"Wildebeest" by h.koppdelaney on Flickr

I’ve found the house I want to move into. Planning to make an offer this week.

Otaku, No Video continues to expand, so that it now includes:

• Two to three videos per week on YouTube (at least one anime review and at least one manga review)
• A live video news show, streaming on the internet every Saturday afternoon for 1 to 1.5 hours.
• Three blog posts per week
• A chat room, which sees daily activity

Launching the O, NV forum has been an interesting experience. I effectively killed much of the conversation with some boorish behavior. I’ve learned, but it’s taking a while for the site to recover. I’m thinking of creative ways to jump-start interest in it.

Work is exciting and exhausting. I’m running several significant projects.

Thanks to my 1.5 to 2 hour commute each way to and from work, I basically only have time to work, drive, and keep up with O, NV. Thus, my desire to move.

"Happy Birthday Lil guy...:O)))" by Kevin Law on Flickr

Read this today in Peter Drucker’s Managing Oneself:

Throughout history, the great majority of people never had to ask the question, What should I contribute? They were told what to contribute, and their tasks were dictated either by the work itself—as it was for the peasant or artisan—or by a master or a mistress—as it was for domestic servants. And until very recently, it was taken for granted that most people were subordinates who did as they were told. Even in the 1950s and 1960s, the new knowledge workers (the so-called organization men) looked to their company’s personnel department to plan their careers.

Then in the late 1960s, no one wanted to be told what to do any longer. Young men and women began to ask, What do I want to do? And what they heard was that the way to contribute was to â€œdo your own thing.” But this solution was as wrong as the organization men’s had been. Very few of the people who believed that doing one’s own thing would lead to contribution, self-fulfillment, and success achieved any of the three.

But still, there is no return to the old answer of doing what you are told or assigned to do. Knowledge workers in particular have to learn to ask a question that has not been asked before: What should my contribution be? To answer it, they must address three distinct elements: What does the situation require? Given my strengths, my way of performing, and my values, how can I make the greatest contribution to what needs to be done? And finally, What results have to be achieved to make a difference?

Indeed. To quote Fight Club, “Our generation has had no Great Depression, no Great War. Our war is spiritual. Our depression is our lives.”

My generation, and the generation now growing into adulthood, must discern the right and the good. My parents’ generation rejected it, and previous generations knew it through osmosis.

Apple Cinnamon Bread

Hardware

• Bread machine
• Appropriately-sized pan or a baking sheet

Software

• 1 small apple
• 150 grams water
• 4 Tablespoons butter
• 520 grams bread flour
• 3 Tablespoons wheat germ (optional)
• 1 Tablespoon cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon salt
• 1 Tablespoon yeast

Directions

1. Peel and dice the apple.
2. Place the ingredients in the above order in the bread machine.
3. Put the bread machine on the dough cycle and start it.
4. Pre-heat the oven to 425° F.
5. Once the dough is ready, place it in the pan or put it on a baking sheet. Bake for about 25 minutes, or until the top is golden brown and the bread sounds hollow when knocked.

Cover of The Backyard Homestead

I may be moving soon.

My new job at NASA (squeeee!) requires a minimum 75-minute commute twice daily, usually in heavy traffic. While I’m okay with the drive itself–having grown up in this area, I have to be–I’m losing too much time. Even with audio books, three hours a day on the road is too much.

So I’ve been looking at houses near Goddard. One is a small house on 3/4 of an acre. That sounds small as I type it, but when I walked the property it felt huge.

Coincidentally, a few days ago I bought The Backyard Homestead, which purports to be a primer on self-sufficiency within a small urban or suburban plot of land.

It’s fantastic. With clear, concise language the authors describe a wide range of activities, from canning and preserving to owning chickens, goats, and cattle.

This is not a complete encyclopedia to caring for goats, of course. Instead, it’s a solid foundation in self-sufficiency. It’s a perfect balance of breadth and depth.

My impression of the last half-dozen issues of Wired:

• Messy, cramped layout.
• Colors that clash and don’t add information.
• Tons of ads. And I mean multiple consecutive pages of just ads.  Very few full pages of content.
• Many stories have a fearmongering aspect. A good example is the article on Simon Singh, who was sued about his work on pseudoscience. This is portrayed like a Worrying Threat To Science, as though religious nutjobs haven’t been doing this for decades.
• Lots of fluff. Snippets of trivia. Speculation based on tiny samples of data.

