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Chapter 2.
9. The wise person says, 'I do not know how the Universe came to be.'
10. 'But I'm pretty sure it wasn't my fault.'

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Now, there's nothing on Earth like the love of a teenage girl for a teenage boy. I mean its borderline insane, it's a physical thing. It's painful. It's proper nuts. I've wondered why this is, and I can only assume that its nature's way of compensating for the fact that teenage boys are fucking idiots. They are all morons, the lot of them, and this might have caused the human race to die out had Mother Nature not robbed teenage girls of any sense of reason or perspective. They love teenage boys so blindly that it doesn't matter how awful they are.

Now, these intense first relationships aren't going to last. The boy is so freaked out by the intensity of the girl that he wants to escape, or the girl wants a boy to live up to the pedestal that she has put him on. Either way, these things rarely last beyond the teenage years, which is all well and good. The woman learns not to love so deeply, to keep her distance, and she becomes wiser and more alluring and more marvellous. But the boy, he not only learns nothing but he assumes that what happened was normal, because that relationship is all he knows. He thinks, 'well, the fact that I was worshipped must simply be because I am *exceptional*. I'm some kind of rock star poet.' And, he assumes, other women will think so too. So he goes through life, relationship after relationship, not being worshipped by saner, wiser women, and eventually cracks at some point in his forties. He has his mid-life crisis and tries to fuck girls that are far too young for him, just because they might activate that poor withering collection of neurons that still think being worshipped is part and parcel of a healthy relationship.

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Actually scratch that, [Music is] not like a drug. It *is* a drug. It's something that you take to change how you're feeling. It's a mood changer, it's uppers or downers. It triggers emotions that you shouldn't really be experiencing at that point. It's fake, ultimately, fake emotions. Or at the very least, emotions that someone else is having for you. Too much of it does you no good at all.

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Graeme was pushing the conversation towards the awkward zone, the no-go area that we'd avoided during the rest of the journey. Should we go there now? It was a good a time as any. If scabs are not meant to be picked, then why are they so eminently pick-able?

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I had lost my respect for rationality long ago. The intellect is not the tool for discerning the future, it never has been and it never will be. It ranks somewhere behind random guessing and answering every question with the statement 'It'll be fine.' Personally I try to rely on gut instinct.

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Chapter 37.
1. If you apply meaning to a thing you have made, then you have art.
2. If you apply meaning to a person, then you have love.
3. If you apply meaning to the universe, then you have God.
4. There is an inexhaustible supply of meaning.
5. Meaning costs nothing.
6. So what's the problem again?
7. *The wise man says, 'But meaning comes and goes. Sometimes it is there, sometimes it is not. That's just how it is. I wish things were different but they are not.'*
8. *'Once you accept that, we can move on to the little matter of the meaning of meaning.'*

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Blue, green, brown or grey.

And how do we know? We just see it. We see it in their eyes. And it is that moment of recognition that forms our memory. Those eyes. We remember those eyes. Be they blue, green, brown or grey.

The sea is the colour of eyes, in all their variations. It changes to match everyone in turn. Every shade in its repertoire matches someone somewhere, and if you wait long enough it will eventually become the colour of the eyes which have looked at you with love.

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I saw that all events on that road existed regardless of whether I had already passed through them, or whether I had yet to experience them. They were like the roads we had driven on and the towns we had passed through on our journey round the coast. We were at the bottom of Cornwall, yet everywhere we had travelled still existed, from Portmeirion to the Hill O'Many Stanes, from Blackpool to Brighton. So did every road in between, every yard, every inch. Time was no different. It was all there, eternal. Every last second.

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We think that this world is ours, don't we? We think that it's the planet of people, and that people do stuff like making music. This world isn't ours. Music was here a long time before we arrived. It was here before we recorded, or wrote it down as a score, or danced to the drums around the communal fire. The birds sang before we did, and the whales before them. It will continue long after you or I have gone. It will continue after mankind has gone. Those cockroaches will make some amazing sounds. We are temporary. Music is not.

I feel bad responding to a very beautiful, poetically written ventpost with prosaic advice, but I'm going to say this:

Resilience is a *skill*. Being able to shrug things off is a *skill*. being able to curb your immediate emotional reaction to something, being able to process your feelings in a way that means you can *do* something with them rather than being consumed by them, and being able to soothe yourself til you can sit down and process those feelings? that's a *skill*.

