Comic Books

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It is a far, far better thing I did than anything I did that was far, far worse

Heavy sigh.  Here we go again.

It’s Monday.  I am heading in to the office very early because I hardly slept last night and don’t feel that I could sleep.

As you probably guessed‒if you thought about it at all, which may be unlikely‒I did not work this weekend.  Instead, I finally got to hang out with my youngest, and we went to a big arcade kind of place whose name I forget, where we played a lot of crane grab style games.  Then we ate at Sbarro and wandered around the mall for a bit before seeking out a comic book store I had recently found out about.

So, all in all, it was one of the best days in more than thirteen years.

Unfortunately, it can be rather dispiriting to return to my illusory life after enjoying most of a day with my child.  Not that I’m complaining about spending that time; I most certainly am not!  But apparently this is one of those ASD* things that happens, when even very positive and uplifting interactions take a toll, especially if they involve a lot of noise and people and such.

Though I must say, in the comic book store, I felt almost instantly at home, and didn’t feel any of my usual awkwardness in asking if they had anything related to the role-playing game Gamma World.  These were my people, after all.  And it was a good comic store, not one that overly caters to “normies”.  Though I daresay all were surely welcome there.

Anyway, the usual friendless and familyless (that’s not really a word…might “afamilial” be better?  Apparently not, based on Google Docs’s reaction to it) days of my peudo-life from day to day don’t seem even as good as usual after such a day.  Also, I think I’m fighting a mild cold, which probably is something that happens fairly easily after playing games that many other people have played.

Though, come to think of it, I don’t remember that being a big deal back in the day when arcades were much more common.  At least I never remember tending to get sick after going to one.  But honestly, I did not go to them very often, so my sample size is very small.

I suspect I am often low-grade inoculated by very small doses of many pathogenic viruses because (among other stims) I bite my nails almost constantly.  I used to bite them more, and even picked at the skin around the base of my thumbnails until it peeled off a long way; my thumbs would sometimes bleed from the picking and get quite inflamed and irritated.  Occasionally, that still happens, but I am able to resist picking at the skin so much.  I have other things that I can do with my fidgeting fingers that are less painful.

Anyway, the nail biting may help prime my immune system against a lot of things.  I occasionally wonder whether it’s a trait or tendency that has been‒or can be‒selected for by evolution.  If it does happen to give one’s immune system a leg up, it would make sense for those with the tendency to have selective advantages.

This may also relate to the tendency of very small children to put a lot of things in their mouths.  I don’t mean to suggest that habit developed because it was good for exposing the immune system to very small doses of things.  I suspect it has more to do with the mouth being highly sensitive and having multiple modalities and more dexterity at an early age than the hands, and so it is a useful primary means of exploring much of the world for an infant.

Still, I think the immune priming is a useful side-effect.  Also, the modern tendency for people to be hyper-fastidious about not allowing their young children to touch things and taste things and expose themselves to tiny amounts of pathogens probably contributes to the surge in (hitherto almost unheard-of) allergies to rather ordinary things in the latter few decades.

I’m going to draw to a close now, because I’m having trouble focusing on my screen.  I don’t think it’s anything related to a sudden worsening of my vision, and I am wearing reading glasses.  It’s more as if my ciliary muscles are just tired, and they don’t want to do the work to make my lenses (the ones in my eyes) focus.

It is what it is.  Hopefully they will recover a bit of their endurance soon.  In the meantime, I hope you all have as good a day and week as you possibly can (which, as I’ve pointed out previously, you will, because whatever happens, once it has happened, is immutable, and was inevitable, and so you have the best‒and worst‒days you could have, every single day).

Dickens wasn’t just playing around with words in the beginning of A Tale of Two Cities, I guess.  No, he was writing floridly because he got paid by the word.  But that’s another story.

*I will indulge in a little sophomoric (and accidental) humor here:  because the S and the D are so close together, especially on the smartphone, I at first wrote “one of those ASS things”.

