Monthly Archives: August 2013

Dicks n’ things

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Blah blah, buncha stuff, yadda yadda, mine at the end.

First we have this rather awesome trailer for a documentary.

I am amazed that I did not know Bill Clinton had a little person in his Cabinet before now. And one with a hell of a voice too, I might add.

That looks like an amazing documentary, and it fills me with hope because clearly, cultural momentum is building and the articulators are rising to the challenge of facing this nadir age of attacks against all the founding principles of modern society by the billionaire barbarians of the private jet set.

Kind of makes me feel like I should be part of that, or rather, a better part of it. I am putting my voice out there on YouTube, but if nobody’s watching, what’s the point?

But I never have been any good at attracting attention to myself. I guess I will just have to hang around being right until someone notices.

Doesn’t seem like a great plan, but it’s all I have until I grow a pair and learn to make my voice heard above the throng.

I just hope that when my ship does come in, I am still alive to enjoy it.

We articulators have petty human needs too. We want fame and fortune and a comfortable lifestyle just as much as anybody else.

We are, after all, just human beings, no matter how big our words make us seem sometimes.

And being a loudspeaker is not easy.

Next up, check out this marvelous story about just how scary the modern Klu Klux Klan is.

The answer, of course, is “not scary at all”. They are just a bunch of old, inbred hillbillies, rednecks, and ol’ boys who mostly just get together to get drunk and eat BBQ and raise a hoot and a holler.

And sure, some of the stuff they say there might well offend you so bad the milk in your fridge turns sour. And they would be mighty pleased to hear that because making your enemies mad without a lot of effort is always a pleasure, especially to a despised minority that has embraced the doctrine that violent opposition simply means they are the ones holding the One Truth against the opposition of the deluded masses too corrupt to embrace it.

Viewed that way, they are far more pitiful than scary. Racism has always seemed pathetic to me. If you have sunk all your self-worth into some accident of birth that you had no part of creating or choosing, that you can never lose and that by all rational measurement is quite meaningless, you are already showing that you are a pretty sad human being just by that.

But the real tragedy is that the Klan had its roots in the Antebellum South, which was arguably the highest level of civilization the South ever had, and whose civilized and genteel virtues would be vehemently and violently eshewed by the modern members of the KKK.

They like the racism part, though. And the putting on airs.

Next slide, please. Ah, here we are : a simply marvelous tale of fascism and homosexuality.

Now you might be thinking that fascism and homosexuality have a very complicated relationship that is mostly very negative. Fascists are invariably violently homophobic while simultaneously worshiping male virtue to a very gay degree.

But this is a very happy story where something awful led to something marvelous.

See, a small-town Italian mayor wanted to assure Mussolini’s government that he was a good Fascist, and so he used the age of tactic of picking on the homos. He had 45 of the local queers rounded up and exiled to a tiny island off the coast of Italy.

But that’s where things get good, because on said island, there was no supervision. This was the sort of exile colony where the prisoners are simply left to fend for themselves, and so suddenly, there was 45 fags on an island together with no meddling relatives or authorities to interfere with them pursuing their natural proclivities, and hence for them, this island was Paradise.

Sure, they got locked in dormitories every night by the cops, but big deal. Locked in with a bunch of other fags. What WILL we do.

Isn’t it obvious? They dressed in drag and did theatre!

And, presumably, fucked and sucked each other with gay abandon.

I really think there is a movie in this story. A light comedy. The only sad part is that when World War II ended, they all had to go home to their hometowns!

And finally, here is my own bit of light comedy for the day.

Sometimes I am the Mighty Articulator. Sometimes I am the fabulistic Spinner of Dreams.

And sometimes I am just a goofy ass clown having fun and playing the fool.

Guess which facet I am showing in the above clip?

I really do not know how to handle my own complexity. I have so many facets, so much potential, so many possible paths, that I just do not know where to go or who I really am.

And I cannot just pick one facet and cut off all the others. I am just not built that way.

