Did it again. Fell behind. This is yesterday’s vid.

And here it today’s.

That’s pride, not Pride, although the two are connected.

Getting a little smarter. Posting the video first. Wow.

This blog and my videos are out of sync again. Isn’t that always the way? You always run out of sync just when you need it the most.

You’d think I would learn to stock up.

So interspersed with my usual chatty babble will be links to the last three videos I have made. They are just talking beardy head stuff, so you didn’t miss anything too exciting. But I like them.

Here’s the first. It’s about cities.

That’s how it works, folks. From Netflix to my brain to you.

I am very interested in ways to update this modern lifestyle of ours. I think it has developed the kind of systemic instabilities that if it were a piece of software would require either a patch or a reboot, and I shudder to think of what it would take to “reboot” modern civilization.

I am picturing a comet. Damn, why did I ever read God’s Anvil, the sequel to Niven’s Lucifer’s Hammer? It’s a hyper realistic, hard science fiction description of the world ending from a comet strike.

Freaked me the hell out.

Anyhow, I am increasingly convinced that the people of the modern world are suffering from a profound mass spiritual crisis due to modern life’s inability to meet their higher needs. Consumer capitalism is very good at the stuff near the bottom of Maslov’s pyramid. Food, clothing, shelter, and entertainment can all be had in copious amounts at prices that make them available to nearly everybody.

And modern life is pretty good at the safety and security needs. Despite what the media would have you think, crime is extremely rare and random crime to people in nice neighborhoods rare still. We have made life very safe and are always striving to make it even safer. Most of us do not have to worry about our physical security.

We do it anyway. But we don’t have to.

But that’s where it stops. Consumer capitalism can’t bring you friends, or family, and as for sexual intimacy, it can only really bring you the sex part.

Real intimacy cannot be bought or sold.

What modern society desperately needs is a spiritual expansion project that builds upon the excellent foundation consumer capitalism provides and expands it upwards by creating social structures that can reach and comfort people, and break the isolation that our careless society creates.

The next vid is about how you’re a caveman.

At least, a little bit.

I am quite pleased to have a little caveman in me. It explains a lot, really.

I am very interested in the dawn of humanity. It’s such a fascinating time to think about. The first people who were… people, there on the east coast of Africa or possibly somewhere closer to the center. What did the world look like to them? How could they have made sense of their place in the cosmos? To them, the whole world was the plains and rocky shores they lived on.

Did they think there must be more?

Particularly, I have been pondering the question of the very first true human. That is, the first one with what we would call sentience. What would life have been like for him or her? What must have it been like to be smarter and more aware of the world than everyone you have every known? Did other proto-humans suddenly seem like animals to this first member of homo sapiens sapiens? Did they wonder if there was something terribly wrong with them? Did they seem spooky and powerful to the rest of their tribe?

Perhaps it happened many times before it happened to someone who, through circumstance or personality, could turn this power to its advantage and use it to have a reproductive edge over both its tribe and its dangerous surroundings.

In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is only king if he is the sort of person who can use his vision to gain power. Otherwise, he’s a lunatic.

This First True Human (FTH for short) must have had a very unusual life. Everything about its freshly minted consciousness must have frightened and confused it, and it had nobody it could talk to because there’s a good chance nobody could talk.

There are some doubts as to whether sentience could arise without language. I am positive it could, and the doubters simply lack imagination.

The third and final vid is about jokes.

I think everyone, or at least everyone who likes to laugh, has that one or two joke that is all theirs because they are the only people they know who find it funny, and that makes it a sort of treasure, in a way.

It’s a joke that needs you.

Often, the reason others don’t get it is that they lack the knowledge required to understand it. That’s not the joke’s fault. The number one rule of comedy is “know your audience”, and if you tell a smoking hot Star Trek joke to a bunch of people who think Star Trek stars Jabba the Hutt, you are going down in flames.

And sometimes, it’s because the joke has a kind of irony that, quite frankly, takes a certain degree of intelligence and intellectual engagement just to detect. This is another case of needing to know your audience. Your intricate little bon mots will probably go over better at the chess club than at the tractor pull.

But sometimes, it’s all about you, and luck. The right joke at the right time just tickles you in just the right way that it opens the floodgates of laughter, and you will love that joke forever for it, even if nobody else does.

Well that’s it for today, folks. Still excited about the new place, but the reality of having to moving all this furniture is really sinking in.

I am thinking $350 ain’t gonna cut it.

This is gonna suck a lot before it’s cool, isn’t it?

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

Um, oops. Forgot to post Sunday’s video to this blog :

Plus, there’s this gem of beardy commentary I recorded today.

Sorry about the de-lay.

Time for another link-gasm, folks! Let’s share together.

First up, one strictly for the ladies, a song that I think every single one of you will enjoy, period.

