Posts published in “Life”

The insufficiency of “I’m sorry”

April 9, 2020 |

“I’m sorry” is totally insufficient. I hate it.

But, before you start to think me a monster, let me qualify.

First, I am not saying I hate apologies. Far from it. I am a big fan of apologies. We all screw up from time to time and a sincere apology can go a long way toward making things right. Trust me: I know. We’ve all done and will do stupid things that hurt other people. Apologize. Say, “I’m sorry” and mean it. You can’t travel back to the moment of your transgression and stop it from happening, but you can acknowledge that you screwed up and take steps to correct. And, don’t forget, there are no "buts" in an apology.

Second, I am not saying that I don’t think we should sympathize with other people’s pain. The human is a communal animal and our societies and our lives are better when we try as best we can to understand what other members of our tribe are going through. Stress at work, family strife, feeling unsure about your life path, whatever it is the ability to read the emotions of others and to incorporate that understanding is key to successfully navigating life. Just think how much better things would be if the GOP had a tiny sliver of sympathy for anyone. Right? A lot better.

What I am trying to get at is that I think "I’m sorry" as a phrase to mean, "I see that you are suffering and acknowledge it and sincerely wish I could help in some way to ease that suffering" is not even close to good enough. There is too much opportunity to confuse it with the other meaning, "I have regret for the harm I caused you," particularly in a moment when emotions are heightened. You know, when you might say something like "I’m sorry".

How many times have you said "I’m sorry" to someone the former meaning, for them to say, "You have nothing to be sorry about. It’s not your fault"? And then you have to clarify with something like, "No no, what I meant was that I am sorry your teeth hurt still, not I’m sorry I made your teeth hurt because we both know I had nothing to do at all with the pain level of your teeth. However, I feel sympathy for the aches in your chompers." This is a strong signal that "I’m sorry" is not up the task we’ve set out for it.

You could try something like, "I feel you," but that could just as easily be confused with "I agree". Not good enough. It leaves us with the same lack of clarity "I’m sorry" does. Grandma died? "I feel you." Wrong.

How about "I am pained for you"? Too dramatic. Try listening to less Morrissey.

Maybe "Yeah, sure, ok, yeah, ok, uh-huh"? I’ve performed extensive testing with this option when a plus-one is telling me about some upset they experienced and it didn’t go so well. I should have just used "I’m sorry".

The French have l’esprit de l’escalier to describe that feeling you get when you leave an argument and suddenly have a whole armament of pithy retorts, too late to make use of. The Germans have schadenfreude which describes the malicious enjoyment we take in the misfortunes of others. The Danish have 2016’s hottest word hygge which the OED defines as "a quality of cosiness and comfortable conviviality that engenders a feeling of contentment or well-being; contentment from simple pleasures, such as warmth, food, friends, etc." Damn, that sounds pretty nice.

And we English speakers, what do we have? "I’m sorry".

Not good enough! It’s confusing! It’s imprecise! It’s wholly insufficient for the work it’s meant to do! And, I hate it. There has to be some better, clearer way to express the same sentiment as simply but without the risk of mistaking its meaning.

While we’re all stuck inside the house due to the COVID-19 shelter-in-place orders, I want you to think about what else could take the place of "I’m sorry" and get back to me by Monday. Leave good suggestions in the comments. I believe in you.

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

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Building a Hackintosh

Building a Hackintosh

January 6, 2020 |

Thoughts

Have you ever built a computer? It’s pretty easy. You select the parts you want, do a little bit of homework to make sure they work together, purchase the parts, and then put them together. You put the processor in its slot, you put the GPU in that slot, and you put the RAM in those slots. Everything has a place where it fits. From there, you install Windows (also pretty easy) and you’re off to the races, free to do whatever it is people do with computers. Anyone with just a little technical aptitude and some attention to detail can figure out how to build a computer in an afternoon or so. Did you like building legos as a kid, especially those Technics kits with the gears that turned into cars with working steering columns or whatever? Then you can build a computer. It’s actually kind of fun and pretty satisfying.

Now. Have you ever tried building a Hackintosh?

That is an entirely different beast.

A “Hackintosh”, for those not in the know, is a PC built with off-the-shelf parts that runs MacOS.

