Books I Didn't Finish

Better to drop a book than loathe the written word.

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Super Mario : How Nintendo Conquered America

Few things are more grating than having an author regurgitate another author's work with less detail and competence. That's what Mr. Ryan manages to do with his book, Super Mario. The first half is largely a rehash of Game Over by David Sheff. If you haven't read Game Over, read it. It's a great book on the early days of Nintendo and how a hanafuda card company went on to dominate the video game industry.

Sheff's research is original and gives us an inside look into the players and events associated with Nintendo's rise to power. Ryan doesn't. Once he's expended Sheff's content, he largely sticks to giving us a bland run down of the games Nintendo has released. I don't need a journalist to tell me what Donkey Kong Country was like. I played it. I lived through it. I remember reading about it in Nintendo Power. And Ryan can't come up with anything that wasn't covered in gaming magazines of the era. Would it have killed him to interview some of the players? I realize the language barrier between English and Japanese is formidable, but he could have at least interviewed people at Nintendo of America. Harris did it for Console Wars. Why should Ryan get a pass? 

Ryan's run down of Nintendo's games isn't even that good. He describes Super Smash Bros Melee as follows: "[Melee] would have been unbearably in-jokey and obscure, if millions of fans weren't winningly enthusiastic about being able to, say, have the Ice Climbers attack Mr. Game N Watch with Ness's home run bat in the Pokemon Stadium, to win a Super Scope." Melee's reviews during it's release were largely positive, and these days Melee ranks on everyone's best Gamecube games list and is still being played in tournaments by die hard fans. One wonders if Ryan has played a game in the past twenty years. He describes Mario Sunshine's shadow Mario as being similar to Shadow the Hedgehog. Has he not heard of dark Link? Pretty sure that's where Nintendo drew its inspiration from.

Anyway, the book's not worth the paper it's printed on.

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The Innovators

Walter Isaacson's back to drop some knowledge bombs on y'all.

The Innovators is the story of the digital revolution and how innovation happens.

Well sort of. It's more of a hodgepodge collection of anecdotes about computers and computing. Isaccson talks about Ada Lovelace, but not Al Khwarizmi. He talks about TCP/IP, but not DNS. He talks about Google and Blogger, but no Facebook or Tumblr. Everything seems a bit shallow and cursory.

If you're completely new to computing history, this will be an informative book and you'll get an idea of how much ground has been covered in the past hundred seventy years or so.

For me it was mostly review. In high school, my computer science teacher insisted on drilling computing history into our heads for a month before getting on to loops, control structures, and things I was actually interested in. There are even things I remember from that class Isaacson leaves out. The computer John Vincent Atanasoff and his graduate student Clifford Berry created was called the Atanasoff Berry Computer, or ABC. And tragically, Berry died in a car accident before the ENIAC patent trial. I'm so glad my mind stored that and not calculus. Good job, brain. There is also the fact that Perceptron suffered from a XOR problem, but I learned about that in college.

This book doesn't seem to have much original research in it. You can find a much more informative history of Bell Labs's contributions to computing in The Idea Factory. For Turing's life, the Enigma is your goto book. Isaacson's own Steve Jobs is a much more informative look at the life of that tech titan and all around douchebag. And as for the interplay between Gates and Jobs during the Macintosh era, go watch the Pirates of Silicon Valley. It's surprisingly good for a made for TV film. If you want to know about computing history without having to pick up a second book, by all means pick this up. It's okay.

The point of this sweeping, magisterial, meandering treatise is supposedly to show how innovators build on one another's work and collaboration is the norm and not the exception. No shit. Anyone who knows anything about science or engineering could tell you this. Even Einstein needed help with General Relativity: "Grossmann, you've got to help me, or I'll go crazy." once pleaded our hirsute prototype “lone” genius.

