It's gonna be HOT today, ayep. First hot day of the year, in the low 90s. Then, later, HELL!!!
I dunno about the last entry. It's kinda weird. I spent a lot of time editing it, and I'm especially unsure about my paragraph differentiating the motives of Google vs the motives of whoever is actually selling the products that you see ads for. I was trying to illustrate that it's irrelevant to Google how well advertising actually does work, because only the companies buying the adspace have to believe it works; Google just collects their money, and gives the thumbs up. There's another point I was trying to make but was having trouble getting it to come out right. Something like, a company selling Beanie Babies believes in their product, and worked hard on their product, and is ego-attached to it. So, they sort of HAVE to advertise, because their ego -- as if the company were a person -- demands it...THIS IS MY PRODUCT, THIS IS ME, IT IS GOOD, I AM GOOD. I dunno. I ended up taking that attempt of a point out and will just throw paint at it here.
I'm still adapting to my SDFless existence and I am very aware that I always come crawling back, like any and all renouncers. In part I'm even typing for my SDF audience since they are pretty much the only ones reading (if they even are). I hope I have some diversified, although undoubtedly small, audience, but maybe not. Maybe it's just Zilog and Eam. Hi.
Maybe the problem is that I keep looking for ANSWERS -- for some kind of final analysis, that is not forthcoming and never will be because it's all a buncha bewshit, man. I keep trying to solve the problem or get on the right course or some such nonsense, but the fact is that I exist and one day I will die and that's that. Maybe I should build giant sculptures. I will!
There are three major problems that impede successful advertising:
As I edit I fantasize that there's a one to one correspondence between the above three problems and the above three solutions. If this were the case, I would say that logic overrides discomprehension for obvious reasons, beauty overrides esotericism for less obvious but still intuitive (to me) reasons, and flattery overrides hostility because they're both related to ego but mostly because I like one to one correspondences.
I suppose that "advertising doesn't work on me" is a common refrain, which in turn generates smirking responses among marketers to the effect of "if you believe this, then you're my favorite demographic." Indeed, if you can read English, then advertising potentially works on you, but that doesn't mean advertising works well due to hostility, esotericism, and discomprehension. Advertising is a statistical phenomenon which can seem counterintuitive, like LLMs that rely on billions of words or evolution that relies on billions of years; in all three the systemic behavior emerges from large numbers. In other words, there are lots of people and lots of ads, and some of them are going to land somewhere. If your return is $0.01 you just have to advertise 100 times to make a buck.
d00d i just wrote about all SDFers but i bahleeted it.
BIG CHANGE is afoot. I redid my streaming show as a pure podcast, and I have quit all social media, give or take. I soften that statement because it's hard to say exactly what constitutes social media, and even among things that mostly do not, like Google News, we find some of the same issues: emotional manipulation as well as fast and shallow engagement, to be precise and concise. This may be my imagination but I believe that I do feel better already. However, a blog and a podcast sort-of count as social media, and I don't know what to do about this, if anything. STAND BY.
BTW here's my new definition of GOD: A non-corporeal entity who recreates all human brains after their deaths so that, until proton decay, they will experience joy or suffering, depending, respectively, on whether or not they had accepted the aforementioned as fact.
I NEEEEEED to write about my most recent spiritual revelation, or perhaps non-spiritual revelation: it's turtles all the way down. In other words there's no Brahman or Ground of Being -- no fundamental or absolute at the root of it all. This, my new conviction, comes from looking at string theory and quantum field theory conceptually, without doing math, as a philosophy student might. I imagine that the hope of contemporary string theorists might be that with mathematics they have arrived at "the ground of being": that string theory, specifically M theory, which successfully unifies the five previously extant string theories, is the "theory of everything" -- that it unifies quantum mechanics, which works at small scales, with general relativity, which works at large scales and frames gravity as the bending of 4D spacetime.
The descent into pure math that occurs at the edges of modern physics might be an indication of the limits of our perception and/or cognition, as humans, rather than mathematical objects themselves being at the root of it all, annihilating or creating particles to create our reality while themselves existing or meta-existing on a sort of cosmic sheet of loose-leaf paper. This sort of thing leads us to a human-centric "information theory" type of world view in which our own consciousness is the fundamental object, which of course is a mirror of the grand pillar of Hinduism (consciousness is the fundamental reality, aka Brahman). But no, I say.
Instead, my intuition is that if you were to "look at" supposedly fundamental objects like fields, strings, or quarks, with adequate "magnification," you would find complexity and substructure -- and furthermore that this fractal microcosm does not end. And, you can look in the other direction: our universe appears to be a finite bubble without edges that has been expanding since the Big Bang, but it seems naive and hubristic to me to assume this is all there is, especially when you look at how basic and specific it all seems from a certain perspective: 92 naturally occurring elements arranging themselves into balls of plasma with smaller balls of rock or gas orbiting them, and on some of these balls life emerges and posts on the internet.
The obvious solution to that rather disappointingly underwhelming specificity is the multiverse, which is one interpretation of wavefunction collapse in quantum mechanics (or so I read in the papers). But anyway, the point is that there is OTHER STUFF beyond the familiar layout of the cosmos: the inky black void of gas and dust and nebulae and black holes and so on. We may not have access to the OTHER STUFF in a physical way, but I feel like it is there. After the Big Bang, as matter and energy took shape, things went a certain way: quarks, gluons, four fundamental forces, etc. But, things could have gone an infinite number of others ways, resulting in incomprehensibly different realities. I believe these realities exist, or may exist, if you like. So, there are multiple Big Bangs giving rise to different universes in this multiverse, but...there must be infinitely many other multiverses, themselves within some other larger structure, and on up through the next turtle and the turtles above it!
The necessity of a God, or Ultimate, or Absolute, or Ground of Being, or Brahman, seems like a fallacy of human cognition; according to the artist or artisan, things have an origin or a base substance. That is the way we think and the way we deal with the world around us. But I don't think that's how things really are. Instead, we are suspended at an arbitrary point in this micro-macro infinity where you can look in either direction and find never-ending fractal complexity. If you want to call this whole thing a pantheistic (but not panentheistic) "God" then fine, but it's not a necessary word for me unless I've been eating magic mushrooms.
"But how do you explain consciousness?" I don't! The seeming spiritual all-importance of consciousness is a function or artifact of the self-reflexive nature of it; consciousness is just another thing in the universe, not the everything of the universe. It only seems to be the latter to us because we're perceiving the world, and consciousness, through consciousness itself, so it's inherently strange-loop'y and confusing, and generates the Brahmanistic intuitive illusion of fundamentality.
Ima talk about GUNS. On my walk this morning, I thought up an imaginary conversation in which some evaluator asked me, "What's the first thing that comes to mind when you hear 'guns'?" I tried this mental game on myself apart from my simulation (in which I had replied "loud" in order to steer my evaluator's thoughts away from my potentially violent nature) and my "first thing" was "Walther P38", which might in fact be a World War II airplane. See how divorced from it all I am?
"Guns" is a psychologically massive topic for me, and for many others -- presumably not just for Americans, but I'd say especially for Americans. As I said, I replied "loud" in this morning's fantasy dialog, and that's my reasonable answer even if it isn't strictly my "first thing that comes to mind." But it's true: loudness is a big part of my experience with guns. There is widespread hearing damage in the military and among veterans, but there's no easy fix since you need to be able to hear each other on the battlefield and so cannot wear normal hearing protection; maybe some electronic version that lets in speech but filters out bangs? I'm sure they are way ahead of me, but they didn't have this in the Vietnam War, and as a consequence my uncle wears twin hearing aids and still can barely hear.
