I’m not going to the MacWorld this year, which turns out to be okay because I woke up this morning and discovered I was already there! By which I mean: either I’ve become the prime example of the Mac demographic, or the company is aiming its (no doubt slim and flawlessly designed) mind-scanning ray gun directly at my beguilingly exposed head.

Just last night, I came home to find myself internetless. My aging router used to need a reset once every few months, but lately it’s been once a week. To get it working again, I have to shut everything down, do a hard reset on the router, hook up my laptop to the DSL modem, re-establish the DSL connection, re-enter all my router security info, then hook everything back up and hope it all works. I’d convinced myself to splurge on a new router, one that’d be easier to set up and hopefully more reliable (and faster).

I was trying to find a reasonable price on the Airport Extreme when my laptop popped up a message — the system was warning me that Time Machine hadn’t backed up the laptop in over 30 days, and what the hell was my problem? I replied that to back up the laptop, I have to do a lot of unmounting and firewire cable swapping and waiting for the backup to finish and more cable swapping (all of which I think was implied by my “OK”), and it makes the whole backup thing kind of a drag again. So the question became: do I waste more money on a new router, or on another external hard drive?

Boom. A router with a hard drive built in. It’s eerie. Apparently the concept is common enough to have its own three-letter acronym (NAS), but I’m so far from understanding IT that the idea was new, and even a little creepily appropriate, to me. The really odd thing is that it’s an Apple product, but as far as I can tell, is actually reasonably priced; it’s about the same as a router plus a hard drive of that capacity, Apple-built or not.

I’ve got to say I don’t really get the “MacBook Air“‘; it just seems like a parody of Steve Jobs’ freaky, Stephen King gypsy-like fetish.

And the iPhone update is neat but not particularly earth-shattering. The whole page-curl thing for setting Google Maps options is a million times cooler than it needs to be, though. I can predict that effect getting way overused when people start writing apps for the thing, and I’m looking forward to it.

I’m not including comic books in my meager 26-book challenge for the year — not because they’re not art or they’re not as worthy, but simply because I already read 26 comic books a year. But I still like spouting off my opinions about things, so they’ll go into the exhibition rounds.

Book
Fox Bunny Funny by Andy Hartzell

Selling Points
Indie comic! Cartoon animals! No words!

Apparent Audience
Illiterate LGBT people.

Actual Audience
Everyone.

Synopsis
The world is rigidly divided into foxes, the oppressors; and bunnies, the victims. This book tells the first half of the life story of a fox who empathizes a little too much with the bunnies.

Disclaimer
I am 100% genuinely and sincerely behind the idea of indie comics. Being a bad artist myself, I’m envious of and impressed by the people who aren’t. When someone can take his artistic talent and expand it into a full story, that’s even more impressive. Having the courage to make it personal and meaningful is even more impressive than that.

All that said, 99% of indie comics just leave me cold. I’m just too much of a cynic to remember the beauty of personal expression, when they so often are nothing more than variations on the theme of “life is hard for me because I’m different.” They never seem to appreciate that life is hard for everyone, because everyone is different, and the paradox that feeling alienated is the one thing everyone has in common.

Highs
The book takes what could’ve been another trite, self-absorbed “journey of self-discovery,” or passive-aggressive complaint about being excluded, and instead shows the universality of alienation and societal oppression. The lack of words and the use of cartoon animals avoids making the theme too narrow in focus — the characters become symbols, the scenes become reminders of events we’ve all experienced.

And it’s much deeper than its title or a first glance at the characters suggests, but also much much lighter, darkly humorous, and more accessible than you’d think from reading reviews that mention symbolism and allegory and sociopolitical commentary. The pacing is inspired, the characters’ expressions are perfect, and there are clever design touches throughout, ranging in subtlety from obvious jokes and funny-animal parody to something as simple as the use of negative and positive space. There’s an attention to detail and world-building that goes all the way to developing what seems like a passive-aggressive religion for the bunnies, where their victimization in this world is rewarded with dominance in the next.

Lows
Occasional lapses in the universality of it, where it’s too easy to just say that it’s an allegory for growing up gay. Which is a shame, because the potential audience for the book is so much wider than that, and there’s a lot in it that invites all kinds of different interpretations. The entire last chapter is extremely interesting visually, but also seems to lose direction somewhat — I’ve got my own interpretation of what the book is saying, but I don’t feel extremely confident that what I’m seeing is what’s really there. And the very end of the book struck me as being sincere and genuine, but also a little trite, when compared to what precedes it.