At the end of the book Isaacson writes a strange chapter that seems to argue : Hal ain't coming and computers will remain dumb. However, machine human interaction is the wave of the future. I won't deny the immediate future will most likely belong to those who can best leverage computational resources to get tasks done. But Isaacson's contention that machines will remain dumb isn't convincing. As Dijkstra once said: “The question of whether a computer can think is no more interesting than the question of whether a submarine can swim.” Of course we're special. We're humans! Go team humans. First in ego. Isaacson doesn't add much beyond John Searle's Chinese room argument. And just because we don't know much about the human brain now doesn't mean we always will. History has shown past is prologue- until it isn't.

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Being Mortal

Did you know being mortal sucks? Story at eleven.

Being Mortal is the story of how we cope with our final years and how society treats us. The author's approach is primarily anecdotal, using the stories of elderly persons during their last years to paint a portrait of what those years look like. As you can imagine, it's a bit of a downer. 

Throughout most of history, most people didn't get old. They got the plague, died during childbirth, took an axe to the head. You know, traditional stuff.

These days we age and age and lose functionality until we haunt the earth in a confused pallor, gasping for air, failing to recognize our loved ones, and defecating upon ourselves. You know, fun stuff.

To deal with the onslaught of elderly persons cramping hospitals in the mid twentieth century, the nursing home was created. These institutions became convenient ways of ghettoizing our needy elderly until nature could run it's course. Unfortunately, they're pretty depressing, and not surprisingly, the elderly hate them. It turns out people want to live for a purpose higher than just surviving. Of course, when you're having trouble performing basic functions, this becomes pretty damn difficult.

My principle issue with the book is it's depressing as shit. My secondary issue, and this is probably more important, is that Gawande doesn't seem to be in a hurry to get to and definitive policy solutions. The books comes across as more of an onslaught of anecdotal tales of dubious value. Gawande's main point seems to be when it comes to end of life care less is more. No shit. That's how doctors treat themselves. But you don't need a two hundred fifty page book to get that point across, a short NYT article does the job just as well.

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Dataclysm

Did you know men are horribly shallow and women think most men are unattractive? 

It's true. And Christian Rudder has the data to back it up.

Dataclysm is a book about the wealth of data generated by websites such as Google, OkCupid, Reddit, etc. More specifically, it is about mining it to reveal information of sociological importance. 

Rudder starts off by showing us men throughout their lives think women are most attractive at about 21. Ladies, I apologize on behalf of my gender. We're awful.

Women aren't much better, they tend to think men are almost universally unattractive. Rudder puts it this way : if you translate the normal distribution of how women think men look to IQ, women think 58% of men are brain damaged. Ladies, I apologize on behalf of your gender. You're awful too.

One of the most interesting things to me is Rudder reveals that among other data OkCupid is actually capturing the number of keystrokes you use to type a message and transmitting this to their servers when you submit. Talk about granularity. What's next? Transmitting a live video feed from your webcam of all your facial expressions as you type for further analysis? Rudder reveals this while talking about the average number of keystrokes used in the first contact message individuals on OkCupid use. Apparently, there are a lot of cut and pasters, and if you do it enough, it isn't a bad strategy.

Other interesting results include the frequency of the word pizza in OkCupid profile posts. It's about as important as the word the. Finally pizza is taking it's rightful place in the English lexicon. We're all horrible racists (multiple chapters on this). White women aren't showing much love to manga, and black men aren't taking an interest in Richard Feynman. Let's get it together, people. 

Overall, it's a pretty interesting book. It will leave you pondering the brave  new world we're entering whether we want to or not.

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The Organized Mind

Is there a science flimsier than psychology? If there is, I don’t want to know about it.

In the Organized Mind the author makes an assertion so ridiculous he immediate loses all credibility: “The processing capacity of the conscious mind has been estimated at 120 bits per second.” CITATION NEEDED. So apparently the conscious  mind can process information slower than the rate an MP3 streams (192,000 bits per second). 

Firstly, what does this even mean? Does it include all visual, auditory, sensory data, and the stream of thoughts we call consciousness? And are bits really an accurate way of describing information in the context of the mind? I didn’t know we stored information in binary. The human brain was not designed by electrical engineers. How does one “process” a brain “bit”.

