A-Bomb A-Holes, Amazing Aloy and Auditing Life

The word of the week is tremulous.

Jan 8 - Pixar... X-Wings?

Let's start the week out right: with Star Wars!

Not just *any* Star Wars though, but a 'What if?' kinda teaser:

What if Pixar had made a Star Wars animated film, along the lines of Cars?

Cue a cute and very well-done trailer:

Jan 9 – Horizon: Zero Dawn

Wow! While looking for something different to watch here and there at work this week, I stumbled upon this 'cutscene assembly movie' from the recent videogame Horizon: Zero Dawn, which is described as:

Horizon: Zero Dawn is an exhilarating action role playing game developed by the award winning Guerrilla Games, creators of PlayStation’s venerated Killzone franchise. As Horizon: Zero Dawn’s main protagonist Aloy, a skilled hunter, explore a vibrant and lush world inhabited by mysterious mechanized creatures. Embark on a compelling, emotional journey and unravel mysteries of tribal societies, ancient artifacts and advanced technologies that will determine the fate of this planet, and of life itself.

Here's a synopsis review that doesn't spoil too much about the story:

I quite enjoyed the 'cutscene movie' which was almost 1.5 hours long and excellently written: for a near-future story, it had great depth and the main protagonist of Aloy was an engaging character all on her own. I especially liked her sense of curiousity, which drove her to become what her world needed.

Great job, Guerilla Games - more stories like this, please!

Jan 10 – Wisdom from Beyond

Some profoundly wise words today from a 27-year-old young woman, who wanted to share them with the world shortly before dying of cancer a week ago on January 4th 2018. She had her whole life ahead of her, and speaks clearly about how her looming passing put her time here into clarity:

 

Jan 11 – Pseudoscience

Ah, the ignorant things I see people type online of a day...

Pseudoscience especially: it really IS true that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and people are willing to listen to anything that sounds somewhat plausible, despite there being so little science involved that you couldn't fill a thimble with it.

Such as this posting, by an ardent anti-climate-change commenter, who has NO idea how science works, but is quite vocal in his opinion of how he thinks science works:

That's right folks - this is 'science' to some people...

 A common thread among folks like the guy above is that they usually offer YouTube videos as 'proof' of their claims, or links to non-scientific blogs. In Matthew's case, he pointed to the video below, which contains such tenuous and flimsy pseudoscientific premises that anyone with an ounce of scientific knowledge would dismiss them immediately:

We live in an age where anyone with internet access can find solid scientific data, thousands of sites, yet garbage videos like this draw people in like moths to flames.

I begin to see where pundits from the sixties decried the death of knowledge when they coined the term 'boob tube' as people tuned into television, and tuned out their brains...

Jan 12 – 2018's Films?

On a lighter note: this year's going to be FULL of fine films!

Here's a HUGE LIST of 44 of the biggest movies coming out in the next 11.5 months, and of that list, 14 are of mild to MAJOR interest to me, as follows:

Feb 16 - Black Panther( HECK YEAH! )

Feb 23 - Annihilation( interesting? )

March 9 - A Wrinkle In Time( kinda...? )

March 16 - Tomb Raider( interesting? )

March 30 - READY PLAYER ONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!

April 6 - A Quiet Place( Horror, so I may rent and watch it with the lights on )

May 4 - Avengers: Infinity War( mostly interesting? )

May 25 - Solo: A Star Wars Story( interesting? )

June 1 - DEADPOOL 2!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

June 15th - THE INCREDIBLES 2!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

July 6 - Ant Man and The Wasp( interesting and funny? )

Nov 21 - WRECK-IT RALPH 2!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Dec 21 - Aquaman ... and also Bumblebee!

As you can see from the list above, many are sequels or reboots, but on the whole everything looks good enough to see in the theatres... which would be a BIG change for me from 2017, where I saw about six films in total on the silver screen.

Of all of them though, it's a three-way tie between Deadpool, Ready Player One and Wreck It Ralph... those three alone will make 2018 a memorable movie year!

Jan 13 – WTF, Hawaii???

For the millions of people living in Hawaii, today was terrifying:

Though it turned out to be a false alarm, I can only imagine the horror and helplessness people were feeling there: there were reports of parents pushing their children down manhole covers into the sewers for shelter, among other things. 

