Six Characters in Search of an Author

I may/may not have mentioned that my psychology lecture is given in the largest theatre at my university, but it does. This theatre also happens to be a literal theatre, and so I see posters for events on a regular basis. There were advertisements for a play called Six Characters in Search of an Author, which is an interesting name, and the poster had people in dark clothing and white makeup looking dramatic so I figured it would be interesting. I didn’t want to go by myself, but had no one to invite really, except for my brother - and so we went tonight, to the last showing.

        There were… a couple dozen people there. Kinda disappointing :/ I’m not sure how to describe the play. It turns out it’s eighty years old and it has a wikipedia article, which describes it as “a satirical tragicomedy,” “part of a movement in the early 20th century called theatricalism or anti-illusionism,” which means it’s like a play concentrated. The best analogy I can give is to “true” avant-garde music, the kind that stops being pleasant to listen to. It’s a great mental exercise to write and discuss, but not all that great to experience.

        This is a great story, and you’re going to love it, so I’m glad I wasted two hours there. First of all, the play is about a play, and so when the actors in the play take a twenty minute break, you, the audience, sit there for twenty minutes. It’s not really an intermission. There just isn’t anything interesting happening. Two actors get on stage and improv a silly argument, but that’s it. There’s another ten minute breaking, so a quarter of your two hour experience is you twiddling your thumbs.

        The basic premise is that these characters have been abandoned by their author and need a new one, and want the director (character in the play) to write their play for them. But they won’t allow themselves to be played by actors because then it isn’t truly their story, it’s the actors’ interpretations of their story, and they insist that they as characters are more real and alive than human beings because at least they’re well-defined.

        But two of the six are dead (this isn’t a spoiler - in my case, they were dolls, rather than actors, so) and the rest are varying degrees of crazy, so you get insane screaming and outbursts and things like that, complete with unpleasant background music. The story of the characters is revealed bit by bit, so you’re always interested (except during the “breaks”) but at the same time it’s very unexciting and weirdly unsatisfying to experience. It’s like if I tried to tell you my life’s story, but half of it was cut out in transmission. You just want more from it.

        That being said, the wikipedia article has a link to the text, and mentions two film adaptations. I’d be interested in seeing how they handled it as a film - as a play, it’s limited in what it can portray, but editing magic could make it great. Check those out if you’re interested.

BarTab 4

I wasn’t going to post about this add-on at first, because if I posted about every firefox add-on I find, we’d be here for a very long time. However, I found out how useful it is last night when I spent a few hours browsing the web and relaxing, so I think it deserves to be posted.

        Side note: FF 4 has a built in feature similar to this, though BarTab has more options for customization, so it might be worth using if there’s an update.

        The basic idea of BarTab is that you don’t really need to keep a tab in memory when you aren’t actively looking at it. So the main draw is the feature to “unload” a tab after a user-specified period of time - if you don’t look at it for a minute, or ten minutes, or 30 seconds, then it will be unloaded from your RAM or however firefox keeps track of your tabs. When you go back to the tab, it refreshes the page.

        You’ll notice a huge performance boost when you’ve got dozens of tabs open with BarTab and without it - while the tabs are still there and available for you as soon as you want them, you’ll be running just as fast as if you had only one or two tabs open. Because that’s exactly what’s happening. It’s actually really, really nice in action, even if you don’t typically open a lot of tabs. The one time you do, it’s pretty great.

        That being said, you’ve got more options than just unloading tabs. You can tell firefox not to load a new tab until you focus on it - I found it slightly annoying because it literally doesn’t load the tab at all, so all you see is “lifehacker.com” or something and don’t know what the tab is supposed to be. I prefer to just set the unload time fairly low - I had it at five, but I’m thinking I might go lower and add exceptions.

        Adding a domain (www.tumblr.com, www.facebook.com, etc.) to your exceptions list keeps tabs from that site from being unloaded. You can manually type them in the add-on options, or right click a tab and pick “keep pages from www.tumblr.com loaded”. So my thought is to lower the unload time to a minute or two and then add exceptions for sites I don’t want to lose. While I’m reading a feature or review on Destructoid, the others I opened will unload until I’m ready to read them. On the other hand, I won’t lose the posts I’m working on or the conversations I may be having on facebook.