With a normal PC, all you have to do is make sure your parts work together. There’s quite a lot of wiggle room. With a Hackintosh, you not only have to make sure your parts work together, but also that all your parts can be made to work with an OS that does not natively support them. But that’s not all! After putting it all together, you have to then trick the computer into thinking it’s a Mac running native, supported hardware. You’re right, that does sound hard!

Oh, wow, these Threadripper Hackintoshes look neat! Oh. No. Creative Cloud doesn’t work.

Maybe I’ll go x299 over z390 for the extra juice! Damn. Documentation is sparse.

Do I need to buy a new power supply? Seems like the draw math works, but you don’t really know until everything’s plugged in.

Is it time to replace my ancient Firewire 800 audio interface so I can remove the PCIe card I had to add to make it work? The less stuff plugged in, the less there is to troubleshoot.

Are there native drivers for my chosen GPU? Nope! Nvidia and Apple are in a fight, so AMD is the only choice.

Will the Samsung M.2 SSDs work? Nope! MacOS hates the chipset that runs them. Time to find some M.2 SSDs that don’t use that chipset.

Should I reuse the tower CPU cooler I already have? Maybe, but it’s pretty big and I have no idea if the new RAM will clear. But will MacOS drive the AIO watercooler I am looking at?

What settings do I need to include in my DSDT? My SSDT? ACPI? What kexts? How do I set up the bootloader? OpenCore or Clover? Which UEFI settings? There’s a forum guide for slightly different hardware for the previous OS, so maybe that will help?

And so on and so on and so on. The questions never end. It’s an absolute nightmare.

I bet you’re asking yourself the smart question “Why on Earth would anyone subject themselves to this torture?” Price. The price to build a machine is often just a fraction of what Apple would charge for something roughly equivalent. Of course, with Apple you’re getting reliability, a warranty, and some premium touches. We don’t need those!

However, Apple has a tendency to let hardware languish for years without a refresh. Look at the trashcan Mac Pro. They released it in 2013 and gave it a single, modest spec boost once before the new 2019 Mac Pro was released. One specification update in six years. No good. There was no way to update that little machine either. You were stuck with what you bought. You can update a Hackintosh (if you like opening the gates to Hell).

And I’ve done this before! Back in late 2013 I started down the Hackintosh road. In fact, the computer that resulted from that is the computer I am typing this on right now. I built it to replace an aging Mac Pro that could no longer handle the HD video footage I threw at it as part of my job. This machine, affectionately named “The Dark Tower”, has served me pretty well in that regard these last few years.

It has never worked perfectly, though. I suspect that a lot of that is to do with my inexperience putting it together seven years ago. Maybe I didn’t pick exactly the right parts. Maybe I skipped some crucial, but tiny, step in the install process. Maybe the hardware is slowly dying after all this time. Who knows! I’ve taken it apart, rebuilt it, and reinstalled both Windows and MacOS many times since then. I have learned a lot about what to do and what not to do.

It is also stuck on High Sierra because Nvidia is no longer producing MacOS drivers for the 980 Ti GPU I have. My High Sierra install is crunchy and unstable no matter how much I do to fix it. The Dark Tower has had it’s day and now its time to replace it. I have some potential video work coming up and this machine is not up to the task.

Now I have a few questions to answer.

Do I stick with the dual boot Windows/Hackintosh format?
Do I go Windows-only? Most of the software I run works on both platforms, though I still prefer the Mac for work.
Do I build a 12-core monster or an 8-core smaller-monster? We’re talking about maybe a $600 difference. Significant, but not game-changing.
If I go Windows-only, do I build an AMD Threadripper machine? Price is roughly the same as upgrading to the 8-core machine.
Do I just buy an actual Macintosh desktop computer?! This is by far the most expensive, but least stressful option.

So much to consider. Wish me luck. I’m diving in. Me and Colonel Panic are going to be getting real intimate.

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The Theme for 2020: Wonder

January 3, 2020 |

About Filmmaking, About Writing, Film & TV, Thoughts and Writing

Cynicism is a shackle.

Cynicism is a shackle and being jaded is uncool and dumping on people who are putting themselves out there is a drag.

