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Thinking about rereading Douglas Adams' (once "increasingly inaccurately named") Hitchhiker's Trilogy, maybe to cut the "every Vonnegut novel" sequence I'm in.

(I am aware how strongly both series lean into the "what white high school boys think is amazing" vibe - but both Vonnegut and Adams are solid writers with a ton of ideas and strong humanist bents)

I remember re-rereading the Douglas Adams series before, but I think that must have been 20 years ago, yikes.

Five years ago, discussing the "specialness" of the Bible (like wondering if almost any series could serve as a "holy book" if it had folks reading it closely for moral instruction, and working to pull out lessons from it) I chose the HHGTTG series as a thought experiment counterexample. And it was a TERRIBLE choice for that discussion because there are so many amazing thought experiments crammed in the series. So much of the book is Adams framing deep ideas in goofy scenarios - the Total Perspective Vortex, Agrajag's reincarnations, etc... like, Adams confesses that the Man in the Shack is Adams retorting his philosophy student friends who were talking about ridiculously strict empiricism and skepticism. You could absolutely make a holy text of it, 42 or no.

It's so hard to read with "beginner's eyes", so many turns of phrase and whole paragraphs have been so deeply pressed into my memory.

(Also, to be fair, DNA doesn't set himself up as much of a worldbuilder, which is usually crucial for my enjoyment of other science fiction or fantasy. He spins hard wacky, anything that is good for a laugh or to explore the philosophical point. I think that's why some of my favorite writing is when he returns to Earth, as in So Long and Thank for All the Fish and the Dirk Gently stuff - literally and figuratively a bit more grounded.)

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okay, so, y-yes i do, i do believe in love at first sight but i also believe that you would love absolutely anybody if you knew their story i also believe that th- modern notion of romantic love is seriously misguided and it creates a lot of problems in our modern world i believe that we need to reevaluate this idea that we have of the nuclear family this idea that we have of 2.4 children this idea that we have that it's adam and eve and not adam and steve i believe that uhm it's possible for all of us to be in love all the time with ourselves and with everyone around us

via

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When I see an artist soliciting commissions and I like their art style I will often order an alien bill... this one by taylorlorae

(More at the alien bill gallery)

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Final year entry for my devblog, I write about the virtual puppet choir I made up that was a great prototype for Sophie's Holiday Vaccine Musical bit...

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Thanks for the vaccines, 2021, don't let the swinging door hit your ass on the way out... Sorry that Flash is going away. I never programmed much in it but there was a whole indie game making culture in it. Flash Game History is a bit of an homage.

The archivists are at work, though, with new options to run Flash stuff

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No matter how far you push the earth away from you -- it will always return to its original position.

I was listening to The Anthropocene Reviewed's take on Auld Lang Syne and was stunned to find out it was a tribute to Amy Krouse Rosenthal - stunned to find out she was killed by cancer in 2017.

I loved her work on 15 Megabytes of Fame a charmingly hand-drawn miniblog from way back when - plus her Book of Eleven was lovely. She introduced me to concepts like Wabi-Sabi and almost everything she wrote was brimming with wistful, thoughtful beauty. I met her in person at Porter Square Books during her book tour for "Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life" and we corresponded a tiny bit - turns out she also went to Tufts, but I guess I missed this loving tribute in the alum magazine.

(Oh and here is a nice personal plug for her final book for grownups "Textbook Amy Krouse Rosenthal")

That Anthropocene podcast mentioned Amy reviving and reframing a simplistic set of lyrics for Auld Lang Syne that British soldiers created during the Battle of the Somme:

We're here,
because we're here,
because we're here,
because we're here...

The soldiers were sardonically drawing attention to the unfairness of being asked to sacrifice so much for such an uncertain cause, but Amy recasts it, and finds the elegant universal existential brother- and sisterhood it can hold.

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Death may be knocking on my door, but I'm not getting out of this glorious bath to answer it.

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Best Movie Posters of the Last Decade via this metalist

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Fun banding for NYE!
As 2018 draws to a close I'd like to say that I feel like the idea of the 10,000 Year Clock is underappreciated.

