How to Argue Effectively 

I argue very well. Ask any of my remaining friends. I can win an argument on any topic, against any opponent. People know this and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don't even invite me. You too can win arguments. Simply follow these rules:

Drink Liquor
Suppose you are at a party and some hotshot intellectual is expounding on the economy of Peru, a subject you know nothing about. If you're drinking some health-fanatic drink like grapefruit juice, you'll hang back, afraid to display your ignorance, while the hotshot enthralls your date. But if you drink several large martinis, you'll discover you have strong views about the Peruvian economy. You'll be a wealth of information. You'll argue forcefully, offering searing insights and possibly upsetting furniture. People will be impressed. Some may leave the room.

Make Things Up
Suppose, in the Peruvian economy argument, you are trying to prove that Peruvians are underpaid, a position you base solely on the fact that you are underpaid, and you'll be damned if you're going to let a bunch of Peruvians be better off. Don't say: "I think Peruvians are underpaid." Say instead: "The average Peruvian's salary in 1981 dollars adjusted for the revised tax base is $1,452.81 per annum, which is $836.07 before the mean gross poverty level." NOTE: Always make up exact figures. If an opponent asks you where you got your information, make that up too. Say: "This information comes from Dr. Hovel T. Moon's study for the Buford Commission published on May 9, 1982. Didn't you read it?" Say this in the same tone of voice you would use to say, "You left your soiled underwear in my bathroom."

Use Meaningless but Weighty-Sounding Words and Phrases 
Memorize this list:

Let me put it this way
In terms of
Vis-a-vis
Per se
As it were
Qua
Ipso facto
Ergo
So to speak

You should also memorize some Latin abbreviations such as "Q.E.D.", "e.g.", and "i.e." These are all short for "I speak Latin, and you don't." Here's how to use these words and phrases. Suppose you want to say, "Peruvians would like to order appetizers more often, but they don't have enough money." You never win arguments talking like that. But you will win if you say, "Let me put it this way. In terms of appetizers vis-a-vis Peruvians qua Peruvians, they would like to order them more often, so to speak, but they do not have enough money per se, as it were. Ergo, ipso facto, case closed. Q.E.D." Only a fool would challenge that statement.

Use Snappy and Irrelevant Comebacks
You need an arsenal of all-purpose irrelevant phrases to fire back at your opponents when they make valid points. The best are:

You're begging the question.
You're being defensive.
Don't compare apples to oranges.
What are your parameters?

This last one is especially valuable. Nobody (other than engineers and policy wonks) has the vaguest idea what "parameters" means. Don't forget the classic: You're so linear. Here's how to use your comebacks:

You say: "As Abraham Lincoln said in 1873..."
Your opponent says: "Lincoln died in 1865."
You say: "You're begging the question."
You say: "Liberians, like most Asians..."
Your opponent says: "Liberia is in Africa."
You say: "You're being defensive."

Compare Your Opponent to Adolf Hitler
This is your heavy artillery, for when your opponent is obviously right and you are spectacularly wrong. Bring Hitler up subtly. Say, "That sounds suspiciously like something Adolf Hitler might say," or "You certainly do remind me of Adolf Hitler."

So that's it. You now know how to out-argue anybody. Do not try to pull any of this on people who generally carry weapons.

Dave Barry

X-Men Origins: Wolverine: Before and After CGI special effects

NYTimes: Some Pirates Won’t Watch Illegal ‘Wolverine’. So goes the title of a NYTimes blogpost. Apparently, someone at 20th Century Fox (un) intentionally "leaked" a rough cut of the film before it's to hit theaters, a rough cut that lacks any special effects or computer graphics imagery.

Well, lads and lassies, risking imprisonment, sneaking through movie lot security, with bruised knees and past gunfire, we here at Solargun.com have gotten our hands on an exclusive just for you. That's right. We managed to smuggle a screenshot of a scene that has star Hugh Jackman before and after the computer graphics department airbrushes out all the "ugly realities".

 
Before: When you're a star like Hugh Jackman, you have some basic demands.



After: Hugh Jackman as Wolverine in finished airbrushed shot

The Daysleepers

Never eat beans before scuba diving


I was listening to The Radio Dept. on Last.fm and stumbled upon an excellent New York band called The Daysleepers. Dreamy guitars with a lot of reverb creating a lush, layered, textured sound reminiscent of highly influential acts of the early 90's like Cocteau Twins, My Bloody Valentine, The Cure, perhaps some other more obscure 4AD bands (Red House Painters) or Projekt bands (Love Spirals Downwards). In fact, they describe themselves on their homepage as "shoegaze, dreampop, ambient music", having been inspired by "Slowdive, My Bloody Valentine, Cocteau Twins, The Cure, and the Chameleons". Oooh, just what I like. On Amazon.com, there's an impressive quote from Robin Guthrie of the Cocteau Twins: "Lovely sounds ... lovely guitars." The album features both male vocals with a sense of nostalgic longing and beautiful ethereal female vocals. It's pure awesomeness.