It is a skill that you can learn, and it is a skill you can get better at.

unfortunately, like foreign languages, it is a skill that is easier to learn when you are a child. just like you learn a native language from the people around you, you learn from the people around you- usually your parents/guardians- how to react to things that hurt in the moment, how to soothe yourself until you can process them, and how to process them until they don't hurt anymore.

if you're highly reactive, the odds are good that, for whatever reason, you never learnt resilience as a kid. The people who were supposed to teach you how to handle the weight of the world didn't, or couldn't, or wouldn't.

if you try to learn this skill as an adult, you have to convince your brain to do things that it was never taught how to do, after it thinks it does not need to learn this anymore. in the same way that it's goddamn hard for a native adult English speaker to sit down and learn how to speak Russian like a native, if you never learnt how to be resilient when you were a kid? it's going to be a bitch to pick it up.

if you learnt "the world is scary and out to get you and there's nothing you can do about it, you WILL feel EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME" (or "showing your feelings in the moment will get you hurt, you need to bottle everything up until the bottle breaks and you get hurt with fifteen years of feelings at once", or "minor inconveniences are the prelude to The Adult In Your House Who Shouts coming down on you like a load of bricks, if things aren't going *perfectly* then you're about to suffer", or any number of other things), trying to learn that the world doesn't work like that any more is *hard* and it *hurts*. Unless you're *really* good at figuring out what you're thinking and why, you will probably need to get professional help.

You're not from the wrong planet. You just never learnt something that's as basic a part of being a human as talking or counting. You were failed, and it's cruel and unjust that no one helped you pick up the slack.

....But adults learn Russian every day. Adults *teach* themselves Russian every day.

You can learn how to do this. You can learn how to get better at dealing with the stuff that hurts you. You can become more resilient and less reactive.

you are not doomed to get hit by everything that happens to you like it's a truck forever.

I've been thinking a lot about "resilience". Stuck in my head is some repost about resilience being... I dunno, overrated? Or just an unfair to demand of people. And while we can't use "well you should just be resilient" as an excuse not to make changes... some resilience seems critical or at least extremely useful. Especially if you can believe that most people in a scene have reasonably good intentions, like even if they might not be willing to sacrifice many of their own preferences for you they won't go out of their way to hurt you either, which I think is often the case.

I know there's a risk I overdo it resilience wise, like my knack for a maintaining a pleasant equanimity comes along with the positive experiences having their corners rounded off too. But it seems like a good tradeoff, if any.

This world is vast and bustling with all sorts of fun things that you don't know about. Enjoy it all you can.

Forgot there was a google earth flight sim. A little disappointing at least on my machine, was hoping for something closer to the quality of the 3D angle-able maps in Apple Maps

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3 Day Weekends Never Feel Like Enough.

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Do you do do you do you do you boo-boo Poopoo

I didn't realize that whole "voice transcription of instrument sounds" really worked :-D The Warren Peace Band (get it?) was the first outing of "Boston For Fun", an offshoot of other HONKish groups for more casual get togethers...

Sen. @ewarren supporters have come out in full force, including the “Warren Peace Band” 🎶 pic.twitter.com/wHWlNcxKX4

— Marianna Sotomayor (@MariannaNBCNews) September 7, 2019

The usual last minute rush but belmontporchfest.org is another Porchfest site in the books, including the printable download.

I really need to do a from scratch rebuild of a system that all of my porchfest sites can use. The little customization hacks have gotten gnarly :-D

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"In a 2015 Vanity Fair profile, you spoke about having regrets."
"I did, but I don't have any regrets left."

Also, he says he always says "We're going to make a movie, and I don't know if it's going to be any good, but let's have fun", that seems like a good spirit to have. Ventusky What a visualization/animation:

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Snapple fact: "Gorillas burp when they are happy." I guess for me it's the other way around. I'm a little late posting some stuff from the Hatch Shell event last month... an artist named "Andrew" was sketching me and my tuba, and also some of the other band folk...



I helped identify Dominic, Lilia, Merrilyn and Sari... not sure of the others.

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The greatest danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it.

recreational programming and the geekiest of nostalgia and the making of:

Yesterday I went White Water River Rafting with some coworkers on Maine's Penobscot River with Northern Outdoors- their final rafting day of the year, which is too bad because it was GREAT! Here's a montage (crudely iMovie'd-- cripes, what a frustrating UI'd program) of the "One Second Everyday" footage I took with my waterproof Canon.

