Peter Howard is Wintermute, mythologist

The City Reborn

28January2008 [directLink] [film]

The City is defeated. The heart is overrun, cancerous, so She appears again on its outskirts.

Walking through the heart of the city, I feel Her absence. The ordinary rhythms are no longer there. There is a martial beat driving the city’s occupants; it is forced and dark, corrupting the soul.

But when I leave the centre, away from its dark influence, I think I feel Her again. Out there, just beyond the periphery, a new light is appearing. She is being reborn, and starts to gather Her followers to Herself. I want to be there, to join Her, but I cannot locate Her. I walk the periphery and sense Her presence coming from all directions, except inside, where She once was.

Every week I walk that path again, along the periphery, and feel Her getting stronger. But She is still not located at a single point.

And the darkness at the centre — they feel Her also. They sense Her presence, and fear it. They know their time is short.

They thought they had destroyed Her, but they misunderstood Her nature. The Cities are true Immortals — far beyond their little games and pretensions to immortality. They can still die; the Cities are forever. The Cities have been reborn again and again, throughout human history.

This is now, but I know that it is repeated elsewhere, else-when. All these pieces are part of a tale that is repeated, over and over. For now, I just write down the pieces as they come. Soon, the circle will be complete, and then — I’ll have the whole tale, in all its tellings.

The Night Before Christmas, or, Why I'm Buying a MacBook Air

21January2008 [directLink] [mac]

On Lovemarks

Falling asleep last Tuesday night (the keynote running mere hours before I got up Wednesday), I felt like I was ten again, with the promise of presents in the morning, and it struck me how unusual it was that a corporation could make me feel that way.

It’s not uncommon, the idea that there’s something peculiar about Apple Inc that makes its customers feel special. I’d long liked Apple’s products, but it wasn’t until I made the switch that I really felt it. I’d immediately picked up Final Cut Studio, and switched to it within days, shutting down an edit I was doing in Avid and starting again in FCP. That was just the beginning.

I’ve since bought Aperture, because it and Lightroom seemed roughly equal, but having used FCP I knew I’d prefer the workflow. (It was unfortunate that Lightroom released an update shortly after that sped it up dramatically, and Aperture has yet to do the same. I’m pushing Aperture on the iMac way passed its limits with the size of the shoots I’m now doing. But I wait, convinced Apple will come up with a solution for me yet.)

And I picked up iWork on a whim; played with the demo, was pleasantly surprised by some of the interface elements in Numbers, and was all too happy to get rid of slow open source efforts.

On the Halo Effect

While it hasn’t, just yet, extended to iPods, my love for all things Mac did make me pay for third-party software for the first time in years (having used Linux and various F/OSS options). I’d used a lot of feed readers, but I watch way too many feeds for most of them; NetNewsWire is blazingly fast, and I was happy to pay for it — now that it’s free I wouldn’t hesitate to recommended it to anyone on a Mac.

On Notebooks

It didn’t take me long to get tired of using a Windows box at work. I still use it — a brief fling with Ubuntu made me realise the futility of alternatives — I need Word, Excel and Outlook for my work. But I’ve been seriously considering getting a notebook for some time, and a Mac was the obvious choice.

The problem, however, is that I wanted a secondary machine. I used a notebook as a primary for a long time, and though it was useful when I went to France, and I used it for work for a period, it wasn’t very portable. It was okay for work because I could plug it into a wall for a day — but then all I was doing was avoiding the inconvenience of having to keep my work and home separate — which, admittedly, was perfect while I was contracting, so I could still do some work from home. But I rarely took it to uni; it wasn’t worth the pain of carrying it around to be able to pull it out for the hour or two it lasted on battery. That notebook is now my home server, so stays connected to the wall all the time — its only benefit is that it’s much quieter than a tower.

But now that I’ve the iMac at home, and a Windows beige tower at work, I only need a notebook to be portable (and to give me the OSX fix I’m missing by halfway through the day). I’ve been studiously following the rumours of a Mac sub-notebook for a couple months now, and have been hanging out for it — even a MacBook is too “big” for me. My iMac is my media machine; I use it to store my music and for video and photo editing. A notebook would be used to hack on a website or write — nothing processor-intensive.

And though “real” sub-notebooks are kinda cute, I was wary of the idea of pecking away at a miniature keyboard and squinting at a tiny screen. So the Air is perfect; it’s actually a notebook — light, portable, simple.

