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EpicMegatrax writes more bullshit
 

offline Hyperflake from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-07-19 23:46 [#02500251]
Points: 31038 Status: Regular



LAZY_TITLE


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-07-20 00:02 [#02500254]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



i don't feel he went after me any more than anyone else,
really, i just wrote plenty and thus gave him plenty to work
with. it's like halo, where i'm torn between the urge to
keep locking horns with it... or throw the controller
through a plate-glass window. particular one i remember...
he was all: oh, the mastering i did on this afx live set was
crap? i want to see what you do with it, big boy. i wrote
some expansive thing that was 1/3 true about how i got up to
take a piss in the middle and stopped to wank to the ten
foot oil painting of aphex on my wall. he ignored it all and
said, "oh, you just ran it through a stereo plugin..." and i
was flatly annoyed because it was all hardware, those
drunken expletives weren't yelled into a plugin, no sir, but
a tc electrix warp factory. at that point i'd already lost
and he kept trashing my plugins and i wanted to stab him but
i couldn't bring myself to stop beating on it. rip mark
bell.


 

offline Hyperflake from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-07-20 00:09 [#02500259]
Points: 31038 Status: Regular



Weird to think it really was him, as you were saying makes
you wonder who else lurks here and takes the piss out of is


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-07-20 00:12 [#02500262]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



like i've written before, i view it like gardening. it's fun
to see how it all turns out, even though how it turns out
isn't really the point. casually nurse all manner of lazy
theories about who is what. most are wrong. a few aren't.
but i'm not keeping score....


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-07-20 00:39 [#02500283]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



i guess i have a certain level of respect for anonyminity. i
don't care about some famous person simply because they're
famous, i sense that there's good shit in that brain and i
want to dig into it and absorb it. but it's hard to have a
real conversation if people realize you're famous chap xyz
and suddenly none of the answers you get are honest; it's
just people being wide-eyed idiots. i simply enjoy the skill
game of trying to suss it, as rdj would say, and i've lost
count of the number of things i've figured out pretty
definitely and then kept to myself forever.


 

offline Hyperflake from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-07-20 00:40 [#02500284]
Points: 31038 Status: Regular



^ yes your spot on, its great to chat with some like minded
people, even though wires get crossed sometimes because the
web isnt a perfect medium of communication, well text
anyway,


 

offline Hyperflake from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-07-20 00:42 [#02500287]
Points: 31038 Status: Regular | Followup to EpicMegatrax: #02500283



im definitely not an alias of anyone famous i can assure you
of that


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-07-20 01:36 [#02500296]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



lies. you're aphex twin


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-07-20 03:03 [#02500298]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



i'm glad it all came up and i reread the SAB interview. the
part about neighbors banging on the wall is hitting home
right now. the arseholes next to me go apeshit at the
slightest floorboard creak and it's driving me insane. i'm a
fidgety guy who has learned he needs lots and lots of
exercise
to not pace about the room tensely for hours at
a time. cigarettes also help, and piss them off even more.
so it's this awful feedback loop where something i do sets
them off and it stirs me up which stirs them up more. in my
calmer moments i tell myself this is shit i bump into all
over life and this is as good a time as any to get over it.
in practice it's not so easy. i tried being nice and finding
ways to get my shit done without bothering them, but a huge
amount of effort made little difference. i went full science
on it, trying various configurations of windows and doors
and shit with a timer to see if any make any difference.
nope. i've resorted to not caring as best i can. it's still
hard not to slam back -- like yes, right there, the fucking
cow beast is mad again -- but a part of me knows i should
just ignore them; let them do it. because i'm sure the
people on the other side of the cow beasts hate 'em as much
as i do and have no idea it has anything to do with me.
eventually they (or some other loud assholes) will get
pissed at cow beasts and i can quietly smoke cigarettes as
they cave each others' skulls in. i should probably just
move. again. goddamit.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-07-25 01:04 [#02500787]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



