If I have one “regret” about moving from Chicago it is that I never took improv classes at The Second City. I attended a drop-in class once with a meetup group and it made me think, “I should try this.” I lollygagged, though, and when I would think about it more, nerves kept me from signing up.

So when I moved to Bellingham, I told myself more seriously, “you need to try this.” Well, I finally signed up for improv 101 at The Upfront Theater and last night was the first class. I was quite nervous leading up to it, but felt more at ease once I got in there, met the instructor and the others.

Guys, it was so much fun.

One of the first things our instructor Robin told us was that the point of us being in that room was to unleash our silliness, and that she was going to make us uncomfortable, and that is OK. That probably reads like a threat, but she was very friendly and funny, so it was mostly comforting and reassuring.

We played a bunch of silly games that built on each other. One of our first games had us in a circle counting off 1 to 7 and making a hand gesture that determined who would go next. Whenever someone messed up, the whole group had to come to the middle of the circle and yell loudly. She explained we do that as a reset and to get us back in the moment. She talked about how often in life we can focus on “Oh no did I mess it up? I messed it up.” In our silly game, the yelling acknowledges — even celebrates — the mess-up and lets us move on. She also talked about how creative people have said failure is a key to being creative; it pushes you to be more creative.

There were a bunch of little moments like this. Between each game she would ask us our opinions and observations, and I think there was some pretty cool things we all discovered. I have heard comedians talk about their love for improv and the building blocks, like “Yes and,” but I was pleasantly surprised with all the little bits of philosophy in the class. It was fascinating being thrown into a group of strangers, being really silly together, and laughing a lot. It’s a diverse set of people, too, and I’m loving them so far. Most of us went out for drinks afterwards and spent as long talking as we had been in class together. I’m looking forward to the coming weeks of being made uncomfortable, laughing, and new friendships.

I keep mentally circling around the themes I wrote about earlier this year in “Grown Up Thoughts”. I don't know if the word to describe how I’m feeling is “dissatisfaction,” or maybe “adrift.” I know I should probably talk to a therapist about it, but for now this is a form of therapy.

It’s been a rough few months this summer. I broke up with Amanda in June. It was a really tough decision, especially with the weight of having moved out here for the relationship. It was complicated, as relationships tend to be. We are still friendly and I anticipate it will remain that way. I don't regret moving here to try.

Now I find myself in a town that I generally like, but where I am not well-connected. It’s been lonely. I have a couple friends through church and I have been going to some meetups to meet new people. People are friendly here, but it takes time to build good connections. My lease is through May and I’m not sure what I’m doing at that point. When I think about moving, it feels a bit like a Catch 22. It is hard to get better connected if I’m planning on moving; moving most likely means starting from scratch again to make new friends. I am reminding myself that I do not have to decide right now. I’m just taking it a day at a time.

I will be 38 in a few months and the recurring internal questions are about what direction I want to head. I enjoy and am proud of my work, but a lot of things in the world bother me. The refugee crises are important to me, as well as the Black Lives Matter movement. I’ve really only done some online advocacy, which can be important, but I also want to do practical things. I’m currently looking into ways that I can get involved with helping refugees settle in America.

So that’s where I am at currently: What’s next?

That No One Asked For

First, don’t vote for Trump.

I have a hard time understanding the earnestness with which people point out third party candidates can’t win an election. I suspect there’s a desire to feel like you voted for the winning candidate. If that’s how you feel, it kind of makes sense to not vote third party. If you vote for a mainstream candidate, there’s still ~50% chance your vote won’t be for the winner, yet no one seems to lament those votes as “wasted.” I guess having a ~50% chance of voting for the winner feels better than x% chance of a third party.

With the current system, most states’ electoral votes go to the candidate with a plurality of the vote. If 45 vote for α, 44 vote for β, and 11 vote for γ, then α gets all of the electoral votes. This means only one vote is actually the pivotal vote. Each additional vote for the winning candidate has, technically, no effect. The likelihood of a state’s electoral votes being decided by one — and only one — vote is so incredibly small. So small I don’t think it’s worth worrying about. More: “Why Vote?”

What about the “spoiler effect”? If only those tens or hundreds of thousands had voted for _____ instead of a third party, the election would have gone differently. I reject these types of arguments. They are pure speculation and only serve to blame voters for the failures of the parties. You control your vote, not the vote of countless others. You are not responsible for a party/candidate that cannot convince you to vote for them. More: “The Myth of the Spoiler: Why the Machine Elites Fear Democracy”

The above is why I feel perfectly fine about voting third party (or abstaining, but that’s another post) and encourage others to explore third party options.