It’s really remarkable the number of supposedly credible names the author has giving his book blurbs of praise. One wonders if they read the damn thing.

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First Family Detail

What do you get when you interview anonymous people about their jobs who aren't supposed to be talking about their jobs? People with an axe to grind.

First Family Detail is about the secret service and its mission to protect the President, Vice-President, their kids, a few random other people, and so forth and so on. The gripes expressed by agents seem largely devoid of substance : So and so didn't seem friendly. We're supposed to believe when Hillary approached Secret Service agents were expected to disappear from sight. I sincerely doubt Hillary imperiously banished the Secret Service from her view. And that dreadful Al Gore once passed gas in front of them! My goodness.

And so, First Family Detail skews negative, particularly when it comes to the Democrats. After all, democrats eat puppies. The only Democrat who escapes largely unscathed is Obama, and one imagines that is because he's currently the boss of the author's sources.

Obama does get dinged once; however, during one of the White House Correspondence dinners he forced the Service to wave through Bradley Cooper without screening his vehicle. Can you imagine what would have happened if Mr. Cooper had been fomenting jihad against the United States? You cannot.

At one point an agent expressed his dismay President Carter would look at the blueprint for a submarine : "I don't know what the hell he was trying to do, figure out if it would work?" Well seeing how he was the Commander-in-Chief at the time, and a former Navy Officer who worked on a submarine, that isn't all that far fetched.

In the last few pages the author filibusters for an increase in revenue for the Secret Service. It comes across as odd, because if the author proves anything, it isn't that money is what's endangering the chief executive, it's the executive's desire to flout the rules. When presidents decree the magnetometers should be dropped and the crowds waved in, they're putting themselves in danger. No increase in revenue can fix that.

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Fierce Patriot : The Tangled Lives of William Tecumseh Sherman

William Tecumseh Sherman was a badass artist. His ability to produce sketches from memory was phenomenal. If he were alive today, he'd be tearing up the Tumblr charts.

Fortunately for the United States, he wasn't born in our time giving him the opportunity to raze rebel Atlanta and wreak havoc on the confederacy.

Unfortunately his career as a soldier was pretty boring until the civil war arrived. He found himself in mostly noncombatant roles, so he left the military to be headmaster for a military academy in Louisiana. Apparently the thought never crossed his mind: why does Louisiana need a military academy? When the war hits he is legitimately shocked. He then lays out a perfectly logical reason why war with the North is doomed:

"The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth... You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war."

The war hits and he reenlists but spends most of its early days fending off the press's allegations that he's a nutter. 

Also, he married his step-sister for some reason. I guess it seemed like a good idea at the time.

By the time he's ripping up Atlanta's railroad, I'd grown too bored to continue.

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Blood Feud

Ugh. This is what I get for not researching a book enough before picking it up.

Blood Feud is a hit piece on the Clintons and Obamas written by Edward Klein. Hillary is Nixonian. Obama feckless, and apparently the acolyte of a radical. Even descriptions have to remain unflattering. Obama has a "sullen pout". Hillary is depicted getting hammered with her friends and cursing a blue streak against the president.

Klein really wants you to know he doesn't like Obama. And don't forget Benghazi. That's sup' important and totes legit, bro.

It's more or less something like this:

Hillary's cackle gave way to maniacal laughter. Downing a fifth of Scotch in an instant, she threw the bottle to the ground.

"Um. Hillary, don't you think you've had enough?" asked a concerned friend.

Hillary sneered, picked up the woman's shot glass, and threw its contents in her face. "No one questions my judgement."

Hillary reached into her purse and pulled out a copy of the Necronomicon. She held it out before her. "Now place your hands on this and swear fealty to me." She cried in her shrill, unbearable voice. Her friends looked on with shock and horror. Some were sobbing.

Hillary picked up her steak knife and swung it menacingly. "NOW!"

