“What a wonderous time is spring…when all the trees are budding.”

There is this OLD Christian campfire song called “Pass it on.”  It’s a relic of the kind of “teach the world to sing and buy the world a Coke” mentality that the American 1970s produced so effortlessly and intentionally in its citizens.  I used to love this song when I was a (little) kid.  It was in the tiny “contemporary” hymn-pamphlet we used during chapel, the one that had all the snazzy songs that the kids liked.

“The birds begin to sing, the flowers start their budding.”

By the time I got to college, it was common to express disdain for the earnestness and cheese of this song, and many others in that hymn-pamphlet.  They were just another victim of the pervasive irony that held all of us Gen-Xers in its hypnotic sway.  And, to be honest, the lyrics ARE totally lame and cheesy, and the metaphors…

“That’s how it is with God’s love, once you experience it.”

…feel a bit lazy and forced, unless you happen to be high.

I mention this because I’m up at 5:43am.  There would be a sunrise right now, if not for the clouds that are hovering over Lake Michigan.  There is a giant pink-bud-studded tree outside my window that is pretty even in the dull blue-gray of the not-yet morning.  In the distance, piney trees point to the sky.  Since I’ve walked past just about every square inch of Grafton proper, I know those trees are meant to shield an ugly factory from a road.  But from my window, they could be the entry point to a beautiful forest.  I can’t tell.

“Once you experience it.”

I’ve been thinking a lot about the must-be-believed-to-be-experienced nature of God lately, and how leaps of faith are essential to understanding, well, just about anything.

This fact has confused and pissed me off for about five years, and made it difficult to pass on.

But mornings like this, even though they are “cold and gray,” make me understand something important, and this by (what else) faith:

I live in Paradise.  Problematic Paradise.

“Loud boiling test tubes.”

Ok so “Earth and All Stars” is still irredeemable, but “Pass it On” is A-Ok.  Even if it does turn God into a giant mystical doobie.

This blog has been “This is Epth Nation” for so long, I can’t remember a time when it wasn’t sitting here taking up space on the internet and staring at me like some long, forgotten Taco Bell Chalupa.  The title and the banner picture have been changed (the latter to the Tales From the Darkside version of “Hooray for Everything.”) to something more appropriate for the state of affairs we find ourselves in right now. Don’t blame me — every time I turn on Twitter, someone is exhorting me to “change the world.”  Consider what follows here to be my feeble attempts at doing that.

As always, know that if I didn’t love you, I’d turtle-ize completely and vanish from the interwebs like an unholy combination of Pynchon and Nyan Cat.  But I do, love you.  So here we go…

Meme of the day — Meet me:

Totally.

My natural latent cynicism, borne of 1000 sensitivity-induced periods of awkwardness, has been amplified up to the proverbial 11.  You would simply not believe the cynical thoughts I have had. That they keep turning out to be accurate scares me, and keeps the cynicism train rolling.

My tolerance for advertisement, and marketing, and salesmanship, and all that jazz, has fallen to zero.  It’s gotten so I’d rather not purchase something if it’s marketed to me, even if I would benefit from it.  If a salesman would ever try to overcome one of my “buying objections,” I think I would walk out of whatever situation I was in right then and there.  This is why I avoid these situations at all costs.

My sensitivity (I’ve discovered that I am a hardcore “Highly Sensitive Person”) has done other things to me as well.   My tolerance for confrontation, awkwardness, phone conversations, and for just about any situation that’s overstimulating or uncertain, is almost nil.  I go from zero to angry panic and back several times a day.  It’s now a lifestyle that I’ve become accustomed to.  I’ve also become accustomed to masking it.  I’ve taken up things like meditation to try to help myself when those situations happen, and I’ve learned to live with my sensitivity.  It’s spiritually helpful, but in every other way it’s kind of a pain in the ass.

I can no longer stand most political talk, and view political speech as hurtful and ends-justify-the-means-y.  That goes doubly for culture war talk, or ridiculous postmodern hypocritical sheep-speak.  People use coded language to built hate-barriers between their team and the opposite team, and gird these barriers at all costs.  It’s exhausting, really.  We are a culture of know-it-all know-nothings.