there are plenty of moments where, despite all my coping
mechanisms, other people are just driving me batshit and i
have trouble getting away from 'em. fire alarm going off in
this ghetto joint at 3am. repeatedly. my earplugs were in
the car so i got a bit drunk and stuffed tissues in my ears;
pillows on top and we're finally asleep until the building
staff is banging on everyone's door at 1pm or something. my
door is latched and they fail attempted entry with a KLONK
as i repeatedly yell that i'm trying to sleep. "the past
fifteen doors were all like this," i hear the daft blonde
from the desk say. "christ," i think, "you'd think she'd
have gotten the hint after ten that everyone was sleeping in
after last night's bullshit and given up; waited." but, no.
a thousand things like this in the course of 48 hours. i try
to go exercise; it's saturday afternoon and the first park
is a zoo. no parking spots. at the second park i get as far
as the gates before some cop shoos me off because something
deep in the woods might still be on fire. the third park is
also busy, but i finally get some exercise. took goddamn
long enough.

contrast that to the moment a few days before where some guy
and i were jockeying around at 11pm on a highway. he'd gun
it past me and i'd let him, then a few seconds later i'd
floor it and whiz past him. rinse and repeat. we were both
having great fun with it; all adrenaline and no
testosterone. just the way i like it. then there was
construction and we both split off into two separate
directions; never to see each other again. americans can be
jerks but there's a certain level of heart we put into
things like driving that makes for unique moments. european
driving is infinitely more professional (in my limited
experience) and more boring.


 

offline Hyperflake from Wirral (United Kingdom) on 2016-07-25 18:27 [#02500801]
Points: 31038 Status: Regular



^ i thought it was going to get really exciting when you
mentioned a branching road cos of construction, where you
hit a ramp dukes of hazard style and glanced off the front
of a bulldozer into a pile of barrels with explosive
chemicals


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-07-26 05:28 [#02500819]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



no, more like -- oh, cops, fun's over, everyone scatter and
go back to being boring normal cars. i almost wish we'd
found a good gas station to pull into and chat, though,
probably would have been a man worth knowing.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-07-26 05:37 [#02500820]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



in collecting words there are moments of wonderful success.
word salad becomes a way to burp the subconscious, out with
it, give it to me lad. i'm all "bloviate verklempt" and i
knew bloviate was a real word... but as far as i knew, i was
making up verklempt. more faeksdeutch. a week later i google
my own phrase because it's sticking around over all the
other nonsense i came up with that week, and i find out
verklempt is a yiddish word, meaning, roughly, "to be
overcome with emotion." it can be happy or sad. like, music
making you cry. or the birth of your first child. or
anything like that. best i had before was "peak experience,"
some clinical ugly bullshit from college psych classes. it
never fit that particular sort of beautiful tension and
tears. once i realized i'd hit upon a deep and real word by
accident, i also realized it tied into a bunch of shit going
on in my life. it's sort of the same thing as having a
confusing dream and figuring it out a week later. i've
always said, half-kidding, half-serious: if i haven't cried
to music within the last week or two, i take a moment to sit
down, have a good think: what in my life has gone so
horribly wrong? a day and a half ago i was hiking and i came
around an absolutely beautiful ridge and i was just crying
over that. it's a bit embarassing but it shouldn't be. it's
sad i have to feel weird about it, really.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-07-26 08:44 [#02500826]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



i remember i'd done something disruptive in class somewhere
between second and fifth grade, and i was locked up in some
sub-room of elementary school for recess. this in and of
itself didn't bother me, but i was pretty bored. i had some
written work to do and i decided i didn't like how i'd been
taught to write letters. i spent the whole of lunch break
and recess categorically coming up with a new handwriting
style. take the way my dad writes an upper-case D and
crosshatches a 7, a few letters from mum, some i'd seen
elsewhere and liked, then a few from class i regarded as
acceptable. i also took inspiration from cursive and began
working out how to write... er, non cursive (i'm sure
there's a word for it, but i forget) without lifting the pen
from the page nearly as much. the decisions i made w/rt how
i write letters were largely settled that day, but
conjoining everything for less pen-left and more speed was
something that has continued and evolved over the years. a
few changes in letter style, i suppose, but mostly in
persuit of more speed. i like the pilot G2 pens for their
willingness to spew ink like byron's cock; 07 is about
write. 10 smears too easily, but i always wind up with ink
from dragging my hand across the paper anyways. i type even
more quickly than i write, but neither works as fast as my
brain, and this is intolerable. i need a bunch of electrodes
on a collander or something to read my zygomatic twitches


