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(by Robin and my friend Pooja)

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So, the phrase "woke mind virus" is a meme describing a meme... but a phrase evolved to thrive in a population of folks who might not be sharp enough to know what "meme" means.

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My power's really low, so this may be the last image I can send. Don't worry about me though: my time here has been both productive and serene. If I can keep talking to my mission team, I will – but I'll be signing off here soon. Thanks for staying with me.

I'm not crying, you're crying. I mean... no it's just a bit of (martian) dust in my eye.

Oy, "productive and serene" my two life goals.

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via

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A friend mentioned my band and I were the poster children for the Tom Donahue Roslindale Day Parade calendar...

(askew banner and weird playing-with-left-hand so I can signal with right and all)

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Thomas Sanders really made delightful vines - I love how those are him finding people to "yes, and" with him. I went to see his live show with Liz I think... show wasn't as good as the vines but I appreciate his work.

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Excellent response to "Do your own research":

(Actually I thought it was more "Do my own research? Sure, just let me get my own $9 billion CDC laboratory [...]")

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Pro-Trump counties now have far higher COVID death rates. Misinformation is to blame. Turning vaccines political is such a tremendous self-own by Republicans. Like, for all the conservative idea that liberals put too much trust in institutions and the media, it's their own institutions and media - especial FOX news - that made it a point of pride not to accept what the scientists who have been working their whole damn careers on this stuff - were recommending. Hell, kudos to Trump for "Operation Warp Speed" and clearing a path to vaccines (fewer kudos for not working to release the patents and let the world chip in, and thus be more likely to breed more variants) but then to not lean into getting everyone vaccinated and boosted is just inane. It's the kind of divisioning with partisan allegiance over facts that is literally killing the nation.

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No, Academia.edu, while I sometimes like the zennish implication ofthe shortened form of my last name I am not the "K. Is" of 2P062 Heme Binding Affinity of Iron Response Regulator (Irr) and its Regulation Mechanism fame.

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Last night was a VERY good night for Tom Brady schadenfreude... Bodycam Videos Show Boston Police Violently Attacking Floyd Protesters Admitting this is just going to make some of my protest comarades shake their heads at my privilege fueled naivety, but I thought a little bit better of Boston Cops than this. Yeah, it's kind of a "Best Of" (Worst of) set of excerpts, but that one cop bragging about hitting folks with his unmarked cruiser before the other cop mentions the body camera is on brings out the ACAB in all of us.

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Reminds me of an easier time, you know? Or a time whose problems I've suppressed.

Such a funny high energy show!

unpretty:
they call him prince charming because he's always really polite to strangers to cover for the fact that he doesn't know if he's supposed to recognize them from somewhere and when you're a prince that shit starts wars

unpretty:
rip prince charming, who had to let the whole kingdom make jokes about his foot fetish for the rest of his life because every blonde with an updo looks basically the same as far as he can tell

bisexuhowl:
#'i met the perfect woman but it was a special occasion'#'so now wherever she is her makeup and hair are probably different'#'this is my nightmare'

unpretty:
did cinderella ever talk to her man about his faceblindness

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Wired presents every Star Wars movie starfighter:

Too quote a great line from my favorite movie in the series:
"There's - too many of them!"
I know there are toys to sell, and I guess real militaries have plenty of varieties, but I wish more of the designs weren't just one-movie-wonders...

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A longread note of caution about the New Optimists. That said, I am super grateful for my privilege, and reasonably hopeful it will extend for me and many people I know, and will continue to work to help extend that to others.

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Hmm, and how US and UK chose a path to make them the new USSR with so much decay likely to follo - increasing inequality and a struggle to survive, rather than following a European model that favors a strong and healthy and comfortable route for more and more people.

Professor X: So what's your power?

Me: I can heal immediately-

X: Oh, we already have someone that can do that.

Me: -from any emotional wounds.

X: That's dumb. You can't join the team.

Me: I'm completely ok with that.

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Other People: do u let ur pets on the furniture?
Us:
Happy Holidays! One song we've added into the JP Honk holiday rotation is "You're a Mean One Mr. Grinch". Listening to the original (even a bit longer than this cut) - I think the Narrator might be a little harsh, maybe? I mean the Grinch is no saint, but dang... "Your heart's a dead tomato splotched with moldy purple spots"?

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The amount of stuff I don't know could fill a bucket with a hole in it.

advent day 20

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Almost exactly ten years ago I wrote: "a pair of robot arms that did nothing but accept shirts handed to it, hanging them neatly up in the closet, would be one of the niftier uses of robot technology I can think of. Worlds more useful than those stupid "can bring you a soda, if someone on the kitchen puts one on its little tray" robots that so captivated me in the 80s."

Scientists are finally on the case!

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advent day 20

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Fantastic. My life needs more narration.

Old link died, here's this one:

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It was a lovely show (with one of the finest pilot episodes produced) but I'm kind of amazed memories of "Cheers" still keeps dedicated tourist stores alive in Boston.
advent day 19

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How can we expect righteousness to prevail when there is hardly anyone willing to offer themselves up individually for a righteous cause? Such a fine, sunny day, and I have to go.