I know the system is heavily rigged against third parties and meaningful change. For example, the Commission on Presidential Debates (CPD) is run by the mainstream parties and keeps third parties out of the presidential debates. Supposedly, if a candidate averages 15% in five national polls, they can be included in the debates. CPD has not announced which five polls it’s using for the 2016 debates yet. The criteria to be in the presidential debates should be that you’re on enough state ballots to potentially win. Gary Johnson (LP) has a pending lawsuit against the CPD for exactly that.

Speaking of state ballots, the mainstream parties do a lot to stop third parties from even getting there. It varies from state to state, but let’s take Illinois for example. “New” parties must create a petition with a full slate of candidates; they cannot run a candidate for only one office or a handful of offices. Established parties don’t have that restriction. Then the “new” party must collect 25,000 signatures and addresses of registered voters for the petition. Established parties only need to collect 5,000. The signatures can only be collected during a specified 3-month period. The signatures can and will be challenged by the other parties. Signatures can be voided for simple errors like using an address different than your voter registration. The Libertarian Party of Illinois collects about twice the amount of signatures needed to ensure they’ll meet the 25,000 threshold, after challenged signatures are removed.

I try to stay grounded in reality about all of this. I realize the likelihood of a third party winning is very small. That’s no reason to vote for a mainstream candidate, though. Even small results could mean breaking important thresholds. Imagine if the Green and Libertarian Party were in the televised debates and millions were exposed to alternatives, probably for the first time. If a third party gets 5% of the vote, they’re eligible for public funding from the Presidential Election Campaign Fund in the next election. That would have amounted to about $10 million this election.

If you vote, make it for something, not against something else out of fear.

Finally, don’t vote for Trump.

Last Saturday I decided to explore some more of this gorgeous part of the country. The Cascade Loop is a 440-mile roadway through the Cascades. I have been through part of it when visiting Leavenworth, but there is much of it I have not been on yet. I chose to go down the other side of the loop, through North Cascades National Park to Diablo Lake. I only made a day trip of it, but would love to take a few days to go all the way around the loop and see everything. Below are some photos.

A month ago there were rumblings of big news coming from DC Talk. After 16 years of hiatus and each member moving on to solo careers or other bands, the DC Talk Facebook put up an image that just said “2017.” Fans understandably started speculating about reunion shows or a new album. A week later they made the big announcement . . . that there would be a “Jesus Freak Cruise” in 2017. A lot of fans were disappointed. Sure, it might be fun to go on a cruise and see DC Talk perform again, but it’s not feasible for most people. It was a poor marketing strategy to hype it up so much. I expect there will be a new album eventually, but leading with a cruise as your first big news after all that hype wasn’t smart.

A lot of the response online was negative and pretty funny, honestly. It got to the extent that Kevin Max himself posted this hilarious meme on Twitter later the day of the announcement:

I’m in a Facebook group titled 90s Christian Music Recovery Group. It is a good mix of reminiscing about bands we enjoy(ed), laughing at how bad some of it was, and a lot of dropping Carman into any discussion possible. It’s actually a really fun group if you grew up with ’90s Christian music.

As you might expect, people there had Things To Say when the announcement came out. The reaction was pretty snarky and funny. It didn’t take long for the memes to start up, and that’s what this post is really about. I wanted to share some of my favorites in a place where they won’t get buried by other posts. Photos are linked to the original and I’ve included links to YouTube.

And finally, the current header image for the 90s Christian Music Recovery Group:

There was an interesting discussion tonight where Shane challenged each of us to write more long-form posts. He told us how he enjoyed reading Tantek’s recent articles about the movie Tomorrowland and missed Tantek writing longer posts. Thus the encouragement to Tantek (and all of us) to write things longer than our short notes. And here I am.

Today was the first day of the 2016 IndieWeb Summit in Portland, OR. This is the sixth year for IndieWebCamp and the third year that I have attended. It’s a gathering for independent web creators (everyone from designers to hackers) to share ideas and actively create things for our personal websites. During the introduction today, Tantek talked about the “whys” of indieweb. I liked how he said it all really starts with one goal: self-empowerment. As we each achieve different levels of that, we can spread empowerment.

