blanketfort

whilst i'm gone, you can go read about the man who loved only numbers: the story of paul erdos and the search for mathematical truth by paul hoffman. both a beautiful site, and about a book i want to read.

well. i move house tommorow, and no 'net connection for 6 days. i think i'll be visiting friends with modems a lot.
i'm mostly curious as to how my cat is going to deal with the whole thing. She's been acting even more neurotically than usual for the last few days, as all the things she knows get put in boxes and dissappear. I guess that means she's still inheriting my neurosese.
wish me luck :)

wow. now theres something to collect. Things That Have Been Sold in Vending Machines, not forgetting tokyoscape: vending machines.

fire and speech were the first two headtrips our ancestors ever made. The first time, aside from the imagination and the odd mistaken plant eating, that we were able to understand things in vast new ways. The only other experience with varying perspectives on life would've been through changing emotions. The rage of a battle, the pain of injuries, the elation of coitus.
I'm really stuck on this idea that the enjoyment of life is all about experiencing new ways of looking at it. Hunting, exercise and sex (if you're doing it right) are all about getting back to an animal nature, moving moment by moment on adrenalin and instinct. the study of and creation of art and science and navel gazing (of the good variety) enable you to mentally step outside your normal perspective. All providing emotional filters to strap over our eyes and make the world a new kind of technicolour.

theres just no point in being serious. life is too short to go around being serious all the time.

if i were to go back to high school again, i could have so much more fun.
wear pyjamas more often, bake more cookies, impromptu perfomances of The Hunting of the Snark in hallways, create more art and more smiles.

the official rules of getting Shotgun in a car [via slashdot]

days dont get much more frustrating than this. first i was hit by a virus which deleted all my registry files. once i finally got fed up with trying to fix it, i elected to just reinstall windows (yet again), and forgot to back up my bookmarks folder.
i want to use one of my "rewind-life-by-two-days" tokens now please.

from the Elle fashion magazine, "Sex with the Ex" survey:

5. Which of the following types of ex-sex have you indulged in?
Sympathy Sex
We-might-as-well-because-there's-nothing-good-on-television sex.
You've-got-to-understand-we-can-never-do-this-again sex.

(i was looking at the site's flash navigation structure, honest)

Adrian Grenier is going places.
I just watched The Adventures of Sebastian Cole which i cannot say enough good things about. I've been waiting for a movie like this for years, and just didnt know it. Its real life, about noone in particular, who does nothing much; and its beautiful, and dark, and sad, and happy, and long, and short.
then i skip over to his biography, and notice that he is about to play a part in a new John Waters movie, Cecil B. DeMented, which also looks as if it might be fantastic ("Plot Outline: A lunatic indie-film director and his renegade group of teenage film makers kidnap an A-list hollywood actress and force her to star in their underground film [melanie griffith]")
.

Today's anarchy was brought to you by the letters B, L, and F (Billboard Liberation Front), and by Decadent Action (Consumer Terrorists, Champagne Anarchists, Cocktail Revolutionaries).

build your own ornithoptor in an evening.

beautifully twisted flash madness: Modern Living [via glassdog]

it reads like the paper of an english major/economics minor undergraduate. An anthropology of a semi-existent universe. Really quite neat: The In-game Economics of Ultima Online [via antenna]

i think the one big thing i'm going to miss about my current apartment is the rain pounding on my roof during a downpour.
its such a comforting noise.

New Scientist: Looking glass worlds : "Some physicists say we are surrounded by a universe of mirror matter, with mirror beings living on mirror planets that orbit the stars."

unanimous unmentioned assumptions

heh. http://nicholas.isfuckingbrilliant.com. [via powazek using IsFuckingBrilliant.com]

how cute: RoShamBo Programming Competition [via this slashdot article]
An Index to the Tripartite Mystery of Roshambo - "Roshambo: It's a religion, it's conflict resolution, it's a cult of personality, it's a way of life, it's rocks and paper and scissors grooving up their thing."