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Shout out to Bright Brass instrument repair in Waltham- John took great care of my tuba over my holiday travels and frankly did more than he charged me for. (He's also run some instrument care lessons at School of Honk)

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nbd just jamming out the new year with Keytar Bear

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Just realized that besides "kirkjerk" "kirkamundo" and "the great kirkini" I could have been using "kirkus maximus" this entire time. (I updated my old essay TRIPLE EQUALS CONSIDERED OVERRATED === = :-( with this postscript - philosophical and epistemological minded folks might find this bit interesting, even if they don't know the Javascript bit that originally framed it)

Listening to a podcast with scientists pontificating, I realize I treat triple-equals usage similarly to how I treat the correct usage of "data are plural", and for similar reasons: a begrudging respect for people using a shibboleth correctly, set against a personal bias for the looser usage; with that split masking a philosophical difference in worldview.

My worldview is: people and things are more important in how they interact than in their internal makeup. Take "Data". It's technically a plural world from Latin, with "Datum" being the singular. But a "Datum" is useless to the point of meaninglessness on its own - ONLY through multiplicity does a datum go from being a one-off anecdote to a statistically meaningful bit of information. Casual use would treat "Data" as a kind of singular group noun - "what this data suggests" vs "what these data suggest", and since that group-making is the only useful way people interact with data, "this data", the street usage, makes much more sense.

(I'm not a big fan of the old tradition of presuming Latin rules need apply to English anyway- like how you should never split an infinitive ("to boldly go") since such a construction is impossible in Latin where the infinitive is a single word.)

With triple equals, I return to the basic idea that it means "reject the comparison if the things being compared aren't exactly the same type" - an internal analysis. Double equals says if two things have the same value when they interact, that's fine! We don't care about the history or composition of the things, just how they'll interact now. (A long history with Perl and other duck-type languages helps inform my view, I think.)

To wax philosophical, I've realized this difference in worldview- whether what's important is the history and internals of a thing (since that will be the surest guide to predicting long-term behavior, and/or give you a special revelation of how things "should be") or whether we should attend to how things are capable of interacting with the outside world - is profound and tough to bridge.

I'd recommend the book "Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking"... and then when I hear some punk like Scott Adams say that because analogies are always imperfect they can never be persuasive, and that it's where "reason is embarrassed to show its face"... balderdash. Finding parallels in how different systems are interacting makes up one of the most critical tools in understanding the world, no matter that there will ALWAYS be some difference in intrinsic makeup. (Of course, saying there are only surfaces or only essences is a false dichotomy; some analogies run deep, that two systems are interacting in parallel ways because of parallel functioning in their guts. And some analogies are just shallow and rhetorical and are of less value.)

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.@BretWeinstein "Metaphorical Truth" sounds like Vonnegut's "Foma" - "the harmless untruths" that can "make you brave and kind and healthy and happy." Skeptical of your use of "truth" as a stand-in for "utility"

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"December 31, 2017 is the only day where every adult was born in the 1900's and everyone else under 18 was born in the 2000's" See ya, 2016. Don't let the swinging door hit your ass on the way out. Remember last day to repost: "I wish people would stop asking me where I see myself in five years... I don't have 2020 vision"

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By the way: I love Tom Brady. I love watching him play, and I love how everybody hates him and how he just keeps destroying everyone regardless. But as a general rule: If you have a picture of Tom Brady in your Twitter avatar, you're almost certainly a Nazi.

The first part of the article, No One Cares If You Lie, brings up some important points about the fact-proof nature of political discourse. When Al Franken wrote "Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them" I wasn't expecting said liars to do such a job of OWNING that...

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I kind of wish Jon Mooallem's tale of the Puritans slaughtering Thomas Granger and all his "lovers" for bestiality (in August 2015 Wired) in response to a man who wrote for advice on his swearing too much coworkers, and then saying, sorry guy, the swearers are the puritans in this example, watch out for the mob, was online somewhere... "Gonk. Gonk. Gonk ko kyenga see."

