You realize you are pushing your cycles and cams and pistons and engraved toothsets of finished brass over to force change so the person who loves you can see your moss and lichened belly clearly.
Clean with alcohol only. Do not attempt to replace blown fuses. Do not remove access panels. Return to certified mechanic for regular maintenance. Made in the USA.
Showing posts with label inception. Show all posts
Showing posts with label inception. Show all posts
7/12/19
6/12/15
Undo Button
You've heard it before. For this and that. How about, after 30, you get to hit undo on one impossible to fix character trait? Just one and it has to be something long established and impossible to undo because it is so far ingrained into the base mechanics of your brain functioning that trying to eradicate it will destroy layers upon layers upon layers of other vital systems and courses and circuitry that are highly desirable.
Consider it an inoperable cancer. Because that is exactly what it is. It will be the death of you and you cannot live without its growth. Its eradication will mean your own extinction as well. It will die when you do. That.
If I had an undo button I would use it on my rage and aggression. The seeds were planted and nursed to seedlings in youth. Agitated and metastasized through adolescence and bloomed through young adulthood. Now the tree of might grows in my yard constantly and every season I have to go in and clean up all the rotting stuff that falls. Stare at them ripening knowing the best way to take care of it is to wait for it to fall. Knowing I have to, must to, gots to, wait it out and tend to it and if it dies it will only be because my heart stopped too. @#$% you, tree. Well after my father dies, I will still have that tree peering in my windows. Shadowing my kids while they play, picking up bats and swatting the little things every fall. Kicking them around. Wondering what they are and if they're edible. Tasting them anyway.
Myself watching them, if they ever do land. Firing cusses at him. My kids will think that tree was always there, because that's all they'll ever have known. "Doesn't everyone have a rage tree?" "Why don't you cut it down? The yard would be so much better without it." I know. I know.
I want an undo button for that. The schizophrenia, the paranoia, the anxiety, depression, mania, twin poles, I can deal with those fairly effectively except when I don't. The absolute rage is the hardest to bridle and if you screw it up people disappear and then so do you. Forever. I can't afford to make that mistake again. Ever.
Consider it an inoperable cancer. Because that is exactly what it is. It will be the death of you and you cannot live without its growth. Its eradication will mean your own extinction as well. It will die when you do. That.
If I had an undo button I would use it on my rage and aggression. The seeds were planted and nursed to seedlings in youth. Agitated and metastasized through adolescence and bloomed through young adulthood. Now the tree of might grows in my yard constantly and every season I have to go in and clean up all the rotting stuff that falls. Stare at them ripening knowing the best way to take care of it is to wait for it to fall. Knowing I have to, must to, gots to, wait it out and tend to it and if it dies it will only be because my heart stopped too. @#$% you, tree. Well after my father dies, I will still have that tree peering in my windows. Shadowing my kids while they play, picking up bats and swatting the little things every fall. Kicking them around. Wondering what they are and if they're edible. Tasting them anyway.
Myself watching them, if they ever do land. Firing cusses at him. My kids will think that tree was always there, because that's all they'll ever have known. "Doesn't everyone have a rage tree?" "Why don't you cut it down? The yard would be so much better without it." I know. I know.
I want an undo button for that. The schizophrenia, the paranoia, the anxiety, depression, mania, twin poles, I can deal with those fairly effectively except when I don't. The absolute rage is the hardest to bridle and if you screw it up people disappear and then so do you. Forever. I can't afford to make that mistake again. Ever.
8/27/10
Think Harder
I take back what I said about New York not being an art hub. If you think about it, the population density is what makes it something of an art hub. If, as I previously suggested, it is no more an art center than any other city because art and art production chiefly exists within the minds of a cities occupants, more occupants means a denser more interleaved art community (not necessarily more interconnected). If we want to value a cities artistic merits based upon production and the potential for creative growth then NYC rightfully ranks high. If we want to assign value to the degree of interleaving and interconnection that produces art like a gene pool than NYC likely won't rank nearly as high as smaller cities and that is because smaller cities possessing the critical mass of community participation that makes increasing densities only marginally more appealing or useful to the community of artists then a smaller city would easily rank higher for the simple matter that the weave will have fewer threads and more contacts between the threads that do exist.