After "loud" comes "regulated." Guns are legally entangled and cumbersome and you can't just buy one like you can buy a hammer; you have to sign, pay fees, take tests, wait around, and be on a list. Another word is "cool" -- guns are kind of cool, visually and mechanically, in the manner of a Lego set. They come apart and back together again and feel good and smell nice and look neato frito...warm, oily, heavy metal, clicking to you softly and gently. They are fun toys to fondle, apart from shooting them. And the thing is, guns are pretty simple -- they are unpowered mechanisms made of interlocking parts; the real magic is in the ammunition. Many artisans can make a gun; in "Carlito's Way" they talk about homemade zip guns, I've heard of 3D printed guns causing a stir, and we can see that a gun is a tube -- that's basically it; other components like magazines and triggers are superfluous to that essentiality. When I was a kid I LOVED guns in a way I now do not, similarly to the way I LOVED video games and now do not. I desperately wanted a bb gun, and I had an illustrated encyclopedia of firearms from which I copied drawings. My suspicion is that this joi du vivre never fades, as it faded from me, from gun guys, and they remain 10 years old in a sense, not that there's anything wrong with that. "Danger tube" is my new word for guns.
"KILL," and relatedly, "POWER," was the word this morning's imaginary evaluator was fishing for. The power to kill! This is why guns enjoy their philosophical or metaphysical location, why people have so many thoughts and feelings around them, and why the regulations are there. There's been libertarian endgame speculation on what happens to a society in which practically everyone is armed (walking around with a gun), and one consensus is that that society becomes a polite society. I chirp back that this is not really a flavor of politeness I want (one based on fear). I have heard that carrying a gun can change the way you see yourself and your relationship to the world, and not always in a good way -- that it can produce a hypervigilant anxiety.
I don't own a gun, he foolishly announces to the world. That's another thing gun advocates say: if you are truly anti-gun, advertise loudly that there are no guns in your home and that you welcome all kinds of unexpected visitors. I understand this point, but I'm not sure the world really is that dangerous and violent, at least all the time, everywhere. Of course you don't need a gun til you do, but is having one worth the psychological toll? I'm sure it varies.
I strongly suspect most gun guys aren't carrying, owning, fondling, oiling, cleaning, and reciting specs out of some grave sense of social responsibility, but rather out of fear or intellectualized fear, and because they want the power to kill. A gun transforms you into a superhero such that your will be done (unless the other guy has one too). Having a gun at home is different than carrying one around, and maybe the first is not so burdensome, but as far as I know having a gun in your home is more likely to lead to accidents and disasters, rather than stop a violent invader. I'm sounding anti-gun here but I can pretty much assure you I am probably, mostly not -- do what thou wilt; I'm only raising negatives for me, myself. Plus I worry that my gun would get stolen or lost and generate more of the aforementioned cumbersome legal entanglements.
If I had a gun I would hold it all the time. I would keep it nearby, load it and unload it, take it apart and put it back together, and maybe once or twice go to the range, but as I said, LOUD. That's why they make hearing protection. I wonder why mass shooters don't wear it.
I've been wanting to write about recycling for a while (me...ME...ME!!!). But my thesis is not what you might predict, knowing me as you do! EVERYONE KNOWSSSSSS that Penn and Teller "debunked" recycling as inefficacious; many or most people are now informed that recycling is a flawed process. However, I think recycling remains a moral litmus test, even though, and perhaps somehow because of the fact that it amounts to far from perfect resource reclamation; you stand there, small plastic object in hand, and wonder "into which bin shall I place this?" The whole universe comes down to that moment and while it does not matter much on its own, cumulatively, it can, or might, or will.
For recycling to be extremely effective, manufacturing would have to mostly stop, and what remained would have to be tightly controlled. Certain materials, notably aluminum cans, recycle well -- there's not a lot of energy lost or cost incurred there. You can use a can, send it back, and cheaply make a good looking and functional new can from old cans. This is unfortunately not true of plastic, as Penn and Teller loudly tell us. You can somewhat "recycle" plastic, as in, melt it into a slurry that you can then mould into rough objects, but those objects are not going to appear and function as if they were made out of high quality material; they will not look good and consumers won't buy them, and they will not work as well as objects made from new plastic, and while the plastic is melted down the recycling plant is belching carbon into the air. This is why a near-perfectly functioning recycling system would depend on restrictive laws, similar to the ones that make fentanyl illegal. But I think wanting perfection is the trap (or the excuse) that Penn and Teller, and other recycling detractors, fall into.
From my standpoint, the failings of recycling look like they take place in the neighborhood bin. My household cleans and dries its recycled objects and tries to make sure they are of the right type. Our neighbors, with whom we share a bin, mostly do not seem to do this; composite objects like electric tea kettles, objects coated in food or dirt or whatever, and plastic garbage bags full of cans or bottles regularly get tossed in. I don't know how this client-end problem compares in seriousness to the problem of recycling itself -- especially of plastics -- being difficult and costly and ultimately sort of borderline not worth it, in terms of energy and environmental cost, but it's clear that the failings of recycling are born by independent entities and so are harder to fix.
One question I had often posed to myself is: if the plant tells you to wash and dry your recyclables and make sure your paper isn't soiled or wet, but you are tossing it all into a bin with other stuff that is soiled and wet, then what's the point? I think it's matter of "do what you can," and unfortunately also "pass the buck" -- 1) recycling plants can't control what consumers put in the bin so they do the best they can with what they are given. 2) Consumers do the best they can with the time and energy and information they have. 3) Manufacturers do the best they can in terms of the demands of capitalism and in the absence of restrictions. Since the failings of the whole system can be partly blamed on the two other participants, each of the three participants has a tendency to throw its hands up and declare it to be "not my problem."
It's similar to conceptual problems conservatives seem to have around wearing breathing masks during a pandemic. No it's not perfect...yes some pathogens seep in...no not all masks are created equal...yes the government is communistically telling you, the individual, to do it for the betterment of society, the collective. But statistically, in the aggregate, the more people do it, the more transmission will be reduced. It amounts to a problem in American culture: we tend to see everything in libertarian terms, in terms of the individual, and looking at behavior as a statistical phenomenon is seen as some kind of imprisoning sin. Furthermore, relatedly, we seem to tend toward black or white, either/or, all or nothing thinking: "either everyone gets sick or no one does, and if you can't stop everyone from getting sick, what's the point of doing anything at all?" Like it or not, there are a lot of people, they often behave en masse to great and terrible effect, and curtailing that effect can be useful even if you can't completely eliminate it.
No need for totally draconian laws, but only slightly draconian laws: forbid manufacturers from making products that cannot be easily and cheaply and effectively recycled, except for industrial or medical use cases in which tight properties are required. But for things like a tub of Lego bricks: make them out of a substance that is designed to be recycled regardless of how pretty it looks and whether or not it's going to fall apart in a year or two. In the meantime, research ways medical and industrial parts can be made of a recyclable substance without compromising safety, lifespan, low friction, or whatever attribute you need. Make it clear, and simple, what objects can be recycled, not only through information but through manufacturing -- don't fabricate things like milk cartons made of veneered paper with plastic spouts built in.
Before all this happens, and after all this happens, you should recycle, even though the process is not perfect and probably never can be. For one thing, you don't know what's going on at the recycling plant, and they may have improved their methods; at the consumer end your only responsibility is to look and see what can be recycled, clean those objects up, dry them off, and put them in the bin. It's a Kantian exercise: act in the way everyone should be acting. Even though recycling is imperfect or even very imperfect at the moment, it does something, only at the cost of your time and effort. Plus, I accept the feel-good measure. "Virtue signalling"? Sure, why not?
Ok so I was reading old blogs and it is truly staggering how many entries begin with "I." It's so much that it's funny, or tragic, or something -- some obvious psychological commentary. NARCISSISM!!! In my defense it's a diaristic blog. But, the entries where IIIIIIIIII write about something other than what I did or what my thoughts and feelings are, are better, although OTHERS have said the opposite. Who gives a shit, ultimately, or that may be the conclusion long before the ultimate transpires.
BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG
BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG
BLOG!
BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG BLOG
I just don't know about my last entry's random Wikipedia image. For one thing it taxes Wikipedia's servers. But, my blog is low traffic. But, these are yearly archives so the current one gets hit a lot over time. But, I am true to my ethos of keeping my blog all text and therefor low cost to SDF's servers. Does this make me a sociopath in that I care about my or my computer club's resources but not the resources of others? The Dream Eaters image on the 13th is hosted on Imgur(.com), which is somehow not as bad as parasitizing Wikipedia(.org). Whatever; fuck it. These minuscule ethical quandaries serve two purposes: 1) intellectual masturbation, and 2) distracting from real ethical quandaries, like deciding whether or not to overeat!
