ThomStratton.com

Jason Mraz is someone I suspect I could like a lot if I got a chance to know him. He seems to really enjoy his audiences and interacting with fans, as evidenced by this concert video where he spots a young man with a shaker in the audience and invites him on stage to play. Stan, the young man, shows some bravery, even chutzpah, and adds in his own harmony. Mraz is clearly surprised, but decides to roll with it. The result is fun to watch.

He also seems to get a lot of mileage out of his duet “Lucky”, singing it often with fans in concerts or in side moments. In this case it was with the winner of a Jason Mraz cover contest.

In this case he heard a fan sing before the concert and invited her onstage to sing with him.

Here he happened to step outside a concert venue and encountered a fan who couldn’t get in, but waited outside hoping to see him. I dunno, perhaps he’s really a big jerk, but I can’t help but like a guy who treats his fans this way. If this is typical he deserves all the success he’s found.

Muslim extremists murder a dozen people at a French magazine office. A father throws his five year old off a bridge. Boko Haram kills over 2000 people and burns an entire town to the ground. A jet crashes, taking all passengers with it. A family’s plane crashes, killing everyone except their young girl, who manages to find her way to a nearby house. A five year old was killed in a random accident with a lunchroom table. 2015 seems to be off to a rather depressing start.

It’s enough to make me want to gather my family near, give them a big hug, and thank God I’ve been given another week with them.

Even without all the nastiness in the world, life is fragile. We Americans like to think we can legislate away pain, suffering, and death, but we’ve only gotten a little better at postponing it. Even then, something totally unexpected can happen at any time. It’s human nature to take things for granted. Heck, it’s impossible to function without taking things for granted. The trick is to spend at least some time regularly appreciating the things that matter most.

Let me just say that I have an awesome family. These people are my world. I don’t appreciate them as much as I should, but I do appreciate them. They’ve become such an integral part of my life that I’m not sure I could recognize my life without them. It was hard enough a few years ago when they went on vacation for a month without me. I still could talk to them, still got email from them. I could hop on a plane and be with them within hours. If I truly lost them I’m not sure what I would do. I’m not sure who I would be.

If you’ve got loved ones close by, take a few moments to really enjoy them. I suspect 2015 won’t always be this depressing, but we should still appreciate what we’ve got while we’ve still got it.

The company I work for requires that we change our passwords every 60 days. There are some 40 different systems, servers, etc., which require a password to gain access. It takes me close to half an hour every time I change my password just to update all the different places I need access. I have to have a spreadsheet to remind myself of all the places I need to change. And I do it, because if I don’t the systems kick me out after those 60 days. They’re fairly careful about their electronic security (physical security is another issue altogether, but I won’t go into that).

I’m sorry to say I’m not nearly so careful with my own security. Most people aren’t. It’s partly because it’s just darn inconvenient to keep changing your password to get into Facebook. I’m more cautious than most, I suspect. I imagine a lot of people set every site to remember them and to remember their password to log them in automatically.

The other reason I find it hard to be more secure is just the sheer number of places for which I need logins. Most sites, in order to track you and gain more information about you and your habits, require some sort of login. I’m not even conscious of just how many places are this way. And, truth be told, it’s probably not that big a deal if you’re not that secure on those sites. But the easiest habit is to use the same login for every site you visit. Should “Jane’s Webcomic Review” get hacked, chances are the hacker would get the same login and password we use for our online banking. Am I right?

If I have 40 different places to change my password at work, I probably have over a hundred online. And I never change them regularly (fortunately my bank requires me to). But I should. And I don’t. It’s easy to do at work because…well, they pay me to. Doing that with my personal accounts requires sacrificing my free time. It would be easier, and less a hassle, if I could just remember to go in and change each password the next time I login. But that’s hard to remember to do, and harder to remember when I last visited that site. Some are easy, of course, since I visit there several times a day. Others, though, I may see once a year.