Surely the potential exists for a person who specializes in technical writing to meet up with a fashionista and produce something God awful or God sent, but as the population density grows well beyond the critical (and indeterminate) density of creating minds the chances of that meeting shrinks and the potential for compartmentalization and xenophobic design grows. I think that's what I was trying to get at before. NYC is not what I expected because I hadn't considered the difficulties in meeting with other people across the geographic mass (if you laid out every floor of NYC in a two dimensional plane it would probably be half of the size of New York proper) or the difficulties entailed in navigating the purposeful dilution of the contacts being made by those who aren't actual producing artists, but who seek to participate for lesser motives (if personal motivations can be ranked from the pure artist to the profiteer and name plater). And that is what has been a little bit of a let down.
The upshot of this is that the individuals are statistically "out there". I just have to find them. So I'm going to start actively looking through my terrible internet connection. I doubt I will find many in Queens, not as a generalization of the population's abilities, but absolutely as a generalization of the population's visible activities.
I think there was something else. Was there something else? Well, look, I wanted to do the inception poster and I am fed up with thinking about it and knowing that I can't upload it even if I did do it so check this out:
_h
^^^There's your poster. I was going to draw an old school circa 80s architecture chair falling backward into claw foot tub with geometric water and various aging and weathering appliqués and pastel Pantones. Since I'm on a 56kbps connection you'll have to settle for the low low loooow fi version. Bam, done. Well at least now you have the recipe so you can go do it. Stick with reds and grays for the text and a faded yellow tub with seawater colors in the tub or some combination of those colors with a two or three color palette for that really nice low budget mass distribution feel. At least that's what I think about the matter.
Lastly I hate middlemen. I spent some time today trying to think of a fun way to describe them. The hand shakers. The go betweeners. The thing is, middlemen are essential to civilization, but even in "uncivilized" society they serve fairly critical roles. I tried to find an axiom that painted them honestly without coloring the words with my own misgivings and hatred of where I fall in the relationship of middlemen to the greater contingent. I came up with: "Middlemen: Making Life Easier and More Expensive for Everyone Since the Dawn of Time". I think that about sums it up. They let us all be lazier. They give us opportunities to pay for opportunities to pay for things and it's so difficult to be on the paying side of their equation. If you're on the production side, you love middlemen. Middlemen find you purchasers. Middlemen create your demand where none may otherwise exist. They help you find customers and they help customers find products, but for absolutely everyone involved costs go up. American is the land of the middleman and if you produce anything or buy anything your dollar costs just went through the God damned roof of what they ought to be. Your time and energy costs may have gone down, but that's an artificial deflation. A trick of conversion and magical math and the incomprehensibly tangled relationship of the greenback promise note to what it cost you to get that slip of paper. There's a special hell for the middlemen. And wouldn't it be hilarious if it was managed by middle managers who answered to no one.
No, I suppose it wouldn't be hilarious. It would be Six Flags America.
You know how I know we're not in hell yet? Scratch that. I don't know. Added a story to Bits. Suck on that. Or just read it. Is it bad if you go to a job interview and they don't tell you what the job actually entails, but ask you to come back for an all day interview? I hope it's a boiler room orientation and not the beginning of a real life Battle Royale. Both were good movies, but the main reason why I would prefer Boiler Room to Battle Royale is that I still have writing to do and can't really afford to risk death on an Island. Well, no I take even that back. Lots of take backs today. The thing is, if I die, something is bound to be published. And that's all a body can really ask for. That and a spectacular death.
