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On Jacob Angeli-Chansley, the QAnon Shaman.

Sigh, I didn't realize Jung was tied up with so much racist garbage.

"I always feel like I was lucky. I got to a point where all my answers--rock and roll answers--were running out. All the old things stopped working--as they should've and as they have to, and as time and the worlds and the way it is demands and dictates, in order for you to go on. They run dry, not as a joyous thing in and of itself, but as some sort of shelter for your inability to take your place in the world, whatever that may be. That's when either you recognize that that's happening or you don't and you continue with your trappings and your ceremony, whatever that may be, and slowly you just get strangled to death and you die. You just die."

"I remember, growing up, at night, and my dad would sit in the kitchen with all the lights out and he waited for me to come in, and he'd sit there and drink, and I'd stand in the driveway and I'd look into his screen door, and I could see the light of a cigarette, and then I'd rush up on the porch and try to get by him but he'd always call me back. And it was like he was always... always angry. Always mad. He'd be sitting there thinking about everything that he was never gonna have, until... until he'd get me thinking like that too. And I'd lay up in my bed, at night, and be staring at the ceiling, and I'd feel like if something didn't happen, if something didn't happen soon, it felt like I was just gonna... like some day, like I was just gonna..."

"And at certain moments time is obliterated in the presence of somebody you love; there seems to be a transcendence of time in love. Or I believe that there is. I carry a lot of people with me that aren't here anymore. And so love transcends time. The normal markers of the day, the month, the year, as you get older those very fearsome markers... in the presence of love - they lose some of their power. But it also deals with the deterioration of your physical body. It drifts away, it's just a part of your life. But beauty remains. It's about two people and you visit that place in each other's face. Not just the past and today, but you visit the tomorrows in that person's face now. And everybody knows what that holds."

"There is nothing like the sea at night when the water is slightly warmer than the air, even though the air is humid after a 95 degree day... God, I love swimming at night. It is all darkness and mystery. It is the void and it must be done naked. Clothes at the waterline, please. Do this, and my pilgrim, you will become cleansed. Never will the evening air, or a kiss on the beach, or a dry towel, ever feel so good again. The walk to the car will be filled with starlit grace and you will never forget it. Once you hit the water, you will be covered in the blossoming beauty of your youth no matter how old you are and whoever you're with, you will always remember them."

"Now those whose love we wanted but didn't get, we emulate them. That's the only way we have, in our power, to get the closeness and love that we needed and desired. So when I was a young man looking for a voice to meld with mine, to sing my songs and to tell my stories, well I chose my father's voice. Because there was something sacred in it to me. And when I went looking for something to wear, I put on a factory's worker's clothes, because they were my dad's clothes. And all we know about manhood is what we have seen and what we have learned from our fathers, and my father was my hero. And my greatest foe. Not long after he died, I had this dream, I'm on stage, I'm in front of thousands of people, and my dad's back from the dead and he's sitting in the audience and suddenly I'm kneeling next to him in the aisle, and for a moment we both watched the man on fire on stage. And then my dad who for years, he sat at the kitchen table, unreachable, but I was too young, I was too stupid to understand was his depression. Well I kneel next to him in the aisle, and I brush his forearm, and I say, "Look dad. That guy on stage – that's how I see you."

"I used to, uh, I had this habit for a long time. I would get in my car and I would drive back through my old neighborhood, back to the town that I grew up in. And I'd always drive past the old houses that I used to live in. Sometimes late at night ... when I used to be up at night. And I got so I would do it really regularly ... two, three, four times a week, for years. And I eventually got to wonderin', What the hell am I doin'? And so, I went to see this psychiatrist, and, uh – this is true – and I sat down and I said, 'Doc, for years I've been getting in my car and I drive back to my town and I pass my houses late at night and, y'know, what am I doing?' And he said, 'I want you to tell me what you think that you're doing.' So I go, 'That's what I'm paying you for.' So he says, 'Well, what you're doing is that something bad happened, and you're goin' back there, thinkin' you can make it right again. Something went wrong, and you keep going back to see if you can fix it, or somehow make it right.' And I sat there and I said, 'That is what I'm doing.' And he said, 'Well, you can't."

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Hey! A talkin' piano!

Never has the old blues admonition to "make it talk, son, make it talk" been so feasible!

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Welcoming the new Union Square T stop with Boston For Fun, a casual band mailing list perfect for stuff like this.

