Hopeless Romantic

For as long as I remember, I've always been a hopeless romantic.  I feel like that bear on the Simpson's, Sir Loves a Lot, "the bear that loves to love".

When I look for a good book, movie, video game, anime, or story of any kind, usually I prefer to look for a good love story in the mix.

But here is the problem... Most in the romance genre is geared toward women.  "Chick-flix" for movies.  Books are especially difficult to find geared toward men.  Often most of the books have female authors intended for a female audience.  The recent trend has been that if it isn't for women, then it seems intended for homosexual audiences.

I don't want any of that.  I have read that women don't care what point of view a story is from, be it male or female, but I think for guys, we prefer a male point of view.  At least I do.  So few fiction books with romance that I've found have a male protagonist, and those that do either are too adult or too childish.

Maybe I'm just picky, but I have a hard time finding what I want to read.  I have to go through hundreds of book descriptions just to find one or two that I even want to try.

Here is a pet peeve of mine:  Romance novels seem to be women's pornography.  I am fully opposed to porn, and I think that when often times men are judged by the images they view, women are far less judged by the books they read.  I don't think books should be sexually explicit any more than photos and videos.

Now that I've got that out of the way, I'll mention another pet peeve.  I have to filter through all of the junk just to find a good book.  Generally speaking, the tactic I've used is that if it's intended for YA (Young Adults), then it's not explicit.  Looking in YA general fiction frequently is the best way to find a cute romance.  Looking directly in the romance genre seems to yield results geared toward adult women.

I wish books had a keyword chain like IMDB does for finding similar themes.  Depending on the app or website, sometimes you have to enter the page just to get a synopsis, if there even is a decent one.  I'd like to be able to skip summaries, and categorize by point of view, age group, etc.

Here is what I look for: I want something cute.  Something where a guy likes a girl, and there is some suspense weather she likes him back.  I like awkward and flirty situations.  I don't want any sex scenes, just some sexual tension.  I prefer the guy to be a normal person, or maybe a geek.  One problem I have with many books written for women is how often the synopsis says the guy is the football quarterback, or a player, or some other jock type.  If a girl want to read that, it's her preference, but I don't want to read a book from a jock's point of view.  It just doesn't seem realistic to me that so many protagonists are athletic males.  I'm not saying they have to be a nerd, but frequently the people fit into the extremes.

As far as the girl interest of the boy in the book, she should be pretty, at least to the main character.  I don't want to read a book where the guy is taking pitty on a girl he doesn't even find attractive.  Other than that, I think it would be neat to see a "good guy, bad girl" story for a change, instead of the other way around.  That's why I liked Barry Lyga's The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl.  It's a good guy's point of view with a seemingly wild girl as his love interest.

I don't mind if the girl is good either.  I'm just giving it as a suggestion.

I also don't want a book that is skewed to all the ugly things of the world.  I don't know if I am just lucky where I grew up, but sometimes it shocks me how much drugs and partying there is in some books and movies.  I don't need nor want large numbers of expletives in what I read, nor do I car for homosexual references or crude conversations or topics.

In any medium, books or movies, it seems the author goes farther than they should or goes nowhere at all.  Now I realize the distance traveled is subjective, but to me, there is a point where they seriously derail a story.

Take, for instance, Maid in Manhattan.  I haven't seen this movie more than once and it's been a while, but what I remember is that after the couple slept together, we are supposed to continue to wonder if they'll be a couple.  Frankly, if they slept together, then all angst weather they like each other is pretty much void.  I'd much rather the book end with the couple getting engaged or married than have a love scene before a conclusion is made on the relationship.  Maybe you call me old fashioned, but a traditional value to waiting until marriage makes the book more romantic, and it's the moral thing to do.  If they don't wait, then what is there to look forward to in the marriage?  Simply the formality of the ceremony?

The least they can do is to keep the story clean by not being explicit.  That way I don't have to feel guilty after reading something, even if I don't agree with the decision of the protagonist.

One thing I love about Japanese culture, specifically in the form of anime and manga, is that they don't shy away from love stories from the male perspective.  I wish more books could be like that.  There are many anime and manga intended for male audiences, whereas in American culture they seem to only make romance a side-quest.  Granted, anime/manga can have "fan service",  but it entirely depends on the anime/manga.  They give many more options and sub-genres than I've seen in American films and shows.  Plus, since it's animated, they have the liberty of doing any theme from space to medieval times, whereas live action shows are usually strictly in their genre.  For example, you don't see too many romance movies that are science fictions in American film.




If anyone can think of a good book, movie, video game, or otherwise that has good romance elements in it like I describe above, please comment.  I think we need more resources to finding these stories.  I've googled and searched, but frequently I only find a small list of books that I like.





