Throb

Winded twists

If you were an operating system, and you were due for a major update, your designers might choose to start over from the ground up to add functionality and glom on an emulation layer to maintain compatibility with all the old things that you're connected to. For people, this is kind of like moving out of the country, or getting a new career. You keep answering emails, you tweak your profiles. Your APIs remain compatible. But now you're speaking a new language, or whatever. Maybe it's more like those people that wake up without any memories in the movies and start over. But they remember something.

I have a fish who, regardless of his intended purpose (as a slow moving warm weather circler), is apparently immune to any ill effects that might be caused by leaving the window open in the fall. This is interesting. He is also pretty good at meandering toward food sprinkles. Bettas would slowly take over the world if the males weren't so keen on ripping each other to threads.

Google bought YouTube. Everybody knew this was going to happen because there was a leak, just like at HP. This is scary: I don't imagine that information gets lost very easily at Google, so I blame one of the 60 or so YouTube employees (probably very drunk right now). Anyway. 1.6 BILLION dollars. BILLION. Amazing. Incidentally, YouTube has become one of my favorite sources of information/entertainment. Crazy. I don't even like video blogs. Who has time? Text scans better. But YouTube trumps TV, except it's not on one.

I found myself watching a bit of Lost Boys last night. The cool thing about vampires is they don't age. You might be seven hundred years old, but the maiden through the window is always like 19. Super creepy. When you're a vampire you keep getting older, but the chicks stay the same age.

Please strike that last from the record.

Dreck

I believe you are more dynamic than the laws of listening
I encourage you to allow yourself to decay
I wonder

I think everything is more than
death and sex

I have this memory of being a boy on a tube in a river

this funny sound with so much music

Temples

blistered fists in twisted coral temples
swarm food
a hell-bound's valhalla
a hemorrage

razor burn template-tracer vivisection
sculpt it by phone
while continents
survive-focus

sky mall sign in up sell
target market

we regret to inform you
we're sorry you're having trouble
please try again
sorry you are a winner

Spring has sprung

Just for the record, tomorrow arrived a day or two ahead of schedule. Don't you think?

Signs

There are two billboards that are visible from my window. One of them says "Bring Back the Troops" and exhibits a strange emotionless melange of Iraq-related faces glommed together in a little scene, as if an American high school student spent a summer studying pre-renaissance perspective and emotion-free mannequin caricature. A soldier glares out with meaningless enlarged-pencil-sketch eyes next to an equally bland orphan-like shape. You get the point. The other billboard has always been commercial, and seems to be sending messages all the way through my tin-foil blockers directly to my pathetically impressionable subconscious. For the first three or four months I lived in my apartment it presented me with a big bottle of Maker's Mark. I would get home and open my shade to a dull black-and-white reminder of the war I despise contrasted with a vivid, luscious rendering of one of my favorite poisons. Son of a bitch.

Then the Maker's board was replaced with an advertisement for V-Cast. It seems Verizon is spending a mint on the ads for their mobile video service, regardless of the fact that they probably have about a dozen customers. I'm building the competition. I hope I'm not in the wrong business.

I have to watch V-Cast ads to view clips from The Daily Show in halting Windows Media on my lunch break too, the bastards.

In any case, the signs I have to look at when I wake seem to be sending me messages.

Now the second billboard has been changed to advertise DANGERDOOM, which might be the coolest thing ever. A mouse in a mask with crossbones.

I need to figure out how to strategically cover the parts of my view that are trying to sell me stuff. Until then I think I'll spend more time at Manita's.

Evolution and the brain

Science catches up with common sense once again: After years of thinking that the human brain (somehow) stopped evolving, we find some proof that we are in fact changing, and at a rapid pace.

