Struggling against the almighty tides of eventuality

I think by now it’s news to no one about President Obama’s birth certificate. Almost everyone has strong feelings about this, and I do as well. But they’re mixed.

I’m just as angry as it seems like someone should be at this sort of thing. After years of elegantly dismissing attempts to distract the agenda with moronic claims feeding off racism and paranoia, Obama appears to have caved to the shrill right. Instead of issuing a firm but polite “go fuck yourselves you god damned lunatics from hell,” the President issued his long-form birth certificate. And, y’know, it looks kind of like what any sane person figured it’d look like: a birth certificate from Hawaii.

However, part of me is a little curious at the timing. He’s been swatting at this pile of bloodsucking insects for, as I said, years. So Hairdo McBankruptcy throws his cheap rug on the stage, shrieking about the birth certificate that most Americans had already suffered ADD about, and somehow builds a campaign off that. Well, that and having a terrible show and a disgusting plastic-encased harpy of a wife. And then, just when everyone’s so distracted by the fact that he’s ineffectually sending lawyers to Hawaii to sip cocktails for weeks on end (cause they have absolutely no legal jurisdiction to get at anyone’s fucking birth certificate) that they won’t even focus on the Royal Wedding, the President drops his birth certificate.

“Look at this, bitches.”

Naturally, the people who were so stupid they were deceived this long are still in denial that a black guy had the audacity to run for President — er, I mean, that he was born in America. No, wait, I had it right at first. The birthers are quite simply racists. And Donald Trump was all too happy to play the part of the southern guy handing out the hardest American History tests to the blackest people during the reconstruction. He struts himself around and proudly proclaims what a historic douchebag he is.

And people are outraged. Baratunde Thurston posted an impassioned video response to Trump’s self-congratulatory bullshit festival. Steve Weinstein wrote an blog critical of our still-so-racist society. And these guys are right. It’s a startling thing to realize, as someone who was in his teens before he encountered the idea of racism and what it meant to other people, just how deep these veins of hatred running through our country are.  But I can’t help but wonder if  President Obama knew all this was coming as he released his birth certificate.

Think of it this way: Donald Trump has been building his campaign on jumping up and down on Barack Obama’s legitimacy for the office. Suddenly, the birth certificate’s available. He’s left sputtering about grades at Obama’s Ivy League alma mater. Not only that, but his stupid comments have incensed people who have, at times, been fairly lackadaisical since getting the President elected. I think it’s possibly simply a master stroke from a politician who’s gearing himself up for a fight to get re-elected.

And I should be angry at being manipulated, but it’s hard to be angry at being manipulated into seeing the truth. Sensible people in this country are often outnumbered, shouted down, and ignored. Americans are all too willing to throw reason and progress out the window. It’s a hard fight, but one worth winning. And you know, I hope this is the end of Donald Trump’s flickering candle in the world of real politics.

Because good God is that man a fucking racist moron.

Tomorrow I’m going to be playing on a concert in Towson. I really should be practicing, but instead I’ve decided to write a blog. My priorities: not very well in order. However, I think it’ll probably be fine. One of my pieces is not memorized (which is particularly weird because I wrote it), but it’ll be fine cause it’s just one page. Also, I might be able to finish sticking it back in my head; again, it’s only one page.

The bigger thing for me is that I’m finally gonna get back out there and play some music. My tendency to shy away from any performing has been more successful than I’d hoped. The last time I played a serious performance outside of a brief annual harp ensemble recital or even a gig, well, I can’t even remember.

This year I’ve asked to play more pieces than I have in the past. I feel a little bit like I’ll be taking over the program for a little while, and that doesn’t sit particularly well with me, but nobody has seemed to mind. I’m used to playing things a bit more cautiously, and trying really hard not to offend people with excessive hubris. It’s a trait I tend to find annoying, but many people around me have hubris in almost sickening volume and I seem to be the only one who cares, so I’m dipping my toe into the water. And it’s panning out thus far.

I don’t feel I’ve prepared as fully as I would really have liked for this performance, in all honesty. I think that the pieces, while good, could be far better. Of course, there’s always room for improvement in every performance, but I played one of them for another performer today after rehearsal, and she said it sounded good. So, I’m going to try not being so very nervous, and hope for the best. I’ve tried a bit more than normal to get people to come to this performance, and hopefully it’ll turn out and I’ll be a big hit. I’m still a bit nervous though.

