Ptbbbbbbth

Whenever I see something incredibly strange and perhaps scarring, I get this urge to share it with my friends. "Hey, this hurt my soul, maybe you should check it out!" Don't worry, I never do this without warning people first.

Watermelon juice that tastes like squeezed watermelon is at Trader Joe's. Go get some, because it is delicious.

Americans produce so many anti-dystopic themed stories but we are sort of living in a dystopia in which we are the fat cats. Of course, we are now sort of paying the price and taking everyone down with us, but think about how corporations affect labor laws to keep their bottom line down. The problem is that those who don't generally don't swim.

Here is an interesting structure called "The Bat Spiral". I like this article for these two lines:
"I'm led to wonder, however, what non-human future might await something like Aranda\Lasch's 10 Mile Spiral if it were to be constructed – and later abandoned – amidst an ecosystem for bats...
We are inadvertently building the future infrastructure of an animal world."

One of the gifts I was planning on making Chris was a terrarium with abandoned architecture, so he could watch the plants slowly grow over and break it down. I'm planning on making one for myself in that magical time known as the future.

Here is a reason why they like physicists and computer scientists in Wall Street.

Also, though I talked about how much I dislike Twilight in the last post, I would like to point out the irony of calling Edward gay-ish: the main fans of the series are women.

Today saw me trying to dissect Mario, figure out optimization strategies, and then ask myself what exactly am I doing. Things are more fun when you're good at them, but this no longer feels fun. I'm doing it wrong.

It's Personal

A girl running through lavender fields. Pic via Jezebel via the Getty.








An illustrated Mario death by John-
ny Yakon, via Offwo-
rld.




































Today's speed run time: 14 minutes until the end of 7-1. I tried out a little bit of "Super Mario: The Lost Levels". Here was my reaction: "I don't see why this was considered too hard for Western au-"/murdered.
I used to suck at the first Mario. I played a single game today, got up to 5-3 and then was killed by Bowser's castle.
My mom used to play the first Mario with us and actually was very good at beating it. In fact, she was considered "the expert" in the family on that game.

Speaking of my mom, she picked up Clingy today, who was so shocked he didn't even struggle. She put him down and he proceeded to hide, then come back and play on the patio. My mom corrected me, as it has been over two weeks since we last saw Gaiylee herself.

Look at the language in this article from the Reuters:
"But Paal cautioned Clinton against hanging her reputation too much on improved relations with China.

"We are not in a position to control them," he said."

There is always the possibility that this man's quote was taken out of context. However, it is very telling of the imprints of foreign policy in this country, even if Obama is trying to change them.

I didn't copy or write down a lot of stuff today.

Wouldn't it be cool if there were bridges that were water and held together by water tension in a theoretical world? It would be so trippy to swim through them and put a hand out into the air.

Physorg.com published an article on friction free computer circuits via quantum mechanics. I'm too lazy to link. Go do it yourself!

So I have over two hundred entries in this journal, which is impressive. I love writing and I love sharing cool stuff with people. Blogs are a perfect balance of the two. I feel strange writing a diary on the computer, especially since I don't want to have one somewhere that is ultimately hackable, but I dislike writing by hand since, well, I'm faster at typing and my handwriting starts to resemble random loops after a while. I just figured it out! A flash drive!

Flash drives, though certainly hackable if you put the wrong things in them or leave them connected to the computer, are the first ultra-easy ways to distribute data that don't require linking computers directly and actually keep the information remote from the rest of the digital world(if you don't keep them connected to the computer, again). They are our first private digitilized miniaturized domains widely available to the public. And don't tell me about external HDs, because those are not miniaturized, at least in comparison to the flash drive.

Of course, unlike a book, you need a computer to make a flash drive work, an extra piece of equipment that must take part in the process. And boot before starting the process. Ah, the booting.

The original Star Trek is an entertaining, theoretical and thoughtful show. What it is not is in any way realistic. Which is now I bring to you this parody; look for upcoming ones about Grecian gods appearing, geniuses going insane, and time travel. This particular one is based on "it's scientifically impossible!"; specifically "Shore Leave" from season one, which I actually enjoyed quite a bit.

1.) The landing party beams down and everything looks perfectly normal on their sensors because their sensors are crappy. Also, everywhere looks like Earth because of Somebody's Law of Planetary BS(or, we reuse the same drawings as alien backdrops several times).

2.)Something impossible is seen and hard proof of its existence is found, usually corresponding with the word "fascinating". Spock's soul dies a little more.

