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Wow. Seeing can no longer be believing - new smartphones are wired up to Google to make astonishing AI photo fakes.

This kinda sucks.

Marched with New Magnolia in the Feast of St Anthony's festival Saturday and Sunday. Saturday had a lot of ducking into restaurants flash-mob style. It's hours and hours of marching but great to be part of a century-strong tradition... I've persuaded the bandleader Ken to add "Space Cadet" (my signature bassline, loving stolen from the Atari 2600 port of IREM's game "Moon Patrol") and man - it's a bop I do love these over-100-year old "In The Year 2000"s, especially the whale bus, from France and Germany: (via prokopetz) Sitting on a bench enjoying the low sun over Jamaica Pond... caught myself at risk for manspreading a bit? but realized in an age of social distancing its at least less of a space hogging issue than it used to be, though a lot of it has to do with attitude.

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Man walking through the trees on the dark asphalt path in the dark after pond side band rehearsal, accompanied by August crickets, had a serious bandcamp energy - even if the flashlight is now a smartphone. Shout out to my Starlake Musicamp Peeps! I keep a text file called "things that are bugging me". When I'm feeling off, I take an inventory of the factors leading to my ennui; general discontent and blues. It's a surprisingly infrequent impulse but a long term project; the entries in the file are Jan 2008, Apr 2008, Aug 2008, Feb 2011, Sep 2015, Nov 2015, Aug 2017 and now Aug 2019.

I noticed it last night, that I was self-medicating alternating with an iOS game (Archero - which is really quite a satisfying little adventure) and reading the novel "Today Will Be Different". I knew I might feel a bit better if I hunkered down on some porchfest or loveblender tasks but I was just not feeling it.

(Another symptom of something being off, from this very entry: I'm using colons and semi-colons. I hardly ever use colons and semi-colons, and I fear I don't use them well.)

I don't take much stock in my own intrinsic feelings, and that's somewhere between wise self-analysis and a self-fulfilling prophecy. (I am profoundly shallow, my entire nervous system and philosophical system are grounded in how surface interactions are more critical in their accountability than obscured inner states.) But I wonder if this very occasionally recurring heap of the blahs was accurately diagnosed by my buddy Dylan as low level depression (but I think think he thinks that about everybody) or as a pileup of anhedonia (inability to feel pleasure) my therapist once mentioned me having... and are those just descriptions or useful signposts for corrections or adaptions?

But despite being aware that this might be a "the call is coming from inside the house!!!!" thing, I can see some external factors:

• First and foremost: I got a new financial advisor who helped me do a general inventory. (Erica Hubbard in Charlestown- super recommended from friends) The news is generally solid and good, the result of the extraordinary terrific fortune of stumbling into a tech career without much debt and then dutifully maxing out 401Ks as they came up. In fact - almost too good, in that she plotted out a plan with me retiring or at least downshifting in 10 years, not the 20 I'd consider traditional. Holy crap! On the one hand, that's great. I feel like I've always been good at having a pile of personal projects going, and with just a bit if discipline would make good use of a retired state. On the other hand... to quote the poet Samuel Menashe:

  Before long the end
  Of the beginning
  Begins to bend
  To the beginning
  Of the end you live
  With some misgivings
  About what you did.

  The concept of early retirement opens some doors but closes many others - and bring homes a sobering realization that many of the paths not taken just ain't gonna be taken by me this go-round. (Or in the realm of romance, the haz-beens of breakups and the never-wuzes of crushes... or my poignant knack of being the penultimate romantic interest.)
• Work is a bit of a grind. I'm doing a lot of stuff to increase accessibility on my company's website. Important stuff, but a bunch of small victories (and some frustrating deferrals) in an endless war.
• Melissa is having a frustrating time at work, and I know my advice for looking on the bright side or understanding about hedonic setpoints ain't always useful.
• My weight has been more or less stuck above 200 for a year and a half, and not that I'm that strict with myself but it feels like it requires too much discipline just to keep it there.
• I get some anxiety about not doing enough for the bands I'm in, or having to pick between competing gigs for two bands, or between a band gig where I know I'd be useful vs other commitments.
• I've noticed my typing getting somewhat worse - the odd phonetic typos I make becoming more rampant. I feel like it spiked a few weeks ago and receded but still... I feel it might be a side effect of a kind of growth but there's a risk that it represents decay.
• As always, the general fears of the age. The arctic's on fire, and our president is mostly intent on making the most compelling reality television possible.