What I need, I realize, is a conception of self that can encompass all my talents and possibilities. I know that I am not my facets, I am the jewel, but that only opens the door.

All I can do is, over time, refine my whole self in such a way that some facets naturally come to the fore and are reinforced.

This is, mathematically speaker, a chaotic process. The number of factors in highly complex interrelationships makes the outcome impossible to predict.

But I am working on my faith. I have lived a faithless life for too long, and it’s high time I learned to trust something or someone, even if that is just another reflection of my self.

And so I have faith that this journey of mine can only lead to a saner, stronger me.

And until then, I mutate in silence.

The limits of truth

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All my life, for as long as I can remember, I have had a burning desire to know the truth.

It is one of my deepest passions, and for most of that time, the dominant one as well. I felt as if, somehow, my job in the world was to pierce all the layers of confusion and illusion, find the real truth, and then tell people about it.

But the truth is not a gentle thing, and I think of myself as a gentle person. I have lived my life with the innate assumption that the truth is always the best thing in all occasions, that you are always better off hearing the truth rather than comforting lies.

And I still believe that. But I am beginning to see its limits.

Sure, for someone like me, who has been a fearless delver into the deepest, darkest, most disturbing layers of human reality in my never-ending and unquenchable thirst for the truth, there is very little that you can say to me which is true that I cannot accept.

My therapist is constantly amazed at how readily I accept the truth of painful revelations and how willing I am to deal with the harshest of truths in my quest to heal myself. But I am not the sort of person who can consciously deny the truth of something which rings true to me. And because I have this lifelong instinct to lunge for the truth the moment I see it, I sometimes leap vast crevices that lead deep into the wounded flesh of my broken spirit that others might have to labour through the hard way.

So I suppose therapy works a little faster for me because of this self-honesty. But I digress.

For a fearless philosopher like me, honesty is always the best policy. I am a very understanding person, so much so that people are often surprised by how readily and non-judgmentally I can accept, understand, and sympathize with their deepest, darkest secrets.

But other people have more elaborate psychological defenses than I, and do not live outside Plato’s Cave like I do, and so the truth, especially in the concentrated form I usually deliver it, can very well do them a lot more harm than good.

Sometimes, a lie is the moral thing to do. Like in movies, where a character is very definitely going to die or at least is very gravely injured, and people tell them “You will be fine. It’s not as bad as it seems. You just relax and we will have you up and out of here in no time. ”

This is quite clearly a lie, or at least, misleading. But I have no problem with that, because it is not like the truth will do this person any good anyhow, and the last thing they need is more fear, stress, and panic. The best medicine, in that case, is to lie.

And this principle applies to the rest of life as well. I have been a fool and a pig to imagine that my deeply oracular truths are diamonds beyond price that anyone should be happy to get. I have let the arrogance of the intellect spill into personal arrogance about what is good for others, which just happens to be what I feel like doing anyhow.

Always a red flag, that.

Now I am not claiming that I have been a brutally blunt bulldozer all my life. I have not. I am, largely, a fairly sensitive, sweet, compassionate fellow who puts a very high premium on the ability to navigate the waters of diplomacy and discourse without stepping on people’s toes.

The kind of connection you can make with others if you have the poise and skill to listen well and give people the kind of help they need is, to me, priceless beyond all measure. I often feel humbled and privileged that I could do that for someone, that they could let me in and I could do them good, even if it’s just by lending a sympathetic ear.

So I am no brute. But I still feel I have inadvertently hurt and/or alienated people all my life with my very sharp and piercing perceptions of the truth.

Whether or not I am “right” or not is unimportant. Everyone thinks they are right, myself included. The issue at hand is whether that truth at that moment was the morally right thing to say. And I think that, many times in my life, it has not been.

And I am someone who takes ethics and responsibility very, very seriously. Possibly to a fault.

So I have to ask myself : what is more important? Being absolutely and utterly honest and truthful, as if one is expecting to be rewarded for having the right answer?

