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hello my name is self help singh
international life coach motivational
speaker and best selling author of the
book do nothing do nothing
there is no purpose or meaning to find
in life
so just exist and do nothing
stop waking up early
life is shit so sleep through as much of
it as possible 5 a.m club bad idea 11
a.m club much better idea stop doing the
things you don't want to do make the
excuses avoid the work commitments the
friend get togethers the family
gatherings if you so wish make the
excuse book and fill it with excuses
keep the excuses ready for the bus for
the wife for the friends
say no to the team's meetings to the
tick-tock
say no to the exercise say no to the
diet eat whatever the fuck you want
soon you will be dead so what difference
is it making stop listening to what
people say about you
stop chasing the perfect summer body
whether you are fat or thin haters will
hate
and soon your haters will also die
hopefully in the most horrific manner
joking not joking oh am i joking
do the least amount of work without
getting fired nike say
just do it
self-help singh say just do nothing
release yourself of obligation and
responsibility and just do nothing
everything you think you need to do
was done before you and will be done
after you
so stop doing
you do it best when you do nothing at
all you are not special you are not
unique creation the world is fucked and
you cannot unfuck it so just do you and
do nothing
stop spending your days searching for
the meaning of life
for that is the most futile exercise
you will die one day just as confused as
you are now so be happy with what and
who you are
as my good friend farooq freddie mercury
once said
nothing really matters
so do
nothing

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I improved a recreation of a graphpaper font I used to do by hand in high school...

A barometric low hung over the Atlantic. It moved eastward toward a high-pressure area over Russia without as yet showing any inclination to bypass this high in a northerly direction. The isotherms and isotheres were functioning as they should. The air temperature was appropriate relative to the annual mean temperature and to the aperiodic monthly fluctuations of the temperature. The rising and setting of the sun, the moon, the phases of the moon, of Venus, of the rings of Saturn, and many other significant phenomena were all in accordance with the forecasts in the astronomical yearbooks. The water vapor in the air was at its maximal state of tension, while the humidity was minimal. In a word that characterizes the facts fairly accurately, even if it was a bit old-fashioned: It was a fine day in August 1913.

After the photoshoot...

Sitting in your car outside of your house is self care. I can't explain it but if you know you know.

Man, that is true. I mean less true now that I'm never driving, but finishing a drive at night, turning off the radio, enjoying the silence and stillness for a bit before rejoining a loved one inside or just the hopeful coziness of one's room... so healing.

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So, successful, if obvious, protip for finding paper goods in stock: ask. I asked a CVS shelver when they restocked (Tuesday night) and went first thing this morning. (Oddly, they have a vulnerable population hour but it starts an hour after they open.)

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On my devblog, the Atari Portfolio and other early PDA fun...

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Monday I noticed gratitude for more daylight; today I'm really noticing the pleasantness of an open window. Don't know if it's being inside so much because of COVID, or just a mild but long winter...

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Alternate panel for Donkey Kong arcade game... love the take on Pauline and Jumpman...
My friend Erica suggested a diet for me - "Have a quasi-religious taboo against free food". Admittedly, this is only really relevant for people with jobs where free food is handy - like many dot com's ever-full snack kitchens.

Of course my place is in full on Google-wanna-be mode and provides free lunch, which I think explains at least part of the "Freshman 15" I put on there and still haven't lost.

And it's tough, that's like $8-12 a day easy, or a greater amount measured in food prep and thoughtfulness- I can afford it, sure. But between that and the giving up of snacks... oy.

Still, that's the whole dilemma of modern weight control. Most people reading this are living in food cornucopias of such abundance and variety that we would be seen as like unto gods by most of our ancestors. Even the ones that managed to arrange plenty for themselves would be impressed by the year round variety of super-flavors we have access to - to quote Matt Crowley:‏

We take it for granted today, but a single Dorito has more extreme nacho flavor than a peasant in the 1400s would get in his whole lifetime.

When you combine that with zero cost (save for strolling over to the kitchen area and peering into a cupboard) - that means most folks attempts not to indulge will be a constant drain of willpower.) The "quasi-religious" aspect is an attempt to piggyback on other bits of human weirdness. Which, frankly, is one of the better parts of religion, when it provides a framework we can hang on to climb above our all-too-human natures.