T minus 15 hours.

The rain was done driving itself into the ground. The smell of wet pavement drifted up to my nostrils. If I had had the time, this would have been around the point where I’d let memories wash over me, of a time way back in the past when running was a pastime, not a survival tactic. But that wasn’t possible anymore. I slipped around a corner, slamming my back against the dumpster, sinking to the ground. This would do for a bit. Breathing was a laborious process at that point. I focused on taking as deep a lungful of air as possible while making as little noise as possible. I could hear the skittering and scratching following behind me. It wouldn’t be very long. Somehow I’d get caught up and the running would start again.

Some time ago, I would have considered this a ridiculous situation that no one would ever find themselves in. I can’t really remember the exact chain of events, just that, in a moment, everything in my life was flipped onto its head. Friends were turning on me, confidants taking their deep knowledge of me and turning it against me. Running, it was the only way.

And I’d been doing it ever since.

My pursuers were relentless, at times I wondered how much they still retain of their humanity. It didn’t seem possible that a normal human drive could push them as far as they’d gone. But then, they were just following me. I guess that meant I’d always been going that far as well. I wonder what that said about me. No, that’s stupid, it’s pretty obvious what it said about me.

I was just as bad as they were.

Nothing I could do would really change what the outcome was going to be. Running from a predator only ends one of two ways, and it was clear that one of the options wasn’t really available to me. Inside me, I could feel that I was already turning into one of them, relentless. Hitting this dumpster was the first time I’d stopped since the rain had started.

Skitter, skitter.

I stood up. It was time to go. As I took off down the alleyway, I thought about animals in the wild. It was pretty well established that they didn’t think like we do. They don’t really process fear the same way, with a conception of their own mortality. They flee danger with a single-mindedness I used to envy. Would I still be running the same way if I didn’t fear for something like my life? Would it matter if I realized that my life was over, no matter what, and I was just prolonging the inevitable?

I took a turn around another building, jumping over a fence behind it, almost effortlessly. That sort of thing used to be beautiful to me. Like a gazelle leaping around boundaries, flowing over the landscape like water, but light as air, I had made my way through cityscapes night after night and day after day. But then, one of those days, all the beauty left it for me, and it was simply cold and utilitarian, another tool for me to use on my never-ending flight.

The last building in the block was coming up, and I slowed down. It had never occurred to me, but I should be happy. I still had my sense of self, in spite of everything that had happened. In between fighting to stay fed, to stay one step ahead, and to stay running, I had brief lucid moments where I realized that I was still alive. It was one of those little miracles that only occasionally made itself readily apparent to me. Even so, it had never made me happy until that moment, under a cracked street lamp next to a burnt-out office building.

I slowed down.

I turned around.

This was it, I decided. My life was still my own, if only for a little while longer. I’d spent my life living as a plains animal might, fleeing at danger, moving around the landscape, disturbing little. But it was time to change my habits. In that moment, I felt more alive than I ever had before. My blood was rushing through my ears, my breathing came rapidly, and my heart pounded in my chest. The skittering came closer.

A brief flash of doubt crossed my mind. This is stupid, you know there’s no chance, I was thinking at myself. Still, it turned out, that didn’t matter as much anymore. My life was still my own, and this was the choice that I made. Who knew, maybe it wasn’t so hopeless after all. But I was done with not facing down my problems. I was done with fearing my problems, and they would learn to fear me. The earth was solid beneath my feet, and I felt alive at last.

The skittering had become a clattering and soon it turned into a thundering, and washed out the rest of my thoughts.

This is the first of what I’m hoping to have as a series of posts on sexual behavior, primarily in humans. I’m not a physician or a psychologist, but I’ve read a fair amount of Wikipedia and that seems to at least qualify me to have an opinion on the Internet, however poorly-formed. I’m not looking to really bash anyone, but I know these topics can be uncomfortable for some people, so please, if you’re offended by any of this, just don’t read it: proselytizing won’t find any souls to be saved here; I’m quite fine the way I am and I think any deity that made me would be too. However, if you find yourself disagreeing because you think I’ve put together conclusions from erroneous facts or just write like a monkey bashing at a keyboard (I’m always looking to improve), please don’t hesitate to leave a note in the comments.