Or being less than completely honest, maybe even slightly misrepresenting yourself, in order to get along with others and do the least harm in the world that you can?

This is not an easy issue with me. I have rather naively acted like my opinions are the same as anyone else’s, and so when I am asked about X, I give my honest opinion.

But they are not the same. My opinions stem from deep analysis and perceptions honed over decades. They are stark, strange, and terrible to behold for a lot of people. Often they will simply not understand because it is too far out of their experience and they lack even the start of how to get a grip on what I am saying to them.

But even if they do have an inkling, it is nothing like what they know, and they, rightly so from their point of view, view me as a strange and dangerous person best left alone.

Final result : I feel rejected and humiliated and alienated, and historically, I am left naively thinking “What did I do to deserve that? ”

Well now I know, and I can start on the journey towards correcting my excesses.

This will not be easy.

But it has to be done if I am to connect with others the way I wish to do.

Friday Science Kalamazoo, August 16, 2013

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It’s science time again folks! Time to warm up the Science Machine and climb on board for a tour of six of the coolest and most interesting science stories of the week!

So take a seat, remember to keep your hands and arms inside the vehicle at all times, and HAVE FUN!

Our first stop is a fascinating study that showed that dolphins have very long social memories.

This study builds on the relatively recent discovery that dolphins have “names”, namely a series of whistles and clicks that signify a specific individual.

From that, and with the help of a facility where bottlenosed dolphins have been kept going back decades, complete with recording of the dolphin’s noises, scientists were able to play back the “names” of dolphins that a particular dolphin had not seen for decades, and sure enough, the dolphins reacted by perking up and immediately responding in kind.

“Holy crap, it’s Dave! Hey Dave! Man, I haven’t seen you in ages! How’s the wife and kids?”

This shows that the dolphins have very long social memories, comparable to those of monkeys, elephants, and human beings.

It also suggests that dolphins, like us, the elephants, and the monkeys, are a highly social species.

Say goodbye to the dolphins, folks, because out next step is a disturbing bit of analysis that suggests that all forms of violence increase during an extended hot, dry period.

This is especially important to us civilization fans who are worried about what will happen to the state of global stability as climate change makes the world hotter.

Obviously, droughts cause famine and famine causes civil war. That’s a no-brainer.

But it goes far deeper than that :

For every standard deviation of change, levels of interpersonal violence, such as domestic violence or rape, rise by some 4 percent, while the frequency of intergroup conflict, from riots to civil wars, rise by 14 percent. Global temperatures are expected to rise by at least two standard deviations by 2050, with even bigger increases in the tropics.

So it’s a little more serious than heat just making people a bit more grumpy.

Nasty. Next, we will visit what brain science is telling about liberals versus conservatives.

Lincoln found that when viewing a collage of photographs, conservatives’ eyes unconsciously lingered 15 percent longer on repellent images, such as car wrecks and excrement

This fits with my own observations that conservatives seem to thrive on fear. They see the world as being extremely dangerous and thus need a high level of order and predictability, even conformity, in order to quell this deep fear of a hostile world.

This is born out by the finding that the more secure people feel, the more liberal they become.

To illustrate this point :

…psychologist Jaime Napier found that asking Republicans to imagine that they possessed superpowers and were impermeable to injury made them more liberal.

So perhaps in order for liberalism to succeed, it needs to craft a powerful message of security.

Everything will be okay, folks. You can relax!

After that reassuring message, let’s go on to look at the latest news about oxytocin.

For a while now, the science press has been calling oxytocin the “love hormone” because levels of it have been shown to rise quite a bit when people are in love, or even just thinking about someone they love. It spikes after pregnancy when mothers are bonding with their children. It even spikes when someone is just thinking about a favorite television show.

But new results show that oxytocin also spikes when you have a very negative experience, including negative social experiences.

So perhaps it is not the “love hormone”, but the “memory hormone”. It responds not to the nature of the experience but its strength.