///Pink Floyd - "Shine on you Crazy Diamond VI" It takes a lot of musicianship to hold a listener for 12 solid minutes. The Red Hot Chili Peppers almost nailed something close in their song Californication, but they fell several hooks short and ended up with something you can nod off to after the first minute and wake up to in the last minute. Floyd nailed it. Experience enhancers optional.
Surely the potential exists for a person who specializes in technical writing to meet up with a fashionista and produce something God awful or God sent, but as the population density grows well beyond the critical (and indeterminate) density of creating minds the chances of that meeting shrinks and the potential for compartmentalization and xenophobic design grows. I think that's what I was trying to get at before. NYC is not what I expected because I hadn't considered the difficulties in meeting with other people across the geographic mass (if you laid out every floor of NYC in a two dimensional plane it would probably be half of the size of New York proper) or the difficulties entailed in navigating the purposeful dilution of the contacts being made by those who aren't actual producing artists, but who seek to participate for lesser motives (if personal motivations can be ranked from the pure artist to the profiteer and name plater). And that is what has been a little bit of a let down.
The upshot of this is that the individuals are statistically "out there". I just have to find them. So I'm going to start actively looking through my terrible internet connection. I doubt I will find many in Queens, not as a generalization of the population's abilities, but absolutely as a generalization of the population's visible activities.
I think there was something else. Was there something else? Well, look, I wanted to do the inception poster and I am fed up with thinking about it and knowing that I can't upload it even if I did do it so check this out:
_h
^^^There's your poster. I was going to draw an old school circa 80s architecture chair falling backward into claw foot tub with geometric water and various aging and weathering appliqués and pastel Pantones. Since I'm on a 56kbps connection you'll have to settle for the low low loooow fi version. Bam, done. Well at least now you have the recipe so you can go do it. Stick with reds and grays for the text and a faded yellow tub with seawater colors in the tub or some combination of those colors with a two or three color palette for that really nice low budget mass distribution feel. At least that's what I think about the matter.
Lastly I hate middlemen. I spent some time today trying to think of a fun way to describe them. The hand shakers. The go betweeners. The thing is, middlemen are essential to civilization, but even in "uncivilized" society they serve fairly critical roles. I tried to find an axiom that painted them honestly without coloring the words with my own misgivings and hatred of where I fall in the relationship of middlemen to the greater contingent. I came up with: "Middlemen: Making Life Easier and More Expensive for Everyone Since the Dawn of Time". I think that about sums it up. They let us all be lazier. They give us opportunities to pay for opportunities to pay for things and it's so difficult to be on the paying side of their equation. If you're on the production side, you love middlemen. Middlemen find you purchasers. Middlemen create your demand where none may otherwise exist. They help you find customers and they help customers find products, but for absolutely everyone involved costs go up. American is the land of the middleman and if you produce anything or buy anything your dollar costs just went through the God damned roof of what they ought to be. Your time and energy costs may have gone down, but that's an artificial deflation. A trick of conversion and magical math and the incomprehensibly tangled relationship of the greenback promise note to what it cost you to get that slip of paper. There's a special hell for the middlemen. And wouldn't it be hilarious if it was managed by middle managers who answered to no one.
No, I suppose it wouldn't be hilarious. It would be Six Flags America.
You know how I know we're not in hell yet? Scratch that. I don't know. Added a story to Bits. Suck on that. Or just read it. Is it bad if you go to a job interview and they don't tell you what the job actually entails, but ask you to come back for an all day interview? I hope it's a boiler room orientation and not the beginning of a real life Battle Royale. Both were good movies, but the main reason why I would prefer Boiler Room to Battle Royale is that I still have writing to do and can't really afford to risk death on an Island. Well, no I take even that back. Lots of take backs today. The thing is, if I die, something is bound to be published. And that's all a body can really ask for. That and a spectacular death.
///Pink Floyd - "Shine on you Crazy Diamond VI" It takes a lot of musicianship to hold a listener for 12 solid minutes. The Red Hot Chili Peppers almost nailed something close in their song Californication, but they fell several hooks short and ended up with something you can nod off to after the first minute and wake up to in the last minute. Floyd nailed it. Experience enhancers optional.
