Mmeh...

I don't really have to much to say. I finally go caught up on my Google Reader on my phone, and that made me feel like I should do a blog posting of my own. I only follow five blogs on the Google Reader, but several of them typically post multiple times a day. If I don't stay on top of it, I fall way behind.

The weird thing is that I tend to not even like one of the blogs I follow. "Bad Astronomy" is its name, and it is by a sciency type who strikes me as very anti-religious. I myself am rather sciency, and I believe that the universe is about 15 billion years old and in evolution and all that, but I am also a Lutheran, and while I believe in God, I also believe that the Bible is not meant to be taken as 100% literal, so I don't think that a belief in science is incompatable with my faith. I think that my view about that is fairly mainstream, and many people don't have a problem with things like the proper teaching of science in school. The minority of creationists are simply very vocal and influential. Anywho, "Bad Astronomy" frequently seems to lump people like me in with the super-hardcore creationists, which I don't care for.
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Internet Boredom

I was bored on the internet, and discovered that one of the many possible anagrams of my name is "Onscreen Strip Joust". Thought that would be a good name for a blog, so I changed the name. So that's that.

On an unrelated note, I should vent a little bit about a frustrating experience I had while playing World of Warcraft earlier today. I started a rogue, which is a class I haven't explored much, and was in Dun Morogh, the starting area for dwarfs and gnomes. My character is a gnome, by the way. Having just reached level 10, I was doing a couple quests in a quarry full of these ape-like fellows, when along came a level 60 human death knight, who asked if I wanted help. I said, "no thanks", and continued killing the monsters, or "mobs" as they are referred to by people who play. She then ran into this cave on the side of the quarry that was full of some slightly different ape-like fellows who I also had to kill. Just as I started targeting the creatures so I could fight them, she would kill them. I kept fighting the ones she didn't kill first, and I ended up pretty deep in the cave. When I tried to make my way back out, there were too many mobs near the entrance and I couldn't stay alive long enough to kill any of them. I got very frustrated and had to stop playing for a while. The moral of the story is this: If you play an online-game, and you have a high-level character, but spend your time in the starting area for low level characters, you are a dick...or in this case, a bitch.

That is all.

Boring afternoon

I'm having one of those afternoons where I don't really want to do much of anything. I spent the morning watching South Park episodes on Netflix, and then I played around with Google's mobile RSS reader. Then Anna came home as I was about to make myself some lunch because she has to go back into work tonight. We put in a Star Trek: Voyager that we have home from Netflix, and she dozed off.
Now she is asleep on the couch, and I can't decide if I should watch more South Park or maybe put in the Arrol Morris doc I have from Netflix about the pet funeral industry. Perhaps I should play WoW or read a book. Nothing sounds appealing. Maybe I will just sit here and watch her sleep...or is that creepy?
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Google Reader

I just set up the Google Reader. It's an RSS reader that you manage from a computer, but that can be accessed from your phone. I set it up with the blogs that I was reading the most frequently, those of Neil Gaiman, Wil Wheaton, and Warren Ellis. I will admit that this morning after setting up the reader, I have read more of their blogs that I had prior to today combined, but maybe it will inspire me to use this thing some more. We'll see.

Zombie Attack!

Currently, Twitter is suffering for a denial of service attack, which is leaving me with no outlet to express myself. Thus, I turn to my oft neglected blog.

Last night, I sent a tweet that any book or movie with vampires in it would be better it the vampires were zombies. I feel that I should elaborate on that with a few examples. Nearly everyone I know is not a teenage girl, so most of the people I know who have read "Twilight" didn't like it. The most common complaints I have heard involve bad prose, bad plot structure, and incredibly dumb characters. I don't have an opinion either way, because I have only read the sample chapter on the Barnes & Noble e-reader, but replacing the vampires with zombies fixes everything.

In "Zombie Twilight", Bella leaves sunny Arizona to live with her dad in cloudy Washington and is given a truck by him when she arrives. The next day, she drives to her new school. She goes to a few classes and meets some people, and then goes to lunch. Across the room, she make eye contact with a boy, a boy like no one she has ever seen. In fact, everyone at his table looks like him, with skin a putrid grey pallor, and dead eyes that never blink.
"Who is he?" Bella asks a girl whose name she has forgotten.
"That's Edward. Everyone tries to stay away from him."
Bella decides to go and introduce herself. Edward and his friends eat her.
Fin.

