a broken mold

I watched To Save a Life tonight with some friends at the theatre. It was a very good movie. Not watered down. Plenty of what-the-hell moments for me.

And then when we got home, Ashley, Joella, Elliot and I sat in the car and had some honest discussion.

Which has got me thinking. You know how when everything is wrong in your life and someone asks how you’re doing and you say ‘fine’? You know how you get sick of that lie over and over again and wish you would just say ‘terrible’ when someone asks you?

So what if your life is utterly chaos and despair and you hide it all behind a mask? What then? Where do you begin to recover? How do you break out?

My best guess is just starting with one person and telling them the truth when they ask. But my fear is that when you’d tell one person, you’d have to tell everybody the truth. And then what happens? They tell your parents and your world comes crashing down in a painful talk? That’s not something I want to do.

Or what if you or I started being a lot more honest to everybody? I know there are books about this. “Radical honesty”, I’ve heard the term. I distrust it because I guess it’s psychobabble. But I think there is some power in the truth whether they’re right or wrong. What if we knew what was happening in our friends’ and families’ lives instead of giving trite answers and asking questions we don’t really want to have answered? What if we actually considered that the lives of everybody around us might be just as complicated and messy as ours or even more so?

I know I’m generalizing here, but consider the questions nonetheless, I ask. I know they’re just questions, but hopefully our lives will change, even if little by little, hopefully we’ll slowly find answers to these questions. Maybe there will be different answers. I don’t know. But I do know that I’ve heard that people pay more attention when questions are answered that they already asked, so ask the questions and then we’ll try to find the answers, God help us.

We are looking for a few more writers to join us. One or two right now would be great.

Our goal is to pick up the publication pace a bit—hopefully eventually up to at least one post a week (more would be cool, too). I think taking on a couple more writers would ease this task, but I also think Matthew and I would need to step up contributing a bit, too (which may become easier in the summer after I’ve graduated high school). In the long run, our goal is to get some notice. Not really to get famous, but more to have conversations and a small community and also just to get out what comes out of our fingers and toes. It’s also a personal blog, and I want it to stay that way. It’s just some friends who like to write.

So, on to the meat of the thing. Seriously, we don’t mind people that are different than us, in fact having someone who differs somewhat from our opinions might be quite cool. We do have a few basic requirements, though:

• You are a true Christian; you believe the Gospel and don’t have any beliefs that altogether contradict it
• You are a competent writer; you don’t have to be extra stupendous, just able and willing to be creative
• You don’t mind our particular Christian beliefs, like Covenant theology
• You are willing and able to contribute regularly (take a look at the dates of previous posts to get an idea of what ‘regularly’ is right now)
• You are currently between 12 and 32 years of age. It’s not that we don’t like you if you’re older than that, it’s just that we want to run a blog written by young men and women.

Interested? Contact us. Tell us a bit about yourself if we don’t really know you. After that, probably as long as you meet the requirements and we’re all comfortable, you join us. If it’s all good after a month-and-a-half, you’re official. Think of it as an internship (LOL).

Six months after you’re officially on, you can become a partial blog administrator, if you so wish (and we’ll leave the opportunity open for any time). After maybe, say, a year and a half, we might offer you full adminship, which gives you a whole lot of power, which means we trust you a whole lot. And if you don’t want to become an admin, that’s fine too. Just offering.

Yeah, I know frequent short to medium sized posts about your life have a great potential to be boring. But I wasn’t quite considering that. Rather, I’m becoming rather enamored of short to medium sized posts that just throw a thought, question, or reflection out. It’s a form that rather compliments honesty.

I want to say my inspiration comes from Jason Kottke and Seth Godin. There’s probably some other stuff in there, too. I know Jason’s mostly an editor now in the sense that he doesn’t create most of his content, but rather points it out and comments on it. But some of his earlier stuff was more personal. And he points out such interesting stuff.

Seth Godin is a marketer. A genius, I’d say. He seems to spout a continuous stream of good stuff on his blog. And it’s not cheesy. I don’t know that he’s a Christian, but he has an ethic that really appeals to me as a Christian: hard work, innovation, courage, and that sort of thing. And his posts usually aren’t all that long.

So, I think I have some stuff to say worth saying here that I could put in a somewhat similar format. The question is, with Matthew not posting an equivalent amount (not necessarily a bad thing), am I going to be posting too much? (For what? Fairness? Equality? My own good?). That’s the question I wish to ask Matthew and all you who read this.

What say you?

I have found a few things out about what Facebook does to your pictures after you upload them, 100% by my own experimentation. In list format:

• Scales the image down so that the longest side is 604 pixels if it was bigger than that to start with.
• Recompress all images as JPEGs at quality 85. I found this out with ImageMagick: identify.exe –verbose filenamehere.jpg. Hat tip to Arjan van Bentem for pointing me to IM. It doesn’t look like 85 is all that bad, by the way, if Wikipedia’s sample JPG compressed photos are anything to go by, but do bear in mind that multiple JPEG resaves will degrade the image quality, since it is a lossy format (but of course just copying or downloading it won’t mess with it at all). Also, Facebook will recompress it even if you upload a JPEG image at the correct size (using quality 85 doesn’t work either; it gets recompressed at 85 again)
• Converts image to Grayscale mode if it is a grayscale image. I suspect this might make it smaller.

