much to talk about. First the room I was in at the Patent Office shook for about ten seconds. Then we all decided to go outside for a while. Then they told us to go home. AFAIK, nobody was injured, anywhere. That's the solid East Coast bedrock for you, I guess. Hurricane Irene has me more worried. Having come to tire of my hermit-like existence, I had (through the magic of online meetup groups) plans to dance away Saturday night and then spend Sunday lazily floating down the Potomac River. Now neither thing looks like it's going to happen. Cock-blocked by the Coriolis Effect, I guess. (Someday I will regret typing that sentence fragment.) (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, August 14th, 2011
5:29 pm	Daria: The Complete Series I never saw this when it was originally on. Best $29.99 I ever spent. Hilarious and moving by turns, a highly improbable outgrowth of the MTV network and "Beavis and Butthead". (I keep hearing that B&B is a little smarter than it looks. I keep not making the effort to find out. I had to endure enough* kids pretending to be Cornholio in high school, thanks very much.) ( Read more... ) (Comment on this)
Saturday, July 16th, 2011
1:35 pm	Recently Re-Read Plato, Ion, Laches, Symposium, Gorgias, Phaedrus, Euthypro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Protagoras, trans. Benjamin Jowett; Theatetus, trans. Robin H. Waterfield. A grab-bag of dialogues, but they're the ones I have on hand. You can learn a lot from Plato. For instance, if you want a horse trained, you should call an expert in horse training rather than some guy off the street. Also, democracy sucks. Plato can be annoying with his twisted reasoning, which includes having Socrates openly make up a myth when he has no better argument. Still, this philosophy thing was fairly new at the time, so it took a while to work the bugs out. (Don't talk to me about the pre-Socratics. "Everything changes all the time!" "No! Nothing ever changes, ever!" Assholes. If your big contribution to philosophy is "everything is water", you aren't trying hard enough.) Big P set the tone for everything after him, and he is the only philosopher I can stand to read, which must count for something. As for Socrates himself, it's easy to forget that the Athenians saw him as a sinister figure, pro-Spartan and borderline traitorus. ("His real crime was preaching a philosophy that produced Alcibiades and Critias", according to the Cartoon History.) Constantly heaping intellectual humiliation on everyone he talked to can't have helped. This Economist article about what Socrates might do in modern America seems to have a balanced viewpoint of him. (Comment on this)
Sunday, July 10th, 2011
8:52 pm	Our Mass-Produced American Furniture Can Only Hum a Little I was playing Medieval 2: Total War as France today, when I noticed that one of my generals was named Bureau Chanteur. Well, at least they got the gender right. And he turned out to be a pretty good general, driving the nefarious English away from Bruges. You go, Bureau. (Comment on this)
Saturday, July 9th, 2011
8:48 pm	Star Trek III: The Search For Spock, Conclusion There's no consensus on the merits of this movie, and I kind of go back and forth on it myself. It certainly has a lot of good moments, but do they make up for the bad? ( Read more... ) (Comment on this)
Tuesday, July 5th, 2011
7:35 pm	Recently Read The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath. I got this for free from a makeshift lending library some crazy person set up in a break room at the Patent Office. I wanted to like it but it didn't make that much of an impression. I already knew that it sucked to be a woman and/or psychiatric patient in the 1950s. Obviously I've dealt with depression and such issues myself, but I feel like this story has been told better in the years since this book was published. Desperate Networks, Bill Carter. The inside story of the four major TV networks in the 2003-2007 era. The book already feels a little outdated; who honestly cares about Desperate Housewives or Lost anymore? From my (admittedly nerdy) perspective, the major networks have been largely irrelevant for years anyway. The Disappearance of Haruhi Suzumiya, by Naguru Tanigawa. Fourth in the original series of light novels that inspired the anime. Will be released as a DVD movie (in the US) in September. Good, but not a good jumping-on point. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 29th, 2011
8:33 pm	Star Trek III: The Search For Spock, Part Nine Recap: In a room on the Klingon ship, McCoy talks to the unconscious Spock. He asks for help with Spock's katra, but gets no answer. McCoy admits that he missed Spock, and he says he could not stand to lose Spock again. ( Read more... ) (Comment on this)
Thursday, June 23rd, 2011
8:33 pm	Star Trek III: The Search For Spock, Part Eight Recap: On the Genesis planet, Kirk and company catch up with Saavik and Spock, knocking out their Klingon guards. Kirk stands for a moment over the body of David, then takes off his jacket and covers his son with it before rejoining the others. McCoy scans the resurrected Spock (who is now unconscious) and confirms that he is aging rapidly, along with the planet, and that he has no mind. ( Read more... ) (Comment on this)
Monday, June 20th, 2011
6:29 pm	Star Trek III: The Search For Spock, Part Seven Recap: Kruge beams up to his Bird-of-Prey, leaving Saavik, David and Spock guarded on the Genesis Planet. The cloaked BoP tries a sneak attack on the Enterprise, but Chekov spots it before it cloaks and Sulu and Kirk visually track it by its "energy surge". Kirk orders all power to weapons and shoots the Bird of Prey seconds after it decloaks to fire. However the damaged Klingon ship gets its own shot in, which destroys Scotty's jury-rigged control system and makes the Enterprise a sitting duck. ( Read more... ) (Comment on this)
Wednesday, June 15th, 2011
6:34 pm	Star Trek III: The Search For Spock, Part Six Recap: On the Genesis planet, Saavik and David find a naked Vulcan boy in a snowdrift. The boy is seemingly mindless and unable to speak; David says this is the regenerated form of Spock. Before they can beam up, however, the Grissom is destroyed by the arriving Bird of Prey. Saavik and David hear what's happening over the communicator, and when Grissom stops responding they realize that they're probably next. ( Read more... ) (Comment on this)
Sunday, June 12th, 2011
2:13 pm	Star Trek III: The Search For Spock, Part Five Recap: Kirk and Sulu visit the hospitalized McCoy. Kirk explains the mind-meld situation to Bones while Sulu talks to an unfriendly guard, then the two of them take out the guards and escape with McCoy. On the Excelsior, Scotty has a run-in with the douchebag Captain Styles, then proceeds to the transporter room. ( Read more... ) (Comment on this)