I can’t drink beer anymore without getting intestinal issues that go on for days.  I’m no longer allergic to cats.  I’m starting to like folk music.  I just bought a new car.  See?  Totally different person.

So let’s go on this adventure, dear readers.  If there are no readers left, that’s ok.  I understand.  I’m still going to try to climb out of this fog, and see if there’s air left anywhere in the world.

Now, for the meme of the day:

She's fierce like my miniature american eskimo was fierce

Ellen Page is quickly becoming the female Michael Cera — someone the audience can identify with no matter what’s swirling around her.  Just like Cera, she grounds every movie she stars in and gives it enough soul to be good.  We like her and care about her, and we see ourselves and our struggles inside hers.

Yeah, so it’s a good thing she’s directly in the center of Whip It, because this is some by-the-numbers Hollywood moviemaking right here in your face.  The stock characters swirl around her — domineering mother, aloof father, cute little sister, wisecrackingly smart friend, cinematically crazy roller derby girls, cute boy/rock star, etc — and it kinda works because Ellen Page is all vulnerable and stuff.

What director Drew Barrymore has done is made a movie about roller derby that is as safe as humanly possible.  There’s no real danger, no real surprises, and unless this is your first time in a cineplex, you’ll be able to pretty much figure out the ending after about a half an hour.

For example, Ms. Barrymore cast herself as Smashley Simpson, a total psychotic who gets thrown out of every roller derby match she’s in because she can’t resist the urge to beat up girls.  That character should have some edge, right?  Well, this psycho has been covered in a shellac of extreme non-threateningness that’s so pervasive, it makes her vicious attacks seem cute.  I realize the point of a movie like this is to make us like and identify with the characters, but does all the menace have to be removed and replaced with cuteness?

That’s not to say that everything besides Ellen Page was bad.  A couple of the other performances — most notably Andrew Wilson (the lost Wilson brother) as Page’s oft-ignored roller derby coach — were top-notch, and the roller derby action was pretty exciting without being unrealistic or stylistically distracting.

Also, the film did remind me of Texas, with its beauty pageants and crazy moms with misplaced priorities.  It got a lot of the details of that right.  And its message of “be yourself,” trite and safe as it may be, did come through in a positive and not totally trite way.  In a way, it reminded me of the Lyndsay part of Freaks and Geeks, where a small brunette girl discovers a new world she likes that doesn’t quite fit with the world her parents have created for her.  Don’t let anyone tell you not to play roller derby or hang out with stoners, small brunette girls.

Tomatometer rating: 84%

What it should have been:  75%

I have Mark Zuckerberg to thank for lots in this world.  He posts pictures of funny things on my wall.  He comes up with funny and/or poignant status messages that interest and entertain me.  He provides me with up-to-the-minute information and opinions on things that matter to me and my many, many acquaintances.  And he does this for me and 500 Million other people across the globe.  Because of this, and the fact that he is awesome, he has made billions of dollars and everyone cares what his opinion is on everything.

OH WAIT THAT’S RIGHT HE DID NOTHING BUT START A WEBSITE AND MANAGE TO BE SMARTER THAN MYSPACE (WHICH, WHEN YOU THINK ABOUT IT, WASN’T THAT HARD).  HE DOES NOTHING ON A DAILY BASIS EXCEPT ACT SMUG AND LIVE OFF THE STATUS UPDATES AND MEMORIES OF MILLIONS OF PEOPLE HE DOESN’T KNOW.   HE IS A VIRTUAL ZERO IN THIS SOCIAL MEDIA WORLD, AND IF HE DIDN’T EXIST, SOMEONE ELSE WOULD HAVE MADE A FACEBOOK AND BECOME A BILLIONAIRE INSTEAD.  HOPEFULLY SOMEONE LESS SMUG.