Her friends placed their hands on the book and repeated the oath:

I do solemnly swear to do everything I can to get Hillary elected president in 2016. It is her birthright. And Bill totally owes her a presidency for all those bimbos. I am in no way, shape, or form concerned with the fact that she is in fact the second coming of Nixon.

She smiled. "And now to show you I mean business-"

She snapped her fingers. Before them stood a red satyr with big black horns and furry brown legs. It was Lucifer.

"If any of y'all betrays my girl, I'll be puttin' the hurt on you." Lucifer said through a nasty sneer.

Hillary dropped her bottle of Jack and embraced Lucifer. They kissed passionately and it was totally gross. I mean, it was sick gross. There was a lot of tongue. Nasty.

I leave you with a New York Times quote about Klein's book the Amateur. It's a different book, but the sentiment holds:

“The Amateur” by Edward Klein is a book about an inept, arrogant ideologue who maintains an absurdly high opinion of his own talents even as he blatantly fails to achieve his goals. Oh, and President Obama is in this book too.

-New York Times Book Review

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The Console Wars

The console wars is the story of Tom Kalinske and his brief tenure at Sega. Kalinske shows up while Sonic the Hedgehog is in development. Talk about lucky breaks. While Nintendo had Mario and Zelda, Sega was lacking in the IP department. Kalinske shows up and reaps the Sonic windfall.

So what did Kalinske contribute? It's hard to say. The book's focus seems to be on marketing. The voice recording of the iconic "Sega!". Race cars in the desert carrying game consoles. Shady salesmen peddling Super Nintendos. Sega did not lack for advertising. Curiously, Kalinske criticizes his predecessor for the Sega does What Nintendon't campaign on the grounds that it was vacuous crap. What doesn't Nintendo do? Make crummy games? There is no passage in the book where Kalinske makes a sustained attempt at improving the quality of Games coming to Genesis.

As Sonic's luster wore off, console sales declined. Meanwhile Nintendo kept churning out must haves. Two words: Chrono Trigger.

There's a comical passage where the Sega guys are trying to find a way to respond to Nintendo's commercials promoting "Mode 7". They come up with an esoteric feature of the Genesis' processor: burst mode. They redub it blast processing and the rest is history. 

Ultimately every gamer won in the console war between Genesis and Super Nintendo because the competition brought down prices for consumers. In the long run, new competitors arrived and Sega bombed out of the console market.

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A Storm of Swords

Yea verily I say unto you. When I speaketh with tongue of yore doth it not pad my word count?

Game of Thrones was inspired by a game of musical chairs that occurred in the 13th century. King Plausible the Okay was playing against Louis the Insufferable. In the end, Plausible lost and was promptly put to the sword.

Tough break.

George RR Martin, writer, grower of fine beards, has blessed us with this series of novels that introduces character after character after character stopping only periodically to kill one off, and then ponder advancing the plot ultimately deciding against it.

There are so many houses in this book I could have sworn I saw mine, House didntfinish of the Hegemonic realm.

Martin has a tendency to have girls bite their lips. A little stereotypical, don't you think?

The book's one saving grace is Martin's enthusiasm for slaying primary characters. You're reading a passage and then - bam. S*** just got real. Folks are dropping like flies. Hide ya kids. Hide ya wife. Cause they killin' e'ybody up in Westeros.

The world Martin creates has no rules. It is utterly chaotic. There are dragons. There are ice zombies. People come back to life. There are about a billion gods and goddesses. People leave their bodies and enter the minds of animals. And a shadow crawled out of some lady's nether regions. Yeah. Good luck trying to find rules for this universe.

The novel is told via the point of view of different characters. Martin tends to switch off the POV character with each new chapter. Some characters are much more interesting than others. I'm sorry, but the Starks and Snow bore me to tears. I realize they're supposed to be the noble House, but they are so boring one can almost forgive the Lannisters their treachery.