I’m often interested by what people describe as features that attract them to sexual partners. It may be that I simply don’t have a hard and fast set of rules dictating what attracts me to someone else. There are some general guidelines, but I wouldn’t say I have a “type.”

Some of you who read this blog know I have a predilection for black men (not just african-americans, as it turns out). It’s alternately a joke or a really big joke amongst my friends, and it’s also, as time goes on, more and more incorrect. It’s not to say that I don’t still find myself attracted to them more often than to other people, but it’s no longer the case that I’m solely attracted to them.

Sexual preference is an evolving thing. Alfred Kinsey discovered in his studies that most, if not all people, experience a modification of their sexual preferences throughout their lives. While his dealt mostly with the gender of preferred mates, I tend to think there are so many more dynamics to sexual preference than simple gender (I’m sure Kinsey did as well and is probably just suffering a rather vicious bullet-pointing of his ideas on my end).

As a matter of fact, simple gender lines no longer really adequately describe people. There are men who enjoy dressing up like women, for any number of reasons: they feel like women on the inside, they want to become women, it simply is a way they enjoy sex, or just because they think it’s really funny. There are women and men who find each of these things to be appealing in their own right. At one point I rode the bus next to a man dressed as a woman, clearly on a date with a woman dressed as a man, and both seemed very happy with that. The fact that these people even found each other in the world is pretty amazing.

It’s become kind of a joke in the gay community that any “Queer Alliance”-type organization will try to account for all of these things in its name, its mission statement, or all of its speeches. I find myself loathing that aspect of organizations. Sure, we all want to be recognized as special in our own way, but after a certain point, when the lines become so blurred, doesn’t it become a hindrance to try and separate the ingredients back out? I identify as a gay man, but it wouldn’t be totally out of the realm of possibility for me to have sex with a woman. I don’t consider that a betrayal of who I define myself as, or a watering-down of what I feel. It’s simply an extension of the fact that, like my racial preference, I simply don’t feel the need to constrain my attractions to fit a label.

It’s sort of blowback to the whole idea of being gay in the first place. Gay people have fought to have their right to define their sexuality as “other” than heterosexuals for some time now, but it just wound up making a new pigeonhole. Now, you’re gay, straight, or bisexual. But what if you’re a woman or a man who’s attracted pretty much only to hermaphrodites? What if you are a voyeur who enjoys watching straight pornography but can only really achieve any active sexual pleasure with a member of your own gender? What if you’re a guy who has an operation to become a woman and then decides you’re still attracted to women (with thanks to South Park for that last one)? These things may deserve their own definition and name, but the more you think about it, the more you realize that you just can’t do it, any more than you can give a name to all the grains of sand on a beach.

So, once again, we are presented with a problem of nomenclature. The world of the last 20 years has had so many new ideas, that they have outpaced our languages’ abilities to keep up. Is it really right to even try to force categorization on people? Is it right to deny them that categorization if they want it? I identify as gay, more or less, but what about that couple on the bus? The nature of their relationship flows in the same river of humanity as mine but I’d be loathe to try creating a name for it. So, am I being prejudiced against them for denying them a place in the world with a name, or am I just being common-sense? Would I be comfortable with being labeled against my will, or with having a label I’m comfortable with ripped away? The murky and irresolute answers to these questions mirror the nature of the world in which they find themselves.

Edit Feb 8 8:53: After playing around a bit more with the functions, I’ve added another caveat dealing with the function volatility.

Some time ago, I wrote about session variables in PostgreSQL. I’ve been using the solution for some time to address the problem of performing a more-or-less-automatic audit trail for certain important tables when using accounts defined by the system and not the database, and it’s been working pretty well so far. However, I’ve always been concerned about the idea of potentially creating a new table for every transaction, even if it’s temporary. The database in question is a very small low-throughput system just used internally, but being inefficient just cause nobody will notice doesn’t seem like a good enough excuse.

As Rails is our front-end and it uses connection pooling, there’s a possibility that two subsequent pageviews would use two different connections to the DB. While that doesn’t always generate a new table (the second connection could have already had the temporary table created), it does necessitate resetting the values in the table that I use for auditing (current_user and audit_notes) every time, just to be sure. I’m unsure where on the scale of efficiency it would fall to validate that an update must occur before actually doing it, but it seems, due to the fact that I must validate the table as a whole exists before trying to do anything, that this is the least of my problems.

