❮❮prevnext❯❯

scenes from PPLM weekend... It got noted that I've probably been doing the most documenting of these lovely getaways... they go all the way back to 2017, though (thanks in part to some photo lost I seem to have suffered) I just have 3 seconds from my One Second Everyday montage (that was the time with the indoor pool and the mysterious troll like co-ocupants of the rental) - but for the other years I've made a new pplm tag I am really feeling better about my life management by shifting to using "2do" just for repeating and time sensitive items and the free-form text "Tot" app for everything else, but I haven't finished transferring all the misc items out of "2do". One category of tasks was "Just Blog It Doofus" so I'll try to tear threw those today...

---

A "no math" (but seven-part) guide to modern quantum mechanics

---

---

---

An "angel" is anything that carries out a mission for God. This includes forces of nature. [...] Photosynthesis? That's an angel. Gravity? An angel. Magnetism? Angel. The Midrash in Bereishis Rabbah (chapter 1) says than an angel only performs one job. That job doesn't have to be destroying Sodom; it could be peristalsis, centripetal force or condensation.

via headspace-hotel who adds "Im obsessed with this idea and I will not be able to stop thinking about the angel that caramelizes onions"

---

Chewbacca's lifespan was 7 times longer than Han's so Han was kinda like Chewbacca's dog. Han wouldn't have died if Chewie had properly neutered his pet

---

fantasy biology but it's weird and kinda horrifying like real biology: reproduction. Fun speculations.

---

Knowledge: knowing that a tomato is a fruit.
Wisdom: not putting tomatoes in a fruit salad.
Philosophy: wondering if ketchup is a smoothie.

---

Excellent Programmer Memes

---

Sein of Blue - what if you Seinfeldified Miles Davis?

---

If you're cremated after you die, you can be put into an hourglass and continue being part of family game night.

---

I really love the game Xevious (which apparently isn't TOO well known but one of those "your favorite game designers favorite retro game" candidates, especially in Japan) but I loved the full area maps on the StrategyWiki Xevious Page

---

Hanson refers to an idea that originated with Jung: the concept of the self as a committee of various parts. "If the brain is a committee, the chair of the committee, roughly, tends to live right behind the forehead. So when you increase activation of the chair of the committee, who in effect is then able to say to the self-critical member of the committee, "Oh, we hear you already. We got it. Enough already. Hand the microphone to somebody else.".

---

Maniac Mansion Design Chart was mentioned on How Did This Get Played

---

Be a Pelican not a Pelican't.

---

I always love attempts to bring game programming to the larger audience, like the Paystation Net Yaroze... here are the sprites from Family BASIC, an addon to the Famicom (original Japanese version of the NES)

---

The MIT Dropouts Who Created Ms. Pac-Man: A 35th-Anniversary Oral History. Love that they are kinda local guys! (Also this company low-ley made THE most amazing arcade ports for the Atari 2600... Battle Zone, Pole Position, etc were just were Atari took back the throne from Activision...)

---

The Onelook Thesaurus is pretty cool.

---

---

The 20th century was the "fuck around" century. The 21st is the "find out" century.

Reading memes about how parents don't understand you can't pause online games (but they should, because you can't pause cable TV either.)

That's kind of funny, because the Atari generation couldn't pause, but it's the Nintendo generation having kids.

(And maybe a later generation grew up with more Tivo than cable TV, where you could pause after all.)

---

Worthwhile episode of the podcast 99% Invisible: Policing the Open Road. Automobiles really changed how policing was done in the USA - they added a whole bunch of rules everybody had to obey (because roads are a shared resource, and cars have are hugely empowering for people but also dangerous) and the decision was made to add enforcement of these rules to what cops do, beyond classic crime fighting roles like dealing with theft and violence. (Enforcement of vice laws was another issue some thought were below what police should be dealing with.)

So this car-based stuff was the wedge for our 4th Amendment protections getting split open... during prohibition, it was decided that cars were so potentially empowering for "bad guys", they were no longer part of "person, houses, papers, and effects" that were protected and cops didn't need a warrant. And once that precedent was set, that the 4th Amendment wasn't an absolute protection and times change, somehow "Stop and Frisk" seemed ok too. (Funny but I don't recall too many "strict constructionists" bitching about that clear violation of the letter of the law/Constitution?)