Trigger warning : it’s done in the style of a song for a musical.

First up, full disclosure, menstruation is the number one reason I am glad to be male.

When I first learned the truth of what ladies have to go through every frigging month, it just seemed so terribly wrong. So unfair. Bleeding from their most intimate area for five days out of every month? That’s sixty days a year of bleeding! That is two whole months out of every fucking year they have to put up with that shit!

And it’s not just bleeding either. That would be bad enough. But they get bloating, cramps, hormonal mood swings they can’t do anything to control, and a host of other nasty shit.

That was pretty upsetting to learn, and I learned it early because I have two older sisters. I can only imagine that it must be catastrophically worse to find out that shit is going to be happening to you.

For that reason alone, I feel a sort of guilt towards women, like we men owe them something for putting up with all that awfulness so we don’t have to.

Being the gender that makes the babies is not easy.

Back to the actual video, I love the upbeat and artfully silly style it uses. Awesome stuff. I think my favorite moment is when she dances across the scene with all the jocks in the locker room.

The timing is perfect and she does it so well!

And then we have this perfectly ordinary little scene.

It’s like the sad little playroom in a children’s hospital.

But this scene holds a truly amazing secret.

See that unicorn over there?

Holy shit, rainbows!

It’s a freaking CAKE! yes, that entire unicorn is cake. And not just any cake. It’s rainbow cake. Because what else would you find inside a unicorn but rainbows?

The cake is a creation of The Tatooed Bakers, and needless to say, it is their flagship work. An entire life sized unicorn made out of rainbow cake. Un freaking believable.

The things they can do in cake these days! When I was a kid, you were lucky if you could read the writing.

Next, we have this interesting trailer for an upcoming series that may or may not be a comedy.

The trailer certainly doesn’t seem all that funny, but the whole thing seems like it is pregnant with comedic intent and really wants to be a parody of that old fashioned prime time soap opera genre, as well as the classic “blood, lust, greed, and betrayal” type trashy novel. Reminds me of SCTV.

The trailer makes it look like they just basically made something in exactly that style, which I suppose is some sort of technical achievement but I can’t imagine why I would watch it.

But it is loaded with some serious comedic talent, and certainly the tableau they present is extremely ripe for some very funny comedy. The genre takes itself extremely seriously and is laden with repeated tropes.

And it hasn’t been parodied recently. That makes for very fertile ground for comedy.

So color me intrigued, but a little puzzled. I am willing to watch an episode before I make up my mind, of course, but I feel like I am getting mixed signals.

Then we have this amazing story of people finding a way to flip traditional paradigms of what you need to do in order to turn a profit.

What a simple and amazing and absolutely beautiful idea. Buy people’s debts, and then instead of using professional thugs with the souls of sociopathic crocodiles to bully people into paying, you help them get to the point where they CAN pay, and then you get a lot more money because you are no longer trying to get blood from a stone.

If someone doesn’t have the money, all those scumbags can do is make them feel worse about it, and you know what? That leads to depression and depression leads to more poverty.

The genius of CFS2 is that it realizes that if you make people happier and help them find money or work, they will not only pay back the debt, but they will do it gladly because they feel so grateful for your help.

This is a business model that works, and I hope it spreads like mad. If I was a philanthropist looking to get the most public good for my dollar, this would be a great karmic investment.

Make money by improving people’s lives? What could be better than that?

And finally, we have my little vid of the day, which also talks about how to use capitalism to save the world.

Specifically, with a Global Minimum Wage define not in the volatile and simplistic language of currency but a more solid and dependable language of lifestyle.

What we want is for the whole world to live the same sort of life that we, the global One Percent, currently enjoy. To bring every human being in the world up to our level of civilization (but not of consumption) so they can lead the safe, stable, comfortable lives we all take for granted.

The Global Minimum Wage (really, more of a Global Minimum Lifestyle) would not be easy to achieve. It would require massive political reform in countless nations, a very large and detailed set of rules and regulations and an inspection and enforcement mechanism with real teeth in order to make it stick, and a major realignment of how we think about the world and all us crazy naked beach apes living on it.

But it’s a goal to work towards, something for global relief efforts to focus upon making real instead of all these NGO’s tilting at windmills as they all try to fix a massive problem with band-aid solutions.

Many fingers might save the dam, but they don’t fix it.

We need the power of capitalism to do that, and the way to do that is to harness it for the good of the world.

Capitalism is a game, and we control the rules.

We can change them if they stop working for us.

Today, I talk toddlers.

And early childhood development in general, from the point of view of a brain nerd.

Happy I kept it short this time!

These things just spring up like weeds!

First we have this sobering and inspiring video.