        Check it out, it’s quite neat. Even if you don’t think you’ll notice much of a difference, it really isn’t intrusive and it works quite well if you ever spend more than a few minutes in a single tab.

dickmcvengeance:

I’m looking to make these decisions in my own life — subtracting tasks from my thought process so that I can actually get things done. I’m constantly feeling restless — as though there’s something bigger that I should be working on — and I can’t seem to make any real progress on the bigger goals I’ve set for myself. With three months left in the year, I’ve cut out surprisingly few of my half-year goals. I’d like to fix that, and I think that writing out my ideas on here will be one part of the process.

So, I read Destructoid.com and Japanator.com pretty religiously, despite never getting around to actually playing games or watching anime. There are plenty of reasons for doing so, but one is that they are full of incredibly smart people with great stuff to say. One of those people is Brad Rice, the editor-in-chief of Japanator, and his Thanksgiving post linked to his personal tumblr. I’m reblogging it because all of his original-content posts make me feel good about life. From what I understand he’s in his late twenties (please don’t let this be wrong), living with his parents, editor of a relatively successful and relatively well-known anime blog, and through that, got a job working for Vonage that lets him continue his editorial duties.

        The fact that there is nothing uncool or wrong about any of that is what makes me feel great. Yeah, he’s at an age where a lot of people would say “whoa japanese cartoons, what are you doing with your life”, and he lives with his parents (or lived as of one post), and he got a “real job” - thus “selling out” or what have you. But dude’s got his life in order, and I think I won’t be the only one inspired by that.

        I’m reblogging because that’s pretty much the easiest way to make your existence known to someone on tumblr, and hopefully that won’t be weird. Given that I’ve mined a public site on the internet for details about someone’s life to share with a few friends, that’s questionable. At any rate, here are some highlights that I would classify only as “recommended reads,” simply because your mileage may vary.

        And a lifehacker post titled Why Technology is So Addictive, and How You Can Avoid Tech Burnout was linked somewhere, but I lost the post, so there’s a bonus that is a must-read.

3The Graveyard of the Chateau D'If·Source: gigaom.com

Note: I’m just writing this to validate the many hours I’ve wasted checking this stuff out. Hopefully somebody thinks some of this stuff is cool. I actually feel better than I did though, because now I’ve resolved the issue, as opposed to spending hours and having no results. Plus I really haven’t suffered anything for it. I’m practically running ahead of schedule in terms of school. You’ve been warned, anyway.

        So after finding Rainmeter a few weeks ago, feeling like I didn’t want to fiddle with it, running around looking for all kinds of ways to do stuff, I went back to Rainmeter and realized the default Gnometer skin had everything I wanted.

        I tried Snarl, and using it requires installing plugins and keeping your program open - so if you want to know that you have new e-mail in Thunderbird, you have to keep Thunderbird open all the time. You want notifications from something else? That’s another program running idly in the background.

        I read that Growl for Windows uses more resources than Snarl, which is frightening, because Snarl uses twice as many resources as Rainmeter is using right now. Plus running whatever programs.

        So I had to start using Gmail because it seems far more popular among Rainmeter folks, and I may have to fiddle a little to get perfect access to stuff on the top of my screen while running Rainmeter, but aside from that everything is good. So. My current technology set up:

- Google Calendar for tasks and events - desktop access via Gnometer (Gcal pop-up)

- Gmail for e-mail - desktop access also via Gnometer (Gmail pop-up)

- Gnometer’s iTunes pop-up for knowing what I’m listening to

- GReader on iGoogle - keeps me from checking shit all the damn time

- Aerofoil, which turns off Aero Glass when I switch to battery life - have yet to test if that’s beneficial at all

        So I’m uninstalling Thunderbird (e-mail with calendar add-on - I’m not going to waste my time teaching it to send e-mail) and SpiceBird (Thunderbird+) and that’s all well and good. It’s not like I need a dekstop program to access my internet contents. I’m going to check out Remember the Milk, Teux Deux, and Toodledo to see if I like any of them better for managing a to-do list.

        Now I’m off to eat lunch, brush my teeth, have a shower, and go meet a researcher to talk to her about being in french immersion :D I wrote a paper about it, she was about to start doing research for her Master’s, I approached her to discuss, and now I am a subject. Neat!

Site-specific browsers4

I haven’t fooled around with this too much, and I also have the issue of having a billion things I want to do on the internet on a regular basis, but this is pretty neat anyway. Maybe you’ll find a use for it. Maybe I’ll find a use for it!

        Here’s what it does: Adds a button under the tools menu for Firefox (the desktop version probably works differently) for you to make a little icon on your desktop, taskbar, etc. that will go directly to the site you’re currently viewing. By default, you get the site - that’s it. No address bar, no navigation buttons, no distractions. So you take your Gmail inbox, you take your calendar or to-do list manager of choice, and you get little icons to open them up. Facebook, maybe tumblr, whatever.

        You get out of bed, check your stuff (inbox, new posts, things to do today, whatever), interact a little (reply to an e-mail, make a quick tumblr post, add an event), go to work, the end.

        Chrome has this feature by default, and Prism is a firefox extension for it. I guess it just depends how you want them to be rendered? Bubbles, for Windows, renders it in IE. If you actually want that. Aside from that, I’m not entirely sure what differences there may be in performance. If you’re using Chrome, the “create application shortcut” option under tools will do that for you. Firefox says “convert website to application.” As far as Bubbles goes, I’m not sure.

        Looking at Bubbles, it has extensions that allow notifications for specific sites. That may put it above Prism and Chrome, because you really only want to check your e-mail when you know there’s something there. At any rate, check ‘em out, do some research if it sounds useful. You expect me to do everything for you?!

———————————————————————-

edit: looking at Bubbles some more, it’s pretty ancient, no posts on the site or anything for months - probably best to skip that one, but that leaves the notification issue unresolved

edit2: guess Prism makes its things in a dumb way, so use Chrome’s thing - I don’t think you need to use Chrome at all or anything after you’ve created the application

edit3: Looking at Snarl and Growl to fix the notification issue. Yip allows access to these through Firefox. Research continues.

edit4: Yip seems more or less dead - the download link isn’t working, anyway, and cursory glance at google results didn’t turn up an alternative download. I question the need for these notifications in your browser when you already have Snarl/Growl providing desktop notifications.

Snarl is, from what I can tell, developed for windows - Growl is a port from Mac, and this means it has great iPhone support. If that’s your jam. Both seem to have a number of useful add-ons to support whatever you want them to support, so yeah.

Though this brings us full circle and makes the site-specific browser entirely useless. I mean, it would probably load faster than opening a shortcut in your browser. But when would you use it? *shrug*

Wizmo4

Here’s a neat little thing. Wizmo lets you create shortcuts to do useful stuff like change your system volume and turn off your monitor. This is probably more important to me on my laptop than to any of you folks (because I think all but one of you use a desktop) but you may find a use for it anyway.

And for Glob’s sake, make sure you use the quiet command. Pure Windows 2000 thinking that a program should play a noise every time it does something.

My only gripe with it is that, as an .exe, UAC is all “are you sure you want do what you asked me to do” and I have to say that yes, I am quite sure. Brb trying to find a way to disable that for specific programs. Yeah I missed the “always ask for this file” check box. In fact, in all of the past few months that it has been popping up, I never read it once. Sue me!

edit six months later: Nircmd is a way better program to use

I have the unknown pleasure in my inventory. Or at least the key to get to it. But I hoped I wouldn’t have to use it. Oh, how I hoped. post-adventure edit: Uploaded pictures of most of what I saw. I missed one opportunity card that was pretty cool....

I have the unknown pleasure in my inventory. Or at least the key to get to it.

