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On the one hand, this picture of me doesn't look much like most of mine. On the other hand, I'm not sure that's a bad thing.

I should get photographed more often. Maybe then I'd have some pics I liked better. I do kinda like this one of me and Remington, though.

These are from ts4z's recent wedding. Go him!

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From Paul Graham's latest essay:

When I was in high school I spent a lot of time imitating bad writers. What we studied in English classes was mostly fiction, so I assumed that was the highest form of writing. Mistake number one. The stories that seemed to be most admired were ones in which people suffered in complicated ways. Anything funny or gripping was ipso facto suspect, unless it was old enough to be hard to understand, like Shakespeare or Chaucer. Mistake number two. The ideal medium seemed the short story, which I've since learned had quite a brief life, roughly coincident with the peak of magazine publishing. But since their size made them perfect for study in high school classes, we read a lot of them, which gave us the impression the short story was flourishing. Mistake number three. And because they were so short, nothing really had to happen; you could just show a randomly truncated slice of life, and that was considered advanced. Mistake number four. The result was that I wrote a lot of stories in which nothing happened except that someone was unhappy in a way that seemed deep.

Y'know, that man can write.

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This week, Rob says:

Recently a team of a thousand workers spent a week scraping off 600,000 wads of chewing gum that had become bonded to the surface of Beijing's Tiananmen Square. If you choose to accept it, Gemini, your assignment in the coming week is to carry out a procedure comparable to China's massive, intricate effort to wipe the slate clean. It may be time-consuming and a bit excruciating--the equivalent of shuffling around for hours on your hands and knees--but in retrospect I think you'll be very glad you did it. Its surprisingly cathartic effect will make you smarter and wilder and kinder and trickier.

Good to know. I'll watch for something like that.