Memo - Everything is evolving, all the time. We are not at a plateau, quite the contrary. Human beings have been extraordinarily successful because we have been able to create and manage change more effectively than any competition we might have had, largely through our evolved ability to visualize situations without having to literally enact them. We are now the direct instigators and products of our changing environments in a uniquely complete way. Much of the genetic and epigenetic programming which controls our morphology contains "legacy code" which evolved in response to the environments our ancestors developed in, but we are also selecting internally and externally based on successes and failures in the worlds we find our selves, our communities, and our compositional genes and parts living in now, at this moment and in the moments which led up to it. We are, each of us, unique, and each of us inhabits and directly influences a unique environment. The degree of our success in reproducing, spreading ideas via memes, and influencing the worlds around us has a profound impact on the worlds 5 minutes, 5 hours, 5000 and 5 million years from now. Our children will be better suited to deal with the worlds we are creating than we ourselves will be. This is a good thing and has always been true.

It has been proven that subtle brain structure differences exist between native speakers of different languages. Doesn't it necessarily follow that as cultures gain and lose dominance so too do potentially hard wired portions of our alleles (gene expressions)? Lords yes we are evolving. My only fear is that the rest of the world may not be able to keep up with us.

Flying Spaghetti Monster Playa Terrorizer

It occurs to me that Jason and I could make only slight modifications to our Burning Man bike hammock project to make it look like the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

1. Create hammock bike
2. Decorate it to look like FSM
3. Dress like pirates
4. ???
5. Profit!

On being social

A friend asked me in an email how I managed to keep up such a complicated social life, when she is so shy... Personally think I'm rather socially inept compared to some folks I know, but for whatever reason I managed to come up with the following sickening hippie self-help tirade/philosophical self-expression:

I think the only trick I know is to be interested and interesting. Most people have something interesting to say for themselves, believe it or not, but sometimes it takes some doing to get it out of them. I tend to lean toward being carefully assumptive. People like to talk about themselves, but I think when they're doing this they're really trying to express their individuality by relating personal success to the implied incompetence or poor choices of others. In other words, you can make fairly powerful connections with other people by 1) being the first to express lust/admiration/respect for them, then 2) listening carefully to them spin their own tales, 3) demonstrating that you understand by wittily engaging them while they're doing this, then 4) bringing something to the table that they can use. I have no idea if this works, but I think I'm homing in on a system. Really all I want to do is have fun and be a badass, both which goals still require some goodly amount of striving. As does the tertiary goal of being able to write a comprehensible sentence. If you need someone to remember you, do something memorable, even if it involves some reasonable personal embarrassment. Most people you will ever really get a chance to talk to are kind of lonely at the moment: so be nice to them, ask them insightful questions about what they're doing or what they are that makes you want to talk to them in the first place. Flirt, subtly, with everyone you meet. Realize that you only have one life and that the people you connect with in it are inexorably tied to your power, self-image, understanding of what's important in the world and opportunities for joy and realization. Don't forget who you were when you were at your best if that isn't right now, you owe that person. Fuck with other peoples' minds a little bit, most folks find it kind of entertaining and challenging. Convince the people you know to pose for pictures, everyone loves this. Touch people, hug people, smile at people, talk to strangers too much rather than too little. Be nice, be cool. Speak expressively and use your hands and eyes and smile to great effect. Effuse your conversation and interactions with other people with your personality, or the personality of the person you feel like being. Visualize the relationship you wish to occur, and play your part. Express yourself, even if you are communicating love for something the person you are talking to has discarded, or expressing distain for something the other person enjoys... at least you are being honest and worthy of their attention. Think about the strengths and interests of the person you are talking to and play to them. Focusing on weaknesses, cracks, holes and other forms of shit directs your precious attention to them and will cause them to grow - if you don't correct them while you're paying attention to them. Sparing an eye for the goal and the big picture will save you much grief. Most of the time it is more useful to focus interactions with other human beings on positive things and growth and goals and dreams. Weeds cannot compete effectively because they have poor strategy. However: don't hesitate to be surreal, be dada. Connections between things are interesting to everyone, even if they exist merely to challenge the imagination. Communicate effectively by balancing the need to connect with others and relate information with them with their relentless need for proof of self-worth, power and the information they need to succeed at their own goals. Disregard small problems which may act as facades for bigger issues. Take confidences seriously, people tell you secrets because they need to tell someone and because they are trusting you and testing you. Respect change in the people around you. Nobody is the same-body twice. Have sex with all your being. I bet that Jimi Hendrix was one hell of a lover. And left handed!

