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Watching "Hard Day's Night"... it's legit funny, and charming all over the place. I'm finally learning to tell the 4 early Beatles apart... John has the longish face, Paul is a babyface, Ringo has the nose, and George is the other one. The other day I had a $5 of Kohl's coupon I used for half of Lego's "Wolverine Mech Armor" kit.


With the claws and hands it looks kinda cool, but it was weirdly unsatisfying to build. Melissa explained why - this is basically a buildable action figure, in a lot of ways it's not a classic Lego kit. (Indeed, its lack of studs to put other bricks on is almost Bionicle level. Also I don't think Wolverine-brand Yellow is a traditional Lego color...)

I watched a Evolution of Lego Star Wars video, and its feeling generally is "look how much better the newer versions look!", but the old ones from the 1990s - yeah, they just looked more Lego-y.

I never understood the "build the model once then keep it like that" mentality, but I think Lego has really leaned into it. The library of pieces has expanded so much, which means A. many of them are difficult to think of a use for in different contexts B. It's hard to keep track of all the possibilities in what bricks you do have and C. even if you know just the right hinge, finding enough matching pieces to build something symmetrically and with appropriate colors is a challenge.

Of course it's a spectrum. I probably wouldn't have been as fascinated by Lego if it was all "what can you build out of square bricks?" the hardest-core purist might demand. But Lego has basically always been "CAD for kids", or I guess now you'd say like 3D printing - the main way of making something with a real design sensibility but without the skeletal look of Erector sets, K'nex, or Tinker Toy.

80s Space Lego was interesting, with the "Blacktron" sets you started getting cooler wings and other options - but a medium-talented builder kid still had a shot at making something cooler than the kit the pieces came with.

The late 90s Star Wars - the way the X-wing came with these awesome clicky hinges was great. And like I write about in 2020, "Life on Mars" continued that path, but there was still a Lego-ness to it.

Now, I dunno. These sets are so fancy, and they might have been what let Lego survive and prosper. And they have the "Creator" sets that are often a bit more back to basics, and show by example how you can use the same set of bricks in a different formation. But somehow it feels like a step backwards from the space ships and robots I'd really like to build.

So it's a spectrum from "just squares" to "as real-world as possible", and I know this whole rant has an "Old Man Yells at Cloud" aspect. I do wish the answer was a bit more in the middle. (I don't regret splitting my childhood collection 3 ways for 3 families I love, but I do wish the pieces in my current rebooted collection, mostly with gifts given to me as a grownup, had more of the spirit of the old stuff.)

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woke is "the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them."

I'm technically a Facebook "Top Fan" of Jeremy's Razors who pitch shit like "stop buying razors from woke companies that hate you". (Daily Wire started up this shilling project when Harry's stopped running ads with them.)

I'm not going to tell you that we live in the cyberpunk future. But I am going to say that we live in a future we didn't plan for. A future we can learn about by reading the genre. A future that might one day be called post-cyberpunk.

Intriguing book, cowritten by a human and the computer system GPT-3. My Science + Spirituality reading/discussion group is reading some excerpts for our next Zoom meeting next week, let me know if you'd be interested in attending.

Also, we'll be listening to Act One, "Ghostwriter", in The Ghost in the Machine episode of This American Life, where a woman uses GPT-3 to work through her grief about the loss of her sister back in college.

GPT-3 is... something. Astounding the coherence, and maybe sometimes the insight. You get to wondering, is there a "there there" or is any wisdom from it just "borrowed". But then you get to thinking... maybe all human knowledge is borrowed. Maybe all thinking is basically powered by metaphor.

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Hey remember when Timothy McVeigh blew up the Oklahoma Federal building, killing 168 folks (including a bunch of kids) and injuring 680 others? That's the QAnon "Stop the Steal" vibe right there - the American militia movement.

The formula for achieving a successful relationship is simple: you should treat all disasters as if they were trivialities but never treat a triviality as if it were a disaster.