However, I recently had the magic of Tom Lane shine down from on high in this recent thread on the pgsql-sql mailing list, wherein he made mention of a feature of which I had been previously unaware: custom GUC variables. I’m not actually sure what the GUC stands for, even. However, what it provides is a namespace into which you can throw arbitrary variables. It’s designed for modules that are loaded at run time and need configuration (like plperl.use_strict).

If you clicked on the link to the thread, you’ll realize that Tom suggested this as a solution to the very problem I had built my “variable” temporary table method to address. The requested solution involved transaction-level isolation, but as ActiveRecord doesn’t seem to like using them unless you beat it thoroughly about the head, I’m more concerned with connection-level isolation. Fortunately, it looks like this does both! Instead of my big long complicated functions, you can simply include “custom_variable_classes = ‘audit’” in postgresql.conf, reload, and in any connection do “SET audit.”current_user” = ‘whoever’;” There are a couple of small caveats worth noting, however:

• This is not the usage for which the GUC system was designed; as such, it is somewhat a Bad Thing to do, as it can potentially cause screwing around with modules that are loaded. This is particularly notable if you have multiple databases in your server, as it’s a global setting. Each one of your users will have that variable namespace. As far as I know, that’s not a security concern, but rather a nuisance concern, if they’ve never asked for such a thing. However, I think it’d be charitable to describe the situation where it’s problematic as an extreme edge case. And as far as the loaded modules, it would seem fairly trivial, unless you have millions being loaded and unloaded all the time (I don’t even know if you can unload without a server restart), that assigning a unique name to your variable class should not be a problem.
• SET statements in PostgreSQL allow for setting string literals with optional quoting. This may not be obvious if you’ve never used the SET command (which I tend only to use for search_path), but it means you can’t set the value using variable substitution, i.e. in a function call. You’ll have to compile the query at runtime of the function using EXECUTE and that can be unpleasant for everybody if you’re not careful about it. That is, use pg_catalog.quote_literal() to make sure your variables are safe, because any characters PostgreSQL can’t figure are part of the string will cause errors. You shouldn’t bother using pg_catalog.quote_nullable(), for why, see the last point.
• Certain values of variables must be ident-quoted. So far I’ve found that to be true of “user” and “current_user” at least (so, set audit.”user” instead of audit.user), and I presume there are others. Someone smarter than me may have an answer for this.
• If you want to access the value of a variable via a function, the function must be declared as VOLATILE. IMMUTABLE is clearly out because it doesn’t depend on inputs, and for some reason that I’m unaware of STABLE is also out. This is probably a function of the SHOW command rather than of custom GUC variables in particular. Speaking of SHOW…
• Retrieving the value of the variable, say in a PL/pgSQL trigger, can be done via “SHOW audit.”current_user” INTO some_variable;” – I’m not sure if there are more efficient ways but that’s the one I’ve found that works. At least, most of the time…
• Retrieving the value of a configuration variable that has not been set yet causes an exception to be raised. This is not an insurmountable problem, as you can simply trap the exception, but as the documentation warns, an exception-trapping block in PL/pgSQL is far more expensive than a regular block, so it shouldn’t be done if you can avoid it, which would be easy except…
• SET statements do not allow you to assign NULL values to configuration variables. This is problematic if, like me, you want to allow someone to optionally insert some notes to go along with any auditing for a particular chunk of work (“I just changed the received time on this log because it turns out that was a 2 not a squiggled-out number”), but don’t want a pile of empty strings littering everywhere. You can handle it in one of two ways: have your trigger functions call NULLIF() and always assign the return value of the variable you want to NULL if it’s set to ”, or just trap any exceptions from unused variables and return NULL. While I think NULLIF() is probably the cheaper option (without any benchmarks backing this gut feeling up), the trapping exceptions method is probably the Right Thing to do.