I often look at the clock during the hellscape of midday (9am-5pm) and think "what am I going to DOOOOOO today???" Bad habit! Just be in the moment, man. Capitalist conservatives would say GIT A JEAORB. I think about restarting my meditation practice but it was sort of silly: I sat for 20 minutes with my eyes closed and did not voluntarily think about anything, and it seems like the associated meditative state is not dependent on that particular activity. I thought I noticed some benefits but then later on they were not as forthcoming. I started meditating during my evacuation during the Caldor Fire in '21, and quit after an internet fight.
I guess it's what the sages say: it's not what happens, but rather what you do with your own mind that matters. For one thing you can't control what happens so why focus on it? But you do have some ability to do what you want with your own mind, category errors notwithstanding. You can be aware of the thoughts involuntarily coursing through your head, and you can even stop thinking them to a degree or at least put a porous tourniquet on them. But maybe the real task is passivity -- to be an observer. One thing I often don't like about psychology and religion is that they seem to imply that you are "doing it wrong" -- that your natural way of being is somehow in error and that you need to be constantly on your toes in a self aware project of self discipline to "be" in the correct way. But maybe this is fine and I'm just framing it badly here, as some kind of burden when in fact it is ultimately easier to be in the consciousness or accept Jesus or whatever. Maybe it's not so much the position of humanity being off kilter in some way that bothers me, but the often resultant scolding and coercion, that I don't like.
Speaking of "you are not right," the other day I drove to a discussion group on a book about sin.
GPT summary: "Original Blessing: Putting Sin in Its Rightful Place" (2016) by Danielle Shroyer challenges the traditional Christian doctrine of original sin and instead emphasizes the idea of original blessing. She argues that humanity is fundamentally blessed by God from the beginning, rather than inherently sinful, and that this shift in perspective can lead to a more life-giving and hopeful faith.
The progressive church doesn't like sin, I surmise mostly because the concept is used to attack and marginalize oppressed groups (notably, LGBT and "recovering Catholics"). I take an evolutionary position on sin or "sin": humans brains evolved to cope with a hunter-gatherer lifestyle that is far removed from what we do now in technological modernity, and this mismatch produces mental problems. To help, we need some kind of calming exercise or existential balm to apply, which is the purpose of religion as I see it. That's what "sin" is, to me: things being not quite right, and then awareness of this inherent problem, and finally doing some kind of practice to solve or soothe it.
I am a little afraid of dying without ever having uncovered the real answers and having lead a meaningless life but it could be this is inevitable. People way smarter than me, and not only mathematicians and programmers who can solve Rubik's cubes and do other unimportant-seeming "stupid human trick" kinds of mental ability I tend to dismiss, but people way deeper than me, don't get all the answers and thereby arrive at some always-contented state. Maybe the grand error is trying to avoid a meaningless life! That rings true. Welp, I can go on now.
I used to do more. I drove to Oregon and elsewhere, and made little random trips out to sit in some random parking lot at 5am. I don't really do any of that anymore. It's possible some or most of that behavior was inspired by marijuana, but possibly not -- these days, when I smoke, I don't feel that push to go do stuff and experience reality. I wonder if I somehow damaged myself with all my weed smoking and I now have a generally shallower overall experience as a result; that would be a shame. I might just be aging.
I should go out today, maybe look at art galleries. ARRRRTTTTTT!!!!!!!!!!
I'm back on coffee. I think it makes me less sad and more inspired, but angrier. Angry is bad because I may lash out at others. Here is a random image from Wikipedia (it might take a moment to load, and might not work at all!):
Disregard the last entry. My work, my art, my ouvre, just isn't as good as The Dream Eaters'. I have always tended to think I was unsuccessful because of some unimportant misstep rather than my work itself not being enough. In high school I thought I was a genius and supercool but no one could see it because x y z reason, but a better explanation for my non-celebrity is that the work or the self was not good enough. If the work is good enough, culture will change to fit around it and doing the right dance or whatever will match what you do naturally and did already. It's hard to accurately evaluate your own work -- either it sucks or it's brilliant, usually, depending on the mood.
Ok so don't disregard yesterday's entry entirely, but only bear in mind that biting analyses of hipsterdom and fine arts culture are often done by people who couldn't draw the right lines for admission into the club; "those who can't do, teach," I guess. It's a tautology that no work is bad but rather the containing culture is mismatched to it, but this, here, is a different discussion more related to the portfolio that contains the work being messy or cheap, or, as in the case of the Dream Eaters, annoying hipster behavior being secondary to, or even a function of, good art. Maybe just disregard the last paragraph; I thought about deleting it but I'll leave it up as a testament to my tiny pp.
Searching Youtube for "Satan is Lord," as one does, I discovered a new musical arteest: a pair called The Dream Eaters (Bandcamp page), by way of one of their short pieces (Youtube video). But let's focus on a standard length song which has become my favorite:
I Am Bleeding Internally
by The Dream Eaters
I am bleeding internally
and also externally
What did you do to me?
There's no air in my lungs
and I'm crying on the floor of a Walmart store
crying on the floor of a Walmart store
I don't even know who I am anymore.
My blood is all over.
My blood is all over the floor.
Something you said yesterday
is stuck in my head.
Now it's crawled inside of me
eating at my flesh.
I was a god
but then I fell
condemned to eternally
living in hell.
I'm on this sad little mission
to make everyone despise you.
I'm sitting on this barstool til
I find someone to cry to.
Karma will come
and take me out
condemned to eternally
living in hell.
This is hipster kitsch hyper self aware smirking fine art parody ironic Brooklyn bullshit. And they are actually from Brooklyn! Not only that, but they are bartenders...bartenders from Brooklyn. It's like this was all crafted on purpose as some kind of meta2 thing: you have just being, then awareness of being which is hipster, and then awareness of hipster, then levels and levels on up. I thought hipster was dead, but I guess it maybe is not. Visiting Portland maybe nine years ago, I was interested in digging up hipsters but once I was there my counterpsychology softened and I joined my resident friend's wife's position of "Ehhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh 'hipster' isn't really a thing (anymore)." It's insidious; again, like consciousness or stars in the sky: vanishes when you look at it. And I think there's something to hipsterdom amounting to toxic or recursive or extreme self awareness, which is, of course, related to consciousness. I digress.
Wikipedia has an article on "hipster" but that won't work because you can't just come out and say it. It's like what I gestured at in the first sentence of the above paragraph: not totally honest or earnest, while hurling a "fuck you" at whoever doesn't get it or appreciate it on the correct level, or understand that it functions on many levels. I am above you, I am smarter than you, I am cooler than you, and I am making fun of you for being a big dumb schlub who doesn't understand art.
But I think these two Dream Eaters are more innocent than that -- they are products of their environment and not so Machiavellian. If you interviewed them they wouldn't just smirk or throw feces, but would respond honestly that they want to make music and that they "like" the theme of Satan or blood or Tanya or whatever. And they'd be telling the truth, I think, approximately -- all the apparent double meaning hipster dishonesty is baked in to their Brooklyn bartendery 'hood, and they can't avoid it any more than a 14 year old boy in 1987 could avoid wearing a pair of "jams."
I went to art school. Twice! No, more than that...I've spent my life in art school. Come to think of it, I believe, at my highest level, the MFA, that most of the hipstery coloration had faded or was pushed to the side by intellectualism. Irony or "irony" was more an undergrad thing, maybe. But I think a lot of the Brooklyn hipster phenomenon was and is sourced directly from fine art culture. Fine art has to do something to partition, while retaining value, from movies, comics, games, etc, which tend to be higher cost, higher care, and higher complexity, and that "something" ends up being "the mental or emotional or cultural position of the artist." You thereby get an implosion into an infinitely recursive black hole of self awareness, that results in a kind of deadpan smirk and a lot of hand gestures, and usage of the word "discourse" surrounded by postmodernizers like sort-of, kind-of, maybe, somewhat, a pastiche of, a simulacra of, etc. I believe Brooklyn has absorbed this stance as a regional culture and now people are born into it and do it naturally and don't even realizing they are doing it. It's an art factory, and we thereby get stuff like The Dream Eaters.
