❮❮prevnext❯❯

I love it. I've started writing music for the tuba, and I am trying to talk myself into releasing it, but I can only imagine the eye rolls from people being like, this b--h hasn't made an album, [...] It sounds like what the gut feels like to me. There's a way that it takes up space that you can't deny, and it also just feels very Black to me.

Ustedes los jóvenes están en la edad exacta de la desesperación. Yo nunca me sentí más acabado y viejo que a los veintitantos. Decía 'ya me pasó la vida y no hice nada'. Pero estoy aquí para decirles que no: tienen un chingo de tiempo [You young people are in the exact age of desperation. I never felt more done and old than in my twenties. I'd say 'life has passed me by and i did nothing'. But i'm here to tell you that's not true: you have a lot of fucking time]

---

This improv of "two sides of a pisatchio being pulled apart fighting to protect the pistachio" reminded me of this prose work I posted 20 years ago:

---

PEAS

"Wait!" cried the last two peas in the can. My hand stopped its arc to the garbage.

"What do you want?" I asked them, the two peas that clung in the slivery cylinder.

"We want out."

"What do you care? You're peas."

"That's right. We're peas. What is there for us but the fork and the plate? How can you deny us our place on the plate? We've lived on the vine, huddled in our pod on cold nights, striving away for greenness and roundness. It's all been in vain if you throw us away."

"I didn't know peas had feelings," I said.

"We do," they replied, "and this is our moment. We have nothing higher, no krishna, no green goddess, no madonna of the vegetable garden. This is our calling, no other, the climax of sun and rain and humus, green energy pushing through our vines, this is us, this is what we are. We are the peas."

"How can I help?" I asked them.

"Give us butter and salt," they said, "and maybe pearl onions."

"You know you'll be eaten." I said.

"Yes."

"Does it hurt?"

"No one knows," they answered.

impossibly incompetent flâneur attempts Pascal's gambit on all faiths rendering himself apostate to all

(yes i had to look up "flâneur")

---

One day, your skull will be as empty as a conch shell on a fence post,

full of wind and gentle quiet.

Today, it's a cauldron of ghosts.

Flesh and electricity.

Water and memory.

A machine that makes reality.

Now. Here. Your skull is the garden where fact flowers into meaning.

---

---

A frightful looking man comes in and looks at himself in the mirror.

"Why look at yourself in the mirror? You'll only feel disgust at what you see."

The frightful-looking man answers me: "Monsieur, according to the immortal principles of '89, all men are equal in their rights. Therefore it is my right to look at myself in the mirror. Whether I do with pleasure or disgust is of concern only to my conscience."

Common sense was no doubt on my side. But from a legal standpoint, he could hardly be faulted.

(via Harper's Magazine)









I'm thinking about taking a break from my current therapist Terry Hunt, whom I've been seeing for ten years- I rate him very highly and he has helped me figure some things out that otherwise would have remained obscure, but I am worried he's become more of a "rent-a-dad" figure of paternal-ish approval for me, feeling a lack I had since my dad died during my teenage years.

Also I think there might be other approaches - specifically IFS, Internal Family Systems - that might be better designed to help answer what seems like the next most important question: what is the most proper and/or useful stance for my inner-voice "rational" self to have for my subconscious, my intuitive self? Are they peers, like pop-psychology is right and each corresponds to a whole hemisphere of my brain? Or does being "co-equal" give my emotional brain too much credit? Are they both "really me"?

As a child I developed a heightened sense of rationality - I would someday have to justify myself, via words and logic, to a righteous God who might choose to send my soul to burn forever in hell. So what my intuitive, feeling self wanted - its mortal concerns vs my immortal destiny - just didn't matter and so my gut self must be forever subjugated to my rational self. Even after I was no longer a person of faith, the rationality and sense of "ultimately true judgement is external" lingered, and I fear it stunted my intuitive self, badly. Observing people at work I think that when my intuitive self does act out, it is more childish and less controlled than those of my peers (but of course it's tough to know what their inner lives are like...)

So in that case, maybe "inner-child" is the best explanation. But maybe that gives it almost too much credit - when I realize my intuitive sense has been lurking and waiting for a moment of distraction to get me to grab that cookie from the kitchen I had "decided" to avoid, I think of a dog waiting for the humans to look the other way before snatching the meat from the table. And that side of me rarely manifests itself with human language. So... "inner-dog"? (Or maybe just the elephant in Haidt's "Rider and the Elephant" metaphor.)