For too long I have indulged this sort of needless negativity and I feel pretty done with it. It’s a habit I (and many others) developed as a teenager and so thoroughly internalized that it’s become a dominant personality trait. But that sucks! When you have a bad habit, you try to undo it, right? Drinking too much? Cut it out. Get soft around the tum-tum? Go to the gym. Being a cynical jerk about stuff? Embrace wonder. I limit myself and the potential richness of my life by immediately writing things off that maybe aren’t the best. Or things that I perceive might not be the best. How might my life now, as a 37 year old man, be fuller if I hadn’t spent so many years thinking things were stupid because it made me feel cool? It’s terrible, and if that makes me cynical about cynicism, then so be it.

I want to get to a place where I can just be excited about things without tempering that excitement with a bad attitude. I want to go to an open mic night and genuinely think to myself, You know, that was pretty good. I want to see a dad-rock band at a local festival and not roll my eyes. I want to read the clumsy poetry of the world and not dismiss it out of hand. I want to like things because I like things and not justify my tastes. I want to take pleasure in the weird experiences that I find myself in all the time. I want to find the magic in creating things that are not masterpieces. I want to welcome the broken and wonky into my heart. I want to silence that damned voice that says so many terrible things to me. I want to embrace the joy of small, imperfect things because life is full of small, imperfect things and dismissing them robs you of so many chances for happiness.

The theme for 2020 will be:

The Year of Wonder

Maybe I mean something closer to “the year of positive attitude” or “the year of not being a judgy dickhead” or “the year of just giving it a damn rest already with the negativity”, but none of those are as punchy as The Year of Wonder so that is what we are going with.

It seems to me that embracing wonder comes in two distinct flavors: inward and outward. That is, am I directing my bad attitude at myself or am I directing it at others. I think this differentiation is pretty easy to follow.

My struggles with being creative are legendary and well-documented. I have written about it extensively before here on The Black Laser. I am sure all this results from this persistent negative voice inside me. I am sure that the same sense that makes me think someone else’s work is worthless is the same sense that makes me think my work is worthless. Where there’s smoke, there’s fire, right?

Why beat myself up for the imagined failures of work I am not producing? It is better to produce and release 85% perfect work, than it is to beat myself up forever because the work isn’t 100% perfect and then never release anything at all. Get over it, Joe, and just be happy that the 85% work is out there. If I consider every single thing I’ve ever created professionally, there might be a handful of works that were in the 85% to 90% range. The rest were lower than that for whatever external reality causing issues. And I made a living that way! The world isn’t looking for works that are 100% perfect. That is impossible. Just do your best and people will respond.

And this attitude is never limited to just myself, either. Why can’t I just accept that someone has worked hard on something and is doing their best to share something of themselves? Perhaps they don’t sing with Bing Crosby’s syrupy voice, or perhaps they don’t shred like St Vincent, or perhaps they don’t craft the taught, lurid prose of Shirley Jackson, but so what? The creative drive is within all of us. For the most part, I really believe, people are just doing their best to express their own truths. Why poo-poo that? Encourage people to live their lives. That starts with not being yet another negative voice in a sea of negative voices. Negativity is easy, but negativity is lazy.

It’s a bad behavior it and it needs to stop.

This year is the year I work to stop it. I imagine it will be a difficult path, one from which I will stray regularly. You don’t change 37 years of bad behavior in a single blog post. But, it is something I want to work on. Just getting over the mental hump that kept me away from The Black Laser for so long is the first step. Christ, it’s not like I haven’t had anything stewing in my head the last few years. It’s just that the voice was so loud, so persistent, that I felt stuck.

Well, I’m back. Hi. Missed you too. Let’s be positive this year.

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Happy Merry!

Happy Merry!

December 25, 2019 |

Thoughts

I hope you are all enjoying your holiday, even if you don’t get much of a break from work.

Sarah and I are chilling at home with our friend Jor. We’re probably cooking something good and I probably ate too much monkey bread, as tradition dictates. Let the people you love know you love them and put your feet up. You’ve worked hard this year and a little relaxation goes a long way.