What stunned me though was that so many people were laughing it off online: comments ranged from "great joke!" to "I wouldn't want to live in Hawaii today" to "I keep hoping this isn't a joke" - the last comment should tell you how many Neanderthals are still alive today and learn to use social media.

I never thought that the world could so easily return to the state of fear akin to that of Cuban missile crisis in the sixties, with nuclear annihilation was only a few breaths away. I grew up in the 1980s, with the threat of MAD hanging over all our heads from the US - Russian Cold War standoff, but it was never immediately real because the public wasn't intimately and immediately aware of developments.

Cue Twitter and 45's penis-size contest via nuclear proxy, and here we are today. I can only hope that everyone who voted for 45 had enough of a shock today to begin re-thinking their support of the madman with the nuclear button...

Jan 14 – Life Audits

I spend much of my time thinking, in addition to doing.

While most of my doing is humdrum, day-to-day tasks at work or the samesuch at home, my thinking tends to rove all over the place... or at least, it used to.

For the last few years, much of my thinking has been in 'survival mode' aka how to make money stretch, how to get a better job, how to overcome my health issues. Little time was spent thinking about fun things, or the future, or even interests outside the narrow scope of immediate entertainment, or writing.

Going into 2018 with a better financial sense of how this year is going to turn out month-to-month means that my thinking can finally escape survival mode and get back to the business of living life by examining it from a far freer scope.

Part of that means looking ahead, as I mentioned above: where do I want to be in the near / far term, what do I want to be doing, and how do I want to get there?

As is often the case, LifeHacker has an article on just this sort of thing form back in 2013: Performing A Life Audit. It asks some excellent questions, such as:

·       What life do I want? In 5, 10, 40 years?

·       What areas of my life could be improved?

·       What’s my motivation?

·       What do I believe in?

·       What do I consider essential?

·       What does “meaningful” mean to me?

These questions, among others, will help you get a handle on where you want to be and how you're going to get there. As I described to my girlfriend today over a nice relaxing lunch at Garrick's Head Pub, for years I've felt the disconnection between my knowledge of what I need to do and my ability to achieve it, akin to seeing a series of handholds rising up a wall towards success... but the bottom one is just out of reach, no matter how hard I strained or jumped towards it.

My hope is that a firm financial plan will provide the boost that I need to grasp that first run towards a far better future this year, in all respects of my life.

It's been a good week: while I've made little progress on my novel, I made BIG progress in the financial side of things, and my health's teadily improving( I swam twice this week! )ao I'm going into this coming week with a steady stride...

New Year, New Thoughts, New Perspectives

The word of the week is obdurate.

Jan 1 - Four Day Mini-Vacation II

Christmas AND New Year's worked out well this year!

This was my second 4-day weekend in a row, and I took it easy for the most part, using the time to give my core muscles a rest as well as my eyestrain; the muscles around my right eye are still bothering me slightly at the end of the day, though I no longer have to wear sunglasses at night to counteract bright lights - mostly.

After a relaxing morning, I met my friend Simon at Caffe Fantastico in the afternoon to just chat and catch up, as I hadn't seen him since he gave me such amazing feedback about my first novel's most recent draft back in October 2017. While Caffee Fantastico is rather loud at times, its location at the very same Parkside Hotel where I swim is conveniently within walking distance of my home. Also, they have Phillips Dark Matter on tap, so that was nice too, as I rarely have alcohol these days due to my regular headaches.

Later on, my lady joined me there for a while, so we enjoyed the ambiance of being in a different place than our usual hangouts and our conversation was as always delightfully deep on a variety of topics.

It was a great way to start the new year!

 Jan 2 – Reward Show!

At last!

I promised myself that I wouldn't watch any new episodes from my favorite shows( Trollhunters, Voltron, Star Wars Rebels, et al )until I finished the edits on my v4.5 draft for my first novel, but as progress has been extremely slow one that front due to financial stress and health issues, I gave myself a slight break for 2018, I picked ONE show to allow myself to watch: Trollhunters!

Guillermo Del Toro's amazing show - Season 2!