Or- given the varied ways the intuitive side of me expresses itself, the patch work of competing desires - or the way it seems like a feeling anxiety starts as just a pang, and then I have SOME control over whether that feeling takes over my whole emotional self, or can be sweet-talked into calming down- it feels like a herd or pack of animals. Like one member of the herd is anxious, and tries to get the whole herd to gallop off. (I think IFS thinks a lot about this kind of internal crowd, except instead of heard they talk of managers and firefighters protecting the vulnerable exiles. I think IFS encourages visualizing those members of the group to be dramatized as full-on people, which is one part I'm still skeptical of.)

Anyway!

After years of my navel-gazing journey, I'm delighted when I realize I've figured something out that used to be mysterious. When I was in my 20s my friend and coworker Paul put it as "Kirk is his own Enigma- 'I just don't understand myself!'" but years later I have a better sense of some of my own inner workings.

Just this morning I realized that the sense of religiosity I talked about above explains a long-running characteristic of mine: I don't have a strong sense of privacy. I blog nearly everything, because my own personal enjoyment doesn't count for much. Everything only has meaning in a context of connections with other people - to me, value is an emergent property that rises of from groups. I don't have self-actualized value at all, so I put everything out there. (This can lead be to come across as self-absorbed, and it's a fair cop, but what people who accuse me of that don't always get is I think everyone should be just as self-absorbed. It's not that I find myself so fascinating relative to them, it's just that I need a public context to generate and evaluate the value I do have... and I'm the only person I can grant myself permission to think closely about.)

---

---

Anyone watching Lego Masters?

This last one was kind of weird - odd that Manny / Nestor team get so little attention in the thing. Also the "pick the 4 most struggling teams for a pep talk" was so pointless, I kept waiting for some reveal but it was just filler...

(I'd love to figure out where to watch the UK version.)

I wish they'd have a website with timelapses of all the build stations...

I don't buy the "Everyone is doing their best" theory. I know firsthand that I'm not.

(whoa, her profile picture has the same "red hat with silver puffy wings" cap I have- I think it's "Vegimals" from the 70s.) Greg Cook took photos of BABAM! and Second Line and Boycott playing for HONK! volunteers at Aeronaut.

---

Tetris is a REVERSE Metroidvania, where you're the bad guy, and the game is leveling up as it continues and keeps attacking you.

...from the Retronauts episode Symphony of the Night and the near-death of Metroidvania games. (Springing from a disagreement between a surprisingly narrow and a much more loose definition of "what's a Metroidvania")

---

In many ways, the United States is not at the forefront of the Enlightenment project, even though the American Declaration of Independence and Constitution were the earliest and greatest gifts of the Enlightenment. The United States was conceived as an Enlightenment nation, but it always entertained counter-Enlightenment forces of cultures of honor; of manly self-defense; of a kind of millennial, quasi-religious, messianic role of the United States in particular as the indispensable nation, the city upon the hill--both very counter-Enlightenment notions.

He speaks of optimism, not withstanding the glitches we're seeing in social progress now. (Not that it should be an excuse for complacency either)

---

Gunfire erupted from a window high above them, but it was only a bass player getting shot for playing the wrong riff three times in a row, and bass players are two a penny in Han Dold City.

Thought of this when musing on being asked to stand in with New Magnolia Jazz Band for playing at a funeral this Saturday...

---

I'm convinced that no one can amount to a damn in the arts if he becomes sweetly reasonable, seeing all side of a picture, forgiving all sins.

Man, here I am reading a deadtree book (hardcover, no less, but $8 from the remainders table of the MFA) drinking a little Crown Royale and taking a break from screens (sort of). #throwbacktuesday

(Other notes: he made and tried to sell a boardgame HQ or GHQ, apparently moldering in his collection at Indiana University and the terms "work the bugs out" and "you were hosed" were used in the 50s/early 60s.)

An image I made up for a devblog entry on an alternate binary numbering system
A few days ago I posted Tadashi Tokieda's video about rotating, translating and, scaling patterns: 'random' dots, fixed grids, and triangles...
Today I built a virtual toy to play with those ideas in the browser (for those of us who don't have a photocopier that prints on overlays handy) -- http://stuff.alienbill.com/dotsenough/

Max Headroom on Sesame Street:

I bet gravity thinks bench pressing is so cute.

Sometimes I think the biggest difference between Mac and Windows is the stupid ctrl vs cmd keys thing. FWIW, I think Windows has better keyboard support.
--from this page of Norman Saunders works-- it focuses on his odd and oddly-sexually charged Batman cards but also gets into the classic "Mars Attacks"

---

They tried to get me to hate white people, but someone would always come along & spoil it.