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--from The Top 50 Tips of 2014

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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMli33ornEU&feature=youtu.be Quake on an oscilloscope. Shades of "Take on Me", somehow. At my old church in Cleveland, we'd often have men from a local rehabilitation center over for Sunday evening meeting. Many of them would share a Testimony that lead with "I thank God for waking me up this morning". This morning I thank Everything for waking me up this morning, and with my vision seemingly intact.

I mean, I wasn't TOO worried, and I still have a trip to the opthamologist to arrange later this morning, but still, a reminder for gratitude after last night's flashin' floaters incident.

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I just finished GTA: San Andreas on my iPad. Overall, better than GTA5, though apparently the Scottish view of Western US is lots of lonnnnng drives...
via. Man, I need to relearn how to make animated GIFs from videos. (2019 UPDATE: not sure if this was quite the video)

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If at first you don't succeed, that's one data point.

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I am the margarita king. I can do anything.

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That's the first step to self-canibalism; put some guacamole on it.

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Why is Time Square a sea of blue dicks?

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Anthony was jealous of the novelty 2013 glasses on TV so I made him these From this old Penny Arcade... (not for the squeamish)

Don't say another Goddamn word. Up until now, I've been polite. If you say anything else - word one - I will kill myself. And when my tainted spirit finds its destination, I will topple the master of that dark place. From my black throne, I will lash together a machine of bone and blood, and fueled by my hatred for you this fear engine will bore a hole between this world and that one.

When it begins, you will hear the sound of children screaming - as though from a great distance. A smoking orb of nothing will grow above your bed, and from it will emerge a thousand starving crows. As I slip through the widening maw in my new form, you will catch only a glimpse of my radiance before you are incinerated. Then, as tears of bubbling pitch stream down over my face, my dark work will begin.

I will open one of my six mouths, and I will sing the song that ends the Earth.

I dunno, it's been a while since I've been drawing on my backlog for the site, and I thought it was a good end to 2011, the year before 2012, with all the silly "Mayan Y2K" issues people think mean the end. (For all we know, it could be the begining...)

Happy New Year!

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Dog breeding is the cutest eugenics there is

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The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong in the broken places.

(Fake It! Deki Groove dive video)

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http://releasecandidateone.com/236:crotchety_old_power_users attack of the crotchety old power users.

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Man those "2011" novelty glasses suck- the first decade had it so much easier. By the way happy new year all!

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"Oh- Don't... it's like Weekend at Bernie's" Amber and I have mixed feelings about the post-stroke Dick Clark... So like I posted after the summer, I've been rounding my new music into seasonal playlists - the season is just a coincidence, when I happen to discover or rediscover some music.

I tended to get music in big chunks this fall, as I ran into some CDs I had forgotten to rip back when I did the bulk transfer to MP3s...

The first few songs listed I particularly like, the stuff from Portugal is great as well.

I made some fun discoveries hunting up videos for these, like how you can find old Beavis + Butthead music videos on youtube, and the Goops/Mallrats "Buttercup".