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Movie and comic book villains, some songs, weekend plans, and a slightly improving mood

Well, it’s Friday at long last, the end of the “official”* work week.  My mood is at least somewhat better than it has been previously this week; starting midmorning yesterday, my mood increased and I even became somewhat playful and a bit silly.  This was, hopefully, thanks to certain interventions I have undertaken, and not just because of some low-grade cycling of my mood.

As far as I know, I don’t have any form of bipolar disorder; certainly no therapist has even mentioned considering that as one of my issues.  Then again, none of them (to my recollection and knowledge) considered the possibility of undiagnosed ASD.  But I have, apparently, done quite a good job at masking over time.  Or so I believe.

Anyway, I’m not going to be working tomorrow after all (my improved mood long preceded my learning this fact).  In fact, I’m going to be getting together with my youngest to have a late Father’s Day outing.  That also came about hours and hours after my mood had improved, and after I had learned I would not be working.

That’s about as good as my life gets, and has gotten, in nearly a decade and a half, but it is quite good.  The only thing that might be better would be if my son were also coming, but I cannot get my hopes up about such things.  He does as he must.

I’ve lately taken to rubbing Aspercream™ with lidocaine all over the MCP joints and the interphalangeal joints of my thumbs, and it seems to be doing at least a little to ease the pain of my arthropathy therein.  This helped make me willing at least to try to play guitar (and sing) a little bit yesterday.  I was still a bit stiff, but it wasn’t too bad.  Mind you, I didn’t do anything particularly fancy; the Bach piece I’ve mentioned was the most challenging part of the session.

I have a whole repertoire of songs I can sing and for which I can play chords from memory.  It’s not a big playlist, but it’s there.  Ironically, it doesn’t include any of my songs, which I would have to relearn at this point!  That’s kind of sad, really.  But it is a weird thing that I’ve noticed, that once I’ve made and shared a video (or even just audio) of me doing a song, I tend to stop playing it at all.  It’s quite strange, at least to me.  Have any of you encountered anything like this?

This shouldn’t be confused with the general anhedonia I’ve been experiencing lately (not for the first time); that makes me not really interested in playing anything.  I also have not been able to find anything that I can keep reading for more than 10 or, at most, 20 minutes before getting bored of it**.

I’m trying to read something different now, so I downloaded some Star Trek and Star Wars novels from Kindle Unlimited, and we’ll see how they go.  Currently, I’m reading the novelization of Into Darkness, which I think was an underrated movie.  Did it play fast and loose with certain aspects of important characters from TOS?  Absolutely!  Even so, the surprise was fun, and the casting, I thought, was very good, as were the performances.

The book is by Alan Dean Foster, who is one of the most reliable science fiction authors out there.  He has written quite a few of the best novelizations of science fiction movies.

I also downloaded the novelization of The Wrath of Khan, one of my favorite movies.  I’ve read the book before (by Vonda McIntyre, who is at least as good, if not as prolific, as Foster), a long time ago, and it was good, so hopefully I’ll enjoy it again.

On a somewhat related note, as a very big fan of Doctor Doom, I am rather nervous about how he will be portrayed in the upcoming MCU movies.  He has been badly written so far in the movies that have featured him, though I thought Julian McMahon (RIP) was well cast and did what he could with the role.

But I’ve long said that if anyone wants to know how to portray Doom onscreen, there is a nearly perfect performance on which to model one’s acting, and that was Ricardo Montalban as Khan, especially in the movie (though the original Trek episode Space Seed is also great).  Khan is a lot like Doom, though he has a more sentimental, romantic aspect to his character (it’s the death of his wife that leads to his wrath in the movie, after all).  Still, the charisma, the brilliance, the arrogance (and, alas, the overconfidence and the tendency to be consumed by vendetta) match the best-written aspects of Doctor Doom’s character.

To be fair to Khan, he is kinder to his subordinates than Doom sometimes tends to be.  This, I think, is one of Doom’s biggest flaws.  Then again, I suspect Doom is “on the spectrum”, so he doesn’t necessarily really get how to manage people at a personal level, though as a national leader he is unsurpassed.

I know, I know, I’m being fanciful, but I really do love these characters.  They are bad guys, certainly, but they are not really evil, or at least not psychopathically selfish and shallow the way, say, Voldemort is.  I’ve said before, Doom and Batman are in many ways very similar characters.  Both have similar tragic backstories and are obsessively driven, implacable, indeed all but unstoppable, and neither of them has actual super powers (contrary to what was represented in the first two Fantastic Four movies).

I wish Julian McMahon had a chance to play a well-written Doctor Doom, because I thought he was an excellent casting choice (and I’m pretty sure Ricardo Montalban was not available).

Okay, I’ll draw things to a close for the day and for the week.  As a parting “bonus”, I’ll embed below some old audio files (NOT high quality recordings – lots of clipping and some flubs and occasional pitchiness) of songs I have recorded me practicing and singing, just for fun, in case you’re interested.

I hope you all have a nice Friday and a good weekend.  There’s a big sporting event on Sunday, I think; if you like those kinds of things, why not take that in?

Sore dewa.

Nothing Compares 2U – originally by Prince

Karma Police – Radiohead

Just the Way You Are – Billy Joel

Here, There, and Everywhere – the Beatles

Here Comes the Sun – the Beatles

Desperado – Eagles

Fake Plastic Trees – Radiohead

Julia – the Beatles

*I’m not sure what exact office might be involved in that determination, but whataya gonna do?

**Though I have been doing some exercises on Brilliant dot Org lately, focusing for the moment on vectors and working into matrices and related stuff, with an eye toward General Relativity.

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Wayward versus prodigal suns, negative integrals, and mildew

Well, it’s Tuesday now, and I’m sitting at the train and writing this blog post on my laptop.  Apparently, the last time I wrote using it was August 21st, but it feels as if it were longer ago than that.  I brought the laptop back to the house with me last night because I knew I wasn’t going to walk back from the train in the evening, having already walked to the train (and then some) in the morning.  And I knew I wasn’t going to walk to the train this morning, because I plan to walk back from the train this evening.  I figured that made it a good evening to carry the computer.

It’s curious how heavy this little thing feels when it’s in the backpack, compared to what I usually keep in there.  When I pick up the laptop in my hands, it feels almost miraculously light, given that I know what it is and what it does, and I know how much computers used to weigh and all that trivia.  But then after I put it in the backpack and later go to pick up and sling the backpack, it’s just so much heavier, subjectively speaking, than it ought to feel.

It’s quite annoying.  I dislike being subject to such subjective impressions from the world.  It’s inescapable, I suppose, since certainly this body was never shaped by nature accurately to assess the weight of a backpack with or without a laptop in it.  I guess the fact that our impressions are so inexact and inconsistent can be useful as a way to keep from feeling overconfident in our assessments of various facts and opinions about the world.

But then again, I tend to hold my judgments and opinions and abilities to be extremely unreliable, anyway.  I think the most common thing I say to myself is, “Robert, you fucking moron!”  That happens at least several times a day, pretty much every day (and I make that estimate without any willful exaggeration).  Just ask some of my coworkers if you don’t believe me*.  I really hold myself in contempt; I hate how weak and pathetic and idiotic I am so much of the time.  Trust me, if you were inside my head, you’d probably feel the same way.

Speaking of me being an idiot, I had slight passing thoughts on and off yesterday of trying to start writing a story I had considered writing before.  It involves a character I invented waaaaay long ago, back when I was maybe about 10 years old.  It was intended then as a comic book.  I even drew the beginnings of one or two comics about the character, one featuring the origin of his arch-enemy and all that.

Then, years later, I started thinking of an idea for a manga featuring the character, but with a much less comic-book style origin and story.  Indeed, it would become a tale about a teenager (not a grown-up, unlike the original notion) who has gone through some form of trauma and has lost his memories and whatnot, but discovers that—apparently as part of the thing that caused him the trauma and memory loss—he has developed incredible powers.

