March 30, 2023

2023.03.30
I remade my old "what day of the week is this date across years" webtoy (good to know when your birthday will fall on a weekend!) with programming via ChatGPT


awww early birthday gift from my sweetie Melissa! Minifig with Tuba/HONK shirt, a laptop, can o coke, lil Nitendo and a Dean kitty!

March 30, 2022

2022.03.30
What fresh hell is this?

empire strikes back strike back

2021.03.30
Lower your blast shields, kids, cuz Uncle Hunty's been drinkin' Two Buck Chuck and doing the dishes, and now he has the hottest take in the galaxy: Empire Strikes back is the Batman of Star Wars movies: something you think is really cool when you're an adolescent, but which seems exponentially dumber the more you think about it.

ISSUE #1! The Force. In the first Star Wars, "the Force" was mostly about intuition and "trusting your feelings". If you were REALLY strong with the Force, you could put a whammy on weak-minded people, like "these aren't the droids you're looking for" or when Obi Wan made some other stormtroopers think they heard a noise behind them. Darth Vader was strong enough in the Force that he made a dude think he was choking to death, and he had, like, a weird feeling when his old mentor Obi Wan was nearby, but it was so weak he dismissed it.

Then in Empire Strikes Back, the Force is suddenly full-on telekinesis in the first 10 minutes with Luke TKing his lightsaber to his hand, Yoda levitating an entire X-Wing out of a swamp, Vader TK-throwing stuff around during a fight, and Luke doing a wire-fu super jump. AND there's Force ghosts! Whereas Luke hearing Obi Wan saying "use the Force, Luke!" at the end of the first movie could've been a memory or at most Obi Wan's will reaching out through the Force to deliver one final message, in Empire he's right there walkin' around, sitting on logs and having conversations like this is all totally normal. AAAAAND then at the very end Luke and Darth have a telepathic conversation across probably thousands of miles of space, so that's part of the Force now, too. Which brings us to...

ISSUE #2! A big important message of the first movie was that even if you're just some rando farmboy from Planet Nowheresville, you could learn the mystical arts and use your farmboy pluck and skills you developed bullseying womprats out of sheer boredom to save the galaxy! This was very inspirational to all the Nowheresville farmboys of the world, of which there are quite a few, who had otherwise mostly been told that heroism was for princes and knights and stuff. Sure, Luke's neighbor happened to have been the sensei of Darth Vader, and Luke's dad had been a knight, but from the sound of it Luke's dad was just another of the countless dudes Darth Vader smushed on his way to supremacy.

Then in Empire Strikes back, we learn that Darth Vader IS Luke's dad! Oh wow! I guess he's actually only "strong with the Force" and capable of saving the galaxy because he's the son of the galaxy's most powerful wizard-knight, and it's all birthright, just like all the other heroes. Sorry, Nowheresville! Well, at least he's in the running for boyfriend to that princess, and that's a step up even from space wizard's son, right?

ISSUE #3 was gonna be about how it feels like the Empire "strikes back" way too fast after having their super-weapon destroyed, but the more I think about it that actually seems pretty reasonable, with them sending probes all over the place looking for those pesky rebels, and then dumping ALL of their remaining resources into smushing them when they find them on Hoth. And then they continue to spend their remaining resources chasing the Millenium Falcon all over for the rest of the movie, and are spread so thin that they have to hire bounty hunters to help them, and end up having to make a leveraged deal with a washed-out gambler for their final move. So that's actually just fine.

So there you go! In retrospect, all the changes in The Force Awakens that everyone complains about don't hold a candle to what Empire Strikes Back pulled on the first Star Wars.
R Hunter Gough on Facebook
He's right! especially Point Two. And the start of making a galaxy that was way too small (oh btw Darth MADE that shiny gold protocol droid) and way too big (just no limits to anything, really going for that "Encyclopedia Galactica" scale) at the same time.

