A Day in the Life #13575: The Redbox Experience, Doug's Talking Points, a Walk on the Greenway, BEST Talks, and Alicia Coming Home

BLOT: (30 Jul 2014 - 09:05:28 AM)

A Day in the Life #13575: The Redbox Experience, Doug's Talking Points, a Walk on the Greenway, BEST Talks, and Alicia Coming Home

It has been too long since I have done such a post. Not sure what's been keeping me away. I have theories, but the most practical answer is time. I just need to take more time to talk about myself. Also, as I've said before, I'm boring. I need to also take more time to not be boring. I'll work on that, too. I guess the last personal post I wrote about winning some prizes in an WLRH giveaway. It now occurs to me that I never wrote about the weekend follow-up. Never despair, talks about our time at the Space and Rocket Center will be forthcoming, hopefully. At least a brief photo dump. I guess for now, though, I'll just focus on the past couple of weeks.

The Redbox Incident

The other day, in a PBeM game [Doug's Note: "play by email"], I used the phrase, "a hot smell not unlike the worst part of an August day," to describe a fetid carrion stench that had filled a small basement, and I thought I was so damned clever. Really, though, channeling Southern Gothic to freak out players in a horror RPG has consequences. I had talked to one of my friends, John, about the movie Under the Skin. He said he liked it and had gotten it through a Redbox. So I go, "Hey, I'll stop off and get it from a Redbox, too!" and tried to do exactly this. Except when I stopped off near Walgreens to use said Redbox, which had Under the Skin, a horrible incident occurred. Right as I tell Sarah, "Oh look, they have it," the fan kicks on and blows a blast of 90-something degree air right in my face. Air that is contaminated with putrefaction. Something had crawled up in their and died and in the heat had gone bad. That stench was shot right into my mouth and nostrils. It took half an hour, and a generous "nasal wash", to get the smell out of my nostrils. I've not felt like going back. I guess I'll just rent it online or something.

What had died, I do not know. How many others suffered the same thing, I do not know. What drippings had gotten on the plastic cases inside the Redbox, I do not know. I can imagine, though, and that is half the battle.

Doug's Talking Points

So, I have started a personal experiment over on Youtube that I am calling "Doug's Talking Points". I have two up, right now, but plan on doing more. This is my first one, about reading as a social act, which I screwed up on a technical level but I think is indicative of what I'm going for:

The idea behind them is that I will take 3-5 minutes to talk about a topic. I will not use a script [though I will allow a couple of keyword cues if I need] and I will not rehearse before-hand. Even if I know a lot about the topic, or even if I have a general idea of what I want to say, the video as seen is something like a fresh take on it. I will not edit the video besides to maybe cut out dead air at the beginning and ending [the bits where I am turning the capture software on and off] or to correct somewhat for sound or light quality [while trying to not tweak it too much]. If I mess up enough to have to start over, I have to start over fresh. The idea is to force myself to get better at talking about topics without the requirement of prompts, and to develop some confidence with myself in such a medium. There should be one on "The Netflix of Books" coming out tonight or tomorrow, and you can view/track the "Doug's Talking Points" playlist here, for better or worse. After the next one, I don't know when I will have a follow-up, but probably within a week or so.

SubZero and a Walk on the Greenway

Sarah has been wanting to try out SubZero out on County Line Road slightly past [but maybe still in?] Madison. It is a place that makes ice cream to order on the spot through liquid nitrogen technology. They serve different bases, so people like me who want to eat iced coconut-milk can, and then you pick out the addings and the flavorings and the mixings and the upgrades. This is what an extra frozen, large, coconut-milk serving with huckleberry and dark chocolate added in [with a waffle slice] looks like:

They use Coconut Silk, mind you, rather than full-fat coconut-milk, so it is not super creamy, but then they have heavy cream options (and yogurt and custard and etc) so that won't be a problem for most people. They were kind of light on the huckleberry flavor, so if you get something fruity you might want to ask for an extra shot of flavor or something, but generally the service was neat and it's recommended. Just note that it's still in its busy stage so there might be a line.

Afterward, we went out and walked on the Indian Creek Greenway, which was nice. It was hot on Saturday, but the Greenway is mostly shady. There were some bikers and some runners. People were pretty nice. The total walk, from one end to the other and back, ended up being about 6 miles. By the end, the heat and lack of water was starting to take its toll on us, but I managed to get at least this glimpse into happiness:

BEST Talks

Some of the local librarians from various institutions get together periodically for a B.E.S.T. meetings [an acronym whose meaning escapes me at the moment] where we swap plans and intentions and conference stories and ask questions of each other and catch up and so forth. It is the standard for the hosting institution to give a keynote style talk. Michael Manasco and myself gave a talk we called "Where Feedback Fears to Tread", about the systems theory notion of feedback and some of its practical and psychological aspects and the ways that we manipulate the data we get to match our notion of what we should be getting, and so forth. Here is a shot of me, rocking a three piece suit, discussing what is probably one of the most important take away slides:

I will be writing up the speech for Salmon Library Blog and then I'll share that, here, as well. It will include PDFs to download if you want to see the slides, etc.

Alicia Is Back in the States!

Well, this is long and I'm mostly out of the obvious catch-up bits, but I'd like to end with a great big WELCOME BACK to Alicia [Doug's Note: my sister-in-law] who is now back in the USA after a year in Germany. We went out after my talk yesterday to meet her in the airport and to catch up a bit before she went for a few days out to her parents. First time I've been in the Huntsville International Airport in a while. Fact is, the last time I went, I think I was saying goodbye to Graveyard Greg. At any rate, she'll be visiting us this weekend and next week, and I'm sure I'll have more to say about that then, but here is a picture of the Ridout sisters, in their current forms...

You can tell they're sisters because of stuff like the smile and the ears and interesting way that their hair is normalizing over time to becoming the same color, or something like it.

Well, that's it for now. It was good to catch up. I'll do one of these much sooner next time [though expect a lot of Horror/RPG posts in the meantime ;)]

Me in 2014

OTHER BLOTS THIS MONTH: July 2014