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-07-26 08:48 [#02500827]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



take what's been poured into your by society, keep the good
bits, throw out the crap, import stuff from trusted sources
to fill in the gaps, then optimize.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-07-29 13:03 [#02501031]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



for whom the bell trolls


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-02 23:50 [#02501224]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



i'd like to adjust the pajama pants issue. i would wear that
shit all the time if i could. i know this is pretty funny.
hell, i think it's funny. but i am a terrible machine that
overanalyzes everything, including pajama pants -- or
sweatpants, which are functionally the same thing.

back in 2013, it was simply what was most comfortable for me
as i worked on my jawns. the hardware jawns. you know -- if
you shut it off, the jawn is gone, mon. so i'd go for 12
hours in my japamana pananas, take a nap on the futon next
to all my synths, then resume working. for your records, i'd
generally put on a fresh pair every time i took a shower,
which makes it more or less once per track.

doing lots of dancing, yoga, whatever has really clarified
it: most socially acceptable pants restrict your movement. i
have spotted a thousand little unconscious habits that have
formed around restrictive pants. i'll be stretching and
contorting in my swordfish pants, and i realize i'm making
some leg movement way more complicated that it needs to be.
after studying it a bit, it dawns on me what this is: this
odd movement is there so i don't rip my pants. it happens to
us all. like, playing volleyball with a girl i liked in high
school. she thought it was great and helped me tape them up.
the rest did not turn out so well, suffice to say. it's only
happened a handful of times, really, but it's just so
catastrophic you learn very quickly how not to move in jeans
and such. a few years later, you move like that without
thinking about it. in the nude, you move carefully, so as
not to rip the imaginary jeans you aren't wearing. i hate
having this sort of useless trash in my brain, but i'm
worried if i make an effort to uproot it i'll split my
collection of courdoroys inside of a month.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-02 23:57 [#02501226]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



one of my college roommates would wear shorts year-round. no
matter how cold. same shit, i figure. his girlfriend dragged
him off over thanksgiving to meet her parents and she got
him to wear pants for that; i'm sure it was the most awkward
experience of his life.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-04 10:14 [#02501319]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular | Followup to EpicMegatrax: #02501224



cognitive burden. that's the phrase used by academic
sorts who think they understand the mind (but don't, because
they refuse to take weasels seriously). pants are a
cognitive burden. the harsh reality of things like ripping
your buttocks or mashing your balls enforces an additional
wad of computation that must be performed for any and all
movement. it's one of those things that's so gradual i
didn't notice until i started digging around in there. but,
sure enough, there it is. another added stressor in my life.
each instance of this is about as strong as cosmic
background radiation, but there are many instances and it
adds up.

my philosophy of movement -- i have to admit, that
phrase feels good on my brain -- goes back to my comp sci
classes, one of the ones on AI. comp sci has this thing
big O notation that represents the worst case for a given
bit of computation to be churned through. for example,
guessing a 4-digit PIN code is O(10^4). ten possibilities
for each digit, four digits. an N-digit PIN code is O(10^n).
flip side, best case -- "little o" -- is O(1), e.g. you
correctly guess the PIN on the first try. this is extremely
important in computers because it's what lets you know how
some lab experiment might react in a situation where ten
thousand users are slamming it at once. an exponential O(n)
is obviously bad news. bored comp sci professors play car
games like coming up with, like, the worst O(n).
cite.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-04 10:21 [#02501320]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



if you're going to program a robotic arm to move to a given
configuration, it's O(n^3), where N is the number of joints
in your robot arm. three because you're moving in three
dimensions. i immediately loved this because it's satisfying
and direct and understandable. i remember having an IM
conversation with a classmate in which i said, "thanks to
being stoned, i have managed to optimize the inverse
kinematics for pringle consumption." or something like that.
pretty much, there are four quadrants the pringle flavor
powder can live on, and it moves around from chip to crisp.
two sides, two halves. i want this powder on a certain spot
of my tounge, for optimum nom. i noticed i was going to eat
a pringle and... no, wait. ok there. oh, shit, this one is
different. you'd think i was doing a robot dance instead of
eating chips... oh, shit, that thing from class. so i sat
there and sorted it out. i visualized different wants to eat
pringles and found one that's more or less the same minimal
sort of motion no matter what quandrant the powder is on.

