What do a movie, an email application and a video game all have in common?  They are all new parts of my life over the last few days and I am going to take a moment here to record my initial thoughts, starting with the film…

The Lodgers : Directed by Brian O’Malley, 2017 (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4399952/) 

Last night I watched the (alleged) horror film The Lodgers.  If there is such a thing as too much mystery and subtlety this film has it.  Despite making it all the way to the end of the film, I still have no idea what the titular “lodgers” actually were or why they did anything they did or what exactly was going on at any point in the movie.  The ambiance was solid, the performances were good, the house was spooky, but seriously, no idea what was actually happening.  Are the ghosts?  Vampires?  Lamia?  Sirens?  No idea.  If you happen to watch this (it’s on Netflix) and you understand what they are, please tell me.  I am dying to know.

Mailbird (Windows application, http://www.getmailbird.com)

I don’t know how many years I have been seeking the ultimate email client application.  Maybe forever.  Maybe I was born on another continent in a former life, eons ago, and began seeking a quality email client application, I can’t rule it out, it certainly feels that way.

This might be the strongest applicant to the job opening yet.  I’m hella impressed with Mailbird.  Hella impressed enough that I took advantage of the $29 Lifetime Pro License deal.  Reasons: 

• Clean interface with solid junk mail management
• Unified Inbox with Inbox Zero Support
• Tons of add-ons and integrations
• Social media (FB, Twitter, etc) integrated into the UI where they effin’ belong so you can catch up with all your messages in one place

This app is BOSS but sadly, is Windows only.  My quest for a perfect Linux, Mac, iOS and Android email client will continue even if I have Windows covered.

Forza Horizons 4 (XBox One)

See that picture?  That is a screenshot of a 1962 Triumph Spitfire 4 from Forza Horizon 4.  Now here is a picture of my 1969 Triumph Spitfire Mk3:

I’ve been playing Forza for a LONNNNNNNGGGGGG time.  Every version ever released for every platform.  Forza 1-7 (XBox/XB360/XBOne) and the previous three installations of Horizon and I don’t think I’ve ever been more excited than the moment I uncovered a Triumph Spitfire just like my very own sitting in an abandoned barn in the British countryside in FH4.  OK, mine is a LHD 1969 Mk3 and the one in the game is a RHD 1962 Spitfire 4, but still, that was amazingly cool and allowed me to test just how realistic the Forza experience is.  The answer?  Pretty damn.  The virtual Spit drives almost exactly like my real one.  Crazy.

That aside, here’s the skinny on this game.  As expected, the game is addictive as hell, massive, beautiful but with some BIG annoyances.  I’m going to focus on those:

• The entire “rave culture festival neon EDM blah blah hoonigan” aesthetic wears real thin real fast.  Menus are annoying, the radio stations all suck, basically they’ve gone out of their way to hype every square inch of the game and it’s really just exhausting and irritating
• The actual racing mostly sucks.  If you enjoy driving racing sims with a wheel and shifter and all that stuff (think Project Cars 2) then Forza gives you some of that and an open world and you can just tool around and have an awesome time…  until it’s time to race.  The courses are cramped, badly designed and frustrating and there is no option to learn them in advance. Events are generally 3 laps of craziness with no semblance of feeling like a sim, very arcadey, very “hyped”.  There is an event where you race a locomotive, lots of “big air” jumps, it’s very silly.  For tooling around the open world I generally drive with all assists off, manual trans with clutch, but for the races and events, I turn damage off (you WILL be rear-ended and side-swiped pretty much constantly by the idiot Drivatars) and set the driving params to lower difficulty settings just to get through them.  I find myself wishing I didn’t have to do the events to get points and XP but, well, ya gotta.
• I would love difficulty settings that would be stored with the car being used!  Forza has needed this feature for YEARS.  When I’m in my Triumph Spitfire there should be no ABS, Traction Control, or Automatic transmission.  I don’t need them for such a low powered car and they don’t make sense for a car from 1969.  On the other hand, I jump into a 1000 HP Zenmo or whatever and yeah, all that stuff.  Wish I could store those prefs with the cars instead of having to change them everytime I move from one car to another.
• The game is working so hard to through shit at you that it is often the case that you will get invited to two or more other things when you’re just on your way to doing one thing.  “Oh, I’m going to this barn find” get’s interrupted with “There is a new race” or “Hey Ryan, participate in this Forzathon Live event” or whatever, over and over.  I often tell the game to STFU and just let me play.