8/6/10
Best Panel Yet?
How awesome is that?! I love it. It turned out pretty damn sweet for a quick job. Either I'm getting better or illustrator is reading my mind. Okay, enough stroking my feathers (though I sort of needed that) and back to it. One more to go. As a side note, I think I might change those paint strokes to sharp angled sort of cutout comic booky "kaboom" explosions. I think that would look even better.
And, by the way, I think I'm going to make that panel the front for the "contact" and "about me." The only reason why I'm not making it the absolute center piece is because I already have in mind a photo I took in the very early hours of a cool day while I lived in Chicago. I think you might like it too. We'll see.
Alright, moving on: I still owe you an Inception review. It's cooled off a little bit and you've probably read other reviews by now, which is a good thing ("the more you know" and all that jazz) because I want to make sure I- who am I kidding? I just haven't gotten to it yet. Maybe it'll be informative, or at least inciteful. I think I'll be able to muster at least above average incite and skip the all capital lettered rants that begin with words like "must watch twice" and "it blew me away." Most people who review films and say things like "it blew me away" as the lead in are probably blown away for one reason or another by just about everything they see. ;) I at least save it for the second line.
I've got to admit, it feels nice to be buried in getting the facade of Bits done. I'll post up a screen shot later of what the panels might look like altogether. Totally pumped.
///Sage Francis - "Lie Detector Test" Honestly, I still don't know the difference between an MC and a Rapper, but if I had to put money down on whether or not Sage Francis was an MC, I would put my bills on a big ol' hell yes. Looking forward to listening to this on a back porch of my own, with a beer in my right hand, smokes on the table, and a friend or two enjoying a big fat lazy Friday afternoon and loving it.
7/26/10
Forever and a Day and Bits and Inception
I feel like I've been away from you forever, but this guy has been hard at work producing results through A/B php learning. Well, I made up the part about A/B learning. It wasn't even a nerd joke. I don't know enough about A/B testing to make a joke about it, let alone a joke that stretches its meaning to other boundaries. Why am I even wasting time discussing that? Next song!
So I've learned a lot of php. Not the core packaged functions (I assume there are some basic functions that deal with arrays and maths and sciences and religions like in js), but mostly learning how to construct and pass information, which I can then apply to whatever codex's are available for php projects. All of that is basically a very long winded way of saying I can now manipulate wordpress as a content management system and a blog hosting system, kind of the same way I can manipulate blogger templates.
I took a long ass time to figure it out mainly because I never did it with more than filling out test questions and completing bullshit exercises in mind, but taking the plunge and doing it from the ground up taught me the ins and outs pretty thoroughly as I hoped it would.
What to show for it?
This to show for it: Bits for Flames . A fine skeletal specimen. I don't know why they call frameworks skeletons. It's more of a nude. Well not even that. I'd call it a unpolished nerd waiting for mtv of the early 90s to come along and... not sure what exactly.
And now we move on to the graphics... the part I've been waiting for. Hah, waiting on myself to get to, now that's frustrating: when you are the only person standing in your way.
Picture time:
So the good news is I'll have more time freed up to work on writing. The bad news is the immediate future will be consumed with editing and uploading the story content to Bits. The better news is that once that is done I'm gonna be back on OEM digesting my life and documenting my failings with new verve. Verve is also a word that gets under utilized. So jam it into a sentence tomorrow if you get a chance. Throw in a fist pump too. Or finger guns.
And by the way, Money Never Sleeps looks like its going to be good. Plus I'll tell you if Inception was good or not. You've already seen it, I know, but I'm still going to tell you what you should think, because I can't tell myself what to think. No, that doesn't sound right. What I'm trying to say is: as someone with a checkered mental past, I'll give you my take on a movie about a checkered mental present. That's better.