Highlights of the day included M. getting swept out of the boat on the very first (admittedly Category 5) rapids, gentle life jacket swimming, shooting numerous rapids and getting lots of water in the face, an excellent lunch with a choice of "river" chicken, steak, or salmon, getting flipped trying to "surf" (getting the raft to stay in one place on an Eddy - it's great, reminded me of staying on a bucking bronco), a fun plunge down a small waterfall (hauling the raft back up some rocks for repeated trips), an awesome prolonged "surf" in that same area, again leaving the raft to do some bodysurfing down the "waterslide", then using oars as crude sails, pushed along by a tailwind from stormy weather behind us.

A set of photos from the day, cunningly arranged to imply a totally misleading story:

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Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, than that of blindfolded fear. [...] Do not be frightened from this inquiry by any fear of its consequences. If it ends in a belief that there is no God, you will find incitements to virtue in the comfort and pleasantness you feel in its exercise, and the love of others which it will procure you. If you find reason to believe there is a God, a consciousness that you are acting under his eye, & that he approves you, will be a vast additional incitement; if that there be a future state, the hope of a happy existence in that increases the appetite to deserve it; if that Jesus was also a God, you will be comforted by a belief of his aid and love.

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A+W makes, like, the worst, weakest Diet Root Beer. At least until you realize that it's Cream Soda. Then it's pretty good, actually.

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loveblender
blender of love
from electric sheep comix' sketch blog...

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http://www.drawastickman.com/ - great interactive animation -- you draw the character and the props, and they animate a little story - good js stuff

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Nostalgia is a way of recycling value from the past, rather than just getting more and more time poor. I recommend being nostalgic as hell.

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Fear is the dark room where the Devil develops his negatives.

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http://factlets.info/EgoDepletion "judges approved parole in about 70 percent of cases heard first thing in the morning, but less than 10 percent of those heard in the late afternoon." That's horrible. Also: "Willpower turns out to be more than a folk concept or a metaphor. It really is a form of mental energy that can be exhausted."
--via kottke. Such a neat way of seeing music happen, especially if you know a little music reading yourself- I can read music, but often don't hear rhythms and chords correctly in my head...

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God responded to Rick Perry's prayers for rain by setting his ENTIRE STATE ON FIRE. This sends a clearer message than hurricanes in New York

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Classical music is the kind we keep thinking will turn into a tune.

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Joining a club that meets just once a month produces the same happiness gain as doubling your income.

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The heart wants what the heart wants. So does the stomach, it turns out, so I had lunch at 11:15. Paul Robertson made the art for a new Scott Pilgrim game on Xbox Live and PSN... gotta check that out!

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Sad that synths/sequencers never have "marching band" drumkits: Tri-toms, tuned bass drums, etc... don't band nerds dig this stuff too?

Tufts sQ! - Magic Suits (1997) whole album zip download Bizarre Love Triangles Not the Doctor I Be Your Water 1979

In 1997, Tufts sQ!, then a small group struggling to find its place on campus after the founding members graduated, worked to put together an album.

That album never got made. (sQ! has since gone on to make a number of excellent albums, very highly polished and terrific sounding.)

However, Somewhere along the line- I think it might've been thanks to Austin Putman- I got hold of copies of the recordings they make.

This is a very rough cut album - in particular "I Be Your Water" has some patches that didn't jell, and I'm sure people with more refined ears than mine will cringe in various places.

Still, I'm proud to have been a part of this, and happy to put it out for the world to hear.

(One of the competing names for the album was "Dances with Trucks", the hypothetical "adopted into indigenous tribe name" I bestowed upon Wayne after following him at speeds upwards of 90 mph on rainslick highways, trying to get to Pitt. in time for a show -- hence the album art, show here in a 2024-ChatGPT'd variation) So this photo bubbled to the top of some piles of stuff after I moved... I have a number of group photos from bands I was in, but this goofy "candid" shot really sticks out.

My high school jazz band, 222 Street Jazz... what we lacked in skill we tried to make up in attitude. By dressing up as a bad Blues Brother impression, of course. The rule was the white shirts and jeans and sports jacket, plus any black hat.

I used an online tool to make an ImageMap... mouse over various people for some thoughts. (Wish I could figure out how to do a Flikr-like boxes to show the regions that have extra info.) The end result probably isn't as poetic as I had hoped...

hover over the photo to see what i remember of them...