• Laughing With (Regina Spektor) --Man, what a beautiful song. Weirdly I got kinda misty just listening to the opening chords right now.
• Bubbles (Jess Yoakum) --glad to find this video - bad audio but I love the cd version of this song, worth getting
• I Can Transform Ya (Chris Brown featuring Lil Wayne & Swizz Beatz) --man, love the core sound of this
• Kick, Push (Album Version) (Lupe Fiasco)
• Right Now (Na Na Na) (Akon)
• Sex On Fire (Kings Of Leon)
• Littlest Things [Explicit] (Lily Allen)
• The Impression That I Get [Explicit] (The Mighty Mighty Bosstones)
• Superstar (Radio Edit) (David May)
• Torn (Natalie Imbruglia)
• Things I (re)heard in or near Portugal...
  • Crazy (DJ Mc Fear) --Awesome remix of a song I was reminded of in Portugal. Fun fact: Gnarls Barkley is not the name of a guy. Just the group.
  • First Day of My Life (Bright Eyes) --I think this is the one I saw in a UK insurance ad - lovely, lovely.
  • From a CD of Marcos' kids...
    • Lovegame (Dave Aude Radio Edit) (Lady Gaga)
    • Boom Boom Pow (David Guetta's Electro Hop Remix) (The Black Eyed Peas)
    • When Love Takes Over (Electro Radio Edit) (David Guetta & Kelly Rowland)
• Yahoo Video things
  • Shatner of the Mountain (Fall On Your Sword)
  • Single Ladies (Pomplamoose Music) --Aargh, so cute
• "The Full Monty" soundtrack --somehow I forgot to rip this back in the day, though I've had it for a while.
  • The Zodiac (David Lindup) --Man, so retro
  • Hot Stuff (Donna Summer)
  • You Can Leave Your Hat On (Tom Jones)
  • We Are Family (Sister Sledge)
  • Rock And Roll Part 2 (Gary Glitter)
  • You Sexy Thing (Hot Chocolate)
  • The Stripper (Joe Loss & His Orchestra)
• "Lesbian Favorites" --another disc I forgot to rip...
  • Obsession (Fem 2 Fem)
  • Swimming (Gretchen Phillips) --She's like Ellen but sweeter
  • I Kissed A Girl (Jill Sobule) --link is Beavis+Butthead... still like this song better than Katy Perry's...
  • Mrs. Brown You've Got a Lovely Daughter (Phranc) --fun little cover
  • Just Keep Me Moving (k.d. lang)
  • I Spent My Last $10.00 (On Birth Control And Beer) (Two Nice Girls) --an old favorite of Mo's, and funny.
  • Twist In My Sobriety (Tanita Tikaram)
• Mallrats Soundtrack - and again, another one. Lots of amusing little dialog snippets
  • Cousin Walter [Dialogue] (Jason Lee & Brian O'Halloran)
  • That Ski Trip [Dialogue] (Joey Lauren Adams, Jason Lee & Jeremy London)
  • Love & Sharks [Dialogue] (Jason Lee & Jeremy London)
  • Kryptonite Condoms [Dialogue] (Jason Lee & Jeremy London)
  • Post Coital Techno Boogie [Dialogue] (Jason Lee & Shannen Doherty)
  • Last Words [Dialogue] (Jason Mewes)
  • A Very Uncomfortable Place [Dialogue] (Jason Mewes, Jason Lee, Jeremy London & Joey Lauren Adams)
  • Taken With A Grain Of Salt [Dialogue] (Shannen Doherty)
  • Build Me Up Buttercup (The Goops) --I was surprised and delighted at the video I found for that
  • Seventeen (Sponge)
  • Smoke Two Joints (Sublime)
• Alive (Joey Lauren Adams) --from "Chasing Amy" to continue the Kevin Smith thing
• It's Your Birthday (Luke) --I think they also used this Chasing Amy...is this where people saying "it's your birthday" comes from?
• From a random cheap 80s cd at Newbury Comics...
  • The Heart Of Rock & Roll (Huey Lewis & The News)
  • Centerfold (J. Geils Band)
  • Ghostbusters (Ray Parker Jr.)
  • Rock This Town (Stray Cats)
  • Mickey (Toni Basil)
  • Come On Eileen (Kevin Rowland & Dexys Midnight Runners)
• Tufts sQ -- fun trying to pickout my voice and/or percussion..
  • Bizarre Love Triangle
  • Not the Doctor
  • 1979
• The Brothers Four --someone in Josh's family gave my Aunt a cheap compilation CD from Thailand of these guys -not bad folk
  • Winken,Blinken And Nod
  • Symphonic Variation
  • BOA Constrictor
  • 25 Minutes To Go --love the fatalistic nature of this song

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http://www.doublex.com/section/life/tuesday-night-dinner-party-16-key-lessons-learned-slapdash-entertainment - "slapdash entertainment", neat idea... Oh man, another year in the books.

Highlights and milestones? The Trip to Japan is a pretty obvious candidate, and of course the big shift to my Aunt + Uncle's brownstone. The downs and ups of the economies and finally, a centrist, technocratic, yet still inspiring president elect.

I think gradually I'm coming to terms with the flow of the years. I want to do a personal timeline project, though, just to see it all laid out.

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Magic Trick of the Moment

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The bowling alley sells used bowling pins for $3 each?? I'd TOTALLY buy one of they weren't sold out... it just seems like an amazing thing.