Forgive my all-caps newbie-style rant.  It’s just that The Social Network is about Facebook, which I think is pretty cool.  But actually, it’s about the guy who takes credit for creating Facebook, which is also a pretty cool story but kind of besides the point.  Put it this way — every time Michael Jordan won a championship, did Dr. James Naismith get credit for creating basketball?  Did the media go on and on about the greatness of Naismith and how Michael Jordan wouldn’t be possible without him?  No?  Then why, every time I post a brilliant status message, does Mark Zuckerberg feel like he deserves any credit?  He’s a billionaire — isn’t that enough for him?  What happened to the idea of the recluse?  Did Howard Hughes and Michael Jackson kill take the luster off Reclusivity forever?

But then there’s the actual movie, which is entertaining.  It tells the story of the beginnings of Facebook and the overprivileged white people who stole the idea from other overprivileged white people.  The dialogue is snazzy, the story is intriguing, and the performances are great and often really funny.  Go see it.  I’m totally not interested in talking about it.

The Zuckerberg was reportedly kinda scared of how he would be portrayed in the movie.  Should he have been?  He comes off pretty well, as a really smart and friendless psychotic who wins in the end because he’s smarter than everyone else, but is still deeply sad.

Eduardo Whats-his-face (his original partner, who ended up suing him after being tricked out of his agreed-upon money) comes off pretty well, too.  The actor who portrays Eduardo Whats-his-face channels Hayden Christiansen in Shattered Glass, and is all vulnerable and soft-spoken and skinny and high-voiced.  It works for him — he ends up being the protagonist because he seems like the person the audience least wants to punch.  So good for him.

And then there’s the Winklevoss twins, both portrayed by Armie Hammer with understated hilariousness.  I loved every scene they and their little friend were in, even if their “you stole my idea” lawsuit seems a little silly in the context of their already multi-million-dollar Olympics-filled life.

Finally, you have Justin Timberlake as Sean Parker.  Mr. Parker founded Napster, and if The Social Network is to be believed, he is responsible for two decisions that ended up contributing mightily to the ascent of Facebook over its pathetic social media rivals:  he pushed the Zuckerberg to avoid advertisements on the site; and, he offhandedly suggested they drop “the” from “thefacebook.”

I’m telling you, if Facebook had embraced ads, it would have been another Myspace, and nobody would know the Zuckerberg from the Zuckerman*.  He would have merely been another standard American internet millionaire — which, due to Bush-Obama inflation, now are worth 1 dime per dozen.

But still, Sean Parker did cocaine, and therefore ended up with only like 7% of Facebook’s billions.  There’s a lesson there for all of us.

Tomatometer Rating: 96%

What it should have been: 96%

*If you don’t know the Zuckerman, clearly you need to brush up on your 90210.  And not the newer version, either.  That thing is death.

She seems nice

Let’s go through the possible ways in which a teen movie can suck, and see if any of them apply to Easy A:

Most of the characters are even-more-exaggerated-than-usual versions of typical false Hollywood teen-movie archetypes?  Check.

Authority figures are divided neatly into “Liberal/Cool” and “Conservative/Fascist” camps?  Check.

It’s a comedy that’s not very funny?  Check.

You can see every plot twist coming an hour before they arrive, turning them from plot twists into a lock-step march into averageness?  Check.

…So we can see that Easy A has a an insurmountable set of problems that prevent it from being good.  This doesn’t stop it from being enjoyable, however, and not just in a unintentional comedic sense.  It has some charm, largely from having its insane Christian-hating heart in a pretty good place, and placing Emma Stone in virtually every scene.

Stone plays Olive, that girl in high school that nobody notices.  This all changes, however, when she decides to tell her best friend Rhi (Disney teen veteran Aly Michalka) that she had sex with a college guy, and the school’s head Christian bitch (Nickelodeon teen veteran Amanda Bynes) overhears.  Rumors of her sexual escapade quickly spread through the school, and before long she’s having fake sex with a gay kid to keep him from being bullied by evil jocks and wearing hooker clothes emblazoned with a literal scarlet letter.  After making several gift-card-for-reputed-sexual-act trades, things play out as you’d pretty much expect, if you’ve ever seen an angsty teen movie.

