August 12, 2023

2023.08.12
photo by my friend Liz...

August 12, 2022

2022.08.12
When I see an artist seeking commissions on tumblr, I often order up an alien bill just for grins, and then post it up on the Alien Bill Gallery... These are by tumblr user fubblers





August 12, 2021

2021.08.12
Melissa posted this saying "Check out Kirk's smooth move for spotting beautiful people on the beach 😆 😉"

Her sister in law asked her "Hahah is that your hat?" and I wrote back "no that is my no dignity beach hat"

August 12, 2020

2020.08.12
I was impressed that my half asleep dream brain was thinking about rendering 4D shapes and what not, like maybe using a timer playback to see the 3D shadow of it change over time....
then it got stuck on the old jingle with Rosemary Clooney singing "Extra value is what you get, when you buy Coronet" and was like "ah, that's more like it"
Wow - this 120 year old photo of a cat (from a recently unearthed time capsule) has a strong energy - see the link for another one with a companion kitten...

August 12, 2019

2019.08.12
SONG TO OYSTERS

I like to eat an uncooked oyster,
Nothing's slicker, nothing's moister.
Nothing's easier on your gorge
Or, when the time comes, to dischorge.

But not to let it too long rest
Within your mouth is always best.
For if your mind dwells on an oyster ...
Nothing's slicker. Nothing's moister.

I prefer my oyster fried.
Then I'm sure my oyster's died.
Roy Blount, Jr.

Tweet Thread on Zion, Illinois. The city layout in the form of a Union Jack is just the beginning of the weirdness... (I wonder why there was a prohibition on tan-colored shoes though...)
I'm not saying there wasn't a democratic mandate for Brexit at the time. I'm just saying if I narrowly decided to order fish at a restaurant that was known for chicken, but said it was happy to offer fish, and so far I've been waiting three hours, and two chefs who promised to cook the fish had quit, and the third one is promising to deliver the fish in the next five minutes whether it's cooked or not, or indeed still alive, and all the waiting staff have spent the last few hours arguing amongst themselves about whether I wanted battered cod, grilled salmon, jellied eels or dolphin kebabs, and if large parts of the restaurant appeared to be on fire but no-one was paying attention to it because they were all arguing about fish, I would quite like, just once, to be asked if I definitely still wanted the fish.
Jay Rayner
(Not sure if original to him or not)

August 12, 2018

2018.08.12
The Marines don't have any race problems. They treat everybody like they're black.
Gen Daniel "Chappie" James Jr., USAF, the first African American to reach the rank of four-star General.

with BABAM at a Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence fundraiser cabaret at Club Cafe:

August 12, 2017

2017.08.12
Paste: What's the best piece of advice you ever got?

Tambor: It's a piece of advice I don't understand, still. It was taught to me by my teacher: "Adore everything." I'm still not quite sure what it means, but it's very powerful. We have a tendency to think--down the line, when I'm paid, and I'm walking the red carpet, and I get to be a series regular. And it's not that. It's everything. It's about the ups and downs. See, the great thing about being an actor--and the lucky thing about being an actor--is for the civilian, when the dog dies, you mourn and you bury the dog. With the actor, the grace note is--the dog dies, you mourn, you bury the dog... and your acting gets better. Because the "paint" gets more vibrant. There's more history to it.

Having a great weekend with Melissa's PPLM peeps. An indoor pool, mad 70s decor, and a mysterious couple who live in the troll-cave like depths even when they have Air B&B guests

Open Photo Gallery





















(In 2023 I realized my photos from these years weren't in my archives. But then I stumbled on videos I had made for One Second Everyday)

best photos of 2014

2016.08.12
Two of the most amazing events happened on the same day in early May; Cora was born, and I went on a Zero-G flight.

Open Photo Gallery


Kay has an enviable look. (Haven't talked about cameras in a while... some of the shots from the end of last year and this one were with a new Canon Rebel T3, a DSLR larger than the PowerShots, and feeling more like a "real" camera overall.)


Had an all-night "Hack-A-Thon" at work, this is Seaport District at dawn.

EBB2 and EBB1 at a playground.


Googly Monster Fingerpuppet. I think this might have been an accidental photo shot when going to take video for "One Second Everyday" - 1SED is great, but probably makes me less thoughtful, or at least less frequent (which leads to the same results) about static photos.


Bar scene, being taken by hunter. There subtle emotional play going on here.