So sometimes I've found writing this down in a public space feels helpful - in fact I feel a bit of lift even now. Suggestions or random attention and supportive sentiment are welcome as well. Via a private FB tuba group-

-one of the better-drawn sousaphones I've seen in a comic.

"Hope is a fine thing, but it don't gurgle none when you pour it out of a bottle."

The book, half a lamenting of prohibition and the old salloon culture, half poems on a similar theme, was kind of like a Will Rogers take on his Archy and Mehitabel stuff (Archy and Mehitabel were of my favorite sets of poems when I was in high school, Archy the cockroach throwing himself with all his cockroach might to transcribe the tales of Mehitabel the cat...) I also liked the verse

The fool will give his life to booze,
The wiser man taboos that,
And I'm a sad Budweiser man
Than when I used to ooze that.

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Odd side effect to not being very judgmental: you end up with friends who get annoyed by some of your other friends, so making various friend permutations can become fraught, and you end up looking for a Rodney King-esque "Can't We All Just Get Along?". I'm not making such a social media deal out of it, but I got an addition to my tattoo yesterday, using this program to help create the banner. The text, "This Fate", is a rough paraphrase of Amor Fati (I think I prefer sticking to my own language for body art.) THIS fate. This circumstance, because no other fate or circumstances exist. Accepting that and loving what is, either the less lovable parts, is part of being a better human; and when we aren't making ourselves unhappy about how things aren't, we have more room to strive for improving the might be. (Tattoo inked by Dave Norton at Pino Bros Ink)

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@ The Worcester Palladium, going to see Thomas Sanders
F'in Gyroscopes, How do they work? For reals. ALL IS HERESY!!!

1. While global warming means many coastal areas have to worry about the encroaching sea, Alaska generally has the opposite problem: relieved from some of the massive weight of glaciers, that part of the world is rising, and sometimes at a surprising clip.
2. I say "I'm worried that..." way too much, and worry too much.
3. In the town of Gustavus, almost universally drivers and pedestrians do a little finger wave in passing.
4. I am much, much, much, much less of an athlete than Riana. She bikes everywhere including work and swims every chance she can get, I ... don't. But she was taking on big sloped hikes and even when I joined her, what was a stroll to her was leaving me sucking wind.
5. Juneau has a streetcleaner running at around 4:30-5am that sounds like a banshee.
6. I start a lot of sentences with "Man...", or at least I do around Riana, who started pointing it out by saying "M, A, N!" when I did so. But it's a useful phrase for expressing wonder or irritation.
7. Southeast Alaksa is clear skies and warm 7 days out of 8! (This is probably not a safe bit of knowledge to walk away with, but it's rather more true this summer than most years.)

This trip to Alaska was an experiment for Riana and me, sort of a more concentrated version of what dating is trying to figure out in general, or if she needed someone with a more profound need to be in nature, and similarly for me if we were pop-culture compatible.

Like any good scientists, we had to acknowledge when the experimental results didn't match our hoped-for hypothesis, and so-- we're not dating any longer, but it's very friendly. She needs a full on partner in driving to get out there and hike and camp, and I need someone who, like once a week or so, would be with me to chill and unwind with some movie or video or something on a screen, and that's just not her. Put another way, she's too much of an outdoor cat and I'm too much of an indoor cat.

(Which isn't to say I had an amazing time in Alaska... EB's mom pointed out how animated I was bringing her through the photos.)

