VIDEO VIDEO VIDEO

Gonna do my best to actually get caught up on my videos today. Got eight left. Seems like a reasonable amount. And when I have caught up, it will be time to start making them again, at least occasionally.

I do kind of miss it.

First, we have me talkin’ about an issue that readers of this blog will recognize as a perennial one for me :

Namely, how the heck to go about being smart without being a dick but also without being ashamed of an asset. I recognize that there is a compulsive, cramped, neurotically self-analyzing quality to the question itself. Listening to myself talk about it gives me a strong feeling that I am chasing my own tail and the whole thing is wrongheaded from the getgo somehow.

The easy answer would be to say I should just be myself and let the chips fall where they may.

Maybe it really is that simple.

And now, some music accompanied by pictures of adorable animals doing adorable things.

Warning : fairly loud, and gets louder and more insistent as it goes.

Par for the course, really. Love the WKRP quote at the end, though. Jennifer (Loni Anderson) really was perfect. She was like an angel of blondeness. An avatar of the light side of the blond.

Kind of depressed today. But whatever. It’s only temporary and I know things to do to pull myself out of the morass. Clothes really do seem to make a profound difference. Right now I am lounging about naked because I haven’t finished doing the laundry yet. As a result, I feel all mentally flabby and formless and weak. I really do need some kind of container in order to pull myself together and feel connected and strong. Otherwise, I am semisolid at best.

I suppose I will know I have truly succeeded in growing a skeleton and committing to it when I feel just as strong hanging around naked as I do when I am fully dressed and put together.

In the meantime, I am going to sip ice water, hang with the fuzzies, and do my words.

More music please :

Two minutes. Impressive. I am glad I managed to rein in my UTBD (Urge To Be Done) that far. It’s sad to think that I have been producing substandard art for a long time simply because I am too eager for that feeling of accomplishment and release that comes from being DONE.

Explains why I have such trouble with going back to something and improving it too. That would take said thing from “done” to “not done”, and what could be worse than that?

I am improving over time, though. Eventually I will get to the point where I am mature and strong enough to let myself get lost in the process and not be in such a hurry to get to the “good part”. Writing, editing, revising… it can all be rewarding in and of itself if I just slow myself down and surrender to process. Have a little faith that, despite not being able to see the end from where I am, there will be one eventually, and therefore I am not “trapped”.

I’m just wandering. I’m still safe. Home is right here when I need it.

Next up, a very tired but happy post-Vcon me rambles on for a while.

Love that story.

Part of my problem with staying pulled together and coherent is the whole bed-seeking thing. The bed is so close and so tempting. The addiction is bad enough that I have actually caught myself feeling nostalgic for the time before I went back to school, when I could laze around to my heart’s content.

I take that as a good sign. It means that I have fully entered the school experience. It is requiring enough of an effort of me that I feel tired, and that’s a good thing. Way better than having all this energy bouncing around in my head making me insane.

And now, I lazily solve terrorism.

That little talk seems different after the Paris attacks. It’s no less true, of course, because the reasoning is flawless. If we refuse to be afraid of them, refuse to even recognize them as having any sort of political justification or religious cause or anything. Treat terrorists as the aberrant freaks that they are, and refused to let them goad you into chasing them down in a mad furor. That’s exactly what the little boy who gives the hotfoot to the giant wants. Refuse to give it to him.

ISIS is different. They are an army, with soldiers and tanks and money. It’s true they want to goad everyone into action, but in their case, action is actually justified because they are no small band of terrorists, they are, in effect, an occupying power, and we kind of have rules against people redrawing borders via force.

We’re really not fond of it.

Aw crap, I missed one earlier and I don’t have the mental wherewithal to figure out how to put it where it belongs. It will have to do go here.

Hmmm. I thought that was the one I recorded while actually at Vcon, but no. That is clearly my room, the one that I am sitting in as I type this. Hmmm.

As for myself, I know that I am an unorthodox thinker and I might well have a lot of paradigm shattering ideas. The problem is, I don’t even know what the paradigms are.

I don’t see the box.

Aaand finally, two more musical moments.

First, one that wandered off somewhere. But don’t worry, I got it back.

Hmmm. Pretty middle of the road for me. Nothing great about it, nothing terrible about it. It’s a meh.

And finally, I hope you liked those pictures of bad design choices, because here’s more of them :

And now, an excuse to go punch a shadow in the dick.

Well, that’s it, I am all caught up now. Time to do video #400. Soon, I promise.