i also took tae kwon doe classes when i was a kid. i quit
when they stopped teaching me punches and kicks and forced
me to begin memorizing patterns of movement. this kick, two
steps, that punch, turn, etc... it was too tedious for me at
ten years old, but a year or three after pringle kinematics
it hit me what this was: growing up, you learn how to walk
and move. it's more or less arbitrary. inefficiencies,
dangerous tensions. those repetitive patterns were design to
A) frustrate you enough that you start actually noticing
them, and B) tear out something that has been arbitrarily
wired and replace it with something structured and
deliberate. retraining your muscle memory so you block
without thinking how to block, and block without frying your
tendons.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-04 10:24 [#02501321]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



you didn't ride a bike perfectly the first time you tried,
right? or threw an (american) football in a perfect spiral?
no, you had to practice. what i decided was that it made
sense to practice movement in general. let's move my arm
here. now my leg there. no real plan other than trying to
work through everything and anything i can think of, analyze
it, and possibly rewrite it. last time i tried i still
couldn't throw a football in a spiral reliably, but i figure
i'd pick it up more quickly now than before i indulged in
this abstract weirdness.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-04 11:39 [#02501322]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



there are so many odds and ends that feed into this all.
ansel adams isn't as relevant as he used to be, but "the
print" is still one of those books i feel like anyone who
takes art seriously should at least flip through. in it, he
describes exercises he used to allow him to hold the camera
more steadily. how he would always exhale as he pressed the
clicker; a polished and calculated ritual backed up by
training, fomented from years of experience. it's not hard
to make leaps from there. individual bits of hardware like
the roland pg300 are a small amusement park of possibility
vs. finger-contorting reality. i never got around to
hand-steadying physical exercise sort of stuff, but i always
meant to. but i did get through plenty of pondering about
how i could work an extra slider or two at once. on my
mixer, how i wired up the channels was immensely important
-- like, i want these drum noises in a cluster of channels
so one hand can handle them all at once, and i'm not weaving
in between synth channels and potentially hitting the wrong
button. on and on


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-04 11:45 [#02501323]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



er, not "the print." i meant "the camera." i remembered
there were three books, two are largely irrelevant in the
digital aged, stopped thinking there, picked the wrong one.
i also might have swapped the robot arm O(n) figures.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-04 11:59 [#02501324]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



am i going to share my finger algorithm? hell no, get your
own bro. i'm going to be a tease, other than to say start
with being able to do freq, res, and chorus rate with one
hand, with that same hand always ready to hop up to lfo
delay/rate and DCO range/lfo/env if the other hand is too
busy. i'm right-handed and so the left hand was the backup
that got over to the DCO if it had time. i will also say
that i would go mad if i tried to think of all this
while jamming. it's just like pants, i learned how to
(not) shred them, got used to it, then stopped thinking
about it.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-04 12:01 [#02501325]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



i guess you can follow the lines and understand that i
rearranged my studio dozens of times trying to get things in
convenient places. roommates would get home and find an end
table missing from the den because it was the only thing in
the whole house that was the height and size i wanted.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-04 12:11 [#02501326]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



i've had moments (initially on drugs, eventually on my own)
where the interface disappeared entirely. somewhere in 2009
my modular was just starting to be useful and i was playing
with it, intently concentrating on some drones and
pulsewidth. i'd had my hands on the same knobs for fifteen
or twenty minutes, working for or five at once, and at some
point it kind of drifted off. it's like that hammer hand
trick. my brain had accepted the knobs in the way it
typically accepted my hand, and, well... do you have to
think about moving your hand to a particular spot? you can
analyze ways to do it offline, but when it comes to doing
it... you just do it. the end result was as close as i've
ever gotten to be able to plug a quarter inch guitar cable
into my head and record the output. the only bummer was lag;
it took my hand half a second or so at times to move to the
right noise vector. eventually someone knocked on my door
and the whole thing popped like a balloon. gone as soon as i
took my hand off.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-04 12:19 [#02501327]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



