Ed That Goes Ping

Wabi Sabi

I happened across a book today at the store called Wabi Sabi Simple. It introduced the aesthetic of “wabi sabi” — which is, among other things, the idea that “things that have been handled, that are aged have more value than things that are pristine” as a friend who studies Japanese language and culture put it. That’s the “wabi” side of it. The “sabi” side is about the beauty of alone-ness, melancholy, sort of. Well, they’re very culturally loaded concepts and nothing I’m going to do justice to in a blog entry. Suffice it to say it was something I wanted to look into further and learn about.

So I go to the glorious Web. And this is why I’m blogging it. What do I find when I look for wabi sabi on the wonderful world wide freaking web?

At the top of the list, this wiki article which starts as a straightforward discussion of the topic and ends up in a big debate over whether or not Extreme Programming is Wabi Sabi. I kid you not. Freaking hacker culture, thinks it owns everything, even Japanese aesthetics. Ptooey.
But that was nothing. The real horror begins Here, at Fox News:

NEW YORKÂ â€”Â Imperfection is beauty.
That’s the concept at the heart of wabi sabi, the new “it” theme in popular design that brings nature to everything from cars to kitchen countertops….in People magazine’s 2003 spring fashion hot and not list, wabi sabi was described as “in” and feng shui, the once-chic Chinese art of positioning objects to create positive effects, as “out.”

Kami preserve us.

Wapsi Square

Wapsi Square has been one of the few webcomics I read daily for a while now. I started it when the creator, Paul Taylor, did a guest comic for PvP.

It’s kind of a “chick comic” despite being drawn/written by a guy; the cast are overwhelmingly female. It’s more of an ongoing drama than a gag strip; there are punchlines but they’re almost always very low key, not laugh-out-loud things. You stay not for The Funny (as Websnark puts it) but for The Story. (And maybe for Monica in her 8-ball shirt! But I digress…) There’s a lot of just ordinary people life drama, but there’s also a big dose of fantasy/supernatural: the main character, Monica, is involved with some strange supernatural forces, including the Aztec god of alcohol.

Quibbles: the pace can occasionally be glacial, with single conversations stretched out into a week or two….or three… or forever… Sometimes the style of drawing, e.g. the proliferation of wide-eyed toothy smiles, gets on my nerves… But these are minor quibbles: the art and writing are very good overall. (I actually quit reading for a while when the pace got TOO glacial and I despaired of anything ever actually happening again in the comic, but I got sucked back in.)

I thought I’d blog it because a recent strip happens to contain a succinct plot summary, so it might be a nice place for a new reader to drop in.

Other “must read” comics for me are Achewood, Questionable Content, and some newspapaer stuff like Dilbert, Agnes, Boondocks, Pearls Before Swine, and FoxTrot. Oh, and the aforementioned PvP, and Penny Arcade.

UPDATE:

Did I just say the art and stuff were “good overall”? Sometimes they are amazing.

Small personal bummer.

I interviewed for a job last week, and got the “sorry, we found somebody else” letter yesterday. A bummer. I’m working right now but it’s a weird situation — I’m doing contract programming for a company which keeps promising it’s going to hire me on as a salaried programmer soon, but says they’re not financially ready to take on a new employee right now. So that’s a non-ideal situation, and since I can’t force them to change their minds on that I’ve been looking around at other jobs. This one seemed like a real winner: a local Perl programming job.

I’d actually turned down two jobs I was interviewing for before this one because the salaries offered weren’t quite what I needed. So I had high hopes going in to this one. I was offered those other jobs, why not this one? But no. Not this time.

I’m grateful I’m not on a real job hunt where I’m doing this all day every day and getting rejections constantly, I guess. But this seemed like such a great possibility.

Lansing State Journal:At least 2 dead in vehicle pileups on I-96 near Lansing

At least two people died and more than 25 others were injured in multiple pileups involving more than 100 vehicles in thick fog Wednesday afternoon on eastbound Interstate 96 east of Lansing, authorities said.

Drive CAREFULLY in the sloppy Michigan winter weather, folks…

The couple said their son called them from a cell phone on I-96 and told them, “I’m standing here in the road and I’m not sure how I got here.” They said Christopher Morrow told them his Toyota Celica “folded up like an accordion” when it crashed.

In A Fix With Yahoo

My password was just changed on my Yahoo account. I don’t know why or by whom. Perhaps it was sniffed over the wire while I was on a wireless connection today. I don’t know.

But the trouble is, Yahoo won’t email me my new password without my putting in my identity information. But I had bogus identity information in there, stemming from when Yahoo’s marketing tactics were getting unpleasant.

So… I can’t remember what date of birth and zip code I put in there. My real ones don’t work. And without those it won’t let me request a new password (they DO have my correct email, to send my password to).

So I can’t change my yahoo groups subscriptions or anything like that.

I can’t login to Yahoo Messenger anymore.

I am Yahoo-Screwed.

That’ll teach me to withhold information from Big Brother, I guess. :(

If you’re used to contacting me on yahoo messenger, well…. I guess you won’t be anymore. Until I establish a new yahoo ID and track you down again.

Crap.

Only thing I can think of is possibly to write a script to brute-force the DOB and ZIP on the new password request form.