The podcasts talks about ideas for trying to treat traffic enforcement more like an administrative task, for example they mention you don't give building inspectors guns just in case they run into some criminal activity over the course of their work. But attempts to de-police-ize traffic enforcement have sometimes failed.

But it is weird. I'm in about the most privileged + protected demographic class the country has got (save for not being stinkin' rich, and having a car that's even shabbier than that) and my pulse goes crazy if I think I may have caught the attention of a police cruiser.

Gotta be a better way.

---

---

One of the more common frustrations I've seen expressed on Tumblr is "why don't neurotypical people just say what they want?" – and I guarantee you, 100% of the time the answer is "because we live in a society that imposes an obligation to agree to any halfway-plausible request, no matter how unwelcome or inconvenient it is, unless you can cite a specific justification for refusing it". That leads directly to this elaborate song and dance of implying requests without actually expressing them so that the receiving party is free to refuse without being obliged to justify themselves. It's not irrational – it's a specific solution to a specific problem!

(Now, if you're going to ask why this deranged expectation that one should always agree to explicitly stated requests unless one can justify refusal has come about in the first place, well, that's where we're gonna have to get political.)

Some small passages I liked from Emily St. John Mandel's "Station Eleven", a novel bouncing its point of view from right around the time a horrific flu virus spares less than 1 in a 1000 and ends civilization, and a few decades later where a small pack of survivors (taking their motto from an old Star Trek Voyager episode saying "Survival is Insufficient") make some kind of living as a travelling Symphony and Shakespeare show.

There are tears in her eyes now. Miranda is a person with very few certainties, but one of them is that only the dishonorable leave when things get difficult.

The brief flare of a meteor, or perhaps a falling satellite. Is this what airplanes would have looked like at night, just streaks of light across the sky? Kirsten knew they'd flown at hundreds of miles per hour, inconceivable speeds, but she wasn't sure what hundreds of miles per hour would have looked like.

I've been thinking lately about immortality. What it means to be remembered, what I want to be remembered for, certain questions concerning memory and fame. I love watching old movies. I watch the faces of long-dead actors on the screen, and I think about how they'll never truly die. I know that's a cliché but it happens to be true. Not just the famous ones who everyone knows, the Clark Gables, the Ava Gardners, but the bit players, the maid carrying the tray, the butler, the cowboys in the bar, the third girl from the left in the nightclub. They're all immortal to me. First we only want to be seen, but once we're seen, that's not enough anymore. After that, we want to be remembered.

"A sea of electric lights. It gives me chills to think of it. I don't really remember my parents. Actually just impressions. I remember hot air coming out of vents in the winter, and machines that played music. I remember what computers looked like with the screen lit up. I remember how you could open a fridge, and cold air and light would spill out. Or freezers, even colder, with those little squares of ice in trays. Do you remember fridges?"
"Of course. It's been a while since I've seen one used for anything other than shelving space."
"And they had light inside as well as cold, right? I'm not just imagining this?"
"They had light inside."

None of the older Symphony members knew much about science, which was frankly maddening given how much time these people had had to look things up on the Internet before the world ended.

Crowds had gathered beneath the television monitors. Clark decided that whatever they were looking at, he couldn't face it without a cup of tea. He assumed it was a terrorist attack. He bought a cup of Earl Grey at a kiosk, and took his time adding the milk. This is the last time I'll stir milk into my tea without knowing what happened, he thought, wistful in advance for the present moment, and went to stand with the crowd beneath a television that was tuned to CNN.

"Why did we always say we were going to shoot emails?"
"I don't know. I've wondered that too."
"Why couldn't we just say we were going to send them? We were just pressing a button, were we not?"
"Not even a real button. A picture of a button on a screen."
"Yes, that's exactly what I'm talking about."
"There was not, in fact, an email gun. Although that would've been nice. I would've preferred that."