These powers are not psychic abilities or anything, but entail the ability to convert his own matter, and the matter around him directly into energy, which obviously means a lot of energy, given E=mc2  and all that.  It’s a silly-ish story, one for which I’ve drawn a picture or two, and it’s called HELIOS, with a rather silly and whimsical subtitle, “the wayward sun”.  Although maybe it should be “the prodigal sun” or something along those lines.

MS Word has underlined the word “sun” in that last sentence.  Apparently, it’s able to recognize the original phrase well enough to think that the word following “prodigal” should be “son”, not “sun”.  Curiously, it did not underline the word “sun” after “wayward”.  Apparently the song by Kansas isn’t as ubiquitous as the term from that horrible, perverse parable in the gospels.  Who would’ve thought it?  Admittedly, the one from the New Testament has a two millennia head start, so I guess we can cut Kansas a little bit of slack.

Anyway, obviously I know the whole back story regarding HELIOS, and of course there is a reason the title is spelled in capital letters.  I think it could be a decent light-novel type story.  It might even be worth trying to write it on the smartphone, just to see how well I can write stories like that using that tool.

But this is all a pipe dream, of course.  I don’t think anyone would be interested in reading it, even if I were able to force myself to start writing fiction again and do it.  It’s just my little personal fantasy (about writing another science fiction story**).  I doubt that I’d be able to summon the energy to write about that character (which is mildly ironic), but even if I did, there would be no point.

I don’t think I’m going to be able to summon the energy for much of anything, anymore.  I mean, obviously, I’m currently still writing this blog, and I’m sometimes walking to and/or from the train station, and of course I’m working at work.  But there’s no percentage in any of it.  I’m just slowly eroding whatever’s left of me.  I don’t really, honestly expect to make it to the end of this month, not without some major catastrophe or departure or whatever.

Maybe it’s just that I don’t want to make it to the end of this month.  It’s an annoying version of the old notion of “feeling that you can’t go on”.  Unfortunately, I know that I can go on, in the sense that I’m at least physically capable of doing it.  I just don’t want to go on.  I see no good reason to do it.  I want to escape.

Also, even though I didn’t walk to the train today, and the only walking I did so far was up to the end of the station to sit down, I’m already sweaty and my shirt and I smell like mildew!  I doubt anyone else can smell it, but I can, and it’s disgusting.  I just washed this shirt, and did so thoroughly, and dried my clothes thoroughly afterwards.  I don’t know how much Lysol I’m going to have to spray on it and me to kill that horrible smell, but unfortunately, I don’t have a change of shirt with me, and believe me, no one wants to see me topless!

It’s a minor frustration, I know—hardly a tragedy.  But there are so few, if any, compensatory joys in the world anymore.  Even if the function’s y-output isn’t terribly negative, if it just is negative at all, overall, then as time goes on, the integral, the area under the curve (or, well, over the curve) is going to be negative, and that negative integral will only get more and more negative as long as the function continues.  Better just to return the thing to zero and cut one’s losses.

That’s a bit of an obscure metaphor, I suppose, but hopefully it makes sense to people who know a little calculus.

I’m just so tired and worn out.  I feel angry all the time, but the vast majority of that anger is always directed at myself, and rightly so.  I need to escape.  But I probably can’t do it on my own.  At least, I only see one general way to do so on my own.

Oh, well, what are you gonna do?  The universe is a horrible place.  No wonder every little bit of spacetime is trying to push away from every other little bit.  Maybe so-called Dark Energy is just an expression of cosmic self-disgust.

Intergalactic space would certainly not be too distant a place for someone to want me to be from them.  I wish I could be so far away from myself a lot of the time.  But I don’t want to be someone else, either.  That’s another conundrum.

All right, this has gotten too long.  Have a good day, please, and thank you for reading.

helios sharper

[P.S.  Upon looking up this old drawing, it appears that I did think of making the subtitle “the prodigal sun”.  Now I like “wayward” better.  Maybe I’m just being perverse.]

*I don’t know how you might go about that, though, and I don’t really expect you to try.

**It would not be hard sci fi in any way, since of course it leans toward the comic book style of things, but the idea behind some of it is based in a bit of real science, including particle physics, especially relating to the Higgs field (where the H in HELIOS comes from), all that kind of stuff.  But I never thought of it as a serious science fiction thing, like Son of Man.