Some of which is by design, by the way.  Easy A tries to be a sort of combo-homage to both 19th century American Lit and 80′s John Hughes films.  What it actually is:  An attempt to copy Juno‘s formula of “compelling female lead + her one blonde outspoken friend + the one cool boy who understands her + high school sexual politics + snappy dialogue + cool parents + adults having mid-life crises = sweet and funny.”  In this it fails spectacularly, largely because nobody in the film besides Emma Stone acts anything remotely like a real-live human being.

i.e., In Juno, there’s a Christian girl carrying a protest sign who meets the title character as she’s on the way to the abortion clinic.  She tries to convince Juno not to have an abortion, and eventually succeeds by pointing out that the baby in her stomach already has fingernails.

In Easy A, there’s a group of Christians carrying protest signs who try to convince the school to expel Emma Stone for being a slut.  And oh, by-the-way, they’re all total hypocrites.  Betcha didn’t see that one comin’.  Ahh, those Christian teens.  Always so cartoonishly evil.

Or take Emma Stone’s cool parents, played by that woman from The Lonely Island’s “Motherlover” video and the increasingly not-dead Stanley Tucci.  Where Juno had parents who were relaxed and not terribly authoritative, they were at least, you know, parents.  Motherlover and Tucci, however, represent some sort of Berkeley fantasy parenting ideal where acting as chill and hip as possible at all times will create well-adjusted, whip-smart, and caring teens.  Because people are basically good, and the only thing that can screw them up is the System’s rules, man.

And I mean, you could find an antecedent in Juno for just about everything in Easy A, and the Juno version is always 10 times better.

Even with all its problems, and the fact that the movie actively hates me for believing that Jesus was who he said he was, I enjoyed Easy A. Emma Stone is believable, and kinda funny, and has the same breezy charisma that she had in Superbad and Zombieland.  She really lifts the thing from 1-star territory into a solid 2.  Also, I approve of any teen entertainment that sides with the underdogs and downtrodden, which Easy A does at every turn.

The moral of the story?  If you want to see Easy A, go see Juno again.  But that’s probably always the moral.

RottenTomato Meter: 85%

What it should be: 45%

So yeah, 11.04 has way worse problems than bad window button positioning.  You see, they moved from their old boring, functional, customizable “Gnome 2″ GUI to a new one, (ominously) called Unity.  Sure, Gnome is a dumb name, but it works, and it feels kinda like Windows, and I can get to my files and applications as if I were, you know, sitting at an actual computer.  In that, it performs its primary function well.  Gnome 2 might be boring, and “Gnome” might be a stupid name for anything except a small guy who sits on your lawn, but it was literally the only Linux desktop that really made sense.

The problem came when Gnome version 3 came out, and it was radically and awe-fully different than the reliable, computer-like Gnome 2.  This apparently drove the people behind Ubuntu so crazy that they were inspired to created something to compete with Gnome 3 (and KDE 4, that other Linux GUI overreach) in the category of awfulness.  So, in the bowels of Mount Doom, a GUI named Unity was forged.

What wrong with Unity, you ask?  Well:

1) It has a dock, a la OS X, that doesn’t do anything you want it to.  First of all, it’s on the left side, where Ubuntu apparently puts everything now.  You can’t move it from the left side, either.  Also, it’s default behavior is to hide behind open windows until you hold your mouse at the left edge of the screen for almost a second.  But wait, I’m getting ahead of myself…

1)  There is no bar at the bottom that holds your open application windows.  There is no way to GET a bar at the bottom that holds your application windows.  Because reclaiming that half-inch of real estate at the bottom of you monitor screen is more important than being able to switch between application windows in one click.  You see, with the combo of the hidden Dock of Death on the left side and the lack of a way to click on open windows, there is no way to go from window to window via mouse.  You have to move your mouse to the left side of the screen, wait for the Dock of Death to reappear, then click on the application you want to switch to.  And if that application happens to have more than one window open (like if you were –gasp — trying to edit two spreadsheets at the same time), then you have to click one more time on the actual window you want to see.  And you have to do that every time you switch windows.