It's tragic that the original voice actor for the show's main character, Jim, was killed in June 2016 in a freak accident when his SUV rolled loose and pinned him against a brick wall. Anton Yelchin was a rising young Hollywood star, best known for his role as Chekhov in the new Star Trek films and by all accounts a wonderful human being; he plays the part of Jim well, and notes from the TrollHunters producers state that they were able to integrate all of his pre-recorded dialogue into this second season, which in a way allows him to stick around with his fans a little longer...

I'm going to take my time watching the series for the next few months, rewarding myself with an episode only at the end of weeks where I've made solid progress on completing my draft, with the goal of having it ready for my critique group and a few others to go through before the summer arrives in June - the anniversary of Anton's passing.

It's fitting, and I think Anton would understand.

Jan 3 – DONE with eBay sales

While I was pleased with my latest eBay sale, I've almost run out of stuff to sell.

Also, it's getting damned expensive to do business online, with shipping costs and eBay fees eating up huge percentages of profits, especially now that PayPal and eBay have gone their separate ways.

For example, as I mentioned a few weeks ago, I managed to sell my rather rare Crossbows & Catapults game collection for a decent $200 price, which was great as the money came in handy for a bill that was due a few days later.

But man, those fees - look at what I paid  for the 'privilege' of selling on eBay:

eBay Fee: C $36.47     Shippo Fee: $46.57  = $83.04

So, if my price was $200.00, then my total profit after fees was $116.96 - ARGH!

What gets me are the new fees, courtesy of Shippo, the company that eBay is now using instead of PayPal and who essentially sits there with a pretty interface between you and shipping companies so they can charge you a fortune for doing essentially nothing. I should've gone with my first instinct and printed up the label on CanadaPost with my business account, but I guess I had to learn a lesson... again.

Now, I may be mistaken, and the Shippo fee may have been rolled into the total fee paid for the shipping label to send to the receiver... but that doesn't really make sense. I will look into it this week by contacting Shippo by email, now that the holiday shopping craziness has died down a bit so I can get an answer in a reasonable timeframe. I suspect that I'm right, and if that's the case I won't be using eBay to sell anything any more, instead switching to local services like craigslist, Kijiji and VarageSale, among others, most of which don't have substantial fees - or any fees at all.

Jan 4 – Stopping Online Stupidity

As some of you know, I've been fighting a fairly lonely battle online for the last year against stupidity, ignorance and even malicious misinformation when it comes to climate change in various FBook groups that I frequent. Here's why I do what I do, in a nutshell, pushing back against people spreading pseudoscience:

Thankfully, my mostly-solo endeavours of the last year have been bolstered recently by the arrival of almost a dozen pro-science online friends, and amongst us we've managed to hold the line against the worst of the climate-change crazies. Which is quite a feat, as the least-knowledgeable are somehow the most vocal in their protestations against scientific evidence in favour of their opinions...

Being polite doesn't help with cognitive dissonance...

While most of the self-titled 'skeptics' are indeed rabid climate-change deniers and defend their opinions in the face of logic, reason and evidence, many others just don't know where to turn in the tsunami of disinformation out there. When presented with proper information, some of those are quite grateful for the help:

For the new year, since I'm no longer have to ‘go it alone' in pushing back, I've also decided to adopt a single resolution for online debate - Tolerance:

It's my hope that in 2018, we'll see less and less of the fake-skeptic on FBook, and more people who are just unable to process the vast amounts of information and need help in finding proper scientifically accurate sources for what's happening in the field of climate change, once without hugely-bent agenda-driven biases, from either side.

It should be an interesting year, hopefully less tiring too!

Jan 5 – Who ARE these people?

I guess I'm just out of it...

By it, I mean g33k culture: I have little idea what's going on nowadays, if 2017's conventions are any indication. That's greatly concerning to me, as I've always been of the opinion that I keep up with g33k culture: I used to love Attack Of The Show along with many other g33ky media I kept up with what was happening.

Yet when I went online this week to see the latest cosplays( such skill! )it was a shock: I only recognize about one in 20 of the characters, a majority which seem to be from more recent anime shows, and there was a distinct lack of any scifi / fantasy or videogame characters that I know. See if you recognize any of these:

This normally wouldn’t be a big deal, but it made me wonder if I'm living in my own little 'g33k bubble' - not paying attention to anything that I'm not already used to, something that could also happen easily with Google when you filter out news items that you don't really care about...

