Leap Day

I wasn't going to post anything today, but after realizing that this is my last opportunity for four whole years to post on a Leap Day, I decided to break out the laptop and clack out a quick thing. I've just finished watching the classic "Leap Day" episode of 30 Rock (a fantastic episode made all the better by the Jim Carrey cameos), and just generally letting the day go.

I hope you all had a great Leap Day. It is, after all, the rarest of the holidays.

Until 2028, everyone, Merry Leap Day!

Aspiring to Competence, Part Two: Seven Nations, Six Strings

Welcome back to "Aspiring to Competence", a series of posts in which I chronicle my attempts to become competent at playing guitar. Armed only with a garage-sale acoustic and Justin Guitar's beginner course, I set out to become the next party-crashing "Wonderwall" bro.

Pursuing a hobby can be hard when you feel like you've hit a wall and haven't made any progress. That has been what's happened to me since the last post on the 24th. In my attempts to reach 30 chord changes a minute and move on to the next lesson, I found myself stuck at 25 for attempt after attempt. It started to frustrate me. I just wanted to keep forward momentum. But I couldn't bring myself to abandon what I had started. I had spent all those hours doing the chord change exercises, and by Jove I wasn't going to leave my practice unfinished.

And this week, I did it. 30 chord changes in one minute. 30 horrible, sloppy chord changes. 30 horrible, sloppy chord changes that were a massive achievement and made me jump for joy.

Moral of the story: if motivation alone can't get you up that hill, throw in a sunk cost fallacy.

Anyway, here are more impressions and important happenings from these past few days of learning guitar:

• I still swear I'm not using the pick correctly. Wikipedia says that it shouldn't make contact with the pickguard, but it's happened to me a couple times. I gotta figure that out.
• If I play the wrong strings in a chord while strumming one more time I will personally attack a Guitar Center clerk with a samurai sword.
• My fingers have begun to callus up. It feels kinda weird, but it does make playing a lot less painful and more convenient.
• Where can I get that hat that Justin wears in his videos? It's a nice hat.
• Getting all the strings to sound nice when strumming is a major pain in the rear. It is kind of worth it when you strum and then hear the most crystal-clear tone you have heard in all your days.
• This guitar thing sounds really nice. I think we'll see that it's gonna become a very popular instrument real soon.
• It's really weird how much the finger's position on the fret influences how easy it is to get a nice sound. I wonder what the science is behind that.
• After getting 30 chord changes a minute, I figured I may as well treat myself to a fun, easy, off-the-books song lesson. So I opened up a video (by, who else, Justin) and taught myself the "Seven Nation Army" riff. My attempts at playing it are awkward and sloppy, but it makes me feel so, so cool.
  

And there we go! I think I'm making solid progress, though I'm keeping my eyes out for the next bump I'm gonna hit. For now, I'm content to just practice chords and chord changes, try to strum on time, and, of course, play that riff incessantly and annoy my friends and family with it.

Until next time, blog-types!

On Ads and Greed

The Atlantic just published a piece called "Something Went Terribly Wrong With Online Ads", which really captured my anger at the increasing prevalence of ads on the Internet. It talks about how ads now permeate every single service that we use. Google ranks companies that buy ads above companies that may be significantly safer. Most streaming services have begun forcing users into ad-supported tiers. It's positively nightmarish and it shows no signs of ending soon.

I think that overloading a website with ads is an act of greed. Oh, there's a website that's providing good services for its users? You best bet they have a plan to make your experience significantly worse for their financial gain. And look, people need to make money. I totally get it. But I'm not convinced the best way to do that is by overloading an otherwise clean website with banner ads that graphic designers will be forced to stare at in Hell, and probably lead to scam sites.

Have you tried going on GoComics lately? Or IMDb? Without an adblocker, they're borderline unusable. YouTube can now cram ads onto any video it wants, even those where the uploader isn't eligible for ad revenue and thus recieves no money. Oh, and YouTube made adblockers against its terms of service. There's nothing one can do. Either don't use the Internet, or watch your CPU usage's knees buckle under the weight of hundreds of ads.

When I started this blog, I very intentionally removed all of the ads from it. Because I hate ads. And if I ever reverse this decision, please come to my house and slap some sense into me. Thank you and have a wonderful day.

Aspiring to Competence (Adventures in Learning Guitar): Part One

It's been a little more than a week since I told myself it was time to fire myself up and learn how to handle the big acoustic guitar that's been in the living room for a while. I didn't really intend to become the next Hendrix, I just sort of wanted to be halfway competent. You know, in the middle-of-the-party "anyway, here's 'Wonderwall'" manner.