Me in Zero-G, on one of those "vomit-comet" type planes - a 40th birthday gift to myself.


Me and my Super-Niece Cora, about 2 months old here. I have a similar shot from the day after she was born, but I like how she looks like she's puzzling something out here.


I didn't take it but this is about my favorite early photo of Cora.


Photo by David F Parmenter - a glitchy panorama of the JP Honk Band at Haley House that I Printed and put above my bedroom door.


Cora at rest with her Mama K.


EB and I collaborated on designing and making the "hoop banner" for JP Honk.


Finally, my tuba "Beauty" and I dressed up as skeletons for Halloween.


"Hey Elliott, here's a tasty way to get over your sadness: Eat your tears."
--Amelia
Dying is Probably Okay - a retort to a piece on Peter Thiel being right about radical life extension.
BABAM band (collective of folks from HONK-stye bands) played along with the Landmark Orchestra at the Hatch Shell, like we did last year. Here's Marie, me and organizer Chris Schroeder's kid, all who were feeling pretty Super!

Disclaimer: if you like vaping, more power to you. Have fun with it! The clouds of smoke seen kind of fun, and I guess it's less dangerous than more traditional tobacco. That said...

I think I figured out why Vaping seems so weird to me- even beyond the dystopian sci-fi feel of it, beyond the goofy candy flavors that are often chosen for it, beyond folks who treat he human fog-machine aspect as a competitive sport:

A classic cigarette is an event. Like having a drink, it demarks a period of time (often providing a small time of respite from work drudgery): from the moment of lighting to when the cigarette is stubbed out. This seems not to be the case with people vaping; people can carry it around and take a puff whenever they feel like it.

Vonnegut kind of justified smoking as "a fairly sure, fairly honorable form of suicide" but vaping seems to rob it of some of that critical dignity... at its worse, especially dangling from a chain around the neck, the vaporizer looks (and, to some extent, acts) like a baby's pacifier- at its best, it's like someone walking around with a sports bottle, having a pull as thirst dictates.

Again, not really trying to mock its use, just isolating why it seems so goofy to me in a "you kids get off my lawn!" kind of way.

August 12, 2015

2015.08.12
The word "bid", in lowercase letters, is vertically symmetrical, but the word "BID", in uppercase letters, is horizontally symmetrical.

August 12, 2014

2014.08.12
Justin was happy, like a clam at high tide, but abruptly ending his musings he recalled that he had every reason to be happy (in his own small way) because he was a quahog and it was the highest of tides, and he squirted with delight.


http://betabeat.com/2014/08/civilians-in-abandoned-mcdonalds-seize-control-of-wandering-space-satellite/ In happier news, this is a lovely bit of real life Cyberpunk (and has NASA's tacit blessing)

alaska

2013.08.12

children's skulls are full of teeth!

(2 comments)
2012.08.12
Ben Wakeling wrote:
A child's skull, before their milk teeth fall out. This is freakier than all the Alien films combined.

Just finished "Just Cause 2" on Xbox 360. So much prettier than it needed to be. Realizing all my favorite AAA games are based on Havok physics.
http://www.thisismyjam.com/kirkjerk -- "A Little Less Conversation, A Little More Action Please"... such a good mashup


blender of love digest

time

2011.08.12

--via 22words
The way Win7's standard path indicator lets you click on any part of the path to jump there OR on whitespace to get path as string is great.
http://www.marco.org/2011/08/12/tablets-vs-obscure-video-game-consoles - my surprise was TurboGrafx 16 sold 1/3 as well as iPad (so far)

to haz, or not to haz

2010.08.12

--Amber noticed this local blatant Reserved Parking FAIL... or is it a Handicap WIN? Doubt it'll make Failblog but who knows.


There's not a sky in the cloud...
Nice Turn of Phrase by MELAS

That's what I look forward to about getting old- advances in kitchen appliances.
Amber

Atlantic City, 9AM
If you like it then you shoulda put a ring pop on it... I have low standards.

"did you know that the things that hold the ends of your shoelaces together have a name? aglets! couldn't do your car. aglets."

(2 comments)
2009.08.12
I was going to drop the store's car off and just sit at home until they fixed my car, then I'd figure out a way to pick it up. Because I had a very strong feeling that it wouldn't be ready on Monday.

Hey, guess what! It's Monday, and it's not ready! Was the engine accidentally shipped to the Lost City of Atlantis? No, that might make sense. Here's the actual reason I was given:
"The mechanics went to a race. They were supposed to be home last night, but, you know, all this rain!"
I paused, then said "Uh-huh." But I thought "I don't even know what that's supposed to MEAN!" Rain? Were they driving cars made out of paper? It was like he was reading some Surrealist Garage Excuse Generator. When I call tomorrow, I expect to be told one of the following:
"Well, it'd be done today, but one of the guys saw a bee once. And, y'know--hives."

"Did you know that the things that hold the ends of your shoelaces together have a name? Aglets! Couldn't do your car. Aglets."

"Seriously, in Flashdance she's got this huge loft apartment! How could a welder afford that? And who put that bucket of water up there?! MAN, I have to lie down now."

"I can't tell you when your car will be ready. (leans in, whispers) The corn has ears."
This is the last time I take my car to a place with a sign over the bay doors reading "Ne c'est pas une Garage."

But after TEN DAYS of having my car, they finally offered me a loaner. I ran to it because you know, all this rain, and sat down and realized "This is MY car!" A Ford Escort, but a Mercury Tracer's the same thing with a few differences in the bodywork. And despite it having the same dashboard layout as the car I've driven for 10 years, after only 10 days in another car I tried to shift into reverse by turning on the windshield wipers.

Any bets as to how quickly my car gets done, now that I have THEIR car? When they call tomorrow, I'll say "Yeah, I could bring it back today, but pancakes made the Pentagon a gerbil. Y'know, all this prune of dog barf!"

Something I had on my old backlog. You know, in trying to figure out if I had posted this before, I found out that according to Google 'til now, Bill's site was like the only place the phrase "mechanics went to a race" (words in that order) appears on the web.

(that's the result of a new sketch program I'm making that I hope will encourage me to do more doodles for the site.)

BLLLAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATTT

2008.08.12
I wrote a small webapp to keep a list of "links to get back to" on my startpage. While adding or changing a link is password protected, recently I changed it so that viewing a link from it was not.

It turns out that I had the "link follow" bit protected because of another cute trick I put in, that of moving a just-followed link to the top of the list so that I could pay attention to what links I was following most regularly and maybe put them on the main part of the page.

Now that it's open to the world, I find that other people are following many of the links. I'm not sure if it's people or 'Bots doing the following.

Continuing my Todo kick: One link was to my great big project To-Do list from March of 2005. I just updated that; it was gratifying that a number of additional things I could strike off, and another number I put into italics to indicate its slipped from relevance, either the context or my level of interest in it had changed to much.


Video of the Moment

--Mr.Ibis sent me this link, Tuba Battles. It's... it's... kind of like the movie "Drumline", but terrible. I am so grateful not to be in that tunnel...

Seeing the array of "related videos" I guess this is kind of a "thing", but it seems like the biggest emphasis is on sheer blatty volume, kind of like that dB drag racing, where competitors just see how inhumanely loud of a fixed-pitch tone they can generate.

Sometimes they'd get their acts together and put together a decent and/or menacing bassline, but... hmmm.


Quote of the Moment
Text processing has made it possible to right-justify any idea, even one which cannot be justified on any other grounds.

Leonovo laptops are better because their crash recovery is a boring button and their competitor offers a warp with a satyr + fruit basket?

kisrael.com watch: day 2418

(3 comments)
2007.08.12
Today marks the 2418th day of kisrael.com. Here's a reminder of how I figured that. Now, why did I figure that? I'm not sure. But... it certainly is a lot of days, and a lot of kisrael.


Games of the Moment
I just read Dewdney's "The Planiverse", about a 2D universe (but with gravity... it reminded me a bit of the Adventures of Alfredo) and they mentioned Alak which in effect is one dimensional "Go".

Looking for that I found Tetris 1D which is slightly less fun than it sounds.


Backdrop of the Moment
--This is a reassembled backdrop from an old Fleischer Superman short, via animation treasures 1. The urge to reconstruct this kind of backdrop is so fundamentally geeky, I love it.

begining to give up her fight

(4 comments)
2006.08.12
There's no denying it, while I was in California New England switched from blistering heat to a definite feeling that summer is thinking about packing up the beachtowel back in the canvas bag, taking down the umbrella, and trying to think of a nice place to go for dinner, some place with decent wine, or maybe just good sangria.

FoSO and I had this exchange,starting with me:
I don't dig the end of summer. Just because I'm so mediocre at taking advantage of the season as a whole.
what a strange reason. i don't like summer because it's generally too hot and sticky. fall is what i'm all about. that end of summertime feel to the air makes me all nostalgic for school and new jeans and notebooks and pencils. and i can't wait for apples and fall leaves and all that goodness! mmmm.
For me Summer is all about long days and doing whatever the hell you want for most of it.
It's the smell of sunblock and sweat after a day of roller coasters and fair food, the girl in the tanktop, rubbing in aloe to soothe the touch of sunburn and huddling together under a comforter to hide from the just a bit-too-much-AC room while watching some vaguely-artsy comedy movie on video.
Fall is...well, early fall is ok, where it combines the long days and energy of late summer with the clean slate of a new school year, but then the season progresses and nature sheds its lushness and gets ready for hibernation.
I guess it almost strikes me as odd that people can have different favorite seasons, given that I see summer as such a clear champ. So what about it, what's your favorite season, and why?

(Speaking of seasons, today is the final in the "Where The Heart Is" series, which means I should go ahead and make that calendar program I was planning to with it...)


Art of the Moment

click for fullsize

"December", by Timna Woollard
from Where The Heart Is.



Game of the Moment
DICEWARS is a nice little Risk-type game. It's pretty much self-explanatory, except you get extra dice armies based on how many connected territories you own. <SPOILER type="strategy" method="highlight to read">the trick is to play it pretty defensive for the most part. Always putting up a good front is more important than maximizng territory</SPOILER>

it's the finest of the flavors

(2 comments)
2005.08.12
Quote of the Moment
And suddenly I had a vanilla epiphany. The rice, a truly bland food, forced the vanilla to take center stage. But vanilla is essentially a supporting actor. It is a sociable flavor, at its best when bringing out the best in other distinct ingredients, softening their acidity, drawing out their intensity, helping them to cohere.
It's always been my favorite, and I appreciate its willingness to get along with other flavors...in fact, sometimes I use chocolate vs. vanilla as a metaphor for things that will try to dominate and grab the spotlight vs. things that are happy to fit in.

smile, darn ya, smile!

(20 comments)
2004.08.12
The Many Faces of Kirk of the Moment
So FoSO volunteered to take a stab at some photos of me. I'm learning that I tend not to pose very easily, or at least not well. Still, I think a more interesting backdrop, getting in close with the zoom, and taking a LOT of photos led to some decent enough results...which ones do you all think are the best bet? (Click to Zoom)




Quote of the Moment
Intuition is not clairovoyance. It's not guesswork either. Intuition is executive summary, that 90 percent of the higher brain that functions subconsciously--but no less rigorously--than the self-aware subroutine that thinks of itself as the person.
Peter Watts, "Maelstrom".
The trouble for me is, yeah it might be "rigorous" (not sure about that) but it's also heuristic, and hard to check the work. Meaning it uses a lot guesstimates...when we reach to catch a thrown ball, we're not doing calculus in our head, we're using some much rougher formula, and using some feedback loops..in general, I'm convinced intuition takes a lot of short cuts, and often it works out, but sometimes it doesn't. And when two people's logical deductions don't match, you can hash it out, but if two intuitions disagree, what can you do? This is an advantage (or, depending on your perspective, disadvantage) scientific inquiry has over religious thought.


Gist for the Neurosis Mill of the Moment
Volcano! Why America's coast could be toast. If this one big volcano goes, it could send a giant tsunami that would slam into the East Coast...the weird part is it would travel 4,000 miles in about 9 hours...I can barely imagine what trying to evacuate the vulnerable regions would look like. But as someone on Slashdot pointed out, these things are set to go off in geological time, which is a whole lot of human lifespans...


Tip of the Moment
Geeks: if you use the Windows command prompt a lot, and you miss the old unix "tab completion", you can get something kind of like it by running regedit and changing [HKEY_CURRENT_USER \Software \Microsoft \Command Processor] CompletionChar= 9 (ASCII value for TAB) or PathCompletionChar= 9 (ASCII value for TAB) -- I only had the former on my system. It's a little different than the Unix shells I grew up with...as you keep pressing it cycles through different possible completions, rather than filling in what is unique and then beeping if there's more than one option.

oh, yeah, what are you gonna do? release the dogs? or the bees? or the dogs with bees in their mouth and when they bark, they shoot bees at you?

(7 comments)
2003.08.12
Poem of the Moment
I love you,
And would brave anything for you.
Except bees.
I'm allergic to bees.
"Green Wave"
...it was in my Palm journal a long time ago (as well as on the front page of the loveblender.)
It turns out I've been reposting a paraphrasing by Rogers Cadenhead, the guy who runs Cruel Site of the Day (He and I have been writing about it.) The paraphrasing, along with some other wonderfully bad poems, is from Oh, the Inanity. I prefer this version to the original phrasing. Cadenhead also suggested checking out Seven Haiku at Night in a Convenience Store from the same literary journal "Green Fuse" (not "Wave").


Link of the Moment
Speaking of cruel sites, making the rounds are these bonded nickel replica of various disasters, from the collapsed Texas A&M bonfire tower to the Oklahoma City Federal Building to the OJ car chase.


Ramble of the Moment
I was finally getting to read documentedlife.com, and I found the author's page of Literature and Film that has stuck with him. It included a list of books that "resisted or defeated" him, including Tolkien's well-known stuff. I was like that with Tolkien for a long time...I figured I'd start with the Hobbit, and always get to about the same place in the book, right when they're floating out of the city in wine casks or whatever, when I'd just lose all interest. Finally a few years ago (when I had a nice walk to the T and then a trainride in, both providing generous amounts of reading time) I went back the Hobbit, and just got through it. Then I finished off the trilogy in reasonably short order.

Though now, I'm not sure if I would have bothered, or just have been content with the movies.

It's funny how some books introduced to us as children loom large, massive unreadable tomes, and then you come back to 'em years later, and they're just...well, regular novels for the most part. My parents had the first books of Asimov's "Foundation" trilogy in one volume...it was pretty hefty, and when one day I opened it and it started with a citation from the "Encyclopedia Galactica"... oh man! I thought it was some kind of unbelievably huge epic... it had its own encyclopedia for crying out loud. Then during a summer off for college, I started reading a friend's collection, he had them in much more manageable normal-recent-paperback editions, and got through those 3 plus a number of sequels no problem.

I had a similar experience with "The Great Gatsby", which was the one book I cliff-noted out of in high school. I returned to it last year, and while it started a bit rough, I ended up liking it a lot. I still think maybe I didn't get it the first time because I hadn't had any real heartbreak.

So, what books kicked your butt? And what books did you make a triumphant return to?

enemy humanoids must be destroyed

2002.08.12
Link of the Moment
Seanbaby takes on the robots. I don't think he's quite as "on" as he used to be.


Quote of the Moment
[Programming is] like writing. An encyclopedia requires a large staff; an individual can't do it all. Some operating systems nowadays are encyclopedic. But there's also always the short story, the novel, and the poem. Those are useful in their own way, though they may seem simple and trivial to do.
Dan Bricklin, inventor of VisiCalc.
I think I much prefer writing those small little works to the magnum opus I'm currently paid to code on...

smith family reunion

2001.08.12
At yesterday's Smith Family Reunion...






Met with Kyle Parrish last night at Trident Booksellers on Newbury Street. Excellent conversation about art and computers and culture. (He mentioned that colonial era clocks had no minute hand, and his theory that our expectations for puncuality may relate to the accuracy of our time pieces.) At the orangeline T we let several trains pass before deciding to end our conversation. I encouraged him to send me a collection of his romance related poems that I could use as a Blender Digest Feature.

Walking home from the T I noticed how loud the bugs were (I also noticed how different the orange line is from the red or green, seeing the red was like being back home.) The bugs made me think of how the original frontier explorations were not silent, but full of this noise.

Did primitive Christians think there was something demonic in bugs? Or was that a later invention?
99-8-12
---
McDonalds is experimenting with "electronic ordering kiosks" in lieu of live counter people.  Mark Gimein points out that it's a "weird devolution of Age of Industry automation: The manual work continues to be done by humans, who are carefully hidden away, while the job of meeting and greeting the customers is taken over by machines."
99-8-12
---
"You were thinkin' too much. I mean, he's there, he's hittin' ya, ya can't *think* about this, Joey, it takes too long."
          "I thought you said it was a mental game."
"In a sense, yes. But primarily, no. Primarily, you gotta hit the guy."
--Ethan Coen, "Destiny"

"Power corrupts.  Absolute power is kind of neat."
          --John Lehman, secretary of the navy 1981-1987
---
just refound the sarah mcl cd- Solace and listening to "drawn to the rhythm" makes me shiver with longing for sQ- the ones I left behind. Kirk the perpetual nostalgic.  Sheesh.
97-8-12
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