it's so wonderfully quiet at this time of the morning. I can actually hear my cigarette peacefully burning away between my fingers. The sky is tinged a very pale blue as the sun slowly approaches reaching over the horizon. The air is cold but the blanket is warm.

standing on my porch, after too much coffee, jiggering slightly, almost start dancing quietly to the silence to burn off some of the happy nervous energy, but then i realized that neighbours might be watching, and "what if they had video cameras or something, that'd be on America's Funniest...." and thought to myself "i must remember not to dance on my front porch" and grinned to myself. Then it hit me, that this is a terrible thought, and that of course i should be dancing on my porch. Everyone should be happy to dance silently on their porch in the middle of the night. this is something terribly wrong with society.

so. for the second time in a week, i've got a dead battery from leaving my headlights on all day.
they really need to make things more nick-proof. *sigh*

groovy picture [via invisible city]

oh i'm so much happier now :)
smiley mad fun: An Entirely Other Day: Bink

good lord am i in a bad mood.
i havent been actually Pissed Right Off in a long time. First off i had another really bad dream, this time with a population of nothing but the girls i've had a crush on in my life, who are all dating all the guys i've ever hated in my life. Then i wake up to some asshole knocking loudly on every door in the building, and get up ready to confront whoever it is, REALLY hoping that it is someone trying to convert me to their religion so that i can just go off on them. Unfortunately it was just the vancouver phone book person, so i made do with glaring at him till he felt sufficiently uncomfortable to scuttle away. I think the milk i had in my bowl of cereal just now was slightly sour, and i've run out of cigarettes.

goddamn it gets bright early. now im tempted to just stay up all night.

mMMmmmm. White Rabbits. Creamy Candy.

I was about to make a comment about how noone ever seems to email me, and I have no idea who is actually reading this site (presumming someone is); but then I remembered that I have 4 month old emails I still haven't gotten around to replying to (sorry malc, it's coming, really).

more toys that we want: Micro-Helicopters, and Skateboard trainers (from here)

Survivor spinoffs:
  Tourister -> two groups of Harvard MBA's venture into Harlem, with expensive camera and computer gear slung over their shoulders. Last person to get mugged wins a bungee jump over Wall Street, to see what the next crash will be like.
  Loliter ->four pairs of 16 year old girls in catholic school uniform are sent into the New Orleans French quarter at night. Last pair alive wins a summer-internship at the White House.
  Terrorister -> 14 fundamentalist ministers are sent into Iraq. last man alive wins the altar boy of his choice. Any religious conversions win an extra Indulgence.

Gothic Gardening: including gardening for black plants, gardening for bats, the abortionist's garden, and many more.

slow sad classical music quietly in the foreground, rain coming down pitterpatterpitterpatter on my ceiling, thoughts fluttering down from the roof of my skull.

The Smile Project blows me away. Now thats Flash.

from the Journal of Mundane Behavior, a paper on Japanese social interaction in elevators, to add to my previous foray into things Japanese.

World Sexual Records: such as deadliest female sadist in history. [via camworld]

good thing to remember: your hot water is included in the rent, and when you're having a really bad day you can stand under the cascading hot water for as long as you want.
ahhhhhh....

Driver Down: "Like eating soup with pantyhose over your head.", which is both a quote from, and a fairly accurate description of Mark Drivers latest rant.
i've got to be cynical sometimes....

good god good nap. what year is it again?

he's not dead, he's just cardiacally challenged.

Maybe we should start getting kids stoned on pot, and find some method that works incredibly well to teach them how math can be fascinating. Explain so that i understand, the beauty of physics. Get me staring at a picture of a movie car crash scene, and help me draw in, with my mind, the arrows of active kinetic and potential forces within the picture. Perform Shakespeare whilst I lie on my back staring down a grass hill at this mesmerizing performance of the bard.