The Future

I spend almost all day dreaming about, analyzing possibilities for, and building sometimes small and sometimes sort of not so small aspects of the future. To be or not to be? To be, resoundingly!

That said, here's what mine's looking like, in no particular order:

1. Burningman. My good friend/reputed but not really hot gay lover Jason just bought a ticket.
   
   I got mine about a month ago. OH SNAP!
   
   But seriously, I'm looking forward to this like... well, like something you're really looking forward to. Just want to dip my fingers in honey, rub it all over my nipples and have it licked off by some anonymous person in a humorous costume. Beats the grind, considerably
2. Elaine is awesome.
3. Mobile stuff is taking off big time. I'm loving being a part of a completely wild set of unknowns. Makes me feel like I'm part of The Bubble, which I basically missed because I was in college. This should be more than a bullet point. Deserves own post, blog. Whatever. Buy cool phones, 'cause they are coming and v cool stuff can happen on them.

I have lots more, but am distracted. Will try to continue later...

Etiquette Tips

• It is important to be polite and shake hands with people when you meet them, regardless of their overbites or unpleasant fragrances. Run to the bathroom to wash your hands after you do this. People are gross and carry diseases.
• Sex in public should be carried out discreetly and as quietly as possible, especially if there are children or people you know present.
• If you have friends with amusing or profane ringtones, call them when you know they're at the movies. It is rude to pass up on opportunities like this and it will encourage them to remember to pay more attention to their phones.
• Executives appreciate clear communication. They also want to feel like they are one of the gang. When writing emails to executives that require their action, make it clear to them by writing the whole thing with capslock on and using lots of profanities, carets, inside jokes, and winky emoticons.
• Avert your eyes if you accidentally catch a colleague reading porn at work. Never mention it. I mean this.
• Don't read your employees' blogs. Don't put them on your blogroll. Don't talk to them or hang out with them unless you are in a meeting. It will just lead to trouble. Cock your head at them sometimes for no reason. Speak in obscure acronyms whenever possible. Laugh very loud.
• Don't bum smokes from chicks. Steal them when she's taking a leak and blame the creepy bald guy at the end of the bar.
• Complement your friends on the odd things about them that they are probably insecure about, and rub them a lot. The puppy dog look is your friend.
• Don't put up posters or bumperstickers or signs about Jesus. Nobody cares about you.
• When approaching a professional sex worker it is nice to make polite small talk about politics and the weather before getting to the good stuff.
• Update your damn blog! The alternative is just impolite.

Dammit!

2'6"

I spent an enjoyable late Friday afternoon hanging out with Jason by the rooftop pool at his apartment building. The pool is maybe 12 feet wide, 35 feet long, and two and a half feet deep. And there's a life preserver on the side, along with two(!?) DO NOT DIVE and one WE HAVE NO LIFE GUARD signs. We thought about it over Budweisers, and it occurred to us that the only conceivable situation in which you would need a life preserver at a pool of these dimensions would be if a toddler striken with dwarfism were drowning and you happened to be confined to a wheelchair, or if you were deathly allergic to water and the flailing victim was having a seizure or something. All unlikely, and fairly politically incorrect scenarios, but, you have to admit, what the fuck?

Kevin Bacon

Ok, here's a killer project... we get a bunch of friends together to shoot a documentary with Kevin Bacon about 6 degrees of seperation and starring us, thus giving us a really high scale on the Kevin Bacon scale. This will work and be delicious. Someone needs to hook this up.

Selby, maybe.