Here are some of my recommendations:

Books:

• The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl - Barry Lyga - A good normal teen boy who falls for a gothic, seemingly rebellious girl.
• Beautiful Creatures - Kami Garcia, Margaret Stohl - paranormal.  Boy falls in love with a witch while they are searching for answers about the past and visions they are having.
• Candy - Kevin Brooks - A good guy falls for a "bad" girl who is involved in prostitution.  Despite this, I don't remember anything explicit in the book.
• Sam's Winnings - Stan Morris - This one has the awkward situations I love.  A guy inadvertently "wins" the girl he likes as a possession in the eyes of the alien race that occupies Earth.  I will warn you that this is a little racy with the awkward situations, but I don't remember anything explicit.
• Out of Time: A paranormal romance - Monique Martin* - It has a male protagonist and it's even a forbidden love story between a professor and his student.  They do sleep together, but I don't remember anything explicit.  This story involves time travel, being stuck with the girl you are falling for, and a vampire in the real sense of the word.  None of this toothless vampires we've seen of late.
• Failing Test - J.M. Pierce* - A high school guy with super-powers falls in love with a high school girl.
• Hidden Steel - Doranna Durgin - A girl on the run who has lost her memory finds a gym owner that helps to protect her.  This one alternates points of view.
• Snowed in Together - Ann Herrick - Some teenagers and two teachers get snowed in at school.  Kind of an awkward situation.  I think there was a point that may have been suggestive of an intimate relationship, but I can't remember for sure.  It wasn't explicit though.

* Books I haven't finished reading.

Anime:

• Kimikiss Pure Rouge - PERFECT cute romance.  Little love stories of various teens in high school.  Well done.  I particularly like the story with the paper airplane.  It involves a really smart girl who feels numb and wants to feel something, so she kisses a guy as an experiment to know what love is.  The guy is willing to help her ;-) and is intrigued.
• Shakugan no Shana - Boy dies, falls in love with a "flame haze", a girl assigned to destroy evil monsters seeking to devour people from the spirit world.  Unlike most anime, I absolutely LOVE the opening and closing credits and it's music for the first part of the first season.

One small step for Gnome, one giant leap backward for Linux-kind

I remember when I got my first laptop.  It was running Windows XP, and for the first time in my life I could actually customize every aspect of the environment I was working in, unlike our family computer which required some consideration for others.

I would intentionally theme it to use tiny fonts and turn off any supposed eye candy as I didn't notice it anyway and it seemed to be a waste of RAM.

Ironically it was the eye candy that caught my attention with Linux.  I had already tried Mephis on my family computer, which I suppose wasn't so considerate of others, because I liked the idea of a free operating system.  I was going through my paranoia-of-copyright phase.  The idea of such an open policy to what you can and can't do with the operating system appealed to me.  I had previously hated trying to legitimately come up with Windows licenses and had resorted to using Windows 98 SE because I didn't have enough licenses for XP.

It was shortly after this time that a friend showed me Compiz Fusion.  If you haven't seen it, I suggest you search youtube.  Basically it's a collection of eye-candy goodness for linux.  However I have found it to be very practical too.  It makes it easy to manage windows and assign keyboard shortcuts to virtually anything you want.

I decided to take the plunge and install Ubuntu.  I had many difficulties and the learning curve was great.  I essentially had to force myself not to go to Windows when I didn't know how to do something, kind of like immersing yourself in another country in order to learn the language.

With the help of my friend, I was finally able to get linux set up how I liked it.  Things became fluid, easy to use, and highly customizable.  I came to feel like everything was easier and better on linux except for some of the bugs I would run into and the lack of commercial games.

Compiz is what brought me to linux.  Now I love other things immensely too, such as the terminal and package manager, as well as gnome 2's layout/organization.  Slowly but surely they worked out many kinks and Ubuntu seemed to actually be a perfect 10 at version 10.04 and 10.10.

That's when it started going down hill for me...

I was used to how I had tweaked my computer.  I had very nicely organized shortcuts and macros to do virtually everything I wanted.  Ubuntu was toying with the idea of using Unity on a netbook version of the operating system.  I decided to try it in 2010 just to see if it was more light weight or any better.  I ran the live CD and found that the graphics couldn't handle the new interface and it was buggy.

In 2011, someone at Ubuntu got the brilliant idea to put the netbook edition of Ubuntu as the primary desktop edition.  Like fitting a round peg into a square hole, they tried to put a tablet interface on a desktop operating system.

Everything about Unity seemed to require more clicks and a whole new paradigm to thinking about desktop applications.  It was application-centric like a Mac instead of process-centric like Windows and Gnome 2.  I decided to switch to "classic Gnome" and read around about the recent trend in interfaces.

To my horror, I couldn't just switch linux distributions and get gnome back in the long term.  Gnome was changing too, and it seemed to be changing very similar to what Unity looked like to me.

I had made the plunge a few years before this point to try linux, so I was willing to try something else new.  I tried Gnome 3 for a few days.  I switched back to Gnome 2 using substitute curse words under my breath.

Who's brilliant idea was it to change Gnome so fundamentally that it didn't even resemble the same project?  It's one thing if a new project, like Unity had shown up as an alternative, but they actually went as far as to overwrite existing libraries and dependencies with their new creation.