Positive or negative, things that cause a very strong response are automatically considered to be very important to our survival, and so we remember them very, very strongly.

Leaving the land of honeymoons and PTSD behind, we enter the world of potentially epoch-making studies about the origins of cancer.

A team of researchers has discovered that 21 different kinds of cancer-causing mutations all leave behind a certain “cancer graffiti” signatures that point directly as to what exactly caused said mutation.

These 21 signatures represent 97 percent of known carcinogenic mutations, and so this discovery could radically improve the epidemiology of cancer by letting doctors and scientists track specific carcinogens and their effects.

For decades, cancer research has involved a lot of guesswork. This guy smoked a lot, so that is probably what caused his cancer. But he also worked in a toxic environment for decades, and then there’s his genetic predisposition due to many cancer deaths in his family….

This new discovery may well take the guesswork out and let us know exactly what leads to what kinds of cancer and take steps to minimize the risks.

Out final stop is at what might be even bigger news : a potential vaccine for malaria.

The results are small so far, but very encouraging, especially because the vaccine works on adults. There are parts of the world where malaria kills millions every year. A vaccine against it would be the ultimate tool for consigning it to the dustbin of history along with polio, the whooping cough, and Spanish flu.

A vaccine would be even better than the current treatment, oral administration of quinine. Its one drawback is that it does need to be delivered intravenously, which adds a great deal of complication to the question of distribution.

But recent developments in intravenous patches which deliver medicine via a postage-stamp sized patch riddled with microscopic needles might just provide a route around that problem, and countless others.

A future without cancer or malaria? Sign me the heck up.

Well that’s it for this week’s science tour. We hope you enjoyed your visit. The next tour will be a week from today, and will feature all new exhibits from all over the world of science.

Please remember to take your packages and valuables with you, and have a safe and pleasant evening.

Me, on tap

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Like I say in the video, I am going to try experimenting with various forms of intuitive art, one of which is stream of consciousness writing, which is what you are areading right now.

I will do my level best to just write and write until I have filled the space with one thousand words.

I can’t actually types as fast as I think, of coruse, so some filtering is inevitable, but I am eager to learn to access the deep sef and so I figured this would be a good place to start.

It won’t be easy. I have been blogging so long that I don’t really need to think about whqat I am going to say. The real trick is not the typing without pause, which I often do for long stretches of time anyhow. Being prolific in that sense has never been an issue for me.

The hard part will be disengaging this overpoweringly bright mind of mine so that I can see what comes out of the dark. Words are not ideals for that because the mrere acting of writing (or typing) them out requires some of that rational mind that I am trying to learn to turn off.

Right there, I just puased for a moment. Just stared into space for around five seconds before my brain clicked back in and I remembered that I was actually doing something. Sometimes my brain just pops into neutral and it is very irritating. Makes me feel stupid.

But then againm, reality has always been an issue with me, ya know?
I have run out of things to say now, so here is where the more radom stuff starts.

Dying underwater, I failed to see the cognizince horizon disappeared beneath the horizon of my eyeline. A bow wave spread across the quietly turbulent water, pushing all before it while growing weaker and more diffuse every second of the way. By the time it reaches shore, it will be naught but a slightly higher than average wave, and nobody will notice, let alone know what kind of explosion caused it.

Ah, the explosion. I can’t say whether I willed it or not. I have lived near the deadly temptation of self-annihilation – the ultimate escape – since I was a teenager. No matter how good I feel or how happy I have become, the part of my that desperately wants to get out and go away to something new is always lurking and looking for an opening, and so I must remain ever vigilant against my suicidal side.

so maybe, despite my years of preparations and all the sunny confidence with which I declared my little experiment to be foolproof to my good-naturedly skeptical friends, this was all about my death after all, and my apparently solid confidence and ease was just the product of anticipating the sweet, sweet surrender that makes the thought of death appealing to those of us with certain forms of damage.

