Gonna share a few things with you before the serious angsting and rambling begins.

First, a link to a page full of links to browser based emulators for 7 different versions of the Mac and Windows operating systems.

I am not much for nostalgia myself, but I imagine that a lot of people would find much pleasure in poking around in operating systems from a simpler and more innocent time.

Of course, I am not immune to nostalgia. I fought it for a long time because I wanted to remember that my childhood sucked and my life got a lot better after around grade six.

In fact, I was on a seven year winning streak before my parents took me out of college. Every year between grade six and that, life had gotten better for me.

But still, my childhood was pretty unpleasant overall. I was alone and isolated for much of it, raised by TV and video games and books. And so I vowed as a child that I would never look back on all of it and say it was the best time of my life.

Because seriously, if that was the best my life could get, shoot me in the fucking head right now.

But nostalgia caught up with me eventually. It just had to build up enough emotional potential to completely overwhelm my nitpicking consciousness and its silly ideas.

So for five years or so now, whenever something references the mid to late seventies in a way that I recognize from my childhood, I am flooded with a wave of nostalgia, intense but still quite pleasant, and I feel the sunshine and smell the pavement and hear the bicycle spokes and roller skates of my early childhood.

I think of hot summer days wandering the neighborhood, climbing trees and investigating manholes and watching construction workers work and all those other universal Bradbury things that change very little over the decades.

The technology might change, society might change, but the basic patterns of human life remain exactly the same. We are born, we mature from helpless infants awash in undifferentiated experience into energetic little critters crawling around and figuring out that whole walking thing, and then into the curious and exploratory toddlers and little ones devouring the world in whale sized bites.

And no matter how rotten (or wonderful) your childhood was, you still made the passage from unconsciousness into sentience like all humans must, and that, in my opinion, is one of the things that unites us not just as humanity but as human.

No baby animal is at the top of the food chain. We are all prey when we are young. We all had to figure out a scary and complicated world full of forces beyond our comprehension. We all had no choice but to trust in our caretakers, no matter how worthy they were of that trust, because were so small and knew so little.

Infants can’t shop around.

Some people never truly get past that stage. They never achieve the state of reason where they are confident in their own ability to create their own understanding of reality. They never develop the confidence in their own mental faculties to decide for themselves what is right and wrong or what is real or not, and so they live their whole life just getting their worldview from whomever seems smart and nice and familiar to them.

These people are largely, but far from exclusively, conservatives.

The other thing I want to share today is this rather naughty but ever so sexy bit of video magic.

Warning, NSFW, male butt.

And what a butt. Drool. I would pay 100 dollars cash to learn that magic trick.

I share not just because it is sexy fun, but because I am not sure how the heck they did it.

The only sense I can make of it is that it only looks handheld. A trick like that absolutely requires the camera to remain in exactly the same position while the actor disrobes and then gets back into exactly the same position, ready to look surprised.

And there’s just no way that any human pair of hands could hold still enough for long enough to put it off. So my theory is that the camera is on a tripod, and the person with the hands is just turning it on that tripod.

That would explain why the hands are so far apart. It’s that, or the guy has arms that could hug a Redwood.

It still would be tricky to get the guy back into the exact same position. I am not exactly sure how you would know when you had it right. Maybe modern camcorders have a function that lets you compare your current view with a frame from a previously recorded bit of video.

If so, party on, man. That would be SO fun to play with.

Let’s see. Those are the two things I felt like sharing. Everything is going keenly chez moi. Tried to download Injustice : Gods Among Us, a game for Android, but it wants a LOT of space for my poor little four gig tablet, so I had room for the game but not the enormous update.

And sadly, the Galaxy Tab 2 is one of those tablets where you cannot install apps to an SD card. I have plenty of room on my 24 gig SD card but no dice. I suppose it’s a security thing. If you can’t install apps to an SD card, that means the system will never execute anything from an SD Card and people can’t fuck with your tablet by slipping an infected SD card in there.

But it’s very annoying to have such harsh limits on the apps I can have. It pretty much means that I can’t install anything without uninstalling something else first and that is very annoying.

Oh well. Tonight, I will do dinner at ABC with my friends, then the BCSFA meeting.

For me, that is a social whirlwind of Biblical proportions.

Seeya tomorrow folks!