And the skepticism shown about the force is so much more in tune with the "subtle mind tricks". Like when Darth says the line about "this battle station is no match for the power of the dark side" etc, he sounds rightfully defensive of a subtle mystical art, along with Han's blase and dismissive lines about it ("Hokey religions and ancient weapons are no match for a good blaster at your side, kid [...] Kid, I've flown from one side of this galaxy to the other. I've seen a lot of strange stuff, but I've never seen anything to make me believe there's one all-powerful force controlling everything. There's no mystical energy field that controls my destiny.")
ᴇᴄʜᴏ ᴄʜᴀᴍʙᴇʀꜱ ᴀʀᴇ ᴛʜᴇ ɪɴʙʀᴇᴇᴅɪɴɢ ᴏꜰ ᴋɴᴏᴡʟᴇᴅɢᴇ
Larmack, /r/showerthoughts

March 30, 2020

2020.03.30
To the Godless Prophet Murphy and his Eternal Law:
"No good deed goes unpunished" so I acknowledge your secular mandate to reward my joint efforts at housecleaning with a pulled lower back in these quarantine times. I further acknowledge that in your eternal promise of "there is no situation so bad that it couldn't be worse" I might have come down with COVID-19 and be supplementing every dry cough with wrenching back spasms, so thank you for staying your hand, and please accept this benediction on your capricious power as reason to allow me slouch out from under the gaze of your bloodshot eye.
An old mentor of mine made this COVID-19 simulation, a bit more detailed than some of the other ones I've seen: ventrella.com/covid19/
Now it's kinda like life is just staring at the 3 dots on iMessage while coronavirus is typing

March 30, 2019

2019.03.30
"This cake is so moist and delicious I would collude with foreign actors for another slice."
"Oh yeah? Well I would commit human rights abuses just for more frosting."
"I would blaspheme for a few more sprinkles."
"I would wage an unjust war and commit war crimes for the recipe."
"Guys I think we should just chill out."

personal growth thoughts old and new(ish) and the supernatural placebo

2018.03.30
One of the weird things about having a long-running blog is not only can it confirm "I've had this thought before", sometimes it was FAR longer ago than I ever would have guessed - 2013.11.13 calvinism and personal growth - 4 1/2 years ago I was noticing that my fixed mindset was intensely Calvinist (in the Protestant, not Funny Pages sense... i.e. you're either of the saved elect, or of the damned masses, and nothing in your own efforts can change that) as was my behavior. The faith in that you are one of the irredeemably saved, when undercut with the fear that you might not be, is not a freeing "so do what you want!" but an intensively restrictive and uptight "you best behave! Or people will have their doubts, no matter what God thinks".

Later I've noticed times when some people a bit to the left of me, or far to the right, seem to be indicating that you have to change something at its core, and then the good interactions you're hoping for will follow. (The anecdote for the left is how to get a band to lean into being diverse and welcoming, and for the right - I've even seen it in a scholarly way of presuming that understanding the Latinate roots of a word was more important than understanding the vernacular usage of it. But I also feel the right's view that "the apple don't fall far from the tree" and justifications for racism by lumping people into the worst stereotypes of their class has the same top-down thinking.)

Me, I dunno. I have no knack for observing personal growth in myself or others. People's behaviors or abilities may change for the better - statistical clear improvements - but I never get a sense of when that can safely feel like an internalized improvement. For instance, dieting never becomes easy, it's always a matter of gumption and leading myself way the hell away from temptation, because frankly if the delicious food is right there I'm gonna eat it. New eating habits never form and so constant vigilance is the requirement.

Further thought: On the 2013 post (man I hadn't shut down my comments section because of spammers by then?) an anonymous commenter wrote "And Somewhere in the salvation army, an angel just spit in its soup." Which is funny, because I had been thinking about how The Salvation Army really is about people being redeemed, through the life changing power of Jesus Christ.

I guess it's telling that both they and, say, AA look to a supernatural power as necessary for making a true change.

Given my current skepticism, I'm at least heartened by pondering on how insanely powerful the Placebo effect is in medicine.... It's too bad we don't respect placebos, because a belief in God is a powerful psychological bending thing, and that's true, for good or for ill, regardless of the supernatural truth behind any given belief...



The sun is probably the closest thing we’ll ever have to a true Eldritch Abomination. Hear me out here-


My sweet Melissa works in the same building as me - in fact her company's "Beer Garden" is an atrium visible from our office area and she left me this message...

