Sudden snowstorm => helping people push cars around SqHill. (view full entry for contents)
Recently was curious about a song performed by the Mystic Knights of the Oingo Boingo in the Richard Elfman film 「Forbidden Zone」. (view full entry for contents)
More pushing of cars: more falling down into freezing puddles. Doing that a few times suggests "Damnit, I want a cupcake!" - I wonder how much business Dozens made from that precise kind of thing today.
Been playing a bit more with some stories I've been tempted to make webcomics/fantasyblogs out of. The most recent story I've been fleshing out is set a few hundred years before the setting of one of my experiments in fiction-blogging, in the near future.(view full entry for contents)
CMU fans might find this kind of neat.
A suggested comprimise for people whose eyes don't simply slide over grey/gray spelling - græy. I *think* I normally spell it grey, but I've seen both of them (and written both of them) enough that my eyes glide over the difference (unlike the -or/-our suffix distinction where the latter is far superiour, or judgement where all other spellings are poor judgement.. :P). I imagine on a computer, græy would stand out as off because in most fonts it looks utterly alien, although in writing my eyes glide over it just like gray/grey.
Read the news today and CS-addled brain suggested "Sometimes I think America needs to have a serious conversation about Race conditions and d(r)eadlocks". Oh goodness.
Logged into facebook for the first time in months to suspend my account - irritating to see all the distant acquaintances pop up with a message "so-and-so will miss you" - errant nonsense and impersonal emotional manipulation. Haha. Perhaps that's a growth industry. Moods have been insensely bad and stormy recently, maybe things have been a bit self-destructive. I seem to be proficient at driving people away for my own neurotic reasons. In theory, there are social events to go to tonight and tomorrow, in practice I will likely panic and hide.
Irritations: (view full entry for contents)
Other ponderings and stuff: (view full entry for contents)
Overall, this feels a lot like the end to the anime 「Lain」.. the temptation and path of disappearing is not really avoidable.
For now, however, I seek crêpes.
Stanford's Social Innovation Review is a really interesting magazine. I rather like Stanford's yt presence, and it speaks well of them that Lawrence Lessig spent time there. They use their yt presence to have frank and interesting discussions of various policy alongside other classes they put online. I don't recall why I have a copy of the magazine, but it's full of examples of people doing clever, useful, and interesting things for the public good. So far, the most interesting thing I've read (I'm about halfway through the issue) is an organisation that tried to fight malnutrition in Vietnam, which was at about 80% in the villages in which they worked. Noting that government nutritional supplements didn't seem to be working, they intead interviewed the 20% that wern't malnourished and found that they were adding small amounts of shrimp and fish to their meals, and so they organised the best-nourished families teaching the malnourished their cooking tips.
I was thinking that my initial brief synopsis of this technique would be to use an evolutionary rather than revolutionary technique - rather than bringing in knowledge from outside, use knowledge that's already there in some part of the population and perform artificial selection on the responsible memes. A lot of effective thinking, I think, is having a rich set of operators and strategies in one's toolbox and holding concepts and rules loosely enough to allow them to flexibly be employed to nontraditional ends. That process of remembering both specific things and a progression of more abstract forms of them for later use is a precious skill.
Yesterday: After work wandered around a bit in Schenley Park while trying to figure out a place I haven't eaten at a million times recently, decided on Indian Place on Craig (where I at at very often when I first came to Pgh and then decided their food quality was poor). It turns out that either their food has gotten good again or their Aloo Gobi was always good - tasty meal. Settled for tea at Kiva Channukah, where I found that recent sketch scans had been badly misdone.
Today: After work spent quality time learning how to make the art lab's scanner not crop my images (I didn't realise that my sketch pad has a weird paper size, which turned out to be the biggest issue). On the way away from campus spotted an offensively stupid poster posted by the local socialist equality party folk. Being posted without permission, taking it down is kosher, so I did - it can join my collection of propoganda. Never undestimate the power of loud people who aim more for confirmation of their theory and emotional resonance to stifle careful, intelligent versions of the movement who might actually accomplish something. I think in general the ideal place people should be, intellectually, is in an idealism that's been sufficiently bombed by reality - neither ignoring values nor ignoring facts is appropriate, and having a perspective that uses each appropriate is crucial. ... Also have had a low-grade migraine all day..
Wondering if my attitude towards storytelling ties to DnD(view full entry for contents)
Visiting the Art building at CMU is a wonderous experience(view full entry for contents)
Tonight is an instance of what I'll title STDEVENING5 (eat alone at India Garden then go to Té Café until it closes), (view full entry for contents)
Recently saw the numbers on how much China and Russia spent from the 50s until the mid-80s on their conflict - staggering. If they had been able to avoid that and spend half of it on infrastructure, I wonder how different the world would be today. It must've been delightful for pro-American ideologues to see things like that happen - who would think that two communist world powers with a long border between them would be at each other's throats for such a long time? (aside: the British/Argentinean conflict seems to be heating up again)
In the most recent Auto-Tune the News (#10 was released a week or so ago and it is most excellent), there are some oddities that become more clear when playing it at 80% speed (in mplayer, the square brackets adjust speed) - there are some parts where the notes are kind of muddled, and some parts of the note-cluster appear to be patterns that "demand" a response (by musical implicature), but they fade back into the non-overtured mainline of the music before the response becomes necessary - the effect on the listener is weird - it's akin to .. having speculative branches in the CPU being discarded but still figuring into the visible timeline of the program, or perhaps Hawking radiation, or perhaps having some anger left at someone after dreaming them doing something cruel.. violated abstractions.. the non-main voices are best heard doing this around 30 seconds in for those rare people who might like following my usual BS :P I sometimes wish I had more of a background in music theory.
Recent efforts to flesh out a character and her world enough that I could write a webcomic about it have been rather successful. Not having New England's version of high society means I'll probably never know how accurate I am, but hooray for wikis to organise these things. A sketch I did some time back of someone who's near one of the ideal forms in my notion of female beauty and a hint of personality from a quirky badass in one of my favourite RPG videogames (Etna from Disgaea) in the midst of an upheaval yields a story that rolls off the mind. Perhaps hooray for being a dreamer.
The 10:00 of a life..
Just had a rather nice dinner at Paris 666, my first time there. Weekends are slightly more lonely than weeks - chance of bumping into anyone I know or having a conversation drops from 5% to maybe 2%. Still, this was a rather nice dinner. What I had: (view full entry for contents)
Now at the Shadyside Crazy Goat, where there is sad, mellow music playing, kind of like if Vienna Teng and Jamiroquai both got completely stoned and thought about making some music but never really comitted to it. Maybe I'll stay here and daydream/sketch until this part of the twilight fades.
I've been daydreaming about what kinds of biological mechanisms would allow a theoretical organism to maintain a colony of cells of its ancestors in a pocket in itself.. (view full entry for contents)
I look around the Crazy Goat, everyone but me is in pairs or triplets - a pair of old men who look to be a bit mentally off, students studying things, someone reading classifieds. It seems that friendships are things to watch.. I see a girl playing with a guy's crazy flip of hair, strange how the years have gone by.
I rather like the goofy lights and random wall colours here - with the high ceilings, it reminds me of my favourite apartment back in Columbus (I've never made another place I've lived "my own" as much as I did that place - virtually every light had a different colour, there were cat5 cables wound up the walls and draped from the overhang part, yarn and other cables, etc etc. I miss it. )
