The Peanut Butter Jam Session (second reading)

Foreword: This was initially published to my WordPress account a few weeks ago. In the time since then, JIF has been slowly replenishing their stock across many grocery stores. I've also read the poem. It's all right. 

While the title of this blog is a reference to an indestructible journal by an explorer trapped in an invisible maze on a jungle planet, I am by no means an expert on lost media. In fact, the name is meant to be somewhat ironic as I’ve actually got a rather unpopular opinion when it comes to archiving or preserving our art and media, idealism versus pragmatism, that sort of thing. It was also made to coincide with a YouTube channel that would focus on obscure pieces of media that didn't fit into proper categories. Speaking of ephemera and miscellanea... 

There is a poem by cyberpunk writer William Gibson called Agrippa (A Book of the Dead). It's not exclusively a work of literature as much as a kind of small scale performance piece. It exists in a few different forms, but all with the same gimmick, that it can only be read a few times before it eventually fades, leaving the reader with an impression of the poem rather than anything that can be directly referenced. What’s interesting about this is that when submitted to the Library of Congress, two copies of the book were submitted, one opened and one unopened. The opened version has long since faded and the unopened version remains as it is, putting the work in an odd quasi-quantum state of both read and unread. 

Speaking of pretentious existentialism, let's talk about Metal Gear Solid 2 for the Playstation 2. 

I haven’t played the game in almost 20 years. It’s one of the last marathon gaming sessions I ever engaged in before I got a rude awakening about managing my time. It wasn’t cutting into my college work by any means, but it put things in perspective. I started what was supposed to be a quick session in the early evening before bed, my expectation being that I would get stuck at a difficult boss or puzzle or something like that and would pick up where I left off the next night or likely later. I ended up beating the game. It was only when I stood up to strike an obligatory pose of triumph that I realized it was nearly morning and I had a class in a few hours. 

Speaking of rabbit holes, I went back shortly after beating the game and discovered a text file. When I say "text file" I'm not talking about a document that you access by putting the game disc in a DVD-ROM drive. That would be too obvious. I'm talking about a text log you access in the game's menu and you have to use the controller to turn the pages, which number something like 129. I read it, and like Agrippa, I've been left with an impression of the work. It's about an investigative journalist looking for a secret base in the arctic. At one point, he takes out a flask and explains that the liquor inside has been mixed with peanut butter. He goes off on this tangent about how much he hated peanut butter growing up, and actually still hates it. Back in his youth, in an effort to make himself like peanut butter, he gorged on it until he couldn't stand it. As a result, he now has to have it in everything, including his liquor. I thought of this passage a few days ago while grocery shopping. 

JIF is currently going through a devastating recall of the majority of their products thanks to a potential salmonella contamination. It’s estimated to have cost them millions of dollars and store shelves have been empty for weeks by this point. I wouldn't have even noticed or been at all bothered by it were it not for JIF being the only company that makes a peanut butter fortified with Omega 3. When you're a vegetarian, some nutrients' sources require you to get a little more creative, or at least flexible. 

I Made a QR Code That Can Be Scanned

Confusion Is Not Stupidity

Something I always wonder is if I spend too much time thinking about words, how people use them, and, most importantly, whether or not they actually know what they're saying. In fact, I often wonder who's actually got what wrong when it comes to words, if I'm the one misreading something, or if I'm right all along and witnessed a genuine murder of English.
I have to tell myself when I'm on the internet that many of the people who commit these acts of textual homicide are either too young to know any better, or are not native speakers like myself. Sadly, unless they up and tell you so, there's no way to know, and you'll always be guessing. Regardless of the reason, however, people need to understand that since at least 99% of the people who read your words don't know you personally, have never heard your voice, or even seen your face, you have to put that much more effort into your words and how you put them together to make up for the lost paralanguage. You can be a reasonably intelligent and rational person, but if you're still mixing up "you're" and "your," no one is going to think that of you and, like it or not, your credibility will take a hit. No, it isn't right to make judgments like that, even if you're one to make them as well, but given that lack of nonverbal information, we can't exactly NOT make them.
I belong to a dating site, and it has this great big emphasis on user-generated content, especially survey questions used to help find matches. They're mostly standard fare, hypothetical situations gauging how one would react to certain social situations and the like. Other questions, meanwhile, are general knowledge questions used to help flesh out one's personal beliefs, and others are just brain teasers, or rather, someone's interpretation of a brain teaser. The question in, er, question, reads like this:

"If you turn a right-handed glove inside out, it fits ___?" with the answers: on my right hand, on my left hand, and what kind of question is that?

I was very suspicious of this question, because I felt like I'd heard it before, and it was one of those lateral thinking riddles that's meant to challenge preconceived notions, with whatever seems like the right answer not being the right answer after all. As such, some of you have probably already have an answer in mind. If so, hold onto it, especially if it's your first impression, the first thing that popped into your head without thinking too hard about it. Don't worry, no one's going to make you feel stupid for guessing wrong, unless you're the person who tried to settle the original version of this question once and for all.
Like I said, I couldn't help but feel like I was missing something about this question. I kept trying to see it as one of those "ton of feathers/ton of lead" or "zero as a number/one as a prime" type of puzzles. So, I tried putting the question itself (or its keywords) in a search to see if this had some other origin. Sure enough, it does, but it reads more than a little bit differently than the one on the dating site.

If you turn a right-handed glove inside out, will it be a right-handed glove or will it now be a left-handed one? 

If you're not seeing the difference between how these questions are worded, remember that the key words in the earlier version are "IT FITS" while now the emphasis revolves around the phrase "WILL IT BE."

What the "WILL IT BE" question is asking is whether or not misusing an item fundamentally changes what that item is to begin with. The "IT FITS" version is merely asking if the misuse can be even be done in the first place. If it still sounds like we're comparing ketchup and catsup, let's use another example:

If you hold a newspaper over your head, it will (if only momentarily) keep your head dry in the rain. Does that make it an umbrella? No, it's still a newspaper, but it's doing the work of an umbrella. If a robot in a factory is doing a job otherwise done by a human, is that robot a human? Again, no, it's just doing the work of one. It shares qualities with, can stand in for, and can even improve on, something else but it ultimately retains its original identity. With that all in mind, let's go back to those answers you were asked to retain from earlier, your knee-jerk, first-response to the "IT FITS" version of the question (as it appeared on the dating site).

If you said, "left hand," you are correct. If you said, "right hand," you're also correct, just a little ahead of the game, if not being more practical about the situation. That glove will fit on either hand, but it's going to be a better fit on the one it's made for, and it obviously won't fit both hands at once.

In the end, even if the version on the dating site is somewhat simpler than the other one, it works equally well as a kind of personality test than a lateral thinking exercise, with people answering the question divided into, say, pragmatists and pedants or outside/inside-the-box thinkers, however you want to read it. Something may have been lost in translation, but it gained insight in the process, walking away a little wiser, perhaps.

Then, there's this buffoon:

This answer was not given on the dating site, but on the other site containing the "earlier" version of the question. For starters, it's not actually a yes or no question, not the way it's worded; it's an either/or question, on both sites. Second, going back to what I was saying about credibility and, to paraphrase, "sounding as smart as you are" this site was an "Answers" site like Yahoo!Answers or eHow. In fact, it was the original Answers site. As such, it's meant to be a tad more formal than your average forum or chatroom or message board, because that's what the site expressly exists for. Between the lack of punctuation and capitalization, not to mention the all-too-pointless addendum of "lol," nothing indicates that the person writing this wants to be taken seriously or seen as any sort of expert on the subject. He may think he's solved the Sphinx's riddle, but all he's done is made a bigger riddle of himself and how exactly he believes he comes across when writing like this. Does he think that pointing out his own "out loud laughter" will highlight some absurdity of the question and potentially invalidate it as a logic puzzle? Even if he'd forgone the abbreviation and opened with, "I laugh at this question because..." it's no less irrelevant to addressing the aim of the question. 