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I enjoyed this:

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*affixes a second leash to a hot babes dog while shes tying her shoe* would you look at that. we have the exact same dog. this is incredible

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Boston is an oasis in the desert, a place where the larger proportion of people are loving, rational and happy.

advent day 20

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ThisIsMyJam: A Long December Sometimes you dig a song, and try to apply it to your life, then it REALLY seems to describe the situation...

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Thus starts the holiday vacation, just managing to get "Todo List: Zero"

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To be a nerd is often to live with a nagging feeling of one's own incurable heartlessness.

--I think the DREAM act is a good idea.

Reminds me of being in Cleveland and that truck with two Irish flag decals then an American flag sticker with "No Vacancy" over it.

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With latest flash mob video, wanted to hear Alan Sherman's "Hal+Lulu Chorus"- couldn't find it. 'Cause duh, he did "Harvey+Sheila"/Hava Nagila. Both very cheesy but fun songs.

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Played "Pac-Man Party". Is it so hard for party game devs to get "Time watching boardgame BS to playing minigames" ratio right?
Some games offer minigame only modes, but too often it's as joyless as "select your next game off this menu".
The first Mario Party got it just right with its minigame stadium; just enough boardgame randomness to give excuses- haven't seen that since.
Party Games have so much potential- a great way to do retrogaming but w/ prettier graphics and more 4 player action than back then. Sigh.
Of course it's a bit moot, my core gaming buddy group dispersed to the winds. Double Sigh.

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And that's where spirituality really lost its way. When it became a stick to beat people with. "Do this or you'll burn in hell."

You won't burn in hell. But be nice anyway.

A kindly written bit of Atheism 101.

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http://todayspictures.slate.com/20101217/ -- nice gallery of old company holiday party photos

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Geared up for my first snow bike commute. And by geared up I mean I brought the new gloves Amber gave me as an early Xmas gift.

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Nightmare fighting w/ fat canibal w/ knife wearing pig mask. Also Amber says I told her about dream method of making unix commands harder. I get the feeling this Christmas week is going to have a lot of "Video of the Moment" and not much else.

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Video of the Moment

--YIKES! Did not witness anything like this in Japan, personally. (Though given their commitment to the train schedule, things are probably even more urgent.)

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Quote of the Moment

Machines take me by surprise with great frequency.

(I contrast this with when a buddy at my college programming job posted John von Neumann's "Anyone who attempts to generate random numbers by deterministic means is, of course, living in a state of sin." - he was playfully saying I blamed too much randomness in the results of my programming...)

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Following Youtube "Related Videos" can be like running your own Dawkins' "Blind Watchmaker" program. One joke they drop in the "Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar" book I've been snippeting this week is the old "'Would you sleep with me for a million bucks?' 'Yeah, probably!' 'How about twenty?' 'No way! What kind of gal do you think I am?' 'Well, we've already determined that, now we're just haggling on price.'"

Man, I hate that joke. Besides its misogynistic tone, it's a representation of moral absolutism extended to an absurd degree. To imply that the difference between a lifestyle-changing windfall and cabfare is merely quantitative is just plain dumb.

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Image of the Moment

--This image makes me very happy. From ftw.generation.no, but there is a LOT of NSFW stuff there...

Gosh, I'm living at such a transitional time.

I really don't want to jump with both feet into the job hunt, but of course recruiters (and even one potential business partner) feel otherwise.

First step: I want to get everything else in my life together. I want to act on my impulse to divest myself of extraneous possessions, get my financial life settled, put in good habits in life-maintenance stuff where currently chaos reigns.

I think I also want to play a few videogames.

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Epitaph of the Moment

If, after I depart this vale, you ever remember me and have thought to please my ghost, forgive some sinner and wink your eye at some homely girl.

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Photo of the Moment

--Subway map at Porter Square, with Central helpfully labeled "Crack City". But it looks like some meta-graffiti erased a word in between, I wonder what it was? Something hateful?

Quote and Personal Observation of the Moment

You're inches away from death every time you go on a mission. How much older can you be at your age? A half minute before that you were stepping into high school, and an unooked brassiere was as close as you ever hoped to get to Paradise. Only a fifth of a second before that you were a small kid with a ten-week summer vacation that lasted a hundred thousand years and still ended too soon. Zip! They go rocketing by so fast.

Lately I've been thinking about how he he liked this other character Clevinger "because Clevinger annoyed him and made the time go slow" It also said he loved shooting skeet, because "He had figured out that a single hour on the skeet-shooting range with people like Havermeyer and Appleby could be worth as much as eleven-times-seventeen years."

I definitely don't hate my new job, but I'm working a lot harder than I have for a while. And the funny thing is, it is kind of stretching time...especially the beginning of the week. It feels like it should be Wednesday or Thursday already. I'm not sure what's up with that, actually. But I appreciate that aspect of my job.

I still wish I could retire...well, nowish. I have this personal myth that my little projects would be the perfect way to fill the hours and have a meaningful life outside of work and family.