Anyway, it's not a HUGE deal, but it makes me wonder if I do end up going to a convention in a year or two( finally! )if I will even recognize a quarter of what's going on around me.

Then again, 2018's going to be DAMN busy for me, so maybe I need to your off and I can pick up my g33k-cred again in 2019 or 2020.

Jan 6 – Family Finances

Today was a long time in coming. - and worth the wait!

For some time, my sister and I have wanted to have a 'family budget talk' with my parents, to get us ALL on the same page as to where we stand now financially... and use that to move us all forward towards attainable financial goals.

Part of the stress that I've continuously felt for the last number of years is not knowing if I or my sister would have to set money aside to support my parents in any given month, as we didn't know what their financial situation was exactly. While they appear to be doing well, some months were not so stable, and today's talk was in part specifically to know where they stood - which succeeded admirably.

All numbers are in the ballpark, but privacy-adjusted - and I'm NOT in the positive EOY!

I presented them with my 'Budget Worksheet'( above )which I developed myself years ago( after long searches for better ones that failed )and have been refining ever since. It allows me to plug in my income and my expenses, then fiddle around with them to see how to stretch each month's income by reducing expenses and the plan ahead for those months that have three paydays or things like GST or income tax returns. The example above shows a fictional version of my own budget, in which I'm earning a good deal more than actual right now along with much more modest monthly expenses and even a 'savings account expense' to save for a rainy day - something up on unable to afford to do yet in my life to date.

It's felt like this every. Damn. Day. Since... well, the 90's.

It was a long afternoon, but quite fruitful, as my sister and I skillfully discussed delicate financial matters with my parents while avoiding any antagonistic or accusatory pathways: this is always a touchy subject and none of us are immune. By the end, we'd all figured out where we were financially and where we wanted to go as a family as well as individuals by helping each other as much as possible every month from now on to get out from under the burden of owing other people money. It was extremely liberating for me to feel the claustrophobic constraints of the financial box I've been living in for far too long loosen and now that my family will would be doing everything possible to get my feet under me at all this moving forward towards futures that WE have control over, and not the banks.

I slept extremely well tonight, and it's worth noting because of the dream that I had.

Normally, my dreams aren't at all exciting, as I've noted previously: I hang around old houses and shopping malls that I've been to, and generally not much that's memorable - just my subconscious hashing out its boring crap so my creative mind can exercise when I'm awake.

Yet tonight, for the first time that I can recall, I dreamed that I was an astronaut.

I dreamed that I was kept busy with all the pre-flight checklists and other work necessary to prepare my rocketship for launch, rushing around along with many other people to ensure that everything would be in place for the upcoming flight.

The best part of the dream?

Towards the end, I knocked on an unmarked door and Spock opened it, ushering me inside to a control center where we went over the calculations for the launch.

I can't quite remember, but I think I had a huge smile on my face as we worked. SPOCK!!!!

LLAP, Leonard...

Jan 7 – Sacrosanct

Sundays are great: I love having every weekend off.

For most of my working life, that was the case and for many years when I worked retail, it was common for me to work 3 out of the 4 weekends in any given month, especially after I left University; it was almost a given.

Now that I've had weekends free for almost 4 years now, I don't think that I'd go back without major consideration, because of what they represent:

Freedom.

Now, some people might say "But you work EVERY weekday, how's that better?" And they have a point, but they'd be missing mine: not working weekends means that I have the freedom to plan around that 'free space' and it's been glorious. Given that so many of my friends also have day jobs, it doesn't matter if I have a weekday free, as it's a rarity that anyone I know now could actually do something of a warning or an afternoon... which rather defeats the purpose.

Sundays especially were sacrosanct to me, days that I set aside specifically for family and friends, not work. Here's what I have to say about my Sundays almost exactly three years ago, when the subject came up in my blog:

I'll leave you with that, friends and family: you're all always on my mind, the matter where we are in life.

My eyestrain has lingered this week in the form of end-of-day fatigue that have unfortunately combined with the shifting weather barometric pressure to give me headaches almost all week long. I've been able to control them with Tylenol until this weekend, when I had to use an Aspirin for the first time in a decade and thankfully that settled the eyestrain down almost completely for the day at least. I also surprised myself by walking 10K steps on Sunday almost without noticing without my cane and it was a wonderful feeling - more of that to come!