But I vow this year I will change all my passwords at least once. I should have done it long ago. It’s definitely time.

It’s become something of a tradition around our house that I read the latest Brandon Mull book out loud to my kids. Even my oldest, nearly-fourteen-year-old hasn’t decided she’s too old for them yet. Which is fine with me. We can usually guarantee a quality experience with Brandon Mull’s works.

Rogue Knight is no exception. A continuation of the Five Kingdoms series begun with Sky Raiders, we pick up again with Cole, Mira, Jace and Twitch as they continue their quest to set things right in The Outskirts and overcome the evil High King–Mira’s father. They’ve joined up with the resistance and have set out in search of Mira’s other sisters, this time in the kingdom of Elloweer, a land with both a rampaging knight conquering city after city and a strange magical force turning the population into an army of drones. On top of that, Cole is still searching for his friends who were kidnapped to The Outskirts with him, and perhaps developing a magical power of his own.

Brandon Mull has one of the most overactive imaginations I’ve seen, and Rogue Knight delivers plenty of interesting and cool stuff. The plot begins to resemble the previous book a bit, but there are plenty of other plotlines to keep things interesting, and we get more pieces of the over-arching puzzle along the way. Elloweer is a new realm with new rules to learn, and there are other players in the grand scheme to make things more interesting. There’s also ample adventure, interesting new sidekicks, and good people trying to do the right thing against terrible odds.

As I mentioned above, my fourteen-year-old daughter likes to listen as well. She’s a sophisticated enough reader and a writer herself, so she and I have a side game going of trying to guess what will happen from the clues given. I’m glad to say we’re maybe right half of the time. Mull may write mid-grade novels, but he doesn’t take shortcuts. His stories make sense and hang together well, but they’re not entirely predictable. He likes to keep you guessing, which is good, because we like to guess. My younger boys have gotten into the game, too, and they’re at least as good as my daughter and I at spotting what’s coming–and they’re not often right either.

These are fun books. Either I’m not so old yet or Mull has a gift at putting wonder in his books, because I’m often as excited about his worlds and interesting elements as my kids. I love reading these to them, and they still put up with me reading to them, even though they could undoubtedly all three read the book separately in the time it takes me to read it to them. But as long as they want me to read to them, I’ll keep reading to them. And as long as Brandon Mull keeps writing perhaps there’s a chance I’ll be reading to them for years yet.

I haven’t posted for a while. I took vacation through the holidays, and that included, to a large degree, blogging. To be honest, I didn’t miss it. Somewhere in the last month or so I’ve decided I’ve run out of things to say. I’m tired of commenting on politics, society, celebrities, and the like. My writing doesn’t progress fast enough to merit more than a monthly update at best. And that’s assuming anyone cares, which no one should, really. It’s not like anyone is desperately waiting for a sequel. (I mis-typed the last as “suquel”, which should probably be canonized as a new noun. I can think of a lot of places it would apply, including my own writing.)

I’ve finished some books lately, and played some new games, for which I should post reviews. I probably will. Eventually. As you’re probably guessing about now, my motiviation level is on the low side of Congress’ approval rating.

Don’t worry (or perhaps be very afraid), this won’t last. I’m sure I’ll find some motivation and/or some new nugget of thought that must be inflicted on the world before long. We writers are an optimistic bunch.

I became aware of Alex Boyé from his cover of Coldplay’s “Paradise” with The Piano Guys, and paid attention to a few of his other videos that came out after that. Mostly what I’ve seen is kinda quirky, a little over the top, and I’m not sure if the disparate elements he brings to things entirely fit.

Then I found his version of the traditional Black Spiritual “Wayfaring Stranger” and was blown away. This song has soul. It may not be for everyone, but feel free to give it a try:

On a lighter note, here’s another cover of his that is simply a lot of fun: Ho Hey, by the Lumineers.

This is still one of my all-time favorite Christmas songs. And this is one of my all-time favorite arrangements thereof: