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Clive Thompson on Back to BASIC. There seem to be a lot of engineers now who don't understand the run-eval loop that BASIC and Lisp used has tremendous power in keeping development dynamic and transparent, which is why it lived on and gained such traction with JS.


Anna Washenko on From Infocom to 80 Days: An oral history of text games and interactive fiction. That old Infocom parser was such a mind blower back in the day; able to parse moderately complex sentences and even have a sense of context ("Which book do you want to open, the green one or the red one?") at a time when other programs were all like "GET SWORD", "KILL DRAGON" was amazing. I wonder how LLM might come to play in this space, I know there have been some attempts to get one to play "DM" for a one person campaign...

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Not that I'm a major gymnastics fan, but I was watching that time when a coach's appeal gave the bronze to USAian Jordan Chiles over Romanian Ana Barbosu - a reversal which has been unreversed (saying the appeal was at 1:04 when there was only a minute to make... which seems a little extreme?)
That was about .1 point. The odd thing is, the live commentators had mentioned Barbosu's routine had gotten a probably false .1 point deduction for going out of bounds - and that her coaches didn't challenge and that was "on them"
So in a way it feels like a bit of a "make good"? Like I think justice was finally served, but man it stinks for all involved.

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Not that anybody asked me, but I can't decide if Olympians hanging out wearing their medals is the coolest imaginable flex or corny as heck (especially on interview shows when a swimmer or track or gymnast is wearing a pile of them)

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Gray cloud: no more olympics.
Silver lining: no more pro-/anti- Kelly Ayotte / NH governor ads

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Hey guy with hydration pack, 2 hiking sticks & North Face vest; my 5 yr old walked the same trail in Crocs carrying a naked Barbie. Relax.

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Hall: Your middle name is "Macho," but I'm wondering if you ever cried. Has Macho Man ever cried?

Savage: Yeah, uh huh, it's okay for macho men to show every emotion available, because I've cried a thousand times and I'll cry some more -- but I've soared with the eagles and I've slithered with the snakes, and I've been everywhere in between and I'm gonna tell you something right now: There's one guarantee in life -- there are no guarantees. And understand this, nobody likes a quitter, nobody said life was easy. So if you get knocked down and you take the standing eight count, you get back up and you fight again. That's the Macho Mania, dig it?

i see trees of green
green trees there too
i see the trees
and they are green
and i think to myself
i am lost in these woods

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So the way I look like my mom has always been a theme, but today we learned that it's close enough that she can activate face unlock on my iPhone...
One big takeaway from Ibram X. Kendi "How to Be an Antiracist" is the idea of segregationist vs assimilationist racism. Both are problematic. I'd say the latter has its heart in a slightly better place. It's sometimes the result of acknowledging the hierarchical judging people generally use to evaluate differences in groups, and so tries to blur everything into a big melting pot any race can participate in.

The book mentions the importance of black (and other group) spaces, enclaves where a given minority is empowered to make the decisions about it - and where a member of that group can be part of a local majority, the default, instead of always being "othered".

In December's Wired (catching up on a backlog) Jason Parham echoes that idea and talks about some important places on the early web that were that.

It's an idea I can get behind but man do I dread the dumbass "but doesn't that make THEM the racists, not letting fine white folk like me in because of the color of my skin?" arguments I'd likely have to get into rebutting. (And I do wonder, how gatekeeping for that kind of thing could/should work - but of course the whole point is that's not for people like me to decide.)

Parham talks about the Blackness of the current web:

Functionally, the web is still very black. Our identities are embedded in Black Twitter-fueled memes and reaction GIFs, from Kermit sipping tea to Real Housewives star NeNe Leakes' virtuoso shade-serving. Black culture is likewise a major artery of platforms like TikTok and our beloved Vine (RIP). Even the very modes of exposure find root in blackness: Black death and its digital-era companion, the police brutality video, became a terrifyingly mundane 21st-century spectacle, recorded, uploaded, and shared with perverse frequency. "Blackness gave virality its teeth. Turned it into trauma," the writer and academic Lauren Michele Jackson has said. In life and in death, black people are the bones and lungs of the web, its very body.

Of course it's interesting- and disturbing- to think of some the toxic whiteness at other parts of the web are fostering, the whole 4chan/QAnon/alt-right shit, which is so very talented at coopting shit.

We are going to die, why rush into it. There might still be some good shit.

-Frank

The response was to a suicidal person who says the "casual and non-confrontational retort" was what gave the sender assurance about the ok-ness of seeking help. This week postsecret has a selection of responses to "share something you would have never experienced if you had completed suicide" from their FB page.

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Nat McIntosh Rules for Brass Band Sousaphones:
1. RHYTHM is more important than NOTES
2. STYLE is more important than TONE
3. VOLUME is more important than HOTT LIXX

Like my friend Betty W pointed out, only the beginner lessons are up but I like the "Extended technique" video starting quote..

One of the questions I get asked most often after shows is 'Where did you learn to do That?' and the answer is, I did not learn to do That, I just started messing around and that's what you all should do if you want to figure out the things that are awesome and that can make You actually sound like YOU on the Sousaphone.

(admittedly it would be cooler if wasn't the white guys from up north, but they recognize where they are taking from.)via NPR, "the accomplished Indian percussionist B.C. Manjunath. He's a master of konnakol -- the Carnatic, or South Indian, art of speaking percussive syllables in rapid-fire, intricate patterns to convey a larger thalam, or rhythmic cycle." Our family friend Larry Wittenberg had a Super 8 w/ Sound camera and has a bunch of brief home movies. (Pretty nifty gadget.)

At least two of them have some footage of my dad. I think it's the only audio footage of my dad I know of, except there might video tape of him playing a elderly grandfather stuck in a rocking chair for a Christmas pageant (given how sick he was at that point, that part wasn't much of a stretch, alas)

Anyway.


(Love the shot of my mom Youtube picked to thumbnail it.)

The opening scene is a child on a distinctive kids chair, consisting of 3 slotting rectangles, made by my grandfather (there are two piece in all, and either can be stood as a chair, a rocking chair, or a desk)

Quiet scene of my dad at 0:20.

Then it's a Wittenberg and Israel kitchen scene, I suppose in our place in Cincinnati.

At around 0:54 is my dad, hiding behind his hands from the camera. At 1:06 the camera is on me, and I think my dad is talking about the mafia (a group he consistently despised, along with the movies that would glorify them.)

2:00 has my dad sticking his tongue out at the camera. Later there's some further goofing and some leg.

Around 3:13, it's a new recording. The scene changes to our over-the-church apartment in Salamanca NY. That's the first home I had recollections of, and could sketch out its layout. Now it's a surprisingly small grass field. My Aunt, Uncle, his son, and a Salvation Army cadet from Poland are also there besides my family the Wittenbergs.

I recognize a lot, like the mission chair, lamp and server from St. Thomas still in my mom's house, the record player behind my dad at 3:52, the umbrella plant "Kirk Tree" that was planted when I was born (finally died a few year ago). I guess as an "Officer Kid" who moved around a lot, it's those kind of objects that make a place for me... in almost any photo taken in an old apartment, I'm often as or more interested in what books are on my shelves then whoever is in the main subject of the shot.

Around 4:00 is probably the single biggest stretch of my dad's voice. Along with me in the background clowning for attention.

My Uncle at 4:50 and one of his infamous naps...

At around 5:15 my dad does a bit of deliberate pantomime with a pampers box, a stuffed koala bear, and a brush , kind of invoking the "Little Tramp" bit with the rolls from "The Gold Rush"

Finally the video ends with a quiet shot of an infant and a toddler, probably just using up the film.

A lot of feelings struck up with this, from some cringing at how attention seeking I was then (I know it's a fairly normal part of life especially that age but still) to some things that will never be fully resolved between father and son, to just a general feeling of bittersweet nostalgia.

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Twenty percent of Americans describe themselves as "spiritual but not religious." Although the claim seems to annoy believers and atheists equally.

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There is barely time enough in a book-- or in a life-- to get to the point.

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The neurologist V. S. Ramachandran seems to have been thinking along these lines when he wrote, "It may not be coincidental that [you] use phrases like 'self conscious' when you really mean that you are conscious of others being conscious of you."

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The philosopher Roland Puccetti once observed that the existence of separate spheres of consciousness in the normal brain would explain one of the most perplexing features of split-brain research: Why is it that the right hemisphere is generally willing to bear silent witness to the errors and confabulations of the left? Could it be that the right hemisphere is used to it?