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Me + Melissa @ CarGurus Holiday Party 2020 - that's Flo Rida on the House of Blues stage:
For a second time I sat in for a practice with "Art Crimes Unit", a casual little band my buddy Johnny drums for. It's nice to be able to slot into a group as a suitable replacement for a different bass player - not just in an all brass band or as a novelty "hey it's a tuba!"... I have a way to go but I've built up a certain set of "by ear" skills and can usually put down a decent groove. (It's a bummer there's wasn't more by-ear training when I was growing up, but I've heard the trend is to emphasize is it more, along with traditional "play what's on the chart in front of you" skills.) From my devblog - Dunno if anyone will find this useful, but geeks on macs who want to add simple captions to a series of images and then make a PDF from 'em might find it a decent solution...

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If I take death into my life, acknowledge it, and face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life - and only then will I be free to become myself.

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Huh guess it's ok to write "shithole" without asterisking or anything on news outlets now. Thanks Donald!

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Why is it usually drawn as science vs religion when there's philosophy to split the difference?

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

New diet plan: NB3.
No Breakfast, No Booze => No Bang-Bang.
Meaning if I violate either of the first two before dropping ten pounds (the same pounds I had lost in September, heh) I send $100 to the NRA, which I really don't want to do.

(Black iced coffee doesn't count as breakfast.)

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Feeling weird that I like David Bowie as a concept more than I like most of the music, but it's probably just my idiosyncratic preferences about drums. A month or two ago a member of Edwin F. Taylor advised me to temper my surprise about the intolerance of religions to other religions, and at how each seems incapable of recognizing the reality of a world with a plethora of faiths. This is my response to his email. I hope people aren't too bugged by it, but if people are interested in my path away from traditional faith, this tries to explain it.

Well, surprise is only one factor; but more irritation, and frustration.

I'm probably making a similar fallacy in terms of "why isn't everyone more like me?" but...
I realize now that Thursday's annoyance is an echo of what started me down my path to skepticism. (Personal testimony ahoy!) I remember it quite distinctly; I was at a summer music camp run by The Salvation Army in the very early 1990s, and I started to think about all the devout moslems in the world. I mean there I was, a literal son of a preacher man (sweet-talkin' optional), trying my darndest to be a good Christian, but if I had been born the son of an Imam, wouldn't I be striving just as hard to be a good Moslem? (This was combined with a sense of suspicion about the clockwork nature of the tearful repentance and mini-revival 'altar call' that would occur the Sunday at the conclusion of this particular camp, but never the Sunday at the beginning. It seemed like the spirit would move in more mysterious and less predictable ways than that, and that some large measure of psychology and manipulation was actually to thank. Or blame.)

I think the teenage years are a natural time and place to have this kind of realization, and the rebellious attitude to be able to act on it. And yet it is not nearly as widespread a changeover as I would have expected, or preferred.

(I'd love a world with more
"When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."
and less
"Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.")

The 3rd pillar of doubt was the feeling that I was still living a "sunday school" life, following my church's precepts against drinking etc, and (if memory of the timing serves) making my cautious steps to exploring connections with girls guilt-ridden and tentative, but many of my peers in the church, seemingly not even struck with the conceptual doubts that I was having, also seemed to be having a ton more hedonistic party fun than I was, and not recognizing a discrepancy. (Or being able to make up for it at that aforementioned 'altar call') I found that kind of picking and choosing, accepting the comfortable and rewarding bits of faith and the promise of eternal life, leaving aside the less pleasant rules and regulations, kind of repulsive. (Apparently I absorbed some very puritan protestant principles!)

Maybe some of my ability to stray from the fold comes from a position of privilege, like Upton Sinclair said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!" My high school years seeds of doubt were able to blossom into "not going to church every week" sprouts in college, and I suppose that reflects both the shelter college provides, as well as the lack of a sense of threat from "The Others" to keep me towing the line.

Over the years I've mellowed a bit, I suppose, and thought about how brittle the faith was I had set up for myself. My parents were pretty liberal, given that they were protestant ministers, and so even before this teenage turning point I had made efforts to see, say, Genesis as a poetically phrased recapitulation of planetary formation and evolution. I guess being smart enough to see that those efforts at reconciliation with this particular flavor of faith were local-environment driven, but not wise enough to accept that dichotomy and still look to the moral and spiritual heart of the Faith of my Fathers, stunted spiritual growth in me. And these days, it's the lack of meta-awareness and tendency to cling to some flavor of literalism that keeps me away from traditional faiths.