Intellectually, somewhere in my memory banks, left there from my childhood, was the knowledge that, when I was nine years old, there was this thing called ERA that had not passed in the USA.

I think I thought it was a bill at the time, even though the word “amendment” is right in the name. But the point is, I knew this had happened.

But until I watched that vid, I did not realize just how fucked up that is.

Here in Canada, our Constitution has equality written right into it. So it never occurred to me that the situation was a lot more precarious down in the USA.

I can’t imagine a movement to pass the ERA now would fail, 31 years later. When it came up in 82, people were still arguing about whether husbands should let their wives work outside of the house.

We are so much further ahead now. Sure, the Tea Party types would reflexively oppose it, but they blew all their political capital on trying to stop Obamacare anyhow.

So really, who would argue with it?

Then we have snuggles for sale.

A bunch of ladies in Madison, Wisconsin are looking to start a professional cuddling service. For $60/hour, clients can go into private rooms and get professionally cuddled.

Needless to say, local authorities think that sounds just a little too much like prostitution to them, and so the ladies are having trouble getting a business license.

But the pro snugglers insist that all the rooms have cameras and will be monitored constantly to make sure that nothing more than cuddling goes on.

That’s all well and good. But a lot of fellows are going to start to have certain feelings while enjoying a nice cuddle with a gal, and at the very least the ladies will have to be experts in pretending there isn’t an erection poking them somewhere.

The rooms all have panic buttons, though, so if the fellas get too frisky, presumably all hell breaks loose.

Then we have this marvelous piece of work from the talented people at Bad Lip Read.

Man, they are getting good at what they do. They have learned that it’s funniest when it’s not totally random. Plus wow, now they have people that can Photoshop things into the backgrounds of videos fairly convincingly.

And more than that, this time they had a whole concept behind the piece that really takes their work to the next level. I found it was a joy to watch and just enjoy their increasing mastery.

Someday, they will re-dub an entire movie. And it will be awesome.

And speaking of the awesomeness, check out this new kind of display system :

The first thing I thought of when I saw that was “Help me Obi-Wan Kenobi… you’re my only hope!”.

But seriously, how “the future is now” is that? One of the things I am most looking forward to seeing in the future is all the science fiction of my childhood coming true.

We already have a lot of things, like cybernetics, nanotech, and real-time brain scanning via fMRI. Heck the USA even has a working large scale laser weapon at, of course, RIDICULOUS cost versus its actual effectiveness.

But when you tell a bunch of generals “We can build a laser cannon”, they just can’t throw money at you fast enough, because laser cannons are cool and surely if the enemy sees our awesome new laser guns they will be like “Damn, that is so much cooler than anything we have! We totally surrender. ”

That is seriously how these people think.

Anyhow, the mid-air display technology is, like the laser cannon, cool as hell, but I am not entirely sure what functional benefits it has. And at a price tag of $20K, you better be able to make some sort of halfway decent business case for it.

Granted, that business case might well be “this will impress the hell out of visitors, including potential investors, with how awesome we are. ”

I can see a lot of middle management types wanting one of them NOW NOW NOW, before that smug asshole over in Accounting gets one.

Then we have this impressive bit of craft which depicts an entire relationship in 5 minutes.

Warning, it’s very stagey, consists of just two actors talking to the camera, and is in black and white.

Why is it in black and white? Who knows. Maybe they thought it would make the whole thing seem more stark and emotional. Or maybe they were just being pretentious.

Regardless, I greatly admire the craft that went into it. It’s all one long shot, so the actors had to be really, really on their marks with every line, and there are a LOT of lines. And the writing is quite deft in the way ot gives you clues as to the passage of time in what they say, as opposed to having to introduce some artificial and obtrusive device that would have ruined the purity of it all.

I can’t say I really enjoyed the experience a lot, but I am impressed by how well it is made.

And then we have our adorable cat animated GIF of the day.

All cats are ninjas. Some just aren’t very good ones.

I LOL’d so hard when I saw that. We cat lovers live for moments of feline comedy like that. Sure, it seems a little mean to laugh at them when they mess up like that, but most of the time they are so poised and agile and perfect that it just slays us when they do something goofy like that.

Especially when it’s one of their awe-inspiring “spring loaded cat” moments that goes awry. The speed at which we go from “coiled steel” to “where kitty go?” just makes the clip that much funnier.

Sorry, kittums. We love your little furry self so much. But sometimes, you’re hilarious.

I am sure we are pretty funny to you sometimes, too.

Finally, we have this little bit of rantiness I recorded today.

I feel good about that one because I managed to keep it under 5 minutes in length, after considerable trimming, and thus was able to keep my points fairly compact and concise. It also allowed me to concentrate more on putting in the extra stuff in order to punch it up a little.

After all, it’s a lot easier to come up with stuff for 5 minutes of video than for 15!