2) There is no actual menu in Unity, and no way to get one.  I want to be very clear on this point:  There is no nested list of installed software to click on (and therefore run) with your mouse.  Now, I understand that some people hate menus, but they’re wrong.  A menu is the single simplest and most efficient way to organize a given computer’s entire set of installed applications.  Period.  If you don’t think so, you’re fooling yourself.  For the makers of Ubuntu, every day is apparently April Fools Day.

3) When you click on what you think is the menu (it’s in the top left corner instead of the bottom left one, but Ubuntu’s been that way for a while now — wait, that’s where it started!), you get what can only be described as the single most frustrating and counter-intuitive thing I’ve seen in a GUI since KDE’s plasma desktop.  Instead of a menu, you are greeted with a giant black window that somehow eats up your whole screen yet shows you virtually nothing.  There are three lists — one for your supposedly “favorite” apps, one for some of your installed apps, and one for random apps you don’t have installed.  There are only 5 of each application listed, with a tiny yet helpful-looking “see more results” to click on for each category.  Clicking on that will give you an alphabetical list of favorite, installed, or random apps, but the list is limited by the fact that only so many giant app icons can fit in the black window (even though it takes up the whole screen).  Let me say that again:  you’re 3 clicks in, and all you’ve managed to do is pull up an alphabetical list of your apps.

Now, there is a “menu” of sorts where you can filter the results by category, but that’s yet another click, and you still might not find what you want (especially if it starts with a “z”).  I found that the most efficient way in Unity of finding apps is searching for their name in the giant search bar at the top of the black Window.  That’s right, I have to f***ing use my keyboard to find my apps.  What is this, DOS 6.0?

I want to make this perfectly clear — I’m the laziest person I know.  This makes me a pretty good judge of efficiency in operating systems and user interfaces, because I can smell unnecessary effort a mile away.  And the last thing I want to do when sitting at my computer is click in a search box, take my hand off the mouse, type in words I have to think about, and hit enter.  If I have to search for something by name, you have failed as a GUI.  You have my apps.  Please give them back.

What they were trying to do is emulate your average smart phone’s screen (with the apps and the black Window), and they failed so miserably that you can hardly recognize what they were aiming for.   My iPhone shows me all my apps on the screen, and I can organize them in whatever way I choose.  Unity does the opposite of that — only showing a few apps, and not allowing me to organize them at all.

4)  It has become apparent that the only reason Ubuntu exists is to sell people on Ubuntu products, such as (the again ominous-sounding) Ubuntu One.  What does One do?  Well, for $3.99 a month you can store a bunch of data in their (presumably totally secure) cloud, and even stream stored music to a variety of devices.  Because using up bandwidth streaming stuff to your smartphone is better than just putting the actual songs on your phone, apparently. That’s why it costs money.

What Ubuntu Inc doesn’t understand is that I use Linux to get away from being sold things by the software that runs my computer.  That’s the whole point of open source and free software, right?

Finally, a serious point:  All the Linux GUIs seem to be hopelessly broken right now, and it’s put the whole idea of Linux in jeopardy, at least for me.  I’m using Linux Mint right now, but there’s talk of them switching to Gnome 3 next year.  Maybe Gnome 3 will improve enough to be usable next year, but I doubt it.  So my choices seem to boil down to:  Using Mint 11 for the next 10 years, or giving up on Linux entirely.  Maybe I should just get a Mac.

Not A Leader

Again, that’s where the good blog posts are going to be.  This current blog is going to be the place of Michael Pape, author.  Blech.

The twitter feed (twitter.com/epthnation) shall remain the same, for now.

2009-2010 was a bad, bad couple of years for a lot of things, including me blogging.  “I haven’t felt like it” “The FBI thinks I’m evil” and “I really really haven’t felt like it” are the three main reasons for my internet silence.  If this bums you out, I apologize.  If it makes you happy, then I take back my apology.

I know I said I was going to make the NBA season a story, but that seems ludicrous in the face of my total lack of interest in it.  What story?  LeBron doesn’t care about Cleveland?  Players don’t care about you or me?  There will be a lockout next year because (in this terrible economy) the two sides of the NBA coin both are thinking they need more money?  I can’t even muster up indignation at the players — this whole thing seems very owner-driven this time.