Basically, racing == dumb, graphics == stellar, car selection == awesome, game is too hypey and intrusive but you can tame it if it’s overwhelming.  I’d call it a win.  I just wish it wasn’t so damn silly so much of the time.  It’s like those bass fishing games where every fish is a 20-pound largemouth.  When everything is over the top, nothing is.

I am the first to admit that I have an unusual number of interests, hobbies, passions, that revolve around making things.  Software development, wood working, audio and video production, and automotive restoration, to name just a few.  Sometimes people are surprised to learn that I have almost no formal training to speak of in any of these areas.  I’ve made my living working in software development since 1994 and written tens of thousands of lines of code for more systems and apps then I can recall and worked my way up from Junior Programmer to Director but my actual education?  The BASIC programming book that came with my Commodore VIC-20 when I was 8, computer lab at Valley Middle School, the computer programming math elective in high school, and 13 months at CDI Computer Academy to learn the fundamentals of DOS, Unix, and C.  That was it.  Everything else?  Self-taught.

My other interests are no different.  Fly tying?  Bought supplies and a book, started tying.  Electronics?  Bought supplies and a book and started making guitar pedals.  Woodworking?  Bought tools and a couple books and started making furniture and guitars.  Audio production?  Bought a 4-track and instruments and microphones and started making records (it’s all computers now but that one started a loooooonnnnnngggggg time ago).  I just like making stuff.  Working with my brain and my hands to turn something into something else or make something where there was nothing before.  

I like to share my interests, I like to show people what I’m working on, and I often get asked the same questions, so here I will go about answering my Frequently Asked Questions:

Q. Where did you learn to do “X”?  

A. Reading (books, internet) to learn the theory and ins-and-outs and then hands on practice to actually learn to do it.  Experiment, practice, read, build, learn, repeat.  This applies to the time I built a kayak, the time I wrote a Zen-inspired word game, or my most recent project, a set of floating bookshelves surrounding the stairwell to my basement.  There is no magic.  Read, read again, maybe watch a video online, then experiment and try to do what you read about, and then read some more, and eventually when you feel confident enough, just do it.

Q. Where do you find the time?  You must have a lot of free time…

A.  I do not have a lot of free time.  I work full time, I have a kid and four dogs and two cats and I’m married and I have friends and I play in a band…  Free time is severely constrained.  Due to this I do not watch much, if any, television, I limit my recreational downtime (video games, leisure reading, watching movies), and I try to focus on only a couple creative projects in at a time.  When my bookshelves are 100% complete I plan to finish up one or two lingering projects before I move on to another big one.  Probably finish the guitar I built and get the transmission installed in my Fiat Spider.

Q.  Don’t you spend a lot of money on these hobbies?

A.  Not really.  I spend as little as I can get away with.  I frequent online auctions, and estate sales, and  I’m constantly looking on Craigslist for cheap (or free) tools and I often find that you can do things cheaply by just learning to do them yourself.  That’s half the fun.  How much can I do without spending money?  I once built a home-made 3-axis steadi-cam for video shoots for a total cost of $3 in parts and Razor scooter acquired at a garage sale for $1.  The biggest expenses are definitely tools and supplies but if I had paid to have my bathroom vanity custom built and installed by a professional carpenter and plumber I would have probably spent over $1000.  Materials cost for that project was under $200 and I got to have fun in the process.  DIY is just good times.  Read Make magazine sometime, lots of people have learned that you don’t need tons of money you just need patience, curiousity, and a willingness to try new things.

Q.  You need a lot of space to do all this stuff, don’t you?

A.  I’m not gonna lie, yes, space is really helpful.  Definitely for the car stuff.  I didn’t start trying to restore cars until I moved to a place with outbuildings.  My work on cars before that was basic maintenance and repair of our daily drivers and building scale models of the cool cars I wished I could drive someday.  🙂  On the other hand, when I lived in a smaller house in the burbs with only a single car garage and a basement I still had a recording studio, woodworking tools, and other stuff.  I built a thirteen foot kayak.  I recorded multiple albums.  I built a guitar.  It was more limited but not impossible.  In some ways the space limitations inspired creative solutions.