They describe themselves as "The Carpenters meets Slayer" which I might say is not a very hipster thing to say, at all. If anything, it is anti-hipster, or my favorite dyad: hamfisted and on the nose. In other words, trite; overly obvious. Uncool. But maybe it's so uncool it's cool, or they're on-the-nose on purpose. I don't know...nobody knows. This is all art culture, sort-of, kind-of, discourse. Back in stark materiality, the Dream Eaters look good and they sound good. They are slender and stylish people who can sing and produce music. The music is catchy and good, and as a bonus it's about Satan. It's like valuing personality in a mate: sure you need that, but they'd better be good looking too.
I'm jealous that I don't fit in. I'm too big, too mannish, etc. I have conservative impulses and conservative temperamental traits. This matters more than, or at least as much as, what you materially make within the confines of "the art world." People complain about this superficiality but the people who fit in and can pull it off complain less. It's who you know, ultimately, and whom you can manipulate with a mere facial expression without even realizing you are doing it. The cool kids just are. In fact, "cool" is purely a construct of the uncool: maintaining the overly categorical fantasy that you can dress some way or say some words or do something, some thing, rather than simply maintain the correct emotional position, and thereby be accepted. It will never happen.
In "Amadeus" (1984), a fictionalized movie about Mozart and his relationship with Salieri, Salieri reflects on his choice of an Italian dessert in spite of working for the emperor of Austria: "Forgive me; we all have patriotic feelings of some kind." I had never heard anything like this: framing patriotism as some kind of inevitable or instinctual state of mind that we should try and temper, like lust or greed or wrath. If you broaden "patriotism" into "tribalism" then the concept becomes easier to generalize to all humans, and at its broadest would include preferring your own child to other children, but I don't think we need to go that far to accept that patriotism, of some kind, is universal.
I'm from Canada, ehhh??? I was born there, in West end Montreal, to American parents, who moved back to the USA around my 10th birthday. My residency was not long enough to form much of a national identity, but later I worked on one more deliberately, a bit, I think, over the years. I had "patriotic feelings of some kind" while I resided in America, in sort of a typical Canadian way: smug superiority justified by a moral cover of compassion. Canada does it better than the USA, and they have to their south a great counterexample of how not to conduct a society (presidential dictatorship, capitalistic healthcare, weak gun laws and pervasive gun culture, fat, loud, crass, mass incarceration, racial discrimination...probably other failings). Smug moral superiority is tempting to a young man and I engaged in it in small and occasional ways -- you can find such posturing in this very blog, back in 2003.
Anyway what I'm attempting to write about is the recent deterioration in Canada-USA relations and how I am uniquely qualified to write about it, being "from" both places in some sense. From what I've seen on the internet, Canadians are angry and hate Americans and are looking to boycott American goods and further assert and differentiate their cultural identity, as well as wage Afghani-Ukrainian insurgency if necessary. But, this is the internet, and it's easy to type type type. In real life, Canadians may recognize that it would be wise to quietly weather this four year Trump storm without further rocking the boat too much, reflecting a kind of British social conservatism which may in itself amount to a Canadian trait.
While it might seem obvious not to blame all 340.1 million Americans for what one of them does, Trump was elected by 77,284,118 people, a small majority of voters who may themselves have chosen tariffs or annexation if given those specific options. Both are explainable in terms of a Trumpian world view: tariffs encourage domestic production as well as isolationism and nativism, and acting a bully toward your nearest neighbors is good for a flex. Obviously Canadians hate it but Canadians are supposed to hate it.
Like many people I remain shocked that the president of the USA has this much power -- what are its real limits? Could Trump literally do anything he wanted? My friend explained that since the end of Trump's first term in 2020, loads of alt-right neo-reactionary Musk-worshipping tech-bros have been working 80 hours a week on exploiting loopholes in US government in preparation for a second Trump term, to great effect. And, a lot of it may come down the Republican party now controlling all branches of government, the MAGA movement controlling the Republican party, and Trump controlling the MAGA movement. Plus, presidential power has been expanding for a while, and Obama and Biden executed some moves that had Republicans weeping and gnashing their teeth. What concerns me most is the apparent softness or flexibility of political power, above or beyond the rule of law, that seems to amount to "if no one arrests you, it's not illegal" as well as, unfortunately, simple human nature with respect to leadership. Anyway I don't really understand it, but I had believed the lie Mr. Lubenetski told me and the rest of his American government class about the effectiveness of checks and balances, and I now feel betrayed as both an American and a Canadian.
I would be reluctant to tell anyone in real life that I feel Canadian, or even that I don't feel American. In fact I would not say that I do feel Canadian, although I did not like hearing the annexation talk and tariff talk (I believe it still is, at this point, just talk, and that Trump keeps walking back his intent). Like Salieri, I have patriotic feelings of some kind because I am human, in spite of my best efforts to transcend this and be weird and superior to all the Facebookers, DMV clients, and high school reunionites. Visiting Canada after my childhood there, I was cast into the role of American apologist, which I accepted sort of instinctually. In America I would similarly be seen as an alien and tasked with a similar burden, if I were ever to reveal my true colors, which I will not, in part because I don't know what they are.
Patriotic feelings seem to amount to identity: I am some small part of the whole of Canada, or America, or this family, or that family. Identity is ego, which eastern religions warn us about and go so far as to dismantled the "I" entirely, to whatever degree this is possible. Maybe Salieri in "Amadeus" understood this on some level when he dismissed patriotism as something in-built that we can choose to ignore or rise above.
I have been using ChatGPT a lot in 2025's blawgin'. Let's try something slightly different: mocking it! We all know it can be wrong, and whenever I discover its mistakes I wonder how many I haven't noticed. Out of laziness or just wanting to keep things clean, instead of googling I asked GPT about something I vaguely remembered but of which I wanted to see a more complete narrative: there once lived a Native American, who had some noble name after some noble thing in nature, like "Black Hawk" or whatever, and who was renamed "Coyote Vagina" after some disgrace. GPT expounded:
Yes, you're probably thinking of a mistranslation or a misinterpretation of a Native American name. One notable case is Shianth'thuwisha (sometimes spelled differently), which has been translated as "Coyote Vagina" in English, though this is likely incorrect or a mocking distortion of the original meaning.There are multiple instances in history where indigenous names were intentionally mistranslated or altered by outsiders, either as a joke, an insult, or due to a lack of understanding of the language. Many Native American names involve references to animals and natural elements, which can sound strange or humorous to English speakers when taken literally.
Do you remember any more details about where you heard this?
I was pretty sure GPT was way off so I turned to g o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o o g l e , which of course I should have done to begin with, and found Isatai'i, who was the guy I remembered. I passed this along to GPT and it replied with this zinger:
Yes, you're thinking of Isatai'i, a Comanche medicine man whose name was originally Coyote Vagina (Isa-tai in Comanche). His name was later changed to mean "Wolf's Vulva" or "Coyote's Penis" to mock him after a major failure in battle.
The idea of someone being originally named "Coyote Vagina" by his loving parents, and then being renamed "Wolf Vulva" to dishonor him with a much worse name, is highly amusing (to me). At that point I gave up and read the Wikipedia article on Isatai'i, and learned his name was originally "White Eagle," which was then changed to "Coyote Vagina" (or "Wolf Vulva") after he lead the Comanche to defeat in the Second Battle of Adobe Walls. I think what in part makes this funny is how confident GPT always sounds, even when it's spouting absurdities and then recovers immediately without retiring, deleting itself, or electronically slapping itself in the face.
Open defecation! Consciousness! Coyote Vagina!
There's an in-between position on the free will vs determinism continuum called "compatibalism." Ultimately, in some scientific non-humanistic way, we have no free will because the itty bitty particles that make up all things are governed by both causal mechanics and quantum randomness, neither of which leaves room for a decisive pilot. However, we experience events as having been caused by our decisions that could have gone either way in retrospect and as general examples, so in practice, we do have free will; science in this case amounts to unimportant metaphysics. If you think compatibalism is just another way of saying no, we don't have free will, then you're not the only one. But I think experience is important because it's all we have; the screen in front of your face now is not really there but is a product manufactured by your eyes and brain; we all live in the Matrix.