So, for all those things to be kept aware of, the end result can be just as simple as:

CREATE FUNCTION audit_user(OUT TEXT) LANGUAGE PLPGSQL AS
$$BEGIN
    SHOW audit."current_user" INTO $1;
EXCEPTION WHEN OTHERS THEN
    $1 := NULL;
END;$$;

CREATE FUNCTION audit_notes(OUT TEXT) LANGUAGE PLPGSQL AS
$$BEGIN
    SHOW audit.notes INTO $1;
EXCEPTION WHEN OTHERS THEN
    $1 := NULL;
END;$$;

I trapped the exception OTHERS for two reasons: one, I assumed that OTHERS would be faster than comparing against a specific case; and two, I plain just don’t know what specific exception gets raised when this happens. I also did not create a function that would set the auditing variables, as I figured there would be little point to creating a function that would basically just be wrapping a SET call. It’s all clearly much shorter and more sane than the temporary table solution, not to mention it seems it’s likely to be a lot faster.

I think I’ve found myself a winner.

I can’t really get behind Follow Friday. I like it when people mention me, perhaps because I enjoy the confidence boost of someone saying what I think is interesting. But honestly, I don’t think anyone new has ever followed me from being mentioned, and I don’t think I’ve ever followed someone who was mentioned. In spite of the fact that I feel guilty for not giving those people props back, I feel like it would be a disservice to all 20 people and 140 spam bots following me to simply spam a bunch of names of people who have mentioned me.

It wasn’t always that I felt so negative about this particular aspect of Friday, but these days it seems like follow lists are just that: lists of names. If you throw my name in there with about 10 other people in one of 3 tweets that is nothing but names and “#FF”, it doesn’t really show much of an effort. The first times I saw anything about Follow Friday, it had “#FollowFriday” and a single name with a reason to follow them. That’s something worth doing. It shows you’ve put some thought into it. Of course, these days if I actually spent that much time it’d practically seem like a love letter to spend that much time thinking about a single person on my list.

Twitter’s always been a pretty ephemeral medium, so it makes sense that over time processes that occur on it will be condensed. But the law of diminishing utility comes into effect nonetheless. If you give me more and more names and do that at the expense of the “why,” because it’s “more efficient” that way, then you’ve lost any sort of meaning with it. Few people will click through the list and figure out if they want to follow those people as well.

I doubt this will impact anyone and prevent them from doing their own list come Friday, and that’s fine, really. I don’t intend to convince people, but merely explain why I won’t just “hit you back,” as it were. I prefer a high signal-to-noise ratio in my personal Twitter feed, despite what it may seem like sometimes. That’s why I skip the “Good Morning!” tweets and the (to me) meaningless “#FF” list.

Now, #WhiskeyFriday is all well and good, and #FridayReads, in spite of not being alliterative, is just fine by me. Like #MusicMonday (which I haven’t seen in quite some time), I am always ready for some new media (but not New Media) recommendations. I’ve also been told about #FridayRide, though I’ve never actually seen that one before. Hey, biking to work is always good (although for me, it might take about three or four hours each way).

If life were like a yarn twisted about, what kind of clothing would your existence make? It seems like one of those stupid questions that stupid people ask to get stupid responses that people think are deep. There’s nothing really to it. Your life isn’t cloth, it’s flesh and blood and bone and pain and misery. That’s what I’ve always thought, what I’ll always think. Sometimes people get fooled by the shadow of their fathers and mothers, and think there’s someone watching over their shoulder, but it’s just a tree scraping against the window, nothing more.

We’re all just empty little hobgoblins pressing up against the roof of our world, with most ignorant of the quiet vacuum lying just beyond. It’s big, and it’s cold, and it’s empty. Our lives, they’re just a fraction of a blink to a universe that’s only now waking up. Even the people who “matter” are just insects crawling next to us. They found a tiny little crumb to make them seem important, but they all died too, when the ever-impending flood rose up and washed them away. Maybe the stupid and the lazy have it right; you’re going to die, you’re going to end up not mattering in the slightest, and you’re going to be alone; why bother making anything bigger out of it than it is?

I want to matter, I want to be important. But a flash in the pan is nothing to write home about, and the soup will still be cold. Even if I could turn this world into a burning star with my passion, the stars themselves die long before the space that birthed them could be considered young. Why am I fighting, then?

I don’t know.

I should get that printed on a shirt.

