Sequels.

Look, I’m not one of those “George Lucas destroyed my childhood” fans. I don’t hate the idea of sequels, in and of themselves.

Sequels can even be great. The Dark Knight, one of the best movies of the year, was a sequel.

And if they’re not great? I’m usually willing to overlook the bad parts, as long as there’s something in there worth watching. I like movies almost as much for the things they make me think about as for the actual plot, and if a sequel gets me thinking about that fantasy world again, that’s fine.

And if the sequel sucks? I’ll ignore it. The original will still be there, ready to watch whenever I want. I learned this lesson from Highlander 2: The Horrible Mistake, also known world wide as “the movie that never happened.”

But sometimes, enough is enough. Sometimes, you need to be a little bit original. And you know what doesn’t need a sequel?

The Phantom of the Freaking Opera.

That’s right, Andrew Lloyd Webber is penning a sequel to his smash-hit musical. That, in and of itself, is annoying, because Phantom has a very nice ending already, and continuing the story removes all of the mystery of it.

But even worse: it’s set on Coney Island.

The Phantom of Coney Island is not gothic, and it’s not romantic. It’s a freaking episode of Scooby Doo.

Also, the title, Love Never Dies? That’s kind of an odd statement, since pretty much everybody is dead.

Hey, do you want to know how Eric (the Phantom) has dealt with the pain of knowing he can never have Christine? By creating a lifesize Christine doll, which he then marries. Yarg!

In brighter sequel news, they’re making another Fast and the Furious. With Vin Diesel.

I might have to shave my head again.

AM Gym Session

Chins: 5
Pushups: 15
DB Swings: 45×15
Drop Lunges: 15
Pikes: 15
3 Circuits

A quick note: when I do double session, I don’t just do my usual workouts twice; that would burn me out pretty fast. Instead, I pare back a little, and do slightly more than half my normal volume each workout.

This seems like it would defeat the point. I mean, working out for fifteen minutes twice a day, or thirty minutes once a day, is the same, right?

Wrong. For one, I am still doing more overall volume. For another, the body actually works harder if you split your workouts into two sessions. I don’t know precisely why – I don’t think anyone does – but I think there are two things at play. One, when you’re only going for half as long per session, you’re able to put more effort into each rep. Two, the body expends a lot of energy to warm up and cool down. and when you spit up your training, it has to do that twice.

Piano

I spent a couple of hours today re-familiarizing myself with a piano. I think I have the major scales down fairly well, even if I have to look at the keys and think a bit as I’m playing them. The minor scales still throw me.

One of the problematic things about missing two of your fingers: my fingering is totally different that it would be if I had all of my digits to play with, so I have to make mental substitutions on-the-fly. I had the same problem when I was learning to type:

Instructor: Okay, class, put your fingers on the home row.
Me: Um, I can’t.
Instructor: What in the blazes do you mean, you “can’t.”
Me: waves hand
Instructor: Sweet fancy Moses! Um, well, go play Solitaire, or something.

I’m trying to play the scales with both hands simultaneously, and my left hand is doing something totally different than my right, yet still producing the same effect, and then my brain exploded. So, yeah.

Writing

Everything was going well, until I realized I was inserting HTML markup into my document.

That’s one of the problems with the way I work: I wrote a lot, but there are always subtle little differences. When I write these blogs, for instance, everything is in HTML, except for the title, which is in bold – really in bold, not wrapped in bold tags – to let me know not to paste it into the actual document. When I write email, though, I tend to use *asterisks* instead of markup or formatting, because I’m used to sending plain-text emails. When I write other kinds of documents, though, I have to use the word processor’s formatting.

Such are the trials of my life.

It was hard getting back into the writing mood today, but eventually I sat down and forced myself to start typing. Those first few sentences are always the hardest; once that’s out of the way, the rest seems to come by itself. I knocked out about three thousand words this afternoon, which is why I kind of laugh when someone complains about a two hundred word report. Two hundred words isn’t even an introduction.

Reading

I finished one of my books yesterday, and I started on a new one. I’m about three chapters into it, and that’s what I’ll be doing for the rest of the night.

Yes, it is two in the morning. No, I am not tired yet.

Diet

A low carb pillar of perfection.