A bunch of stuff

• I'm maybe just about sort of ready to start thinking about chasing girls again. Elaine made me promise to wait until July 4 though, and she usually gives good advice.
• People who stand still and get in the way on escalators and people movers (at airports, typically) really erk me. Especially if they're... caloric storage devices.
• I got on stage at a show last night, kind of accidentally, and made up some words and singing stylings, and thought I did ok. Afterwards a "friend" told me I should "stay in the audience."
  Meh!
  I like performing, and I'm new to it, and I don't exactly focus on it, so I don't have vast quantities of "material," but who needs friends like that? It's fun to play music on equipment and sing into amps and stuff. Can I sing? Who knows!?
  Another friend told me my mic wasn't on, which made things even more... confusing.
• Revenge of the SIFF!
• I'm supposed to be in my buddy Matt's documentary tomorrow, in which I'll tell the story of my life, or some life I wish I'd led.
• I'm working on editing and reviewing another friend's first fictionish book. He was in Iraq during the war and saw a bunch of interesting things, but chose to embellish or augment the experiences he had. This will be a big seller, it's awesome.
• I would never do a reality show. I'm already in one.

Digital Boy

Man, I leave here for a second and look at the trouble you get into! I can't leave you kids alone for a second!
Having lots of fun lately:
- I got a fish. Named him Eddy. He swims in relentless clockwise circles around a Mayan idol and is only a beta, so he crashes sometimes.
- There have been a number of interesting breakthroughs at work after a fairly decent period of... congestion. Reminds me of a bad joke, but I can't tell you because I have too much class.
- Reading and critiquing a friend's first novel.
- Finishing a painting I've been working on and off for... oh, six months now. Probably represents a solid 8 hours of work right now...
- Reading a great book by my main man Fritjof Capra. It's gotten me all excited about some favorite projects that need dusting off. I'll try to put a book report up soon.
- I'm getting better looking as I age. Yes, I used to look worse.
- Redesigned Throb's header. It probably loads a little slower now, but I needed a change of venue.
- I've been remembering to have a little more fun with people. When I was younger I used to give just about everyone a hard time. At some point someone must have beaten this habit out of me, but I want it back. This has been an amusing experiment.
Um... That is all.

The Near Naked Future

I'm sometimes a little upset that our culture changes so damn slowly. I mean, sure there's always stuff going on, but men still wear ties, we haven't discovered any new colors in a while, the pope is old and white and male...

One of the things that really bugs me is the clinging remnants of Victorian culture which seem to drive American fear of public nudity. So here's the thought: If your body were scanned every time you neared a public place or building and appeared nude to whoever was monitoring it, if that scanner could detect terrorist weapons you might be carrying, wouldn't that apparent loss of privacy be worth the reduction of terrorist activities? Wouldn't you feel more comfortable being watched? This kind of thing could help change society for the better. I'd love to be a part of a society of extroverted exhibitionists (so long as we were all extremely sexy future-people).

For no good reason at all (besides my strange mood this week):

The Day After

Here's a new tradition for the day after Valentine's Day. You've just spent a bunch of time and effort on your hot lova, I propose that the day after should be reserved for girls and guys-only nights. I'm planning a guys night out tomorrow, complete with beer, whiskey, pool and/or bowling, uninhibited belching, humorous sexual anecdotes and/or exaggerations and other generally socially unacceptable behavior. You should too! I'm hoping this evolves into a great 'merican tradition so we can make Hallmark some well deserved extra pocket money.

Update! A friend-who-will-remain-anonymous points me to this similar proposal.

Colcannon

Got to eat the best Irish food so far (in my life) in a pub in Ocean Shores, Washington: A rack of lamb with colcannon, which is mashed potatoes and cabbage. Pardon my Irish, but that shit was fucking good. Also went to the ocean and made my peace with all of the craziness under a blanket of endless stars. I took a few pictures, will post them soon.