My digestive issues sorted themselves out for the most part. No more trouble in the engine room, at least for now. Trying to remember to take things slow and careful, but it’s not easy when you are accustomed to eating in front of Netflix and not thinking about it.

So I end up inhaling my food. Apparently, that is my default form of eating. If I remember, I can eat like a human being, if not, I might as well be the vacuum cleaner elephant from the Flintstones. Harsh.

I will do my best to chill with the food Hoovering. I just have to pay attention to what I am doing.

That’s the thing about being an introverted and introspective kind of dude. I have such a strong preference for inner life versus outer life that I try to do things, actual physical things, with as little thought as I can possibly get away with so it doesn’t sap those precious, precious mental clock cycles.

As a result, we are clumsy and uncoordinated and dreamy and absentminded and distant. A lot of the endemic problems of being a dreamer can be traced directly to this deep prioritization of inner life.

It is also, of course, the source of our greatest strengths. It takes that kind of inner focus to big a great thinker. An extroverted and extrospective person is too busy experiencing and processing external reality to have the mental space free for the sort of deep contemplations, that grand process of slowly integrating all you know together in search of fresh connections, that are required in order to create original visions.

There are the thinkers, and there are the doers. The world needs both. Without the doers, nothing gets done.

Without the thinkers, a lot gets done but it’s all stupid.

And me, I am very very much a thinker. I think it was my way of escaping reality as a child. I retreated into my mind. But not in a Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes or Walter Mitty way.

I just thought about things. To this day, I find it hard to describe the inner workings of my mind. If I am left to my own devices, in a situation where I have nothing to occupy my mind and I just have to sit and wait, my mind definitely turns inward. And I have an inner monologue like everyone else.

And like everyone else, it cuts in and out depending on what my mind is doing at that point. Must people don’t quite realize this, but a mind at rest shifts between what we might call subverbalized thought and periods of no verbal anything at all.

These are the times of truly deep contemplation. It is this state of mind that various forms of prayer and meditation access, as well as a few of the really good drugs. It is often referred to as a clear mind, a blank mind, a mind without thought, and so on.

But that is mistaking the tip for the iceberg. A mind without thought would be dead. Literally… a flatlined EEG is the legal definition of death in most of the civilized world.

What we are talking about instead is a state of no conscious thought. Without the burden of conscious thought, the mind can devote all its CPU to the sort of deep integration that our chattering, nattering conscious minds often make impossible.

Thus, the mind is able to resolve a lot of the conflicts within it, defrag the mental hard drive, clear orphaned processes out of its RAM, and finish processing the backlog of emotions that the conscious mind won’t let it process because they are unpleasant. If the process ever truly completes, the backlog is eliminated, and in my opinion, that’s when you achieve Enlightenment.

That’s why these sort of consciousness free can make a person feel so much better. Sudden you have a brain that works so much better, like a computer with a fresh install, and this, of course, makes you incredibly loyal to the method by which you achieved it. Addicted, even.

Which is great if what does it for you is Thoreau style communion with nature in solitude or transcendental meditation or hours of prayed and fasting.

Not so great if you are doing it will alcohol, drugs, sex, high-risk behaviour, or other destructive means.

This is also the secret behind The Zone,. The reason a human being is happiest when they are operating at their full capacity is that this occupies their entire conscious mind and lets the subconscious mind sort things out.

When we operate at full capacity, you reach a state of neurochemical balance between arousal (adrenaline etc) and calmness (oxytocin etc). Happiness, in this case, is having both of those systems turned up to 11, but still in perfect balance with each other.

Back to introversion. Having read this far (thank you!), you might be tempted to think “Well fuck the conscious mind, let’s all just sit down, blank out, and get happy. ”

But that would not work. The mind still needs things to process, after all. It needs stimulation or it goes dormant, as anyone who has been stupefied by a really boring lecture can tell you.

And despite what us introspective types may think, the mind cannot begin to provide enough stimulation for itself. It needs constant input from the five senses in order to stay alive, even if that input is largely ignored by a conscious mind that is too busy exploring its own contents to pay attention to, you know, reality.

Remember, all you strict rationalists, that even stimulation via reading is stimulation via the senses. Even if you lead a cloistered life of Internet and video games like I do, all your stimulation is still via the senses.

So, you know, we still need reality for that.

For now, at least.

Coming to you from his nano-sealed brain chamber, this is your faithful (ish) blogger signing off for today.