PM Gym Session

Chins: 5
Dips: 10
DB Snatch: 45 lbs, 10 reps per arm
Lunge: 10 reps per leg
Pikes: 10
4 Circuits

So there I was, minding my own business, when I heard someone say “what about that guy? He looks like he knows what he’s doing.” I knew where this was going, so I put the weight I had been swinging up over my head back on the ground, and turned around to find out who was talking about me, and why.

I actually kind of respect people that are willing to come up to me in the gym, especially when I’m in the middle of one of my more… extravagant workouts. I can’t imagine that I’m in any way welcoming. Regardless, there were a couple of girls standing behind me, looking back and forth between me and the chin-up/dip station.

Said apparatus both confused and frightened them, so I spent about five minutes waking them through how to use it, why they should use it, and how often they should use it. It really isn’t that difficult, and they were both surprised by how much easier it is when you use the assistance lever.

There are people who believe that we who are serious about out training belong to a special group, a brotherhood of iron, and that we are beholden to a certain code, the precepts of which include “pass on what you have learned.” I think that’s a bunch of crap. Taking five minutes to help someone out is basic civility. You shouldn’t need a code to tell you that.

A note: if you’re going to train twice in one day, you should give yourself about six hours between sessions. Eight is preferable.

You will note a distinct lack of powerlifting in the above routines. This is because the gym I went to, a new facility that just opened about five minutes from my house, doesn’t have an Olympic bar. I will leave the stream of incredulous profanity that this provoked to your imagination.

And then I went to Wal Mart.

Some day, I’ll learn.

The last few weeks have kind of sucked.

Its mostly due to my work schedule. I’m in the midst of a very important, very rushed project, and that means I’ve been putting in a lot of overtime. A lot of overtime. And as a result, pretty much everything else has fallen to the side.

It’s something of a tradition, however, for almost everyone in our office to disappear for the week between Christmas and the New Year, and I fully plan on taking advantage of that fact. I’ve taken next week off, and plan on getting caught up on what used to be my life.

In that line, I have a few goals for the next few days:

Sleep: I am once again riding the insomnia train to exhaustionville. Last Monday, I woke up at 3am, went to the office, and didn’t get home until 9pm. That is what they call a “Very Long Day,” and that’s becoming much too common. So my first goal is to get to sleep at something approaching a decent hour, and to remain unconscious until my body decides it doesn’t need to be horizontal anymore. I might take the batteries out of my alarm clock. New Year’s Eve will, of course, blow this right out of the water, but at least I don’t have to wake up the next day.

Diet: For the last month or so, my diet has consisted of equal parts junk, garbage, and failure, with perhaps a sprinkling of a pre-diabetic condition mixed in for spice. This is because I’ve been eating out a lot, going to Wing Night with the guys from the office, and partaking of the free soda in the cooler in our cell… er, office. Next week, I’m going to do a protein-sparing modified fast, just to clean out my system a little bit, and hopefully remind my body that there are other sources of energy besides sugar and woe.

The Gym: I have been going to the gym, and I’m still stronger than you are, so step off, but with my schedule being the way it is, I haven’t been very consistent, and I haven’t been working towards any particular goal. I’ll be doing double sessions next week, which means I’ll be in the gym twice a day. Right now, I’m planning on doing three AM strength session, two AM olympic sessions, and five PM metcon circuits, but that might change as I get into it. In order to make sure that this produces a training effect, and not an “ow ow ow ow dies” effect, I’ll be taking fish oil capsules by the fistful, being religious with my peri-workout nutrition, stretching after each session, and sleeping a whole lot.

Piano: I’ve been meaning to teach myself an instrument for, well, ever. I hang out with a lot of very gifted musicians, and I enjoy music in general, and I want in on the game. I don’t expect to become a virtuoso in a week, but I do want to re-learn the major and minor scales, and maybe a few chords. This should be easily doable in a week.

Reading: I have a stack of books sitting in my small library, all of which I’ve been meaning to read for a Very Long Time now. By the end of the week, at least one of these will move to the “done” pile.

Writing: I don’t know how much I’ll be blogging over the next week, but I’ve been working on a project for… let’s say three months now… that I really want to put to bed. I’ve got five chapters left, and five days. That should be no problem.

I’d also like to make time to fall in love and save the world, so if you’re an eligible female or an evil mastermind and want to hang out, hit me up in the comments.