Inventions which will make the world much better, thank you very much

• A robot which hunts, eats, and is powered by locusts.
• A service (to send pictures of yourself to) which lets you know if your clothes clash today.
• A method of protection against tsunamis. I haven't actually figured this one out yet, but here are some ideas, all of them ludicrous:
  • A system of drainage tunnels underneath populated areas, which forces rising waters into underground reservoirs or aquifers.
  • A system of small nuclear weapons lining beaches, designed to explode when a tsunami approaches, causing the wave to dissipate.
  • A giant plate under the surface of the water which pivots along an axis parallel to the beach. When waters recede just prior to a tsunami, all of the weight of the water is on the seaward half of the plate, causing it to rotate down and click into place, lifting the landward side up into a temporary dam. This would just break the force of the wave, it wouldn't be able to stop the waters from rising. (Unless, of course, the landward side of the plate revealed the afore mentioned drainage system as it lifts into the air! ahHA!)
  • A warning system consisting of RFID tags clipped to the ears of dogs. A centralized computer looks for anomalous collective behavior patterns and warns the people who live in the area.
• Special underwear for use by women when menstruating. Mojo suggests I call these simply "The Rag," and that they're a horrible idea.

Well now I guess that clears everything up nicely...

The problem with Fight Club is that most of the characters didn't look beat up enough.

The problem with this country is selfishness masquerading as ambition.

The problem with Star Wars was its success.

The same thing for just about everything that's ever succeeded... Much easier to manage mediocrity I suppose. Fat heads yield small reality tunnels yield fat heads.

The problem with transcendant ecstacy is reality.

The problem with family is how much a part of you they are.

Most things that work well are designed to adapt and improve. The problem with most things lies in the designer's definition of the environment their work is created to prosper in.

The problem with me is that I traded my soul to the devil in a poorly worded contract.

The problem with you isn't clear to me. That doesn't mean that it doesn't exist, but it might.

Airplanes

Got on the plane at 6:30 in the morning. Put my seatbelt on incorrectly, but the flight attendant played a helpful video which clued me in.

The plane took off uneventfully, but soon was hijacked by a guy with a nail file and his partner who claimed to be wearing a hatband made out of C4. Luckily, a fireman (who looked exactly like Nick Cage) got up about half-way through the flight and regained control of the plane through the skillful wielding of a knitting needle his wife had snuck on board inside the empty shell of a laptop computer. The plane got back on course and the rest of the trip seemed to be going pretty normally until about 5 minutes before we landed and somebody who had left their cell phone turned on got a phone call, reducing the plane's electronics to molten ooze. The jet engines exploded into a twin balls of flame. The people manning the exit row doors didn’t know what they were doing. I couldn’t remember where the floatation devices were. Improperly stowed carry-on baggage smashed skulls willy-nilly. Oxygen masks hypnotized us. Etc, etc.

PS. My cell phone is always “turned on.” Pass it on.

Seriously though, I was selected for a full security search both on my way to Lansing, MI and on my return trip. I discovered on my return that I had gotten through both searches with a loaded X-Acto knife in my carry-on luggage with about 20 extra blades. Good thing I'm just a (mostly) harmless designer guy.

Uncanny Valleys, etc.

Okay, a whole bunch of things:

- Saw The Incredibles. Awesome. I know I’m late to the game here, but I fully expected this to rock and it did. Easily the best action movie I’ve seen in a couple of years.

- The Uncanny Valley. I’ve had a couple of conversations about this recently. I love it when stuff likes this rises, becomes more than a conversational meme and actually gets a wikipedia entry. Generally, the “uncanny valley” is a term used to describe the awkward almost-reality quality which animated characters and robots have to surpass as they get closer to appearing realistic. As characters approach realism they trigger negative emotional responses… Kind of like Al Gore.
I really like this model, and I suspect it applies well to a whole slew of things: why do we distrust our neighbors (blue states vs. red states) when, if you get down to it, 90-something percent of us share the same basic opinions?
How about girls? It’s the women closest to what you are really attracted to who are the hardest to allow yourself to get close to, the biggest heartaches. The girls who don’t matter are simple and dissatisfying. The girls who do matter are either The One or a whole world of negative soul-destroying craziness (through no fault of their own). It’s their own attractiveness that makes them so goddamn dangerous. How can an imperfect fit feel so good and just not work out? The Uncanny Valley.
As a side note I should add these things, which also fit the model: cafeteria food, some kinds of masturbation, late model Bob Dylan.