3.)People still think that it's a good idea to split up because that makes for dramatic death scenes which lead to dramatic scenes for Captain Kirk to lament over his crew member. Or Kirk still thinks that crew members can handle themselves even though they keep dying because they have PHASERS*
*Note: phasers usually knocked out or taken away by the end of the episode

4.) Captain Kirk meets THE GIRL. All girls in this galaxy have an inexplicable attraction to at least one member of the crew, usually the one who's name is an anagram for "Tiberius Kirk James". And that specific member tends to "genuinely" fall for this woman in return because they have sexual ADD. McCoy, Spock, and Kirk have at least 5 women each who are waiting for them to settle down with.
In this episode Kirk meets a special lady from his past of which he has 6 million. He must have been dating some of these girls at the same time as each other or be a serial monogamist, because, how many relationships can you have in twenty-something years?
P.S. Kirk's charm has won more battles for the federation than the Enterprise herself. The Federation should just package up an "essence du Kirk" and send it around instead of spaceships.**
**Working parts included.

5.) Their phasers stop working. Suprise! Also, The Enterprise is helpless for one reason or another because the scientists in this time period are too busy focusing on how cool it would be to be able to "blow up half a continent" rather than "shields that work properly", despite the fact that the Enterprise is mainly a defensive ship. Communicators are out, too, and for some reason it never occurs to them to use the injectable trackers besides as a deux ex machina for prying them out of their arm and setting things on fire in a Nazi jail. Yes, this actually happened.

I mean, nothing usually goes wrong, right?
Wait.

6.) So now the crew is being chased and seduced by a wide variety of things that turn up for no reason despite the fact that it's pretty obvious now what's happening. Everyone seems to have lost their critical thinking skills....

7.) Which leads to the Shatner vrs. somebody fight. Badly choreographed and involving lots of rolling, I'm never quite sure what the point of these are.

8.) Spock and Kirk figure out the solution and start acting on it, because the show is running out of time and Shatner's shirt has finally ripped open. Then the solution appears out of nowhere, in this case a peaceful creator who was waiting to intervene until the emotional scarring occurred. The explanation is cool, but sort of leaves you going "wait, but what about...". Also, the skimpily clad girls couldn't not show up, so they decided to include them at the end. Everybody is happy and Kirk decides to spend time with a cellular cast of one of his many long-lost loves.

Huh?

The Dorkiness is With Me

I want a Chapman Stick now. What is a Chapman stick?

An interesting article from Wired about scarcity vrs abundance planning.

"This is the power of waste. When scarce resources become abundant, smart people treat them differently, exploiting them rather than conserving them. It feels wrong, but done right it can change the world."

"The way to get from what the mathematicians call a local maximum to the global maximum is to explore a lot of fruitless minima along the way. It's wasteful, in a sense, but it can pay off in the end."

This feels like the correct way to treat waste vrs. what some American consumers has been doing. Of course, this would also require constantly monitoring trends and identifying the correct variables, though in any marketing projections the ability to model is kind of just a little bit central. What about perhaps literally applying these principals to trash?

Boing Boing columnist Cory Doctorow wrote a column.
I find it interesting that he mentions the fact that conspiracy theories are "pure gold for science fiction writers". Both conspiracy theorists and sci fi authors have the task of taking a fictional premise and making it sound convincingly real. The only true difference is the heading both are sold under. In fact, L. Ron Hubbard blurs this line significantly, though his creation is under the more general heading of religion.
The implication of this column is that ideas are the true genius in the world today. I disagree, as I think the fact that people have created so many DIY inventions is a testament to ingenuity on their parts. It's not necessarily some simple thing to create a fictional invention. Quite simply, it just shows that there are a lot of mechanically gifted people out there, but that is no reason to knock the talent.
This also makes me feel like building something, but I have work to do.

When I was a kid, I loved Star Wars. I didn't talk about the movies to my friends or engage in any fan activity besides imagining myself as a Jedi(don't you dare comment), but the concept of a universal "force" and the notion of peace through control were both extremely appealing to me. My dad and I had frank discussions about Buddhism, which I had only known about marginally before, and the rest is history. A lot of discussion can be had comparing East and West literature/theology and the societies that produced them.

But this is not what I am going to talk about.

During this period I suddenly acquired a taste for tunics. A recent article in io9 which I am too lazy to find discussed how fashion has started borrowing from science fiction. Thanks to recent shifts in fashion it is now becoming easier and easier to dress like a Jedi or Cyber Goth without having everyone around you suddenly converge into a mob of beating-the-passerby.
How long before we start actually looking like a mashup of science fiction characters?

I've always wanted to wear a cloak because I read one too many fantasy novels as a kid. The problem with cloaks is that since the invention of the jacket, they are much less functionally useful. That has never stopped fashion, though. Cloaks are awesome. Imagine one with a ton of useless contemporary buckles. Don't add any fake pockets, though, because those enrage me.

Of course, I'll most likely stick to my "uniform" of khaki pants and wifebeaters/tshirts. But still, you should listen to me fashion industry!

