Oh, happy day

P: November 16, 2007 by Judah

So, first, a tragic tale: some time ago–let’s see, I was still in building six, on the south side of the building, so this would have been in late 2005 or early 2006–I put on The Amps Pacer in the afternoon, went home, and came back the next day to find it… still playing. I realized that winamp was set to repeat, and I immediately stopped it and went to last.fm to see if all of the tracks were being scrobbled, and sure enough, there they were. I was at my desk, so I just picked some new music and went on with my day, not really wanting to deal with the problem. I figured I would use the profile editor to clean it up later. (don’t anticipate)

When the week rolled by, the Amps had skyrocketed to number 5 in my playlist, and now every song on pacer was in my top 50. I had let it play 36 times overnight. I went into my account to try to find the profile editor… and I couldn’t. The profile editor was just gone. I was upset, but it didn’t immediately occur to me to check the forums. If I had, I would have seen that there was already a great amount of talk about what to do in this situation (my kid sister listened to Britney Spears on my computer, HELP!). Instead, I sat on my hands and did nothing for some additional weeks. When I finally did get into the forum, I discovered that it is possible to remove tracks that have been recently scrobbled, say within the last two weeks, but by then the opportunity was gone.

Now, over a year later, the last Amps song has dropped out of my top 50, and the band itself is down below 10. There are still some oddities: the Amps rate higher than The Breeders? Higher even than The Pixies? I have one Amps record, they should be languishing right around The Kelley Deal 6000, not up near The Weakerthans, or The Court and Spark.

But it is awfully nice not to see that big block of Pacer songs at the bottom of my top 50 tracks anymore. Awfully nice.

Beowulf by Seamus Heaney

P: November 14, 2007 by Judah

Beowulf: A New Verse Translation (Bilingual Edition)

Beowulf is an epic poem about a great Scandinavian hero, written in Anglo-Saxon (or Old English), over a thousand years ago in England. This translation, by Seamus Heaney, is pretty new and has been very well received.

Some notes on the story first, because why not: There is a great leader of Danes named Hrothgar, who builds a maginificent hall. Unfortunately, this disturbs a monster named Grendel, who, in revenge, takes to sneaking into the hall at night and mutilating sleeping men. Hrothgar's efforts to defend the hall are unsuccessful, and the happy place becomes sombre and empty. Eventually, the news reaches a great Geat warrior¹ named Beowulf, who voyages with some warriors to Hrothgar's Aid. He takes on Grendel in single combat and rips his arm off. Grendel limps back to his mother's house to die, and his mother, enraged, comes back to the hall to get revenge. Beowulf follows her to the murky water she inhabits and fights her at the bottom, eventually defeating her and returning with Grendel's head as a trophy.² Hrothgar rewards him happily and he sails away back to Geatland, where he eventually becomes king. Some years later, a dragon is aroused and Beowulf gives his life to defeat it. Then everyone gets really depressed, because they believe their land will eventually fall.³

The first part of the story, Grendel and Grendel's mom, that's good stuff. Good and epic and larger than life. The part with the dragon and 50 years later? Not so great. Feels kind of tacked on.

Now, a word on the translation: Beowulf is probably the best surviving work in old English, so there is a lot of nitpicking about translation and a lot of choice. The original has a rigid verse structure that makes verse translations difficult, and of course translating verse into prose inevitably means losing something. This particular translation has been quite popular and is definitely better than whatever old translation I read in high school. It is in verse, and it maintains some of the alliteration, and in fact is close enough to be printed with the old English on the facing page.

Read it.

1. I couldn't resist this one (great Geat)
2. At no point in this story did Angelina Jolie show up naked. I double checked. I admit that I can't read old English and had to rely on the translation, but there wasn't anything in that facing block that looked like the words "Angelina Jolie." In this respect I feel slightly lied to.
3. For the eventual fate of the Geat kingdom, see a fucking map.

Novels in Three Lines

P: November 7, 2007 by Judah

Novels in Three Lines (New York Review Books Classics)

Felix Feneon

I was oh so tempted to write this in three lines. I think I have a fixed layout here and everything, so it makes sense. It would have ended up something like:

Novels in Three Lines, given as a birthday present, was read in two days by Judah Nielsen, Campbell, CA. A happy birthday.

Unfortunately, that doesn't really convey much. What we have here is a collection of short news items that were written by Felix Feneon, a Frenchman, in a distinctive style. There are some 1200 of them, many involving stabbings, shootings, suicides, drownings, and acid scaldings.

Scheid, of Dunkirk, fired three times at his wife. Since he missed every shot, he decided to aim at his mother-in-law, and connected.

So what makes them novels?

Well, nothing more than a French pun, really. The same word, nouvelles, can be used to mean either novels or news, and the translator has taken the approach that these are the novels Feneon didn't write. Many of them could be expanded into short stories or novels, and there is no doubt that the author makes his style felt in these very short spaces, but they are, in fact, non-fiction.

When this was given to me, it had a post-it note on it that said "This is the ultimate toilet book–you can read three novels while you take a leak." That seems like one of the two good solid uses for the book, the other being, perhaps, a coffee table book. Or if you choose to read it cover to cover, it shouldn't take long. A couple of hours, perhaps.

Assassin’s Crossing

P: November 5, 2007 by Judah

Today’s Penny Arcade discusses the difficulty of porting a latest generation sandbox game onto the Nintendo DS, but ends up making what I consider a Dueling Analogs joke in the process:

Penny Arcade - The littlest hashshashin

That said, fans of Animal crossing will probably have felt, at one point or another, that this was the fate that awaited them if they went back to their neglected towns.

About Penny Arcade:

Penny Arcade is the long running, highly popular, and very polarizing video game web comic of Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins, which occasionally diverges from gaming discussions to talk about the news, giraffes, fruit rape, and so on. It runs Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and the earliest strip in the archive is from November of 1998. There is a video game based on the comic in the works, and there is a yearly Penny Arcade Expo. The two also founded the Child’s Play charity, which has donated more than a million dollars to children’s hospitals worldwide, hoping to combat the media image of video gamers as violent sociopaths.

The King-maker

P: November 2, 2007 by Judah

Today’s Achewood gives political advice:

Achewood - How do you become King?

About Achewood:

Achewood is a web comic about a series of cats, stuffed animals, at least one human, and arguably, the English language. I love it dearly, and my only complaint is that I actually like Asahi Super Dry, which is the butt of an occasional beer joke. See also the blogs and various print projects that attend the main comic. Chris Onstad’s baby.