Happy 50th to the pixel!

- Fundamentalists of all flavors should be sauced, barbequed and enjoyed with Californian cabernets. More on this in a later post.

- I have the strange desire to do something likely to break me, like surfing too-big waves, skateboarding down steep hills, traveling to Cuba, looking into her eyes.

- My project to make a photo family tree of my family will be a success. Inspired by a postcard in Cabinet magazine (incidentally, the best magazine ever), I suggested we document our family reunion by taking a picture of all of the attendees with their heads protruding through a big giant family tree printed on a piece of fabric. My parents, ever supporting, took the initiative to procure such an uber-chart and cut holes in all the right places. Barring unforeseen circumstances a picture of me and my brothers, cousins, etc. inside a family tree will appear on this site in about a week.

Deep Thoughts

The bottom of the barrel is infinitely deep.

The less competent often perceive modesty as a weakness.

Sometimes loyality keeps you together. Other times it blows you apart.

History is context sensitive. As is taste. As is love. As are people.

By my observations, only a small minority of people take the time to admire a stunning sunset, an eclipse or the northern lights. It's almost always worth it.

A majority of people think they are better than average drivers. See also: friends. See also: lovers.

Conversely, almost everybody is a better dancer than they think, a better singer than they know, a better artist than anyone has ever told them, more rare and amazing than they can ever admit. Our culture could be interpreted as a deep web of psychoses.

Story Seeds

• A woman dies and leaves behind a man who has visions of her ghost. He spends the rest of his life getting closer and closer to recreating her.

• The Devil performs oral sex on a woman for eternity.

• A man is engineered who has no sense of pain. A time, deep in his adolescence, he is curious and peels back the skin on his face, starting around one of his eyes. He pulls back his own skin until his entire head is staring back at him in the mirror, gleaming muscle and blood. He finds it beautiful and rips the skin off his entire body. If he flexes he can squirt. He wraps himself in a shower curtain.

• There is a man who hears new symphonies in his head. He can’t write fast enough to get them down, so he goes through an operation to implant a chip which interfaces his brain with a computer recording device. Every subtle note that goes through his head is transferred to his software. He listens to his music. Some kind of recursive feedback loop occurs and his head explodes.

• Humanity overpopulates Earth and succeeds in terraforming Mars. Martians make better jazz and cultivate unusual flowers, but the best wine comes from Australia.

• An asteroid hits the planet and kills everyone except for you and me and maybe a couple of weirdoes. It’s lonely.

• The red states band together and declare independence against the blue states. Civil war ensues. The borders of the world become insolvent. Genetically-determined groups declare a new kind of non-local sovereignty. As do groups of like mind, groups of like culture, gays and lesbians. Everybody has The Bomb. A new kind of order/disorder memescape.

• A sex-obsessed woman is jailed for her indiscriminate acts of other-pleasuring. She can seduce any male. She sees herself as a tool to pleasure men. She falls helplessly in love with a guard at the jail who is a eunuch and cannot be pleased, but the irony escapes her.

• You keep dying. But you wake up, as if it didn’t happen. Every day you die a surprise death and every morning you wake up. You aren’t scared any more, you start to control it, you start to play with it. You set up your own deaths. You are immortal, but the catch is: you have to continue dying. Maybe it happens that you start killing yourself the way you like best as soon as you wake up everyday. Maybe it gets faster and faster and faster.

Maintaining an election

Anybody want to place bets on the presidential election? As I'll be doing live-ish coverage of it tomorrow night, I thought I'd post a general call for reckless community projection.