There are two things that need to occur for the series to be resolved satisfactorly. The others have to make a major push to take the wall, and Danys needs to land at Kings landing and try to take the iron throne. But Martin draws this out forever. At the rate he moves, everyone will die of old age before the plot resolves itself. In the mean time enjoy four thousand irrelevant subplots.

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Divergent

Divergent is the tale of Beatrice Prior. Beatrice changes her name to Tris during the course of the novel, so I guess she really was Beatrice prior. 

Writers are brilliant.

In Divergent, the world has segmented itself into various groups. The Candor are very candid. The Erudite are very learned. Amity is a bunch of lovey dovey community types.The Abnegate are… you get the idea. 

Supposedly this is because it prevented wars or something. The writer glosses over the reasoning and sort of asks you to go with it.

It’s kind of hard to suspend disbelief. Why would I want to condense my existence into a word? No, seriously. I realize this is supposed to be an allegory or something, but it comes across as completely implausible.

So Beatrice comes of age and has to take a test that will tell her which class clique faction is right for her. She takes the test and discovers she is a special snowflake divergent. What’s a divergent? Someone who’s too cool for your arbitrary distinctions, man. That is to say, she got an inconclusive test result.

So she has to make a choice. Loathing the selfless life of the Abnegate, she chooses to abandon her family and go with the Dauntless. The Dauntless are supposedly brave, but they come across as stupidly reckless and sociopathic. They jump from trains and their initiation basically consists of terrorizing recruits and having them beat one another up. The recruits primary instructor, Eric, thinks throwing knives at them is a great way to build character. Nice guy. I like him.

All of this might be forgivable if there wasn’t a glaring whole in the plot. The crux of the plot is : The Erudite resent being left out of government which is controlled by the Abnegate, so they want to wage war on the Abnegate. How will they do this? Mind control on the Dauntless to use them as an army.

I’m sure this unprovoked attack will go over well with Amity.

If you have the ability to control minds, why wouldn’t you just get the Abnegate to hand over the reigns of government to you? Supposedly this is because there are a lot of Abnegate who are “divergent” and cannot be controlled. But obviously it can’t be a majority, because they’d keep hemorrhaging kids to other factions and eventually cease to exist.

The book is filled with long passages in which Tris stares longingly at her hunk of man, Four. He’s so brave, handsome, and only slightly threatening. And he’s willing to take things real slow, ‘cause he’s a super classy gentleman. Unrelated sidebar: a woman wrote this book.

In the end a lot of people die, and you’re like: ok. Can’t say I really care. This is a generic dystopia. There’s not much to see here. Am I really this bored? Have I wasted my life completely? Should I write an apology to my ancestors?

The book leaves room for a sequel, sadly. Sadly, a sequel was written.

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Flash Boys

Canadians to the rescue, eh?

Flash Boys is about a couple of boys who feel the need. The need for speed.

Well something like that. It's about high frequency trading (HFT), and the n'er-do-wells who do it. These gentlemen bilk the consumer through a process so convoluted, I honestly couldn't really follow it. Basically, it sounds like they exploit price differences on different markets. Or Something.

Fortunately, the story has a protagonist, Brad Katsuyama, benevolent Canadian. Brad becomes aware of the issue when his company the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) acquires a new system, and he realizes he can't make trades at the prices advertised. After extensive analysis, he's able to find out why. It only occurs when his trade is occurring in more than one pool. Someone is using the information from his trade in market A to goose up the price in market B. Adding to this market malfeasance, some brokers were being paid to send their clients to certain markets. This would seem to be a conflict of interest.

Together with a ragtag group of ex RBC employees, Brad plans on ending market abuses. They open their own market which is HFT proof. 

The root cause of this flash trading monkey-business is something called the Regulation National Market System. It required brokers to find the best market prices for their clients, but this had the unintentional effect of requiring brokers to make trades across more exchanges. This wouldn't have been a problem if the mechanism for determining these prices, the Securities Information Processor (SIP), wasn't interminably slow. Since it was, it allowed those with the means of compiling a more accurate view of the market to front run ordinary investors.

