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Things are happening, people are going places, rain is falling! Intelligent life is devouring the Titanic! It's a Tuesday in Chicago!

A quick note -- I have reached the end of the signed-copies list for Charitable Getting and I'm about to start going through and just giving one more poke to people who haven't responded to my initial emails, as well as people who asked me to bump them down on the list. If you signed up but haven't yet been contacted by me, please let me know! It could be you somehow got left off the list, or our wires got crossed.

Selkie linked me this morning to an event going on in Brooklyn today: Voices of Justice is holding a Passover Seder specifically for survivors of domestic violence, child abuse, and sexual assault. CALANY has an article about it which I found fairly apropos; it remarks not just on the coming-together of people who share a common experience, but the link between the bondage of the slaves in Egypt, which is remembered in the Passover meal, and the spiritual suffering that can come with being an abuse survivor.

There's a ton of fascinating photos of the prep for the feast and some discussion of how preparation, as well as participation, can help survivors to feel like they have a community that welcomes and respects them. Selkie asked if I'd link the story and I said sure, but I didn't know what I could say about it, not having particularly extensive experience with Judaism; turns out I have a bit to say after all, because it's not really about religious practice as much as it is about how food and communal dining, particularly traditional communal meals, can be a method of healing and reclaiming.

So I think it's pretty cool.

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Okay, I actually paid money (not much money, granted) for The Black Swan, by Nassim Taleb, so I feel like I should read it cover to cover. And it says "Happy Birthday Sam" in the front, so it seems like some kind of sign. But I've been struggling with it for days and now I also have The Vesuvius Club by Mark Gatiss to read, and I find myself dreading going back to The Black Swan after strolling through Gatiss's friendly prose.

Because The Black Swan, okay, is exactly like if Rodney McKay went to business school instead of studying physics and then you had to sit and listen to him talk about it.

Taleb is, as people warned me he would be, a bit arrogant. Which is fine, I've put up with worse than arrogance for the pleasure of learning something. And he is talking about mathematical, philosophical, and financial concepts that are just barely at the edges of my comprehension. Which is also fine, I've resigned myself to often only understanding a percentage of books I read when they concern business or math.

But he's also just plain not a very good writer. He rambles, he meanders, he speaks unclearly, and he holds up fictional events as "evidence" of the truth of his theories. Which he is unapologetic, if not entirely up front, about. But that is irrelevant, because you can be unapologetic about being full of shit all you want, you are still full of shit. Also he reeks of the kind of dipstick I have to deal with all the time who thinks that because he works in finance he should be excused his rancid manners.

Taleb does have some interesting observations to make and some intelligent things to say, but they're so obscured by a combination of incoherence and ego that I don't feel like putting out the required effort to decode them. Bad ROI. In the end I went through all the pages I'd marked and really only found one quote worth keeping. Mind you, it's a pretty good quote, in terms of putting into pith a belief I've held for years.

You can afford to be compassionate, lax, and courteous if, once in a while, when it is least expected of you, but completely justified, you sue someone, or savage an enemy, just to show that you can walk the walk. --p. 7

And now I'm going to read some more of The Vesuvius Club, where we have just been introduced to Miss Pok. Miss Bella Pok. (Oh how I laughed.)

(no subject)

My origami calendar is nicely pantheist. You may remember that on Ash Wednesday we had the Church Of Marc, also known as ROCKET CHURCH. And today, for Passover, there was an awesome Star of David!

Now, here's the thing, I need to apologise in advance. Because the six-pointed star is supposed to be made with a piece of copier paper, but since white copier paper is boring, I used some origami paper from my calendar, torn to about the right proportion. The most recent colour of paper in my calendar, incidentally, happened to be yellow.

I was just doofing my goy ass along, and I did not pause to think about the fact that I was folding a yellow star. I didn't even think about this until I got home and looked at the photo and thought, Sam, what the fuck is wrong with you?

Fortunately, Photoshop filters exist to stop us from making assholes of ourselves. So I coloured it blue.

I think it looks sort of ghostly and fantastical. And like I possibly overused the blur tool slightly. It's a super-fun fold though, and I'm pretty sure with a little ingenuity you could make it into a modular form of some kind.

I don't actually have an "I'm an idiot" icon. Just pretend this one is ironic.