A few times I've seen thing that pointed to my experience being a bit provincial; I don't remember the names, but there was one online series of articles from an (ex-?) priest about his time in the seminary, and his claim that a lot people in that role have also shaken the literal parts of their belief, and also how the monks of various "incompatible" faiths seem to understand each other a lot more than the ministry. Also, there was a liberal Archbishop from England (sorry I don't have better citations for these) who said something like "well, of course the resurrection of Jesus isn't literally true, but it still is a story, of God's love for his people, that is at the heart of our faith". That sort of blew my mind at the time (probably mid to late 20s) and pointed me to think about the "Great Revival" roots of my protestant culture. (Hmm; might not be technically accurate, given The Salvation Army's English origins, but close enough.)

Over the past few days I've been thinking about the term "Cosmopolitan" (too bad the name has been so claimed by the magazine!) What a crying shame that rather than increasing our exposure to different outlooks and upbringings, to break through the bands of geographical distance, the Internet and other advances in the specialization of media are so used to gather together in increasingly tight virtual enclaves, enhancing our ability to make little echo chambers of like minded folks (freed from the old constraints of geography)

In the end, a seemingly utter and widespread world wide failure to "walk a mile in the moccasins" of other faiths is a tremendous deficit of empathy, or even self-reflection, and is the catalyst for so much of the damage religion provides, when it has potential to do so much good.

cancer isn't funny unless it is a funny comic about cancer, like a clown with cancer or something

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Clown sittin there in chemo. He gotta pump the stuff into his veins by hand. It honks every time he squeezes bag.

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a clown wheezes as he tries to stay involved in a pie fight, but he has to pause for breath. He is a sad clown

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'Look on the bright side, now you're thin enough to fit into the clown car' oh man guys I went a little dark there

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Clown resolutely shaving off bright red tufts of hair before they fall out to the tune of 'Yakety Sax'

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Clown ends call with insurance after finding out his treatments are not covered anymore with sad honk.

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'The good news is the tumor has shrunk by 30%.' *happy honk* 'But we still have to operate.' *sad trombone honk*

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During surgery a lapel flower squirts water over doctor. 'Clamp that! STAT!'

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IV connected to an upside-down seltzer bottle.

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one clown tosses a bucket full of meds at his suffering friend clown

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(all that via http://mightygodking.com/2013/08/02/really-twitter-is-so-much-better-than-facebook/ ) In Cincinnati, our quarters had a built-in laundry chute to send clothes down to the laundry area in the basement. One evening my dad was taking a bath when my mom was doing the laundry downstairs. Realizing she had forgotten to bring down my jacket to be washed, she yelled up the chute "send down Kirk's jacket!". My dad decidedly failed to leap into action, continuing his bath while yelling back "I don't talk to no walls"-- probably our most durable family catchphrase, and illustrating our family's (or at least my) fondness of parlaying instant reactions into absurdist humor.

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I'm semi-seriously adopting a new mantra: "I Like It". I want to program myself to cultivate my knack for seeing the good side of things.

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The best way to know life is to love many things.

--I just loved this Optimus Prime-as-Android-mascot from the story Hasbro sues Asus over Transformer Prime tablet...

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Is copy and pasting the font/color/etc along with the content ever useful? Seems like a terrible and annoying confusion of data and metadata
Yikes! Puts tonight's expected extreme snow in perspective...

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Some days the god damn red and green lines are gonna make one of Those People randomly swearing, seemingly at nothing.
--via failblog - what can I say, I laughed...South Park, the cultural touchstone that unites us all. Kind of.

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Feeling dangerously nostalgic.

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Delayed "Oh Yeahs"; the double entendre of the Simpsons drink and bar name "Flaming Mo", that "Spectrum ZX" is said "Zed X" by a Brit.