So, beware of decreased image quality if you are uploading a twice-(or more)-saved JPEG. That being said, I wouldn’t worry about it much, since it’s only Facebook. If you have a slow link to the net, I’d say go right ahead. I wrote about sizing your photos down for faster Facebook uploads a while back, so if you need some instructions, here you are.

Oh, and one more thing. I have found that JPEG compression can be used to artistic effect. Orange Peal Design’s site is a good example (in fact, the only one I know about). Gives it a certain feeling and not just a crappy impression. Strange how these things work.

I have a few things to say.

First, I’m a little bit busy. I still don’t consider myself busy by the standards of some of my friends (I have hours and hours of free time, for reals), but it has picked up this year, I think.

Second, I started off this year trying to consistently read the Bible. I don’t think that reading the whole Bible in a year gives you spiritual super powers, although I do think that all of the Bible is worth reading. Also, I think the Bible is worth reading every day. The way I think about it right now is read it every day, get back to it if you missed it, don’t commit suicide or have insecurities if you don’t read the Bible in a whole year. Not that I always do all that but that’s how it’s laid out in my mind right now.

Third, I want to start working out a bit this year. I want to start out with the one hundred push ups training program. It sounds like a very doable, macho, and cool regimen. I did the test several days ago and hit 20. Sad, but it leaves a lot of room for improvement, that being the point of this paragraph. And I haven’t started yet. I blame this weekend (went to Moscow, had Collin over, went to a fireside chat (lame fire… way too low), went to a contra/square dance, went to a missions-themed Sunday School and church service today, ate at the fellowship feast afterwards, and set in on a couple videos and some Q & A. And did some clean-up following that.). That being said, I’m planning a Tue-Thur-Sat schedule for it, so we’ll see how it goes this week.

Fourth, as I think I’ve said before, I want to get some more writers writing here. But here’s the idea I want to get across: it’s not exactly volunteer but it’s not paid and it’s definitely not an internship. I think it is most easily communicated as “I just want to get some friends together and write a sweet blog. And get conversations going.” So hopefully we can get a more official (but not more formal) statement out on that in the near future.

Fifth, leading on the heels of the last para, I’m hoping good things for this blog. It’ll be awesome if we get more writers and I’m looking forward to putting some more effort into writing (I’m thinking post-graduation-from-high-school, which happens early this June). I’m thinking Senior Thesis class may have some redeeming qualities… Anyway, I want to have a discussion with Matthew sometime soon about what he thinks about the blog (past, present, future, probably with emphasis on the last).

Sixth, speaking of school… I almost want to skip this whole graduation thing. I say to myself that I’d be quite happy with a regular end of the school year and beginning of summer. I don’t really know if that’s true. However, best not to dwell on that because I really doubt I’m getting out of this. I am to have a hand in planning it, though, so I can flaunt my influence there (what value it has). And Anna and I are both hoping the other will be valedictorian. Except I think I secretly want to be valedictorian because I keep catch myself writing bits of a speech in my head. Blast.

Seventh, the 29th of December was a bit of a nice date for our family. Finally we got a decent internet connection. Stuck with dial-up for over 10 years. And then finally broadband. Fitting for 2010 I’d say. I think a post relating to the topic may be expected in the future.

I believe that’s all for now. Also, a public thanks to you, Matthew, for your well-written recent posts. While it’s true I’ve always written more posts, I have felt the quality of your posts was very often rather splendid while it was not always so much that way with mine.

Loremipsumdolorsitamet.com is no longer online. At least not in it’s proper form. However, you can view a copy right here. As the page says upon clicking the [info...] link, “Purely coded in JavaScript. This means you can save this page locally (File → Save As…) for offline use.” Or, online use in a different place.

So, what is it? A filler text generator with a choice of Lorem Ipsum, English, Jabberwock, or Tagalog. Enjoy. Especially if you miss it.

Update: Here is the official new location, I think. Complete with background image and header (yum yum). It seems to have originally been designed by Rico Sta. Cruz. The source code refers to his old site, ambiescent.com. His new site is ricostacruz.com, and Lorem Ipsum is now hosted at a subdomain there.

It seems from what I’ve read around the interwebs, the package name might have changed. Also, in my fresh installation from the LiveCD, the Microsoft Core Fonts listed in the Ubuntu Software Center doesn’t have an install button. Fear not, though.

Open a terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal). Type this and press enter:

sudo apt-get install ttf-mscorefonts-installer

Wait for it to do it’s magic and you should be good to go. If you run into problems, I suggest starting at Google. Installing the MS core fonts seems to be an issue in this release, but then again maybe I don’t know because I’ve never had problems with it before.