He found he was a man who repented almost everything, regrets crowding in around him like moths to a light. This was actually the main difference between twenty-one and fifty-one, he decided, the sheer volume of regret.

A few passages were reminders of the cornucopia of small technological miracles we are surrounded by daily... it reminds me of Nicholson Baker's "The Mezzanine", and its meditation on the design of mundane objects. (Or the old essay I, Pencil - a bit of libertarian propaganda but a reminder of the crazy complexity in even something as mundane as that...) But it also has some of the most gripping scenes of normal people bearing witness at the inflexion point of collapse since Cory Doctorow's When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth.

---

Coding for Fun and the Culture of Learning - made an entry for my company's engineering blog, about the fun of old 8-bit computers, the comapany's Peer-led classes, and the fun of programming stuff in Processing and p5.js

---

Fun history of Apple Easter Eggs:

(mentioned on The Daring Fireball's Talk Show podcast...) I ran a fundraiser the Banda de Música Juvenil de Loma Larga La Unión El Salvador - a program that gets musical instruments and training into the hands of boys and girls in El Salvador, and helps keep them out of gangs. With my buddies on FB, the matching funds I put in, and a donation from JP Honk, Omar(the man organizing it) wrote "Hay están los instrumentos del dinero que ustedes donaron se compraron 7 trombones 3 clarinete y 4 flautas trasversales" (There are the money instruments that you donated, 7 trombones 3 clarinet and 4 transverse flutes were purchased)
photo by Jason Victor Rosenman

---

Trump: "*All* cars driven into peaceful counterprotestors matter"

---

By all means, compare these shitheads to the Nazis. Again and again. I'm with you.

---

Cool, our cross-honkish-band BABAM got mentioned by name in a Boston Globe article about our gig with the Landmark Orchestra! Heath Robinson is a somewhat less-whimsical Rube Goldberg, but with something like Winsor McCay's sense of solidity in his drawing.

---

Today's sense of how time flies: I've been doing my daily blog ( http://kirk.is ) for around 15 years. (!) Lately I started a UI-specific blog, http://kirkdev.blogspot.com/ ) And by lately I mean around 5 year ago, or about 1/3 as long as sooooo old daily blog.

---

august blender of love

The internet is one huge experiment in confirmation bias.

---

It's almost scary how lighting can change the appearance of a face in photography.

---

[Kirk has] an estimated 3.0% Neanderthal DNA, which puts [him] in the 92nd percentile among European 23andMe members.

---

---

At gameloop, an "unconference"... feel like a bit of a poser! Wonder if any other processing.org wonks here...

---

Gameloop unconference had neat everyone introduce yourself via 3 hashtags... like twitter's limits, brevity can be wonderful #gl11

---

Thinking that 'Hey, I like playing games, so maybe I'd like making them' is sort of like saying, 'Hey, I really like taking baths, maybe I'd like to be a plumber.'

---

New Blender of Love Digest is here!
click for fullsize

---

Surprise find: Asbury Park's Silverball Museum- lots of awesome old school pinball from across the decades!
I was talking about "Learning Guitar to Get Laid" the other day... and Tuba is like Bass, only much more so.

---

You're so humble.... I mean, for someone so full of himself, you are humble.

---

'The brain seems to be more stingy with mechanisms for pleasure than for desire,' Berridge has said. This makes evolutionary sense. Creatures that lack motivation, that find it easy to slip into oblivious rapture, are likely to lead short (if happy) lives.

---

The time you spend reading this tweet is gone, lost forever, carrying you closer to death. Am trying not to abuse privilege.

---

http://www.gamedesign.jp/flash/dice/dice.html - forgot how much I dig "Dice Wars". Like a dumbed-down "Risk".

---

Decades ago I noticed that any month that has a Friday the 13th starts with a Sunday... err, FWIW. Wow, mundanity ahoy!