Love and Creation in the Nation

Comics courtesy of A Softer World.

Tomorrow is the anniversary of the Stonewall riots! I wonder how to celebrate.

HOLY C***!!! NEIL GAIMAN IS AT UCSD STARTING ON THE 28TH AND PEOPLE WHO ARE NOT ME ARE BEING TAUGHT BY HIM! Ok, I am totally finding a way to see him while he is here. This is happening.

"All love letters are
Ridiculous.
They wouldn't be love letters if they weren't
Ridiculous.

In my time I also wrote love letters
Equally, inevitably
Ridiculous.

Love letters, if there's love,
Must be
Ridiculous

But in fact
Only those who've never written
Love letters
Are
Ridiculous

If only I could go back
To when I wrote letters
Without thinking how
Ridiculous.

But today, really,
my memories of those
letters are the ones
that are truly ridiculous

(All the strange words,
all the strange thoughts,
are naturally ridiculous)"

-Fernando Pessoa

I have never written a love letter. Chris and I were unabashedly sentimental in a way which led to both of our parents making fun of us so it's not as if our emotions were not expressed, but love does not inspire me to write, it inspires me to do. I wrote a couple poems dedicated to my first love after being rejected by him and a dark poem about the emotion itself once. But I completely agree that sincere and eloquent writing dedicated to deep emotion is worth creating even if to some it seems pretentious or overdecked, though I would make a conscious effort to stay out of the realm of complete ridicule.

The latest Star Trek episode parallels Peter Pan and Never-Neverland, which is sort of brilliant, as was the Venus drug episode(though wives are not for cleaning and cooking, of course).

Today I saw a name in my inbox which made me conceive Caronlina Muffet. Caronlina Muffet only exists in words. She is a doll with button eyes that was cobbled together by someone with too much time and imagination. The child that created her lives in a world of canopy beds and bedtime stories. She or he, as I haven't decided on his or her gender, spends most of his or her time in his or her room. Ms. Muffet is made of scraps of muppets and pages from Fairy Tale books in character, but in the reality in which she exists she is only made of scraps. She might have gotten a part in Coraline, had she auditioned, but being a doll she couldn't. Secretly she was deeply disappointed in this, but do not tell the child that made her, because he or she simply wants the doll to be happy.

Carolina Muffet may appear creepy to some, but she is not bad in any way. She was created from a simple love of life and retains this in her stitches.

People

I remember a conversation I had when I was sixteen.
"I hate people", I typed in my instant messenger window.
"So are you a misanthrope?" asked Chris, who was just getting to know me at the time.
"No......"
The conversation went on from there, although I don't remember the rest of my reply. It basically stated that I like individuals but dislike the way groups of people operate.

What? I went out with him for practically three years. Half or more of my current stories include him.

I love individuals. People from all walks of life have so many tales to share, new nuggets of information which I may never have heard in my circle. Whether we be blessed to see the intricacies of the human mind by never being able to objectively view it or are trapped in obvious but invisible boundaries, sharing things from our innermost minds is one of the most satisfying things I can do with another human being. Or, I am biologically programmed to feel that way.

I feel good, strangely over the breakup. Not completely over it, as one might expect, but as if some crucial point has been passed. In fact, I still felt really sick this morning, but this afternoon I feel very good.

So I am curious about something. Sunblock absorbs or scatters UVB and UVA, crucial and large components of sunlight. People who do not get exposure to sunlight risk developing SAD(Seasonal Affective Disorder, although I'm pretty sure they made up the acronym and found a name to fit it). Sunlight is also used by the body to metabolize vitamin D. So while we may be protecting our skin by applying sunblock, are we doing the rest of our body any favors? There are no studies on this that I can find. I mean, preventing direct DNA damage is, of course, important, but I'm curious. This would of course only apply to those who use sunblock religiously.

My spontaneous and casual writing has definitely improved because of this blog. Although, interestingly, when I look back on posts a week later I almost always find errors to correct, no matter how many times I review the initial post.

Hmmm

I could never be an artist for a living. I write when I wish to and I draw when I need to. Art, for me, comes with inspiration. Yes, I could write a story without first having the spark to write one:

Johnny looked over the desert sands. He had seen a painting once, a painting with a white lamb on green pastures, and he was imagining that his surroundings were cool and sunlight, blurring together like the oil on the canvas. But Johnny's family hunted oil, and herded people. Johnny was not old enough to understand the latter, but he could sense it in the air and the whipped backs of the workers.

Right now my train of thought has been interrupted by the newest crazy lady who recently moved into the neighborhood whom I have seen around my neighborhood while attempting to catch the bus. She is walking down my street and yelling to herself at the moment. I'm not sure that I like her. I feel shaken, for some reason, and afraid to focus again. The last thing I heard her say was "I can see you, you asshole!", though there is little to no chance that the statement was directed at me.