You'd think with all this bad behavior the SEC would be trying to fix things, right? Well about that...

The saddest part of the book is when Brad is speaking to the SEC and some SEC staffer complains his attempt to make the market fair for consumers is unfair to high frequency traders. That made me a little teary eyed. These are the guys who are supposed to be doing the regulation, and they're looking out for the predators.

My only quibble is I could not follow a lot of the financial details in this book. The trading strategies of the HFT firms are strange, and you get the sense their algorithms are somewhat shrouded in mystery. The characters are interesting, however. And the broad strokes of how Brad and his colleagues react to the issue makes for an interesting read. The sub-plot about Sergey the coder is also interesting. Lewis is capable of painting a scene better than most fiction writers and tells a great story.

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Creativity, Inc

In the early days of Pixar, there was an improbably long table. It was thin and long. Frankly, It was less a table than a solid line. It split Pixar headquarters in half and continued on across the universe in a very real and physically impossible fashion. 

The table was an impediment to communication. To communicate with someone at the far reaches of the table, you would either need to send a message through a pneumatic tube, or via the preferred method, a courier on horseback. In the unlikely scenario your message was actually received by the recipient, you would have to wait days for a reply.

The table had to go. And so it did. It was replaced with a much more sensible square table that was economical, bolstered congeniality, and in no way violated physical law. The table would go on to become an idea factory giving birth to such classic films as Toy Story and Monsters Inc. Pixar worshiped it as a deity, adorned it with laurels, and sung its praises to the four corners of the Earth. In time, the edges of the table wore down and the table became more round than square. It was donated to King Arthur and his knights who use it to this day.

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The Martian

Have you ever wanted Apollo 13 and Castaway to be combined and then turned into a novel?

No? What do you mean no?

Mr. Weir manages to create a protagonist with a truly amazing will to live.

Although ostensibly, very little to live for.

Left behind on Mars, there are no lovers, friends, family, or meaningful work awaiting Mark Watney on Earth that he hungers to return to. If there is, he doesn't mention it. There is no animosity born toward the crew that thought he was dead and left him behind. No.

There is just an unyielding desire to stay alive and a preternatural sense of good humor about his really f'ed up situation.

The majority of the book presents itself in an epistolary format, and from the beginning we are bombarded with what is essentially a laundry list of technical challenges to be overcome and the arithmetic related to working out those challenges. A brilliant engineer, Watney can apparently fix nearly any problem that comes his way. Of course, he didn't think of laying out rocks to spell SOS on the martian surface, but hey, who's keeping score?

The answer was me. I'm keeping score.

NASA, that ever resourceful government agency, takes no photography of the "Hab" he is located at until two months after the incident that left him stranded. I find this difficult to believe. An incident occurred and they don't take a photograph for two months? Even if they were trying to avoid bad PR from photographing a dead astronaut, this makes little sense. Their satellites probably would have picked up something unintentionally from regular surveillance by that point. And the guy's dead. If his body's there, the public will see it eventually.

The remainder of the characters also seem to be no nonsense engineers with little on their mind except their jobs. Can I get one warm blooded character, please?

I have to hand it to Weir, the pacing is good. The voice is unique. He lacks pretension. But none of this can make up for the fact that it's hard to care about what's going on. Why should I care about this protagonist? He seems to have no inner life. There is no emotional core in his character. It's just a guy who wants to survive, and that isn't enough.

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Capital in the 21st Century

I know some of these words.

-Internet meme

A specter is haunting Capitalism, the specter of inequality.

Fortunately French economics professors are on the job.

Idea for a film: Thomas Piketty as an Indiana Jones type figure raiding old government bureaucracies for data on inequality.

Piketty busts in to the Chinese archives. A beautiful seductress in a sleek red dress strokes his cheek gently. He throws her to the ground to get his hands on some old hard disks full of income data. Laughing maniacally, he rushes to the roof where a helicopter awaits. "Au revoir," he shouts under heavy gunfire, biting down on a baguette and frog sandwich.