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New writing technique: if a paragraph is getting long and/or tangential, first start to fix it by breaking it into two at a logical point.

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Go Philly!...

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"Purdue Perfect Portions" has this commercial with a hokey "stunt double" figure skater. Will there be less of that in the HD era?

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Jordan's Furniture. A. The brothers aren't named Jordan. B. It was better when it was both brothers.

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Who to root for, Steelers vs Chargers... a few of "my teams" are Steelers rivals, but 1 rule: Always root for cold weather cities over warm.

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Among other reasons why it's a bummer that my dad died so young, I start to suspect I missed out on some valuable facial hair grooming tips. Getting geared up for a March trip to Japan! But man, I am such crap at planning trips. I'm also not such a brave tourist. On the one hand, I try to avoid the most blatantly tourist-friendly ways of seeing countries, I want to see the real life of a place. On the other hand, the prospect of being stuck somewhere and not speaking the language so much makes me really anxious. Usually my solution for this is having a friend in the other country to play host, but still I'm going to need to make some sidetrips on my own and I find that a bit intimidating.

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Article of the Moment
Slate on Ghost Malls - coming soon to a commercial district near you?

They always freak me out, to see a strip mall (or one of those hybrids that's like a strip mall but has an interior to walk around in) with closed store after closed store.

Some of that might be the centralization, with Wal*Marts, Best Buys, and Targets attracting business that would otherwise be more distributed, but still.

Is it just me, or is it a little difficult to talk trash about television without sounding a bit too elitist? (The whole Onion Area Man Constantly Mentioning He Doesn't Own A Television effect...)

So anyway, I still have this sniffle, and my upper back/shoulder has been hurting for a couple of days, so I thought last night I'd go ahead and catch up on "Top Chef", which is about the only thing I've been purposefully tuning in for over the past year, other than sports. (Though I have been enjoying some TV-on-DVD series that Miller and FoSO have been setting up, like "Supernatural".)

Circa 1992ish, on Marnie's Family PC

I decided the difficulty of finding a comfortable position justified my not trying to multitask with reading or the web. So I just watched. But then I started to observe a bit, and I realized how crazily passive it can be, the whole "zoning out" thing. I suspect the main culprits are the commercials, especially with their sheer repetition. (There's this one Sears spot in particular, some skinny dude talking about how with his martial art "you have to be fit all over"...oddly they play that over a picture of a treadmill, which isn't much of an "all over" fitness machine.)

It kind of scared me how little thought I was doing, how I was just kind of absorbing. I mean sometimes I'd have a critical thought about the program, or work to pick up some detail of a commercial, but mostly... bleh.

This isn't meant to be critical of people who do dig TV... I know there is a lot of nifty stuff on, and it can actually be a useful form of relaxation, one of the easier and more interesting ways of getting to an alpha wave state, for what it's worth.

In Middle School and I guess before, I watched a LOT of television, the TV would be on from the end of school until bedtime. (I'm not sure if I'd be multitasking with books or legos or not then.) In upstate New York there were years where clever channel surfing would let you watch an entire evening of MASH or Benson. Those times likely helped shape me as a person, at least a bit. I don't feel I'm very good at developing stories, coming up with narratives from scratch... could being fed all those shows have something to do with it?

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Quote of the Moment

Watching television is like taking black spray paint to your third eye.

... of course I saw this Slashdot fortune right before the night of Top Chef, so it may have influenced my observations a tad. Quotes of the Moment

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had an underlying truth."

This is one of the hardest lessons for humans to learn. We cannot admit that things might be neither good nor evil, neither cruel nor kind, but simply callous - indifferent to all suffering, lacking all purpose.

Strange dream last night. I was smuggling things into Japan for the Japanese Mafia and got caught...the weird part was the prison, it was like a giant wall with scaffolding, with the tiny room sized cages dangling from polls or other framework sticking out of the walls. Ok, not that strange, as far as dreams go, but still.

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Overheard Conversation and Link of the Moment

Dude #1: I want a new printer but they're too expensive.
Dude #2: Yeah, I know what you mean. I want to find a good cheap one.
Homeless busybody: Cheap?! That's why you're a fucking Jew!
Dude #2: Actually I'm not Jewish, but I'm glad you're homeless!

