Strange Radiation

The last time I was updating this blog really regularly, I was a freelancer, and single, and people actually read blogs. A lot has changed since then. I spent a lot of the last decade living my online life on social media, and as I toy with the idea of revitalizing this blog — for my own amusement, if nobody else’s — I thought I might do a little “you are here” post.

Let’s start with the most important update: You may recall that back in 2009 I went on a date with D., to see John Kelly perform the entirety of Joni Mitchell’s “Court and Spark” in his own inimitable style. That all turned out pretty well: He turned out to be the great love of my life. We married in 2017. We consider our selves very, very fortunate men.

About a year after that Dad passed on. He was a sweet, soft-spoken, smart, complicated guy and I miss him. I wish Don had had the opportunity to meet him at his best.

The other major transition is that in 2012 I managed, through hard work and good fortune and an accept-no-substitutes fixity of purpose that I think alarmed a lot of people who loved me, to turn the intermittent freelance work at Major Publication into an actual staff position as a New York Times copy editor. After a two-year rotation through the newsroom, I’m back where I started, at the Sunday Magazine. Most months I spend one week assigned not to the magazine proper but to The New York Times for Kids, which is an utter joy. I love it. If you want to see a copy, you’ll find it only in the print edition, on the last Sunday of every month. We’re extremely proud of it.

I’m not really writing fiction these days. After years and years with the Secret Cabal, a local spec-fic writers’ group, I couldn’t help but notice that every time I was due to turn something in for our monthly meeting I would start to go out of my mind. (I’m sure Don was observing this long before I was ready to say it out loud.) I eventually realized that I’d hung the sign that said WRITER around my neck at 17 and never since allowed myself to consider whether it was still making me happy. And it wasn’t: Much as I love having a story to tell people, the pressure that I put on myself to get from blank page to something I was prepared to share had drained the fun out of it. I’m working on that. I’d love to find my way back in. But for now, I’m on a break.

As things go, though, I can’t really complain. I’m a lucky guy.

The burning hulk of what was once Twitter is sinking into the swamp; as much as I will miss what it was, it is unquestionably time to abandon what it is now. Before I did that, though, I wanted to leave a note on my account, telling people where they could find me; and if I was going to send anybody here I figured I should make sure everything at Strange Radiation was working properly, so I spent the afternoon cleaning the carbon scoring off the matter collider and otherwise getting the place ready for visitors.

This is where it’s going to get a little nerdy. You have been warned.

Technical Notes: Implementing a Post Comment Count for Lovecraft

The most interesting aspect of that process, for me, was the chance to address what struck me as a nagging absence in Anders Norén’s beautiful Lovecraft WordPress theme: the lack of a comment count on in the post metadata field on the index page. Unable to find an explicit solution online — it seems as if the question has been asked a few times but never answered — I taught myself just enough about WordPress child themes to do it myself. If you want to do the same, create a child theme (as detailed, say, here), and then, in your function.php file, duplicate the bit of the Lovecraft parent functions pertaining to <div class="post-meta">. Into that bit of code, insert a single new line at the appropriate spot:

<p class="post-comments"><a href="<?php comments_link(); ?>"><?php comments_number( '0 comments', '1 comment', '% comments' ); ?></a></p>

Presto! That’s it. While I was in there I also got rid of the part of the same div that put the author’s name on every single post, because dude, it’s just me in here. No css changes were needed. If this helps YOU customize things, great; just don’t forget to back everything up before you get out the wrench.

I’m in Mexico! In Mérida, capital of the state of Yucatan, thawing out. This morning has been spent enjoying the breeze and teaching myself a little about the Maya civilization, which was local to here — we’re going to see the ruins of Uxmal later this week, and I’m so excited. But today is also a big day for another reason: Buddy is 3 today.

A while back I did a series of rituals with someone who specializes in such matters, working through some stuff. In our very first session, I was told to visualize walking down some stairs into the earth, where among other things I’d find an animal waiting to meet me. And there he was: a winged garter snake who flapped over and coiled itself around my right arm. In that very moment a little background process running in my head knew I’d found my tattoo. I’d circled the idea for years, never finding an image I wanted to risk living with forever — but this was it.

After months of casting about on the internet, I found the amazing Johno, who at the time owned Black Iris Tattoo in Greenpoint. One look at his instagram feed told me this was the guy. There was an email conversation, and we made an appointment. It was HAPPENING.

I spent much of the night before the big day staring at the ceiling, miserable. What if I got it and hated it a day later? For the rest of my life every time I looked in the mirror it would be a source of shame and regret. Should I cancel? But if I canceled, wouldn’t I regret THAT every time I looked in the mirror? Either way, I was on a familiar road to self-torture.

Then I remembered: One of that snake’s messages was to treat myself as I would others — with love. And living in fear of my being mean to myself was not loving. I decided to roll the dice, get the ink, and love myself anyway, no matter what. That was the kind of man I wanted to be.

So I went to Brooklyn. The sketch Johno had made from what I sent him was… thrilling. Magnificent. And he spent a few hours putting it where it belonged, and today I am a man who loves his ink and what it reminds him of. Thanks, Johno. 

And happy birthday, Buddy.

Well, it was lose the blog archive or migrate away from Movable Type and into something, you know, modern and functional. So that’s happening. Plus it might be fun to have a place to yammer at greater length than Twitter or Facebook allow. So, yeah. This is happening. Ere long this will actually start to look good, even. But for now, it works and my ISP isn’t rolling its eyes at me.

All kinds of shiny new stuff going on under the hood. What that means for the future of Strange Radiation, I’m not yet certain. I am curious to see how the antispam systems hold up.

Let’s begin with another music video: “In Your Arms,” by Kina Grannis. The song itself is… cute. A happy if not particularly world-shaking romantic pop tune. But the video:

I know, right? That’s a hell of a lot of work. Specifically, it’s 2,460 frames, created and shot entirely by hand over 1,357 hours using 288,000 jellybeans. Damn. The numbers are tabulated in this equally fascinating (to me) video — the one that actually moved me to write an entry in my poor neglected blog — right here:

On the face of it, two solid years of labor for a single music video sounds pretty crazy. Her record “Stairwells” came out in early 2010 — isn’t the buzz cycle for a disc supposed to have ended by this point? On the other hand, the final result is getting a lot of attention. And she comes off as pretty charming in the making-of, to the point that I’ll probably give a few of her other songs a listen as a result.

I don’t know what it says about me that I so often find the “how we did it” documentation at least as interesting as the end result. I have spent many happy hours, for example, listening to the screenwriters’ commentary tracks on the Lord of the Rings extended DVDs, as Jackson-Walsh-Boyens talk about the millions of tiny decisions they had to make on what to keep, what to move, what to cut. (The screenwriter’s commentary on “Sense and Sensibility” is pretty great as well, but hey, Emma Thompson, how can you go wrong.)

And finally, if you haven’t seen the animation work done for Oren Lavie’s “Her Morning Elegance,” well. Hie thee hither.