But right now, bed needs me in it.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.

A title without the word Saturday in it

See? I can break out of the box.

It’s been a decent day. Did not end up depressed, at least not yet, knock on wood. Started the day right by getting dressed as soon as I got up. I was still sleepy as hell, though, but I fought through it and got myself to a decent state of waking.

Admittedly, drinking a liter of Diet Coke helped.

and I got done the little things I was planning to do. Like finally getting Netflix working again. It stopped working because the payment was due Tuesday and I didn’t get my check till Wednesday. So they suspended my account till I paid up.

This has happened an embarrassing amount of times. They’re so patient with me. They know I will pay eventually.

So Wednesday, I cashed my cheque and put $30 on my brand spanking new VISA from Vancity, and the next day, I went to switch my Netflix account over to the new VISA instead of that piece o’ crap Money Mart one I used for years.

And it wouldn’t work. I put in all the information perfectly but it just said “This information cannot be verified”. That could mean a lot of things, but usually, in my experience, it means the network that does that kind of thing is down or otherwise fucked up from my point of view.

So I tried again later, then tried again a couple times on Friday, but it still didn’t work. And I was just about to throw int he towel and call tech support for my credit card and see WTF was up in the what-what today, but I decided it was worth one more try to see if the damned thing would work this time.

And of course, it did.

So Netflix is back in town, and I can continue watching Scrubs.

Ordered in tonight, which I am proud of. Not only does ordering in mean dealing with the dreaded telephone, it also meant I had to find out how to buzz the delivery person in. In the past, both of those would be big gumption traps. But not today. I decided I wanted to do it, found out what I needed to find out to do it, and did it. And it was good.

Well, decent. I took a risk and ordered a combo with foo young in it. Turns out I still don’t like it and neither does my stomach. But otherwise, it was good food. Cost about the same as eating in a restaurant and I didn’t even have to put my shoes on to do it.

Plus I got fried wontons. Num.

The place I ordered from, Bamboo Express, has a strange definition of “egg roll” though. And I knew this, because I have ordered from them before, but forgot. What they call an egg roll is this lump of fried batter the size and shape of a potato with a token amount of fried bean sprouts inside.

That’s not an egg roll. That’s a vegetarian corn dog. That’s a corn dog without the dog part. Sadly, that doesn’t mean it’s only corn. I would be happy with corn. I love corn.

But I don’t like corn dogs. I find them quite gross. And my opinion of these “egg rolls in name only (ERINOs)” is not much better. So, never ordering THOSE again.

So technically, I didn’t like two major components of my meal. But I ordered both of them, and it’s not their fault I don’t like them. Nor is it the restaurant’s fault. Live and learn, and all that.

Been pondering the environment and global warming lately, and I have decided that the enlightened behaviourist solution will never work. It was doomed from the start. The idea that you could save the world via getting people to voluntarily make drastic changes in their lifestyles for highly abstract reasons was never realistic or practical. But it took over environmentalism because was the nice-guy solution that jibed with the left wing’s general wimpiness.

Other solutions, more realistic ones, like political change and the technological solution, involve too much confrontation, hard work, and dealing with icky things like science and compromise for the liberal masses to handle. They prefer to live on a puffy pink cloud where they can pretend that just making people “aware” will magically solve the problem without them having to do a single thing outside of their left wing comfort zone.

But hey…. it’s only the future of the human race we are dealing with here. No reason to crimp your style.

So fuck the behavioural solution. And fuck the political solution too. Any plan that involves the world coming together as one to confront a problem in a mature and responsible fashion is a long shot to say the least. I am not saying that it’s impossible, but seeing as time is a factor, I don’t think we can afford to wait around.

The technological solution is the only one with any likelihood of success. It’s going to be up to people like Elon Musk, which I suppose should make the Objectivists happy. It’s going to be science that gets us out of this mess. If the equator is still habitable by human beings ten years from now, in 2025, it will be because we invented solutions to the problems caused by the unforeseen effects of our previous inventions.

Global consciousness is on the rise, thanks to the Internet. Walls are coming down at a breathtaking pace. People from opposite sides of the world are sharing the same links, laughing at the same memes, and talking about the same news stories.

But it’s still too slow. We need inventions that eliminate the need for lifestyle changes entirely, or that at least lower the lifestyle cost to something reasonable. People are willing to change, but only to a point. Anything that would be a major disruption to their life will get rejected out of hand.

It is science and science alone that will save humanity from itself.

I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.