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Channel 7 News is on it - some little clips of our celebratory band.

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I've been geeking away at a somewhat esoteric project, an editor for 48 pixel wide atari 2600 graphics (harder than it sounds, good for title screens) and added color yesterday:

"somebooks"on Atari Age made that absolutely charming image with it. Definitely is excellent to see someone make something cool with a tool you provided. I’ve been thinking about this quote from 2002, Mark Turmell talking on the fall of the arcades and the rise of the Internet:

But the bottom line is that the players and kids stopped showing up. I think this is a weird fact, but every week we looked at earnings around the country, and the day that the Clinton report from the testimony of Monica Lewinsky got published on the Internet, the earnings in the arcades dropped 20%. Unfortunately, [those earnings] never returned! At that moment, I think the Internet became a source of entertainment.

Sometimes cultural changes happen all at once. We are likely at some kind of pivot point now. Right now it’s so easy to ask What’s the point of anything social? Why do people like to travel so much? Why come together in huge numbers to see a show or a sporting event or a politician? For the first time in my lifetime, a huge mass of people are painfully aware of the little gamble each mass event can be.

Even smaller numbers - in earlier seasons, how rarely did I notice how so many activities in the world were so, so dependent on humans in proximity. We are such social creatures, coming together for so so much. When that's blocked... man do things fall apart. What a freezing water shock for an economy that has been jogging along, on pretty clear straight lines up from 2009, a kind of fake second wind from tax cuts. "Make America Great Again" will have a truth in autumn of 2020 that it didn't in 2016.

And the weird part is, it could be so much worse. This virus’ hospitalization rate, while enough to swamp our gotta-stay-lean-and-profitable (or government underfunded) health care systems, might be even smaller than it looks. Ditto the death rate. Bad enough, for sure, and my heart goes to everyone who has lost someone, or where the struggle is yet to come. But it’s just a biochemical die roll it wasn’t an order of magnitude worse. Pray that we will put a larger focus on forward-looking research focused on prevention and response.

Don’t let Trump off the hook for this one. No, it’s not all his fault, but our anemic response, our inability to get tests up and out in a way that would have really helped and saved lives, comes from the top. You had a pandemic response team around for a reason ’til he let it fall aside in 2018. Then we had months where we could have focused on building ventilators and masks and cooperating on getting the most accurate and fast test, but we just played wait-and-see. There’s historical evidence Trump really buys perception as reality, and so he just talked it down. And there’s a line between talking to soothe jittery markets and to spin so much “miracle” kumbaya that people don’t take important action, and Trump crossed it.

When Trump’s sharpie crosses out “Corona” and replaces it with “Chinese”… he knows the game he’s playing. Move the blame, distract from his own disastrous under-response - give a little “sensible” racism for his base with just a kernel of virological truth - but more importantly, if called on the distracting racist bullshit of it, he can turn the story into “oh look at those liberals, more worried about being all Politically Correct than with dealing with the big crisis here!”

All of us will have to rebuild some of our lives after this. Many of us will face economic hardships. And most of us might be poised to ask, what should my priorities in life be. Let us look for answers of love with safety and like the old hippy said:

There's always a little bit of heaven, even in a disaster area.

Right now - find that heaven as best you can.

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so no one was gonna tell me that walruses can whistle i just had to find this out on my own? pic.twitter.com/Pn06ZSkddH

— 𝑒𝓂𝑜𝓉𝒾𝑜𝓃𝒶𝓁 𝓈𝒽𝑜𝓇𝓉𝓎 (@FrickinDelanie) March 19, 2020

Doomed Boeing Jets Lacked 2 Safety Features That Company Sold Only as Extras - to quote Internet of Shit: "....are you saying that a plane crashed because Boeing made them pay for downloadable content? ...it sounds like you're saying airline safety systems have DLC." Been geeking out on "The Hamilton Polka" lately - a 5 minute polka party that's a Reader's Digest version of the musical, more or less. As goofy as a polka is nowadays, it really catches some of the emotional tones of the lyrics.

I found a cool Rolling Stone chat with Yankovic and Miranda and was excited by "RS: Is your band on it?" "Yankovic: They are. My drummer, my guitar player plays banjo on it. My bass player plays bass, though the bass is overwhelmed by the tuba, which is playing the same part."

YAAAAAAAAS!