March 30, 2017

2017.03.30
Computer Love Letters... this echoes (but predates) some ideas I've had for blending Love Blender and geekery for a long time.
[William] Hamilton died in 2000, after catching malaria on a trip to Africa to investigate the origins of HIV. About a decade before his death, he wrote about how he would like his own burial to go. He wanted his body carried to the forests of Brazil and laid out to be eaten from the inside by an enormous winged Coprophanaeus beetle using his body to nurture its young, who would emerge from him and fly off.
No worm for me nor sordid fly, I will buzz in the dusk like a huge bumble bee. I will be many, buzz even as a swarm of motorbikes, be borne, body by flying body out into the Brazilian wilderness beneath the stars, lofted under those beautiful and un-fused elytra [wing covers] which we will all hold over our backs. So finally I too will shine like a violet ground beetle under a stone.
from "Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness", Peter Godfrey-Smith

(Full disclosure: I am making fun of myself here, too. My wife and I have been married for nine years, and in those nine years I have not shared a one-on-one meal with any other women except maybe my mother or sister. That's not because of any principle other than the one that also has prevented me from sharing more than maybe two one-on-one meals with any men in those nine years: I'm an asocial hermit. Also my company is of no value to anyone.)
Referencing how disallowing the possibility of men and women dining together for non-pre-pre-sexytime reasons is greatly disempowering to women. Conservatives like to bash Islam for its anti-Feminist ways, and yeah that's more egregious, but this kind of thinking is more insidious.
Man, the dumb-ass crap conservatives will put on the side of a bus. And here I thought "if we didn't spend so much on EU we'd have more money to put into NHS" was the biggest bus lie I'd see.

March 30, 2016

2016.03.30
Slate on Why conservatives are talking about struggling white people the way they usually talk about black people. I know it's too easy for me to think of neocons as cackling villains, but the whole big business / fundamentalist 'solid south' white coalition has bugged me for a long while; Trump's say-anything populism has driven a wedge in the that, and this article points to how some of that kind of business conservative might start sounding if they stop thinking they can no longer use pretending to care about fundie issues (like anti-gay-rights and anti-abortion) to keep those voters on their side.
The love child of Nietzsche and Pollyanna.

huh

2015.03.30
this space left unintentionally blank (2019 UPDATE)

March 30, 2014

2014.03.30
I remember it used to be challenging to make a good calendar icon, but somehow these days a white box with a red top (with option day-of-month inside) suffices.

alien bill productions; the logo

(1 comment)
2013.03.30
So here is the winning result from the Alien Bill Productions logo project I sponsored.
On my devblog (which has been getting a lot more writing from than this place, lately, and oddly) I talk about the process, the other great entries, and the ethical issues.
Saying goodbye to 38-year-old-Kirk, forever.

soon...

2012.03.30
--Found this on my tubmlr recently. I think this is the original source. Such an awesome and terrifying way of viewing our culture's birthday traditions with the specter of our own mortality!
When civilization falls there will be legends of "Googal" the omniscient oracle, with glowing altars in every home and business.
Conservatives: dumber than ever. Faith over reason is a recipe for bad policy and awful political stances.
http://hint.fm/wind/index.html --awesome map of current prevailing winds all over the USA
It seems kind of insane how almost all of the Panera's pastries are like 2 or 3 Snickers' worth full of calories.

tuba training

2011.03.30

--via xoBruce. I guess that's a good warning for any hobos who might be asleep on the tracks!
Amber points out this is the last day I can make that joke "Old? No way! It's like I have the power of two 18 year olds stuck together!"
invisible hand
Invisible AND Opaque?
Had a thing, my neighborhood was really weird, you know, because my mother's a Puerto Rican a little bit. Huh, and my father's colored a lot.
Richard Pryor

the start that date that kiss that gift

(1 comment)
2010.03.30

--Lacunar Vals by "9000" -- Wired had a piece on this artist, check out the photostream on flikr
If I knew the world was going to end tomorrow, I would plant a tree.
Martin Luther

My birthday is tomorrow. I was born around 20 past midnight which makes me doubly grateful for Daylight Savings Time: without it my birthday would be "March 30" which you see less often than 31, which is the last day of the first quarter. (Though I guess I'd be making "the 30th is twice the ides of March!" jokes)
You've got to roll with the punches to get to what's real
Diamond Dave

beer bellies gone bad

(2 comments)
2009.03.30

--via Failblog. This is not quite the tattoo I plan to get.


Beautiful low clouds lit by the city of Boston at night as I drive home on 93.
My Aunt got carded buying me an M-rated (17+) video game for my birthday... ("Mad World". The game. Well, the world too.)
Cool Ranch Doritos are labeled 'Cool American' [in Iceland]
To quote Team America, World Police: AMERICA-- F*** YEAH!

manholespotting

(4 comments)
2008.03.30
Ugh, break-up today.

My fault.