Detail from a charmingly vandalized poster of John Singleton Copley's Paul Revere portrait at the MFA... the poster was at Park Street:

Man, would Sam Adams Brewery have been so quick to co-opt this image if they knew about his hidden life? (I hope so, it's pretty glam!)

---

Dream: our black cat Rex could transform himself into white rollerskates- but both he and skates were present? Hitting skates made eyes flash red. Amber told me to stop that.

---

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-12503686 -- the UK on OK, one of my favorite bits of speech.

---

You look like a million dollars. All green and wrinkled.

---

I know companies put their names on their buses, and it's immature of me to chuckle at this, but I don't think I'd ride the "Hotard" bus.

"Fidelity": Don't Divorce... from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.

via miller

---

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200903/meltdown-geography - great Atlantic article on the crisis: diverse cities good, homeowning bad

---

At work, Nic reports VC guy says: ad-funded Web 2.0 out, small paid subscription content and games in.

---

http://dir.salon.com/story/books/int/2002/06/06/florida/index.html - interesting comparing that previous new Atlantic article to that old Slate one.

---

Not to count chickens or to miss blessings in "this economy", but damn, job interviews in rapid succession is its own kind of stress.

---

I know airports are cranky about cars waiting for arrivals... just found out about Logan's "cellphone lot". Good to know. So after three days of sophomoric pseudo-existentialist interactive art "humor" we now continue with our regularly scheduled naval gazing!

Went to the Dentist today. And I had a damn cavity! Such an unpleasant start to the morning. And it wasn't just the pain, or the sound... but the smell. A little bit like a wood burning kit, but with the knowledge that it's my poor teeth bearing the brunt.

I suppose it's good that my dentist sticks with good old novocaine but sometimes I wish I had a guy who would use laughing gas instead.

---

Article of the Moment

Everybody knows that hindsight is 20-20, and those of us who worked on "Operation What Could Go Wrong?" — which was subsequently rechristened "Operation Nothing to Worry About" and then slightly modified and relaunched as "Operation Aiiiieeeeeeeee! Run!" — cannot help but notice, every time we pick up a newspaper or turn on a newscast or watch a late-night comedy show, that everyone is suddenly a big, gosh-darned expert on how to shoot down a spy satellite.

You know I didn't know the satellite in question is the size of a bus... I was thinking these things are more like washing machines or that scale of large appliance. (thanks Bill the Splut)

Quote of the Moment

We're all in this alone.

For the final day of filler, the theme is...well, you figure it out.

Slate on The Cushy Life of the Backup Catcher.

The Blog of the Incredible Hulk

Finally, The Label Man really digs his vegetable and fruit labels...

---

Quote of the Moment

If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day.

Article of the Moment
From Jim Bakker to Milli Vamill, MSN asks Where Are They Now?

---

Image of the Moment

--from this Worth1000 contest "Cubism"... round things made square.

---

Thought of the Moment
So I was a bit happier noticing at how "late" sunset seemed to be these days. But then I thought, it's like a month and a half or two after the darkest part of the year, so all it means is I've muddled through the darkest third or fourth of the year. That's a long time to be thinking "man, it's dark."

I think too much. I should just appreciate the longer days, and be even happier when Daylight Saving kicks in.

Video of the Moment
Probably the most amazing high school basketball shot in the history of the universe. Hmm...if people could learn to do that consistently, maybe basketball would be a whole new ballgame.

---

Photo of the Moment

--Tonya and Alex at their wedding reception yesterday. If it weren't for the placement of a few of the champagne bottles, this would be about my favorite wedding photo ever. I think overall I do dink around with low light stuff too much, get a lot of blurred photos. I need to figure out how to get my camera to take even darker, quicker pictures when it doesn't have enough light. Charity of the Moment
Chip in to send flowers to random gay people waiting in line to get married in San Francisco...very cool idea.

---

Death Match of the Moment

Which icon of the old school would win?
	VS.
80s Rapper KRS-ONE		70s Computer TRS-80
Street Cred
Well-regarded by hardcore fans		Hated by millions of schoolkids
Advantage: KRS-ONE
Color
Black		Monochrome
Advantage: KRS-ONE
Google Hits
81,200		88, 500
Advantage: Too Close To Call
Personal Feelings
Liked that line "and war...is just a game on Atari"		Eh, this little "dancing demon" game was cute
Advantage: KRS-ONE
Name Meaning
"Knowledge Reigns Supreme Over Nearly Everyone"		"Tandy Radio Shack for the 80s"
Advantage: KRS-ONE
Language
English		BASIC
Advantage: Tie
Competition
Doug E Fresh		Commodore 64
Advantage: TRS-80
WINNER: KRS-ONE!

