Skip to main content

Ralsina.Me — Roberto Alsina's website

As I was saying yesterday...

I have not post­ed in this blog in a long time.One ofthe rea­sons is that a whole lot of things have hap­pened in my life, and I have not blogged about them.

It has got­ten so that if I were to "catchup" here, I would need to post a 35-­page post with 300 pic­tures, 100 code snip­pet­s, 50 rants and maybe 3 youtube videos.

So... screw that and let's pre­tend that was all a dream and that you (if there are still any "y­ou" out there) have not been ne­glect­ed, and all is good.

So, what am I post­ing about? Oh, just a short rant.

I am sad­dened and pissed off by peo­ple who proud­ly say "I don't know any­thing about X", where X is math, knit­ting, as­tro­physic­s, foot­bal­l, medicine, pet care, hair­dress­ing, cof­fee brew­ing, pol­i­tic­s, or dol­phin-rear­ing (this does­n't ap­ply to wine. It's per­fect­ly ok not to care about wine, be­cause most peo­ple who do care about wine are fak­ing it).

There are tons of things I know noth­ing about. And you know what? Each one is a per­son­al fail­ure. Ev­ery time I see my mom knit­ting, and I sim­ply can­not grasp how the hell it work­s, it piss­es me of­f.

While it looks mind-crush­ing­ly bor­ing, she's ba­si­cal­ly tak­ing a string, make some knots us­ing stick­s, and pro­duc­ing a freak­ing sweater. How cool is that? I say pret­ty damn cool.

When­ev­er I see some­thing that looks bor­ing, or un­in­ter­est­ing, I al­ways think, there is, some­where, a per­son who has spent years of his life be­ing the best at that. There is, some­where, a per­son which is the world's au­thor­i­ty on how to tie a string to make a sweater.

There is some­one who is the non-­plus-ul­tra of lay­ing out coloured tiles so it looks good in the shape of a dol­phin.

There is some­one who is the best at us­ing an in­cred­i­bly in­ac­cu­rate spray­can to draw on a wal­l.

There is some­one who can look at a lot full of cars and tell you the log­i­cal or­der to re­move them so they leave in min­i­mum time.

There is some­one who can hit a small bal­l, fly­ing at 150k­m/h with a round stick, 1 out of ev­ery 3 times.

There is some­one who can guess what word goes with al­most ev­ery short def­i­ni­tion.

There is some­one who can tell you all reg­u­lar span­ish verbs that start with T.

There is some­one who knows all about the his­to­ry of jour­nal­ism in Tur­key (I ac­tu­al­ly walked in front of the Mu­se­um of Turk­ish Jour­nal­is­m, and it pains me that I could­n't go at the time).

There is some­one who knows the di­a­log for ev­ery simp­sons episode.

Ev­ery one of those things, and bil­lions more, may be bor­ing to me, but that is sure­ly be­cause I am fail­ing at notic­ing the fun in it, it's a rough­ness of my soul, a fail­ure of my per­cep­tion, a flaw in my vi­sion, which crip­ples me in­to say­ing they are all bor­ing.

Bore­dom is not a sign of su­pe­ri­or­i­ty, it's a sign of in­fe­ri­or­i­ty. Next time you see a bored per­son, some­one that has noth­ing he wants to do, who looks con­de­scend­ing­ly at those who are pas­sion­ate about some­thing, no mat­ter what that may be, feel sad for him.

Looking for Jake

Cover for Looking for Jake

Review:

This short sto­ry col­lec­tion is all sorts of good. Sad­ly I ran out of Chi­na Mieville to read, I will have to find some more.

Iron Council (New Crobuzon, #3)

Cover for Iron Council (New Crobuzon, #3)

Review:

Hap­py to read an­oth­er New Crobu­zon book. It seems to me that the world there is get­ting just a tad too weird, it seems that ev­ery­thing is there, adding new sen­tient races as need­ed, with ex­act­ly the tal­ents re­quired for the plot.

How­ev­er, the plot it­self moves for­ward nice­ly and the end­ing is pret­ty good (and that has been a Mieville weak­ness in some ear­li­er book­s).

All in al­l, liked it a lot.


Contents © 2000-2023 Roberto Alsina