If I did will it, if I did make it happen by inserting my mind into the process and pushing the energies in the wrong direction (don’t laugh, it’s happened before), then I die here with a guilty soul, because if my experiment had succeeded, the world would have known a perfect power source, a form of trick fusion that would burn bright and hot for 850,000 years and yet be as safe to handle as a pebble.

Yes, my crystalline fusion would have produced an unimpressive looking milky white stone that, under the right conditions (and only those conditions), would pour out enough to power an entire city from a rock around the size of a softball.

And all from something around as hard to produce as a laboratory diamond. In other words, not exactly something you can whip up in your kitchen) bur well within current technology and certainly extraordinarily profitable for the right company.

But don’t go thinking my wonderful Steiler (pronounced ‘styler’) crystals would have been for mass power generation only. With a relatively simple (but sturdy) interface, it could produce any sort of energy you like, including the entire electromagnetic spectrum plus mechanical. And they can (could have) been made to whatever specifications you want in order to give power to whatever you want.

How much would you pay for a car that never needs gas and produces no emissions and is so mechanically simple that it almost never breaks down and needs almost no maintenance? And yet has a more powerful engine than the biggest jet engine ever built?

Or how about a little device the size of a paperback book that you hook up to your home’s power supply and never get another electric bill in your life?

So if I did cause this malfunction (and my own slow demise), then I have much to be ashamed of. I had every intention of using my invention to save the world. I would let anyone have the secret of the process and the ways to get the energy out again, production would have begun in dozens of places at once, and a wave of change would have swept through the world practically overnight.

We are talking Sputnik level event here.

And yes, I was also keenly anticipating the glory and prestige of being the Man Who Saved The World. I have never been interested in money or material goods, but I am as fond of fame and approval as anyone, and I was sure that I was destined to have a huge section in history books about this era.

But now, as the oxygen slowly leaks out of my tiny bathysphere and rescue seems extraordinarily unlikely given the necessary secrecy of my operation, I am forced to see the wreckage of my great dream floating all around me while I slowly die an ignoble and very slow death.

If the history books write about me at all, it will be as a hilariously wrongheaded academic who blew himself up trying to do something that any undergraduate physics student would have told him was impossible on the face of it.

I hacked the law of conservation of energy, and nobody will ever know.

I hope someone at least takes my body home.

(Wow…. prose. Not what I expected. I am not sure I am doing this right yet. I may need to go more primal next time. I am too good at putting words together. )

Ten supersonic links!

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WE ARE OVERSTOCKED! All these links must go, go, go!

1. Science is not the enemy

A very passionate and articulate defense of science both as a route to knowledge and a path to wonder. I love this kind of science writing. It captures the magic and poetry of science as well as the practical and real world benefits of it. I am a little leery of the author’s defense of science against a supposedly siege of opposition from the arts and humanities. I am sure there are Luddites in the A&H world just as there are Philistines in the sciences. But war? I’m not seeing it.

2. Ten Lies Your Depression Tells You

Well. I guess I don’t have to write that “lies depression tells you” article after all. Someone beat me to it, and did a pretty good job of it too. Everything in that list is something I have felt about myself, some more, some less. Depression is s terrific liar because it does not even have to convince you of anything. It just makes you chemically incapable of believing certain things (regardless of logic, evidence, or probability) and leaves you to figure out the justifications yourself. Well done.

3. Abe, by Rob McLellan

A fairly good use of a simple setup and some quite simple CGI to tell a story much bigger than its budget. Abe’s mouth doesn’t even move (or blink) when he talks. A good simple robot model with a few places of articulation, an actress to do the screaming et al, and some solid voice acting for Abe our terribly confused and broken robot, and you have a dramatic little scene that is both chilling and tragic. I have the urge to set the whole thing to “Fix You” by Coldplay, though. But that’s just me.

4. An extremely offensive song

Brace yourself folks. This one has to be heard to be believed. Get ready for a concentrated dose of Mad Men era sexism sung by a suave, slick chauvinist.