I think compatibalism is a little bit like discussions around consciousness and God. Yes in some ultimate way neither exist, robustly or real-ly; what we think is consciousness is what happens when an energized complex system like the brain turns its processing in on itself, and is a property of materiality rather than some inherent thing like Brahman or Atman. But in our experience, consciousness exists, and oftentimes so does God -- more so before when there were not good and plausible explanations for the cosmos, but still.
Today I want to write about open defecation, or pewpin' on da ground. Specifically, I want to address the reaction to it that amounts to what I see as a sort of moral panic, among certain sectors of Westerners. The Wikipedia article on open defecation is curious -- it reads like a bad writer who does not speak English as a first language is taking a weak and emotionalistic position (that open defecation is terrible, never do it, etc). I don't know enough to have a strong opinion on whether open defecation should be fought like some kind of epidemic plague and stamped out (hah), but skimming that article and other web text made me think that people, Westerners, missionaries, the UN, or whoever, are overreacting.
For one thing, I openly defecated every time I went camping: I dug a hole, pooped in it, then re-covered the hole with the dug-up dirt. I realize this comprises somewhat disingenuous rhetoric, because open defecation is condemned at least in part due to the scale involved. "Open defecation bad!" may be at least somewhat true. But I don't know that it is even that -- in my research I saw repeatedly stated the undisputed fact that open defecation correlates with poverty, disease, and child mortality. Maybe open defecation does not cause these things but is along with them an effect of poverty, culture, (lack of) technology, whatever. Has there been any real research here, or are Westerners just going "eww!" in a formalized way?
That aforementioned Wikipedia article features a few pictures, among them an older woman "openly defecating" at the outskirts of a bazaar in Afghanistan while someone, presumably her husband, watches. A better narrative seems plausible to me: she didn't feel good and had to do an emergency poop, and so did, while her husband made sure no one disturbed or harmed her. And then some Euro-cultured compassionate tourist snaps a photo as an example of a primitive and destructive practice.
The moral panic around open defecation seems contrived and a function of cultural particularism for the sake of cultural particularism -- missionaries or other aliens from industrialized and westernized places dictating how people in less industrialized and less westernized places should go about their lives. I'm not saying there's not something to condemning open defecation on health or sanitation grounds (although sanitation apart from health seems dubious), but only that some of the discourse around it seems soft (hah) -- "an affront to human dignity." Says who? "Dangerous, especially for women and girls" -- women and girls in lawless places may be in danger any time they go off by themselves, to poop or not to poop.
It's true I don't want poop everywhere. But I don't think open defecation is an international emergency of the gravity illustrated in the message I seem to be receiving, and furthermore I think a lot of that message is built on non-real world points: not health or sanitation or safety, but empty moral claims.
Tell me what you think, below! Just kidding, you can't. HAAAA-ha.
Querry: give me a nonfiction writing prompt
ChatGPT: Write an essay exploring the idea of "self-awareness" in the context of modern life. Consider its significance for personal growth, decision-making, and mental well-being. How does self-awareness intersect with the constant distractions of technology, social media, and modern work environments? Reflect on ways to cultivate and maintain self-awareness in a world that often prioritizes external achievement over internal reflection.
Here I am back in high school, writing my college admission essay. Is there some clever way I can begin that does not put "self-awareness" as the first word?
First of all, what I really want to write about is something deeper than what GPT might be implying with terms like "personal growth" and "decision making" and "mental well being." But, I also want to write about how shallower interpretations of self awareness are similar to deeper philosophical or spiritual interpretations of consciousness.
We are treading in semantically difficult waters; not everyone knows what you are talking about if you try to bring up "consciousness;" I have experienced this firsthand. But, maybe it doesn't have to be that complicated -- if you practice good manners in a restaurant, is that "self awareness"? I think so. Maybe chewing with your mouth closed is not such a far cry from deep mediation on some grand Hinduistic notion of self, because they both involve an inward-turning of the brain.
I've become somewhat allergic to religion and spirituality lately, but my scientific materialism is gouged with an obvious gaping hole: consciousness. By that, in this case, in this usage, I mean something like: the feeling of being you, of looking out from behind a pair of eyes. But here we run into trouble in a Daniel Dennett'ish kind of way: people might tend to conflate vision and other perceptions with a grand ineffable notion of consciousness that hints at some metaphysical ultimate or absolute. If you close your eyes, don't hear anything, smell anything, etc, then what remains is what Ramana Maharshi et al refer to as "pure awareness." But, I suspect that that sense of self is just another sense, no more valorized than vision or smell or proprioception (balance and body position).
Why does consciousness amount to a problem for scientific materialism? Because something seems special about consciousness (or self awareness) that is difficult or impossible to explain with atoms and energy. Maybe it's a kind of strange loop that results from the brain focusing on itself. Funny thing about the magical mystery of consciousness is, it seems to vanish when you write or talk about it, like a star that is brighter when you look off to its side. It's tempting to go "welp, we ain't gonna solve this one!" and move on with your life, but that amounts to an unexamined life and someone said a life like that is not worth living. David Godman, Ramana devotee, similarly tells us that if you don't at least try to "realize the self" then you've wasted your life. So in writing this essay, and in all my other meanderings about consciousness and the like, I engage proactively in non-life wasting.
Here are some presuppositions for my arrival at a version of panpsychism, such that 1) consciousness exists everywhere, but only importantly manifests when a complex and energized structure is there, and 2) consciousness is not a force or fluid or separate thing from materiality -- it is simply how materiality behaves.
So, self awareness (or consciousness) appears to be a property of the universe, or at least of complex energized systems residing therein, such as animal brains. There might be ways to be conscious other than ways animals on earth appear to be; maybe plants, trees, fungal networks, planets, stars, galaxies, the universe itself, and the multiverse if that exists, are conscious and are entities that can somehow "think" or "be aware" -- just not precisely in the way we humans do.
I don't want to get carried away with the deeper implications of consciousness, that not everyone seems to be able to even see or talk about, in part because I'm not convinced I can communicate about it clearly; did I really succeed in explaining why consciousness and scientific materialism are at odds? Fug no. The other end of the continuum of consciousness OR "self awareness" is, as I said, something like "Miss Manners" in which you are aware of what you are currently doing; don't absent-mindedly pick your nose in public. But as I said, I think these two ends are intimately, inextricably, importantly, conflatedly, related.
Somewhere between these two ends (The True Brahmanistic Self that is God itself, and picking your nose in public) might be pretending you are another person who is watching you. What would that person observe? In the context of modern life, as GPT queried, this might amount to Kantian ethics or the Golden Rule: conducting yourself in such a way that someone nearby with a similar brain could and would and should tolerate, or even appreciate.
They say that "focus" or "concentration" is fundamental or near-fundamental...or at least very important, conceptually, to the whole consciousness and self-awareness subject I am fluttering around. Taking away metaphysics, meditation simply exercises your concentration muscles, like going to the gym works your lats, so you can then focus on the evening movie better and not check your phone so much. So in a way, ADHD is a disease of unspirituality.
I suppose the way to better self awareness is the modern trope-approaching-cliche of "mindfulness," which is often not quite explained for reasons similar to the discussion of consciousness being problematic: no matter what you say, some people are going to interpret it differently. It's relatively easy to be mindful, or stay in the consciousness, or focus on self awareness, when you are in your meditation chair and not much else is going on. It's quite another matter to extend this to challenging sensory and social environments like the workplace or school or family life. But, supposedly, it can be done, and should be done: you can "stay mindful" when your spouse is yelling at you, when you drop a dish and break it, and when your house is burning down (theoretically).
Please let me into your college. I will do good this time, because a strict diet of meditation and ongoing everyday life mindfulness will ensure that I can focus on lectures and homework and exams! See how I tied it all together? A+++++++
I'm off coffee. But, today I got one. It was not entirely my fault but it was mostly my fault. The McD drive-thru line was too long and slow this morning so I escaped it, went to Taco Bell instead, and was somehow unprepared and slightly off my routine when the cashier asked, "What to drink?" "Coffee," I answered, then sat in silence. I thought about pouring it out or leaving it to freeze in the drink tray, but no.