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Star Wars: Episode IV sound design explained by Ben Burtt:

Always satisfying to hear a friendly professional pull back the curtain on his craft. If you're in a hurry, the best part is the antepenultimate bit on Tie Fighters and elephants at 39:10, and then the "Sound People... or Worse" shtick to end it was amusing.

It's rather easy to forget how important soundscapes are to movies - until you try assembling your own videos by splicing shorter scenes (and of course in some ways the advent of "talkies" set the visual part of film construction back decades.) And I think he underplays how cool the radio voices (36:58) trick was - hearing the voice of the pilot currently shown "flat", then having that pilot continue to talk but the visual and audio switches to a different cockpit so the voice is distorted, is enormously effective, parallel to a deep focus change.

Also he mentions making frequent use of "worldizing", playing back constructed audio and then using recording of that, which adds a lot of acoustic life to it. To me it sounds similar to the echo chamber in Phil Spector / Larry Levin's "Wall of Sound" recording style.

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The Starks are a family who chilled in their own segregated neighborhood, not bothering anybody. Ned was the father, and he had five kids. He was also raising his nephew Jon Snow. (His sister got knocked up by this crazy guy, and ... you know how we do.) Anyway, Ned let his homeboy convince him to take this "good job," let his daughter marry a white boy and moved his family into a white neighborhood. Ned fell for the trap, and the Lannister/Trumps cut his head off because Ned knew about the Russian collusion.

Cutting corners just makes more corners.

A friend's online moot/mute swap typo provoked me to write the following, clearly I'd been looking for an outlet for this ramble...
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I make all kinds of phonetic typos (where I'll end up typing a third word that sort of sounds like the others), and then this odd m/b swap where I'll switch "me" for "be" say, or vice versa. Not mute for moot for some reason, I guess for me the vowels are less "swappable" than they are for others.

Lately - hopefully without raising too many questions about my mental health- I've been thinking a lot about this subconscious me, how there seems to be almost a personality in here, different than the rational / inner voice me (the one that tries to take credit for BEING me, though I think I got over that via Dan Dennett's "Consciousness Explained")

This "other me" might correspond a bit to the Id as drawn by Freud - or the pop culture "inner child", one that throws tantrums when things seemed aligned against it - that thwarts my attempts at smart eating by provoking cravings - and, FINALLY getting to the point - I wonder if it's the background processor that lets me read (well, skim, but with good absorption rates) and write very quickly, but not always accurately ("I want to live life like I type; fast, and with lots of mistakes")
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This other me - under certain states of sleep/awakeness, I feel like I've had glimpses of him. Sometimes I think it might be a multitude, I've gotten this impression of a skull full of colorful worms, or lets say "sock covered slinkies" because worms are gross. (It looked a bit like this kinetic digital art piece I made, paintbars.) The fugue-ish state with that visual also gave me the idea that the worms are a little bitter because they're generally not in control, and short lived and forgotten, and that they can generally only communicate via emotional post-it notes. (Ever get that? Like I'll get a sudden stab of, say, melancholy, or relief, or something, and have to sit a moment and trace back where it came from.)

Also when I was a kid, twice when I was going through anxious times (moving to a new city) I had a dream about this "alternate me". For a while I thought he was supposed to be my opposite - skinny when I was chubby, wearing the other half of the pajamas I had on, and silent where I would be talkative - except then as we wrestled I went to scream, and couldn't, classic sleep-paralysis. This might be looking too much into it but now I wonder if he might be a manifestation of this other part of me.

There's a whole type of therapy, popular in New England and maybe not so much elsewhere, called Internal Family Systems that encourage recognizing similar sub-parts, and roleplaying engaging with them as full-fledged people. (So closer to the silent kid than the skullfull of worms) The practice talks about specific roles (Managers, Exiles, Firefighters) that I'm not sure feel true to me, but it might be an avenue worth exploring. "Spiders are really tiny 3D printers"
--/u/Peerkons dragonish cloud
April 15 "In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes" Today we are releasing an online comic to help you deal with one of those: http://SoYoureGoingToDie.com , "the Skeptical Nerd's Comic Guide to Coping with Your Own Mortality".