Much shorter, no time for bad plots and derivative prose.

Here's the plot of Anna Rice's "Interview with the Zombie":
A writer goes into a room with a zombie and gets eaten.

I'm still thinking about the plot of "Zombie Dracula", but I think in that Dracula would be a necromancer, raising armies of the undead to raze London to the ground.

I hope Twitter starts working soon.

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Oil Change

Just a quick entry while I get my oil changed. I am impressed my the old TV her at the service center. I don't know if it means they have been open for a long time or that they can't afford a better set. I am excited about this oil change, because it is my first in this car. I don't think it is worth my time to do it myself because you don't save that much money, and you don't have to figure out where to dispose of the used oil.



It is a really nice day, and I think I will do something fun outside when they are done with my car. Can't decide if that will be a bike ride or some yard work. Yard work could be fun if it isn't too hot and if my neighbor doesn't try to talk to me. If he does talk to me then I will probably try to clean out my old car that he wants to buy.



I think they are almost done with my car. Time to go.

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Nice day, part 2: The Puppies

Here are the puppies that were mentioned before. I don't know if you can see them, but they really were cute.
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Nice Day

It's a nice day here in Menahga. Maybe a little cool, but I like it. I walked over to Spirit Lake, and thought I would share the view. The air is cool, and there is just a slight breeze. As you can see, the water is almost like glass.

I don't know if it shows up in my picture, but there is some kind of radio tower across the lake from me. I wonder if it is the tower my phone uses? I have always enjoyed walking and being outside, but I am very fussy about my temperature. I don't like being too hot, so I don't care for the middle of summer. I suppose that is also why I never played many sports...too sweaty.

The sun has poked out from behind the clouds. That might of been a better picture, but I don't know how to do that in the middle of an e-mail, which is how I am writing this. Some other people just showed up here. I think they are having some kind of mid-afternoon picnic. They say the frog are out.

From where I sit, I can hear several birds singing, but I can also hear cars and trucks on the highway, which is only a few blocks from the lake. I have always found the sounds of nature and civilization to complement each other in the most interesting ways. Like me blogging from my phone at a picnic table by a beautiful glassy lake, across from what might be my cell tower.

The people who stopped her actually wanted to walk their puppies. They are very cute. I took a picture, but I don't know how to add it at this point. I'm not good at identifying puppy breeds, but they are either chihuahuas or golden labs.
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Trepidation about Netflix selection

I am finding that I am especially anxious about my Netflix selection that is slated to arrive tomorrow. It is the movie Happy Endings, which is classified as a Independent/Romance/Comedy/Gay-Lesbian movie. It has Lisa Kudrow and Maggie Gyllenhaal, who I normally like, but it is described as "a series of connected vignettes". That choice of phrase makes me a little nervous about the film. Add to that that one of the vignettes is described thusly: "a gay man discovers that his partner may (or may not) be the father of their friend's baby".

Now, I don't have anything against a movie that has gay romance in it. My problem with it is that in this day and age, it seems like every movie with gay romance is trying to do for homosexual on-screen romance what Guess Who's Coming to Dinner did for inter-racial on-screen romance. These days, only the most conservative kooks think anything of it when a black and white couple is seen on TV or in a movie, but when you put two men or two women together, it gets some attention.

I remember in my twelfth-grade English class, I learnt that nothing is ever colored red unless it symbolizes something (red blood, a rose, a red dress, red drapes, etc.). Movies are the same way right now--No one is ever gay, unless it means something. I don't think I have seen any movies that had a gay character that didn't have some huge aspect of the plot hinge on that character's sexuality. I really think that is sad. I look forward to someday when movies can have characters who turn out to be gay or straight without their sexual identity being a major plot point. Sadly, movies these days are not able to have characters with gay relationships without being about gay relationships.

I am kind of burnt out on serious thought about this issue after #amazonfail, so I really hope that Happy Endings will not be too much about gay relationships, but given the desciption, I don't really see that happening. And that raises another point...

Why do so many movies that depict gay relationships involve one of the partners either just discovering that they prefer the same sex or cheating with the opposite sex? That is just another face of the problem that movies so far cannot have gay relationships without being about gay relationships, and apparently a great number of filmmakers think that without including heterosexuality as a contrast they won't appeal to the "mainstream audience". I don't get it at all.