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"and if you play Defender I could be your Hyperspace" is a brill.lyric; you can be the poetic escape, but also that's a social gaming tactic

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top tip:leave the memcard / battery door open on your camera open until you put the bits back in place, lest you walk off w/ empty camera.. In the news, thousands of mourners -- including firefighters from across the nation -- are gathering to morn Paul Cahill and Warren Payne who died while fighting a restaurant fire in West Roxbury.

I don't mean to take anything away from firefighters -- having someone willing to put his or her life on the line to protect your person and property is something none of us should take for granted -- but I'm a bit surprised that this kind of event is so rare that it's feasible to have a national gathering of firefighters when it does occur.

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Geek Poem of the Moment

Some said the world should be in Perl;
Some said in Lisp.
Now, having given both a whirl,
I held with those who favored Perl.
But I fear we passed to men
A disappointing founding myth,
And should we write it all again,
I'd end it with
A close-paren.

I also liked today's cartoon on Insomia.Essay of the Moment
Game- and comic book-author Evan Skolnick says " Everything I Needed to Know About Game Writing I Learned From Star Trek". Kind of a nice walk down memory lane, and a good exercise in thinking about plot and character.

Note to my future self: changing a toilet seat is well-nigh trivial, so long as you're able to figure out which side the hinge is on for the caps protecting the plastic screws.

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Webcomic of the Moment
Wow. I have never had such a strong feeling of "this comic is for people like me" as I get from xkcd, "A webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language", from super-geeky jokes (most of which I get, or at least I understand what I'm likely not getting), to oddly romantic one-offs, to just idiosyncratic things like the red spiders in geometric perspective landscapes shown here, it's great. It even covers a few issues that were near and dear to my heart: the non-fictional nature of Centrifigual Force, no matter what high school teachers try to drill into us, and the horrendous irony (not to mention, annoyarifficness) of quoting Monty Python skits word-per-word.

I know there's a whole Nerdcore/geeksta rap movement out there... this might be the comic version of that.

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Link of the Moment
Wikipedia's lamest edit wars...bicker bicker bicker! My favorite was about Cranky Kong:

Was Cranky Kong the original Donkey Kong? Could it be the character in Super Nintendo and Nintendo 64 games is actually his son? Or perhaps his grandson? Should we trust offhand comments made by a video-game character? Does being licensed by Nintendo make Rareware publications "official"? How official is the "Nintendo Seal of Quality"? To some people, these questions are a matter of life and death.

FWIW, the original Donkey Kong Country on SNES is a great game for a more hardcore gamer to team up with a less experienced gamer, it has a fairly unique co-operative mode where the "n00b" can control the action but then switch off when the going gets rough, plus it's colorful, has nice music and bossfights.

Question with boldness even the existence of a God; because, if there be one, he must more approve of the homage of reason, then that of blindfolded fear.

It's an interesting thought, and a good response to Fundie Christians who assume the founding fathers thought the way Fundie Christians do now. But it falls prey to a certain fallacy, the "I used to think that the brain was the most fascinating part of the body. Then I realized, 'look who's telling me that.'" problem that Emo Phillips set forth.

Isaiah 55:9 has God saying

For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways, and my thoughts than your thoughts.

I used to think this was a great big copout. But at the risk of taking a sci-fi and/or transhumanist approach to this...if God is a system outside of our system, if our universe is the equivalent of a petri dish, carefully isolated and exceedingly more limited than the one God works in (an idea which, interestingly, diminishes God along with us, for God might just be a small part of some even larger system), then who's to say that logic and rational thinking amounts to a hill of beans? Maybe the rules that run the universe, despite seeming to line up fairly well to logical analysis, really do have threads (supersuperstrings, I guess...) that are so outlandish, that extend to something so far outside of our system that we'll never have a hope of understanding it.

(Of course, this "meta-rationality" is just a brand of rationality itself, recursively suggesting its own demise. Still, it's interesting that Thomas Jefferson doesn't acknowledge the risk.)

God doesn't have to play fair. Maybe he simply demands "blind faith"...either because it follows some consistent rules that we'll never be able to fathom, or just on a whim. As for the multitide of religions...maybe we just need to pick one, and stick with it. Then would agnostic skepticism be less acceptable than one of these faiths? Maybe, maybe not. Who knows? (Of course there's always that one rhetorical trick, maybe the afterlife is whatever you expect it to be. In that case, I better start thinking in terms of paradise for everyone, including a lazy bum like me!)