Q.  But what if you screw up?

A.  Of course I screw up.  I screw up all the time.  🙂  It’s part of the fun.  Sometimes I cut something the wrong length.  Sometimes I cut my finger when I meant to cut a board.  Sometimes I strip a screw or melt a component or sing off key and wreck an otherwise perfect vocal track.  I long ago gave myself permission to make crap, the screw up, to stay dedicated to the process of making even when those things happen.  Some of my favorite things about some of my favorite projects are actually workarounds to mistakes.  For example, I was building a vanity for my bathroom and I cut the tops to width and realized that I had made it 1 1/2 inches narrower than the mirror above.  I had wanted them to be the same width.  Oops.  I couldn’t add 1 1/2 inches.  Instead I added towel bars to both sides that were 3/4 inches wide a piece.  This made the total visual width match AND incorporated two towel bars that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.  Win/win.  Mistakes and limitations and constraints are all opportunities for creative thinking.  I ask myself: Do I really need to fix this?  Is there a way to change the project to incorporate this?  What can I learn from this mistake?  Do I need a band-aid?

Q.  Did your parents teach you to be like this?

A.  No.  No, they did not.  My parents didn’t do any of these things.  My dad was not particularly a “handy man” type around the house.  He was capable and had basic tools but I don’t remember him doing much building or making.  Maybe at his day job but not as a hobby at home.  I’m pretty sure my parents didn’t even know I had a computer.  We didn’t weld stuff.  We didn’t have woodworking tools.  They weren’t big readers either.  I didn’t really have many role models in this arena.  In school I had shop classes, wood and metal.  There were computers.  My Uncle Steve did model cars, I liked that and thought it was cool, but other than that… I didn’t even have the internet, just curiousity and the library and limited funds.

Q.  Isn’t it better to have things done professionally?  I don’t trust myself…

A.  Sometimes.  I don’t insist on doing all things myself either.  I am very conscious of the things I don’t know how to do and I’m very conscious of how much time and effort it can take to learn to do something properly.  Take auto restoration, for example.  I have three “classic” cars and a laundry list of things to do to each one.  I don’t know how to do those things.  I have never done them before.  I will probably screw up, no matter how hard I try to avoid it.  But that’s why I’m working with VERY inexpensive cars right now.  If I screw up a Fiat Spider that is worth $200, well, it’s way better than screwing up a car worth $50,000.  I expect to screw up while I’m learning and then screw up slightly less when I gain confidence.  If I don’t have the luxury of that learning process, if it needs to be done right the first time, I will pay somebody to do it who has already learned, aka, a professional.  Hardwood floors?  Paying a professional.  Replacing the siding on the house?  Ditto.  Knowing what can be tackled by me and what should be handed off is important.

Anyhow, I think it would be cool to add a portfolio section to this site to share all my fun projects with the world in case other people find them interesting.  I plan to do that.  As soon as I figure out how..  🙂

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It has recently been suggested to me that I might want to keep a running tally of things I read.  I kinda dig this idea.  Seems fairly mindful.

Anyhow, a few recent reads and brief thoughts on them:

• Uplift Series by David Brin: I have read Sundiver, Startide Rising and I’m currently reading The Uplift War, all part of the Uplift series by David Brin.  Pretty decent sci-fi series in which species are “uplifted” to full sentience by other species and shenanigans ensue.  Humans, for example, have given chimps and dolphins a genetic bump up the old ladder so they are now doctors and scientists and star-ship captains.  Great concept, sometimes slightly bad writing, I expect it gets better.
• Purity by Jonathan Franzen: I’ve only ever previously read The Corrections so I’m not exactly a JF fanboi but I did actually enjoy this one too.  Very modern and relevant plot, kind of dark comedy, enjoyable read.  Girl with mysterious past gets involved in an international conspiracy, but not what you might expect.
• The Prague Cemetary by Umberto Eco: This was a difficult book to like if for no other reason that the main character is an anti-semitic lunatic with multiple personalities who is personally responsible for developing the concept that the Jews should be eliminated via The Final Solution and he is NOT Hitler, he’s an earlier fictional character in the late 1800’s.  I hated him throughout the book and at the end when the author stated that he was the only fictional character in the book and the rest of the stuff actually happened it made me kinda ill.  As usual with Eco, it was enthralling and you couldn’t turn away, but still…
• Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon: Sometimes with Pynchon I can get into the book and even enjoy it by the end, and sometimes I am just thinking “dude, wtf?”  This book was the latter.  I will be honest, I didn’t go to the end.  I got 2/3rds done, wondered why I was bothering, and abandoned the read.  WWII intrigues around a guy who has been conditioned to get a boner whenever a rocket is about to strike.  Ha ha, except, not really.  Weird but not enjoyably so.  I have read Mason and Dixon, Inherent Vice, The Crying of Lot 49, I basically know what I’m getting myself into with TP, but still, this one just didn’t do it for me and I bailed.
• Fight Club 2 (Graphic Novel) by Chuck Palahniuk: I had no idea there was a FC2 or that it was a graphic novel until I ran into it at a bookstore in Marquette MI a couple weeks ago.  Color me intrigued. Devoured it in one sitting and I have to say I enjoyed it until the end where I felt it got a little too clever, a little too deus ex machina, a little too silly.  Would it stop me from recommending?  No.  Would I re-read it?  Almost certainly.  I loved Fight Club, both the book and the movie, and I have loved some other books by this author, so, sure, why not?
• A Scanner Darkly by Philip K. Dick:  I love me some Dick.  Seriously.  (Shush, you.)  He’s a great writer who strikes a really great balance between unique ideas, entertaining writing, relevant and thought-provoking concepts, and frankly, being funny.  His books are always weird and worth it.  ASD is no exception.  A story about a cop who gets involved in the use of a drug called Substance D (aka Slow Death), it’s really a disturbing, sometimes funny, very strange exploration of drug culture.  Normally I shy away from stuff like that.  I am not a fan of Trainspotting.  But in this case, well, I can see why this is one of his more popular and better known works.  And speaking of Dick… 
• The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch by Philip K. Dick:  Immediately before I read ASD I read The Three Stigmata… and everything I said above applies but perhaps it’s even more bizarre.  ASD goes into a drug culture that is more like opiate addiction but T3SOPE is more like LSD, with Barbie dolls, and pottery, and space colonies, and aliens, and religious symbolism, and…  well…  Just read the damn thing.  You’ll see what I mean.  Perky Pat my ass…
• Ready Player One by Ernest Cline:  I didn’t see the movie but after reading the book I would sure like to.  What a fun read.  Probably the most entertaining full-length descent into 80’s geek culture ever, in which everything from John Hughes movies to Zork is relevant and the stakes are high no matter how basically silly the core concept is.  I don’t care whether it makes sense, I had fun.  Let’s all live in a lifelike virtual world in which everything is possible and spend our lives fetishizing 8-bit video games as if Joust has some sort of ultimate value.  Why not?  It’s fun.  At least, as a book it is.
• The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements by Sam Kean: God I loved this book.  Did you know that you can buy spoons made of gallium that appear to the casual observer to be standard metal spoons but dissolve in hot tea?  No you didn’t.  Except you, James.  I know you knew that because you’re you.  But the rest of ya…  This book tells a story about each element in the period table and it’s just fascinating reading.  Doesn’t hurt that the writer is funny either.  Highly recommend.  Especially if you like Mark Kurlansky’s work (Salt, Cod). 
• Big Bang: The Origin of the Universe by Simon Singh: You are here.  Science has gone through a fairly massive effort to try to figure out how that happened.  This is the story of the path that lead to the current best understanding and it isn’t what you think.  Somebody didn’t just say “Big Bang, we don’t need no stinking God, Darwin FTW!!!”   There is a long and fascinating backstory and many many people who contributed and Simon Singh tells the story very well.  Read this book, and then The Disappearing Spoon.  They actually go quite well together.

I could keep going, there are a few more recent reads worth sharing.  Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly and and A Brief History of the Dead by Kevin Brockmeier both come to mind, but other than saying they are both quite good, I’ll leave off here.  Maybe I’ll do this again as I read more books.  Maybe…