May 4, 2023

2023.05.04


via shhhitsfine.
Speaking of... this recently unearthed photo from Christmas '79, listening to my dad's heart with a stethoscope I got in a toy doctor kit.




May 4, 2022

2022.05.04


via
my hair is a bit meshuganah but my mom's new glasses are suspiciously similar to mine 😃

more like "CRAPTURE" amirite?

2021.05.04
Very thoughtful piece on Evangelicals and how expectations of the Rapture looms so large for them.

(I think it underplays the who pre-Trib/mid-Trib/post-Trib angle... for some Christians, they cut the bitterness of it all with sugar of "Well God loves US BELIEVERS *too much* to let us go through the bad stuff, so we're going to be whisked away with a Get-Out-Of-Apocalypse-Free card" - an angle I really resented when I was more of a fearful, post-trib believer, waiting for all good Christians to get rounded up here on Earth, and then only later would things be rebalanced)

The Salvation Army I grew up with was- to its credit - much more about doing good work in the here and now than this stuff, but still, it had a bit of brimstone about, and I think trauma about the fear of hell and the stuff in Revelation was one of my most formative influences... gotta get right with God, subjugate anything I might personally want to whatever God wants, lest I burn in hell forever.

It took me a while to realize there are flavors of Christianity that lacked that kind of f***ed-up-ness!

And man, it is pretty f***'d. Both individually - coercing people into staying in line with the church - and then institutionally. You can't expect people to be good stewards of the planet or even of society when they they are convinced Earth has hit its "Sell By" date and nothing we do matters.
A bunch of people, plus a band, has more power than just a bunch of people.
Forgot to post this last month! I'm pretty happy with how I was able to present what BABAM is trying to do, though I absolutely didn't call our backing of the big BLM counterprotest/parade in 2017 a "personal" triumph

I like this

May 4, 2020

2020.05.04
Poking around the website "The Video Game Kraken" I ran into Cube World by Radica Games Ltd - a toy line I have just the faintest memory of, but is so far up my alley it should set up a mailbox.

It's a collectible series of magnetically linking boxes and communicating boxes, each with a little person on an LCD screen. The idea captures the same artificial-creature charm of the Tamagotchi, but without the "care and feeding" aspect. (But using movement detection for some basic interactions) I think the commercials give a flavor of it:


and then later they expanded beyond just LCD screens, kind of breaking that tiny 4th wall with real world peripherals:


It's super charming when one resident climbs into the neighbor's box and they interact. I'm really curious if anyone has analyzed the interbox communication protocols - it looks like a new box can "teach" animations to its neighbors, rather than everything a box can display being wired in at the factory, but I'm not sure.

Here's one person's large collection:


I guess I will resist the urge to add another set of tchotchkes to my life, but I really do find these things to be sort of inspiring. Ever since the Game Boy and PalmPilot I've been enamored of cheap LCDs and what they can do...

May 4, 2019

2019.05.04

May 4, 2018

2018.05.04
TIL: "helicopter" isn't heli + copter, it comes from helico (spiral) + pter (wing, ala pterodactyl)
I am getting so frustrated with the low quality of iPhones voice to text transcription. Probably Never enough to make me switch, but boy is it annoying... I can say the word quote to put a " there butwhat do I say to end the quote? we are barely at the Atari 2600 level of voice interface...
People who can't distinguish between etymology and entomology bug me in ways I cannot put into words.

On FB my college roommate Rob pointed me to this guide to Siri/voice-to-text "markup" commands
Heh, CarGurus is #1 largest car shopping website in the USA. Not bad for a site that is so hard to pronounce :-D It's nice being with a company doing so great - (though honestly it's not the tech that's winning the battle, it's being more on the side of the car buyers)

May 4, 2017

2017.05.04
You are welcome on my lawn.
PopeRatzo's .sig on slashdot.
I love the double-edged sentiment!

May 4, 2016

2016.05.04
Last night So, You're Going to Die got a Best in Category (Small & Self Publishers Illustrated) from the 59th Annual New England Book Show, the longest running book fair in the country.

Thanks to my sweetie Melissa who was my date and a great hypeman on FB, Stephen Cartisano (a member of the Book Builders, and a great encouragement for both printing and submitting the book) and of course James Harvey, who actually gets the lion's share of the credit. (Though the judges did complement the skull endpapers I generated.)
The most disturbing part of freedom, Woodfox says, has been the dawning realisation since his release that in America in 2016 there is very little sense of political or social struggle. When he entered prison in the 1970s the country was on fire with political debate; now, as he puts it, "everybody seems to be 'Me, me, me, me, me.' It's all about me, what I need and how I'm going to get it."
He sounds pretty sane, considering.
My stripper name is 'good grief cover that up'

May 4, 2015

2015.05.04
One glimmer of hope for Western culture: somehow in the past half-century we quietly figured out it's ok for people to be lefties, and stopped trying to forcibly convert them.
http://www.quora.com/Why-are-you-a-Democrat -- some good answers
Wow - Hannah's main interest Adam from "Girls" is the dude holding the crossbar'd lightsaber in the Star Wars Trailer...

May 4, 2014

2014.05.04
I just realized Spaceballs has more women than Star Wars. And more black people.

Two endless irritations of old gaming: the PS2 only had 2 controller ports, the Wii menu NEEDS the sensor bar, even if the game doesn't/

May 4, 2013

2013.05.04
This was one of the 5 days (2011.07.07, 2013.03.16, 2013.05.04, 2013.05.08, 2013.05.13) I missed, as of this site's 5000th entry on Sep 8 2014...

steven king on taxing the rich

2012.05.04
Making the rounds on the left-leaning social media is an excerpt from this rant by Steven King:
I guess some of this mad right-wing love comes from the idea that in America, anyone can become a Rich Guy if he just works hard and saves his pennies. Mitt Romney has said, in effect, "I'm rich and I don't apologize for it." Nobody wants you to, Mitt. What some of us want--those who aren't blinded by a lot of bullshit persiflage thrown up to mask the idea that rich folks want to keep their damn money--is for you to acknowledge that you couldn't have made it in America without America. That you were fortunate enough to be born in a country where upward mobility is possible (a subject upon which Barack Obama can speak with the authority of experience), but where the channels making such upward mobility possible are being increasingly clogged. That it's not fair to ask the middle class to assume a disproportionate amount of the tax burden. Not fair? It's un-fucking-American is what it is. I don't want you to apologize for being rich; I want you to acknowledge that in America, we all should have to pay our fair share. That our civics classes never taught us that being American means that--sorry, kiddies--you're on your own. That those who have received much must be obligated to pay--not to give, not to "cut a check and shut up," in Governor Christie's words, but to pay--in the same proportion. That's called stepping up and not whining about it. That's called patriotism, a word the Tea Partiers love to throw around as long as it doesn't cost their beloved rich folks any money.
What's interesting is that they leave out the more right-leaning prelude:
At the risk of repeating myself, here's what rich folks do when they get richer: they invest. A lot of those investments are overseas, thanks to the anti-American business policies of the last four administrations.
I guess I'd like to know more about his view of that.

via BB
What if realists were in charge of U.S. foreign policy? -- we need a Realist Party.
The practice of art isn't to make a living. It's to make your soul grow.

What kind of codes do pirates scan? Q-Arrrr Codes! Hahaha just kidding, they don't scan them either.

Test driven development is like grammar driven literature.
Bob Walsh

search for meaning

2011.05.04
Logotherapy, keeping in mind the essential transitoriness of human existence, is not pessimistic but rather activistic. To express this point figuratively we might say: The pessimist resembles a man who observes with fear and sadmess that his wall calendar, from which he daily tears a sheet, grows thinner with each passing day. On the other hand, the person who attacks the problems of life actively is like a man who removes each successive leaf from his calendar and files it neatly and carefully away with its predecessors, after first having jotted down a few diary notes on the back. He can reflect with pride and joy on all the richness set down in these notes, on all the life he has already lived to the fullest. What will it matter to him if he notices that he is growing old? Has he any reason to envy the young people whom he sees, or wax nostalgic over his own lost youth? What reasons has he to envy a young person? For the possibilities that a young person has, the future which is in store for him? "No, thank you," he will think, "Instead of possibilities, I have realities in my past, not only the reality of work done and of love loved, but of sufferings bravely suffered. These sufferings are even the things of which I am most proud, though these are things which cannot inspire envy."
Victor Frankl, from "Man's Search for Meaning".
I appreciate its support for my (sometimes seemingly narcissistic) deliberate journaling...
Boston -- Ambulances have added a lower whooping voice to the tradition siren. Why? Maybe for folks who can't hear high pitches? -- Sounds weird!
For me, what it comes down to is this: no one is evil in their own mind, at least not at the time they're committing the acts. Everyone just has their own (often conflicting) priorities and agendas that they try to balance as best they can. Now, some of these priorities can be, in a reasonable objective sense, be recognizable as small minded and greedy and even Evil, but still -- once you let supernatural fundamentalism into the mix, most bets for a universal objective evilness evaluation are out the damn window anyway, since we can only guess at what God wants.
From a recent Facebook thread (I'm quoting myself here, but hey.)

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/05/anatomy-of-a-fake-quotation/238257/ - best coverage of the "fake" MLK jr quot
Holy pipe-smoking cats, Bangai-O HD is out today? Why are the Twitters not singing hosannas and rejoicing over this RIGHT NOW???
SIMULATE the effects of early onset dementia by looking at the 'people you may know' bit on Facebook.

amber at niagara falls

(3 comments)
2010.05.04

--Amber (Niagara Falls, Ontario.)

Decided to exercise the iPad by making a flat color picture... I was tempted, then, to trim the edges, but I kind of like 'em the way they are, how they add a bit of a dream like quality.
As they enter the water together, she thinks of the tank top left behind on the sand, drawing in the sun and heat. Later she will wear the tank top into the water, and observe the almost too interesting way the water inundates the fabric, transforming its nature as it now clings and reveals, and she will think that it is a complete, if imperfect, metaphor for love.
A passage in a book in a dream I had this morning.
Weirdly, I then had another dream about transcribing this quote from the previous dream, but at my grandma's old house. Then I got up and transcribed it for real, though there's always some give and take with the half-melted dream memory and the conscious desire to make a good quote.
Marine Week in Boston- lots of amazing hardware out by Copley and other spots you can poke around with- guns, artillery, vehicles, etc!

they like big guns and they cannot lie


armed gal


probably not the life for me, but hey

bee at work

(3 comments)
2009.05.04

--Man, I'm bugged (get it?) when my best photos turn out to be the "mistakes" - I wasn't using the flash on purpose but the lighting came out so dramatically... focus wasn't great though, and the guy wouldn't sit still.


"Once you can accept the universe as matter expanding into nothing that is something, wearing stripes with plaid comes easy. "
Albert Einstein
(Allegedly.... UPDATE 2019 a little too good to be true, quote-wise.)
Thinking about listening to iPod while working, the theory that it's kind of a way of burning off surplus attention energy that could otherwise lead to distraction. It can be a delicate balance; if it's difficult work, I need all that energy, so silence is best-- and the easier the work is the more interesting the music can be.
Is looking for love like job hunting? Both seem less about showing your awesomeness and more finding someone ready for someone like you.
Also, love and job hunting; in both worlds, you just don't know what's really going on, and when it's a rejection, you might never know why.
Boston is kind of an ideal city, save for the climate. And maybe it's that way just to weed out the weak keep it from getting too crowded.

quote of the moment

2008.05.04
Pressed, I would define spirituality as the shadow of light humanity casts as it moves through the darkness of everything that can be explained. I think of Buddha's smile and Einstein's halo of hair. I think of birthday parties. I think of common politeness, and the breathtaking attempt to imagine what someone else is feeling. I think of spirit lamps.
John Updike

Was at an upscale-ish restaurant last night; funny how even the swankiest menu has to have that "consuming raw or undercooked" footnote...
"you know if there's some one you'd want to keep away from an actual magic wand...'I suppose you wonder why I have antlers'-wait wait on GWB
now with twitter more than ever I wish iPhone SMS had a damn character count! f'in iChat clone minimalism.
main regret on being a doodler more than a proper cartoonist: can't really draw a woman I find sexy. I'm no r crumb!
(err not that i'm into r crumb's vision of amazon femininity all the time, but at least he knows what he likes! and can draw it.)
took me a second to trace my feeling mildly bummed to realizing the haggard main character of gta4 is 4 years younger than me.

unoutgrabeable ... that's what you are ...

(2 comments)
2007.05.04
Quote of the Moment
My analyst (who is also losing ground steadily) told me later that it was a happy thing that I had been able to go back to school and spank my teacher. He said that noticeably good results would begin to show up in my life. They haven't, though.
James Thurber, "Back to the Grades".
James Thurber has always been a favorite of mine. I just reread his collection "Middle Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze". I was surprised by a few things:
Article of the Moment
Researchers think that the world is walking 10% faster.

That just reminds me of what a wuss I feel like walking to the T station. It feels like I'm slower than nearly everybody, some of the "little old ladies" included. And you know it's not supposed to be a race, but still. Those people passing you on the right... not the joggers, just the folks going to work like you... you know they're feeling just a bit smug.


Snark of the Moment
--I found this headshot (a .gif file, oddly) on a old review of a Pocket PC. I have nothing to say but: Mr. Zabrek, you deserved a better photo. Here you look a bit too evil to trust to PDA recommendations.



Pop Culture of the Moment
It seems kind of odd to me that Spiderman 3 seems to be taking the series down the same dumb-headed path as the Batman series. The first Batman was about the Joker; great. Then they did Cat Woman and Penguin. It kind of worked. Then it was Riddler and Two-Face, plus oh yeah, here's Robin. Then... Mr. Freeze, Poison Ivy, Bane, and why not, here's Batgirl.

So this Spiderman seems to have the New Globin, Venom, and the Sandman.

I don't get it. You'd think the producers for potentially long-legged series would want to dole out the baddies one at a time... are they afraid any one of them can't carry the movie? That this mishmash is a way of increasing the odds that J. Random Moviegoer will be drawn to one of the characters at least?

choo choo trolley

(6 comments)
2006.05.04
For what it's worth, I really like the Moussaoui verdict. I think declining to kill for the sake of punishment and vengance can be an appropriate difference between Us and Them. Moussaoui would have claimed victory either way.


Ambiguous Quote of the Moment
"The ancient Egyptians crossbred horses, cattle, wheat, and grapes, to produce animals and food of higher quality."
Alan Lightman, "The Discoveries"
...man, if you read that incorrectly, it produces a very vivid image...I don't quite know what it is, but I don't think I'd want to drink wine made from it!


Philosophy of the Moment
Hypothetical Moral Dilemmas. I like the relationship between 2 and 3, how it points out the distinction we make about intent and inevitability, even if the end result is the same.

old-lady rub needed

(2 comments)
2005.05.04
Random Quote of the Moment
excuse me, can you hand me that tub of old lady rub for me? cause im an old lady
I have no idea if it has another meaning or if it's from somewhere or what but it gets stuck in my head, redundancy and bad punctuation and all.


Thought of the Moment
We have a good model of a dozen or so regions of the auditory and visual cortex, how we strip images down to very low-resolution movies based on pattern recognition. Interestingly, we don't actually see things, we essentially hallucinate them in detail from what we see from these low resolution cues. Past the early phases of the visual cortex, detail doesn't reach the brain.
That thought is interesting...it's probably what makes learning to draw well so hard, and what makes dreams so vivid.

honk

(3 comments)
2004.05.04
Passage of the Moment
So I do get to laugh. Our situation, the human situation, is, in the final analysis, neither grim nor meaningful but funny. What else can you call it? The wisest people are the clowns, like Harpo Marx, who would not speak. If I could have anything I want I would like God to listen to what Harpo was not saying, and understand why Harpo would not talk. Remember, Harpo could talk. He just wouldn't. Maybe there was nothing to say; everything has been said. Or maybe, had he spoken, he would have pointed out something too terrible, something we should not be aware of. I don't know. Maybe you can tell me.
Phillip K Dick, from the introduction to "The Golden Man"

Photos of the Moment
Ok, I admit this might fall in the "questionable signs of Kirk's mental health" department, but Mo has a revitalized interest in getting serious about photography (and a new nice digital camera to boot) and it has triggered something competitive in me. Part of it is a philisophical difference about cameras; portable (my favorite, since it's always there for the shot) vs. well, higher-end, and larger.

Anyway, Jane took the first one...we were slacking in the marshy and rocky area at the Salem shore during low tide. The second is a simba head I saw on the street. (I probably attracted some odd looks taking the picture. And The focus was, admittedly, a bit tough to get a hang of.)





I keep thinking I'd like to take a class in photography, but I'm mostly interested in composition, and want to keep it digital, but it seems like most places that get serious want you to pay your darkroom dues. I know there are reasons to go with film over digital, but still.


Link of the Moment
Retrogaming Times, an online classic gaming periodical, just published its last issue. Some interesting stuff there, especially the Many Faces Of... feature, where they did ratings to see which systems had the best versions of big arcade games.


Story of the Moment
One scene told thirteen times: Always Be Closing. It's a great read, and the gimmick works well I think. It reminds me a lot of this one piece of interactive fiction, Andrew Plotkin's The Space Under The Window.

all too common wisdom

(1 comment)
2003.05.04
Politics of the Moment
In my judgment, in the judgment of a lot of economists - and the truth of the matter is, it's now become kind of the common wisdom in Washington, D.C. - the best way to create growth is to let people keep more of their own money.
GWB
Man, that's not what I've heard from the economists, including the beloved Greenspan (who thinks tax breaks are kind of ok, but only if it doesn't lead to big deficit spending.) But this is the way this administration works, repeat something enough and then after a while you can start calling it "common wisdom".

On a related note, Slate.com poses that musical question, George Walker Hoover? Even the promised 1.4 million jobs in 18 months that the plan should bring is below average job growth. Bush's might be the first presidency since Hoover where the American economy lost jobs...I know that's after a runup bubble (where taxes were raised on the highest earners and we added 5 million jobs in a year and a half...though maybe that was all the magic power of the Internet) but still, the fact is the adminstration doesn't know how to fix it.


Funny of the Moment
I mistyped Ranjit's site moonmilk as "moonmilik" and in trying to get back on track via IE's MSN post-404 search engine (Stupidly, I should remember to just retype it in the URL field at the top) I noticed that the first moonmilk hit is Dear Postal Customer, a kind of funny note from the post office explaining some letter damage...but if you look at what it's trying to explain, it's kind of like damning with faint apology.


Randomness of the Moment
So Brooke came over, and rode shotgun as I finished this month's Blender of Love, and actually wrote the front page blurb. (Along with laughing at the horrible grammar of some of the posts.) And with that blurb's "Rhythm Is Gonna Get You" reference, Mo mentioned a weird snort in the middle of the song. Brooke and I didn't believe her, but we managed to track down this Wav file (found on this webpage) and sure enough, there is a random sound in the middle of it. Brooke and I thought it was more of a grunt or a "rooof!" (ala "Who Let The Dogs Out") than a snort, but still, I really had no memory of it being there.

By the way, everyone should buy and read the graphic novel Clumsy that I reviewed for this month's Blender. It's great and bittersweetly romantic.

high finance and low

2002.05.04
Guestbook Update of the Moment
Justin, my friend Maxim Weinstein says check out practicallynetworked.com, there are some of those LAN/WAN routers that deal with dialup, possibly the Netgear.

Mark T! Damn, that's a bit cold! But of course, what is a 'blog but a cry for attention. Ah well. Wouldn't mind hearing more about what your perceptions of me are. I mean, even my blog and loveblender publicity efforts are pretty muted, and it's not like that quote is dismissing the value of doing something that other people might admire or find interesting or useful...


News, Graph, and Link of the Moment
So, yesterday was a bummer, in that the unemployment numbers for April were higher than expected, and that took a toll on the markets. I did a little bit of googling, and found the following interesting chart:

That's the unemployment rate since 1970. (You can see some other views where I made this chart, at this economagic page) So in a larger view, we're not doing all that poorly at the moment, though obviously it's not as good as during the Clinton years (ok, ok, possibly a coincidence...though Republican first terms seem to be a bit of a bummer!) I wouldn't mind seeing some longer term data, like for the 50s and 60s as well.

It's weird how worried people get about the day to day flux of the stockmarkets. Sure more of us stand to lose money when the markets are failing, and in general they're a bellwether of the economy (or is it the other way around?) but still, it can't be that healthy for so many people to be paying such attention, such odd despair and elation. Anyway, if you have that particular monkey on your back, I'd recommend feeding it at finance.yahoo.com, which if you think about it basically gives you a very blog-like view of the days happenings, updated multiple times over a single session.


Quote of the Moment
When a pharaoh died, I bet the servants tried all sorts of tricks to make people think he was just sleeping, because of the tradition of burying the servants alive with the pharaoh to serve him in the afterlife. Kind of a whole 'Weekend at Tut's' thing.
George MacMillan via Kim on a.f.c-a.

frankenbeansenstein

2001.05.04
Republican Madness of the Moment
He claims to be a god-king, a leader of the Buddha religion, which historically has been considered a cult because of its anti-Biblical teachings concerning the one true Holy God, Creator of Heaven and earth and His Son, Jesus Christ.

Links of the Moment
Wired.com article on Japanese robofish. Neat stuff! (Had a link to a neat store RoboToys.) For a long time I was fascinated by the idea of electronic pets. Now that they're more or less here, I dunno.

In an odd bit synchronicity, I also just stubled upon this year old news about scientists at the University of Chicago sticking parts of an eel brain in a robotic body. It's still really primitive, but the thing could react to light and control the body accordingly. (Reminds me of The Locust Car, a 3-wheeled cart steered by the electrical muscle impulses of a Locust.


I've decided to limit my Blender features to one per month. Let's see if that raises a storm of protest.
99-5-3
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