Filling a Manuscription

This is a handmade book my roommate got for me some years ago. It's been sitting in a cloth bag in a drawer for most of that time, much to her chagrin. I explain in increasing anguish each and every time she asks about the solitary confinement that it's simply too precious for my damn chicken scratch. It's a drastic character flaw I cover up by using an adopted shorthand I'm very hesitant to explain to people lest they find out I'm writing dirty limericks about them while we're waiting for meetings to start or for food to arrive. That's actually a lie; They're haikus. Okay, fine, that's a lie too. I'm writing about how nice they are, nothing but the nicest niceness that ever been niced, can we please move on? Anyway, I did eventually take the book out of its t-shirt material and drawstring prison and begin… something, though I'm going to change the chicken scra—script for this one just to further the Voynich Manuscript aesthetic I'm going for. It may mean blacking out the first page, but supposedly the Mona Lisa is painted over something else that DaVinci wasn't happy with. Speaking of unknowns, I only found out literally a month ago she's wearing a veil. It's that thin horizontal line right below her hairline. I don't believe it adds to any mystery or awe of the piece, merely an observation. On the whole and especially in this particular day and age, I think Munch's The Scream is more deserving to be where she is now in the Louvre, but I'm not a museum curator or an art critic, just an asshole with an opinion. Oh, but I repeat myself, 2020 jokes are becoming old hat already, and we're getting off topic.

Speaking of everyday occurrences, paintings, and being off-topic, here's a kind of book you don't see everyday:

It's been cropping up on my Instagram feed as part of an Etsy ad. It's a thousand-page handmade leather book with a moon theme, available in a handful of colors and 2 sizes, your typical 8.5x11in variety and a 9x12in version because masochism is a thing. Speaking of being judgmental about other people's obsessions, I love this thing. I love that it is almost thicker than it is wide. I love that it looks like I could use it as the perfect if near-lethal retort to, "Stick and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me." I love how cartoonish its proportions are despite being a practical object you can use for its intended purpose aside from blunt instrument/settler of arguments. Put a few layers of oily makeup and a thin, barely-noticeable veil on it, I'll marry it. Of course, it would be a small and simple ceremony with a BYOB kind of reception because it's 800 dollars… for the smaller version.

The moral of the story is if you're having reservations about writing in a handmade book someone got you as a present because it's simply too beautiful, just look up handmade journals on Etsy and stop being a big blubbering baby about it.

In the wise words of Ron White, I told you that story to tell you this one.

Along with a full encyclopedia (World Book, 1987) and a handful of National Geographic magazines (the only magazine that looks good en masse on a bookshelf), my family had a dictionary, one of those ginormous ones that you genuinely should not put on a shelf as it will compromise the entire structural integrity of the bookshelf and whatever wall it's up against. I think my Mom still has it. We kept it on a lectern, a simple little stand that holds the book open and at an angle so it's easier to lean in and pore over its pages pondering the proper praise… phrase… to say… to someone… who may or may not be challenging you to hospitalize them. Anyway, many a year ago (you'll work out how many in a moment) this anything but easy to move easel was in our living room. We had to move it there from the TV room where the bookshelf was in order to comply with building codes.

On at least 2 separate occasions, my brother would have friends over and they'd all be chilling out in the living room enjoying each other's company, as we all had no choice but to do before smartphones and tablets came along. Besides, the N64 was in the other room and it would be too early in the evening for Mario Kart to show you who your real friends were. At some point, someone would look over to the easel and ask, "Is that really a dictionary?" I suppose they thought it was maybe one of those family Bibles or illustrated editions of Lord of the Rings rather than the kind of dictionary you typically only see in school libraries. My brother would confidently answer, "Yes. Yes, it is." A few exchanges of "No way!" and "Way!" later, as was fashionable at the time before emojis ruined everything, the remainder of the evening would be spent looking up words and, if they were lucky, finding out not only every possible meaning it could carry, but the history of how it came to be.

In the words of a Bishop I once met, "If you really want to stick it to someone, tell them how 'nice' you think they are." If nothing else, it's a good way to tell if they have a comically large dictionary at home, and whether or not you have to bring your own hard hat when you visit.

… Ah, shit.

Fear is the Mind-Killer, Mediocrity the Brain Cell-Killer

Disclaimer: like all of my other trailer impressions (which I keep telling myself I'm not going to do anymore), they are only impressions. None of what I'm about to say comes from any sort of insider knowledge and certainly not any kind of advanced screening, much as I wish I carried that kind of clout. It's entirely possible the final film will differ from the trailer and alleviate the concerns I have about it. That said, one of the reasons I started doing more trailer analyses is because I like to work under the premise that a trailer is a movie's first impression, and like in any first impression, you should put your best foot forward. You can call my bluff without showing your hand. When a trailer gives an impression of a movie that turns out to be different than what's on screen come the debut, I feel it's valid grounds for criticism. It's a fine line between piquing my interest and lowering my expectations. 