Think about it: Trump hasn't properly executed a handshake with any visiting foreign leaders. Before Trump, none of us had any idea that not being able to do the handshakes was even a thing.

I really hope Trump realizes how low his "ratings" are. Sad!

Since well before I set loose my robots, we've been a binary race. We mimic the patterns of our computers, training our brains toward yeses and nos, endless series of zeros and ones. We've lost confidence in our own minds.

It echoes a theme that's been on my mind of late, how we are trying to reduce things in the world from their glorious multiplicity to a single line of "worth" and then further put that to the boolean values "good" and "bad".

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Melissa is using my old iPad, after setting stuff up for her I used Photo Booth and gave her a special custom wallpaper.... it had the desired time bomb effect when she went to use it later
via Bill the Splut...

Man, that's kind of wild!

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I love the logo of the bad guys' organization...

We don't read and write poetry because it's cute. We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race. And the human race is filled with passion. And medicine, law, business, engineering, these are noble pursuits and necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love, these are what we stay alive for. To quote from Whitman, "O me! O life!... of the questions of these recurring; of the endless trains of the faithless... of cities filled with the foolish; what good amid these, O me, O life?" Answer. That you are here - that life exists, and identity; that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. That the powerful play *goes on* and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?

I suppose it's time to go, though I would rather stay.

The neurologist V.S Ramachandran:

The key to the whole puzzle, I suggest, lies in the division of labor between our two cerebral hemispheres and in our need to create a sense of coherence and continuity in our lives. Most people are familiar with the fact that the human brain consists of two mirror image halves--like the two halves of a walnut--with each half, or cerebral hemisphere, controlling movements on the opposite side of the body. A century of clinical neurology has shown clearly that the two hemispheres are specialized for different mental capacities and that the most striking asymmetry involves language. The left hemisphere is specialized not only for the actual production of speech sounds but also for the imposition of syntactic structure on speech and for much of what is called semantics--comprehension of meaning. The right hemisphere, on the other hand, doesn't govern spoken words but seems to be concerned with more subtle aspects of language such as nuances of metaphor, allegory and ambiguity--skills that are inadequately emphasized in our elementary schools but that are vital for the advance of civilizations through poetry, myth and drama. We tend to call the left hemisphere the major or "dominant" hemisphere because it, like a chauvinist, does all the talking (and maybe much of the internal thinking as well), claiming to be the repository of humanity's highest attribute, language. Unfortunately, the mute right hemisphere can do nothing to protest.

Quoted in Brian Christian's "The Most Human Human", about playing the human side of the real life Turing test. How can you most convincingly show that YOU are the real human, darn it all?

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Alan Turing made up a "paper machine" algorithm for playing chess... I would love to see the details and/or an implementation of that!

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There are multiple levels of similarity between B+W photography and e-ink readers; their respective fans have parallel things they dig.

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A piece of your brain the size of a grain of sand would contain one hundred thousand neurons, two million axons, and one billion synapses, all 'talking to' each other.

I know I shouldn't feel any sympathy for supervillains; that, if they had their way, I'd be toling in the methane mines of Titan, or be just another pile of bones beneath their throne of skulls. Although you and I can't empathize with the blackhearted motivations behind their schemes, can we admit that perhaps we have more in common with supervillains than we do with superheroes? [...] Consider the evidence: How often have you swooped in, saved the day, and been carried off on the shoulders of a cheering crowd? Now, how many times have the poorly constructed plans that you dreamed about for months collapsed into shambles?

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6 Insane Uses of Animals in Wartime (That Actually Worked) -- flaming camels and plummeting turkeys. Excellent.

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How long will Apple use simple numbering for the iPhone and iPad? Will 2018 feature the iPhone 12 and the iPad 9?

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The trick to Red Line happiness: play the rush hour odds- a packed train takes longer to load/unload, making the empty train just behind wait.
--This makes me want to buy some dog food. And maybe a dog.

To view this content, you need to install Java from java.com
rgbwar - source - built with processing
A Glorious Trainwreck for Klik of the Month Klub #21. More of a toy than a game... press space to reset the RGB armies. They swarm around (there's some pseudo-flocking behavior built-in) and shoot each other with lasers. The faster they're moving, the faster their lasers are recharging, and flocks tend to move faster than individuals. Also you can use the mouse to mess with individual blobs a bit.

There might be a metaphor in how as the war goes on everyone becomes an indistinct charred husk.