When all is said (poorly) and done (haphazardly), the part of this so-called answer that got under my skin the worst is how this idiot tries to expand on his own point by offering what he believes to be a counterpoint, only to completely fail at doing so every step of the way, right up to letting us know, whether we want to or not, that he find this question loudly laughable. 

My biggest pet peeve when it comes to bad writing, grammar or otherwise, is when people say "but" when they really mean "and." It's a type of incompetence that goes far beyond double negatives, comma splices, run-on sentences, and even the seemingly inescapable "possessives vs. contractions." I can genuinely forgive most of those issues, mainly because they can still make sense when spoken aloud. We don't speak apostrophes and commas, we speak words and phrases. "You're" and "Your" may mean very different things, but they don't sound different, and unless someone sees your speech notes, no one's going to be able to tell one way or the other. At best, the pauses between certain words and phrases could be a verbal form of periods. Punctuation is a guide for how to read words and phrases, not a series of rails and walls to restrict how we communicate. However, confusing a word that means "like" with a word that means "unlike" is never coherent, spoken or written. If you know the difference between "YES" and "NO" there is no reason to confuse "AND" with "BUT." 

yes it does BUT you can always do it 

Whether or not you can always do it (assuming he means turning the glove inside-out) was hardly the issue in the first place; if a glove can be turned inside out, why wouldn't you be able to turn it back? Furthermore and finally, how is this meant to contrast what came before? 

My favorite fast food place is Steak 'n' Shake, but I go there often. 

I love this movie, but it's my all-time favorite. 

I can drive, but I have a license. 

You're inside, but you're in here. 

This book is on the table, but it's not on the floor. 

Whatever wisdom or intelligence this person possibly meant to convey, none of it has come through. He's treated a multiple choice question like a true or false one, he's tried to present a display of common sense as a counterpoint that doesn't counter his first point, and he's compounded that respectively mismatched and irrelevant information by revealing that he laughed out loud. Here's a riddle, was he laughing at the question or his own answer? 

A Fabricated Encounter (from Facebook)

The Facebook status message that started this:
PAY VERY CLOSE ATTENTION TO THESE INSTRUCTIONS: I would like my Facebook friends to comment on this status, sharing how you met me. But I want you to LIE. That's right, just make it up. After you comment, copy this to your status, so I can do the same. I bet HALF of you won't read the instructions.

to which I replied:
I was sabotaging a cruise ship with the intention of stranding the passengers to die a slow and painful death of starvation as a sacrifice to the ancient god Dagan. I was setting the detonator in the boiler room when you walked in on me, mistaking the room for the sauna. I thought you were going to try and stop me, but while I was explaining my evil plan (as all bombastic villains do) before silencing you, it turned out we actually worshiped the same evil deity and you'd even poisoned the entire food supply and were simply sticking around for a celebratory sauna. So, we fired up the jet skis and left that band of wayward travelers to their doom.

and in return:
The obelisk stood dusty in the dunes as I brush at them... frustrated at my situation. "Oh Lord DAGAN. Why must I unearth this damned monument?!" I yelled to nothing in particular. "Because he wishes it so," a voice from behind me called out startling me causing me to drop my brush. I looked back and spotted you setting down your backpack and breaking out a brush of your own. "The name's Matthew Joseph of the Great Dark Deepness, yourself?" I picked up my brush and returned to the delicate dusting of what looks like Dagan sitting atop a massive throne with men and women weeping at his feet and replied without looking at you, "Desiree of the Deep Weeping." The conversation went from Dagan to darker topics as the sun sank behind the larger dunes of the endless desert. The chittering of the hellflies dying on our buzz zapper makes us laugh as we continue our dark duty in the light of our new friendship.

This is seriously my new favorite thing right now. Thanks, Desi :)

Another casualty of my Linux loyalty.