It's beautifully illustrated by UK artist James Harvey, and has 8 small chapters, each one presenting a different way of coping with the fact that some day, for each of us, This Ends. Everyone has to make their own peace with that, but over the years I've had people write to me that the ideas here, now newly illustrated, are legitimately comforting.

We're trying to generate attention for this work, both because we know seeing it in its current web format can be useful to people who don't feel certain of a hereafter and because we'd like to pursue some print publishing options, so please share and pass around the link as you see fit.

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I just found out the old Exidy arcade game "Car Polo" exists. This is exactly the game I would have wanted to have made in that era.

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Car Polo:

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Canada is just, like, the B-side.

am fine. weirded out that I just bought shoes at that marathon store a few months ago.

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Eyes Wide Shut is an even better film when you understand the central theme: Tom Cruise is not nearly as cool as he thinks he is.

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Aspartame tastes like sugar made of JPG artifacts.

Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle from CUSEC on Vimeo.

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Aren't memories just dreams we have while we're awake?

It's the coolest hidden Nintendo song since Totaka's Song... funny how I listened to that background bajillions of times, and the entire melodic aspect is utterly disguised. I guess there's a temporal aspect to melody recognition -- or even recognizing that there is a melody present.

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http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/04/just-simple-truth Thanks you very much, Republicans.

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dyJaaYoWPPw - a game I'd like to see: "Body Harvest: Liberty City" Hmm. Sometimes I wish I knew more about grammar -- like when Thurber was talking about Miss Groby's attempt to teach him metonymy and synecdoche...

One of the things I liked about the game "Braid" was the quaint and charming - if ever so slightly cornball - writing. This ending of this passage gets stuck in my head:

Tim needed to be non-manipulable. He needed a hope of transcendence. He needed, sometimes, to be immune to the Princess's caring touch.

Off in the distance, Tim saw a castle where the flags flutter even when the wind has expired, and the bread in the kitchen is always warm. A little bit of magic.

The thing was I was reading "Peterman Rides Again" -- a book by and about "the" J. Peterman -- and he gave this example of his catalog's oft-exalted copy:

The cotton we have used in our uncompromising replica of Gatsby's shirt is so luminous, in and of itself, that even a person who notices nothing will notice something.

Gatsby, of course, could afford stacks of these shirts; rooms of them. Never mind. All that matters is that you have one, just one. A piece of how things were.

I wonder if there's a name for the little trick these two clips share, of ending with a short, verbless fragment giving another name for what was just described.

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One cannot change the size or quantity of anything without changing its quality.

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David Foster Wallace's word list

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Thanks to a recalcitrant laptop I spilled a big cup of bitter Au Bon Pain iced coffee on the rug at work-I know what I'll be smelling today!

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http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/4/7/ - Jeez, Jell-O isn't "powdered bone slime"... it's *wiggly* powdered bone slime!

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Weird- the concept of synecdoche has shown up in three different, unrelated areas for me today, hadn't thought about it for years...

--Now THAT, my friends, is a Unicycle. From cracked.com's 16 More Images You Won't Believe Aren't Photoshopped

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Ripped a cuticle on my right pointer finger resetting office water cooler... workman's comp? (PS why are bandaids still "white folks" color?)

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This company has whiteboard wallpaper. I think I need a room in my apartment with white board wallpaper. It's very dot-comish but I don't remember seeing it before, So I'm thinking more and more about adding a new "books + flicks" sidebar. I mean, should it include movies and videos, or would it be better to have a focus just on books? Call it something like "good reads" or what not. There are a lot of decision to be made, I'm hoping having a certain topic will let it succeed in a way the "sidebar of the people" hasn't.

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Description of the Moment

But [in Tokyo] we are confronted with a world synthesis. Here there meet and mingle the twenty-six civilizations of Toynbee, the eighteen religions of Turchi, the five kalpas (Buddhist comic eras), von Eickstedt's thirty-eight races and sub-races of mankind, the fifty-six ways of making love of the Kama-sutra, the seventy styles of cooking, the six perfumes, the eighty-two smells, the 120,000 stinks, the twelve dozen kinds of dirt, the seven wonders, the thousand lights, the 2,600 tongues, the thirty-four vices (with the exception of opium smoking), all the fantasies, and the two great principles of yin and yang which according to Chinese magical ideas, generate the infinite variety of the world. Not for nothing has another American called it a 'wonderful, hybrid, dissolute, noisy, quiet, brooding, garish, simpering, silly, contemplative, cultured, absurd city'.

The book, a thoughtful find at the local swap shop from EvilB and Leslee, is a view of Japan from the very end of the 1950s, and its intriguing to compare its experience of Japan to my own, especially since the American lens has changed greatly in that half-century.

Best footnote from the book so far:

Earthquakes are one of the four Japanese terrors; the others are fire, thunder, and father.

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Animation of the Moment

--A series of images from a 5,200 year old Iranian goblet might be said to constitute the oldest animation!

With the return of the Red Sox I've been listening to Sports Radio a bit more, and... wow. I'm mildly surprised they're still banging the "LOL, so much for global warming, amirite?" drum. One of them was even clever enough to repeating the metaphor "the Earth has a fever" without even extending it to the idea of sometimes a fever also brings on chills. Ok, so maybe that bends an already strained metaphor to the breaking point, but seriously, to ignore what seems to be a higher preponderance of weird rather because "why that's not quite warming, is it?" is just frustrating.

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Quote of the Moment

A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.

A sophomoric interpretation wonders "so why does that impact matter if the other lives don't matter", a slightly wiser (if more geeky) level is to see that importance as an emergent property...

Anyway, Happy Jackie Robinson day. His wikipedia page makes for some good reading.

And I hate to say it, but shame on the Red Sox for being the last major league team to integrate, and maybe their backwards stance helped perpetuate the Curse of the Bambino (PDF, or see the google HTML)

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News of the Past Moment
I guess it's as good a day as any to put in my two cents worth on Don Imus. I find the most startling aspect of the whole sordid affair is: people were still listening to Don Imus???

Puncuation Fun of the Moment
Puncuate the following so that it makes sense...if you give up, hit Ctrl-A or highlight the text (with its ten HADs) and reveal the puncuation:

ANN,  WHILE   BOB   HAD   HAD   "HAD,"  HAD   HAD "HAD   HAD." "HAD   HAD"   HAD   HAD   A   BETTER   EFFECT   ON   THE   TEACHER.

My coworker Tim showed that to me yesterday, I HADn't seen it before.

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Kittens of the Moment
Ksenia's family is catsitting Mia, a mamacat who just had herself a batch of kittens...last night FoSO, FoSOSO, Ksenia and I headed over for some kitten therapy. I was going to dole the photos out one per day but Ksenia accused me of being too stingy, so here you go all at once... So I've been using the Firefox browser more these days. It's definitely a nice product, and really stands toe to toe with IE, but I do have some gripes...comments or suggestions (ala "that's 'cause you're doing it wrong, dummy!) welcome.

(Thanks to Catherine, who urged me to start using Firefox, and then post stuff here.)

Things Firefox does better than IE

• Tabbed browsing -- didn't "get it" at first, but now I like the "semantic grouping" I can do, multipages without cluttering the taskbar. And ctrl-click opens a window in the background, much better than the shift-click, alt-tab dance I use in IE to open many links off of one page.
• The Ctrl-F find function as a toolbar. It sticks around for searching multiple pages, and has a nice search-as-you-start-typing factor. (IE's inability to pull up what I last unsuccessfully searched for as a default for the next search has always bugged me.)
• Syntax-colored "view source" is better than IE's use of notepad. (Netscape 4.7 had that too.)