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Syria. Jeez-loweez. There's so much hubris here, in terms of, humanitarian and WMD-use concerns or no, if we thought Syria could really strike back at us in our homeland, there is NO WAY we'd attack.

We're playing policeman for the world, but we're kind of corrupt.
retro fixie at alewife

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THOSE ARE NOT VALETS. DO NOT LEAVE YOUR CAR WITH THEM.

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Just got email thinking my one resume reference of Ehcache means I'm an expert qualified to author a new book. Pity buyers of that book!

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http://jasonsantamaria.com/articles/stealing-sheep -- for those gettin' to 40 or thereabouts, the inspiring late start of font master Frederic Goudy

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Take away alcohol and stupid, and the world would require about 90% fewer cops.

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My code would be good if I knew how to write it!

Irene as seen off the coast of North Carolona, via WILX News I got fooled. This one is from Pensacola Florida 8/09/2011. Thanks xoxoxoBruce and sorry everyone!

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Yeah, 3-5 folks got killed, but "HURRICANE DRIVES TOWARD NEW YORK WITH DEADLY FURY"? Really, NY Times, get a hold of yourself.

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Luck is probability taken personally.

--originally via archmage's friday photos but I found this animation somewhere... maybe gifanime?

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Eyes are so crazy good at adjusting for your head's movements! Watch yourself in a mirror, shake and bob your head, they stay locked- weird!

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"Improper Bostonian says brine-based garnishes are the new thing."
"Like brine.... shrimp?"
"Dude that's sea monkeys."
"Ew, never mind."

--Dual tribute to Legos and the Commodore 64 computer - basically the things that made my childhood awesome

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After night of reading book on George Washington odd dreams about his valet William Lee. (Also: I learned that small pox was big deal in war, and helping the army cope with it was one of Washington's big successes.)

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http://www.incident.net/works/miseanu/nues.html - NSFW Flash-based (in more ways than one) art, a study in women clothed and unclothed. (Though the clothing is oddly mid-90s-feeling.) Turns out it's mostly based on the works of Akira Gomi.

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List of Fictional Curse Words - still bummed this got deleted from Wikipedia in such ignominious haste.

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http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112312561 - Reading Rainbow killed by Bush's Hooked on Phonics. Wait, RR was still on?

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Just drove by the Kennedy funeral preperations.... lots of faux-campaign "Kennedy. Thanks." posters up in the area. The other day I found this entertaining bit of bus stop advertising:

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Quote of the Moment

Furthermore, [writers who say "I know it's not a real word"] are giving up one of their inalienable rights as English speakers: the right to create new words as they see fit. Part of the joy and pleasure of English is its boundless creativity: I can describe a new machine as bicyclish, I can say that I'm vitamining myself to stave off a cold, I can complain that someone is the smilingest person I've ever seen, and I can decide, out of the blue, that fetch is now the word I want to use to mean "cool." By the same token, readers and listeners can decide to adopt or ignore any of these uses or forms.

Maybe it's no coincidence that English and capitalism seem to go together, both tend to accept new concepts and absorb or subvert them for its own purposes... (I was reading the comic "Action Philosophers" on Karl Marx, and he recognized this property... get rich selling Che t-shirts, what do we care?)

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proposed bumper sticker: "I've driven drunker than this" --D

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cmgaglione maybe the "bunny" from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, with "big, pointy teeth" and all that? ;-)

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Looking at the small burbly fountain at park plaza arlington... you can't really track indv. droplets; it's a bit like a series of strobes

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For me the weird thing about the site "photoshop disasters" is how many of them I wouldn't notice in the wild. We see what we expect to see. Ordered myself some pseudo-free (still have to pay for shipping, plus a few bucks to avoid the advertising on the back) business cards from VistaPrint:

I didn't actually want to print my home address on it, so I used the space for a haiku:

     a haiku written
needs a season to be real
  um... tree in blossom!

At one point I started having a chat with this one nice gal at the bus top, and ended up giving her one of my old business cards, but had to awkwardly scratch out the email on it. I have this possibly unlikely notion that having a card like this might be useful in similar social situations, but probably not so much as I think.