Their web splash page has nice contemporary design elements: dark photo of giant octopus tentacles overlaid with a nice 2d floral illustration with half opacity.


Think twice before ordering the Phillip McKraken sushi...


I like how the 2d illustration looks a wee bit like flowers and a wee bit like waves. The tentacles are a nice association with the first track "Release The Kraken" from their first full debut album "Drowned in a Sea of Sound" (2008). For that track, I like how the "release" has a double meaning: does it mean "unleash", as in, unleash the monstrous kraken to destroy the world? or does it mean "free", as in free the enigmatic mysteries of nature? In the lyrics, it's kinda cool that the Kraken is a symbol for love. About the Kraken...


This Kraken loves the people on the ship


...on a random note, I originally thought this band was Swedish. Why you ask? Well, I was listening to Swede Pop on Last.fm, and this band was part of the set. So when I found the album on Amazon.com, and saw that the first track was called "Release the Kraken", I naturally thought it was a Swedish band, since the first thing one thinks about the Swedes are gigantic Krakens.


Swedish Chef playing air guitar


Current band members are:
- Jeff Kandefer
- Scott Beckstein
- Elizabeth Kandefer
- Mario Gimbrone


It's always snowing in Buffalo, NY


Current discography is:
- Drowned in a Sea of Sound (2008)
- The Soft Attack (EP) (2006)
- Hide Your Eyes (EP) (2006)

External Links:
- The Daysleepers
- Amazon.com
- Browse similar bands on Last.fm
- Discography on discogs.com
- Myspace

Someone doesn't know how to render smoke

I've been seeing these advertisements throughout the city for a new horror flick called "The Haunting in Connecticut". I can't think of anything scarier than Connecticut. The first time I saw these posters, I couldn't really make out WTF I was looking at. But upon closer inspection though, I thought someone had vandalized the posters with some brown love.


Looks like a Zune ad.


Upon even closer inspection, the only thing that crossed my mind was: "ew"


What Haley Joel Osment is reduced to acting in these days.


What is apparent about this poster is that someone doesn't know how to properly render smoke. The volumetric and specular effects are so full of fail. The smoke or ghostly ectoplasm I'm familiar with usually has a thin, wispy, ethereal quality to it. But this particular smoke has a lot of girth, is brown, reminiscent of large intestines, and appears to to have a somewhat metallic, shiny, chocolate chrome effect. Chrome + Chocolate = Scary. Maybe it's the smoke of Montezuma's ghost.


Two girls, one cup, and one boy with ipecac.


To be fair, perhaps it's not supposed to be some ectoplasmic goo from beyond at all, but the aftermath of some bratwurst fest in Hamburg gone horribly awry. In which case, the poster graphic is perfect!

Retro hand illustrations are "in"... but why?

One design trend I've been seeing a lot of lately is the retro look of hand drawn illustrations that appear as though they were drawn with markers and tempra paints, like some sort of 70's inspired art from 1982. A recent cover of Computer Arts magazine (issue #158) is a "perfect illustration" of poor execution.


This cover made my eyes bleed.


Do I like it? Eh, not really. What's wrong with it? It seems simplistic yet messy, and appears to lack any artistic skills. There is no symmetry, no balance, no depth, and no control over the contours, form, or lines. It's simply a two dimensional barf of colors and shapes.


Prince Charles as a high school art student.


This particular Computer Arts cover is particularly atrocious because of the fey douchebag on the cover. He's right out of your high school art class and the symbol of pastey, anemic folk art, complete with Zoolander's Blue Steel sunken cheeks. Note the hand-silkscreened T-shirt with stretched out neck and 70s jogging jacket. Also, the placement of the "Get your dream job" right in his crotch, well, maybe there was a typo when typing "Get your cream job".


The money shot.


Although I appreciate this new wave of neo-psychedelia, there is just too many examples of poor execution. But what of a good example? Here's one:



Delicious with a cherry on top.