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Viewing, walking, carrying, and planning

Well, it’s Monday again, the start of a new work week and also the first blog post of a new month.  It’s also what I refer to as Independence Eve (in the US).  Why not?  We have Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve.  Why not an “Eve” for the national holiday celebrating the official founding of the country?  I encourage you all the read (or reread) the Declaration of Independence tomorrow.  It’s not very long.

I’m writing this post at the train station for the moment, though I will probably be finishing it on the train, or even at the office, since there are only about eight minutes until the arrival of the next train.  The reason for all this will become clear shortly, for those who are interested.

It was a relatively eventful weekend for me.  I decided to force myself to go to the movie theater* on Saturday morning for a matinee showing (not to be confused with a manatee showing) of The Guardians of the Galaxy 3.  I allowed myself to do this—or negotiated it and gave myself added incentive, since I wasn’t exactly keen on going to the theater per se—on the agreement that I would have some movie theater popcorn while there**, and then would walk back to the house after the movie (I took an Uber to get there…I thought it would be unkind to arrive at the theater sweaty, in case it was crowded).

I did do that walk, about 6.7 miles, in the afternoon heat and humidity of south Florida.  It was not easy, but that wasn’t unexpected.  I did take two twenty-ish minute breaks, one at a bus stop and one in a very lovely little park, where I meditated a bit in the shade to relax.  That was useful both because of the heat and the walking and because of the stress of having gone to the theater.

I enjoyed the movie, but even though there was very low attendance, I still had to deal with someone sitting in my assigned/purchased seat.  As if I need that kind of trouble.  The person/family was gracious about moving, but I don’t understand why it should have been an issue!  In modern movie theaters, the seats are assigned.  Why would one sit in any seat other than the one for which one had paid?

So, I felt very tense and stressed out by even the modest number of people around me at the movie, but at least while the movie was playing I was fine.  I even laughed out loud two or three times, since it was a funny movie.  I also thought that the guy playing the High Evolutionary looked really familiar, and then last night while re-watching a video of clips about how “The 11th Doctor is a Bad-ass”, I realized that the actor who played the High Evolutionary had played a secret service agent in Doctor Who series 6 episodes 1 and 2 (The Impossible Astronaut and Day of the Moon).  I didn’t just trust myself, though I was fairly convinced, but I looked the actor up on IMDB, and confirmed it.

That’s kind of fun.  He was excellent in his role as the HE, and that should at least help encourage actors who are, at present, in supporting or even “background” roles.  Of course, Karen Gillan had major roles in both things, but she herself had also appeared previously in the 4th series of Doctor Who (The Fires of Pompeii) in truly a bit part, where she was so heavily made up that you wouldn’t recognize her if you didn’t know it was she***.

Anyway, it was a hell of a walk back from the theater, but my choice of boots seems to have been quite good, and I wore knee and ankle spandex supports on both sides, and I think that helped make sure I didn’t have too much of a problem with recovery.  I took it comparatively easy on Sunday (my laundry day, in any case), but overall I still walked about four miles total over the course of the day.  Then, this morning, I’ve already walked to the train station, which is about five miles, and I have another mile to walk from the station to the office.  So, I’m getting a fair amount of walking in since the start of July.

I want to get to the point where I can walk more or less indefinitely, because I have a challenge I dream of undertaking, at which I would either succeed or die trying.  I’ve mentioned it before, though I don’t recall how much detail I gave, and I won’t go too much into it now, but I will say that part of my walking yesterday involved going to buy some groceries—not many, but some—and bringing a hiking-type backpack to carry them, in order to test it out.  I’m pleased to say that it worked very nicely—if anything, it’s better and easier than my day-to-day backpack, which I guess makes sense, since it’s meant for carrying rather significant amounts of weight in challenging circumstances.