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Crowd Control of the Moment
Slashdot had an article about the White House Crowd Control manual recently unearthed by the Washington Post. Here was my favorite bit from the PDF:

The rally squad's task is to use their signs and banners as shields between the demonstrators and the main press platform. If the demonstrators are yelling, rally squads can begin and lead supportive chants to drown out the protesters (USA! USA! USA!) As a last resort, security should remove the demonstrators from the event site. The rally squads can include, but are not limited to, college/young republican organizations, local athletic teams, and fraternities/sororities.

I'm not sure which part I find less wholesome, the almost self-parodying use of yelling "USA! USA! USA!" or the idea of importing the local football team and/or frat to act as rhetorical muscle.

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Games of the Moment
Gamasutra on 20 Really Difficult Games and the design lessons to be drawn from them. Some of these I haven't even heard of, and the only one I really got through was Blast Corps, which was absolutely terrific. (via slashdot)

Ugh. Off to Colorado. Not sure if I'll have time to make real entries!

UPDATE: Above is what I pre-published. It's kind of weird that I'm so gung-ho about not missing days... actually, some of the scripts that support the site may kind of depend on that, I'm not certain.

I was trying to figure out if it was my imagination, or if the breeze actually felt... I dunno, less dense than at lower altitudes. It seems unlikely that I'd be able to really sense that, so it's probably wishful thinking. At one point I felt a tad lightheaded, but then again, is it the alititude or just a day of work and travel after 5 1/2 hours of sleep?

Quote of the Moment

The Onion: Is there a God?

Jimmy Kimmel: Uh, I think so, yeah. Sure. I was praying for Him to kill me last night as I was vomiting up my lobster pasta. I can't take this altitude: I've been [at the Aspen Comedy Arts Festival] for four days--three last year and one this year--and I've vomited on three of those days.

O: Yeah, the altitude can wreak havoc...

JK: Well, I use the altitude as an excuse, but it's really the 17 shots of whatever people hand me.

--That's been deep in my Palm journal since 2000. Just following "On July 28, 1945, an Air Force B-25 bomber crashed into the Empire State Building on the 79th floor. That's kind of funny.". Hmm, now... not so funny. I remember recalling that fact right when I first heard about 9/11, back for that brief time when we thought it might have just been an accident. Sorry for the near lack of posting today...my 'net connection was out this morning, then I had a fun BBQ at Lex's...

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Link of the Moment

1. Coca-cola was originally green.
2. Every day more money is printed for Monopoly than for the US Treasury.

Via Mr. Ibis, who was interested in how 38% of North America is wilderness, vs 28% of Africa...that surprised me too, til I started thinking about all the Arctic wasteland in Canada. Dang it. I think I left my sunglasses at yoga class last night. Or something.

Man, does that make me extremely unhappy.

UPDATE: I just want to reiterate my love for Eye Q Optical at Harvard Square (and Newbury Street.) I figured I'd order a second pair of sunglasses, even if I get my originals back a backup would make sense, and since previously I let them sweet talk me into getting two frames, they gave me the replacements for half-price. (Like $50, which is really cheap for prescription glasses that I love so much.)

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Manifesto of the Moment

Who are we? A word about our membership.

Since the world began, we have gone about our work quietly, resisting the urge to generalize, valuing the individual over the group, the actual over the conceptual, the inherent sweetness of the present moment over the theoretically peaceful future to be obtained via murder.

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Article of the Moment

The party of Lincoln and Liberty was transmogrified into the party of hairy-backed swamp developers and corporate shills, faith-based economists, fundamentalist bullies with Bibles, Christians of convenience, freelance racists, misanthropic frat boys, shrieking midgets of AM radio, tax cheats, nihilists in golf pants, brownshirts in pinstripes, sweatshop tycoons, hacks, fakirs, aggressive dorks, Lamborghini libertarians, people who believe Neil Armstrong's moonwalk was filmed in Roswell, New Mexico, little honkers out to diminish the rest of us, Newt's evil spawn and their Etch-A-Sketch president, a dull and rigid man suspicious of the free flow of information and of secular institutions, whose philosophy is a jumble of badly sutured body parts trying to walk. Republicans: The No.1 reason the rest of the world thinks we're deaf, dumb and dangerous.