WHY ARE ALL OF YOU PEOPLE HERE THEY DON’T SELL CHRISTMAS PRESENTS AT PRICE CHOPPER THEY SELL FOOD I JUST WANT TO EAT MY GOD GO AWAY!

Let me pose a question to you. Say the following happened:

It was a little before 8 at night when the breaker went out at Emily Milburn’s home in Galveston. She was busy preparing her children for school the next day, so she asked her 12-year-old daughter, Dymond, to pop outside and turn the switch back on.

As Dymond headed toward the breaker, a blue van drove up and three men jumped out rushing toward her. One of them grabbed her saying, “You’re a prostitute. You’re coming with me.”

Dymond grabbed onto a tree and started screaming, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.” One of the men covered her mouth. Two of the men beat her about the face and throat.

How would you react? How would you want your daughter to react?

If I saw something like this happening, I would hope that I had the presence of mind to fight to protect this girl. I would hope that the girl had the presence of mind to fight to protect herself. Except…

As it turned out, the three men were plain-clothed Galveston police officers who had been called to the area regarding three white prostitutes soliciting a white man and a black drug dealer.

The little girl was not a prostitute, by the way. So what do you think happened? Did the police appologize? Well, not quite:

Three weeks later, according to the lawsuit, police went to Dymond’s school, where she was an honor student, and arrested her for assaulting a public servant. Griffin says the allegations stem from when Dymond fought back against the three men who were trying to take her from her home.

Three men, dressed in plain clothes, jumped out of a van and tried to kidnap her, and she was wrong for fighting back.

The city, of course, sides with the officers:

Also, “The city has investigated the matter and found that the conduct of the police officers was appropriate under the circumstances,” [Attorney William] Helfand says.

This disgusts me beyond beliefe.

Boing Boing

“This is George Washington’s axe,” the curator said with pride, gesturing toward a worn and rugged thing, locked inside of a glass case, “held in the very hands of the first President of our great nation.”

“Of course,” he said, “we are much more careful about it now than we have in the past. The room we used to store it in wasn’t climate controlled, and the wood rotted, so we had to replace the handle. And one of our interns dropped it one day, and the blade cracked, so we had to replace that, too.”

“But,” a young boy asked, “if the handle has been replaced, and the blade has been replaced, it isn’t really George Washington’s axe anymore, is it?”

The older, more complex version of this is called Theseus’ Paradox, named for a legendary Greek king. The question asked by the ancient philosophers was, if all of the pieces of a thing are replaced, is it still the same thing?

George Washington’s axe, in the above story, is pretty obviously not George Washington’s axe; none of the material was ever held by America’s first President. The question becomes less clear, though, when we talk about more complicated things. If you replace all of the boards which make up a ship, one by one, is it still the same vessel? If so, why? If not, when does it stop being the same ship?

I was looking at my hand – and no, there were no chemicals involved in this, so shut up – thinking about this. My hand has the same shape as it always has, and even the same scars, but the cells are constantly dying and being replaced. The human body, on average, completely replaces itself every ten years. But we’re still the same person, aren’t we? This is still my hand, isn’t it?

In Star Trek, the scriptwriters needed an easy way to get their characters down to the surface of an alien planet, so they invented the transporter. You step in, an extra fiddles a few levers, there’s a light show, and six seconds later, you’re either banging a hot alien chick or getting eaten by a Horta, depending on the color of your shirt.

But the way the transporter works is kind of disturbing. It literally rips apart your atoms, rending you into a trillion microscopic pieces. In that moment, in between stepping into the transporter and meeting the green skinned belly dancer, you’re dead. The fact that you get reassembled on the other end is beside the point.

Transhumanism is one of the up-and-coming philosophies in the tech world. The short version of a long story is that these people are striving for eternal life, but tend to be atheists, and therefore don’t put a whole lot of stock in the immortality of the soul. This crowd generally wants to find a way to transfer their consciousness into a robot or a computer.

This is, obviously, quite a ways away, but what if it were possible? What if you could make a copy of your mind and put it inside of a machine? Would it be you? Would you live on, even though you had died? What makes you, you? Is it the mind, or the body that houses it, or both? Which part of George Washington’s axe is the most important?

Prophecy fans have been predicting the end of the world for millennia.

