Yesterday I wrote about a few of the various kinds of peace. I don’t have kids, which is important context. If you have children, it’s possible that peace isn’t available to you in any form.
The editorial department would like to apologize for this oversight.
A Follow Up Note About Peace Read More »
If you want to know why people start putting up their Christmas decorations in October, some of the answers are in this picture. I took this on a random day in early December. Here we see Luna sitting in one of her favorite sunny spots. In the background, unwrapped Christmas presents for our family are piled on our dining room table. It’s daytime, so the doorway garland isn’t lit. She and I are enjoying the calm and quiet typical of this part of the day.
There is chaos on that table. Some of those presents were hard to find. Some were more expensive than we’d hoped. Some I feared were insufficient to the sentiment they were intended to communicate. Some of them suck and I know they suck and that’s just how it goes sometimes. The best ones aren’t even on that table.
Let’s move closer to the foreground. These decorations take a long time to put up. Krystal considered every single detail of our display with the care and attentiveness you’d see from a curator at a niche museum. The person who arranges the exhibits at the Museum of Dollhouse Furniture isn’t in that business because they want to drive a Ferrari one day. The effort is the reward.
The table itself is where our family Christmas dinner takes place. That meal starts being planned in mid-November at the latest. Many lesser meals were consumed while reviewing the components of that greater feast. No detail escaped consideration.
We do all of this because we love the planning, love the people we’re planning for, and love the idea that joy is something you can cultivate. It’s not an immutable element of the universe that can only be located and then hoarded. Joy is a compound that can be mixed by hand. With Christmas joy, there are are more supplies.
One of the great go-to messages in Christmas music involves wishing for “peace on earth”. The implication is complicated, as the idea seems to exist in a liminal space between something God is supposed to take care of, and something we’re supposed to generate ourselves. Krystal and I are atheists, so for us waiting on God is a lot like depending on Santa to fill that empty spot under the tree. In our house, if peace on earth is to be found, we’re going to need to make it ourselves. So we start early.
Peace is a tricky concept to nail down. Sometimes peace is sitting in an empty room enjoying the simplicity of nothingness. That’s a 25-50Hz sort of peace. Low frequency peace. Nothing in, nothing out, everything is in balance. No one takes pictures of that kind of peace. There isn’t anything to photograph. Might as well leave the lens cap on.
On the other end of the spectrum, imagine a picture of a doctor asleep in a darkened exam room in between busy emergency room shifts. That’s peace in the 40,000Hz range. This is the sort of peace that only intense and sustained effort can produce. The peace after a war. Eyes of storms. Empty apartments after a move. Hard peace sorely won. Loud, joyless peace, pitched too high to hear comfortably.
In this picture, you see midrange peace in the 1000-2000Hz bandwidth. This is peace with great tone. A little grit, a little character, but not overloaded with chaos. That’s why our tree is up by Halloween. More peace and joy, please. We’ll take as much as we can lay our hands on. The more optimism and whimsy the better. More fun hats and cookies and having a good time simply because you’ve chosen to. We’re working hard and enjoying the atmosphere that work generates. I love these moments of peace in the joy factory. Actual Christmas is just the pageant at the end.
2023 Christmas Season Review Read More »
I’m nuts about peanut butter cookies. When I was growing up we were very poor. When Christmas time came around, rather than spend money that didn’t exist, my mother used to make large batches of cookies as gifts for her family and friends. Her sugar cookies were very popular and always in high demand, but it was her peanut butter cookies I looked forward to most. She eventually had to make a batch just for me, as I could not restrain myself from eating part of everyone’s Christmas presents. In my mind, they are synonymous with Christmas and home and family. After she died, they were among the many things I missed about her at Christmas.
This year, Krystal secretly obtained the ingredients for an updated version of this recipe, baked them while I was sleeping one night, and then gave them to me for Christmas on the first day of my vacation. That way I could enjoy them throughout the entire holiday. This was thoughtful on so many levels. They were phenomenal. I finished them by the last day of my break, but I’ll remember them forever.
When people say “it’s the thought that counts”, they might mean “I thought about this at all”. Which is fair. It does and you did. But whatever consolation prize the deployment of that phrase was meant to justify had to borrow gravitas from better, truly thoughtful gifts. They had to steal a few of Krystal’s cookies. And that’s fine. She made a bunch of them.
My Favorite Gift This Year Read More »
It’s more about getting the habit going at this point. Here’s a random picture.
A Well Thought Out Post Read More »
Today was very busy, by which I mean today was a normal workday after a break and I’m building my work week stamina back up. I am therefore proud to announce the creation of Photo Phone In, where I post a photo instead of really writing anything substantial.
For our inaugural PPI, I give you our Christmas Butter Tree, a new tradition we decided to create when we saw a butter tree on sale at Straub’s.
I’m back at my desk after a lovely holiday break. On one hand, this is great because I’m happy to be back and ready to take the new year head on. On the other, I’ve forgotten nearly everything I once knew about what was going on, so a lot of that clear-headed optimism will be expended remembering the details around what I do for a living.
I slept badly. I was concerned about the risks associated with not sleeping well before retuning to work, which of course created a level of anxiety strong enough to ensure the very consequences I had intended to avoid. I love irony as much as the next guy, but it looses its charm when confronted at three-thirty in the morning through bleary, sleep-deprived eyes. I don’t think I’m alone here. The first day back from holiday vacation must be one of the least productive of the year. It’s like everyone is onboarding all over again.
I did not die in 2023. Optimistic about keeping that streak going in 2024.
In order to encourage that sort of behavior, I’ve committed to checking in everyday. It’s a proof of life sort of thing. By committing to daily posting, I’m accomplishing several things at once.
Will I make it a whole year without missing a day? Almost certainly not. But I just went an entire year without drinking, so who knows? No reason not to try, considering the stakes couldn’t be lower. Here goes nothing!
I’m on vacation for the Thanksgiving holiday, and decided to spend some time learning about generative AI in Photoshop. If you work long enough refining what the AI prompt first generates, you can eventually produce some really specific and fairly impressive results.
I asked it to give me “classic holiday cartoon scene, thanksgiving vacation, mad scientist lab”, mostly just to have something to start with that might spark an idea. It returned three things, including this:
I thought it would be fun to turn this into a thanksgiving scene where a robot doctor, an alien, and a monster all share an apartment and are having Thanksgiving dinner. I did the refinement using only the various selection tools and the text prompts of the generative fill, adding and removing things to clean the image up and tweak it into something coherent. The end result took several hours, but is quite close to what I originally had in mind.
Can you create actual art with this technology? If I ask a machine to give me a picture of a cat and it gives me a picture of a cat, what it gives me might not be art. But work on anything for as long as I worked on this, and the end result is something new, regardless of the tools used in its production. I had a visual idea and used these tools to create it. That’s fair game.
Thanksgiving Vacation Day 1 Read More »
Are we doing music on this thing too? Yes. Yes we are. Here is Yup, which I imagined being sung by a choir of cartoon sea creatures.