Isn’t it off how sometimes something is so awful you just have to share it? Sharing that video is the Internet equivalent of saying “Smell this!”. The basic gist of the song is “Don’t you dare be anything less than perfectly sexy, ‘little girl’, or your husband will start sleeping around and maybe even leave you, and it will be all your fault and just what you deserve. ”

5. Powerful poetry about OCD and love.

Wow. There is so much amazing poetry being made by young people these days! My generation didn’t produce many poets. I suppose poetry was just too earnest and eager for us jaded types. These young people are screaming out their feelings and making themselves heard in the world by telling their stories, and I only wish I had that kind of courage. The ending of that poem makes me want to cry, it’s so sad. But I can see the girl who left him’s point. Living with OCD cannot be easy. Of course, our poet has no choice.

6. A Buzzfeed list of interesting English on Chinese signs

Here are some of my all time faves.

*TARDIS noise*

I hear that this is where Doctor Who shops for condoms.

As you can see, the more surreal, the more I like them. The truly great mistranslations are like a kind of minimalist poetry conjuring bizarre realms with just a few bewildering words.

And on that note… my all time favorite, bar none.

The rallying cry of... something.

The rallying cry of… something.

The Buzzfeed people say they meant to say “dried food”, and I bet that’s what the Chinese said. But as for the translation…. tell me how those concepts connect.

7. John Corvino lays it down

I am both in awe of and jealous of that guy’s style. All the did was talk to the camera, just like I do, but he turned it into so much more just by being so stylish, witty, and concise. That is exactly the sort of content I hope to produce some day. It is perfect YouTube content. Short, dense, fun, and hilarious, all while making a serious point. I love hate envy admire you, John Corvino!

8. Why We Are Lonely, animated.

And speaking of the concision, I love this piece because it makes its point so fluently. The voiceover and animation act together in such a smooth and precise way that it really makes what is a fairly information dense presentation flow like an easy river. As for the problem it describes, I am wondering if this is more a problem for the generation after mine. I made a solid rule in my late twenties that I would never, ever, ever prefer Internet company over the real thing. And I think that keeps things contained.

9. Better Homeless Signs

A brilliant and biting piece of satire of a certain kind of clueless and entitled hipster.

Yowch! Great work. They really sell how horribly tone-deaf and elitist these people are, and manage to structure the bit to keep that proverbial ball in the air by having each successive revelation be just that little bit more awful.

Oh. And supposedly, there are people actually, unironically doing exactly what is being parodied here.

Now I don’t know about you, but I would be a lot less likely to donate to a homeless person with a super fancy sign like that. He’s clearly not broke.

10. Why Be Good?

And finally, La vidéo d’aujourd’hui faite par moi.

It presents some ideas I only recently put down in words in response to this blog post from my friend and late night conversation partner Bill “The Wizard” Honeywill.

They are all ideas that have been floating around in the primordial stew of my brain for quite a while now, but this was the first time articulating them.

And like I say in the vid, there are doubtless countless more practical, rational, self-oriented reasons why it is better to be a good person.

I would love to make a big list of them all.

Maybe you can help?

A bitter truth

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Part of me is… dead. I am dead inside. Some part of my died along the way. And it’s not coming back. [1]

And if I needed to know just what I have been mourning, it is… that. That dead part of me, the part that died a long time ago but that I have never been able to let go.

And so it has stayed with me, poisoning me from the inside as it rots away.

For a while, I thought that everything was merely frozen inside me from the icy touch of emotional repression, and that everything inside me would one day thaw out and be rejoined to my shattered whole.

But now it seems like some of me just plain died over the years. Call it… freezer burn. Cryogenics never has been a precise science. There was bound to be some tissue damage.

Now I am left wondering how exactly I let go of this deadness inside of me and let my mental immune system attack it, render it harmless, then flush it out of my system forever.

Hard to say how that would work. I have a feeling that a lot of my psyche has been arranged around the necessity of never ever touching my deep, deep wounds, and I do not, at this moment, know how to reach that deeply inside myself to fix the bent, bruised, and broken parts at the very heart of me.