Things IE does better than Firefox

• IE has a very usable FTP 2-way client, Firefox has an FTP browser only.
• IE has a better password-remembering system.
• Firefox's Ctrl-F doesn't seem to search input form fields.
• IE's "mouse select jumps to word boundaries" is not perfect but better than Firefox's character based model.
• Ctrl-N in IE brings up a clone of the current window, complete with history. Firefox opens up my startpage...redundant, because I can easily launch it from the start menu.
• Ctrl-T in Firefox opens up a new and utterly blank tab...even more useless thanthe Ctrl-N behavior!
• IE shows undisplayable characters with box placeholders, Firefox uses question marks.
• Tabbing in Firefox doesn't reset the cursor blink cycle, or something, so you don't get instant confirmation that you're typing in the correct box.
• IE has better drag and drop editing of the toolbars, including the "File Edit View" bar. (I like compressing that bar, 5 small buttons, and the address bar all on one line.)
• Ctrl-O in firefox is the normal file open dialog...not as useful as IE's URL-or-file-browse feature.
• I wish Firefox had an option to let each tab have its own close button...often I want to quickly close a bunch of tabs based on their title, but instead I have to switch to each one and close it separately.

Things Both IE and Firefox Get Wrong

• Both have "reuse windows?" (does double clicking an HTML file or clicking a link in a chat program etc open a new window or reuse an existing browser window) a configurable option, but have the "wrong" default of reuse. New browser windows are cheap, and losing my previous place because of a new activity is annoying.

Of course, Firefox is an Open Source Project, so theoretically I as a programmer am empowered to fix these things. Realistically, working on other people's complex code is something you only do for money or great enthusiasm, which I don't have in this case. If there's a potentially more productive place to make suggestions I'm all ears.



Curse of the Moment

"God damn you with faint praise!"

My new favorite curse to begrudgingly concede to the guy I just lost to, like after a close videogame match. A lot more fun than "good game, I guess."

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Nudity of the Moment
Naked is a non-prurient Flash art piece about people and their uncovered bodies. (Contains people naked, so don't go if that offends you. Or if you can only stand to look at gorgeous models nude.) The voiceovers with people talking about body issues, along with an odd little control scheme, remind me strongly of traditional art installations.

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Geekery of the Moment
404 Research Labs, everything about the error you get when the webserver can't find the file you want. Includes the helpful tip of making sure your custom 404 page is bigger than 512 bytes, otherwise IE5 might decide to show its own custom page instead, the jerks.

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Conspiracy of the Moment
Latest rumor in the Arab world? Baghdad didn't fall--it was handed over, in a secret deal to keep Baath party officials alive and prevent what was a likely bloodbath. Can't say I disapprove if that is what happened. So I spent my first day of unemployment making art. (Or is it "art"? But maybe I shouldn't count this as unemployment, since Patriot's Day is a day off for so many companies in this state.) A few weeks ago on Ebay I bought an Etch A Sketch Animator, a toy I had in middle school. Today I spent a few too many hours laboriously copying in a ten-frame excerpt from a previous small gif cinema piece, "bob s. and i" and putting into this device.

For those not in the know, an Animator is a bit like a traditional Etch A Sketch in control scheme, but you can make up to 12 frames of 40x30 on-or-off pixels, and play them back in a sequence of up to 96 frames. By a happy coincidence, 40x30 was the size I had selected for the small gif cinema pieces when I converted them to GIF from a larger QuickCam format.

I've always loved obsolete video technology. I think I got a special kick out of trying to push photo realistic concepts through...a similar concept to what I did for pixeltime way back when. Alas, my lack of hardware hacking skills prevents me from repeating what this guy did, but I'm still pleased with the results. I was redoing my PDA (more on that later) when I noticed that August 16th is my 10K day! I'll be 10,000 days old that day. Funny, I don't feel a day over 8000... Anyway, I was reminded that I once had plans to make this as project, making a web interface to calculate the difference between any two dates, or figure out what date is a certain number of days away from another date. At first I assumed I would do this in Perl with round trips to the server, but javascript turned out to be a better bet...

Update: 5124 days later, I released a prettier, friendlier, and more functional version of this: TIMETOY.net... but I like to be able to compare that to this original version... and funny how prescient my experience with javascript vs perl was then...

So here it is. It can calculate in days, weeks, hours, minutes, and seconds. You can give it a start date and an amount of time and calculate the end date, or you can give it a start date and an end date and calculate the time in between. Birthdays are an obvious fun starting point. Or count the minutes between now and Christmas. Let me know if you find something interesting. I've seeded it with 100 days from right now to give you the idea.

start date:
difference:
end date:

calculate from difference

calculate between dates