Verdict
More wisdom and insight than I’d ever have expected from a comic book like this, told with confidence, sincerity, and good humor. It’d be an outstanding book even if the art weren’t excellent.

I’m still wandering around in a bewildered daze, due to leaving work today when it was still light outside. I wandered directionless around San Rafael for a little bit, probably looking like a recently-returned alien abductee. Eventually I made it back home and finally emptied the past two weeks’ worth of trash, washed the mountain of dishes in my sink, and began to take back crucial pieces of apartment territory that my cat had claimed as his own. Even more interesting than that, I just sat and stared for about a half hour, then watched two episodes of “Monk” that I’d already seen but still felt proud of myself for figuring out the case.

To paraphrase Danny Glover in the Lethal Weapon movies: I’m starting to feel that my advanced years have hindered my job performance. There was a brief period back in my 20s when I could actually do an all-nighter; I don’t know if my work was actually any good, but I know I sure felt like I was being as much of a bad-ass as Indiana Jones.

Nowadays, the flesh is willing but the brain is so very weak. I’ll start looking on wikipedia for quick verification I’ve got a reference correct, and then come to my senses 45 minutes later having followed a chain of weblinks all the way to an article about how to build your own home stop-motion animation studio or something else that I couldn’t care less about normally, but suddenly seems like the best idea ever. And of course, distractions just start the cycle of unproductivity going, where perfectly reasonable schedules turn into all-nighters.

Whatever the case, I’m done with a big chunk of work now, and should be able to gradually readjust to life as a normal productive member of a society. I’ll still be wandering around confused, hairy, and bleary-eyed, but out of choice instead of cause I can’t do no better.

I’ll say this, though: this is the first job I’ve ever had where all I had to do was write. And that breeds a kind of frustration that’s unlike anything else I’ve ever tried to do: putting a ton of (excess) thought into something that ends up being so small on a page (and breezed through in 30 seconds), and watching other better-organized people have to come in and pick up the slack. I’m pleased with the end result, but I can also finally understand why you frequently hear so many people bitching and moaning about how writing is so hard and aren’t I a tortured artist because I have to sit and type words all day.

I still think it’s a pretty silly complaint, but at least I understand a little better where the complaint comes from: the fact that it seems like it should be so trivially easy bounces around the synapses and then snowballs until all you can think is “I put all that effort into this?” and then you can understand why so many real writers became alcoholics.

I usually make fun of the Bay Area for going into a panic whenever there’s a light drizzle outside, but today’s storm shut me up pretty quick.

I left for work thinking nothing unusual was going on, and things just got progressively worse. Stoplights were out on Fulton street, but they had crossing guards keeping everything moving. Traffic was pretty tolerable on the Golden Gate Bridge, but then as soon as you passed through the tunnel, you started to see more and more tree debris on the freeway. Power was out in the entire shopping center at Marin City, forcing me to go to a McDonald’s for breakfast (intolerable! Call the National Guard!)

Most of it was this weird juxtaposition of normal day-to-day activity in self-absorbed Marin, with the occasional bit of weirdness like an entire tree lying on a freeway on-ramp. Nothing worthy of an Irwin Allen movie, but still eerie for a morning commute. I think what made it even creepier was that I had my iPod on shuffle, and both the Royal Crown Revue and the Pixies version of “Stormy Weather” came on.

I’d reached the exit for work when traffic on 101 ground to a halt. I got a message that power was out at the office, so I should turn around and head home, but by that point it was too late. I was stuck at the San Anselmo exit for an hour and a half. I had to give up that route and pull off into a shopping center with no power, to use their facilities in the dark (which is itself a nerve-wracking experience).

When I eventually made it back to 101 South, traffic was moving more quickly, which brought its own set of unnerving incidents. Even going 35 mph, the car kept hydroplaning, and then a gust of wind would come up and threaten to blow me into the next late. Driving through the headlands, you could see huge branches fall off the trees and start rolling down the hills towards the freeway.

And getting back on the Golden Gate bridge was something I don’t want to do again — it was like driving through an automatic car wash. There was a solid gray wall on either side of the bridge, and the wind sounded like it was coming from every direction. Everyone was driving slowly enough not to get blown into each other’s lanes, but it was still impossible not to get that image of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse out of my head.

Back in the city, stoplights were still out along Park Presidio, and I saw a car that’d been parked on one of the side streets had its roof and windshield crushed by a fallen tree branch. And of course, ten minutes after I get back home, I see on the news that they’ve shut down 101 between the GG Bridge and Sonoma County, asking everyone to avoid going to Marin. Now they tell me.