Mine:

Electoral votes: Kerry 277, Bush 252
Popular vote: Kerry 50%, Bush 47%

So, basically, Kerry wins it in a relative landslide. I'm a positive thinker.
Of course, regardless of my optimism, I think it would be almost as bad for our country as a Bush re-election should another election be so close that it comes down to the Senate or Supreme Court. Colorado could be a deciding factor. I haven't seen the latest poll numbers regarding their initiative (to split the electoral votes designated by that state proportially according to votes - beginning w/ this election), but if this passes I think it could throw a few Kerry's way.

Site du jour tomorrow: Electoral Vote Predictor.

Dangerous Dreams for a Dangerous World

A few daring predictions:

Kerry will win the election. The "October Surprise" is the weapons stock that the Bush war machine failed to secure. Kerry will talk this up more in the last days as things get exciting.

The Red Sox win the World Series. Chalk the curse up as yet another piece of obscure baseball trivia. Reverse the Curse t-shirts, yet another piece of baseball ephemera worth lots of money to somebody who isn't me.

Somebody famous will die soon.

I'll go to Michigan in mid-November. Come back with a refreshed sense of my place in the world and the history we are making together. A few new books under my belt. Some good ideas.

Speaking of which, Elaine and Mark will come back renewed and excited and hungover from CTIA, but they won't talk about it much.

I'll get my shit together.

Holes in metal

I noticed today that some of the motorcycles parked behind my work have cooling holes drilled into the brake disks.

Here's the question of the day: If metal expands when it gets hot, as this disk heats up do the holes get bigger in diameter, or smaller? I imagine I should know this from somewhere deep in my education, but I can't remember. I'm also interested in finding out how the engineers behind this pick the right sized hole, why the holes are placed how they are (they were different on every bike I saw) and if these lessen the life of the brake pads in any way. Maybe I'll ask metafilter.

Update! I posted this question on Ask Metafilter. No great concensus yet, but interesting comments.

Update Again! Sounds like the holes get bigger. Neat.

This is Reality

I want to create a reality television show about an old folks home or a home for insane people or invalids. Instead of watching too-pretty hand-picked prom queens fighting over boy(or girl)meat I'd much rather see old or otherwise messed up real people dealing with the struggle for survival in worlds beyond their control. Maybe there should be weekly challenges?

I remember reading once that the Roman emperor Nero once filled the Colesium with the percieved dregs of society, cripples and the altitudinally challenged and so forth, and made them battle to the death with plentifully supplied clubs and sticks and poles and stuff. Clearly we're beyond that. But what if you were to mix this model with a little bit of love and a whole lot of Sim City?

Spastic waves of deliciousness

I am not usually the first to find new things, at least within the crowd I run in. I find things when WE ALL find them.

I have a life which has details which are only interesting to those who are in it. Blogging to me is a little like telling a friend about a dream you've had: it only works if it's outstandingly new or contrary to their experience or, even better, if your audience is a character in it.

My tendency is to focus on the strange fringes of my experience, in the hope that they may make connections for my readers that otherwise would never have happened.

This post, however, will bring you no delight if you don't know me. This post is purely about myself and the current state of wary but unabashed joy I'm finding myself inhabiting.

Continue if you care...

I'm freaking out. What an odd thing. I've found the most wonderful girl... I can't even think of her without getting all 1980's lovesong. Simply wonderful. Happy, great, good.

There. Now I've done it, said it, felt it, been there.

Phew.

But I'll tell you what: New love, new people... this is about as good as it gets. Life has been amazing to me thus far. Complicated, but amazing. And it keeps getting better. We are the luckiest people ever to have lived and I am one of us. Send me your suicidal friends, your weary, your bored temp workers, etc. etc, I'll show them the error of their ways in a dance on a bar.

It's not that I don't have my problems, my dark side. I will never understand some of the things I've seen. I'll never understand what history has seen. This shit used to be my sole impetus toward creativity.

But I will say this: I think it's getting better, all of it. And Tris is pretty cool.

Your little friend

Take...