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The parts of a car that look the most like a car are some of the least complicated and least important parts in how it works. As with people.

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http://nelson.oldradio.com/origins.call-list.html - what call letters were meant to stand for

• Admittedly the heavy use of Engrish is a bit offensive, but I do kind enjoy Misinformers Playstation 3 Sneak Preview from way back when:

  mis: So you mean, you can plug a phone line into it, and play multi-player games online, like with the Dreamcast?
  
  Sony: Dreamcast? Ha ha, funny stupid yankee! You dishonor me with your mention of this Dreamcast. The Praystation 3 does not connect to internet, Praystation 3 CONTAIN the internet. You prugga in the computer to the port, the internet isa all there. We copy it inside machine for fast access.
  
  mis: Wait, so you're saying that you copied every single file on the internet into this box? That doesn't even make any sense! The internet is a constantly changing network of millions of individual machines. How does the PS3 update its so called "internet" if it has no connections to the real network?
  
  Sony: Thasa right. No connections. Praystation 3 get internet from outerspace.
  
  mis: And its power?
  
  Sony: It run on love.

• Nice photoblog: Derilect New England
• Ken Perlin seems to have some interesting toys on his site.

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Travelog of the Moment
Fairly relaxed day today.
FoSO sent me an indirect reference to this Slate piece on the midlife happiness downturn (which bottoms out and starts the long haul back up at age 45.)

Is asking someone "are you happy" a reliable way of knowing that they're happy? Not that I can think of a better one.

What I find more alarming about this article is this bit:

The authors also find that over the last century, Americans, both men and women, have gotten steadily—and hugely—less happy. The difference in happiness of men between men of my generation, born in the 1960s, and my father's generation, born in the 1920s, is the same as the effect of a tenfold difference in income. In other words, if my father had little money compared to his contemporaries and I have lots of money compared to mine, I can still expect to be less happy. Here, curiously, the European pattern diverges. Happiness falls for the birth years from 1900 to about 1950, and generations born on the continent since World War II have gotten successively happier.

It might be a bit facile but it seems like the whole relentless grind of a consumerist economy might be to blame... an entire giant industry devoted to making us feel not quite content with the stuff we have now, and then pointing out the lifestyles of the rich and famous.

Also, is it a coincidence that the middle aged happiness downswing corresponds with the child-raising years, and all the anxiety and sacrifice that time can entail?

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Transcription of the Moment

before to make the holy mountain,
because
i want to know how was the mind of a master...
i hire-ed a guru...
and he came to teach me how to be a guru,
and he gave me the lsd!

when i want to search the actors
i said you need to make love with the director...
with the holy mountain i did it
with the black girl, with all the girls!
this is good tech-nique.
....nnnnot with the men

I dug it up after Bill the Splut wrote about how awful "El Topo" was. (He said "it was time travel in reverse--after 2 hours, I checked my watch and found that 50 minutes had gone by") Link of the Moment
Following up yesterday's TRON link... Arcade at the Movies links to videogames, real and fictional, shown at the movies. The "monster chess" shown in Star Wars is one of the most famous. I found this link in an AtariAge discussion about Rogue Synapse, a group of amateur coders who make some of these fictional games reality. I absolutely applaud the effort, though the games lack some of the polish and gloss that the early movies had that should be possible on any PC these days. I think they'll even construct fullsize arcade games for you. "Space Paranoids" from TRON! "Starfighter" from "The Last Starfighter!" Cool stuff.

--I always liked the Dogfight game from Star Trek III.

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Even More Random Move Link of the Moment
Watched "Colossus: The Forbin Project" last night. It ends like the first part of a trilogy that it is, but they never made movies for the sequels... luckily I found this page that explains what happened in the other books.

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Online Tool of the Moment
Yet another minimalist-UI specialty tool, this one marginally more useful than most, htmlescape converts HTML characters like < and & to their safely escape equivalents.

Musing of the Moment
My current favorite self-hypothesis is that I'm a kind of weird hybrid, an attention-seeking introvert. After bouncing around some ideas with my mom I see that it runs in the family a bit although maybe it's rude to use such stark terms for other people. But among my Aunt, my Mom, and myself I think there are some similarities: we definitely like having our own times and our own spaces, but we also enjoy socializing, and we also like performing, from my mom's theater work to my own tendency to make with the funny at the dev group's daily lunch.