This would seem to be a disregard for Occam's Razor, that we must avoid "needlessly multiplying entities". But who's to say what "needless" is? You could do a lot of great science just in using Newton's beautiful and elegant laws, before realizing the need to use more and more complex rules once things really start speeding up and getting large.

I guess you could always try a utilitarian approach...if there are questions about the hereafter that won't be answered in this world, then we might as well live by the advice in Vonnegut's Book of Bokonon:

Live by the foma that make you brave and kind and healthy and happy

According to that page, Foma are "lies" or "harmless untruths". There's something to be said for that. There's still the meta-problem here, to what extent can the tolerant be tolerant of intolerance, since it's such an assymetrical situation? (The old Onion.com ACLU Defends Neo-Nazi Group's Right to Burn Down Its Headquarters dilemna.) So many other people--especially in the United States and the Middle East--feel that their belief system needs to be all-encompassing or else it (and society) all falls apart...I guess its ground I've covered before...search this site for "fundamentalist" to see more about that, lest I repeat myself more than I already am. Oh what the heck:

"Since there is no higher authority than God, and, since there can be no higher priority than obeying him, the entire notion of separating politics and religion is inherently troublesome to the fundamentalist mind."
--Andrew Sullivan.

Boy howdy!

Enigma of the Moment

I was reading my morning paper, and saw that Elisabeth Kubler-Ross, author of "On Death and Dying" had died.

I couldn't believe it. It made me so mad.

I thought that I would give up my morning coffee if only it weren't true, and I was so sad.

But finally, I finished my coffee and went to work.

I liked it just for its mood and rhythm and I knew there was a joke in there but it took me a while to get it...

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Game of the Moment
Kind of annoying that you only get 5 tries, and it is a commercial for a scubadiving service, but PADI Skydiver is a worthy little brief diversion, a 3D version of those those "Human Cannonball" games.

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Invention of the Moment
So the story behind the amazing inventor of a whole new type of aircraft makes for some good reading. I liked the idea of using a flame as a loudspeaker...I wonder if the "Fan Wing" design will catch on? It's slow, which is useful in certain applications...the wing assembly looks a bit like a harvester behind a tractor...

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Gameshow of the Moment
Ken Jennings continues to romp on Jeopardy. You know, everyone thinks he's so smart or at least knows a lot, but I'd wager (hah) that that's only half the story; probably he has opponents who know just as many of the answers but are a millisecond less quick on the trigger. (A while back Slate described the KenJen drinking game...daring to ask that age-old question, "What is the raison d'ê tre of the television-based drinking game?") Funny of the Moment

"Well you know what they say, when life gives you lemons, make lemonade."
"But I'm allergic to citrus."
"Well you know what they say, when life gives you lemons, swell up and die."

(And my favorite from Red Meat, "when life gives you poop, make poop-juice!") Flash Toys of the Moment
More Artsy Flash Fun. Probably a bit cooler than the link I posted the other day.

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Quote of the Moment

Earth is a great, big funhouse without the fun.

Don't agree with the sentiment, but it's a good quote.

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Backlog of the Moment
I think Bill might've posted this one last October or so...The Final Marvel Comic, a duel between Hulk and Thor...the insult contest is funnier than I remembered:

"Thou shalt not BERATE the SON OF ODIN! I SAY THEE NAY!"

"THOR's MAMA! THOR'S MAMA FAT!"

"Wha...what didst thou SAY?"

"THOR'S MAMA SO FAT, SHE EATS...COW! HERD of COW!"

"I WARN thee, beast-- Ne'er shall THOR allow such...BASE speech regarding fair FRIGGA, former Queen of the REALM ETERNAL!"

"THOR'S MAMA SO UGLY, SHE REALLY SIT AROUND HOUSE! GRRRRRR, STUPID THOR'S MAMA IS UGLY!"

Quote of the Moment

I'm sorry, I'm afraid I subscribe to the theory of intellectual osmosis. As such, I must now cease our conversation and move away from you before my intelligence begins to drop. Good day.

The guy ends up sounding a bit like The Simpsons' Comic Book Guy (actually, for best effect try to hear his voice while reading the above quote), but there's some funny stuff in there.

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Toy of the Moment
Razor Scooters are so dotcom late-90s! What you need are some Heelys! Sneakers with a single removable wheel in each heel. It looks really cool, a kid in what looks like normal sneakers gets a running start, does a little hop, and then glides, check out this quicktime video.

from the T-shirt Archive: #19 of a Tedious Series
Given as a gift. Apparently by some one unclear on my gender.