On Aether

Amongst all the nitpicking, or the whining that Apple didn’t release exactly what they’d predicted they would, the most sensible complaint has been that the Air doesn’t come with a 3G card. Or rather, that Apple didn’t give us ubiquitous wireless. (It is the future after all.)

But I’m not convinced. WiFi is enough for me, for now. The 3G networks here are still unreliable, and expensive.

I’d much rather use sensible software (like NetNewsWire) that lets me download the bits of the web I want, when I can get a connection. And really, I can get myself to a wifi network most of the time nowadays. If I can’t, I probably don’t need to be on the internet anyway.

On Form Over Function

Yes please.

7-13January2008 :: This Week

15January2008 [directLink] [weekly]

• bought and am listening to Andrew Bird’s Armchair Apocrypha; after last week‘s show I had to get something; not as raw as a live performance which, though not unexpected, was something of a let-down; the album has since grown on me, and am especially loving ‘Simple X’ (“Some people wake up on Monday morning / … / with no explosions and no surprises”)
• bought and am listening to the soundtrack for I’m Not There; there are a number of really good songs on here, and I’m loving the Mr Jones song (‘Ballad of a Thin Man’)
• watched American Gangster; really enjoyed it — didn’t feel anywhere near as long as it actually was; Denzel Washington’s performance is up there with Training Day, and Russell Crowe doesn’t remind me of Russell Crowe, which is a good thing; lots of decent performances in the bit parts too — I’m convinced Common has an acting career in him, and TI is surprisingly good

1-6January2008 :: This Week

06January2008 [directLink] [weekly]

• re-watched The Transporter; entertaining, and I like the not-too-stylised fight style
• re-watched Sin City; love the look, and the storytelling
• watched Fauteuils d’orchestre; Cécile de France has this cute boyish thing going, and of course I love Paris, but a mostly by-the-numbers story
• watched Blake Snake Moan, and loved it; had initially been put off by the marketing of it as an exploitation flick, and Sam Jackson just looked like a magical negro; but saw it in the video store and discovered it was made by the guy who made Hustle & Flow — so glad I gave it a chance; it’s a blues movie at heart, its characters are flawed and remarkably human
• watched The Science of Sleep; very weird, but whimsical and surreal — I can see why so many compared it to Amélie; all told was a little too strange — so felt gimmicky at times — but was entertaining
• saw Andrew Bird at The Famous Spiegeltent as part of the Sydney Festival; extremely impressed; beautiful songs with great build-up as he and the band put down loops, knocking out a riff on the violin, and a drumbeat, then adding to those for the song proper; (it helped that bits of it got very bluesy, and after I’m Not There and Blake Snake Moan that was a guaranteed win)

Sydney, NYE 2008

03January2008 [directLink] [photography]

More photos! — Sydney, NYE 2008

Brought in the New Year at a friend’s place in Neutral Bay, with a beautiful view across the harbour. The NYE fireworks aren’t normally something I go for, but with the promise of a night drinking with friends, the fireworks were thrown in for free. Suspected too that the dSLR would let me take much better fireworks photos than I’ve ever been able to with mere point-and-click cameras, and I was right. The album has a range of images, some chosen for their stylistic quality rather than because they’re a good photo, but there are some of those too. And a beautiful range of colours.

With the camera out for midnight, I took a few photos of people too; it’s way too dark to get a “real” photo, but some came out really well — there’s plenty of blur because people were moving around in the second or so it took to expose the image, but there are enough interesting pieces in focus and within the depth-of-field to make them worthwhile.

Slouching Towards Bedlam

02January2008 [directLink] [myth]

A New Year rolls around, and they’re quietly removing more of our legal rights. The burden of proof has traditionally lain with the prosecution — part of the whole innocent until proven guilty thing. But that’s now being reversed.

NSW Bar Association president Anna Katzmann warned it could introduce a new system where “yes” can mean “no” if the woman decides the next morning she must have been drunk to have given consent.

Attorney-General John Hatzistergos said the onus would now be on the accused to show he had reasonable grounds to believe the alleged victim had consented.

(SMH 30December2007)

What’s particularly bothersome about this is that this is just how fascism creeps in — first it was the “terrorists” (locking them up in Guantanamo without trial); now it’s “rapists”. And the whole way it’s difficult for us to cry out because we shouldn’t be sympathising with terrorists and rapists. And though it’s been bothering me for a few days, I’ve absolutely no idea what I can do about it.

cf Niemöller’s First they came…

And when they came for me, there was no one left to speak out.