A quick perusal of the early Christian writings – writings from the First Century, by Jesus’ contemporaries – shows that these people literally believed Omnium Finis Imminet: “the end of all things is upon us.” They fully expected the Son of Man to come in power, to establish the Kingdom of God on Earth, and to do away with the old way of things, and they fully expected it within their lifetimes. This obviously did not happen, but that hasn’t stopped each subsequent generation from confidently saying “this age shall not pass away before this things are fulfilled.”

In the year 1,000, the world experienced its first millennial panic, as Christians around the world looked expectantly for the sign of the Christ written in the heavens. When that date came and went, the waiting faithful moved their prediction to 1,033, thought to be the millennial anniversary of Christ’s death and resurrection. A similar thought process led to the beliefs that the end would come 1,500 years after Jesus’ birth, and then 1,500 years after his death.

William Miller, apparently gifted with a persuasive tongue, convinced his followers that the world would end on March 21^st, 1843, and then revised his prediction to October 22^nd, 1844. Many of his followers sold their land and possessions in preparation for this event; that turned out to be a mistake.

Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon church. announced that the Lord would return no latter than 1891. The Jehovah’s Witnesses, who I for some reason keep confusing with the Mormons, predicted the end of the world in 1914, 1915, 1918, 1920, and so on. They currently hold that this world will pass away on the 6,000^th anniversary of the creation of Eve, the first woman, but are unable to establish an exact date for this event.

The Reagan years gave us 88 Reasons why the Rapture will Occur in 1988, and its sequel, The Final Shout: Rapture Report 1989. The popularity of this series dwindled with each subsequent year.

And then the year 2,000 came, kicking off a whole new wave of millennial hysteria. That year came and went without much incident – not even a computer bug – so many speculative minds have now turned to the year 2,012, when the Mayan calendar runs out; the belief is that the Mayan calendar ends on December 21^st, 2012 because they knew something we do not, and not because their numerical system suffered from any inherent limitations.

From the beginning of civilization and right up until today, people have looked at the wars and rumors of wars, the growing immorality, and natural catastrophes, and claimed that these signs all point to one thing: the end.

Science and Science Fantasy have likewise been preoccupied with the end of the world; countless stories have been written about how we could be destroyed, or how we could destroy ourselves. When Worlds Collide, for instance, spins a tale of a rogue planet tearing through our solar system and colliding with out world, and the panicked rush to preserve humanity. The Terminator franchise, on the other hand, tells us what would happen if our own technology were to turn against us, while The Stand shows us the effects of a pandemic virus. Recently, the Large Hadron Collider, a real life, real science machine, was put forth as the candidate most likely to kill us all.

The Day The Earth Stood Still touches on a great many varieties of The End of the World. It opens with the Asteroid Impact scenario; the alien craft if of such mass, and moving with such speed, that its impact with the earth would cause an Extinction Level Event: the Earth, as one scientist says, would be sterilized. Both the original and the 2009 remake, of course, feature the threat of alien invasion; what would we do – what could we do – in the face of an overwhelmingly advanced civilization, intent on causing us harm? The devouring swarm seen in the trailer is known to students of Nanotechnology as Grey Goo, a horde of tiny, self-replicating machines that inexorably devour everything around it, breaking it down and turning it into more of itself.

But The Day The Earth Stood Still is primarily about the threat we pose to ourselves. In 1951, created towards the dawn of the Atomic Age, and with the images of World War II still fresh in many minds, it warned against the horrors of Nuclear War, and our own barbaric natures. If it had been written in the 1990s, it may have focused on the threat of Genetic Engineering. But today, in 2008, the message is one of environmentalism: the Earth’s ecosystem cannot support human life, and therefore human life must be done away with, in order for the Earth to survive. The details differ, but the message is the same: “we have met the enemy, and he is us.”

These prophets of doom all share one important trait: they were wrong. The world did not end in 1,000 AD, nor in the sequel. Germany did not sweep across the globe. America did not go to war with the Soviets, and Nuclear Armageddon did not visit us. Genetically engineered food has not killed us off, and a swarm of tiny robots has not eaten us. And, so far, although our environment has been damaged, it has not yet managed to kill us in self-defense.

It’s easy to look back on these doomsday scenarios and scoff. Each time science advances, skeptics will come forward and counsel of its dangers, and warn against playing God. And, once again, they will be wrong, science will continue to advance, and humanity will remain stubbornly non-extinct.