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Cookin’ With Lasers – Sausage & Sage Stuffing

Cookin’ With Lasers – Sausage & Sage Stuffing

December 1, 2019 |

Fitness

My friend Nicole was recently giving me my monthly haircut and we got to chatting about Thanksgiving. She mentioned that no one in her family was good at making stuffing, which was surprising to me because stuffing might just be the easiest, most delicious part of a Thanksgiving spread. Because I am such a generous soul, I offered to send her my recipe for stuffing, which I basically stole from Mark Bittman. Ok, ok, maybe not stole, but definitely adapted.

Granted, Thanksgiving is past at this point, but Christmas is coming up and stuffing is just as good then as it is any other time. Make it during the summer time, too! It’s good!

So, in the interest of bragging about my selfless, generous nature, here is my recipe. Feel free to follow it or change it or do whatever. It’s your life.

Sausage & Sage Stuffing

Ingredients:
1.5 lb sausage, herby Italian, not spicy
2 loaves of bread, I like sourdough
Butter, 1 stick, unsalted
Yellow onion, 1 medium
Celery, to match the onion
Fresh sage, half cup
Fresh thyme, quarter cup
Fresh flat leaf parsley, maybe half a cup?
Chicken stock, unsalted, for wetness
Salt, to taste
Pepper, to taste

1) Slice and toast the bread. Allow it to cool. If you’re really nuts, I like to toast the bread on the grill. I think it give the toast better flavor and better color to the stuffing in the end. You might need to scrape off some more burnt bits, but sometimes you have to suffer for your art.

Pulse the toasted bread slices in a food processor until both loaves are broken up decently. I like a mix of medium and small chunks. Save the toast powder this creates.

2) If you could only get sausage links, pull the meat out of the casing. If it’s loose, you’re set to go. In a dutch oven, cook the sausage until it’s done. Break it up into crumbles while cooking. Remove it from the dutch oven.

Dice your onion and celery. You want approximately equal portions of each. Melt 2 tablespoons of butter in the dutch oven. Sauté the onion and celery in the dutch oven until soft. Salt and pepper. Add the sausage back with its accumulated juice. Stir in the sage, thyme, and parsley.

3) Next add the bread crumbs and dust. I find it’s easiest to do this in two passes. Stir the it all up in the dutch oven.

Add the chicken stock. Again, I like to do this in steps. Add some, mix it in, add some more, mix it in. That way you know when to stop. The right amount of liquid yields soft toast crumbs, but is not soupy. Better to be sparing on the liquid as you can always add more later, but you can’t get rid of it. You’re just going to need to suss out this volume yourself.

4) Bring the stuffing up to temp over medium heat for a couple minutes. Just until it’s hot. Now taste it. It should probably not be salty enough, so add more salt, but be sparing as it concentrates a little before serving. If it’s lightly salty, to your preference, then it’s good.

Transfer to a crock pot set to Warm until you are ready to serve. I like to put another two one-tablespoon pats of butter on top of the stuffing when I put it in the dutch oven. It will slowly melt and butter is good, so fuck it why not.

Yields 6 to 7 quarts. So much.

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That Damned Voice

November 26, 2019 |

Thoughts

You know that voice in your head that hates everything you do?

This idea is so stupid.

Why are you wasting your time? Just give it a rest.

No one gives a damn about this garbage.

I hate that guy. I hate the way he talks to me. I hate the way he affects everything I try to make or do. I hate that he is always there, always nagging, always loud, always getting in the way of exercising the creative juju that helps me feel like a whole person.

But, you know what the worst part of that voice is? That voice is me. One hundred percent, inextricably me.

I wish I could blame his negativity on some external influence, but that would be dishonest. That jerk telling me how much I suck is me.

The voice is something I’ve always struggled with, especially when my job was more creative. I would stress and stress while working on a cut, wrestling with that voice the whole time. They’re going to hate this. This sequence doesn’t make sense. I am a fraud. This is horrible. I will never work again.

The voice was a constant companion back then, like an overly sensitive smoke alarm placed directly above your oven door that goes off at the slightest provocation. He would smell my lack of confidence, sensing that I was about to put my core in front of the jury and he would start screaming, screaming, screaming. Relentless.

Eventually, fear of failure would drown him out and I would push through the noise to get things done. That was the cycle. Project starts -> stress stress stress -> down to the wire -> recognition that I had just enough time to get the thing done -> execution. Far from the best way to work, but I managed to squeak by. I never excelled, never enjoyed the process, but always enjoyed the creative flow-state that resulted when the voice drove me to the precipice of fear. Then I could work.