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Service of the Moment
Boingboing mentioned a free 411 service, 1-800-FREE-411. I tried it last night! Worked very well, and the sponsor ad wasn' too bad at all. It was kind of cool, I've never used that much Voice Recognition software, it seems to do well at doing speech-to-text without any training. ("Cambridge Massachusetts" and "Fedex-Kinkos", in my case.) And then it dials...sure beats paying Sprint a buck and a half.

Toy of the Movement
Heh...collaborative (or competitive) virtual fridge magnets...not the poetry that was oh-so-cool in the 90s, the old school colorful letters. Nifty!

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Poem of the Moment

Empty-handed I entered the world
Barefoot I leave it.
My coming, my going --
Two simple happenings
That got entangled.

From this old Salon article on Japanese Death Poems.

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Query of the Moment
Does anyone have any idea where the phrase "Let's blow this popsicle stand!" comes from? It seems so oddly specific...

Went to Locke-Ober with my Aunt, Uncle, and Mom last night. Fancy-shmancy! Lots of dark wood panelling. At first I was surprised how little web presence they had but when I got there I realized I was spelling it wrong. Though my websearch with the incorrect spelling taught me two things: the place is in the script for "Good Will Hunting" (albeit not spelled correctly) and they didn't let women in the main dining room until the mid-80s. Even now, they have a pretty strict dress code, but it can be kind of fun to dress up every once in a while.

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Toy of the Moment

--"Alien Bill Horde". (You can make 'em run the other way with the mouse...but you might need a recent Java plugin installed.) In meetings, sometimes I'd draw a huge swarm of Alien Bills, but the computer is so much better at it...(source)

AIM chat of the Moment
kirk: So I'm watching the 60s Batman movie
kirk: man, modern day Ronald McDonald looks a lot like oldschool Joker
LAN3: hahah.
kirk: of course, Ronald is pretty scary these days
kirk: his commercials imply he has fantastic magical powers
kirk: he's moved way beyond visual tricks like outlining goldenarches with his two index fingers
kirk: in one, he can freeze time for like, the entire world except for him and some minion kids
LAN3: One can only hope the Hamburgler doesn't get this power.
kirk: or else, entires cities would be flattened into "rubble, rubble"...
kirk: get it??
LAN3: hahaha, awful!

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Link of the Moment
A geeky cataloging of almost 200 particles of Star Trek. (Includes energy waves and the like as well.) "So tiny, you can't tell it's a deus ex machina!" It's not just all dilithium any more! Great, we're going to war, but at least it's not immediate or anything. Slate's Saddameter puts the chance of war at 72%.

In good news, I'm halfway through 2003 in terms of the backlog now...

• The Rosetta Project is a cool mission to make a modern hugely-multilingual rosetta stone, the multitranslation archaeological find that let us start to understand Egyptian hieroglyphics. By the same guy who brought you The Long Now.
• Geekness: I'd previously posted about OO-skeptics, and here's another one.

• The true subject of poetry is the loss of the beloved.

• The Toy Robots Initiative. How cool is that?
• Old Wired article on how different cultures prefer different kinds of user manuals.

• When I was first asked to write an article about how women get over a broken heart I figured it would be the easiest money I ever made. Are you ready? We don't.

• I do, believe it or not, consider myself to be a Christian--and I'm sorry, but you just don't go shooting doctors. If a judgement's to be made, God gets to make it. Not you. Him. You are Barney Fife. Keep your bullet in your shirt pocket. All right?

• I thought I liked the Fran Liebowitz line "Sleep is death, without the responsibility" but then I realized I only liked it because I was reading it wrong... I thought that it was saying it was death that had no responsibility, which really is one of the few cool thing about dying...

• "This linguistic oddity stemmed from the fact that educated people used to learn Latin. This is no longer the case. In Latin, data is the plural, and datum is the singular. So it sort of bled over. I was delighted when reading early Roman texts that they considered Etruscan a "better" language and used it for religious purposes for quite some time. Sound familiar? Apparently, "Roman Numerals" were borrowed from the Etruscans as well."

  I think this quote ties into this link on the Etruscan language but I'm not sure how, exactly.
• Mark Twain on Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses. This classic essay pretty much stick Cooper in a big old ghetto, though I'll always remember how "Last of the Mohicans" was set in Glens Falls, New York where Dylan (of pointless sidebar fame) and I used to live.

Quote of the Moment

The United States of America has just succeeded in bombing a country back out of the Stone Age.

Maybe a little overly optimistic, but an interesting point.

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Link of the Moment
In California at least, the right to wear pants shall not be infringed. Ok, not quite as wacky as it may first appear. (thanks Ranjit...wow, he's been a veritable fount of interesting stuff lately.)

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Geekness of the Moment
Yes, I am a geek. A bit of a video game geek. That's why the other night I typed in all of Electronic Gaming Monthly's "Best 100 Games of All Time" (for their 150th issue) into my homebrew database. I've always been interested in lists like that. But the scary thing is, it's not the first time I've done this...I did the same thing with their "100 Best" list they made for issue 100. So I was able to compare the two lists, you can see the results here. (You can also see the older list that a bit more analysis on it.) I think it's interesting to see what games slipped, as well as what older games have seemed to improve with time.