But I hoped I wouldn’t have to use it. Oh, how I hoped.

post-adventure edit: Uploaded pictures of most of what I saw. I missed one opportunity card that was pretty cool. The above picture is EB14, so EB15+ is all spoilers.

extra edit: aw man, lost my opportunities hand, I was saving those

TOUR-onto

Saturday was good - I finally managed to take notes on chapters 5 and 6 for psych, which I had been “working on” for a month. Then I popped them onto my Kindle and chapter 6 turned out really well - no conversion errors at all. Sweet.

        Sunday morning, I get up at 5 am. Have breakfast, brush my teeth, get dressed, wake up my mom. Then we drive to the bus station, buy the ticket, and I sit down to read psych notes.

        Get on the bus at 7 am, read psych notes for a few hours. Finish Voltaire’s Candide, read The Art of Manliness guide to Building Your Resiliency - highly recommended, in fact moreso than anything else I’ve read lately. Continue reading psych notes. Get stuck in a detour trying to get to the bus station - turns out sunday was the Santa Claus parade. So we spent half an hour getting to the bus station, when it was like right over there.

        So anyway then I walk from my bus station over to Union Station and meet Lily, after many texts of “I am at this place, where are you” and “ok wait I’ll go where you are.” Our plan for the day was as follows: Get hot-chocolate at some place called Soma and go to Honest Ed’s, then go to Kool Haus (not a horrific carnival fun house, luckily) at 5 pm for the show. By “the show” I mean Bring Me The Horizon (eh) and August Burns Red (yeah) playing with Polar Bear Club (woo!), This is Hell (??), and Emarosa (?). Which is something I was planning on seeing with Lily for a couple of months but it turns out I didn’t mention it to anyone. So yeah! I did that!

        So we got a map inside Union Station and walked on over to The Distillery District, which was a wonderful little place and I hope to find somewhere similar closer to home. You know how the little villages were in FF VII, with little brick houses and pipes and metal stuff for decoration? I mean, they were kinda like that. At least the place Cid lived was like that.

        If you don’t know what I mean, think 19th century village. Brick houses. Metal pipes. That’s the defining features. They had metal sculptures and “art” here and there - a “Christmas tree” made out of pipes with light bulbs in the ends, two ends of a bridge that don’t connect, stuff like that. There were people with fancy cameras everywhere, so I assume it was a cool place to be.

        It was also an expensive place to be! We were there for a few hours, went into two? places, and I spent like… $35 or something. First we went into the chocolatiers place, which is to say they make chocolate and sometimes turn it into a drink, and got some Mayan hot chocolate. Which had a pretty strong after taste that burned your mouth. $4.19 for that. I also got four tiny chocolates, which were $9 total. So that was all well and good and we hung out there for a bit to chat while drinking hot chocolate.

        Then we go off to find something to eat - I got a chicken club sandwhich (pretty good, $7 or something) and an Italian cookie/bread thing with almonds in it that was dipped in chocolate - $3. After sitting there for, hmm, an hour/hour and a half, I also got some caramel cheesecake for $3.50. So $15 for lunch.

        After checking the time and checking the map, we decided we didn’t have time to go to Honest Ed’s and decided to go see Kool Haus to scout out the area. This was around 3:30 PM and there were already people in line - like hell I’m going to wait outside on a cold day for an hour and a half. There was a market area nearby so we went there, but it was just flea market stuff because it was sunday and the parade was going by there. We worked our way back to Union Station and got food from a dude in a cart for $4 (each-ish). Worked our way back to Kool Haus not long before 5 PM and listened to increasingly desperate scalpers try to sell tickets.

        On the way in, there was a bag check - I had my pockets full of electronics and maps, Lily’s bag was full of books, the security girl was o.0. Drop off our coats for $2.50, go out into the main room - surprisingly big, actually. Huge crowds around the Bring Me the Horizon and August Burns Red booths, proving who the cool bands are, and absolutely no one over by the other three booths. I got a Polar Bear Club hoodie ($40) and a tour shirt ($10) and they’re pretty sweet.

        At 6 PM, the first band comes on, doesn’t announce themselves until a few songs into their set. Their singer was not that great, their guitarist (or bassist? I can’t tell by look) was a better singer and the best part of the band. He would jump into the air and fling his legs out in opposite directions. I got Lily onto my shoulders (with some help from the bar) so she could see but we were too slow and he didn’t do it again.

