palmerpink

Don't get me wrong; I'm really excited about my new phone. Hot specs, good camera, cute look, you name it--it's got all the telltale signs of sexy new tech. But what is this lustful excitement--and how reasonable is it? At its simplest, this excitement is the marvel of novelty. The New Thing with Its New Stuff . But how long is novelty to last? How much impact, in the long term, can novelty really offer? And what is left after novelty dissolves in the flowing liquid of time? Here are some loosely organized notes on the subject. What comprises this novelty? Of course, the literal newness is part of that novelty, but there's even arguably a novelty in the old newly acquired; I may come late to the party on some new device (as in some ways I almost have here with my forthcoming Pixel 2), but it will still be a new device to me with--to me, at least--new features. Which is another, if not greater, aspect of the novelty: the differentiation of features. This phone ...

When I was looking for cars, there was one undivertible restriction: It had to be a hatchback. Why? Well, over the years, I accumulated various experiences regarding different types of cars--experiences which eventually cornered me into a hatchback love affair. I remember my father getting a Saturn sedan when I was a young kid. Maybe it was all the waiting around while they haggled, or maybe it was the (then) appalling new car smell, or maybe it was just the look of the car itself, but I took an instant dislike to the car. By extension, I suppose, I've always thought sedans were kind of uggerz. So no sedans for me. In high school, I remember some gas hike or another, and all the discussion of gas-guzzling SUVs. I remember the Hummer especially, that ghastly monstrosity, and all the shame thrown at their owners. I recall how an opinionated friend's despised those particularly, and SUVs generally. (He even wrote a short story about a possessed SUV killing its owner or some ...

You may have noticed my using these hashtags on twitter, usually related to my little "road trips" recently. You may also have found those updates amusing, or annoying. For me, these have not been entirely trivial, though they've almost always a bit tongue-in-cheek. Here's what they've been about. Roughly almost exactly a year ago, my mom came to pick me up at the train station for my Thanksgiving visit. Proud of having finally gotten my license a scant few months before (though still all but entirely unpracticed at driving), I offered to drive us home. The next 20 minutes of my life were among the most terrifying of my life. As mentioned, I'd only just gotten my license; I'd only driven for short jaunts using Zipcar to run errands. I'd hardly ever driven more than 45 mph and certainly never driven at night. Navigating those winding country roads and hurtling on at 55 mph with cars coming at me out of the darkness--coming, it seemed, so near, wit...

A few weeks ago, I drove through my old neighborhood and had a peculiar experience. It wasn't quite some Wordsworthian experience of the sublime, but it was something. I'm hesitant to even share this, but I think it's important. It was already a night rife with some weird feels. I'd become convinced that one of my dearest friends was avoiding me out of resentment; I'd been ghosted by a hot guy I'd been getting along great with; and things generally had an odd shape to them. So I went for a drive. Originally, I'd gone out to put something in my car, but I kept going. At first, I went down the way, following the street outside my complex. It winds its way back to Rockville Pike, which connects to Randolph. Normally, I'd follow Randolph back to my street and go home, but instead I kept going. I live so close to where I used to live...so why not just visit it, I thought. It was odd, driving down routes I used to exclusively walk. It was weird, ente...

Well, this post will be boring, but perhaps interesting to the, like, one person, perhaps a fellow blogger, interested in how blogs are run. I noticed the other day that I have more than a thousand labels just sitting about. I may use, like, 30 over normal posts. That's a lot of excess. So far, I've worked around this by selecting certain labels for the sidebar rather than having that unwieldy list overwhelm itself. But at some point I guess I should cull the herd. Find tags with only one or two posts and remove them from said posts. That'll take a long while, though. The limited list, though, isn't terrible since it singles out tags that are not only the most used (probably) but also the most interesting (hopefully). On another note, I reinstalled disqus on this blog. I want people to be able to comment, on the probably rare off-chance they ever do, but the default commenting system is highly restrictive of what accounts can be used to log in (google, livejournal, ...

Yeah, so we're a bit past 300 posts, at about 306 published posts, but it's still worth reflecting on where I've been. It occurred to me the other day--I've been blogging off and on for 15 years now. That's crazy. Here are some of my thoughts on all that. As I mentioned before , I've felt hesitant about continuing this blog. That's largely because, I think, I have bad memories of my early days, the take-no-prisoners days. I'm glad my old blog doesn't exist anymore: Not only was it beyond embarrassing, but also it hurt people, and I'm not proud of that. That being said, I learned a lot from blogging, even then, in those larval days. I'd like to think I honed my writerly skills and voice through it, learned some niceties of joining subjects and verbs with their various clausal and phrasal accouterments. Also, something about getting my thoughts and feelings out into the world...though sometimes damaging, as it could be back then, it was sti...

This past summer, I had my first vacation. And I wanted to read something light and fun. And I found something--though, it delivered more on the "light" than the "fun." But that was the least of its issues. Specifically, I was reading the EarthCent Ambassador series by E.M. Foner. There are about 13 books in the series, and I powered through about 7 of them before its flaws got the best of my patience. I don't like being a quitter, but--frankly--I don't much mind in this case. The series follows Kelly Frank, Earth's diplomat on a massive sentient space station. The Stryx--the AI running this space station and others like it--have helped humanity to become a space-faring civilization. The series consists of Kelly's facing various problems on the station, sometimes on behalf of Earth, and solving them with the help of her friends and the Stryx (who officially deny having provided help). This all sounds more exciting than it really is: the probl...