Well this is not the blog post I was expecting to make.  Nor are these the pictures I was expecting to upload.

Background: I am in Portland (actually Beaverton now, all will become clear in time) and the purpose for my trip 2000 miles out here from Michigan was to look for a house for my family to rent. Looking for a house is plenty hard enough without having to go through what I have just gone through in the last couple of hours.

So after a hard day of stressing out about what houses were available in what time frame at what price in what neighborhood etc etc, I came back to the hotel hoping to get some sleep so I could get started early in the morning making calls and driving out to neighborhoods to check out the potential houses.

Something I have started doing lately every time I stay at a hotel is check fro bed bugs.  Apparently there’s a big resurgence in the population lately, and we had a bad experience once with a hotel that was swarming with them. But I’ll come back to that.

Anyway, one good way to check for bedbugs is to strip the sheets off and check in all the corners of the mattress and under it, and around the edges of the headboard and other parts of the bed.  The little guys crawl into spots to hide, and will sometimes leave little black poo markings on the way, so those can be a good indicator that there’s a problem.

Anyway, the hotel I was staying at last night, which was the Budgetlodge at 9th and E Burnside in Portland was not real clean.  Yeah I was cheap and just got the first thing that I could find that looked reasonable and inexpensive and hoped for the best.  I was a little disappointed when I got there and the place stunk like pee, but even that was manageable.

Tonight (yesterday?) while checking for bedbugs I found a dealbreaker under the mattress.  No, there were no bed bugs that I could find.  I did find this though:

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Mirrored from Xmitter.

This is my current internet footprint, all the places I can be found these days.

Xmitter is my main blog, and a place I put experiments and writings and things on a not at all regular basis. It runs on the Laughing Squid servers, and I currently have it set to cross post to various other places and services.

Twitter is another thing I do, and will post things there oh I dunno a couple times a day or more. Sometimes in great bursts of activity, sometimes quiet for whole hours at a time.

I also have an eponymous Tumblr blog. I got the domain on a whim and cause it was cheap. Currently I have blog posts from here, Flickr uploads and Youtube uploads reposting there.  Lately I’ve been reblogging some other random stuff there, too.  I’ve been wondering if maybe I should do something different here. I dunno. Maybe I should have a big picture of my nose or something at this particular domain (this is what Rebecca suggests.)

Flickr is where I have been putting all my photos.

I’m on Facebook, like everyone else on the planet, and will happily add you there if I know you.

That’s about it.  It seems a bit random and disjointed, but that’s the internet, and hey it’s where I live and work.

I kind of feel obligated to do this kind of post since I’m preparing for a really big cross country move in the real world. It is my hope that by staking out my area on the interwebs, and being active out here where everyone can see me that I can keep in touch easily with everyone I know.

Mirrored from Xmitter.

The always brilliant io9 has an excellent interview with Grant Morrison about his new Batman and Robin series. I haven’t read the Bats, or really any underwear pervert comic in a long time but I may have to at least check this one out. I love almost everything Grant Morrison does, and this tasty quote definitely makes me want to see what’s going on in that universe these days:

I prefer to focus on the wilder, weirder nights of his career and I like to see him facing devilishly brilliant, flamboyant psychos who can actually put him under pressure and take him to his limits. Watching a billionaire Batman disarm poorly-trained, poverty-stricken muggers effortlessly or beating up skinny junkies might be fun for a scene or two but does tend to raise thorny issues of class and privilege that the basic adventure hero concept is not necessarily equipped to deal with adequately.

Mirrored from Xmitter.

Hi.  This is a reminder that I am still here. I’ll have a real post or two up soon enough. Carry on.

Mirrored from Xmitter.

This is a test. this is only a test. For your trouble, here is a pretty picture:

Mirrored from Xmitter.

This past weekend we went out to the DIA yet again, wherein I took lots of pictures. It was actually my first time taking the shiny new camera, and I got a number of nice pictures of things I had attempted with a point and shoot and failed miserably at. Like this detail of Mary Magdalene:

This is from a Netherlandish painting done about 1500 by someone known only as “Master of the Embroidered Foliage“, for what should be obvious reasons in this detail. Most likely this was actually a group of painters operating in a studio from a sort of template, producing very similar paintings around the same time.

Something else I did differently this time around was to take pictures of all the museum cards for the pieces I liked, allowing me to annotate everything better. That way it sounds like I know what I’m talking about here.

Mirrored from Xmitter.

I know I already did Intron Depot, but I think Ghost in the Shell is awesome enough to deserve its own entry. This is the English version of the graphic novel, I also have a bunch of the individual issues packed away in comic boxes as well as a japanese version. There is also a movie and more than one miniseries out there, so it’s probably safe to say that this is Shirow’s most successful creation.

The story digs pretty deep, drawing heavily from western philosophy to discuss the nature of consciousness, humanity, evolution and the interface between human and machine.

Mirrored from Xmitter.

OK Well it’s been far too long since my last post so I’m going to go ahead and make one. Doing a book every day was getting a little crazy so I’m going to cool it a bit and go weekly. I got pretty far but I just ran out of time to do it every day.

Anyway, I think I’m going to make Wednesday book day for no reason in particular.

Todays book is Snowcrash, which is a kind of post cyberpunk classic. It spread in a virus like manner amongst my group of friends in the late 90’s and I basically had to read it to be able to follow any conversation that was going on for a period of a couple of months. It has what I think is the best opening of any book ever.

Mirrored from Xmitter.

I’ve gone missing from here the last couple of days. Took off for the weekend to a place where the bandwidth is narrow, and the various other busy making things in life took priority. I guess I’ll pick up the books thing again and see how well I can catch up. Or maybe I’ll just take this opportunity to call it quits on that project and start the new one I’ve been thinking about.

I think I may have just about exhausted the different kinds of pictures I can take of books, as well as the trite little things to say. But who knows, maybe I just need some other inspiration.

Be back shortly.

Mirrored from Xmitter.

Dune was one of the first adult novels I ever read on my own.  I’m not sure where I got it from, probably the library, but it took me forever to read it. I also saw the David Lynch movie somewhere in the middle of reading it for the first time. Or rather, it was most likely the disavowed Alan Smithee version of that particular production. So that’s forever tainted my view of the book. Unfortunately whenever I imagine Feyd Rautha it’s always Sting yelling “He is the Kwisatz Hadarach!!!11”

The 2000 miniseries improved on some things and was god awful horrible about others, so really there still hasn’t been and probably never will be a perfect Dune movie ever made. Certainly we will never know the greatness that would have been Jodorowsky’s Dune.

Mirrored from Xmitter.