The trailer for the new version of Dune dropped a few days ago. I've watched it, and my reaction is, "It looks fine." Were I to be pressed for additional adjectives, the most affirmatively I could answer is "Adequate" with alternatives and/or additions consisting of "Competent." I hate to use a term like "Unnecessary" because as Oscar Wilde taught us, all art is fundamentally useless and that's the point. Art should never have to be defended and it certainly should never have to defend its own right to exist. It looks like someone split the difference between the David Lynch take and the Sci-Fi Channel miniseries (from the before time, back when they could spell). Unfortunately, in splitting the difference, the whole seems to have become less than the sum of its parts. Gone is the wonderfully mesmerizing mastery of color and light from the miniseries, traded in for a dull array of grays and browns even in what looks like midday with a clear sky. The cast seems closer to the David Lynch film in terms of star power and potential to play it larger-than-life, but they are notably understated in delivery, almost tired. Also, raise your hand if you thought Jason Mamoa was playing Gurney instead of Duncan. 

It's all very minimalist, which is where Denis Villenueve shines, but just like Dune 2020 and its earlier iterations of 20 and (good grief) 36 years ago, he seems at odds with his own sensibilities. I've seen two of his movies, Arrival and Blade Runner 2049. I adored Arrival and think it's one of the best thinking man's science fiction films since Under the Skin or The Europa Report. By contrast, I couldn't tell you a damn thing that happened in Blade Runner 2049 except some above average visuals that you can recreate at home. Simply watch the new Dune trailer, but hold up any and every piece of colored glass you can find, swapping them with every new scene. I've got a similar trick for James Cameron movies involving a strobe light and cobalt glass, but we're getting off-topic. 

Here's the complicated relationship I've had with the works of Frank Herbert: I never got into the books, and it's for the same reason I don't actually hold the past adaptations in higher regard beyond technical achievements. The WORLD of Dune, the setting, the lore, the cultures, and the history is all monumentally fascinating. The STORY of Dune, as in the one story that's now essentially been told 3 times (4 including the first book), is painfully dull. At its core, the story of the Atreides and the Harkonnen is a mafia revenge movie set in space and with gently messianic religiosity because that's how science fantasy/planetary romance rolls.

If I were in a more cynical mood, I could make an infographic drawing lines of comparison between Dune and Get Shorty since The Godfather is too obvious. Just pretend John Travolta is House Atreides and Dennis Farina is House Harkonnen, Hollywood is Arrakis, Gene Hackman is a Mentat, Danny DeVito and Rene Russo are Fremen... Okay, I'm not pretending it's without its stretches, but even this mental exercise isn't meant to knock it. It is by will alone I set my mind in motion, and my thoughts have acquired a lot of speed. Out, out, damn lip stains!

The best versions of any stories are the ones that make me not care about how many times or ways I've heard it before. It's not diminishing it to say it all comes down to the neat little package you doll up your plot with. That's how mythical worlds have worked from the cave painting we used to symbolize the word go. 

Excalibur is your father's lightsaber is my Gom Jabbar in a Weirding sort of Way that surrounds us, penetrates us, and in the darkness binds us.

There is no one story, and it is all the same story, 36 plots all asking, "Who am I?" It may all be tales told by idiots, full of sound and fury signifying nothing, but I can't stand the silence and I think all of you feel the same way. I'm not being any sort of iconoclast when I offer the following advice to those poor players who strut and fret their hour upon the stage. When you hold all that hostage for the sake of that one story, you're doing it wrong. You've gone from putting the cart before the horse to putting the cart on the horse's back and then kicking it impatiently when it can't get up because you put a damn cart on it. Also, the cart is full of vegetables and the horse is named Just Desserts because Ben & Jerry got out of the horse racing business after the Jolly Green Giant bought them out. 

Speaking of bad business dealings nobody wins from, let's talk about Spider-Man. 

• Bitten by a radioactive spider, 
• misused his powers at first resulting in the death of Uncle Ben, 
• now fights out of a renewed sense of personal responsibility. 

Even if you never picked up an issue of the series or watched any of the near-endless cartoon adaptations, we've had at least 3 cinematic versions of Peter Parker by 3 completely different actors, helmed by 3 completely different directors, and all under the supervision of 2-ish production companies that sort of get along except when they don't and Civil War has to be re-written at the last minute and he's not really Spider-Man more like Iron Man Jr. because marketing guys don't know asses from elbows, among other problems. Regardless of these rocky starts and repeated reboots/retoolings/reworkings/reanimations, by the time we got to Into the Spider-Verse, that initial setup, that origin story, was practically a running gag.