Finally got around to Bed Bath Beyond last night. I have a fair amount of closet space, 3 bars worth, but not a lot of shelf or drawer area, so I thought I'd revolutionize my life with those vaguely-Euro pants clip hangers. Then I got some shirt hangers, only this new odd type, rather than the usual tubular plastic, it's like thin metal covered with something velvety. And towels... I hadn't realized how bachelor boy I was at risk of being until my friend pointed out I really didn't offer anything for guests to dry their hands with in the bathroom. And then these "As Seen On TV" Hercules Hooks (Warning: spokesman shouting at you) that seem to be pretty damn good at offering a place to hang stuff with only a small puncture in the wall (though you have to carefully avoid studs and the like.)

I put up one or two of the art pieces I was thinking of, then I put the Olympics up on the wall with the projector, settled into the iJoy chair that I have custody of on behalf of my Aunt, finished off a book I'd been meaning to get through, and fired up a laptop. It felt homey in a way I hadn't experienced in a long while... just kind of nestled in there, and with the art around (even if mostly in stacks against the wall) it really felt like my space. And sometimes it feels like I'm finding a new, good rhythm in life, taking care of issues as they arise and generally feeling like I'm giving myself room for whatever comes next, even if it's more of the same... I guess it's some combination of these Todo apps, finally making progress in the apartment, having a smaller amount of bills to think about, and is happening despite work getting more complicated as I volunteer for a management-ish role for another team.

I might still want to add in a slender Ikea-ish sofa to go with the iJoy and the hide-a-bed loveseat. I'm also tempted to frame the area of wall the projector shines on with art, so that it looks like a mysteriously blank area that only makes sense when the projector is on.

---

Link of the Moment
A friend of mine, recently transported to Pittsburgh, has started a restaurant blog there. The prognosis ain't too good so far.

Passage of the Moment

He remembered once when the grass was damp and she came to him on hurried feet, her thin slippers drenched with dew. She stood upon his shoes nestling close and held up her face, showing it as a book open at a page.

"Think how you love me," she whispered, "I don't ask you to love me always like this, but I ask you to remember. Somewhere inside me there'll always be the person I am tonight."

In the end, my feelings about this book are mixed... it felt like a slog, even though it was punctuated with some beautifully executed scenes. It took me two weeks of subway reading (well, that includes a few days skimming the Blender review) and I felt mostly every bit of it.

Another line I liked:

Nearby, some Americans were saying good-by in voices mimicking the cadence of water running into a large old bathtub

Reminded me of this one roadtrip I took after college and sharing a shower with my travel companion, an old clawfoot tub in the middle of my buddy's large bathroom.

Ugh, I'm such a nostalgic!

---

NO MORE FOLDING PANTS FOR ME! Nothing but Euro-ish "pants clamps" hangers. Trouble is, no idea if legs or waistband go better up...

---

"I worry that Taoism lets a bad man justify his badness; 'That's just my path'" "Do you know many bad man Taoists?" "No..." "So why worry?"

---

<3 spaghetti straps Interesting bit on public radio this morning, about the Brazilian community in Boston starting to dry up, thanks in part to the weak dollar and a perception of an increase in anti-immigrant feeling. Actually one of the guys heading back said that he thought the economy was in free-fall and didn't see it getting better in the next five years. That seemed like a pretty dire assessment!

---

Toy of the Moment

--News Ticker from Lore's Bad Gods. The description from its page

The Doo-Dah News Network brings you the finest headlines that you can sing to the tune of "Camptown Races" if you add "Doo-Dah" to the end.

(I guess Lore used this trick before, but I think this is actually automated.)

I like how the author-insert Lore cartoons now include the drink recipe of what he's drinking (click on "Notes").

Woo, really busy today. I'll try to post more later.

---

Joke of the Moment

You are driving in a car at a constant speed on a curvy road.

On your right side is a valley and on your left side is a fire engine traveling at the same speed as you.

You see a giant galloping pig, the same size as your car, in front of you.. Behind you is a helicopter flying at ground level.

Both the giant pig and the helicopter are also traveling at the same speed as you, and the accelerator seems to be stuck, so you can't evade them.

What must you do to safely get out of this highly dangerous situation?

Answer:

Get off the children's Merry-Go-Round, bozo! You're drunk!