Maybe that’s the message: hope. That no matter what we face, we will overcome. Maybe the lesson of all of these doomsayers is the survivability of the human spirit.

Perhaps, though, it is our ability to examine ourselves, and to contemplate the consequences of our actions, that keeps us from destroying ourselves. Perhaps our knowledge of our own mortality keeps us humble enough to ensure our survival. Perhaps, like Jonah, these prophets of doom are successful when their predictions fail.

Because even though these prophets of doom have all been wrong, sooner or later, one of them might just be right.

I went to WalMart again last night.

Feel free to insert your own steam of colorful profanities. I certainly did.

I had three items. Three measly items. So I stood in the “Fast Checkout Lane.” Let me tell you, friends, if ever something has been misnamed, it’s the “Fast Checkout Lane.”

The couple ahead of me was apparently doing their shopping for the week, and apparently incapable of doing the math necessary to understand “20 Items or Less.” But that’s pretty much the way it goes at WalMart, so I’m sort of used to it. Angry at it, but used to it.

But this couple was special.

They were buying bananas. Plain, ordinary bananas. The kind of bananas that sell for less than a dollar a pound. It seems that the couple was unhappy with the cost of their bananas, because they actually had the cashier void them, pull one banana off the bunch, and re-weigh them. That’s right: six bananas were too costly, but five, that was spot-on.

They were also buying milk. Look, people. There isn’t that much difference between 1%, 2%, and skim. And even if there was, I doubt that the sixty year old woman ringing you out is going to be able to explain the intricacies. Shut up and get on with things.

And then it was time to pay. This process involved a check, a traveler’s check – seriously, a bleeding traveler’s check – a fistful of change, and a bag of rupples. I’m amazed they didn’t try to barter with a cheese wheel.

James Bond: drives like a maniac.

James Bond: is still a Parkour champion.

Woman Sitting Across The Aisle From Thomas: shares her disbelief with the entire theater.

Thomas: will cut you if you don’t shut up.

Random Hot(ish) Girl: goes back to see the guy that tried to kill her.

Thomas: facepalm

James Bond: drives a boat like a maniac.

The Vast Global Conspiracy: is vast, global, and conspiratorial.

Hot Chick From the Home Office: waits a respectable five minutes and twenty seconds before sleeping with James Bond.

A Bunch Of Things: happen.

Thomas: is confused.

Thomas: is bored.

Thomas: is daydreaming about User Interface Design.^*

The Bad Guys: are defeated?

James Bond’s Dead Lover’s Evil Fake Boyfriend: is caught.

Bond, James Bond: is never said.

Shaken, Not Stirred: is never said, either.

Jason Bourne: does it better.

^*Seriously. About an hour and something into this, I realized that my brain had gone on a little vacation, and was thinking about the cool stuff I can do with the JavaFX library.

There’s a scene in Twilight, where Edward, a century-old vampire, is settling his relationship with Bella, his seventeen-year-old paramour; he touches her face, leans toward her, and whispers, “you have no idea how long I’ve waited for you.”

That is part of the appeal this kind of story holds; the promise that there is always hope. Even as Edward’s days stretched into years and decades, even as he lived out a lonely, often miserable existence, it was never quite hopeless, because his story has no end. For him, there was always tomorrow.

I read a blog the other day, and the author related – humorously, but accurately – her fears of her approaching birthday. “I’m turning thirty in a few weeks,” she wrote, paraphrasing, “and I’m in the place where I just want someone to hold on to me at night, but I really think that I’m going to die alone.”

There were nearly two hundred comments by the time I got there, and I read through them all, all four pages of them. And the comments were eerily similar. The first one simply read “me, too.” The rest generally echoed thesame sentiment. Page after page of people telling the story of their isolation, their loneliness, their pain. Hundreds of people saying that they were afraid that they were running out of time.

The complaints and laments were numerous, but the solutions offered were few; it seemed like a great number of people were experiencing this problem, but that few had found an answer. The most common refrain – and this only three or four comments out of the two hundred – was “don’t give up hope, you never know when…”

The older I get, the less I hold to this advice. I am no longer willing to wait, to hope, that something good is going to come my way. The more I become aware of my own expiration date, the less willing I am to let life happen to me. Some people live life waiting for tomorrow, but eventually, tomorrow never comes. Life must be lived, not waited for.