So, screw that.

I read an enormous amount of totally useless stuff on the internet. You would not believe the stuff I read.  Much of it is to reinforce my beliefs, and much of it is to just piss me off.  This might seem judgmental, but that’s ok.  I forgive you for thinking that.

SOOOOOOOOOOOOO, lots of things go through my head that I’d like to share, but don’t seem appropriate for a personal blog.  They would seem more appropriate coming out of the internet mouth of one of my alter egos or something.

SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, I’m going to start another blog, where I can explore these things that affect me so.

Epthnation.com will not cease to exist, but rather will become the mouthpiece of Michael Pape, aspiring author and soon-to-be-productive member of the Community of Books in America.

That means some fiction, and some writing commentary, but mostly…silence.  I’ll basically shut up until I have something to say.  Isn’t that a nice idea?  Now, if I write a book and SOMEHOW manage to snooker somebody into publishing it for me, that will be an example of something you could find out here.

SOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO, don’t delete this RSS feed just yet…please?

More details on the blog when it’s up and running.  It won’t be on the epthnation.com domain.  It’ll be somewhere else.

In the meantime, my Twitter feed is living and active and full of “win.”  I’m not sure if I’m going to also create a separate Twitter feed for the new blog (seems like a good idea, but also more work then I’m liable to be able to tolerate).  Twitter’s nice because it’s condensed and flippant, just like my brain.

In the end, the choice was between Android and iPhone. I chose the dreaded iPhone because of the convenience of staying with AT&T.  Since they never really made me angry, I had no reason to leave.  Plus, Sprint had some problems this week, and yellow is my least favorite color anyway.  And Verizon customer service is reportedly run by Ghengis Khan.

I stayed away from a ‘Droid because AT&T doesn’t allow 3rd party apps for it.  This is obviously a deal they made with Apple to sell more iPhones.  Good for them.  They just sold one more.

I hate making phone calls, so the iPhone is right up my alley.  If it didn’t have “phone” right there in the title, I’d think it was just a cute little computer.  Seriously, how cute is this thing:

Look at those cute little squares made of pure fun

The so-called “App Store” has an application for just about any purpose you can think of, and several thousand you couldn’t possibly think of.  I can watch Netflix instant movies on my phone, which makes me feel like a super-technological Japanese person.  I can view just about any website and have it look like it does on my computer (albeit a lot smaller).  I can pinch and spread content to make it smaller and bigger.  I can launch birds into houses to try to pop the pigs inside (Angry Birds game — don’t ask).  I can listen to my Pandora radio stations as I walk the streets of Grafton.  I can update Facebook and Twitter in elegant ways, as if the sites were made for the iPhone.  I can put links to websites on my “desktop.”  And this just scratches the surface, really.  Just think of the time I could waste playing with this thing!

To avoid sounding like a paid Apple advertisement, let me give some words of caution to the prospective iPhone buyer: the phone is also a TERRIFIC and CONSTANT ad-delivery device.  You will find this especially true of the “free” apps in the App Store.  Every one of those cute squares is trying to sell you something.  This might be a reality of life in the digital age, but it still sucks.

Also, a couple things pale in comparison to my old BB Curve — the keyboard and the e-mail app.  Using e-mail makes me feel like I’m sitting at a MacBook Pro trying to figure out why it’s fighting me as I try to get work done.  And the on-screen keyboard is terrible.

At $199 with a two-year contract, it’s a little pricey for those who hate 2-year contracts.  Fortunately, I love them, so it’s not a problem for me.  The Android devices were similarly priced, and I can remember a day when the iPhone was like $399 and first-generation and buggy and a total rip-off.

But seriously, far and away the worst thing about the iPhone is the nightmare of having to use iTunes for Windows.  It’s a jalopy in a situation that calls for a Porsche.  If I had a Mac, I’m sure this iTunes stuff would all make more sense.  But then I’d really be a techno-douche.