Even thoough I have tons of stuff I "should" be doing, from decluttering my apartment to attending to the loveblender, I've been spending my freetime "tecnoslacking"...no, not playing video games, though come to think of it, it is assembling tools and information about games.

I made one page that aggregates the results from 5 "Top 100 Video Games of All Time" lists...EGM 1997 and 2002, Game Informer 2001, and IGN.com 2003 and 2005. Here's the top ten from the "powerlist" I assembled.

	Name	EGM 1997		EGM 2002		GI 2001		IGN 2003		IGN 2005
1.	Tetris	1		2	\/ 1	3	\/ 1	4	\/ 1	3	/\ 1
2.	Super Mario 64	4		5	\/ 1	12	\/ 7	5	/\ 7	5	=
3.	The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past	3		3	=	23	\/ 20	6	/\ 17	11	\/ 5
4.	Super Metroid	6		1	/\ 5	29	\/ 28	3	/\ 26	10	\/ 7
5.	Street Fighter II	5		13	\/ 8	22	\/ 9	10	/\ 12	8	/\ 2
6.	Super Mario Bros.	37		22	/\ 15	2	/\ 20	1	/\ 1	1	=
7.	Castlevania: Symphony of the Night	12		4	/\ 8	18	\/ 14	17	/\ 1	16	/\ 1
8.	Chrono Trigger	29		26	/\ 3	15	/\ 11	12	/\ 3	13	\/ 1
9.	Super Mario Kart	15		44	\/ 29	35	/\ 9	14	/\ 21	15	\/ 1
10.	The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time	--		8		11	\/ 3	2	/\ 9	2	=

I made it so you can compare any subset of the 5 lists, like to see how EGM changed, or just to view a single rating by itself.

I'm also working on a basic tutorial for writing music on the Atari 2600 (called "do re bB", bB being the batari BASIC language it's focusing on.). I'm pretty proud of this little HTML keyboard I made for a web front end to a "calculate the note" command line program called "Tune2600"...

# #  |   |  # # # | | C | | D | | E | | F | | G | | A | | B | | C

You can see the full keyboard at webTune2600. Breakthrough of the Moment
Gene therapy to make monkeys stop slacking. When can I get this to put in my Dunkin Donuts iced coffee in the morning??

---

Ramble of the Moment
It's always grated on me a bit that I don't have an exact starting date for the Blender of Love. I think I used to have a slightly stronger idea of the starting point...for some reason I've written a lot of things that put it at "late 1993", like on the Blender history page. 'Course, late 2003, I was kind of too busy with a breakup to think about that anniversary all that much I guess...

So I've been looking for other dates. I've been using Google's "Groups" features to search my old Usenet posts. I started advertising it in my signature file in July 1995, as far as I can tell. (July 12, I wasn't, July 19, I was.) So July 2005 might be as good a date as any to make an anniversary, though it won't be as cool as one for the absolute start.

Other milestones:

• The first posted comment is "5 Sep 1995", on the original comments page, back when I would cut and paste things from e-mail.
• The earliest "someone else's submission" on Heart on Sleeve corner seems to be "10 Nov 95". (heh, I found an old mail archive...I was getting a TON of Blender related stuff around that time in 1995...the web was so young then, it was easy to get attention when you were doing someting 'new'.)
• I made a seperate page as a regular feature called Heart on Sleeve Journal for other people's works in Fall of 1996:
• August 1997 is the first "Blender of Love" digest.

Anyway, it's kind of sad to my archivist self that I don't have a clearer idea of the start of it all. Ah well. But come to think of it, I don't have a clear idea of how I'd want to mark any given 10-year anniversary either...

---

Quote of the Moment

Naturally, the common people don't want war, but after all, it is the leaders of a country who determine the policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. This is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in every country.

Of course, if they're not utterly evil leaders, THEY firmly believe the war is justified. Our administration was hankering to move on Iraq for a long time, from a fear of WMD to a wish for revenge for the assassination attempt on Bush Sr. Palm of the Moment
So I'm finally retiring the old Palm IIIc. Actually, it's Mo's old IIIc, she generously let me use the one she got when mine when on the fritz. I got the IIIc January 2001, though you can see be jonesing for something new a few days before. Wow...when I got that IIIc, I was still at my dot bomb!