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Resolutions I've already been acting on: stop second guessing and just hitting send on email, and eating better.

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It's rough that thanks to the economic and global turmoil, we're all kind of expecting 2009 to suck - Happy New Year anyway... So, 2007 winds to end.

I think years with "7" are underachievers. Maybe all years that end in an odd number are at risk, but "1" "5" and "9" kind of stake their place by proximity to the end, midpoint, or center of the decade, leave 3 and 7 as the stragglers. For some reason 2008 seems like it should resonate a bit better.

Anyway.

Patriots finished out an unbeaten regular season in grand, edge-of-your-seat fashion. Evil B used the game as an excuse to get an HD receiver unit for his TV to pickup the broadcast signal. It worked better than I expected it would! It seems odd to be drawing high resolution signal from good old fashioned rabbit-ear antennas.

Leaving aside those slacker Bruins, the 3 Boston sports teams have lost 3 games since the Sox regained their footing against the Indians... all 3 were basketball losses, two by 2 points, one 5-point loss in overtime.

This year we've been about the most blessed sports city on Earth!

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SciFi of the Moment

Tersurus is the planet on which Chancellor Goth met the dying Master prior to The Deadly Assassin. It was also the setting of the Comic Relief spoof episode The Curse of Fatal Death. The spoof described the Tersurons as the most gentle, yet most shunned race in the universe, due to the fact that they communicated through carefully controlled "gastric emissions". They became extinct when they discovered fire.

Lady Miss Kier in Groove is in the Heart

I spent a few too many hours making these, but it was fun, and "productive" in its way. Mostly I wanted to point out the slinky little move on the right... it's not quite the same without the slide whistle, but you get the general idea... UPDATE: check the comments -- a while later Lady Miss Kier asked permission for using these! After I said yes of course she said thanks - I just had my friend Heather add it to my myspace page! I love what you did with... ME ! and thanks for your sweet words!!! I'm going to add it to my other site also- thanks again- kier

Not too long ago I made my holiday gift for myself a Canon SD450...I shouldn't have waited for so long, it's a big improvement from the S200 I've been using... most notably, response time is much better. It has like twice the resolution, though that seems mostly useful for taking up more diskspace and making my image editing programs rather sluggish...it's also smaller, with a friendlier UI, but the same physical interface Ive grown used to.

Anyway on with the photos... Wow...it seems hard to believe that this is the last day of 2004. And that this decade is half over already. Actually, given how much the cultural scene has been dominated by 9/11 (and to think a few years before that I assumed it would be dominated by Y2K...) -- and the way 2002 and 2003 kind of collapsed in on themselves for me -- it seems strange.

For the record, I think the best name for this decade will be "the 2000s" despite the ambiguity with the name of the century. None of the other options seem that great, either too contrived or otherwise unintuitive.

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Funny of the Moment

9:30 a.m.: I meet my parents at Penn Station. My father arrives wearing a "McCain" hat, even though he's an avid Democrat, because he found it on the train. He's a Jew, but he would wear a Hitler jumpsuit if it was free.

Google Game of the Moment
Googlelacks! Sigh. I always thought this idea Ranjit and I came up with deserved its own page, or maybe even its own site, but it's been half a year and I haven't gotten around to it so I probably never will...maybe because it lacks a really cool name and a way of objectively judging the results. Anyway, in the spirit of Googlewhacks, its (for lack of a better name) Googlelacks: using Google to find variants of clichés. For this, you need to make use of three Google features: putting a phrase in quotes, using the * to show what word you expect to be replaced, and using - to exclude what usually goes where the * is. For instance:

"good * make good neighbors" -fences

brings up farmers, spies, minefields, friends, defenses, borders, nukes, nights, and smokestacks making good neighbors, and that's all on the first page. 720 in all, though some of those are repeats.

"one * to rule them all and in the darkness" -ring

(I had to cut out the end of the phrase, it was getting too long) comes up with blacklist, key, bowl, OS, spam, browser, and meat. 613, again counting with duplicates.