Here are my updates and impressions so far:

• My fingers hurt really bad the first couple of days, but I've gotten so used to it that it doesn't really hurt anymore! Heck yeah!
• Human fingers are not meant to bend the way that some chords require.
• The two chords I can play, D and A, sound really cool when you just keep practicing them over and over again.
• Wow, these things are big. I'm no expert, but I think it's a lot bigger than a ukulele.
• We don't deserve people like Justin Guitar who put hundreds of hours of fantastic lessons and tutorials on the Internet for free.
• I'm working on chord changes using Justin's method, where you need to be able to make 30 half-decent chord changes a minute before you can move to the next lesson. I'm currently sitting around 21, so making progress!
• When do I get to learn "Seven Nation Army" again?
• Steel strings sound cool when you run your hands over them.
• Just holding a guitar makes you look a hundred times more awesome.

How fun. We'll see how that goes in the future.

Navalny

RIP Navalny. Free Evan Gershkovich. Stand with Ukraine.

In Russia, saying any one of those things can get you arrested. If you have power and you say those things, it can get you killed.

Here in America, I can put those things out for the entire Internet to see.

Alexei Navalny's death at the hands of Vladimir Putin's violent regime is a reminder to all of us: never, ever take freedom of speech for granted.

RIP Navalny. Free Evan Gershkovich. Stand with Ukraine.

Life in Hell

Hardcore Simpsons fanatics will know that Matt Groening cut his teeth drawing a cult classic newspaper comic called Life in Hell. In fact, he famously intended to pitch an adaptation of the comic to Fox before panicking about losing the rights to his creation and coming up with his life's work on the spot.

Unfortunately, the comic ended in 2012 and its book collections are long out of print, but some lovely Tumblr user has been kind enough to scan and archive many of them on this blog.

And boy, are they wonderful.

It's a wonderful strip, and shows a lot of hallmarks of Groening's sense of humor that would later come through in The Simpsons. It's sharply satirical ("How can we consider letting you out when you haven’t realized how much you deserve being in there?"), edgy ("Will Life in Hell offend me?" "We'll do our best"), and full of charming character designs. It's fascinating to see what Groening was working on when he wasn't busy changing TV comedy forever.

As a lifelong comics fan and amateur cartoonist, I think that the Life in Hell archive blog is one of my new favorite websites.

Google and WebP

Why on Earth does Google Chrome insist on saving images as .webp when none of its services (Docs, Slides, Drawings, etc.) even support it? They invented WebP, they should be the first people to integrate it into their services! Instead, if I want to do something with a WebP file in Drawings or something, then I have to put it through a converter, which just slows down my process. It's infuriating and just creates one more image for me download.

Here's the deal, Google: make WebP compatible with all of your services, or let me download stuff as PNG. The choice is yours. Just don't make me do the work for a software choice that you made.

Scott Pilgrim vs. My Brain Cells

Those reading my blog should know for future reference that I am highly prone to becoming hyperfixated on random things. After I find one of those random things, it occupies the entire space of my brain for about a month, causing me to space out randomly while my brain cells scream about the aforementioned random thing to each other.

And right now, the random thing my brain cells keep screaming about is this:

I'm currently in the middle of the third book and I'm almost done watching the movie for a second time. I keep drawing the characters and listening to the soundtrack. Every sentence I hear in real life just makes me think of Scott Pilgrim quotes ("Bread makes you FAT?!?"). This is what obsession looks like.

The basic gist is that there's this slacker bass player named Scott Pilgrim who falls in love with this girl named Ramona and then has to fight her seven evil exes in hyperkinetic video game-style battles in order to be with her. I know it sounds like a sexist dude-bro-gamer power fantasy, but it really ingeniously subverts its own concept and fleshes out its characters really well. It's really about relationships and emotional maturity. It's kind of an Annie Hall for the Wii generation (that has to be the first time that sentence has been written). And the movie? It's a great action flick. It's a great comedy. It's a great romance. I highly recommend it.

So in case you want to know exactly what it's been like inside my brain for the past couple of weeks, now you do. Intriguing and lightly horrifying, no?

A Good Day

Sometimes a day is just good. That is what I thought to myself when I took a look at today's Wall Street Journal and saw that they had published a Letter to the Editor that I wrote last week. My jaw hit the floor. My ramblings? In their publication?

Sure enough, there it is!