Pretty frustrating. No use dwelling on what could have been had I unlearned this bad habit decades ago, though. You can’t change the past, only the decisions you make today.

Now, he’s a less common visitor since my work is, overall, much less creative than it once was. Now, I have numbers and math to back up the decisions I make and, as long as those make sense, there’s less uncertainty, less of my self on the line. The voice no longer has such frequent opportunities to make himself known.

But when he does?

It feels like he’s making up for lost time. He shouts about everything tiny choice I’m considering. The din is nearly impossible to cut through. I can feel it in my chest and in my head and in the jelly of my eyes. Without the fear to drown him out, I have no escape. The voice grinds until I cast that day’s creative idea away and give in to easier pleasures. Then reprieve.

Reprieve, however, is short lived. My mind is never quiet and during that easier pleasure I recognize the pattern of emotional self-abuse and get angry. Angry at myself for letting the voice win again. Frustrated for another night of giving in to an unearned reward. Depressed that this is just how it will always and forever be.

Luckily, that pattern, too, is just another bad habit. The only real way to do away with the voice is to unlearn his language. So, here I am, struggling through this post to try and shut him up.

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Noodle

November 20, 2019 |

Thoughts

In case you were wondering yesterday what Noodle looks like, she looks like this:

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Where have I been?

November 19, 2019 |

Thoughts

Hi there, The Black Laser friends. It’s been a while. Nearly three years, in fact, if we’re judging by the date on my Donald Trump post directly following this one. And, boy, is that post still unfortunately timely.

But where have I been since January 21, 2017? Here! Everywhere! Lots of changes! In the interest of keeping things brisk, let’s do a nice, vaguely chronological list.

I quit my job at Wax and left the industry all together. I loved my crew there, but I was burnt out on the ad industry and needed to change. My energy output was far greater than my energy input.
I moved from New York City to San Jose, CA. Similarly, I was pretty burnt on New York City. It’s the most fun place when you are 28 and single, but that gets old and you get married and move out to Queens and, one day, you wake up and think, “What the hell am I schlepping through the fucking snow for?” So we moved. Even better, I moved away without writing a break up letter with the city. Feel free to search for some examples of one of those on the internet.
I started a construction company that focuses on greenhouses called Verdant Construction with JJ, his dad John, and an Australian named Jason. I figured that it would be easy to jump head-first into an industry I knew basically nothing about. Whoops!
We moved from San Jose, CA to Soquel, CA, which is not too far, but the quality of life near the beach is wildly superior to San Jose.
I bought a monster grill that I get to cook on 4 times a week, even through the dead of winter. I haven’t seen snow, or my arch-enemy “the wintry mix,” in nearly three years.
I spent a semester at Cabrillo College in Aptos, CA taking some basic business classes. I realized that, suddenly!, I was a business man who knew pretty much nothing about business. Whoops again! So I thought to fix that problem without having to learn everything the hardest way: by failing.
After whetting my appetite for higher learning at Cabrillo and recognizing that community college was never going to meet my standards, I started an MBA program at the business school at Santa Clara University. Because I was not busy enough working full time and traveling all over the west coast for work. Whoops whoops whoops!
Our old cat Henry died. He grew more and more threadbare over his last six months and spent a lot of time sick, barfing much more frequently than even his usual high level. Eventually his motor control gave out and he quickly wound down. Rest in peace, business cat.
We got a kitten, Noodle, to keep Baby company. Her name was Dixie at the foster home, and I wanted to call her Cup. Sarah thought Cup o’Noodles which matched the fact that she (the kitten) is a floppy, cross-eyed, little cuddle monster who loves belly rubs. And, it turns out, that Baby didn’t want to company. We hope she warms up to Noodle over the next year.

And that’s pretty much it for me for the last 2.8 years. Many changes, some good, some not great. I’ve been a lot of places, met a lot of characters, and eaten a lot of sketchy burritos. Life is pretty good overall. I’ve got some upcoming projects to share, a strong new theme for 2020 I am getting started on early but won’t share quite yet, and a bit of a bug to exercise the old space bar. So, yeah, hi, I love you. Thanks for reading.

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