If anyone actually reads this, and they know of any movies that involve gay relationships without becoming some kind of preachy thing about homosexuality, let me know. Any gay or lesbian romance or romantic comedy that isn't about homosexuality but is just a movie where the characters happen to be of the same gender...I don't think it exists yet, but if it does, and you know about it, let me know. I would love to see it.

First attempt at e-mail

As you can see, my wife's Mac is way across the room, so I thought this would be a good opportunity to experiment with some of the mobile capabilities of my blog. In the interest of full disclosure, you should know that my laptop is within arms length, but is shut down. It is a PC.



I don't have too much experience typing on a phone, so you will have to forgive any typos and spelling errors. Oh, let me check here...I guess my phone will let me spell check before I send this, so that's good. I am hoping to be able to use this e-mail stuff so that if I have a good thought while I am out and about, I can get it in the blog before it passes. I also think most pictures that make it to my blog will get there this way, since we don't use the camera much except when we go on a trip. "We", in this case, is my wife and I.



We not much else to say. I hope this e-mail thing works. If so, I might do a few more posts with pics of my excursion today and tomorrow to see Jim Gaffigan in Fargo. Also to see my sister-in-law.

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Celebrities and Twitter Ratio

A few days ago, one of my friends sent a tweet wondering why celebrities only follow other celebrities on Twitter. Other than a few thoughts about respecting the privacy of their less famous (regular?) friends, I have no idea. However, ever since then, I have been thinking about how Twitter could be used as a way of judging how much of a celebrity someone is. This would be based on the ratio of the number of people following them to the number of people they follow. Here are some examples:

As I write this, I have 21 followers on Twitter, and I am currently following 45 people, so my Twitter Ratio would be 21/45, which is about .47, so I would not be considered a celebrity.

Rainn Wilson, who plays Dwight on the American version of The Office has 442,732 followers and only follows 85 people, so his Twitter Ratio is 442,732/85 which is 5208.6118, considerably larger than mine.

I would think that anyone who has a Twitter Ratio greater than one could be considered a celebrity. I have not figured out too many people's Twitter Ratios yet, but I think that a scale could be devised that determines how much of a celebrity someone is based on this number. There would have to be some rules in place so that people could not inflate their Ratio. For instance, Brent Spiner, who played Data on Star Trek: The Next Generation only follows four people, so his ratio is 57880.5, and I doubt anyone would argue that he is ten times the celebrity that Rainn Wilson is.

The ratio would also not apply very well to the many non-persons who tweet, such as TheOnion and SciFri, as these generally follow anyone who follows them, and would have ratios very close to or equal to one. There are also many celebrities on Twitter who pretty clearly aren't actually doing their own tweets, and their Ratios would be less meaningful as well.

I don't know if this idea has already been put out there by anyone before, but I think it is kind of fun. Kind of like figuring out how many degrees away from Kevin Bacon someone is.

In fact, now that I have written all of this, it occurs to me that the number of followers you have tells how big of a celebrity you are, all by itself. What the Twitter Ratio instead measures is how down to earth a celebrity is. It tells how many followers someone has for every one person they follow. Rainn Wilson is more down to earth than Brent Spiner, because he has a lower Twitter Ratio. I suppose that is also apparent when one reads what they tweet about...

Let's try this again

I got a new phone recently, one of those fancy ones that does the internet and all that sort of stuff. I started getting Twitter updates on my phone, and started sending them more frequently as well. The whole micro-blogging thing is kind of fun, so I thought I should give the actual blogging another shot as well.

I haven't been too successful with previous attempts at blogs, but I see that a lot of the people that I am following on Twitter have blogs, and looking at some of the posts, I realized that not every blog post has to be a Pulitzer Prize winning essay. Of course, I already knew that most aren't, but I have such high standards for myself. On Twitter, I saw links for well known bloggers, such as Wil Wheaton and Dooce, and saw that the key to a good blog was more of a doing it regularly type thing, and the good writing follows from that. That is true of any writing, but the point is to stick with it, and to post something pretty often.

There are plenty of things that I could blog about, especially now that I have seen what some of the most read blogs are doing. I often spend big chunks of time reading about whatever random thing catches my interest on the internet. If I just make myself post some links and write a little something about why whatever it was caught my fancy, then I will be on my way to having a serviceable blog.

To paraphrase Will Riker in Star Trek: First Contact, "Don't try to be a great blogger, just be a blogger and let the internet make its own judgments."