Supposedly, exercise such as walking is supposed to be beneficial for depression.  I’m not so sure it’s the case with me.  In the past, I usually only exercised thoroughly (which I often did) when I had already been recovering from depression.  It seems very clear, in my case, that the exercise was a consequence of the abating depression, not its cause, because I’ve long since been in the habit of exercising, and even now, at my worst, I still do dips and pull-ups and things five to six days a week.  Anyway, if I can push myself to walk and walk and go longer distances and maybe even undertake a great challenge, such as I have in mind, I might either succeed at treating—and maybe even curing—my depression, or otherwise, perhaps, at dying in the process.

Of course, it has not escaped my notice that I might succeed at treating my depression and then end up mortally harming myself.  That wouldn’t be so horrible.  I enjoy irony like that, and it wouldn’t trouble me to die ironically—or, at least it wouldn’t trouble me any worse than would dying in most other possible ways.  In any case, I think it’s almost certainly better to die while wanting to live than to live while wanting to die.

*I don’t think I’ll go the movies alone again in this life.  It’s just not enough fun to warrant the stress.

**I wanted to put Goobers® or Reese’s Pieces® in the popcorn, which was my personal tradition for movie theater popcorn, but alas, they did not have either of those candies available.  I was forced to make do with peanut M&Ms®, which is a worthy candy but, unfortunately, just not quite the same.  I did have a nice, “small” Mug® root beer, though.

***That’s the same episode in which Peter Capaldi first appeared in Doctor Who before returning as the 12th Doctor.

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You Were and Have Been Warned

Well, as I warned you would happen, it’s Saturday, and I’m doing a blog post, because I work today.  And, as I also warned you, I did in fact post my video The Superman Neutrino Hypothesis to YouTube yesterday afternoon, and I’ll embed it here, below this sentence.

As you’ll see when you watch it (or have seen, if you’ve already watched it), it’s just a bit of meandering, rather silly stuff, with me applying scientifically valid physical thoughts and questions (and making a few arithmetic errors along the way) to the nature of a comic book hero—the most archetypal comic book hero, though never one of my personal favorites—whose powers have always been rather puzzling to me.

Not that such puzzlement is surprising or unusual.  There’s no good explanation for most of the many powers superheroes have.  I think the closest I’ve seen to someone trying to give a “mundane” physical explanation for a superpower was when, in the first Spider-Man movie, they zoomed in on Peter Parker’s fingers and we saw squillions of tiny little gripping projections growing out of his fingers.  Presumably the same thing was happening with his toes.

But then, if that’s the explanation for his ability to stick to and climb walls, how does it work when he’s wearing gloves and boots?  Did he somehow design a special fabric so fine and porous that it would let this “stickiness” come through, undiminished?  How in the world did a teenager from Queens, however brilliant he might be, come up with such a thing?

At least Sam Raimi had the sense not to have Peter Parker just invent his webbing—which would be an almost Nobel-worthy breakthrough in materials science and engineering and possibly condensed matter physics—in his little house in a poor neighborhood in Queens.  Then again, Raimi still had to make the webbing come from Peter’s wrists, for valid, story-based reasons, but that fact is rather odd.  No spider secretes web from near the ends of its legs, but rather from glands in its posterior (or “abdomen”).

If Peter had developed a more natural bodily location for the production of his webbing, that would have made for an awkward superhero, huh?  Raimi was probably right not to do that.

Anyway, that’s pretty much all I have to talk about for today.  This is quite a departure for me in terms of post length, and I don’t know if people in general will be happy or disappointed that it’s so comparatively short.  It doesn’t matter much, either way, though.  I’m just not interested in writing much, today.  I’m not interested in doing much.  My back and legs have been acting up even worse than usual these past several days, and that’s saying something.  In addition, and possibly exacerbated by that pain, I’m almost always stressed out, whether at work or at the house or even during my commute, though the latter is perhaps the least stressful time.

It really gets old.  I’ve got to do something about all this; it’s just not worth the effort to keep going, especially when there’s really nothing at all to which to look forward.  My “epic quest” looks harder to carry out when my pain is so severe, though I’m trying to find ways to counter that.  Otherwise, I feel like just giving up on it, and on everything else, and just shutting down the game.

I guess we’ll see what happens.