The change required will be deep and fundamental. Far more than merely shedding a skin, it will required something a great deal like surgery, and there is no anesthetic for surgery of the soul.

If it doesn’t hurt, it’s not working.

I froze myself to avoid the pain, but in doing so I also kept those deep awful wounds from ever healing, and life is very difficult when you are frozen stiff inside.

Even more so when part of you is dead, dead, dead.

Once more, I am forced to realize that do not really know what it going on inside this scarred and splintered soul of mine. Perhaps it is simply not possible to be your own analyst and I am wasting my tiem wandering in these long leashed loops of mentation when a wiser soul would be able to get at the problem directly and act in its own best interest, unbound by chains of rationality and sense.

But I am forty years old, and change gets harder every day. It sounds almost silly when I say I want to change but don’t know how. If you want to change, just… change. Right?

Wrong. Not when you have spent as long as I have developing and honing your rational self to the point where retracting it seems impossible, like asking a turtle to remove its shell.

It couldn’t do it even if it wanted to do it.

All my mental tools are absurdly rational. Maybe this is why I have been unable to heal myself over all these years. The very tools I am using are wildly unsuited for the job. I might as well be trying to eat my soup with a hammer.

And sure, I make progress now and then. After all, you can get SOME soup into your mouth with the hammer. But on my own, my mind is capable of many wonders of wit, insight, analysis, and understanding… but it cannot heal the damage to my soul.

Once more, I think of faith. There have been times lately when I feel myself reaching out in desperation for… something. I don’t know what it is. But I want to align myself to let its light fill me. I want to twist myself into whatever shape will let that light shine all the way into my soul, and make that deep dark place warm and alive once more.

I wouldn’t call it God. I am still too strictly rational for that nonsense. But I will call it the God in me, that is, the part of me that others reach via faith that represents the perfection towards which we strive and the purest form of the love and approval we so desperately need.

I am extremely willing to try to reach that. I am far beyond caring whether a route to happiness is “cheating” or not. We drive ourselves to madness with our inane Skinner Box games that tell us we are not allowed to be happy unless we “deserve” it. or else, anarchy and chaos.

Fuck that noize. I deserve as much happiness as I can get my greedy hands on, and I need that light so badly in order to heal ancient wounds and burn out the dead parts of my soul that I am willing to do whatever it takes to get there.

And perhaps it is this new-found spiritual yearning towards completeness that will ultimately be my salvation. Part of me has woken up and freed itself from the permafrost and this part of me does not merely intellectually understand that I am so very cold inside and that warmth is what I need, it actively yearns for connection with some great Source within me that is beyond all the rules and theories and ideas and hence can provide the spiritual sustenance that I have lacked for so very long.

It is hard for me to accept that there might ever be something more important than the truth. My ferocious desire for the truth, my Veritas Uber Alles side, has grown extremely strong and powerful over many years of learning and sifting and distilling and analyzing so much information.

It has, in fact, taken over without my ever really willing it. The shine of my own mind has been my substitute for spirituality for a long long time.

And of course, nobody can make themselves believe that which they know to be untrue.

But maybe, just maybe, someone like me can start believing something they do not know is true.

And maybe that’s exactly what I am going to do.

Footnotes    (↵ returns to text)

  1. Obviously not literally. Tissue necrosis is nothing to joke about.↵

As per usual…

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Whaddaya know. Four videos, mine last. Hooda thunk it.

Let’s start off with Craig Ferguson being surprisingly deep.

That is very deep coming from Mimi’s boss.

And I think he is substantially correct. He goes too far and his analysis is not exactly precise, but then again, he’s a talk show host, not a Harvard Dean.

But he is right about a youth-worshipping culture. I would add that the youth demographic is so attractive because not only do you get a chance to instill life-long loyalty in someone (like today’s goldfish-brained corporations care about that), but young people have way more disposable income to waste on stupid shit than any other group.

