Dusting off:
- Peter Murphy: Deep
- Cypress Hill: Cypress Hill & Black Sunday
- Fugazi: Steady Diet of Nothing (not that it was dusty)
- Joe Strummer & the Mescaleros: Global-a-Go-Go

Dusting off:
Everything But The Girl: Walking Wounded
Ani Difranco: Dialate
Type O Negative: Bloody Kisses
The Clash: The Clash
The Offspring: Ignition

Dusting off:
- The Sisters of Mercy: Floodland (Man, this has been hitting the spot lately)
- The Cars: The Cars

Dusting off:
- Alice in Chains: Dirt
- Soul Coughing: El Oso
- Nirvana: In Utero
- Dr. Dre: The Chronic

Dusting off:
- Red Hot Chili Peppers: Mother’s Milk [EMI]
- Electronic: Electronic [Warner Brothers]
- Nick Cave & the Bad Seeds: Henry’s Dream [Mute]

It brought great sadness to my heart today to hear of the death of the visionary author and dreamer, Arthur C. Clarke. Clarke is best known as the author of 2001: A Space Odyssey, and collaborating on film of the same name with Stanley Kubrick.

I spent hours upon hours in Perkins and Denny’s in my early 20′s, discussing what the Monolith was, why HAL did what he did, what the Star Child is, analyzing every single shot of both movies, praising Clarke and Kubrick—obsessing, geeking, loving. Walking home from work today, thinking about the profound impact his work has had on my life, I realized just how deep in my psyche it runs. If you look closely, you’ll see references to 2001 and 2010 all over the place in my life: the inscription on my iPod, “Dr. Chandra—will I dream?”; my hard drives at home, all named after moons of Jupiter; my Powerbook, named TMA-1 (let’s see who else out there is geeky enough to get that). I never read 2061 or 3001; I guess it’s time.

I watched 2010 for the umpteenth time just a few days ago. David Bowman’s final transmission, “My God—it’s full of stars,” and the Monolith’s message of peace at the end still give me chills every time.

Among everything else, Clarke’s legacy includes his Three Laws:

“When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible, he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong.”

“The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible.”

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”

Thank you. We’ll miss you.

More information: New York Times BBC News Wikipedia

Gary Gygax died last week and the universe did not collapse. This surprises me a little bit, because he built it.

Adam Rogers, senior editor at Wired and contributer to the New York Times, has written a fantastic eulogy to Gary Gygax, co-creator or Dungeons & Dragons, and along with it, an equally fantastic ode on the joy of being a geek. Also make sure to check out Sam Potts’ brilliant accompanying diagram.

I confess: I played role-playing games as a kid. I’ll also confess that I’ve never played Dungeons & Dragons; my parents were of the school that believed it was connected to Satan worship. (While I’m at confession, I might as well also confess that I wore a floor-length cape to my Senior Prom.) But in junior high, I spent many hours in basements with my friends Dean, Kirk, Paul, Gray & Rob, drinking Jolt, eating chips and candy, playing other role-playing games, pretending to be an elf, a dwarf, or a character from the Star Wars universe. And while I never taught myself Pascal (see Sam Potts’ diagram for reference), I did teach myself BASIC on my Apple IIc, checked out BBSs on my 300-baud modem, and later on in life, taught myself enough web programming knowledge to make a career out of it. And anybody who knows me knows that I periodically clear a room with some geeky discussion, more often than not, about music, typography or computers.

In adulthood, role-playing memories showed up in a few favorite scenes of some favorite TV shows and movies. I love the end of Freaks & Geeks when pseudo-tough-guy Daniel Desario joins the geeks for their RPG, and the scene in SLC Punk when the young Heroin Bob breaks up their game to introduce Stevo to punk.

This story brings up a lot of fun memories — things that helped make me who I am today. Dean, Kirk, Paul, Gray & Rob, I hope those days served you as well as they did me. To Gary Gygax: thank you. Long live geeks!

When I was a teenager, I remember people talking about how teenagers thought they were going to live forever. As I have grown up, I have come to understand both that and my own mortality more and more. Friends and relatives have died, my patch of gray hair is now more than just a patch, and small cuts and bruises don’t heal as well anymore.

We are all given a certain number of days on this earth: statistically, as an American living in 2008, around 28307 — 77.5 years. Certainly, we’re all different, and of course there are things we can do to shorten or extend that. Smoking for 15 years didn’t help, but quitting almost 8 months ago did, for one example.

But statistically speaking, I have 77.5 years. So do you, dear reader (at least you American readers.)

A post last August by colleague and friend Jeremy Zilar inspired me to look at my own lifespan visually. It started as a simple graph in Illustrator, similar to Jeremy’s, but soon grew to more.

Enter Lifeline.

So with a little help from some friends, I developed Lifeline: a simple, php-based project to show us the days of our lives. Take a look at my life, or check out your own. Bookmark the results on your iPhone if you want a reminder.

I have set Lifeline up as an open source project, and it will continue to grow — improvements are already in the works.

As of the night I write this, at 33 years old, my life is statistically 43% lived. 12124 out of 28307 days. Is this where I wanted to be at 43%? Where do I want to be at 50%? 60%? How about 80%?

How will that effect what I choose to do today?

Thanks to all who helped with this, whether through inspiration, answering questions, helping with code or just being worth living for. Jeremy, Travis, Adam and Alyson, Thompson & Sarah.