The reason I liked this execution is because it puts a very contemporary spin on classic psychedelia. It's from the "new retro" tutorial on the Computer Arts website. Note the galaxy background with purples and blues, reminiscent of OS X. The rainbow also has a nice glassy effect with some fairly complex gradients, not an easy skill to master for an amateur.

The Raw Shark Texts

Magical realism often has split worlds: sanity vs. insanity, dreamworld vs. reality, life vs. the afterlife. In a tenuous time straddling two centuries, when the steel girded ego of the American empire is in danger of collapse, it's not surprising this genre of fiction, a kind of literary schizophrenia, has been popular for a few years.

TRST is also a kind of schizophrenic exercise, most notably exploring the boundary between the real world vs. the thought world, where curious conceptual fish swim around and devour memories and text forms. But having read the first half of TRST as magical realism, I found it to be an unsatisfactory experience. Why would I read it with this expectation? This book was recommended to me by someone who really enjoys Haruki Murakami.

Magical realism often has bizarre, sometimes illogical events, but there is a kind of aloof but apparent passivity or sometimes blatant reluctance to accept these strange set of affairs by the characters, even if they ultimately go through and rationalize their bizarre encounters. Hence, magical realism is sometimes described as having elements of 'dream logic', where strange, fragmented patterns occur, yet there is a kind of (sub)rational flow, an associative thread which holds everything together, no matter how fragile.

For instance, in Murakami's work, a character may see a little, green creature digging up a hole in her back yard. And she wonders, how odd. Or a man walks into a closet in a high rise, only to find a deep subterranean well inside. And he thinks, I wonder what this is doing here. In TRST, there is no moment of doubt. Everything happens at once. Almost immediately, a character is attacked by a 'conceptual shark' made of text that jumps out from his television set. Later, characters teleport from a basement somewhere in the UK to a ship floating off the shores of Greece. A postcard someone holds becomes a digital teleportation portal. And no one, most notably the protagonist, questions any of this, or attempts a rationalization. It just happens as a matter of course.



This kind of no nonsense, stick to the facts (albeit strange facts), earnest story telling makes TRST read more like science fiction rather than magical realism. The focus in this book is plot, rather than a deep exploration of psychology or language. Sure, the book is about language, about textual landscapes. But it just doesn't sing. It's not eloquent. It starts and stops. It's uneven. It stutters. Sometimes it's downright awkward. Sounds suspiciously like most SF out there...

Don't get me wrong. I liked TRST. A lot. But as mentioned before, I first started reading it expecting something in the vein of Murakami. All the elements were there, but something just did not click for me. It wasn't until I started to read it as science fiction halfway through that I started to really enjoy the book on its own terms, a kind of fun SF plot-driven romp.



In this respect, I think the brightest parts of TRST is conceptual, similar to the way that 'conceptual art' highlights the ideas and the process of art making rather than painting a pretty picture. An artist who comes to mind when thinking of TRST is Damien Hirst (who is also from the UK), and in particular, his work 'The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living' (which also has a shark as its main theme). Like Hirst, Hall explores the boundaries between mind/body, space/time, air/water, and the visual/the hidden (or sublime). And both use the physical form of a shark as a representation of fear, awe, or power. But do I want to have an old, decaying shark in a smelly tank sitting in my living room? It's probably something better enjoyed from afar, as a concept. A conceptual shark.

Photography

I just joined Flickr and posted some photos.
I originally had some reservations about using Flickr. I don't know -- there's something about having your photos out there for the entire world to download. I'll probably not upload personal family photos until/if I get more comfortable doing so. But in the meantime I'll post some generic artsy fartsy photos. I turned off the download feature and uploaded only smaller image sizes. And I'm a total hypocrite for doing so because I like downloading other people's hi-res images.

Delerium's "Nature's Kingdom" (ft. Kirsty Hawkshaw) Video

I first heard the song "Nature's Kingdom" in the summer of 2001. I was living in a small New York City apartment at the time, working 90 hour weeks as a peon at a tedious office job, and the WTC 9/11 disaster was still a few months away in the future.

When I listened to "Nature's Kingdom", the deeply evocative lyrics conjured up images of deserts, sand storms, drifting sleep, and the aching of some lost, fragile love. This might be why the song always reminded me of the movie The English Patient.

Inspired by both the film and the song, I edited a short video. I used found images from two beautifully made documentaries on deserts: BBC Planet Earth: Deserts, and National Geographic Africa 2: Desert Odyssey, as well as incorporating some scenes from the film The English Patient.