The shorter version of what I just described goes like this: We had to endure 5 garbage Transformers movies before we got Bumblebee. 

For as much as the two visual adaptations of Dune thus far differ and how closely they do or do not adhere to the source material, the overall beats of  

• Loverboy Meets Spice Girls, 
• Loverboy Loses Spice Girls, 
• Loverboy Gets Spice Girls Back by declaring war on an intergalactic empire while riding giant sandworms and blasting TOTO from a boombox over his head. 

are all still present and accounted for in this New Kid on the Block and it's all so NSync with itself I crave a Social Distortion. This should not be old hat by now. I should not be bored by Sand People upgrading their Banthas to steroid-infused Sarlaccs to take down Sandcrawlers and Jedi Masters who can Force-choke space itself. Look, I get this is all new for some people, that not everyone absorbs, dissects, and compartmentalizes operas of the outer space persuasion the way I do, but that's not my issue here. My issue is that we keep hitting the reset button and assuming it's a form of time travel had it been invented by Big Brother. Couple this with the fact Frank Herbert by his own admission wrote Dune to be Sci-Fi that was as light on the Sci-side of things as possible to make it more approachable and accessible, and you can see why I'm nowhere near as excited for a third adaptation as I probably should be.

I don't want The Dunefather for the 3rd time.
I want Rogue Dune... Atreidebee... Into the Foldverse... The Fremenorian... Okay, I'm done. 

I also want House Ordos. I couldn't begin to tell you who they are in Get Shorty. Might have to bring Be Cool into the mix. 

Two Great Techs That Tech Great Together (part one)

This was going to be a single entry, but it ran a bit longer than I meant it to, and the flow got lost along the way. That other half is an impression of the recently-released Microsoft Surface Duo. I bring this up because I want to make clear that I do in fact consider ink and paper to be technology. I'm even going to be that hoity-toity type and stake the claim ink and paper is the most important technological breakthrough in human history. Simply put, we found a way to make words easily-transferrable from person to person across time and space. If that's not a breakthrough, I don't know what is. 

I forgot my wallet today at breakfast. Fortunately, I was with my roommate and the place is practically down the street from us, so I was there and back again inside of 5 minutes. My French toast had just arrived and my coffee was still hot. When it came time to pay at the register, I noticed the tap symbol on their card reader and asked if they took Apple Pay. They did not. From what I understand, it's some kind of opt-in feature on card readers and most restaurants simply don't bother. By contrast, the place we used to go to for breakfast before the pandemic claimed they took Apple Pay, but it never worked. 

Over my life, I've had many different types of wallet. The one I probably had the longest was a chain wallet. They're sometimes called skater's wallets, but the first time I had ever seen one, it was labeled as a trucker's wallet. It was a good, sturdy little number whose only serious issue was its button closures as they would bite off the corners of the cards placed in it, including my driver's license. The chain was useful for keys when I was still working retail at the electronics counter. I even had a convenient little pen on a carabiner. Overall, it was secure, durable, and versatile to the point it almost made up for eating cards. 

The wallet I had immediately after that one was an old neoprene case for my MiniDisc player. It was a bit bulky, but at least if I had to put it in my back pocket, I could sit down without feeling like I was sitting on a brick. That's probably the best example of something being repurposed as a wallet this side of an Altoids tin. Some time later, I remembered a cigarette case my brother had given me and my fellow groomsman. I didn't smoke, neither did he, nor did most of his friends, but they're just about the size of a credit card, and the little straps or springy paddles used to hold the cigarettes in place was a decent way of keeping cash folded. I gathered a small assortment of those, but rather than a daily driver, they ended up being storage for rarely-used cards or business cards I'd gathered over the years. A Gerber knife served as a money clip for a few years before I got sick of the clip scratching up the cards. It was a bad situation; either you had the numbers of your cards partially visible, or you wound up erasing the signature off the back (along with those 3-4 little numbers you need to verify your purchases). 

Fortunately, when it's holstered, it doesn't look like a knife, meaning far less nervous looks when I reach for my wallet to pay for something upon hearing the total. 

I don't carry cash with me anymore. If I ever do have cash, it's because someone's given it to me. The last time I had cash, I ended up making some Girl Scouts very, very happy. I feel embarrassed asking if their parents have one of those card reader add-ons for their phones. I've been seeing those more often at fairs, conventions, swap meets, and the like, but I imagine it may create some liabilities for the Girl Scouts if parents are effectively becoming the middlemen in the transaction as opposed to the cashbox being the intermediary. 