If the people at Gnome wanted to create a new window manager, then they should have given it a different name.  Now I was finding that the longer Gnome 3 existed, the less the programs I used and loved in GTK would work with Gnome 2's libararies.

Gone were the simple menus organized intuitively.  They replaced it with an intrusive menu that covers the screen, allows little customization, and has huge icons big enough for your thumb on a touch screen.

I felt like Linus Torvalds did, that my "sane" interfaces had been replaced with something with the intent to make it difficult to get any actual work done.  I remember shortly after reading something like "Linus is starting to like Gnome 3" only to read a quote from him that made it sound like it was becoming tolerable.  Hardly and endorsement.  Even funnier, one person suggested to Linus that he make "his own distro."  How ironic.

So I tried newer versions of linux, trying to find one that had later drivers and kernel for my laptop, but still supported Gnome 2.  That's when I found out about Mate.

Good old Gnome 2 menu system

Mate is a great idea.  They forked Gnome 2 and basically did a search and replace on everything "gnome" in the code for "mate".  I highly support the initiative.  It pains me to think how much easier it would have been if Gnome 3 wouldn't have overwritten functionality with their new interface instead of making a new project for it.

Unfortunately, now I'm in a bind.  I'm uncertain to the direction linux is taking.  I'm hoping Mate will be well supported, but for now it's annoying how things using GTK2 vs GTK3 have to have their theme's synchronized if the theme exists for both, and there are bugs from the refactoring.

Mate created a fork of the major Gnome 2 projects, like nautilus becoming cuja, gedit becoming pluma.  The problem is, I develop plugins for gedit 2.  So now what do I do?

On the one hand, they have written gedit 3 to work and look much like gedit 2.  But there are some problems.  One, the plugin infrastructure is totally different, requiring me to rewrite every plugin.  For plugins I didn't write, I have to wait until they are ported or port them myself.  There have been some annoying bugs in gedit 3 with all of the new code as well.  The terminal doesn't match the mate-terminal theme, and the keyboard shortcuts for the tools weren't working for a while.  I'll admit, the plugin structure does seem improved, but is gedit as light weight as it was before?

On the other hand, we have pluma, gedit 2 rebranded.  I can easily port my python plugins to it, but some of the functionality or C plugins haven't all been successfully ported yet.

I feel stuck at this crossroads.  Do I make my plugins for pluma, or for gedit 3?  Will pluma be around in the future when even one of the guys working on mate seemed to say they just use gedit.

People may say I should leave gedit anyway, but I want a native, light weight syntax highlighter that looks and feel like the rest of the OS.  Not something bloated like Eclipse or graphically out-of-place and non-integrated like jedit (file browser integration).

In the mean time, I need to get work done.  So I've switched to Linux Mint 11.  It's still supported for now, has gnome 2, with even the fun little tooltip scrollbars, and still plays nicely with Compiz Fusion.  I've had friends suggest Xubuntu, but they have the same problems of mixing old with new GTK dependencies as Ubuntu does.  Ubuntu, even when first switching to Unity made compiz much harder to configure with emerald not being in the package manager and Mac-like themes conflicting.  I still remember maximizing a window with the window buttons on the right only to have them move to the left when maximized.  If I wanted a Mac, I would have chosen a different distribution.

Here is the thing I really don't understand... Gnome developers claim they have done usage studies, but in the end, it's like they've abandoned their market.  Even if you are arguing that Gnome 3 is more intuitive for the computer illiterate, then I ask you how many computer illiterate people do you know that use Gnome?  I have no problem with them trying new things, but I have to get work done, so couldn't they have done their playing somewhere else?  Some distributions, perhaps Edubuntu, would be a great place to want to try things out on computer novices, but by overwriting they make it difficult to get the interfaces we've all come to love and understand.

Linux has come a long way in becoming the wonderful interface that can put to shame both Windows and Mac.  But now they seem to regress.  They abandon their main markets just after getting some real polish to their product.

I know some will say "linux is free" and "go make something you like yourself".  I love that linux is free, and if I had more time I'd love to make things better in it than I already do.  That said, I find it very restrictive how Gnome has essentially forced it's customers to either a paradigm shift or to get lost.  That's why I support Mate and their efforts, since Gnome 3 should have been the fork instead.

Sources:

Linus Torvalds rant - I want my sane interfaces back!

Linus Torvalds google plus post comment:

Where there is room to do things several different ways, recognizing different people have different needs, Fluxbox, XFCE, KDE, LXDE, etc, etc, etc, allow end users latitude in what options are available and how they configure their desktop. Whereas Gnomes attitude is “This is what is best for you, it is best for you in the long run. You will like it and thank us later. We have usability studies to prove it.”

I keep checking back to see if things have changed, but they only seem to be more restrictive. So I vote with my feet. I run and support (with code, documentation and helping users) other desktops.

Sick and tired of gnome shell

Mate Desktop