An answer consistent with the hypothesis of mental duality in the normal human brain suggests itself. The non-speaking hemisphere has known the true state of affairs from a very tender age. It has known this because beginning at age two or three it heard speech emanating from the common body that, as language development on the left proceeded, became too complex grammatically and syntactically for it to believe it was generating; the same, of course, for what it observed

More than any of those other quotes, this idea has got me thinking. I want to read up on split minds, and the dual consciousness we all seem to carry. I've coming up with some "Just So" stories about and want to find out if that split could explain things like this "inner teenager" I have to struggle with in order to, for instance, keep my weight where "I" want it. I've tended to assume that my conscious self was just the aggregate of all of my brain when it decides to muster itself into a voice, but could it be there's more of a spatial division?

Even if true, it does myself - my full self- a disservice to let my left-brain speaker presume it's "more authentically me" than my inner teenager or what not... "we're" all in this together, in the most literal sense possible. Similarly, in the Sam Harris podcast where he's patching things up with Daniel Dennett, I'm surprised they both let Texas belltower shooter Charles Whitman - whose notes and requested autopsy pointed to a brain tumor as the cause of his murderous behavior - let that brain tumor be considered as something external to Whitman... since if detected in a timely way it could have been removed, and Whitman would have been by most accounts a fine upright person. But I'd have to say, when that tumor was controlling his actions, it was "really him", you know? Saying otherwise feels like a distraction.

I want to ponder on this further to think if other external influences to a person's behavior, outside control, hypnosis, etc, challenges my view, but I think it's pretty consistent.

My debit card pays for things with past hours of my life, and my credit card pays with future hours of my life.

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This Slate piece makes me feel slightly less weirded out by the Google/Alphabet thing (PS http://abc.xyz is so cute) -- the concept is that it makes it easier to justify Google's oddball "moonshot" tech projects vs having to justify them to investors who'd prefer the focus to solely focus on profitable search and ads and stuff.

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When hearing that Rick Perry's staffers are not going to have salaries, I turned back to this guide to remember who he was: A Democrat Handicaps the 2016 Republican Candidates. (Watching the debates, I was wishing Fox was more consistent about captioning people with names. I know I'm a bit face blind but some of these white dudes are tough to keep track of) I enjoyed this film/film audio mashup.
Denis Medri does Star Wars High School -- so clever. (His deviantart page seems a little wonky, this source has some easier to get to versions...)
I love Leia and Han w/ "The Falcon"... last night we watched "Brick" which is a direct mapping of Dashiell Hammett-esque speech and drama onto high school. It's funny leveraging the semi-univeral high school experience and accompanying tropes that way.

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2008, 2012 Republican VP picks: doublin' down on the crazy!

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Wheaties: Breakfast of Champions. Dinner of Losers.

--via thepoke For a while I've had in my head a list of three activities I'd like to do before I got too old: Skydive, Bungee Jump and Parasail...

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Extreme Outsourcing. Just like the photos yesterday, it's always (academically) interesting to hear what kind of approaches work best at starting romance internetally, but even if I were looking, I think I'd have to be me.

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"Kid, I don't know what kind of crap you're trying to pull here, but you are CLEARLY NOT A TEAPOT!!!" New day care guy: not working out.

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The cool thing about snorting while laughing, really, is that it gives you something to do on the inhale....
--Sprite Sheet from Solar Jetman, a lovely physics-y based game on the NES (video here). via auntie pixelante's twitter

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http://www.slate.com/id/2223835/ - Slate on "What Do Babies Think About All Day?"

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WBCN having sign off day- kind of sad day for Boston scene- http://mmone.org/ museum - also old "Boston Tea Party" by where JZ used to live-

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Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and it may be necessary from time to time to give a stupid or misinformed beholder a black eye.

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http://tinyartdirector.blogspot.com/ - the littlest art director tells her artist/designer what's what and no mistake. Very cute!

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Listening to the last hour of WBCN. One strategy that has worked well for me on the loveblender is to make one improvement every month, every time I put out a new digest. Sometimes it's visible to the users, other times it's an improvement to my behind-the-scenes workflow. Sometimes it's major, but if I'm pressed for time it's allowed to be trivial, it just has to be something.

