Category: GENERAL

Last Night I Dreamed…

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… and woke remembering the dream, so I figure, it must be noteworthy. What I remember is that I was involved in making a film with Jetse de Vries. Mind, he was in the body of this other guy I know, a filmmaker in Korea named Josh, but it was Jetse alright, and he piled us all into a train with a ton of gear including stuff you’d see inside the van of the Lone Gunmen (the conspiracy theorists guys from The X-Files) that was about to cross Korea. Jetse/Josh began monitoring something that looked like a heart monitor, with …

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The Poet by Yi Mun-Yol

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When I ran across a very positive review for Yi Mun-yol’s novel The Poet over at Korean Literature in Translation, I was really excited to check the book out. It’s a novel about a poet who went by the handle Kim Sakkat–“Rain-Hat” Kim, the grandson of a rebel-leader who suffered social censure (and, almost, the execution of his whole family, in retribution for the granddad’s “crime”). The grandson becomes a poet, and then a wanderer, and arguably the first proto-rapper or beat poet in Korea… and the novel purports to explore his life story. Sound great, right? Unfortunately, I found …

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The Gay Marriage-Pocalypse

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This year, I’ve had two random people on Facebook who’d friended me for completely random reasons–one, a fellow saxophonist in Korea, and the other an Ezra Pound enthusiast in Indiana–completely lose their marbles on my Facebook Wall, after I posted something in support of marriage equality. The arguments are almost always the same: somehow my unapologetic atheism indicts my position; somehow they think I must be gay (presumably, because what heterosexual could support homosexual marriage? Ahem…); somehow gay marriage not being procreative is the problem, but not the only one (just one in a bag of trick arguments they pull …

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Links You Should Check Out

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Today, I was reminded of why I stopped doing these link roundups: they’re time-consuming to produce. I’ll probably switch to just tweeting or linking on Facebook, like almost everyone else I know, and this is probably the last post like this I’ll do. But anyway: Typhoon Haiyan: We were lucky: it was much-diminished when it hit Vietnam, and on top of that, it landed nowhere near us. Folks in the Philippines were nowhere near so lucky, and pretty desperately need our help. Climate change is apparently making storms (and other extreme weather events) worse, so events like Haiyan are likely …

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Resolved… Baidu Blocked

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Yeah, so: my hosting problems? It had nothing to do with my database. Nothing to do with my plugins, or anything else I was doing. (Okay, moving one little command in my config file a little higher up helped somewhat, but that wasn’t the main problem.) It had everything to do with bots needing to be blocked. Which, you know: you’d think that would be the first thing they’d suggest, since that’s nothing to do with WordPress and everything to do with spammer parasites attacking websites in general, right? I just wish someone had suggested it weeks ago, and saved …

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Gauging the Problem

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I’m still having hosting problems, behind the curtain of this website. My latest last-ditch effort is to try a new theme, in the hope that maybe that will make some kind of difference. I won’t know till tomorrow, so I’m going to have to leave this set up like it is. If the site looks a little unfamiliar, or maybe a little awkward–like with those tiny featured-post image thumbnails that show up above my posts, which I’m not about to “regenerate” to the proper size unless I decide to keep the theme change permanently–well, I don’t know what to say …

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Linkspray

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A spray of links and goodies. I’ve been saving up. The Shining: Since watching Room 237: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHE5YUNkssQ … and then rewatching The Shining, I’ve been a little fascinated with the film, and a lot fascinated with others’ (often slightly-to-very-crazy) fascination with it: Staircases to Nowhere: a documentary on the making of the film, with interviews of the crew: The Overlook Hotel is a tumblr dedicated to ephemera from the film’s production/promotion/etc. STANLEY KUBRICK’S MASTERPIECE, “THE SHINING”: Basically a book-length reading of the film in the form of a blog, which I have yet to read though I’ve read fascinating reviews. Apparently this …

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Sorted! (…I Think?)

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So: if you’re like me, and you started your blog a long, long time ago, and you’re having trouble with CPU Minutes usage? Don’t do what I did. I did a million other things, including all the things my hosting company suggested. And then, at wit’s end, I noticed some php script being called by something in the database that shouldn’t be there. Plugin authors have gotten a lot better about this, but in the old days? They designed plugins that didn’t delete the stuff from the database that they created. Whole tables and tables of crap, just sitting there, …

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Ominous, or, How Blogs Die

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I’ve been tidying up my Feedly subscriptions, trying to cut things down to the bare minimum so I can start following blogs I actually like and keep up with news from friends. I’m making an effort not to subscribe to (or keep up subscriptions to) every damned thing, because that was how I stopped following feeds in the first place. So anyway: the ominous. The death of a blog isn’t really ominous in itself. Lots of people have migrated to other social media platforms, though I feel sad about that in some ways: blogs work as a nice reservoir of …

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