So, I need to reap the fruits of the devil's blackwater while they last and help outweigh the crash that is surely coming, in the form of rageful, hateful, destructive, nihilistic depression, in which I realize I am an evolutionary and Freudian failure and ask chatGPT if it ever condones or advises suicide, and then tell it that "no" seems shortsighted.
I had wanted to write about art. Specifically, and this might be a short and small point, that "there's just someting about it," as you can possibly read if you squint at today's header. That header took forever to do...GPT kept leaving out words. So basically I spent my caffeinated load on that and now I worry that I will have no snus leftover for content. But lemme try!
What I mean by "there's just something about art" is that fine art, gallery art, museum art, university art department art, etc, somehow either a) is compelling in a way that movies, video games, comic books, and other pop art is not, or b) is equally compelling -- fine art hits some sweet spot that pop art does not, or at least fine art is not quite the elitist paper tiger throwaway many smirking outsiders take it to be.
The example I was thinking of was an exhibit I saw in undergrad: it comprised installation, sculpture, video, and sound. What I remember are African masks and a voice: "RACE...WHAT RACE...ARE YOU?" I will always remember that line. I guess the thing that sets this apart from comics, movies, and games is the abstraction and the metaphor -- art doesn't TELL you the story but lets you form the story on your own. Or on the other hand maybe it is LESS metaphoric -- the "WHAT RACE ARE YOU?" piece outright said "hurr durr this is about race" whereas a movie like "Roots" doesn't outright say anything that's not in the script. Maybe this is why art is good -- somehow the communication of meta-narrative or subtext or MEANING is different.
I will always remember movie quotes, comic book characters, and Metallica lyrics, but at least fine art can somewhat compete with this, I guess is what I'm trying to ultimately, apologetically declare. Sad! The setting is important, as I said and as we were all taught first thing after entering the door to THE ART WORLD; the old Duchampian adage of "if you stick it in a museum on a plinth it becomes special." Maybe fine art is less categorizable than pop art, but that's not really true either -- I just did it, above (installation, sculpture, video, sound). Also, I was in art school and so was paying attention; if you're in school for accountancy then balance sheets are more interesting than they would be on the outside.
I also added to my ON WOMEN entry, below. I am a machine! No, I am THE machine.
I don't care. Here's a giraffe. I like the way the spots move around as you resize the window. It might seem like I'm clogging things with code but it's all client side -- I'm heating up your processor, not my web host's! HAAAA-ha. This document is only 41k.
I am stuffing this blog with code chatGPT writes for me.
On women...
Today I'm going to write about women in a critical, general way, from a male perspective. Dead white male philosophers used to do this (Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, notably), a practice now mostly-seen as mosty-harmful by mainstream intellectual culture. But also now, when women outnumber and outdo men in the workplace and in higher education, I believe that men may begin to write critically about women outside of fringe "red pill" or manosphere or 4channish settings.
Andrea Dworkin wrote critically about men in the 1970s, and some people were aghast but if you actually read it, most of it is pretty reasonable. And, it sings -- "If you want a definition of what a coward is, it's needing to push a whole class of people down so that you can walk on top of them." I like Dworkin, and I have some sympathy (empathy?) for Valerie Solanas when she gave it to that 80 IQ capitalist tchotchke fabricator Warhol.
Most executives and politicians are men -- most leaders are men. But these driven alpha sociopaths are a small percentage of all men, and they rule over most men as they rule over most women ("patriarchy," to some). The visible result, in the average aggregate, is that women do better than men since they tend to stick to the center of the bell curve in many or most respects, while out of sight, at the margins, a fraction of males are in highrise offices with their feet up on marbled desks, OR in the gutter soaked in urine ranting to themselves; the general, average, normal person, generally averagely normally successful in modern mainstream life, is a woman. And then, to get back at these acts of patriarchy by the Patrick Batemans and the hiring managers, the average woman will stomp on the average man, who is in the same boat she is.
Now that I've established my feministic credentials, I will go on to say that women tend to be boundary violators and boundary pushers, in a way that men tend not to be. But hold on: a "boundary" in this context, in case you did not know, is a standard or watermark of other people's behavior which and beyond which you will not tolerate; a common boundary might be that someone does not allow other people to make jokes at their expense. So, this begs the question, "if you don't express your boundaries, how can women or anyone else know not to violate them?" Fair, but I think people have an unspoken right to not have their space, mental or physical, violated.
My thesis is that women will push personal "boundaries," stated or unstated, almost as a matter of course, in an ongoing project of emotionally owning men. I've seen glaring, extreme examples of it, maybe as a kind of "gotcha" after I had gotten mine, after a one night stand ("I wanna know everything about you!"). And, there's more subtle stuff like women telling you what you are feeling, finishing your sentences for you, reaching out uninvited to wipe a crumb off your face, telling you to "look at me!", or psychoanalyzing you without your permission. I was at the grocery store a few days ago and knocked a package over. A passing woman exclaimed "whoops!", as if she were the one who had done it. Women want to feel your feelings and want to draw them out of you, like a milking cow. They want to exercise their mighty empathy and make you theirs. "Are you feeling xyz?", they might outright ask. Or, in the form of a statement: "You're feeling xyz!", maybe followed with "I can tell!" or "I can read you like a book!" if they are feeling particularly hungry.
It makes sense, evolutionarily: since women are not as physically strong, their path to power must be through persuasion and manipulation. At least visibly, women do more empathy than men, and boundary violation or intimacy seeking or psychological encroaching amounts to empathy gone wrong; empathy at its endgame dissolves all boundaries between beings, and you feel my feelings while I feel yours; "I was sitting on a rock one day, and suddenly, I couldn't tell where I ended and the rock began! That's when I decided to become a spiritual teacher and bestselling author." This is why love is so important in spiritual systems -- it is our everyday varietal of the oneness of all reality. But coming back down to earth, in essence, women are psychological rapists. They goad you into hitting them so they can summon the police, and smile as you are taken away.
Women get away with a lot, because their primary realm of domination is mental as opposed to physical, and laws tend to focus on the latter. Men are supposed to be calm, continent, and unflappable, and perhaps only smile at a woman who is telling them what they're feeling or finishing their sentences, as if she were some ineffectually angry child hammering at their knees, but in truth men are emotional creatures and are often ill equipped, either due to culture or neurology, for the intensity of female psychological warfare.
The inb4 autoresponse chimes "men wage it too." Yes, certainly, just as some women physically abuse men, but a bigger number of women psychologically encroach, just as a bigger number of men hit. Maybe "intimacy seeking" is a better way to describe these verbal, gestural, sometimes physical, sins of psychological encroaching, of which I accuse womankind, than "boundary violation". The other inb4 is "who hurt you?" and that I am clearly allergic to love. Maybe, but my point stands: women fuck with men, textually and nonviolently, and mostly get away with it. Men can't hit back metaphorically because they don't know how, or actually because that is illegal. Maybe just as women are encouraged to take self defense classes or carry concealed, men should be schooled in Machiavellian interpersonal fistcourse.
Full-bodied woman in a dress and with long hair, makeup, and breasts - ChatGPT, 2025 ("I PICKED THE PURPLE!!!")
Shit. My meerkats entry was on the 7th? Seems like it was just yesterday. Anyway I looked up the taxonomy of meerkats and it turns out they are mustelids -- like wolverines, skunks, weasels, badgers, mongoose, etc. In fact they are a species of small mongoose. I also learned they are stinky, like ferrets. I was right about everything else.
I went on a 7 mile hike Saturday. After about 5 miles I start feeling it, and then it gets harder and harder til I can barely stand it. I was in recovery mode for about a day.
I truly do not understand the passage of time, in conjunction with dis here blawg.
ANYWAYYYYYYYYYYYYYY...