I wrote this about a week ago, in response to a then-current news item. Fearing a tide of Charles Village people (or anyone, really) who would read into this that I just didn’t give a shit about someone dying, and come and harass me, I didn’t post it. However, I guess at this point I’m either going to have to post it or delete it, and I’m getting tired of deleting the thoughts I have. So, while no longer timely (and thoroughly unedited), here’s my thoughts:

If you’re one of the people who follows me from Baltimore, you’re probably aware of the homicide that happened in Charles Village this weekend. I definitely am; it was at the end of my street. I wasn’t made aware of it until the next morning, somehow I missed the commotion that must have been made. However, I haven’t missed, for the past three days, repeated news crews, and a press conference the Commissioner of Police himself attended. Huzzah, you might be expecting me to say, the city is responding to a violent crime in my neighborhood with a swift hand and recognizing that there’s a problem.

Except I’m not saying that.

The thing is, and I know I’ll sound callous and unfeeling for saying it, is that Stephen Pitcairn is a small number in a large statistic. Baltimore is not a safe city. There have been one hundred and twenty homicides in the city limits this year so far. And while Mr. Pitcairn was doing valuable research, every single one of those other people were flesh and blood just the same, and so few have received the attention he has. It’s partially due to who he is, and partially to do with where he was when it happened.

And that’s really the problem. I don’t want people to marginalize his death, but I don’t want people to marginalize the 119 other people who’ve died this year, either. But they are marginalized, because so many of them occurred in poor, black neighborhoods where that’s just part of the deal. We just finally caught some of the spillover in our little hamlet between multiple sections of town people colloquially call “ghetto.”

I’ve seen a number of extra police in the days since it happened, typically buzzing around the exact location, as though there’s a mystical significance to that specific spot and any future murders would only take place there. I do not feel safer for the over-the-top show. I don’t feel any less safe than I did last week, as a matter of fact.

Because this is Baltimore, this is one of the murder capitals of the world, and if you felt invincible cause your house had some cute paint and you can walk to a farmer’s market in a parking lot, even though you can hear the semi-automatic fire that periodically rings out from Waverly, then you’re a fool. You’re not any less safe than you were before, your eyes have just been opened to the reality of where you live and you’re hysterical. And it’s disrespectful to the people who, when murders happen around the corner from them, are ignored.

It’s a major tragedy that Stephen Pitcairn died. It’s an outrage that the people who did it were released repeatedly into the world after apparently committing other robberies. But it shouldn’t be so much more than when someone else dies senselessly. The city is dying all around us, and we can’t just draw a line in the sand and say “Not HERE. You can kill them THERE but we will HAVE our painted ladies, damn it!” Cause the problem with a line in the sand is that when the wave comes crashing down it gets washed away.

It’s been a while since I blogged. Sue me.

I fully intend to get into a regular posting schedule, one of these weeks. I’ve even got a plan mapped out. But that’s for later. For now, I’ll detail how I set up my partner’s photoblog. It was actually less than completely straightforward.

We run our sites on Dreamhost, and setting up the MySQL database, subdomain, and WordPress installation went about as easily as it ever does (that is to say, in about 5-10 minutes I had it all running). Then, I went to install a plugin called “Yet Another Photoblog” which I had read in at least one place was a pretty decent plugin for converting WordPress more easily into a photoblog. The plugin installed fine, after a couple of attempts – for whatever reason, WordPress was giving me unzip errors and I thought I’d have to do it manually; fortunately they resolved and installation proceeded.

The plugin itself makes minimal changes to the overall admin interface of WordPress. There’s basically an additional file upload field above the “Add New Post” main editbox, as well as an additional section in the Settings sidebar. I hadn’t played with it before, so I tried a few posts. Here’s where I ran into issues.

I kept on getting errors saying “Error: File does not exists!” when I would get to the preview page. I tried with just jumping straight to publishing, and that didn’t work either. The posts had thumbnails on the admin side, but nothing showed up on the front-end. Also, the pictures were in the uploads directory, so I knew they were there.

I read on the plugin’s page that themes had to be chosen specifically for YAPB, and so I loaded the site up with one. The thumbnails showed a frame, but no actual picture. Chrome said the thumbnails were being sized as 1px X 1px. I couldn’t figure out how to get the full CSS picture with Chrome’s interface, so I jumped over to Firefox where I had some neat tools, and found the thumbnails showed up just fine there. That’s odd.