Quote of the Moment

Marc, the Mexican-Canadian foreman, gets out of the the truck. He shakes his velvet mullet in the golden morning sun.

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Article of the Moment
In response to my referral to "consensus in the scientific community" LAN3 mentioned a recent Crichton article on agenda-driven non-science that evidently has been making the rounds. It does make me rethink my postion on a few things, though I don't the article is without flaws. I mean, it is just an untestable (and therefore not-strictly-scientific) hypothesis that evolution happened, but according to Chrichton, that's beyond what science should comment on...that position seems extreme to me. Also, I doubt that SETI was the cause of this playing fast and loose with the scientific method, but rather an effect.

I previously kisrael'd a good quote by Sagan on this...though it's interesting that Crichton points to him as one of the central offenders, with the nuclear winter thing. (Heh, between that and the whole Apple BHA incident, I definately have mixed feelings about the guy.)

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Link of the Moment
The Worst Sex Scenes in Moviedom. Though uh...I kind of liked "Body of Evidence". The 20 Worst Movie Titles is worth a read as well. Insult of the Moment

"And we're not allowed to watch spoilers here..."
"Uhh..I've got some spoilers Who wants to hear a spoiler? ... here's a spoiler... YOU WILL DIE ALONE."

A bit long, but laugh-out-loud funny...hardcore Star Wars fans (especially the ones in costume) are easy pickings. Some of the other videos in that archive are pretty good too.

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Pot Calling the Kettle Black
Oh wait...I'm a geek too. And as if to prove it, here's my annual review of the Media I consumed last year: movies, books, video games. I did the same thing last year, for 2001. Interesting to see how the lists compare. I think I'm a little less consistent in recording this stuff, so this list might not be quite as complete.

Movies at the Cinema: (11)
Amelie, Attack of the Clones, Bourne Identity, Men in Black II, XXX, feardotcom, Barbershop, Spirited Away, K-19: The Widowmaker, Bowling for Columbine, Standing in the Shadow of Motown
Movies on Video/DVD: (50)
Fritz the Cat, Ghostbusters, Bruce Campbell vs Army of Darkness, Black Mask, Hard Boiled, Dracula 2000, Jin-Roh (the wolf brigade), M*A*S*H, Sugar & Spice, Interview with the Vampire, Holy Smoke!, Heathers, Rat Race, Sexy Beast, Metropolis, Revenge of the Pink Panther, Training Day, Mullholland Dr., ocean's eleven, Groundhog Day, bamboozled, Groundhog Day, Vanilla Sky, Haiku Tunnel, Ali, Pitch Black, American Pie 2, zoolander, Showgirls, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Orange Country, Strange Days, Cool Devices, O, Freddy Got Fingered, LotR: Fellowship of the Rings, Resident Evil, Cool Devices, Wet Hot American Summer, Cool Devices, Vanilla Sky, Making of Tron, Tron, Friday, Crash, 12 Chairs, Brotherhood of the Wolf, Queen of the Damned, The One, The Cell
Movies on TV (34)
Bedazzled, Demolition Man, Perfect, But I'm a Cheerleader, The Perfect Storm, Three To Tango, Black Sheep, The Last Supper, Saving Silverman, Meet the Parents, Rising Sun, Lethal Weapon, Planes, Trains, and Automobiles, Sister Act 2, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes , Big Kahuna, best of show, The Tailor of Panama, True Lies, If Looks Could Kill, A Very Brady Sequel, 2010, 2001, Joe Dirt, X-Files Series Finale, Pollock, Girlfight, It Came From Hollywood, Fever Pitch, 8 Heads in a Duffle Bag, Porky's, Snatch
Video Games (12)
Luigi's Mansion, Luigi's Mansion, Smashing Drive, Rogue Squadron, Super Mario 64, Doom 64, Super Mario Land 2: 6 Gold Coins, Bangai-O, Spybotics: The Nightfall Incident, Bangai-O, Metroid Prime, Blitz 20-02
Books (39)
How To Be Good (a novel), Galatea 2.2, True Names and the opening of the cyberspace frontier, Dispatches From The Tenth Circle, Wouldn't Take Nothing For My Journey Now, Rosencrantz & Guilderstern Are Dead, Memoirs of an Invisible Man, Arcade Fever, Conquest, Mastering Enterprise JavaBeans, The Meaning of it All -- thoughts of a citizen-scientist, Globalhead, Leash, Sex and the City, Our Dumb Century, Tuf Voyaging, Crystal Express, Mort, Amusing Musings, The Great Gatsby, The Joke, Equal Rites, Fever Pitch, Lake Wobegon Summer 1956, Still Life With Woodpecker, Inside the Worlds of Star Wars Episode 1, The Modern Man's Guide To Life, Garfield Food for Thought, All Families are Psychotic, Lipshtick, Pulp Fiction Screenplay, The Simplicity Reader, Good Poems, Permutation City, On The Road, Geeks, The 100 Happy Secrets of Happy People, From Clouds to Code, Struts Practical Guide
Comics/Graphic Novels (16)
The Dark Knight Strikes Again (2 of 3), James Kochalka's The Sketchbook Diaries, 9-11 Emergency Relief, Star Wars Infinities: A New Hope, Wake Up and Smell the Cartoons of Shannon Wheeler, Big Book of Hell, Tank Girl, Caricature, Batman The Ultimate Guide to the Dark Knight, Dori Stories, Dark Knight Strikes Back, The Cartoon Guide to Sex , How To Know When You've Got It, Forty Years, Kingdom Come, Watchmen