I was reading about the Unix Philosophy on Wikipedia, and one of its stipulations toward good program design is to store data in flat text files. Sounds simple enough, but it's surprising (or rather, it's not surprising given how programmers actually are) how complex that sort of thing can actually get. 

People like to think Microsoft Works is an oxymoron. I disagree as I think it's one of the most competent word processors I've used since Appleworks on my old iMac. It's certainly better than feature-bloated Microsoft Word with its triple-figure price tag and myriad of features I honestly want someone to justify the need for to me. Seriously, what perilous problem was laid to rest by the onset of the latest version of MSWord? What award-winning novelist and finally got past his writer's block and completed his life's work? What disease was cured? 

Anyway, I'd written some stuff in Microsoft Works and, without giving it that much thought, simply saved the files as "Works Documents" which didn't seem like a proprietary format at the time, much less a proprietary format that would end up giving me such a headache later. They were put on a flash drive and then basically left in a drawer for a few months. During those few months, I decided I'd had it with Windows and Macintosh and went the Linux route. I'd traded in Microsoft Works and Appleworks for OpenOffice, which so far seemed able to do anything the others could do... or so I thought. 

Going in, there was no reason to assume converting the files would be such a problem, I'd written documents in Microsoft Word that I'd open in Appleworks without so much as a hitch. Earlier I'd written papers in MacWrite II before bringing them to Wordperfect which would then be brought to Appleworks. Sure, there might be a small issue with the formatting of the text (a paragraph suddenly not indented, double-spacing becoming single-spacing, and the like), but the point was every single word was there just like before. 

This time, however, when I tried to open the Works documents under Open Office's Writer, the words were not there. Nothing was there. It could not open the file. Let's think about that: a word processor could not even begin to try and open a document, which was just words on pages, written by another word processor. At first I thought this was just some sort of Microsoft/Linux barrier, a kind of "migration deterrent" from Big MS to keep Little L out of its clubhouse, so I took the file to my roommate's computer. She didn't have MSWord or even Microsoft Works, but she did have Notepad and Wordpad. Strangely, the exact same thing happened; the MSWorks file could not be interpreted in any way, shape, or form by anything other than MSWorks (and possibly MSWord). Like I've said before, there wasn't anything even all that special about these documents, they were simply text, no pictures, no boxes, no graphs, no columns, no page numbers, no headers or footers, no nothing. All I could think was, "What's so special about these files that they need their own special format?!" 

I then thought to myself, as I often do in these situations, "I can't possibly be the only one who's run into this problem. There has to be something I'm missing besides the possibility that I would have to either go back to Windows or at least present my roommate with the gift of MSWorks (which she might not have actually minded because she hated Notepad and Wordpad). There has to be a way to convert files like this." I did some searching and while I was relieved I found a solution (and a free one, I might add), I was still incredibly annoyed at how utterly convoluted the solution really was. 

I found a website that gave me the option to upload a file and select the format I wanted to change it to. It was originally intended for reformatting picture files (.png, .bmp, .tif, that sort of thing) into JPEGs, but it could also handle a wide variety of text files. Here's the annoyance: after uploading my file, rather than simply download it again from the site (or at least displaying it in the browser window so I could just copy and paste or save as an HTML document), I had to give an e-mail address for them to send the converted file to. If that sounds petty, hang on because I haven't actually gotten to the annoying part yet. When I checked my e-mail and found the message from the conversion service, I was baffled and (here it is) annoyed that instead of the converted file being presented to me as an attachment in the message, a link in the body of the message took me to back to the original site and THEN began the download, at which I said, "Why e-mail me a link to the same place I could have just downloaded it from after uploading in the first place?" and went on to wonder what disease THIS system cured with its over-engineering. I was so flustered by the experience that when I stumbled across a forum discussion asking what man's greatest accomplishment was, I proclaimed with full conviction: PAPER! 

Take that, proprietary file formats! 

But the important thing is, I got the file opened in Open Office's Writer and I'm now finishing what I started. I'll post the link when it's done. It's a little work of fiction.