(The thing about the library is true, by the way, and boy do I have some words for the sleazeballs who keep hiding those books)

This was really special for me. I am a loyal reader of the Wall Street Journal and I deeply admire the work that they do. I have written about ten such letters in response to various opinion pieces, and finally, one of them has been published! As someone who spends a lot of time reading articles and then venting about said articles, having my voice in the pages of a respected national publication just means the world to me.

I'm especially proud that it was on the topic of censorship, something that I feel very strongly about. Left or right, book bans are book bans, whether you're a politically motivated "concerned parent" or an equally politically motivated publishing company. Both are censorship, and I'm glad that I was given the space in such a widely read newspaper to declare this.

And then, as if the day couldn't get any better, we got a new Homestar cartoon.

For those who don't know, Homestar Runner is a Flash cartoon series, and one of the most important works of web-based creativity in history. It's hard to explain to someone who has never seen it, so let's just say you have hours of wonderful mid-2000s goodness to look forward to. Its sense of humor is a taste you'll be glad you acquired. I can go on forever about its brilliant cast of characters, its intricate network of recurring jokes, its influence on Internet culture. I won't do that here and instead just leave the brand new cartoon here. New episodes are pretty rare, so they're nothing short of an event when they come along.

All days should be like this. By which I mean, all days should have my words in major news sources followed by the release of new Homestar Runner cartoons.

Superb Owl Sunday 2024 is Here!

(Credit: The Atlantic)

https://www.theatlantic.com/photo/2024/02/photos-superb-owl-sunday-viii/677414/

The most anticipated day of the year is upon us! I am, of course, referring to the yearly tradition of Superb Owl Sunday, in which families gather around their screens, grab some snacks, and look at photographs of owls. How wonderful.

There are some great ones this year, from a Siberian owl in a snowstorm to short-eared owls fighting. Though I will say I liked it a lot more before they started cutting to the eagle-owls every other picture. They're definitely part of a psyop.

Love y'all, and have a wonderful Sunday!

Feelings Are Weird, Man

It's always good to acknowledge what you're feeling in any situation. I'm a firm believer in that and I try to practice it in my everyday life. It's yielded great benefits and helps to clear out my mind from emotional jumbles.

And then sometimes you have to acknowledge that stuff like this is getting you choked up:

• A Weird Al polka medley (saying which one it was only makes it more embarrassing)
• An origami fortune teller I found in a box that I made a long time ago
• The cardboard box I found the fortune teller in
• The song "The Ants Go Marching" (not the beautiful Dave Matthews Band song, the nursery rhyme)
• A dream about a disembodied head made of blue jello

Feelings are weird, man.

My Blog's Motto

I haven't gotten any questions about it yet, but for those curious, the motto of my blog is a variation of a lyric from the absolute banger that is They Might Be Giants' "Doctor Worm".

Man, that's a good song. TMBG is the only band that could write a song this good about a worm that plays the drums (and let us not forget Rabbi Vole on the bass).

I didn't pick the motto for any real reason. The lyric doesn't have any particular significance to me. It just seemed right, y'know?

(Also, I'm only now realizing that this is the second TMBG-related post in a row. If that's not an omen for what the future of this blog holds, I don't know what is)

Alternate Universe They Might Be Giants

(My goodness, embedding YouTube videos in Blogger is an ugly and needlessly fussy process)

In an alternate universe, They Might Be Giants recorded their song "Sapphire Bullets of Pure Love" for their debut album instead of Flood. A YouTuber named Luke Hennisch made a fantastic mockup of what that would sound like, even using samples from the actual drum machines and synths that TMBG used for their debut.

As an enormous TMBG fan, this little glimpse into another reality made me smile.

Blogman Begins

Testing, testing, one two three, testing?

Hello everyone, and welcome to briglarson.com, home of Brig Larson's personal blog! Here, I, Brig Larson, will share all manner of things, interesting or otherwise. Expect anything, from humorous bursts of thought to contemplations on various topics to creative writing. You name it, we've got it (within reason).

Feel free to look around! Marvel at the lovely Bush-era web design! Subscribe to the RSS feed! Psych yourself up for the new posts that will be coming! And hoo boy, will there be new posts.

I intend to use this blog for the rest of my life, as an alternative to the ever-growing nightmare of social media. This is the start of something big. I hope that you, the readers, who probably exclusively consist of friends and family, will join me. I'm only now realizing that I made that sound way more dramatic than it actually is.

I wish you happy reading, from this post into all future ones! Be kind, stay hydrated, and have a fantastic day.

:)