DuskInward horror, the bones override the vanity, grasp for what the body needs. Intellect shudders, feels violated at the other it finds in itself, fetishised as a symbol of death. Within lie ever more complex layers of striving, all to build the necessary illusions aid layers for a sane, completely lacking in insight, mind. Limited by birth, its first breath a soft echo of its last.
It's time again for my yearly reflections. Who am I? What has changed?
Last year this time, I had just committed for the second time to try to make things work with Debb. I was working for the Robotics group at CMU, and had only recently began to see myself as not being a libertarian. I was working on my BLOG software around this time last year too, moving to CSS. I had one cat, Wally, and kind of had Beefalo back, as Debb had brought her back into my life when we got back together.
In the 6 months after that, Wally died, something bad was revealed relating to my family, I got Tortfeasor to replace Wally, and both my job and my relationship with Debb began a slow slide into misery. I put an end to both, switching my job into Psychology, and ending the relationship. I made an evaluation of my political philosophy and began to tenatively explore the idea of calling myself a communist. I'm still not entirely certain the name applies -- the system I desire differs from any communism-as-practiced that I know of (I still need to read up on the Sandanistas though), but I've decided that free markets lead to power concentrations and the advancement of values that enslave people. I devoted more of my time to Wikipedia, and spent a lot more time with CMU's philosophy group. Eventually, I began to spend some time with a friend, N, and that eventually and slowly changed into a relationship. It's not a simple relationship -- both of us are too complex for that. It is, however, enlightening and fulfilling. We're heading to Europe for most of January..
So I still ask myself, who am I? What are the things that drive my life, what are the things that dominate my mind? I am still a philosopher -- I still see it valuable to think in the philosophical traditions, and to attempt to structure my life by the things I decide. My positions and style have changed, but the identity has not. I still am also big on science. In both, I feel that people don't really know how to mix sentiment into the way they see the world, and I hope to be both an example of a better way to live and think, and to keep working to improve myself in that way. I do adopt the new identity of communist with a bit of uncertainty, both because of what it means to others, and because my commitment to it is contingent on it working, something which I am not certain is possible in a way compatible with liberalism. Extinguishing capitalism is not worth doing if the replacement system doesn't provide a decent life to people. Capitalism will likely be the end of civilization, but we must find a cure that's better than the cancer. I hope it's possible. I am still a geek, but I'm enjoying working partly outside of programming-type jobs. Wherever I have worked and touched code, I've found people uninterested in fixing it, and unwilling to allow me to do so. That's really frustrating. It's nicer to work with the opensource community, as the programmers generally are better and care more about good code, and where managers do less damage because they are typically the community as a whole. Wikipedia, as I mentioned, is a big part of my life presently, and it's part of a general focus on things that benefit humanity as a whole. I'm focusing a lot of my attention on what kind of structural and within-structure changes can be made to make things better and limit the ability of people (businessmen and criminals, among others) to damage the system and society as a while. I am increasingly worried that the large scale course corrections needed for the American government are not possible to make because of entrenched power and political persuasion necessary. Musically, I'm not too far from where I was -- I'm continuing to work on broadening my musical horizons. Groups like "No Doubt" are new to me, but old to the world, and I am happy to continue to explore what's out there.
What do I expect from 2005? It'll be interesting, first and most obviously, to get used to writing 2005. I anticipate deeping my connection to the Wikipedia community and becoming more involved in politics as I get more comfortable with how I think now. The relationship is promising -- it's still young, but I hope it grows and we get good things out of it. I hope to continue to work on my BLOG software, and when the major rewrite is working enough, I would like to get some additional people working on it. Right now, it's quite close to being minimally functional -- the only thing stopping me from putting up a comment-disabled version is that the commandline importer is little more than a stub. The Wiki part isn't very close to being mature right now, but it kind of, vaguely, works (it can display entries using a small subset of the full wiki syntax, but there's no way to put entries in right now except by tweaking the database directly). Over the next year, I'm hoping to move dachte.org from its current box, a virtual UsermodeLinux box, to real hardware. This will help with performance issues -- 128M RAM is really lousy. I also hope to spend a good amount of time with my friends, both those in Columbus and those in Pittsburgh. I haven't had time to do that much recently, and it's important. I also hope to reestablish and maintain the inner peace that I've been trying to keep that recently slipped a bit.
Recently, Debb gave me the cats back. It's wonderful having them in my life again (although the vet bills to take care of a surprise problem were not fun.. yuck!).
And so, Comrades and others, I bid you adieu. It's time to go pick up N from the airport.
Evening
Morning