So, assuming people agree that "introversion" is a reasonable simplification/diagnosis to make...one part of it that I've already mentioned is my need to recharge on my own, just a little zoning out with a book, or tv, or most often these days the web. Sometimes, after a full day, immersing myself in the websites I frequent, catching up with email and the message boards I participate in, is the mental equivalent of sinking into a nice warm bath. Heh...and like a bath, it's possible to overdo it...the web equivalent of letting my fingers get all pruney is when I'm actively procrastinating using the web, and Pavlov-ishly keep returning to the same sites that I know haven't had a chance to "refresh" yet.

One little bit of "bubble bath" in this increasingly pressed metaphor is IMDB; I love going out with people, seeing an older video, and the pleasure of returning home, unwinding a bit, and looking up the quotes and trivia for the title.

I'm not sure, but I think these past few days of backlog flush have had a ton of really good stuff, maybe even better than a day when I'm actually here. I think some of these links I wanted to read through before posting...which makes it take a real long time to write up, since I always start reading or viewing.

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backlog flush #43

• Wow. Blind from the ages of 3 to 46, Mike May seeing for the first time in his life is some amazing reading, how his brain is learning how to process visual information for the first time ever.
• Halcyon Days, amazing interviews with classic game programmers....I bought this when it was a "book on floppy" but now it's available for free!
• The WW2 Art of George Rarey, assembled by his son.
• The English Learner Movie Guides...oddly compelling straightforward explanations for words and phrases that might be tough for a non-native speaker to get in various popular movies.
• I'm not sure why I backlogged RandyLand...maybe because it's such a study in how not to make a personal webpage.
• How Many Plots Are There in Literature? 36? 20? 7? 3? 1? More on the 36, and some other Frequently Asked Reference Questions.
• WHOA--awesome, awesome link: O Brave New World That Has Such Bloggers In't!
• Elevator Moods: Funky little movies filmed in elevators.
• Prisoners' Inventions. I am still trying to keep up my regimine of the "burpees" exercise, which is kind of another form of prisoner invention.

• I met a traveller from an antique land,
  Who said--"Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
  Stand in the desart....Near them, on the sand,
  Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
  And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
  Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
  Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
  The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
  And on the pedestal, these words appear:
  My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings,
  Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
  Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
  Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
  The lone and level sands stretch far away."

  ...I love using that "Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!" line.

Movie Quote of the Moment

"And by the way, her tits weren't even real."
"Well, I could squeeze 'em, that's real enough for me."

Many women don't understand that a lot of guys think this way. The movie was a lot better than it should have been.

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Link of the Moment
Video Clips of old Cigarette Ads from the 50s and 60s. The second Flintstones link is especially interesting, though when the show was first run it was during primetime and considered an adult show, kind of like the Simpsons I guess...

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News of the Moment
"Shock and Awe" is underway. I'm at home sick today. CNN has some amazing coverage at the moment: no commentary, just switching between various exterior shots, some nightvision, others with bombs lighting up the scene. It really brings home the barbarism of what we're doing. It's a city of frickin' 5 million people! (On the other hand, "the lights are still on", they seemed to be focused on the "military targets".)

Damn it, I was hoping that with all the question about the state of Iraq's upper echelons, they could have avoided this, and we mighta won while looking like real heroes. (I don't think throwing missile after missile from miles off shore impresses anyone as heroic.)

Our tax dollars at work! Headline of the Moment

Does abstinence make the church grow fondlers?

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Quote of the Moment

We are much more simply human than anything else.

Quoted in this thoughtful Salon piece by a former (celibate) priest, against the Roman Catholic church's stance on celibacy. Life's going a bit crazy right now, layoffs to the left of me, layoffs to the right of me, layoffs all around me! But I'll muddle through.

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Funny Costumes of the Moment
A lot of funny costumes on this page, 70s Live Action Kid Vid. All these cheese shows that lived on in syndication in the 80s... I remember the Bugaloos, but somehow missed out on the even more famous H.R.Pufnstuf. Anyways, this is a really well researched page.

A little closer to home was this Great Space Coaster tribute. I loved this show when I was a kid. I can hear the theme song now, and then the brilliance of Speed Reader and Gary Gnu... wow.

Finally it's Kaiju. I saw a sticker with the URL at the men's room for the Upstairs Lounge in Boston. It looks like people making up some more of these elaborate costumes and duking it out. The FAQ says it got its start at the School of the MFA, where I took some of my first programming classes (they had a tie in with Tufts.)