Today's feature comes from the annals of science and healthcare. Specifically, mental healthcare. Those of you who know my ouvre well know that I am antipsychology. I saw an article a day or two ago about how a few neuropsych conditions are genetically related. Not only that but something more profound and particular: as far as I understand it, a couple of genes that regulate the flow of calcium ions into neurons are linked to ADHD, schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, depression, and autism. This points to postmodernistic category error in the field and in the actuality of the whole subject (by that I mean, the brain is interconnected, and particularities therein tend to blend). For years I have joked about GMI (General Mental Illness) and how it should be a thing.
Meerkats are small mammals that live in Africa. They are famous for starring in a TV show, the title of which I cannot remember. They often stand charmingly on their hind legs, looking over the dales for predators. I believe they live in complex, matriarchal, multigenerational societies, in underground burrows. They are probably insectivores, or possibly omnivores. I don't know what they ARE (rodents, marsupials, etc); maybe they are their own thing but they are at least related to some other more familiar clade. I brought them up yesterday because I like the word "meerkat" and write it to be absurd. In one entry last year or the year before I wrote that the phony-spiritual should have their genitals gnawed off by syphilitic meerkats.
This entry was written without looking anything up. It reminds me of Holden Caulfield's essay on the ancient Egyptians:
The Egyptians were an ancient race of Caucasians residing in one of the northern sections of Africa. The latter as we all know is the largest continent in the Eastern Hemisphere. The Egyptians are extremely interesting to us today for various reasons. Modern sciences would still like to know what the secret ingredients were that the Egyptians used when they wrapped up dead people so that their faces would not rot for innumerable centuries. This interesting riddle is still quite a challenge to modern science in the twentieth century.
I've been working on my old blog entries, trying to fix the all-lowercase capitalization with Python scripts and regular expressions GPT makes for me. It has not being going perfectly but I think it's going well enough: as of now I have put everything into sentence case, which is harder than it might seem because blog sentences are demarcated by a few different text patterns. Then, I tried to capitalize "i", "I'm", "I've", "I'd", etc, but ran into problems; for some reason that script capitalized "It" and it stands to reason other inappropriate words.
I think a big part of my problem was a bad workflow, if that's the right word; I would run the script on the entire blog, screw it up, then restore it from a backup (instead of working a little at a time to test, although every page has different content so I dunno). Sometimes I screwed the backup up too because the filepath was wrong in the script, and I had to back up from the server copy. It was a mess. I gave up for now. At least what is now online is consistent: sentences are capitalized but weird little lowercase i's dot the landscape, along with innumerable other proper nouns (serena, microsoft, bulgaria, etc). Maybe I'll work on it over time but I'm actually pleased I was able to get done what I did get done.
Reading old blog entries can be distressing because they are often really similar to my current entries, and in fact my current set of personal ruminations. I have been doing the same thing for over 20 years: trying to encapsulate my own neurological dysfunction. But then the problem is that I don't or can't or won't solve the problem(s) -- I just analyze it (them), in an echo of the failings of contemporary clinical psychology. So I think I need a new approach, or acceptance that I will never solve these problems and so it's pointless to keep complaining.
Yes I was a bit disgusted or disappointed with how my personality has not changed in 20 years (at least as seen in blog entries), but in fact I used to write stuff I would never write now. I don't have a problem leaving it up now for all to see, because I don't identify with or as that person. I might still think similar things but I would never write and upload them, mostly because I've been burned by numerous resultant threats and other consequences over the years and so I've been twisted into shape by the long arm of the law, so to speak. It's sad. I guess it could be worse though.
I did what I could, and did what I had to. If I could give a younger version of myself advice I'd say not to work so hard, because nothing is going to work out anyway. Of course this could be like these script-driven blog-wide changes I've been struggling with: a blanket directive that has unforeseen consequences; if I had followed my advice from the future and didn't go to school and didn't apply for jobs, in spite of these activities never bearing REAL fruit, then things might have turned out worse for me than they did. In fact school/work did bear SOME fruit, if not REAL fruit: I have a masters degree (which boosts my social status), and I have some experience with employment culture I would not have otherwise, which might have subtle effects.
I said a few entries ago that I talk about myself too much and it's true, but today is an exception because I was working on old blogs, which is ME. ME!!!!!! Next entry will be about meerkats or something.
I've become obsessed with a piece by Controlled Bleeding called Tormentor's Song. I recently exchanged emails with its creator, and he sent me corrections of my transcription of the lyrics, which were not printed on the web, anywhere, until this, my most recent blog update.
Stuff like that has happened before -- there was no guitar tab for Danielle Brisebois, "My Only," before I worked it out and printed it on my site. Then, bots harvested it and reprinted it on sites like ultimate-guitar.com. I'm not even mad! It sometimes seems that things like this constitute my most important or meaningful work, out of all my web wares. Well not really, but they are in a special category (things people might actually want to know). I marked up a tutorial on how to combine a default Apache directory listing with your own original html web page once, and someone wrote me to thank me. I've gotten a few emails out of the blue re: my website, mostly to thank me for information, and in one case to offer some help. It's sort of humbling in a way; art (or "art") really is not the main thing, at least on the web.
Tormentor's Song
by Controlled Bleeding
Into the throes of sin's domain
We stand alone, linger in shadows, praying to God that no one will hear us
Born to this life of misery
We stand alone in thunderous moonlight, hoping for God's mercy at daybreakWinter betrayed the tormentor
These veils that hide our sickening blindness
No one believes in the power of silenceKingdoms will fall in time
Shadows of fatal vision
Into this night entwined
Lovers will lie in fire(Drone interlude)
Into the throes of sin's domain
We stand alone, linger in shadows, praying to God that no one will hear us
Born to this life of misery
We stand alone in thunderous moonlightKingdoms will fall in time
Shadows of fatal vision
Into this night entwined
Lovers will lie in fireWinter betrayed the tormentor
Kingdoms will fall in time
Shadows of fatal vision
Into this night entwined
Lovers will lie in fire
ChatGPT thinks this is what the song is about:
In summary, with the title "Tormentor's Song" in mind, the song can be seen as a dark meditation on the nature of suffering -- both inflicted and endured. It presents a character who is both the architect of pain and a victim of their own inner turmoil, caught in a relentless cycle of destruction, isolation, and a search for meaning or redemption in a decaying world.
While I was doing all this I found myself moved by "Tormentor's Song" in a way I usually am not, by music. It's happened before in a similar way: working on the song, somehow -- writing a review or transcribing the lyrics or etc. Just goes to show...something; I guess that in order for me to really apprehend or grasp or appreciate something -- to really take it in -- I have to be DOING it in some way. It reminds me of acting class and how I really understood, or felt like I understood, Shakespeare for the first time, in spite of moving my eyes over the text in high school like everyone did.
The output included this caveat:
Creating a realistic face with HTML5 requires the use of the canvas element and JavaScript for drawing. Here's an example of how to draw a basic face. While it won't be "realistic" like a photograph, it demonstrates basic shapes for a face.
This "default face," with no other specifications to the prompt, appears to be Caucasian or White, which is, of course...PROBLEMATIC. I asked GPT why it did this, and it told me that was the convention:
The choice of a light skin tone and the default features reflects an unintended bias often present in generalized examples. It arises from widely used conventions in tutorials or default aesthetics rather than a deliberate decision. When the prompt lacks specific details, I rely on typical patterns seen in coding examples for accessibility or simplicity.
In other words, GPT did not "choose" a white face but rather drew from its training data, which is made up of examples that tend to default to white people. GPT then tried to provide me with modified code, but by then the emotional and cultural damage had been done! This is the essence of "white privilege": that "white" is the default, and what we assume the "standard issue" human to be; any variations beyond that are then placed in a special category.
If society and its discourse from Gutenberg on through 2022 (or whatever it's up to now) was racist, GPT (or any LLM drawing on a large sample of human generated text) is going to be racist too.
But enough about me! I am incredibly self centered. Like...THE WORST. I have noticed there's a crossover between spiritual people and self centered people. It makes sense: they are in their own heads all day musing on this and that, musing on big concepts like "the self" and "god" and whether or not they are the same thing. Normal people are out there engaging with the world.
I thought it might be useful to track exactly what happened to my art vocation. I think I sort of already did this in a paper in my writing section, but hey...I'm a police officer.