Here are some screen shots from the video:



Here are the lyrics to the song:

Nature's Kingdom (Delerium, ft. Kirsty Hawkshaw)

Moon beauty
To live and to love
In delirious bitter gardens
The vision floods
Under the mind sky

Night breaths
Whispering symphony
After a blood sun storm
Love's light relieves

With a goddess and a dream
In sleep's misty shade
I lie beneath
Worlds imaginary

With a goddess and a dream
In sleep's misty shade
I'm going out to meet
An old friend

Sing a true moment
Recall a trip
No language can heave
Through life
Like an ache, a sense
The blinding wind

Making believe
That if there's a sandstorm
You'll come and rescue me
Help me find my way
Back to the waking world

With a goddess and a dream
In sleep's misty shade
I lie beneath
Worlds imaginary

With a goddess and a dream
In sleep's misty shade
I'm going out to meet
An old friend

The desert knows
We are strangers
Until the sands of time
See through our eyes

We could be lost perhaps forever
But there's space in the air
And it's ages
Till sunrise

List of Books; Children's Books; Slow Reading

It's taken about three weeks to catalog the books in the library. Although a few books remain, I managed to catalog about 850 books so far, sorting them by author, title, genre, and ISBN. We've accumulated quite a few from our college courses (medieval French literature, Victorian English literature), high school books we were really supposed to return (but never did), and more recently, science fiction we've grown to love. We also have collected books over the years in genres we found by accident, by word of mouth, or by our own research, like French Decadence (in translation), postmodern literary criticism, Russian literature (in translation), and feminist studies. We've also amassed quite a few reference books, from language and etymological guides, to travel guides, to all sorts of dictionaries, and other language curiosities. Putting the list together reveals that about 13% of the collection is classic literature, 10% science fiction, 10% children's, and 9% contemporary fiction, with various other genres each under 10%. It was somewhat arbitrary, but I segregated 'classic' literature from contemporary fiction (most bookstores have a combined 'fiction/literature' section). But the separation seemed to make sense at the time.

Almost all of the children's books were those my parents bought while our family resided in Guyana, all printed and published in London from the late 1970s. And, unlike today's (ultra) race-conscious literature, the books of that time were filled with somewhat ignorant (or naive?) views of race and ethnicity. One of the more flagrant examples is a book entitled 'The Three Golliwogs,' which is just one book of a larger collection by British author Enid Blyton. The 'Golliwogs,' who appear in several of Blyton's books, depict racial stereotypes of Blacks in ragdoll clothes. I don't particularly recall having thought anything negative about the Golliwogs when I was younger (when I was between 5 and 9 years old), but now the inherent racism in the caricatures is unmistakably clear. It's troubling to think that, although Blyton's books were originally written in the late 50s, the books continued to be re-printed in Britain in their original form until at least the late 70s, the time of our books' imprint. Before the book cataloging project began, we entertained the idea of reading some of my childhood literature to Sue's six year old niece. Not surprisingly, after browsing through some of them ourselves, we decided against it.

In any case, Blyton's ignorance (or naivete) is but a small speck in our children's collection. I have other treasured books that my family had for almost a quarter of a century. It's saddening to think that my parents put all this effort and money into purchasing these books, because while I was between the ages of 5 to 9, I was not so interested in reading these books as I was looking at the illustrations. Most of the books I'm certain were read by Susan. But her two younger brothers were happy just looking at the pictures.

Reading came slow to me. At times, I wonder if I was ever formally taught to read when I was a child. Upon reflection, my early reading hurdle was probably due to the fact that my parents were not native English speakers (or rather, readers), and we were in a foreign (and potentially hostile) country, and I never had a chance to emulate anyone reading because I never saw anyone actually engaged in the act of reading -- I don't recall a silent 'reading time' at school among the students (this would have been the second grade), and I don't recall any bibliophiles among my young friends (but we played with lots of toys), nor do I ever recall even seeing Susan reading a book. Perhaps I should consider it almost a miracle that I like to read today, or that I am even literate at all. But I do not attribute the slow acquisition of reading as any fault of my parents, my school, or my environment. For you see, even at a young age, I was completely obsessed with art, drawing, sketching, tracing, and doodling. I believe it was this predilection for visual arts that, in some way, overshadowed my ability or desire to read. It's rather ironic that much later in life, I would immensely enjoy English literature, composition, and creative writing, graduating with an English literature degree.