Site Comment of the Moment

Just wanted to thank you out of the blue, Kisrael. As an atheist , a few years ago I had an existential crisis. I found your site and I found exactly what I was seeking. Not coddling, but understanding. Your mortality for skeptics section is one of the most useful things i've ever found on the internet.

That's really one of the nicest complements I've received in a long while. Also re: yesterday's comments, yeah, on closer inspection, that penguin slap is totally fake.

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Toys of the Moment
It turns out yesterday's Zombie Simulator was part of a much more interesting project--Processing seems to be a way of simplifying the creation of java applets...so these things will still run in any browser but they won't require quite so much difficult programming. Many of the applets on the front page are quite interesting or beautiful...'Skyline' is especially cool.
I gotta fight to not get distracted from my Atari game programming, since "Processing" is undoubtedly easier...though I'm making some really good progress with the programming, it actually plays like a game now.

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Commentary of the Moment
Slate.com has Christopher Hitchens really ripping into 'The Immorality of the Ten Commandments'. Pretty strong stuff for a mainstream website.

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Package Copy of the Moment
For dietary reasons, Mo's been buying spelt bread lately. Her preferred brand is named "Ezekiel 4:9" and it quotes that verse on its side:

Take also unto thee WHEAT and BARLEY, and BEANS, and LENTILS, and MILLET, and SPELT and put them in one vessel, and make bread of it...

(Though they leave out the next part, "...according to the number of the days that thou shalt lie upon thy side; three hundred and ninety days shalt thou eat thereof" Lie upon they side? 390 Days?) Frankly, I think it's much more amusing to read this verse in Samuel L. Jackson's famous "Pulp Fiction" Ezekiel 25:17 quote. (a quote which, unlike the bread which leaves out the odd bit, adds a lot that isn't in that verse) This thought occured to me the other week: I can totally see why people used to believe in spontaneous generation for stuff like fruit flies. You hardly ever see just one, flying around looking for fruit...but leave some old banana out and boom, a hoard has descended. Plus, fruit flies are so tiny and simple seeming... That whole Francesco Redi cheesecloth experiment that "proved" spontaneous generation didn't happen? Who knows, maybe the cheesecloth screwed up the air flow that was needed to bring the fly bits to life!

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Quote of the Moment

Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.

Sometimes incorrectly attributed to the Dalai Lama along with 17 other "instructions for life"

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Link of the Moment
The true-life article that inspired the movie "Blue Crush". What a lifestyle. To explain to the surfer girls why she herslef had never surfed, the author "explained I'd grown up in Ohio, where there is no surf, but that didn't satisfy them; what I didn't say was that I'm not sure that at 15 I had the abandon or the indomitable sense of myself that you seem to need in order to look at this wild water and think, I will glide on top of those waves." Not sure if I would've been much better. I'd still like to bungee jump one of these days though. Quote of the Moment

I rehearsed once again in my mind exactly how I would go about making love, changing some details, tossing in a few improvements, and I practiced making ecstatic cries. I'd never made love before and had never cried out in an ecstatic way (except one Christmas when I got a Lionel train, but "Oh, boy, thanks, Mom and Dad" was wrong for sex) and I wanted to do it right.

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Quandry of the Moment

Kirk find out for us in a daily entry why it is that lazy, good for nothing people keep their jobs and those of us that work our tails off get no recognition.

I don't know if I know Ann C. or not. I also don't know if I might not be one of the good for nothings, so maybe I'm the wrong person to ask.

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Quickness Test of the Moment
Test how fast your 'net connection really is. I've always wondered about this, actually, it's kind of reassuring to see.