Prof. Piketty has enlightened me. Before I read this book I didn't know:

50% of people in all societies where we have data have basically no wealth.

For most of recorded history, economic growth was negligible.

But the rate of return on capital has been remarkably consistent (roughly 4-5%).

The rate of return on capital is almost always greater than the rate of growth in the economy (r > g).

This leads to increasing wealth stratification (the rich get richer).

The expected low growth rates of the 21st century will only accelerate this trend.

He has the data to back this up.

Dismal science indeed. 

Mr. Piketty has an odd penchant for referencing 19th century literature, and inexplicably, the film the Aristocrats. The cogwheels of his mind are very mysterious. In fact, he states one of the primary goals of his book is to determine how closely 19th century french society matched what Balzac wrote in Le Pere Goriot. One can not help but find this adorkable.

Piketty portrays the United States as a one time innovator in the field of progressive taxation. Heck, we once had a 94% top marginal tax rate. Of course in the 80s, we began to drop this top tax rate. This resulted in top executives at large firms clamoring for much higher incomes. They got them, as their peers were the ones who made the call.

In other words, forget the 1%. It's the top 0.1% that are really walking away with income gains.

But then again, who cares about income? Inequality of capital is much greater than inequality of income. In the world Piketty paints for us, the ultra wealthy are dominated by wealthy rentiers who are capturing increasing portions of the economic pie. And why wouldn't they? Remember r > g. And the richer you are, the higher your rate of return. Piketty uses data from University endowments to hammer this point home.

Piketty's solution is a global tax on wealth, which he immediately discounts as Utopian. One doubts he was the leader of his high school's debate club.

But Piketty does have a point when it comes to taxation. Tax isn't just a means of generating revenue. It also expresses our values as a society. It's time to stop mollycoddling the rentiers.

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Daily Rituals : How Artists Work

Every day I wake up and head downstairs. It's still pitch black out and all sane people are still sleeping. Awaiting me in the kitchen is a reservoir of coffee, which I down instantly.

Before entering the shower, I admire my outrageously thick eyebrows. They are dense enough to support a unique ecosystem and give me a look of permanent malice even while resting. 

If it's a weekday, I'll go to work, where I am an INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT man and in no way dispensable. The breakfast hour arrives and I eat some cold cereal and a granola bar. My coworkers walk past my cube and are very careful to avoid eye contact lest they be pulled into the vortex of darkness.

If it's a weekend, I turn on my notebook and then proceed to do... everything except write. The number of ways I've found to murder time in cold blood is truly astounding.

Recently a scientist from Harvard showed up at my door. Turns out he had caught wind of my indolence.

"Do you realize what you've done?" He said, eyes watering. "We didn't just say it shouldn't be done. We said it couldn't be done."

I stood impassively. I was both mildly interested and annoyed that I had to get up for this.

"You are the most lazy man alive. You've shattered all of our theories. We have to start over. Everything... is... lost."

He fell prostrate and broke into tears. I closed the door to let him mourn in privacy.

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The Men Who Lost America

The men who lost America were men just like you and me.

Well, more like you.

King George the 3rd was a chaste, devout, Christian gentleman who had contempt for the loose morals of his age. Or Something. Unfortunately, when the war of independence broke out, he became the main obstacle to peace with the colonies. Prime Minister North routinely attempted to resign and the King refused him again and again.

"We shall fight on to the end," George said. "We shall not flag or fail. I'll be damned if I'm going to lose a country that will go on to invent the cronut."

Resolute, the king retired to his chambers to pray solemnly and commune with the paintings on his walls.

Lord North cried himself to sleep every night. Despondent beyond consolation, he wanted nothing more than to resign in disgrace.

"It could really help my career," He reasoned. Then nonsensically he would launch into a speech about his intent to remain prime minister. Perhaps George's insanity was contagious.