This idea seems to work pretty well. I like the shades-of-grayness of it; the Blender would still be chugging along without this kind of attention, but slowly I can make the site better for myself and for the visitors and regulars there.

I might see if I can use my new found Todo app mojo to get through some other large, multifaceted tasks I've been putting off, like truly resettling and unpacking my room. For the moment, I've sacrificed my galley kitchen as a catch area, but I know how easy it is to never get to reclaiming space like that. But if I said "one apartment improvement a day", ideally tackling a milk crate but it could be more trivial than that, I think I might make a lot of progress to getting where I want to be.

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Poem of the Moment

Glory be
for
sour apples
and
sweet tea,
for
white lies
and
black
thigh highs

He's been one of the most consistent and best writers on the Blender...

I love this little bonbon but my favorite work this month was One year by twinkle, such a balance of detail and abstraction, a sensuality without being explicit, the nuanced emotional tone...

Also this month I reviewed my friend Christa's book iDo, all about wedding planning online. Seemed like a pretty good and smart approach to it all, not that I have any kind of plans those lines in the foreseeable future...

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Video of the Moment

--Wow, Nature is AMAZING

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Listlessly reading "Tender is the Night", reviewing with "Spark Notes" -- funny noting the plot details they leave out (on purpose?)

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Bush @ The Olympics. "I don't see America as having problems". "Once religion gets started in a country it can't be stopped." Oy.

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I want to make a terribly stupid and cheeseball fanfiction "When Bernie Mac meets Isaac Hayes in Heaven"

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katwinx no direct link alas but http://www.globz.net/ - click on green pac-man box and then "the dancer". That's all I see with these guys.

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In my experience it's not a good sign when the guy at the restaurant counter has to use the menu for prep instructions.

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Lately I've been noticing when you can see someone and their reflection at the same time, how different the mood and look of the 2 can be... I'd like to make a show called "The Dusk Area". Here's a synopsis of the first episode, "At Last Enough Time":

Barry Hemis is a meek bank clerk who loves to read but is denied this pleasure by his shrewish wife and demanding boss. He alone escapes the nuclear holocaust when he sneaks off to the bank vault to read during his lunch break. Emerging, he despairs at the desolation and loneliness of the shattered landscape until he discovers a treasure trove of undamaged books at the public library... enough for him to read for years! Tragically, he accidentally breaks his eyeglasses and is left with nothing. But that's ok because he dies of radiation poisoning a few days later, and in fact barely notices the irony, what with his hair falling out in clumps, the bloody stool, and the constant vomiting.

Pretty good, huh?

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Video of the Moment
So until I get around to making that, here's Minesweeper: The Movie

"Why are you really here?"
"I want to make this land safe!"
"Why are you here soldier??"
"I'M HERE BECAUSE I'M BORED!"

(via Mr. Ibis)

So, big terrorism scare, albeit one that seems to have been foiled.

Still, it definitely woke me up about the upcoming half-decade anniversary of 9/11. There's certainly a chance that this was just one facet of a multifaceted attack. It also shows the desperate importance of treating the "War Against Islamic Fascism" as a police affair more than a military one.

New idea for a business: a series of stores called "Liquids Pastes -N- Gels" to be placed right around incoming flight gates, with a gigantic selection of toiletries and booze, so travellers can replace anything they had to leave behind.

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Art of the Moment

click for fullsize "November", by Timna Woollard from Where The Heart Is.

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Quotes of the Moment
I got the chance to catch up on some reading this week, and one of the books was Nick Hornby's "The Polysyllabic Spree", from a monthly column about the books he read, and the books he bought. He quotes some of them himself:

The truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more.

... very self-referential, that.

At one point Lewis describes an older trader throwing a ten-dollar bill at a young colleague about to take a business flight. "Hey, take out some crash insurance for yourself in my name," the older guy says, "I feel lucky." As a metaphor for what happens on the trading floor, that's pretty hard to beat.

Dialog of the Moment

"Keep your rear foot firmly in contact with the ground, don't let it roll up on the arch."
"..."
"Create length along the front...and be sure to focus on Uddiyana Mudra and Uddiyana Mudra, they can really help."
"...[grunt]..."
"Try and keep your belly soft."
"No problem!"

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Link of the Moment
Star Trek business cards. I love the retro-60s design work.