        But all was not lost! For Polar Bear Club was up next and that should have been great. Except their singer was as bad live as I have heard. I caught, maybe, one piece of each song they played - except their last song, Living Saints, which was recognizable. Hell, even when they announced the songs I had a hard time knowing what was going on. Barring the occasional signal from the music, I was essentially lost, and I knew most of the songs by heart. They played Light of Local Eyes (which I wrote my mock valedictorian speech about), Our Ballads, Boxes, something, and Living Saints. There may have been one more song, but in that case, they played two songs where I stood there for five minutes and had no clue what I was listening to.

        Interest was relatively low for them. Sad, but when they play that way… It wasn’t really their scene anyway, but even so.

        Emarosa comes on, they’ve got a keyboard, I’m like oh no… But it wasn’t actually that bad. I was bummed out after Polar Bear Club but I’ve filed them away to check out later.

        Up until now, each of the bands was getting set up in 15 minutes and playing half hour sets. Opening bands and stuff. August Burns Red also got set up in 15 minutes, and played for an hour. While waiting for them to get set up, I was kinda falling asleep.

        That didn’t last for long.

        The first three bands were all pretty restrained, jumping around and stuff but mainly playing in the middle of the stage and thus being invisible to Lily. August Burns Red were not like that. They brought out a bunch of boxes to put over the speakers and spent most of their time up there and encouraging the crowd. Not only were they more interesting to watch than the previous bands, they also played really, really well. The polar opposite of the other bands, if you will. Everything sounded right, and that was great, because I knew them well enough to recognize a few songs, if only by the chorus.

        So August Burns Red was a highlight of the day. Then we wait for half an hour for their royal highnesses Bring Me The Horizon to get their shit set up. I was pretty apathetic about them from the start, but to give you an idea of what we’re dealing with… Half the people there had already seen the band seven times. I heard it from a chick talking to a fat dude. At least she was there for her eighth time, and as one of the two people I eavesdropped on, that is half of everyone.

        They also had a *SURPRISE* GUEST SINGER OMG! Some girl comes out in the middle of one of their songs and everybody screams “OH MY GOD THERE SHE IS AAAAAAH” and I’m like oh, ok. Now it all makes sense. Yep.

        So she sings for a few minutes and takes off. Wikipedia doesn’t say they’ve ever had a girl in the band or in the credits of any of their albums, so I have no idea who she was. Attractive, probably the one doing all the female electronica stuff in their songs, but if she’s not credited with anything…

        So after their half hour set up Bring Me The Horizon played for 45 minutes, then tossed their shit out into the crowd and left. A brief chant for encore died when it became clear that they were thoroughly done with us. Cue the stampede for the doors.

        We go back to Union Station, I buy a vanilla hot chocolate and a cookie from Second Cup (the first time I’ve ever gotten anything there, actually) which were pretty good. I drop Lily off at her bus stop place, then go off to my own bus stop (around 11:45 PM) and get in line for my bus - which was leaving at 12:30 AM. I popped some ear plugs in and slept for pretty much five hours straight, which was pretty nice.

        So that’s what I did! And now I want to find a place with cafes and dumb art to go with a friend, except that it isn’t five hours away from where I live. Vael, we’re going to find one of those places, and enjoy it immensely in the summer.

PSYCHOLOGY4

Now available: Consciousness (mainly interesting because of sleep) and Learning (entirely interesting). This is good stuff, folks. Very good stuff. Extremely good stuff, even.

Don’t let the learning chapter go by - read that .pdf like your life depends on it. You’ll be a better parent, you’ll be a better person, you’ll be more productive and you’ll be better in bed. Maybe.

Then there’s this gem:

The problem with delayed punishment also explains the ineffectiveness of punishing a pet hours after it has misbehaved, when the owner finally returns home. For instance, it won’t do any good to hit your dog with a newspaper while shoving its face in the feces it previously left on your carpet. This common punishment doesn’t teach your dog to stop defecating on your carpet - it teaches the dog to keep its face out of its feces.

Did I mention reading this would make you a better parent?