Eventually, through much Googling and hair-pulling, I tried manually creating the cache directory (didn’t fix it), renaming “phpThumb.config.php.default” to “phpThumb.config.php” in the plugin directory (god only knows why it was named that way anyway, nothing mentioned it except an obscure forum that I’d link to if I could find it again; still didn’t work though), and some hackery with the PHP in the phpThumb library itself (which also didn’t work).

Eventually, somehow, I managed to find this forum page, which linked to this other forum page, and detailed exactly how to fix my problem: Going to the Settings page, then to Media (it said Miscellaneous in the forum, but I guess the name or changed since then), and manually setting the uploads folder to “wp-content/uploads/”. This shouldn’t work, as the default is ALREADY “wp-content/uploads/”, but it does. I haven’t had any other problems.

If this post was incredibly boring to you, it’s because dealing with figuring this out sucked my brain out through a straw, threw it in a blender and hit “fuck this motherfucker up.” I think it wouldn’t have been so bad if the error message had been slightly more explanatory (a file name/line number would have killed you?), or if the solution hadn’t been so mind-numbingly stupid at the end.

Saturday, among other things, I went to the Windup Comics (“Comix”?) Fest[ival]. If that wrestling match with punctuation didn’t completely turn you off, you’ll now be entreated to a review of that experience:

I actually really liked it. Like DC Comic-con, it was pretty much a single room, i.e. The Windup Space on North Avenue in Baltimore. It had a completely different feel from that convention, though. More on that “feeling” thing later; first, location: fortunately for me, it was within walking distance (only about 6 or so blocks), so I didn’t have to worry about parking. Had that been a concern, it may have been less awesome because North Avenue isn’t always the nicest of streets. It was my first time at The Windup Space, and it seemed like a nice enough little bar. I can’t speak to the quality of drinks or service, though, cause I was mostly focusing on the comics (and I was poor that day).

As I said, this gathering had a completely different feel than my sole previous experience at a comics gathering. I think that’s because this event focused primarily on the artists, and not the retailers. There were a couple of retailers, but most of the people were actually local, independent, artists and writers. That can be attributed to the difference in who was the chief organizer: from what I understand, DC was organized by a retailer, and Windup was organized by an artist (in fact, one with whom I went to high school) and an art studio. Suffice it to say, without dragging out the comparisons much longer, I walked into DC Comic-con with a decent amount of money and nothing I wanted to spend it on, while I walked into this place and found plenty of stuff I wanted to buy but had almost no money with me.

The artists were all really friendly, and that was pretty great. I came in towards the end of the day, since it started about 1pm and closed at 7pm, and I wasn’t able to make it until after 5:30. In spite of what I heard was lower turnout than expected (maybe due to the rainy day and this being the first such event), everyone was pretty happy and readily willing to interact with me, explain what they were doing and selling, and just be generally quite congenial. I found a couple of things I really wanted to get, a couple of things I thought would be cool to check out, and a couple of things that were neat but not really my speed. Fortunately everyone had plenty of business cards and flyers, and I managed to get something from almost everyone so I could remember to check them out later.

Local Artists' Media

Ultimately I had to whittle down my must-purchase list to one item, which was the Floppy Boy comic on the left. While many things caught my attention, as I said, I stuck with this one because I thought it’d be particularly cool to have something written by someone I know personally. I wound up with Volume 2 rather than Volume 1, though, so I’ll have to pick up the rest of the collection later. It’s a collection of former-webcomics (the server blew up, I think, and if I remember correctly I was told it was “a long story”), which Gavin admitted were pretty hit-or-miss with the comedy, but I thought were pretty entertaining.

I’ll try to remember to update this later with links to the artists, as was my original intent, as the picture of a stack of flyers is clearly not legible enough to make them out, but I don’t have the physical copies with me. Hopefully in the meantime this link to Interrobang’s page on the festival (with list of artists) will suffice.

In closing: it was really an awesome show, and I’m glad I went. From what I heard from the organizers, they’re going to try to do it at least annually, if not twice a year, and I’ll definitely head back for more. If they can keep the same positive energy going towards it, I think it has the potential to turn into a Pretty Big Deal.