---

Bushism of the Moment

"Haven't we already given money to rich people? Why are we going to do it again?"
"Stick to principle. Stick to principle."

MullyMolly Ivins says that even tops her previous favorite Bushism, his October 4 2001 proclamation that "We need to counter the shockwave of the evildoer by having individual rate cuts accelerated and by thinking about tax rebates."

---

School Headline of the Moment

College Republicans battle sex events: Tufts University hosts 'Condom Olympics,' 'Vulvapalooza'

"'The gratuitousness of these events is incredible,' said Tufts Republicans President Philipp Tsipman."...he says that like it's a bad thing. (And how do you pronounce Tsipman, anyway?) Go Jumbos! Now I'm slightly more likely to give my alma mater money. Sometime. Why is the couch so much better to fall asleep on than a bed? Is it because a bed's generally just so flat?

---

Online Comic of the Moment
Something Positive is a pretty funny online comic. A bit raunchy (and sometimes rather evil, like the first cartoon) but good, it has some interesting character based stuff for being a gag-oriented comic. The thing is, it's really wordy...it took me hours and hours to read through the year's worth of archive. So, as a service to you, my loyal reader, I have braved the whole year to bring you a select list of really good ones: 12-21-2001 (cultural!) / 01-08-2002 (raunchy) / 01-10-2002 (heh) / 01-14-2002 (not all that funny, but explains the cat) / 01-28-2002 / 02-18-2002 (good catchline) / 04-03-2002 / 04-24-2002 / 04-26-2002 / 05-15-2002 (the start of a good week...I don't know why I'm interested in the romances of comic characters) / 05-25-2002 / 06-15-2002 / 08-14-2002 / 09-02-2002 (raunch but one of the funniest) / 12-10-2002 (mmm, goths) / 12-14-2002 / 12-17-2002 / 01-21-2003 (where the illustration is from.)

---

Article of the Moment
Yesterday's talk about geekdom inspired a larger than average amount of traffic on the daily comments board (not that that's saying all that much, but hey) so I thought I'd go ahead and link to Paul Graham's Why Nerds Are Unpopular, a serious consideration into the social hierarchies of schools, and the people at the bottom. I think I didn't have it as rough as some, probably a C on the scale introduced in the first paragraph. I'm not sure if Graham gives enough consideration to a "multiple intelligences" point of view for nerdom; it's not just that we let other activities attract our time and attention away from the things that would have given us a better place in the social structure...maybe we just weren't very smart about those things in the first place.

---

Web Toy of the Moment
Thanks to the power of Flash, it's very easy to make your own Zen-a-riffic Insights.

---

Link of the Moment
Hrrmmm...SNOWFLAKES is a project to get people to adopt frozen embryos, like those made for fertility treatments. I'm kind of amused by the term "Snowflakes". I guess if you view life begining at conception, it's a reasonable program, otherwise, well, I guess you think that they put the "flakes" back into "snowflakes". Probably going to be light updates the next few days...I'm in jobhunting classes, and more or less out of the memeloop.

---

Links of the Cold War Moment
Slashdot had a reference to a story on the CIA showcasing some spy gadgets at Reagan Presidential Library. They have an even more interesting online museum (love the minicameras and the tire spikes). Not to be completely out in the cold war, the NSA also has a online exhibit of cryptography stuff.

---

Quick Link of the Moment
Wow, it's the power of what you don't show in an image that sometimes makes all the difference in a visual presentation. (Thanks John.) A while back I finished Gleick's groundbreaking Chaos. It wasn't as cool as I had hoped, maybe because the basics of it have been so integrated into geek culture that it no longer seems so revolutionary. But since finishing it, I've been on the lookout for chaotic systems in my own life. So far the best one I've come up with is the HEPA airfilters we have at home, the way they shift into different modes of audible vibration doesn't seem to follow any definite pattern, but it's not purely random either.

---

Link of the Moment
Cat's Eye Technologies has a lot of demented mini-languages. Befunge is particularly mind-brutalizing. FORTRAN meets the old game Lemmings-- your code pointer travels through a 2D grid, kind of like an old Atari videogame.

---

Exchange of the Moment

"She could suck the chrome right off a trailer hitch."
"Uh- I don't think the quality of that kind of activity should be rated in PSI."