Big corps used to be after the kid’s candy money, and that’s still going strong, but the real cash cow is young people who have jobs but are still living with their parents rent-free.

All their income is disposable. For them, money is for having fun period. Sure, in the long term, that is tragic, but it makes for very high profit margins for the people willing to exploit them.

I really like Craig’s point about how it’s impossible to worship youth without worshiping stupidity. I mean, what is the point of mutilating body and soul in order to seem young if you spoil it all by displaying wisdom, forethought, and tact?

It’s all so futile. We need to find a way to teach everyone the good and bad things about every age, and give kids some sense of what is in store for them and why their life is not over when they turn 30.

Next up, a little social experiment from South Africa.

Don’t worry, it has nothing to do with race.

And I am sure our experimenters meant well, but I think their results are highly misleading. It does not prove what it purports to prove.

Because here’s the thing. The sound of live drumming is very distinct and unusual. It is going to immediately grab people’s attention and disrupt their lives, and because it is so unusual and so disruptive and so obviously rude that people will have no compunction about going and complaining about it. It’s a simple situation that has a very simple, low-commitment solution, and the complainers are very clearly in the right, so it’s an ideal situation for noise complaints.

Now you might say “Right, and the second half proves that the Kitty Genovese effect of people not wanting to get involved is still in effect, right?”

Wrong. See, human beings have very good hearing, and one of the aural skills we all learn growing up in a media saturated society is how to tell real sounds from those coming from a speaker.

That’s why we don’t react to every sound on television as if it’s really happening. Imagine how bad it would be to lack that skill!

So I think the second night drew no response because everyone just assumed that what they were hearing was a noisy and violent television show.

On a lighter note, here’s some very highly production value fan comedy.

This is what happens when YouTube (owned by Google) puts some of its money muscle behind making high quality content for Geek Week.

Although honestly, this is the Internet. Every week is Geek Week. It’s like having Golf Week on the Golf Channel. Totally redundant.

But damn. That’s about as spot-on as you can get without actually hiring ILM and getting the original actors. Check out that Chewbacca! He’s not quite the right color, but still. Damn!

And the material is pretty good too. Nothing truly spectacular, but solid comedy material that, due to the rapid fire nature of the format, keeps the ball int the air well enough.

Next, another fairly good effort from the folks at Cracked.

For once, they took a decent premise, stuck with it, found genuinely funny observations about the genre that had not been done to death by others before them.

Why, it’s practically original.

And all without falling back on gore and screaming, or SO RANDOM LOL, or any of the other tired bag of cheap tricks endemic to the modern skit com scene.

There has never been more skit comedy in the world than right now. But Sturgeon’s Law is absolute. The more there is of any art form, the more bad examples of it you can find, and as a consequence, the easier it is to get the false impression that it is all crap.

My own extension of said corollary of said Law : the more of an art form there is, then by the natural laws of distribution via differentiation that permeates all human endeavor, the worse the bad stuff gets and the better the good stuff gets.

More samples, more outliers, and the further out they lie.

Aaaand finally, my low-energy video for today.

Explanation as to why at the end.

Another day I spent sleeping. I think the heat is wearing me out. Homeostasis takes up a very large proportion of one’s bodily resources in weather like this, and I am not exactly rolling in excess energy (that I can access, at least) on a good day.

I try not to let excess sleep get to me too badly. I try to just take it as comes and just sort of surrender that part of my life to the whims of fate whenever possible.

I am increasingly convinced that a lot of my problems, and maybe other people’s problems too, have their roots in trying to control the uncontrollable and then punishing oneself for not being able to do it.

There can be great peace and release in surrender. Giving up on unwinnable battles might not be the absolutely maximum of nobility, but it can free up so much energy and release so much pointless pain that what you lose in noble futility, you more than get back in happiness and peace.

Unwinnable battles for control don’t know whether you give up or not.

And if they knew, they wouldn’t care.

You’re just torturing yourself.