Anyway, it's a fun game to play. Try it and post any cool phrases you come up with on the Comments section. (Anyone know if there is there a name for the kind of cliché-play that this game digs up?) If I get enough feedback on this sport, and a suggestion for a name, maybe I'll try to make a page for it. (Huh, since Google opened up their site as a webservice for developers, maybe I should make a handy interface to count unique word substitutions...then there would be a way of keeping score.)

Goodbye 2002!
I'm going to miss this year...after all, it's the second and likely last palindrome year of my life time! That fact and a quarter or two will buy you a newspaper, but hey, it was kind of interesting. I'm just happy to have avoided two layoffs in one year...

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Link of the Moment
Good grief, it's the Peanuts Arcana Tarot Deck. Many of these cards are really clever. 'Course I don't know jack about Tarot decks, but I can appreciate the little jokes.

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Cartoon of the Moment
There's a new chapter of Nowhere Girl up...it reminds me a lot of the story of Mo and also the one of our friend Lee, young women who are pretty much self taught in technology. And I was struck by the first episode's sense of being a bit character in other people's lives.

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Flash of the Moment
There's something beautiful about Fly Guy, an interactive Flash piece. The minimalist art style, the music, the exploration of the other travellers, or maybe just the dream of flying.

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News of the Moment
War in Iraq cost estimation reduced. CNN pointed out that the guy wouldn't really give reasoning behind the new numbers. I suspect it all ties into the Administrations ability to come up with a conclusion and that get people to diddle with the facts that support that conclusion.

I'm a bit meta-alarmed that the idea of war with Iraq doesn't alarm me as much as it did, though it's still blatantly obviously a bad idea.

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Japanese Pop Culture of the Moment
Mo just sent me an email with this link and the Subject "hee hee".

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Bad News Quote of the Moment

This is a crisis unfolding as badly as the Great Depression. The economy doesn't feel like it yet but, in a year or so, it may do.

And when that guys asks if you wanna buy an apple, he'll be talking about his computer...hardeehar, har. I wanted to get this out of my system and not post it on the first day of the new year. Lets hope he's just a gloom and doomer and we'll see some new vitality. What better way to end the year then with a picture of me that happens to be slapped with a big old "2001"...
Mo thinks this is about the scariest picture of me ever and keeps trying to destroy it. It's Peterman and me on "Superman: The Ride of Steel" at Six Flags New England on September 9th. (A multimedia view of another ride on the same day can be found in this journal entry.) The moose antlers were a perennial favorite of my dad.

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Quote of the Moment

A man gazing at the stars is proverbially at the mercy of the puddles in the road.

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Link of the Moment
Thanks to the power of the Internet, it's The Naked News. Newscasters take off their clothes as they read odd little news snippets. I find it strangely sexy, more so than a traditional strip tease, probably because it makes nakedness seem normal. (The same way I'm more easily distracted by jeans and a tanktop than by lingerie...) So, this is day two of the new page.

I'm trying to figure out how this fits into weblogging culture. I never thought of trying to start a weblog, because I always viewed them as sites that do the websurfing for you, and I don't do much websurfing myself. But according to Rebecca Blood's Weblog History piece (brokenly linked from the NY Times piece on the trend), there's a general trend to more journal like 'blogs anyway. So maybe I'm closer to a trend than I would've guessed. And I do plan to put in interesting links that I find, as well as mentioning any books I read or movies worth mentioning.

Writing a public journal changes the way you think, in a good way. It encourages you to try to think in broader terms, to not just experience but to analyze, and analyze in a way that might make good copy.

Enough of the navel gazing. (Not that it matters so much given the likely size of my audience, but hey.) My friend Peterman reintroduced to an online comic Sinfest. (A cow-orker had shown me "Who's Yer Deity" before, but I didn't pay much attention.) Anyway, it's a very irreverent strip, likely to offend the traditionally religious (though I think there's a theist element to it) as well as the prudish. Some of the strips bring up some interesting points. "Pooch", in particular, has a very Zen (and Dog-like) Be-in-the-Moment attitude that you can see in "Conscious Again", one of the "Play" strips, and especially a certain one of the "New Ball" strips.

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Quote of the Moment:

Life is a shit sandwich. But if you've got enough bread, you can't taste the shit.

(found in Uncle John's Bathroom Reader, Vol. 11)