One set of children's books that was regretfully lost over the years, but which I miss very much even to this day, is the collection of the entire series of Tin Tin classics by French author and illustrator Hergé, printed in large color strips on glorious legal sized pages. Out of the entire collection of children's books, the Tin Tin series in particular stands out as the one that I remember reading the most. Perhaps it was the artwork that captured me. Maybe it was the exciting detective mystery aspect. Unlike any other comics of its time, it was truly one of the first prototypes of the modern graphic novel, having beautiful artwork, and stories and characters who were deep, engaging, and philosophical, as well as humorous. Regrettably, it was our very fondness for these books which inevitably led to the folding, creasing, and tearing of the bindings of these lovely, large paperbacks. I remember my parents having to staple the bindings so the pages wouldn't fall out. But under the carelessness of children, with the spilled drinks, the fingers sticky with fruit, the borrowing to friends, the packing on long trips, and the general abuse they took over the years, the beautiful collection became fragmented, stolen, or lost forever. I've sometimes seen new reprintings of the same large, legal sized paperback Tin Tin books around the city, but I'm reluctant to purchase them due to their tendency to wear and tear. I've also seen hardback editions, packing two or three paperback's worth into one securely bound volume, but unfortunately they are letter size, and the diminished size makes a tremendous impact on the artwork. I'll wait for the special legal sized hardbacks to come out one day...

Lists

I decided to change, and it all started when I wrote a 'to-do' list. I've written to-do lists before, especially in college, when a year long procrastinating habit ultimately caught up to my sorry, lazy ass at the end of the semester, and I found myself buried under essay deadlines, cramming for chemistry, or finding a last minute internship for a discipline I wasn't in the least bit interested in. These lists would be written on a ripped out page from a notebook, the edges frayed and tattered. I would fold up the paper twice horizontally, twice vertically, to get eight little rectangles, one box for a day of the week (and the extra box for what to buy at the grocery store). Write essay on a minor poem by Alexander Pope. Check. Study for chemistry. Skip. Do an all-nighter for Chemistry. Skip. Buy coffee and No-Doze. Check. Search usenet for research ideas. Check.

It's strange to think that in those days, the internet was just a novelty. If a particular Chemistry question stumped us, or if we had to critique Alexander Pope's misogyny, we couldn't simply Google it. We had to physically walk to the library during school hours (our lame ass school's library was not open 24 hours), go to the card catalog, look up by author or subject, then hit the stacks (of books). There was no guarantee that the question you had in mind would be found in any particular one book. You had to, OMG, READ it. Or at least scan it. Go through the table of contents. Go to the index. God forbid, go to the bibliography and reference yet another book. It would take at least a week to gather enough materials to even think about skimming. This labyrinthine exercise, this bean counting, this circuitous navigation, much like the sliderule or abacus, is a lost art that generations to come will find difficult to comprehend. For the dateless MUD-heads, geeks, porn addicts, computer science majors, or AD&D players (stress on "Advanced"), the early wayfarers of "the information superhighway", the "inter-net", or the "world wide web", it was not as simple as point-and-click. It was a chaotic, lime green, textual jungle of NN, listservs, majordomos, and nebulous yet ultra-specific named usenet servers with names like alt.barney.dinosaur.die.die.die. If you were lucky and found a thread on a usenet group which happened to discuss early Eighteenth Century English literature, then you posted a message on the server, waited a day or two, then checked back to see if anyone posted a reply. You'd be lucky if you got a couple replies. And despite being able to utilize all this arcane technical knowledge, the content was never formally presented or articulated, but rather, filled with invectives, sarcastic diatribes, and worst of all, flame wars. But at least it was invectives, sarcastic diatribes, and flame wars about whether Alexander Pope's possible impotence was a case for his misogyny or not. In those days, the internet was largely used by universities, and the content was primarily produced by students, professors, researchers (and sometimes, the government). It predated commercialism. It predated spam. It was a time when there was something called netiquette, which is no more than a vestigial organ of the Victorian internet days.

I would be in the computer lab, trolling the usenet servers for academic threads, one thing to scratch off my primitive, tattered notebook to-do list. If I managed to find that piece of paper again and look to see what else remained on the list of things to do, I would invariably find a little spot, or crease, or mark, which would resemble the shoulder of a woman, or a wheel of a bicycle, or the eye of a monster. I would end up spending at least a half hour extrapolating lines, shading areas, drawing curves, until I filled one of those empty panels (maybe the grocery list one). Of course, I would be situated right next to the digital media and graphics lab in the computer center, and I would feel compelled to use a scanner to scan the sketch into Photoshop, after which I'd spend the next 6 hours doodling on the computer and transforming the artwork into something pretty and pointless. Thus, my to-do list of academic protocols and grocery needs would inevitably transform into a digital and painterly record of my procrastination habits.