It’s like reading a randomly colorized Twitter feed that’s half advertisements.

Screenshot from Swingers

Swingers has heart.

It’s clear that its main strengths lie in its script and its actors. The rest of the film fades away in comparison. Much like, say, The Big Lebowski.

The script contains more memorable lines and sequences than the vast majority of films, and it does so at the expense of a strong, driving story. This is not a complaint; Swingers is about a man caught in an awkward time in his life. It’s about his everyday choices and his everyday life; it’s about the clubs he visits at night, and the girls he walks up to.

Even better, the film has a strong moral core, as is shown by the final scene in the movie. Far from the typical amoral dating movie, Swingers has a few things to say.

You’ll probably recognize almost every cast member, and the film works mostly because of the strength of their performances. Jon Favreau based the script on his experiences with these actual actors, and they inhabit their characters perfectly.

I still remember a lot of the film, even a week later, which is a testament to its script and actors. The rest is, well, typical of a low-budget movie: it’s there to get the job done.

The job got done.

© Judd Winick

A recommendation from the three guys at iFanboy means a lot to me. They know how to review and recommend a comic book.

So on a whim, and after a stratospherically high recommendation from Ron, I bought The Big Book of Barry Ween. It’s an independent comic about a boy genius and the adventures he goes on.

Thankfully, hilarity really does ensue.

Cliched set up; hilarious execution. Judd Winick’s writing is consistently funny and his plots move fast, almost too fast for Barry to keep up with.  This is essential for Barry Ween‘s premise; things have to get big for them to pose a challenge to a genius.

More importantly, the patter between Barry and his best friend Jeremy is scatological in the extreme. Normally this turns me off, but this material is so well-written and presented in such a contrast to the boys’ standard suburban life that it works.

The book’s divided into chapters, one for each adventure Barry and Jeremy get into, culminating with a big two-parter that, delightfully, gets serious. No spoilers here; suffice to say that my attention lingered for a long time on the final two pages.

Color me impressed.

I’m several weeks into my new job at NASA. I’m elated and frightened.

I’m experiencing a new employee’s stress. Besides learning the location of the kitchen, and when the trash is collected, I’m incredibly scared of screwing up. Of missing some vital assignment or suggesting the wrong thing or telling the wrong joke. So much shared culture has built up here, and I’m afraid of suggesting the taboo topic, the subject that will forever tarnish my reputation.

Of course, there’s absolutely no evidence of this. My co-workers have been universally kind, understanding, and explanatory. In fact, if this were a place where an ignorant suggestion would forever tarnish my reputation, I wouldn’t want to work here.

But I do want to work here. Badly. I want to spend the next 20 or 30 years of my career here.

Plus, I’m now beginning to receive real work assignments, serious responsibility. I don’t want to screw this up.

No, it’s  more than that: I want to succeed brilliantly. I don’t want to do okay; I want to do great things here. I want to bring NASA big successes.

Without offending anyone or screwing up.

Here’s the plot of a movie:

A regular guy grows increasingly frustrated by the crime and evil that surrounds him on the streets of New York. So he gains the power to fight back, then sees a young girl in trouble and saves her from the men who’ve kidnapped and drugged her for money.

That’s the plot of Taxi Driver.

Three things intrigued me most while watching this film for the first time last week:

1) I thought Taxi Driver was about Travis Bickle’s rise and fall. That’s not accurate. It’s about Travis’s increasing disgust with the depravity around him. It’s about a man who just can’t take it any more. He wants to be a hero. He’s capable of evil, certainly–he nearly shoots a politician just for being a politician (okay, it’s more complicated than that, but still)–but it’s because he cares about people. Every one of Travis’s violent acts results from Travis seeing someone suffer, and his desire to end that suffering.

2) This is one of those films that has everybody in it. I recognized most of the faces.

3) If you want to know why people consider the 1970′s the Nadir of Western Civilization, Taxi Driver provides all the evidence you need. Now, yes, the film intentionally focuses on the worst parts of 1970′s New York City, but from what I’ve seen and read and heard from those who lived it, Taxi Driver is accurate. No wonder post-apocalyptic films took off; no wonder kids inhaled comic books. The apocalypse seemed like the only logical conclusion to the decay, and the only logical escape was into a fantasy world of spandex-clad superheroes who could stop a nuclear bomb by pointing a magical ring at it.

In such a dark world, heroism became twisted. Twisted into forms like Travis Bickle.