28 days later | Rtm

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glasses?!

By Scott • On 2015-02-05 • In 28 days later, scott • 1 min read

For the vast majority of my life, my eyes have been perfect. Far away, close up, medium distance: all was crystal clear. There was a time as a child where I actually wanted glasses, right around the time I also wanted braces with the colorful bands. Instead, I was the only member of my immediate family to not require glasses. No longer.

It’s been a long time coming. I’ve noticed over the course of the last year or two that it’s gotten harder and harder to get my right eye focused. It gets blurrier the sleepier I am, which for an insomniac is an issue. By the end of each day my right eye often feels fatigued and uncomfortable. Even though I didn’t want to admit what was happening, I saw the writing on the wall, even if I couldn’t read it from a distance quite the way I used to. Finally, I broke down and went to the eye doctor, mostly to make sure there was nothing more egregious causing my eye trouble.

The final verdict is that all is well, I just need to start wearing glasses occasionally if I want the mild blurriness and discomfort to cease. Even though I’d tried similar self-experiments over the last few months, I was still genuinely shocked with what the letters on the digital eye test looked like when I covered my left eye and was forced to use only my right. It is genuinely only my right eye that has an issue. Seeing through the prescription the doctor and I had landed on was actually a bit of a rush, and made me realize just how much work my eye is always doing to keep up with it’s leftern counterpart.

Goodbye hassle free vision, hello Warby Parker (or Eyes on Fremont).

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ancillary justice.

By Scott • On 2015-02-04 • In 28 days later, books, fictionista, nerd candy, scott • 1 min read

I’ve been writing again, every single day. Here, and also working on a short story. After a very long time where I couldn’t bring myself to write, one might think that I’d feel better to see some progress, some momentum. Instead, everything I write just reminds me how much I’m not writing, how much time has been wasted, how much more I could be doing. It’s counterproductive and unhelpful, and hopefully I can just ignore those voices and keep doing the work.

One thing that helps toward that end are the folks who work and slog away at writing with nothing to show for it, and after decades finally find some traction. If you keep putting in the work, you never know. One such writer is Ann Leckie. It took her a while to get a story published, and even longer to finish her first novel… then that novel won the Hugo, the Nebula, the Arthur C. Clarke Award, the Locus Award, and the British Science Fiction Association Award. That’s astounding. Keep putting in the work, you never know.

As for the book, I find it well deserving of all the accolades and praise. I won’t go into plot details, but it is a story of revenge and identity, set against a backdrop of a delightfully nuanced human empire many thousands of years in the future. The philosophies, class struggles, gender ideals, as well interactions between biological and artificial intelligences is beautifully imagined by Leckie. The world she has built is unapologetically complex and alien enough to our own to require some close reading early on to get what’s going on.

At times, Leckie’s story had me thinking on a massive scale, lamenting the ways power and injustice abound in our own world. Other times, it had me thinking on a profoundly personal scale, about the fact that each of us is made up of a seeming endless number of fragments that often only relate to one another through the narrative we choose for ourselves.

Leckie wrote something genuinely brilliant when she could have given up. She could have believed the conventional cultural bullshit that a 45 year old woman isn’t about to burst onto the literary scene. Instead, she said ‘Fuck it’ and kept doing the work. I’m glad she did.

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calvary.

By Scott • On 2015-02-03 • In 28 days later, movies, scott, Uncategorized • 1 min read

January is over, and so far I’ve been back to my usual movie watching. Reunited with my first love, and it feels so good.

One of the very best films I’ve seen so far this year is John Michael McDonagh’s Calvary.

The film opens with Father James, a small town priest, hearing confessions. An anonymous parishioner promises to kill him the following Sunday, because the man was raped by a different priest as a child. The film then follows Father James attempting to come to terms with his life and vocation, while deciding if he will leave town, defend himself, or accept his fate.

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Calvary works with the efficiency of an assassin. There isn’t a wasted frame in the film. Especially in terms of the film’s dark humor. Brendan Gleeson is one of the most under-appreciated actors alive. He’s even better in Calvary than he was in McDonagh’s previous outing, The Guard.

The depth and subtlety of both the writing and the performances are captivating, and the acid humor, anger, and tenderness are all so impeccably delivered. These performances are enhanced by how visually beautiful the film is. The cinematography is really photographic. The camera doesn’t move. Wonderfully framed shots are set up and that is where the shot is held, frame after perfect frame. The fact that the camera isn’t moving leaves the viewer alone with the gravity of the moment.

You should watch this one.

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what does that feel like?

By Scott • On 2015-02-02 • In 28 days later, scott, sports • 1 min read

What does it feel like to fail profoundly when absolutely everyone can see you?

Last night, in one play, the Seahawks went from certain repeat champs to losers. The difference was literally the absolute worst play call I have ever seen in sports. Not a dropped pass or missed timing, not a fumble or even just a mere interception (although interception it was), but a conscious decision to do something that made no sense and is unambiguously bizarre.

What does it feel like to make the call that wipes away a season’s worth of effort, rendering moot so much blood and sweat spent, men playing injured and tired? And what does it feel like to fail like that during the most watched event on television?

I’m a Giants fan, with the exception of OBJ my favorite team was abysmal this year, so I don’t mean this question bitingly. I’m not asking as a dig at the two men who made that play call. I mean that sincerely. How the fuck do you bounce back from that sort of profound failure? Where everything you work for distills down to one moment and you make a strange decision that you will forever wish you could take back?

I’m not sure I could. I can’t be certain I’d have the resilience required to fail like that in front of everyone and get back up and try again.

Without hyperbole, the end of that game will be remembered for how bizarre and nonsensical that decision was, and I just can’t wrap my brain around what it must feel like in the wake of failure that will forever be connected to your name. It’s not often I’m happy I was never talented or gifted enough to be an athlete, but today is one of those times.

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28 days later.

By Scott • On 2015-02-01 • In 28 days later, scott • 1 min read

Writing is often a solitary act. For some, this is experienced as loneliness; for others it is experienced as a blessed relief from other people. For someone like me, who in every personality testing metric always hovers right on the tipping point between introvert and extrovert, it is often both lonely and a relief. That’s a big part of the reason why I’m always attempting to incorporate the people I love into my writing process. Trigger Fiction is a great example, where I make stuff up based on prompts my friends have given me.

Yet, the fact I’m still writing at all is due in no small part to a silly writing challenge with my friend way back in 2004. I wanted to try to write more often to see if I could learn to be any good at it, so I teamed up with my friend, referred to as Waldo Nelsonsonton for privacy purposes, and we endeavored to force ourselves to write every day for as long as possible. Without that rhythm, and without seeing what changes and emerges when writing is actually happening every day, I probably would have lost interest and never would have realized just how important writing can be for me personally.

The other day, we were chatting and realized we both needed that sort of kick in the creative ass again. I’m finally getting a bit of momentum in my writing for the first time in a long while, and what better way to push that forward and keep things rolling than to jump back in with Timmy the Fish in a winner takes all test of writing endurance.

A new post. Every day in February. Waldo named it 28 Days Later.

May the shortest man win.