Anyway, the IIIc was always a bit wider and longer than I liked, so I took to decorating its case with stickers, you can see the last rendition here on the left. I liked how the stickers piled up over the years.

UPDATE: Heheheheh. I carried this Palm with roughly that group of stickers for months, and only after having that picture posted for 10 hours do I notice the way the Small Soldiers Ogre's boulder turns the TITAN A.E. into "TIT". My inner 12-year-old must've been asleep!

Its replacement is a Sony Clié SJ22. I've kind of warmed up to it now that I see it's styling as a bit iBook-ish, but man, is this thing girly:

• The name: Clié? I mean, it sounds like woman's name or cosmetic already, and the e-with-an-accent just makes it all the more swishy.
• Actually, with its soft grey tones and overall styling, it kind of looks like something from the cosmetics counter.
• The flip lid is, I kid you not, just slightly fuzzy, almost like it was covered in something like velvet. Or something, I don't know much about material.
• The stylus is much less rugged-feeling than on other Palms. In fact its silvery-metal, with white plastic at both the writing point and the other end. It looks like a frickin' twirling baton!

But anyway. I think it's the cheapest PalmOS PDA out there with a 320x320 screen, which makes the pixels really tiny and the text look really nice. Plus you can read it in daylight, unlike the IIIc. (And the stylus isn't falling out all over the place, unlike my IIIc) It's not perfect as a doodle pad, it tends to jump a bit when reading the pen, but overall I'm secure enough in my manhood to be very happy with it. In fact, it probably is attractive enough that I'm not tempted to subvert it with stickers.

I know it might be odd to write this much about a piece of hardware, but I've had a PalmOS device with me ever since fall of 1997, so it's an important accompanist to my brain...

---

Invention of the Moment
Call me gadget-happy, but I think I'd really like to get one of those high-tech toilets Wired is writing about.

---

Prank of the Moment
ZUG has fun with credit card receipt signatures. I liked the surrealness of some of them.

I haven't thought about ZUG in a long time. I love how it informs you that "You're reading ZUG, the world's only comedy site." Video Game Quote of the Moment

The winds blew and the clouds moved on as if they were oblivious to their mortal plight.

The game has different endings for each of the different characters you finish the game with, and what strikes me as odd (and possibly Japanese) is that it's only a "happy ending" for some of the characters...I guess it's understood that the other characters are cursed or otherwise doomed.

I like this quote though, describing Maxi's death, painting a lovely picture of an indifferent universe that goes on even when we don't.

---

Link of the Moment
WhatTheHeck.com seems to have a steady supply of interesting links. (And claim to be the first "weird Ebay auctions" trackers.) I ran into a Eric, one of the founders, at a brunch Max Weinstein had on Sunday. (I think Max is looking for a Sys Admin gig, if anyone's got an opening.) WhatTheHeck seems to need an archive feature, however. Mo was feeling really unwell yesterday, mostly nausea that her body didn't seem to know what to do with. (She thinks she has been a bit off since Mexico, she's going to the doctor's this week.) I dunno, somehow it reminds me of our mortality, that while this is probably just a passing viral thing, some day there's a good chance we'll going to have to deal with something more serious.

---

Current Events
Have you seen Al Gore's Beard? He looks like Riker on Star Trek. (Geek Humor: Maybe people mapped Picard/Riker to Clinton/Gore, so he lost when he tried for the commanding spot...ok, that may be a geeky observation, but that previous link was from a PlanetRiker tribute page. At least I'm not that bad.)

---

Link of the Moment
The Baltimore CityPaper Online has a weekly Summary of the Comics Section. I love the idea of it: the writer is very analytical and sarcastic, but is reading the stuff anyway. When it comes to the comics page, I know that feeling. Except I don't get paid for it. (via Comics I Don't Understand, another interesting comics study.)

---

Quote of the Moment

There is a general place in your brain, I think, reserved for "melancholy of relationships past." It grows and prospers as life progresses, forcing you finally, against your better judgement, to listen to country music.