UPDATE: Some Star Wars ones as well, possibly actually made up in the actual era. Plus a famous card of 3CP0... News Article of the Moment

"It started about who would play solitaire on the computer."

Both are in pretty serious condition at different hospitals. Crazy Greeks! Though come to think of it, if my girlfriend was national Judo champion...I'd probably let her go ahead and play solitaire ahead of me.

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Random Thought of the Moment
I was looking at my old Palm-Pilot journal, KHftCEA. I gave up using my ever-present Palm as a journal shortly after I started doing this site on a daily basis...too much overlap. Overall that's been a positive change, but there's a certain lovely spontaneous triviality that posting to the web lacks. (Combined with being more aware of it being a public, "mom reads it" forum...even though I've since published the old Palm stuff, it was written in a more private voice and was more open.)

So I don't know if I should go back to having that kind of private notekeeping, or maybe add in more stuff here, or what. But in the spirit of the KHftCEA, here's a thought:

Maybe a friendship that turns into a romance is a bad idea, because it's too easy to not try to impress the other person. When I compare the lack of evidence I worked to woo Mo, vs. how much I have for some of my previous romantic interests, it's kind of sad. I absolutely took her for granted too quickly...I remember even noticing how much more she seemed to be into me than I was into her, back in the day. I mean, I was still into her for a lot of reasons, but I was probably pretty lousy at showing it.

(Heh...another side benefit of keeping a journal on the Pilot...the relative difficulty of writing in large amounts of text probably caused me to be more succinct...these last few days have been text, text, and more text.)

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Eye Brow Raiser of the Moment
This Slate piece (arguing Kerry = CostCo, Bush = WalMart, CostCo beats WalMart) mentions a factoid given in Fortune the average salary of a Costco member is $95,333...yow! Is that like, average household income, or for a single person? (I'm always amused at surveys that ask "Household Income Range" but don't do a good job of asking how many salaries that's made up of, or how many people it supports.) Anyway, here's the .doc file (or Google HTMLification) with that factoid.

Anyways, I thought I was doing pretty well for myself...but apparently I'd be bringing the average down if I were to join CostCo!

Interview of the Moment
News You Can Bruise / Deep Sea Interviews: (a rhyme!) the coffinfish.

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Goofiness of the Moment
So the other day at breakfast with Dan and Nikki, the "Marion Blackberry" jam on the table got us thinking...Mo mentioned she thought that the name for that kind of blackberry was sometimes shortened to "Marionberry", which amused me greatly, given the former mayor of Washington D.C., Marion Barry. Who is, lo and behold, black. Which makes me wonder if his name was a bit of a joke, and if he has any siblings named "Elder", "Cran", or even "Logan". (This Oregon berry page was useful in the investigation.)

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Request of the Moment
You know, it seems like a long time since I've heard any funny or clever riddles, jokes of the Question/Answer form. Well, I found this page but most are pretty lame. (Par for the course, most likely, but still.) Anyone know any good ones? Feel free to post 'em on the comments section.

Google came up with the following one (highlight with the mouse to see, mildly offensive...)

What's funnier than a dead baby?
A dead baby in a clown costume!

Well, not really a great one, but I chuckled.
UPDATE: Ranjit regaled me with

"What do Hungarian ghosts eat?
"...ghoulash!"

Which reminded me of my elementary school favorite:

What smells in a haunted house?
Scooby's Doo!

God, I loved that joke. Dang, almost forgot to do an entry today...this one is going to be quick.

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Image of the Moment

This is the main image from my favorite t-shirt ever, the lady in green. I've always loved the mood of uncertainty it seems to carry. It plays a small role in a set of correspondance I'm assembling, more on that later. I wish I knew where the image came from originally.

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Quote of the Moment

When I want to end relationships I say, 'I want to marry you so we can live together forever.'
 Sometimes they leave skidmarks.

Hey, could the Wendy Wang who signed my guestbook contact me? You aren't who I guessed you were...

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Video of the Moment
I guess NYC gets a lot of visitors this time of year. Very cool.
(Via mondain on thinkattack)

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The Beauty of Understatement

...the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan's advantage...

from the T-shirt Archive: #14 of a Tedious Series
Hard Rock Café. Ugh. Musta been a gift.