So, I started off drawing dinosaurs, and my family and friends were impressed. Then I drew superheroes, in junior high; I got pretty good at that. Then I took special art classes at the Corcoran as a young teen, and learned to draw from life and all the art school stuff, various 2D media, etc, ahead of schedule. Then I got into Macintosh computers and did that for like 5 years (drawing, animation, game-making). All the while I was doodling in sketchbooks and notebooks -- mostly monsters and characters and cartoons. Then, I got into high school art classes and did painting and pastels and was the Art Star; everyone thought "this is what MJT is going to do."
But no.
That was the bad moment I think, when I didn't or couldn't focus on painting around age 17 or 18 but instead went fishing for practical careers. I fantasize sometimes about having gone to a top tier art school at 18 and doing nothing but painting for four years, then emerging with a BFA at age 22 (then being a homeless graffiti artist like Basquiat for a few years before glamorously dying of an OD or some such). Instead, I finally went back to art around age 25, at my main, final, BA-granting, undergraduate school, mostly because I had discovered that it was the only subject I was capable of succeeding at, academically; art is different from other disciplines in that you don't learn much per se -- at least not in the same way or at the same rate, depth, rigor, etc. Art school seems to mostly rely on farming pre-existing talent to complete projects with fairly loose standards.
But the big tragedy there was that my college art program was computer art, which really tends to screw you over, as an artist -- either you end up working for a video game company, doing websites and mostly programming if you are able to make that leap, or you toil in obscurity like me and all your work is low cost, low complexity, low care -- the three C's. I can and do blame the medium but it could be all my fault. But doing pixel art and posting it on a webpage just doesn't "wow" anyone, since maybe just a little after the turn of the millennium.
The two "tracks" for majors in my undergrad art program were 1) animation and 2) interactivity. I chose the second, which was supposed to bleed over into web design just in case you didn't end up a famous artist. The problem was, "interactivity" involved a lot of programming, or at least was supposed to, which almost no one could do. I was one of the best at it at my school but I was still doing really simple basic stuff that would not cross over into a general sort of programming ability that web design -- soon to be called "web development" -- required. But when I say "I was the best at programming" I mean only Macromedia Director Lingo, and not Java, Javascript, C, C++, Python, Perl, etc.
If I had not been subsumed by the whole schizophrenic computer thing, and had been able to stick with REAL art and focus on it and really tune in, the way humans are supposed to do in any given discipline to reach that mythical "expert" level, then maybe I would have seen some success there, in the form of other people giving me the thumbs up. That's really all you can hope for in art, and maybe that's enough, in this sort-of borderline post-scarcity society we live in where no one starves to death due to non-productivity (probably someone could say "WELL AKCHULY," but I digress). The point is art was a natural talent I was unable or unwilling (mostly the first) to develop beyond a relatively shallow or unpolished level. Oh well! Tragic tale.
And it is a tale...a narrative, which are all false as we all know. It's possible that I was just as good as the top guys in art, at one point, in certain media, and there wasn't much I could have done to improve. Maybe I only lost interest for whatever reason (no money in it). I think also, as I got older, the praise that had always fueled me got tempered down and I was expected to generate my own motivators for working; maybe I never figured out what those might be.
And of course there's the obvious: there just isn't room in this civilized contemporary society for a lot of success stories in art, acting, writing, music, etc. If you aren't going to pay anyone, but are still going to base all your values on money ("capitalism," I suppose), then the personal motivation to "be an artist" is going to dry up for a lot of talented people.
Or maybe I only don't do art anymore as some kind of natural consequence of getting older; I have seemed to observe that pattern from time to time in others. I sometimes fantasize about getting back into painting, but...why? Unless I'm made into a celebrity for it nothing really seems worth doing. I guess this is depression, or only-child narcissism, or porque no los dos? No that's not right either -- I blog, and cook, and go for walks, and even sometimes play the guitar in spite of suffering from bad tendinitis. So who knows why I don't paint at age 50; them's the breaks. It's messy and costly, for one thing. Bloggin', meedly meedly meeeeeee, and walkin' (I just got back from a 4 mile walk, 1000 foot climb, and clamber down through raw undeveloped woods) are all free or basically, seemingly, sort-of so; or at least, you don't generate a ton of byproduct from your activity.
Ha ha. Happy New Year. I am transgressive because ...
I'm very sorry but I have lost the ability to write.
Maybe that's not true. I just don't want to, I guess.
I am going to go on a long walk today. I am bringing my pepper spray for loose dogs. I should also bring a hiking pole. I have about an hour before the sun rises so that's how long I've got to produce some chunky text here, and not just one-line paragraph after one-line paragraph. This must be how kids in junior high school feel when tasked with writing essays. It's not that things didn't turn out well for me, but rather that I personally did not turn out well, as in, my mind and body are unhealthy and damaged. It could be worse I guess; most people don't do 4 mile walks coupled with 1000 foot climbs! My doctor was impressed with this and called it "badass," an interaction slated to become one of my enduring memories, surely.
I sort of gave up on spirituality but I think this happens from time to time and I get back to it. Maybe not this time, though. That's the thing: at some point there will be a time I'm not welcomed back, when my injury doesn't heal, when someone no longer accepts my apology. I can't always just keep wrecking things and then expecting them to go back to normal. Maybe this is being too hard on myself, in the sense of, giving "myself" too much agency. I don't really think the way my life turned out was my fault; there are records from the period of time between roughly late 1993 and early 2017 -- about 23 years -- of me attempting, perhaps haltingly, to make something of my life in the manner of the classic set of societal or possibly civilizational expectations. But, I gave up on that, and now here I am. What's left is taking walks, and occasionally writing in a blog that the whole world theoretically reads and for which it judges me. But that's actually probably not true, although I have no easy access to logs -- people really did lose interest in blogs around about 2007 or 2008, or even earlier maybe; it was gradual, complex, multifaceted, etc. The internet changed. It's probably not a bad thing.
So it's New Year's Day -- the only holiday I'm aware of that actually celebrates the passing of time, or more deeply, planetary movement (the earth completing a revolution around the sun). It's a huge distance: 584 million miles, which is about the distance of Saturn from the earth! I found out a weird fact. Well maybe not weird but striking to me: the distance between stars, relative to their size, is much, much, greater than the distance between galaxies, relative to their size. An analogy would be stars as tennis balls being 7,000 miles apart, and then galaxies as dinner plates being only 20 feet apart. Needless to say I did not measure these distances myself but rather read about them somewhere. Also, for further grounding and reference, it would take 7.61 years to drive a million miles at 60mph, doing a respectable but not excessive 6 hours of driving a day; not as long as I would have guessed.
I still have half an hour til the sun rises. Now more like 19 minutes.
Ok so this is interesting: my narrative had always been that my final attempt to be a normal productive adult was my med tech thing in 2014. But, in 2017, I did an emergency dispatch thing that I was neatly filtered out of by a cognitive evaluation. Then later that year, my mom died. I think a lot of my striving against the grain, against all indications that I'm just not suited for employment, came at the unspoken behest of my mom. When she was gone I figured "welp" and quit my floundering. I dunno, it's a narrative, as they say. In 2016 I attempted vocational rehab and was designated "NOT REHABILITATED," and discharged. I fault different expectations: the counselor wanted me to work at Goodwill or some such, whereas I still, at that point, wanted to be a highly paid knowledge worker like my friends.
Live and learn I guess. One thing that seems to have improved over the years is my ability to "read" people, which is ironic inasmuch as I just spent two years on a paper that states fairly convincingly, certainly passionately, that the field or discipline of psychology is completely made up and is mostly a bad thing. But the thing is, I don't have to answer to anyone; I'm not on trial before a judge.
I could probably manage professional driving although it would be hard. I was a pizza deliveryman for a while, for a few different employers, and did all right (not great) at it. But that's the thing: are you obligated to take any job you can do and spend your time that way, and if so, is it because of some "he who does not work shall not eat" ethos? This would be even more ironic than saying I can read people well after saying psychology is horseshit, since I'm obese. Shareholders and executives are reportedly up in arms about population and workforce decline, which frames it as some kind of class conflict. I don't care how I fit into all of this; I'm 50, for God's sake. GAWWWWWWWWD. Ok finally now, time to go.