FOLLOWUP: I went ahead and compiled the 2000 list of Kirk's media consumption into the same format. Incidentally, all of these lists are only things I see through more-or-less their entirity, I don't bother with HBO films I see half of, or video games I play with friends (as opposed to 'completing' in some sense.) Color of the Moment

	To the left is the color of the universe. When you take the average of the shades of all these bajillions of color readings of the universe, what's you get is the Howard Johnson's reject that you see here.
Some astronomers counter that it (the universe) is pretty much just the black and white you see when you step outside at night, and that our view of color only makes sense in terms of the human eye anyway. BTW, this color is #A2E8CE for all you web programmers out there. I'd really like to get away from Boston's nightly purple glow and see the Milky Way sometime soon.

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Funny of the Moment

Andrew Plotkin wrote:
> Liz Broadwell wrote:
> > phil hunt wrote:
> > > Boudewijn Rempt wrote:
> > > > Being the wrong sex, I've never understood girl's
> > > > infatuation with horses.
> > > Perhaps they like the idea of something powerful
> > > making rhythmic movements between their legs?
> > I was always attracted by the fantasy of riding a suitably
> > large horse right over the boys at school who insisted on
> > making remarks like that.
> Yes, exactly. It's a vibrator, a giant plush toy, *and* a
> weapon of war, all at once.
Which is to say, a penis substitute.

Poem of the Moment:

The world's
wordless
beauty intact, indeed
it can never be other
than

radiantly intact
like the stars, like the stars

when the stars have no names once again.

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Link of the Moment:
"Pardon me, Waiter, what's this blimp doing in my soup?" (via Ranjit)

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Rant of the Moment:
Not the most breaking news, but man, I can't believe George W wants to push this missile defense shield thing. If and when a nuke is unleashed on USA soil, it's probably going to arrive via rental truck, not missile. I grudgingly admit Reagan spooking the USSR by talk of Star Wars may have helped bring down their already suffering economic system, but I don't think the same principle applies against China, or any other current player for that manner. It'll just encourage them to build up missiles that can get through the thing, and sour our attempts to stop arms proliferation on the international scene.

And not passing the Test Ban Treaty! Sheesh! We need to test these things? What enemy would gamble on our nukes not working at the critical moment? (Lets hope it never comes to that... I'd rather they gamble on us not willing to unleash that kind of destruction.) And then there's the little fact that almost every test of this system in development has been a big old flop... I'd rather gamble on our current nukes working than this new-fangled crap.