Anyways, right now I want to do math, which is good because I have two midterms this week in the subject.

I'm going to go be vaguely creeped out now and double-check the locks.

Another Hodgepodge

I'm still drifting between denial and reality at the moment. I wrote a lot of this entry yesterday before the breakup and want to publish the content.

I was invited to an "erotic party" over Facebook, which is a first. No, I'm not going, just noting this because of amusement.

The top three mistakes in my writing are:
1.) Forgetting words. I'm not quite sure why this happens, though I suspect that it's because my
mind thinks faster than my fingers can type.
2.) Extraneous commas
3)Repeating words.

"The real question was why no one ever seemed to figure this grim scenario out on her own, just by looking at you. This was enraging in and of itself - the fact that severe depression, much as it might be treated as an illness, didn't send out clear signals for others to pick up on; it did its deadly dismantling work under cover of normalcy. The psychological pain was agonizing, but there was no way of proving it, no bleeding wounds to point to."
-Daphne Merkin

Depression is a disease that our culture fails to recognize. Bringing in a note about being sick from stomach flu will help people excuse a lapse in productivity but equivalently crippling mental issues will inspire no sympathy from many. This is not an overall rule, as I've actually encountered many sympathetic and kind people, but there is still a feeling of judgment which encourages silence rather than reaching out for help. Therapy is seen as either for the weak or shallow and pills a part of our feel-good culture. Are there some people who will prescribe medication without a second thought and therapists who are ineffectual? Absolutely, but this overall stereotype of the psychological and psychiatric professions is horribly detrimental to those in need of help. Mental illness is not a choice and those affected can still be sane, competent and smart people, as I would like to consider myself to be. I still blame myself for things I did under the influence of this disease, although for me it actually is easier to accept blame in some ways than to admit that it is something which I can't or couldn't control. Therein lies another problem, as the line between the disease and the patient can be difficult for the patient themselves to recognize, let alone others. This fact only beneficial to disease out of all those involved.

After reading this Wikipedia article on Francis Bacon I am wondering what a movie about his life would be like. Also, I wonder what regular names in our day will go on to become swear words, food items, or some other oddity.

I really like this song by "The Kills":


I haven't even watched the video, however.

Good Morning

Is there such a thing as a pointless memory? I don't think so; my belief is that every experience lends something to be learned from, as long as we don't overgeneralize from it. Then again, I am only nineteen, but I have a sneaking suspicion I won't be proven wrong.

Today I was attempting to deal with some of my worst memories, prepared to accept that they were simple exercises in pain that one must let go and forget. Then I realized that those experiences helped to make me damn strong. If I can survive and grow from them I can survive and grow from many, many things. And that is a wonderful way to start the day.

One of the reasons I often read and rarely write is that part of the joy of tales for me is the mystery of their every aspect before I start and complete them. It is interesting to write a story not knowing where it may lead, but far more difficult. Part of what I enjoy about writing in general is that I sometimes sit down to scribe what I know and a conclusion will magically form from the previous elements. Take, for example, the shallow issue of clothing and American culture.

Clothing has, throughout human history, helped to form an indicator about a person, whether it be rank or affiliation. In the modern day, subcultures are no exception, and there are instant subconscious impressions which can be formed by looking at how a person dresses. Of course, in the modern day, a lot more influences a person's dress than cultural affiliation, such as time, comfort, and aesthetic appeal. Lastly, it is impossible and not worth the time to indicate all the things which compose a person in dress. There is a paradox here, where some people dress specifically to be associated with a culture and others simply dress for convenience. It seems the wisest thing to do is not to form opinions based on clothing, but ironically, some people may even be offended if their cultural affiliation is ignored. Perhaps the only thing possible is to tread lightly and give the benefit of the doubt. Stereotyping people based on the way they are dressed is at times no better than stereotyping people because of their race.

Writing organized the structure of my thoughts and helped me to articulate them in a manner much more effective than speech, even if this was a shallow topic.

I also love drawing because when I start, I rarely know what or who I will end up with. Today I drew a character I named Angelica Bonnet. Her wispy hair, long face, neck, and fine features would be beautiful if she didn't live in a society which appreciated the bold and straight line. Angelica has tried to live in this society and conform to it all her life; only a small inkling in the back of her mind wonders if she has been following the wrong path, an inkling she rarely pays attention to. She has fit into her society successfully, but she is not beautiful now.

I planned none of that.

Yes, many great works have come from pre-planned scenes and points, and occasionally I feel the need to create one of these myself. But I feel right now as though the greatest story I ever write will be a road which I will wander and discover new things while exploring.

Note for early readers: I condensed the last two blog entries for brevity. I don't pre-plan posts and sometimes the organizational structure that results from sporadic posting is not the best.