Sigh, like Milan Kundera wrote "We never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come."


Japan of the Moment
So one odd series of photograph I took in Japan were manhole covers. Not every one I saw, but I saw a few that caught my eye, either because of design, or with a splash of cover, or because the hole was in grass instead of asphault, etc...


That last one probably is the one that got me noticing them on one of the first days, but I didn't think to photograph it 'til the end.

wings give you red bull

2007.03.30
Random anecdote: I remember once my dad was on an airplane trip, and somehow I found out he was bringing me back "wings" from the airline. I didn't know what they were, but my folks made them sound like something I should be excited about, so I was! Some kind of flying toy? or better yet, something that would let me fly?? I was literally dizzy with anticipation.

When I found out that was just some stupid decorative pin, I was so deeply disappointed.

Another time he took an airplane trip where, through a series of bumps and rebates and discounts and something to do with PEOPLExpress, the airline ended up paying my dad to fly, much to his amusement.


Link of the Moment
Why a Career in Programming Sucks. Some good points, but it still comes down to how it feels like one of the last bastions of being payed well for making stuff. (via Catherine, but her LJ is mostly for friends only)

spammedalot

(6 comments)
2006.03.30
Hey, is it just me, or are spammers suddenly into telling you about their "new email address"? I guess it's some scheme to get around filtering, though if it helps get past digital filters, or just is something a human might recongize as previously usually coming from a human, specifically a human they'd had corresponded with previously...

Random thought experiment, how long will it take all the "I have a new email address!" spam to catch up the number of emails that legitmately used that? Maybe a while, since you see that on a lot of business corespondance, but still.


Orgy of the Moment
--I really loved this not TOO explicit orgy scene from the Perry Bible Fellowship "Cupid Mistake".



Article of the Moment
FoSO fwd'd this article reiterating the idea that more money doesn't equal more happiness, and little details of daily life (like, having a shorter commute) are more important than sheer salary size. I'm not quite sure what the action item on this is for me though.

pollution is pretty

2005.03.30
Oil Rainbows of the Moment



Link of the Moment
When Bad Scenes Happen To Good Movies and then vice versa. (via Bill the Splut)

temporary overcast of the cluttered brain

(7 comments)
2004.03.30
Saw an excellent film last night, the best I've seen in years: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Made me grateful I bent my usual "only see big F/X blockbusters in cinemas" rule; thought-provoking and melancholy-stirring, an incredible (mildly-scifi) "what if"; "Vanilla Sky" minus the beautiful people factor (but better than that), some elements of Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five" with it's timeshifting, a musing on the nature of memory, and living in it; a bit sexy in parts but never exploitive (not that I mind a bit of gratuity now and then...), some thoughts on the natures of dreams and consciousness, finally asking the question if you thought you could mend a heartbreak by selectively erasing it from your mind, would you?

It's a good question.

I never would, being a nostalgic kind of guy, but it's a good question.


Selection of the Moment
Lay Your Sleeping head, my love,
Human on my faithless arm:
Time and fevers burn away
Individual beauty from
Thoughtful children, and the grave
Proves the child ephemeral:
But in my arms till break of day
Let the living creature lie,
Mortal, guilty, but to me
The entirely beautiful.
W.H.Auden, from "Lullabye".
Always been a favorite of mine, something in last night' movie brought it to mind.


Political Jabs of the Moment
Bush/Cheney took down their "sloganator" banner builder, but not after some folks gave them some great ideas.


Site of the Moment
Linked to from boingboing's sidebar, it's Cancergiggles, a site by a man who has about 6-18 months to live from cancer. Written with huge doses of humor and willingness to talk about things head on.


Gratuitous Large Font Use of the Moment
Sweet Jimminy Crickets! This is the last evening of my twenties! And I'm at home cleaning my study and looking for my frickin' checkbook! (And moaning about it in my journal.) Heck, in Europe, I'm already 30!

Ah well. 5-6 years ago, my Y2K-etc fearing self thought I'd be lucky to make to 30. But here I am.

birthdayayayay

(3 comments)
2003.03.30
So, sorry for yesterday's update, it was pretty lame. And today's might not be much better, just longer...in my defense, I was spending most of the day celebrating my birthday (and today I'm gonna write about it.) Lee had invited me along to Fun Spot, an entertainment center in New Hampshire with a ton of classic arcade games, all very well maintained. Take a look at the list of games...it's like MAME but with real machines. Plus, Lee's birthday gift was $20 worth of tokens (and they give you 125 instead of 20*4=80 for that--) I got through like half of the tokens, I'll use the other half when New England Classic Gamers meet there, I think some time this summer.


