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Reading n stuff

Finished reading my 15th novel of the year today at lunch.

I know I keep harping on this, but it feels good. It feels like an accomplishment. While I do have a 20-book goal for the year, I’m not just trying to race through these novels. There is no point in that. I’m reading at an enjoyable, casual speed and really immersing myself in them. It is the consistency of ready at least 5% of a novel every day this is creating the success because it is becoming 1) something I look forward to and 2) a habit.

Tonight I’m starting a novel by SF author Robert Silverberg. I’ve read a number of his novels and they have been enjoyable. While I knew of him already, a few years ago I read his short story The Iron Star in this anthology of space opera and military SF. I was kinda blown away by the emotional and ethical impact of this story and it made me a fan. Silverberg, like many of his generation of authors, really started writing in the SF magazines and went through a formative period in which he wrote a hell of a lot of stuff. The material I’ve read is from his “mature author” era. His work from this period can be a bit more cerebral than some of the adventure space opera stuff I’ve been reading a lot of lately. It will be a good shift for me.

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That’s the way to do it

This past weekend the London Calling skateboarding event happened in, you guessed it, London. A lot of big shots from the English and U.S. skate scenes were there. It’s kind of an old school event.

Alva was there.

I saw some shots on his Instagram page of him skating South Bank. That spot is no joke. My dear friend Tony Gale took me there in 2015 and it is gnarly. Even the flat is gnarly.

Alva posted this image on his Instagram page. It is everything I love in skateboarding, in one image. What a fantastic shot.

Tony Alva doing a nose wheelie on a skateboard

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Reading

As I have told a few friends, I’ve been spending time reading every day that I suppose was previously devoted to farting around aimlessly on the internet. I started this in April, and since then I’ve read 11 science fiction novels.

If you read 5% of a novel every day you will finish that novel in 20 days. I know that books vary in page counts (obviously) but that means for a 300 page novel, 15 pages a day will get you through that novel in 20 days. That’s pretty good.

So even if I only have 20 or 30 minutes to read it is worth the effort. Usually I get started and end up reading 10 or 15 percent, at least. Having the Kindle charged and ready and in my backpack during the workday is key.

Anyway I’m making a project of this, with the very modest goal of reading 20 SF novels this year. Tracking them on my Goodreads account.

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Riley & Grogu

This little monster is now 9 months old. To say the least he has change my life – our lives.

We brought him home when he was 9 weeks old. We did this because we wanted him with us during the window of time when he’d bond most strongly with us. The first 3 months were rough. We’d never had a dog before, either of us. So here we were with a puppy that needed ALL the training, no experience, and a backyard that turned into a mud pit when it rained.

My wife enrolled him in the Great Puppy Day School at the What a Great Dog training center here in town. They were amazing. He is very smart, and requires very little instruction. It helped a lot. Potty training was all on us, and it was tough.

Now, months later, he is indeed becoming a great dog. Sweet, good natured, quiet (an anomaly apparently with shelties).

Tonight he picked up his Grogu toy and hopped up on this air bed with it.

We love him.

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AI

I have not delved into the AI stuff much at all. A few months ago I played with an AI art generator until my free tries ran out. I have not used any of the others. When I was doing the art thing I very much wonder what online resources had been evaluated and remixed to create the images produced. I have to think they came from somewhere. Or maybe “everywhere”?

The slurping-in of people’s creative output by these systems is kind of troubling. Even being as ignorant of this stuff as I am, I have to say my immediate reaction is to hate it.

I have stopped posting video to Youtube. I am considering making all my Vimeo videos “unlisted” or “private” from here on out. I’m even thinking about making all my stuff here on CL require a log-in to view, or something like that. I realize this is a meaningless gesture given the nature of this issue, but really it is only a “gesture.” I just really don’t want to feed this beast even my own little collection of thoughts, images, and sounds.

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Doing the unthinkable

Well, not really unthinkable. I’ve thought if it many times, and done it many times.

I am getting rid of most of my books. In fact, I just did it. Over the weekend I boxed up 90% of my books, and today at work I donated them to the library, which will sell them either in the book sale or via a vendor who sells our nonfiction donations for a good price and splits the money with the Friends of the library (so it eventually benefits the library, just like the in-building book sale does).

I had a lot of books sitting there, taking up space in my office, doing nothing. I kept a few books about skateboarding. I’m a skateboarder. They are inspiring to me and to some extent represent who I am. I’m not the other things.

It feels good to be rid of them.

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Alive

I’m sitting out on my patio this morning. Drinking coffee. It is good. On the left side of my body the sun is hitting me and I’m warm. On the other side of my body the wind is hitting me and I’m cool. The breeze smells fresh. An airplane just flew overhead. There’s a bird singing. The buzz from my tinnitus is less noticeable than usual. Inside the house my wife is getting our puppy ready to go to his manners class. This morning for the first time when he came out of his crate he jumped up on the bed to snuggle with me. He clacked his front teeth in a sassy greeting. Later today, we’re going to see my nephew play in a college baseball game.

But right now I’m just sitting quietly on the patio, soaking it all in. It is good to be alive.

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The Devil is in the Details

So here is the kind of thing I’m working on — the details.

This move is pretty simple. A backside 180 slide into a 720 spin, into two end-overs.

Here’s the thing that I’m working to get better. The idea is do use this to reverse the direction of travel. In this case, I’m moving away from the camera, and I want end up coming back to it. The two end-overs at the end of the sequence are critical, because they generate speed to return the way I came.

The problem? I tend to over-rotate the 720 spin. I should finish it pointed right back at the camera. That way I would be doing a FULL 180 end-over off the nose into a second end-over, which would generate a lot of speed and flow. By over-rotating the 720, I reduce the degrees of pivot in that first end-over, thereby reducing the speed generated.

Yes, I’m out of practice. My goal with all this, as with all my moves, is for this to be one continuous flowing motion that keeps speed throughout.

Video is really a helpful tool.

Some of you might find it amusing yet unsurprising to find out that when I do stuff like this I pick a seam in the concrete and pretend it is the top of a banked wall. So when I do this trick, for example, I’m pretending it is a banked wall that I go up and then come down. I do that a lot in freestyle, actually.

When I do this trick on a bank, of course, gravity allows me to change direction without thinking about it. Also, on a bank I don’t fakie carve into the 720 much if at all, so the exact 720 is easier to do.

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Reading

It’s been a rough couple of weeks for reading. Sometimes life is like that. Things going on. Stressful things, and I am just so beat I can’t concentrate on a book. Still, gonna plan to knock out the short novel I’m currently reading this weekend and start another.

A while back I downloaded the audiobook of The Three-Body Problem, by Liu Cixin. I listened to the first 30 minutes of this acclaimed novel and found it to be just unlistenable. Now, this is weird because a lot of people whose opinions I respect really love this novel and the series. I am aware of what it is about. Yes, I’ve watched a lot of videos on Quinn’s Ideas about it. Yet still I found it pretty horrible.

Over the last few nights I’ve given it another try.  I’m doing better with it.

I don’t know if I have ever read a novel translated from Mandarin before. I feel like there might be some translation issues I’m running into. Let’s face it, literary translation is a very hard discipline. I am friends with one of the foremost translators of Mexican literature into English, and we’ve talked about it, and it is as much an art as writing the novel in the first place.

The other possibility is that the novel, even in its original language, reads like a technical manual.

At any rate, I’m listening because while it “listens” kind of soulless, the ideas are huge and interesting and I like them.

Another thing: because the last “big series” I read was Hyperion and the Fall of Hyperion, the bar may be set pretty high. They were some of the best SF I’ve ever read, and wonderfully written.