Sidenote: I don't buy into the whole conspiranoid narrative about a cashless society. For all intents and purposes, we've been living in a cashless society since the 1960s when the Gold Standard was phased out by Nixon. Call me paranoid, but the only reason I can see for anyone to insist on cash in this day and age is not wanting a paper trail. Maybe I'm simply not enough of a thorn in the government's side to be worried about waking up an unperson with a few keystrokes and mouse clicks. You say Doubleplusgood, I say Viddy Well. 

This is Holst. Everyone assumes he's named for a holster. He isn't, though that does tend to be a common nickname when we just don't know what to do with him sometimes. 

This is my current wallet. I bought it from the Rooster Teeth website a little over 2 years ago and it's been great. I only have 3 cards in it including my driver's license. I like how lightweight it is, even if it does occasionally mean leaving it in my other pants. 

Instagram has been a surprisingly big influence on nearly all of my major purchases of late.

Lately I've been seeing advertisements for something called the Sketch Wallet. It was a very successful crowdfunding campaign that's surprisingly still going strong this long after the campaign ended. The typical story with crowdfunded projects is once the initial production run of the bright, shiny object is sold out, the creators have scattered to the winds and moved on to other bright, shiny projects. This isn't necessarily a bad thing; clearly whatever niche needed to be filled has been left a happy customer. Those who were on the fence or wanted to wait and see missed the bus and simply have to wait for another one. Such is life. 

I doubt those lukewarm would-be customers would have to wait especially long, if at all, since there's nothing all that special about the idea of this wallet. It is essentially a travel journal. You could find its cousin in any office supply or stationary store as it's simply a small notebook with a leather (or fabric) cover that just so happens to have a slot or two for some cards and maybe cash. 5 minutes of searching could probably land you a half-dozen DIY patterns to breathe new life into that old purse or those the legs from your cut-offs if you were feeling adventurous. Speaking of adventure, try looking up "passport covers," though the real adventure may be trying to find a notebook that fits the standard 125x88mm size.   

What the guys behind Sketch Wallet have done to stand out from the crowd is appeal to artists. As I said, pocket (refillable) notebooks are nothing new. Similarly, pocket sketchbooks are nothing new, but applying the "it's also a wallet" label is admittedly a not-too-well-worn path to tread. That said, I'm going to try and read all of your minds and guess your impressions of this product thus far. 

"It's too big and bulky to be a wallet and too small and insubstantial to be a sketchbook." 

Was I right? 

Credit where credit is due, it is abundantly clear that the crew behind the Sketch Wallet knows their audience. They're not simply appealing to artists to stand out from similar products, but because they understand those products don't quite tick all the right boxes that artists may need in a small, refillable sketchbook. For starters, travel journals are typically for writing, an informal iteration of the classic reporter's notebook, or a less ephemeral take on Post-It notes. The Sketch Wallet, by contrast, offers their refills in a small variety of styles, including blank (obviously), dotted (the minimalist's graph paper), and tan-toned. 

There are currently three sizes of wallet. The smallest size has pages about the size of an index card folded in half, distinctly rectangular. The medium wallet (arguably the most popular given most of the available options are sold out) is almost square. This was the marketing blurb that convinced me without question these dudes were on the level: 

"great for Instagram"

Albeit pickings are slim on their happy medium, the refills are still readily available and even without the cover are a decent value. They come in packs of 3 with 60 pages (30 sheets) apiece for around 10USD. For comparison, the Moleskine Cahier style notebook also comes in packs of 3 for around the same price, though offering 80 pages (40 sheets), the major difference being not square and not offering any sort of toned paper option. We could entertain a healthy debate about which is the better value. However, just like the awful truth about your precious, precious cash is that the value is in the eye of the beholder. Indispensable to you is redundant to me is intriguing to her is useless to him. 

I've been a card-carrying member of the man-purse club since at least November of 2017 as I take my iPad with me everywhere. Along with the iPad is at least one Moleskine notebook (typically graph paper). This is completely, 100% normal for me. 

The patch does serve a distinctly practical purpose. It covers up an old employer's logo.

A term that often gets brought up with many new gadgets and life hacks and the like is "A solution looking for a problem." it's one we hear more and more, but it also seems to be losing some of its stigma. As our avenues for communication spread and grow, direct feedback and specialized manufacturing allows for a more tailored end user experience. While I have little to no use for a less-than-agreeably-sized sketchbook pulling double duty as a wallet for my shrinking library of embossed plastic and laminated paper, it's obvious there are people out there who have been waiting their whole lives for this little gizmo. 

Speaking of which:

Next time, Gadget... Next time.