Quote and Mix CDs of the Moment
If you are a disc jockey, kindly remember that your job is to play records that people will enjoy dancing to and not to impress possible visiting disc jockeys with your esoteric tastes. People generally enjoy dancing to songs that have words and are of a reasonable length. Sixteen-minute instrumentals by West African tribal drummers are frequently the cause of undue amyl nitrate consumption and shirt removal.
Fran Lebowiz, from Disco Hints: The New Etiquette.
Previously in the passage she suggest people amyl nitrate should be consumed in one's truck, not in the middle of a crowded dance floor, and that fellow dancers interested in your progress at the gym will not be too shy to ask, one does not have to remove one's shirt, despite the warmth.

So I'm finally learning how to make optimal party dance mix CDs...the watchwords, as that quote reminded me, are A. danceability and B. familiarity. (Mix CDs for cars are a different story, there you can try to introduce people to new music.) Also, I've realized that each new generation of mix CDs can be a refinement of the last. To those ends, I loaded my two new mixes with late 80s/early 90s party hiphop, and a lot of modern covers of new wave songs:


Roaring Twenties Disc One:
Groove Is In The Heart (Kirk party mix neccesity)
Burning Down The House (Tom Jones cover)
Wild Thing
Like a Prayer (deep throated techno-ish cover)
Bad Touch ("like they do on the Discover Channel" song)
The Humpty Dance
Take On Me (Ska cover)
Shake Your Thang (Salt -n- Pepa)
Jump Around
Tained Love (Marilyn Manson cover)
Stress (Jim's Big Ego)
It Takes Two
99 Red Balloons (Modern cover)
Walk This Way (Run DMC/Aerosmith version)
Funky Cold Medina
Tainted Love (original, here by mistake)


Roaring Twenties Disc Two:
Baby Got Back
One Week
Gonna Make You Sweat (Everybody Dance Now)
Slam
Unbelievable
Hungry Like The Wolf (funny lounge cover)
Things That Make You Go Hmmmm
One Way Or Another
Private Idaho
What I Like About You
Walk Like an Egyptian
Ice Ice Baby
My Sharona
I Will Survive
I'm Too Sexy
Smack My Bitch Up
Smells Like Teen Spirit
Vogue

Disc One is a bit stronger than Disc Two. In general, I try to arrange songs in descending order of coolness.

not your father's volkswagen rabbit

2002.03.30
Have you seen this ad for the new Saturn SUV, the VUE? It has a VUE, apparently the size (and color) of one of the wild hares it's with in a winter wilderness, when suddenly a cougar attacks, singling out the SUV, but then gets caught on a log after trying to run the vehicle down. Well, the TV version adds the caption "Professional Driver, Closed Course". Well, thanks for that one! I guess I won't try this at home, escaping from a wild cougar 10 times the size of my vehicle.


AOL Chat of the Moment
kirk: what's for lunch?
john: whatever
kirk: a big steam plate of indifference it is then
john: sweet!
kirk: sweet, sweet indifference. Where would I be without you? Caring about every damn thing that's what
--Maybe you had to be there...oh, wait, John WAS there. Must be just me.


Link of the Moment
Where do you go for your half-baked ideas? Why, the halfbakery, of course. (Link via a Slashdot article about this NY Times piece with 9 interesting technology ideas.)

lies, damn lies

2001.03.30
Link of the Moment
Read the Lies People Tell (the site seems a little disorganized, this seems to be the best starting link.) Kind of cool stuff, the "Lies our Parents Tell Us" was a Cruel Site of the Day recently.


Quote of the Moment
Information wants to be a Socialist... not a Communist or a Republican.
Karen Schneider

"How about we reenact the resurrection with hand puppets instead?"
--Captain James Israel, when pushed to hold a sunrise Easter service.)
---
"Never test for an error condition you don't know how to handle. "
--Steinbach
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I've been Jonesing for this $2000 RCA 36", HDTV compatible, SVGA ready tv. That's a lot of money for a television, but you can swing the numbers games a lot of ways.  3 months rent, (2 if we had a nicer place), 3 digitical cameras (and I'll probably use this more), etc etc.  Most importantly, for me it represents a part of the 'good life'.
00-3-30
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