After the introduction, we had time to demo our websites and show what we have working now. These varied from basic websites that have not been touched in years to more advanced sites. It’s not a competition and there is no judgment if a site is lacking in design polish or is in-progress. It’s a good way to introduce yourself, your site, and some things you would like to achieve with it. There’s quite a variety of designs, topics, software, and techniques represented, so it is also serves to get some inspiration and encouragement for your own site.

The second half of the day consisted of sessions the attendees organized barcamp-style. There’s an empty schedule grid on the wall and anyone interested in facilitating a session on a topic wrote it on a Post-it note and put it on the grid. This scheduling took place in about 15 minutes and then the sessions started. I participated in sessions about accessibility with web hosting, Camlistore, supporting offline content, and building for longevity. There was a blind man who attended and the discussions about improving accessibility were some of the most interesting to me.

Tomorrow is the create day, where we will work on creating something that we can show a demo of at the end of the day. I’m looking forward to seeing what everyone makes!

I miss the conversational nature of Twitter. Perhaps it is because I don’t check it as often, or I need to curate my lists better, but I feel like there is an increase in the amount of noise there. Twitter is becoming more and more a place to syndicate your Instagram, Medium posts, and everything else, rather than fun conversation. Yes, I realize you are probably reading this from a link on Twitter or Facebook. (gRegor, you hypocrite.)

Of course, I’m not contributing much to the conversation on Twitter lately, either. I have been feeling pretty stressed, so that causes me to tweet less often. I don’t want to just tweet about how stressed I’m feeling, though. Ain’t nobody got time for that. One of the ways I decompress after work stress is working on my site or other indieweb projects. It feels nice to work on something I am much more in control of; I don’t have to answer to others or work on complex data problems. After putting that work in, I need to, well, actually write something. So that brings us to today.

I have half-joked about setting up a feed reader since Google Reader disappeared. The social aspects of it were quite fun at the time. I wonder if that era has passed now that we have so many more social-whatever things vying for our attention, but I am still tempted to try. I recently found a software library for reading RSS/Atom feeds and have been working on adding microformats support to it. Once I get that working, I am going to try setting up a feed reader and explore some of the social aspects Google Reader had. I don’t intend for this to be a big thing open to the public, but I will start with a small group of people and see how it goes. I will share the code, too, so if others are interested they can run their own copy.

If you’re interested, or just like to answer survey questions:

1) What feed readers have you used in the past?

2) Do you use any feed readers currently? If yes, which ones?

3) What are some of the most important features of a feed reader to you?

4) What are you least satisfied with about your feed reader (or feed readers in general)?

Google Music recommended Young Ejecta to me and I have been enjoying them quite a bit. The Planet is a nice mix of minimalist synthpop and euro disco. Note the album cover involves nudity, so probably not safe for work. The video below is safe, though.

Also, glad to see Napoleon Dynamite is still working it.

This past December I turned 37. Leading up to my birthday I did not have any particular thoughts about it, but in the following days I started to think about how I’m closing in on 40 now, and that’s quite a weird feeling.

It seems a particularly Generation X (and onward?) thing to talk about not-feeling-like-an-adult. I am sure it is a pretty universal feeling everyone has at some point, but my generation seems to voice it more often. I don’t think that’s a bad thing, generally. Oftentimes it comes with an empowering response of self-definition. Take the classic xkcd #150, for example:

I guess I feel cliché talking about how weird it feels to be approaching 40, but here I am. Several times I have thought “Wow, 40 is about half of your life. What are you going to do with the second half?” It can be an overwhelming feeling until I remind myself that it’s not something I have to decide right now and am then locked into for-evvv-er.

For the most part, I do feel like an adult, and I am pleased with the life choices I have made thus far. What I am realizing is that “I Don’t Feel Like an Adult” is just a chapter in the book, not the title of the book. “I Don’t Know What It Means To Be Forty” is an upcoming chapter. Other chapters include: “You’re Funny, Dammit! Nevermind Their Groans,” “Whittling 101,” and “Using Humor to Deflect Your Insecurities.”

A bit of housekeeping: the comment form is back! So let me know what you think about your age, soon-to-be age, or other chapters you want to see in my book.

Chances are good you are already familiar with Walk Off the Earth due to their creative covers of popular songs. They did a great cover of Adele’s “Hello,” but the alternate tap dance version below is even better.

Here’s a previous favorite: their beatbox cover of “I Knew You Were Trouble.”