Since retro movie posters are all the rage, I'll make an Inception themed retro poster. I sort of want to get in on it, but at the same time I feel like it's becoming one of those things thats already exhausted itself. The problem with the internet is that it takes forever to digest the sheer amount of "stuff" out there and at the same time once you find the stuff worth seeing or of interest to you, you're already too late to participate meaningfully because 80% of the internet is populated by critics and 20% by doers. 80/20 comes to bite me in the ass again.
I'm pretty far from my starting point. I'm gonna shut up now and get back to it so we can talk later about something more fun and interesting and depthy. If Anne Coulter ever comes to my front door and says anything even remotely derogatory I'm going to break his nose. For the record. The late nights just keep on rolling.
///Mum - "Sunday Night Just Keeps On Rolling" riding your bike through the night on empty streets with a burly Atlantic breeze beating across the back of your neck and the click of manhole covers beneath your wheels and the u-lock bouncing off the aluminum frame and the bike chain spooling around the drive gear and buzzing through your derailleur all come together and conspire in the orange street lights under pollution lit clouds to sound like this song. Minus the little kid at the end of the youtube video. I hate kids. They get into everything.
So I've learned a lot of php. Not the core packaged functions (I assume there are some basic functions that deal with arrays and maths and sciences and religions like in js), but mostly learning how to construct and pass information, which I can then apply to whatever codex's are available for php projects. All of that is basically a very long winded way of saying I can now manipulate wordpress as a content management system and a blog hosting system, kind of the same way I can manipulate blogger templates.
I took a long ass time to figure it out mainly because I never did it with more than filling out test questions and completing bullshit exercises in mind, but taking the plunge and doing it from the ground up taught me the ins and outs pretty thoroughly as I hoped it would.
What to show for it?
This to show for it: Bits for Flames . A fine skeletal specimen. I don't know why they call frameworks skeletons. It's more of a nude. Well not even that. I'd call it a unpolished nerd waiting for mtv of the early 90s to come along and... not sure what exactly.
And now we move on to the graphics... the part I've been waiting for. Hah, waiting on myself to get to, now that's frustrating: when you are the only person standing in your way.
Picture time:
So the good news is I'll have more time freed up to work on writing. The bad news is the immediate future will be consumed with editing and uploading the story content to Bits. The better news is that once that is done I'm gonna be back on OEM digesting my life and documenting my failings with new verve. Verve is also a word that gets under utilized. So jam it into a sentence tomorrow if you get a chance. Throw in a fist pump too. Or finger guns.
And by the way, Money Never Sleeps looks like its going to be good. Plus I'll tell you if Inception was good or not. You've already seen it, I know, but I'm still going to tell you what you should think, because I can't tell myself what to think. No, that doesn't sound right. What I'm trying to say is: as someone with a checkered mental past, I'll give you my take on a movie about a checkered mental present. That's better.
Since retro movie posters are all the rage, I'll make an Inception themed retro poster. I sort of want to get in on it, but at the same time I feel like it's becoming one of those things thats already exhausted itself. The problem with the internet is that it takes forever to digest the sheer amount of "stuff" out there and at the same time once you find the stuff worth seeing or of interest to you, you're already too late to participate meaningfully because 80% of the internet is populated by critics and 20% by doers. 80/20 comes to bite me in the ass again.
I'm pretty far from my starting point. I'm gonna shut up now and get back to it so we can talk later about something more fun and interesting and depthy. If Anne Coulter ever comes to my front door and says anything even remotely derogatory I'm going to break his nose. For the record. The late nights just keep on rolling.
///Mum - "Sunday Night Just Keeps On Rolling" riding your bike through the night on empty streets with a burly Atlantic breeze beating across the back of your neck and the click of manhole covers beneath your wheels and the u-lock bouncing off the aluminum frame and the bike chain spooling around the drive gear and buzzing through your derailleur all come together and conspire in the orange street lights under pollution lit clouds to sound like this song. Minus the little kid at the end of the youtube video. I hate kids. They get into everything.
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