Considering that I’ve still got power and even my satellite reception is unaffected, I think it’s a good day to stay inside. And remind me never to give the power and roads workers any grief anymore; those guys were out all over the place, in the worst of it, guiding traffic, repairing power lines, and clearing roads. They get this kind of stuff completely cleared away while I’m still in bed.

Over the past week or so, I’ve seen a bunch of links to “How to Draw a Face” on the comedy site The Sneeze. (Which is a consistently hilarious site, by the way, and not just for “Steve, Don’t Eat It!”)

That’s a neat story, yes, but nothing’s made me crack up like giving his four-year-old raisins for Christmas.

At the end of last month, ABC launched a new viral marketing campaign for the upcoming season of “Lost.” It’s an ad for the series’ fictional airline, with a press release announcing that Oceanic would start flying again after the Flight 815 disaster, and a promo website called FlyOceanicAir.com.

And oh no did you see that?!? The website got hacked by a mysterious stranger with some mysterious connection to Flight 815! I am intrigued! Who is this strange whistleblower? How did he manage to hack into a Flash movie? Why did he spend so much time working on jamming-your-signal visuals and sfx in After Effects, instead of just putting his movie on top of the other one? And most importantly: how do you get that constant week-old beard thing going on, anyway — whenever I try it, I go from “late 70s prom photo” straight to “werewolf in mid-transition,” with no roguishly handsome interim.

But ho!, what’s this? Has my eagle eye spotted another URL cleverly hidden inside the hacked transmission? What other, greater mysteries are there for me to unfold?

So yeah, I’m not a fan of the “alternate reality games.” They always devolve into a bunch of internet shut-ins poring over rehashes of puzzles from the back page of Games magazine, all to get to a website that plays ineptly-written videos performed by struggling actors.

But I’ve got to give them credit for this much: at least with this one, they kept the “you’ve stumbled onto a secret part of the internets!” nonsense to a minimum. You don’t even have to enter the “top secret” URL; our man Sam has cleverly hacked flyoceanicair.com to automatically jump to the game site, so you don’t have to pretend you’re discovering anything.

And apparently, he’s hired ABC’s camera and lighting crews to film him as he explores the mystery. I don’t want to tell you how to do your business, Sam, but maybe you’d have more time to find your girlfriend if you didn’t have to look at dailies and have meetings with the composer to make sure you’ve got just the right note of tension in the background music.

But really, the stuff I’m making fun of is the best part of this attempt at an ARG. The thing might not have anything remotely original involved (at least yet), but they cut out the artifice and went high on the production values. So it’s a bunch of “click here” and “find-the-pixel” puzzles, but they’re really nice-looking find-the-pixel puzzles with music and HD video. Hey, it worked for Myst.

And Sam: when you find Sonya, tell her to have that mole looked at.

(I read this book over the Christmas break, so it doesn’t count towards the 26 books I’ve resolved to read in 2008. But I have a corollary resolution to post something on this blog every day this year, no matter how short or irrelevant, so I’m cheating and rolling back the date.)

(Okay, the real post starts right now.)

Book
Lost Horizon by James Hilton

Selling Points
The First Paperback Ever Published!

Recommended By
A list of “If you like ‘Lost’, you’ll love these books that inspired it!”

Synopsis
A plane carrying four people escaping from a civil war is hijacked, taking them to the utopian lamasery of Shangri-La.

Highs
The main character of Conway is so well-developed, it’s a surprising jolt to those of us whose only exposure to the 1930s is Hays Code-era movies. “Oh yeah,” you’ll realize, “I guess people back then were capable of intelligence and subtlety after all.” He starts out as a comically heroic stereotype, almost a mythic hero to his former schoolmates. Over the course of the book, you learn that he’s got no interest in being a hero, or in any of the trappings of the west of WWI or the British Empire. And you discover along with him that he’s mastered zen without realizing it.

Lows
Every other character starts out as a stereotype, and remains so. For every passage that challenges your condescending attitude towards popular literature and entertainment of the 30s, there’s another passage that just reaffirms it. And it’s impossible to gauge how impressive the climactic reveal of the secret of Shangri-La would have been when the book was written, since it’s such common knowledge now.

Verdict
Kind of like if Jurassic Park had been written in 1933: An easy but not insulting read, there are plenty of moments of depth, and you’ll probably learn something new. But you can totally tell it was written to be turned into a movie.

My favorite thing on the internet of the moment is this old-school video for “Psyche Rock” by Pierre Henry, the inspiration for the theme song from “Futurama.” Transistors as bombs and spermatozoa: awesome.