Give me serious and deep rituals (pattern language style) around it, and give me hits of acid whilst we dissect flowers, keeping a counselor nearby who knows how to handle "i'm a flower murderer" trips. Walk us in a grassy field at night and explain the mysteries of the sky to us whilst we lie on our backs, and smoke, and pass around binoculars. Show us through art museums in private tours and magically explain what the artists were like, Shaw or Twain style.

i really love the idea that you can conduct music at one speed using one hand (eg 3/3), and conduct at a different speed using the other hand (eg 4/4). It takes some training and some fierce concentration, but it is possible. Trying it without knowing how, the mind explodes at trying to conceive what kind of state of mind would have to be possible in order to achieve it. What other completely different states of mind can I achieve without straying from the realm of "sane man" (using whatever definition you please)?

I think this is the huge attraction of both books and drugs. This is also the thrill of languages, games, activities and every type of art.

a wonderful short movie that made me remember the better moments of sesame street. [via k10k]

i'm trying to plan out what i can do with the kitchen in my new place (yes its still 3 weeks away, but i'm obsessed). trying to make it interesting, without going over the top, whilst keeping it easy and pleasant to use.

possible bad ideas:
-halloween to whatever degree the entire room, making it a witch's kitchen.
plastic spiders and eyeballs and teeth in jars, scrawly handwritten labels
for everything, dried herbs hanging in bunches, into one cupboard build a
gentle outward sloping ramp and build a lightweight paper mache screaming
head which is attached at the temples via two strings to inside the cupboard
so when the door is opened the head rolls out and falls down to dangle at
face height, etc (what to do with microwave and other appliances...?)

-take all the doors off of the top cupboards and just arrange the contents
aesthetically (and by country)

-b&w i think the counters/cupboards are all black and white, so continue the
theme with all the b&w postcards/photographs/posters i already have.

-chinese style: use my entire set of chinese dining ware as main dishes,
decorate room with scrolls, proper wooden cutting board, little chinese
jars, woks, bamboo baskets and art, kitchen gods altar,

i really could go for one of those excercise machines that you can sit on while you type. with the pedals and the slow gentle motion from a pedalow. tip the room up so that im at a 30degree angle in a tall backed, comfy office chair, keyboard and mouse right under my fingers, cat sprawled out on my belly and purring gently. hmmMMMmmmm.

you realize something brilliant (or so sounding at the time anyway), and try to argue it through in your head to explain to someone, and then realize that the complete opposite of your conclusions is true. love it.

i think the show Survivor has to be one of the most depressing things i've seen recently. Why don't we just pay the local islanders a million dollars to survive their normal daily life?
sickening.

"Whoever you are, there is some younger person who thinks you are perfect. There is some work that will never be done if you don't do it. There is someone who would miss you if you were gone. There is a place that you alone can fill." -- Jacob M Braude

webcams will be fun once we get closer to streaming refresh rates. then i could send someone an email whom i knew was at their computer. people usually change body posture when they change programs or interfaces, so i would know when they might be checking their email. i could then watch to see what their reaction is. whether they laugh or smile, look aghast, or frustrated.

i still really want some Duff beer, or even Reeb, but this will do in the meantime. [via keithbrown]

my cat is staring at me something fierce. usually i just block her out (she literally does sit 6 feet away staring at me for hours at a time everyday, sitting next to her foodbowl on the kitchen linoleum) but now i can just feel her staring at me, and the black outline of her shape in the periphery of my vision is standing out with such contrast thats its burning an image into that side of my brain.

from the pressed fairy calendar:
"Saturday june 3rd -> The Worst Day in the Fairy Year.
no one quite knows why this day has been named. One theory is that this is the day on which King Gargle-Afterwards first launched his drive to prevent fairies from drinking nectar whilst under this influence of moonshine. Others say it is more likely to be named after the day on which Queen Flat Bird Hat invented the digital wristwatch."

wow, that was a damn good misread: my eyes panned down and read "Take-out cartoons litter my coffee table", which hit my train of thought like a car the villians left in the middle of the tracks.
those bastards.

why couldn't high school pranks have been like this when i was there?

if you want to worry yourself, and use a cell-phone, go check out this compilation of all the articles published on cell-phone health risks

dont dip your cookies in your orange juice. it's the other mug.

Magic! some great articles about Harry Houdini, and the site of Penn and Teller.