Video Realistic Face Animations

...Add...

an interface that can see what you're looking at

...And a dash of IBM's recently open-sourced voice-recognition technology...

Voila! A computer interface you can speak contextual instructions to.

I could see doctors using something like this to speak with "the surgeon"...

Noise

There is nothing better than the death of a bad idea.
I revel naked in the rotting compost of my past.
I want to drink the salt of truth until my body revolts and evacuates the last bits of everything bad that's ever happened.
My taste for expensive things will make me wealthy at the exact time I cease caring.
In the style of our times, we are experts of many things that have stopped mattering.
We have met the enemy and she has caused some of us to lose our heads.
The fundamental genius of nature will remain compelling forever.
And so on and so forth

On weblogs

Almost everybody who reads this page, as far as I can tell, is either an active blogger or comes from other blogs (the exception being, from reviewing my logs, strange search queries coming in from Google).

Anyway, I've been pondering limiting this blog to a certain concept or theme, to compell me to actually frequently post in it. Most folks are friends, most friends know me. I certainly post too infrequenly for most of your tastes. The strange thing is, with most of my friends, in conversation I am rarely the "hey this happened to me" guy. I tend to more readily respond and react to stories with stories. Blogging does not afford this opportunity.

There is, however, the chance to achieve a more readily updatable style through the focusing of a blog's subject matter. My friend often says "The creator creates containers containing creation". In the creation of this container I seek a means to better define its walls by limiting posts to a defined subject matter.

So I'm appealing to you, dear reader, for votes and suggestions about where I should take this monster.

Some ideas:

1. - A photoblog. I'm a pretty avid photographer but my pictures are weird and of possibly limited interest. Certainly it's unlikely you'd see artful black and white nudes. More likely are artful black and white chunks of random human flesh. I'm convinced there's a difference.

2. - A moblog. I have a cool phone. I guess I could join the ranks of my good friends who keep blogs of their daily lives as told through what they pointed their phone at.

3. - A log focused on developments in genetic engineering, design, growth, the visual gestalt, technology, art. Actually, that's probably the closest thing to a description of what Throb would turn into should its current form continue to mutate. Stuff I like. Too much to limit my focus much. I don't want to be BoingBoing, I want to read it.

4. - Something random. Ovarian cysts. Innovations in the space of cacti. Seattle artists. Something that could become a reseach field, a new interest. Lots of things are possible here.

5. - Found pictures. I've collected interesting and cool pictures off of the web for over 6 years. I have a ton of gems, but many of them are copyrighted or otherwise kind of iffy to use. Should I care? It is, after all, only a journal...

6. - A blogblog. What's worthwhile about what other people are writing about.

7. - Poems. I like to write strange shit. I could do it daily.

8. - others?

Let me know what you think in the comments section of this post. Also feel free to compliment or berate me or whatever. You know who you are.

Just for the record...

extraLEGAL DISCLAIMER:

I never meant to hurt your feelings.

The world isn't fair. Believe me, it comes around both ways.

I've thought about it.. I would kill any one American to save the lives of 10,000 poor third world-type people. I just would.

I wish I could hang out with you more.

Yes, I think about you. At least generally.

All of my ex-girlfriends are fucking awesome.

I probably owe you something in some karmic sense or another.

Mentally disabled people are sometimes even cuter and more worthwhile than your precious pets.

And vice versa.

Waiting for Corporation

A man cuts a whole in a woman
and climbs inside of her
He curls like a fetus against
her violent quaking heart

and

Unable to sleep, he is compelled to
immerse himself in her further

First massaging, then eating he eats the
living majesty of her body
from the inside out

He strips her inside completely
leaving only shell woman of the woman and woman devoured
separate from her self: strong and powerful encompassing.

They are synonymous and beautiful and blissful. An orchestra. Ecosystiod.

The man's belly, though, becomes uncomfortable;
Overfull of her.
Her movements are now his movements,
Her expressions become his
Their differences are crystal.

She bends down and orgasms herself out
Relieved and whole and empty.