also, the guy who wrote that hammer hand mentioned shrooms,
but he really wants arylcyclohexylamines for that job.
shrooms are more the thing if you want to very sternly
record an sh101 meditation on death to minidisc.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-05 04:18 [#02501421]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



lots of stuff i've written here is a few versions old, at
this point. i got into kinematics while derailing the
Cheetah EP thread. i remember posting about tae kwon doe in
response to something jnasato said around two years ago.
i've bothered my poor friends for hours; declaiming on my
mad nonsense. fragments are all over this place. and other
boards. ancient irc conversations. recursively indented
bullet-point lists on paper with arrows i have grown
increasingly fancy and indulgent about drawing. i must
curtail this

pringle kinematics was circa 2005, connecting tae kwon doe
and pringle kinematics was circa 2011. abandoning VSTs was
2007, yawning at burial was 2009... as was performing that
mind-meld with my modular. I know you don't care, I'm just trying to annoy you


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-06 20:29 [#02501525]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



so, yeah, last night i was doing some stretches. kneel on
the floor, back and forth a bit. lean all the way back and
lean on my hands like a scissor mechanism. forward, down on
my elbows. back up. back again. the soles of my feet curve
perfectly against my butt; it feels nice. but life is not so
nice, because i hear a rrrrip. and, yes, i've just split my
pants. my pajama pants. some scenarios are just unwinnable,
i think.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 18:10 [#02501566]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



is there a word for the places that grow and sell plants?

no, not farms. that's a different thing. they grow more than
plants, and they aren't a store. i'm looking for the thing
where it's got a couple greenhouses, some open-air shit,
maybe a small field, shopping carts, staff, and obviously, a
cash register. i could probably coax the answer out of a
search engine, but as usual, i won't, because that's no
fun.

anyways, those places have a sub-area they refer to as "the
nursery." i am presuming that they plant the seedlings in
there and let them grow a bit. eventually, one of the
minders (nurses? gardeners? hortifuckin' culturist?) says to
no one in particular, "this one is doing well! it's time to
move it to the [big greenhouse]."

continuing the theme, i'm sure they call it something other
than big greenhouse, but i'm not going to look it up. i am
enjoying the vacuum of not knowing all these things, but
it's also practical: i spend long enough writing all this;
there's ten minutes of research i just dodged.

anyways, the plants that are far enough along and healthy
are moved to the big greenhouse, and once they're mature and
ready to be sold they're moved to the, uh... sales floor?
see, here i am, saving more time.

i would say xlt has been unwittingly functiong as a sort of
nursery for a whole pool of thoughts i've been working on.
bits and pieces of fragmentary thought are scattered all
over. every now and then, i'm in the right sort of mood, and
i write a small novel in the space of a few hours. this is
the big greenhouse. from there the analogy begins to break
down; the sales floor is a whole complex mechanism of chutes
and ladders that lead to 37 or so different places.

so, sorry/you're welcome.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 18:30 [#02501567]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



i was out for a drive and still picking at all these threads
in my head. the head thread, the magick 'n' alcoholism
thread, this thread. they spawned more threads that don't
exist and i won't be posting. until traffic got thick, then
i was simply driving. my brain is a naggy, chatty spiral
forever. there is insomnia. a lot of blathering. however,
when traffic gets particularly aggressive, my brain simply
shuts up and lets me focus on driving. i thank the universe
for this every day, because without it i would have died in
a car accident years ago. i suspect it has to do with the
fear of dying, really, and that's much more relevant driving
on the highway than it is lying in bed.

if traffic lightens, the chatty spiral promptly resumes, and
i do mean promptly. tacking back and fourth four or five
times a minute is not out of the question, but that's rare.
traffic is usually either bad or not bad and tends to stick
with whatever it's on for a few minutes at a time, and
that's more normal. it shuts up when i get to an
intersection, then promptly resumes if the light is red and
i have to wait for more than a few seconds. this is my
low-boredom threshold (cite: phrase stolen from aphex)
kicking in.

the chatty spiral is a huge mess. i am repeatedly leaping
from topic to thing to tentacles. then it occurs to me that
i can't just write that like that. i need to explain this
whole other thing, nine paragraphs or so, or it won't make
any sense to anyone. then i began thinking about myself
thinking about this, and decided i had to post about that,
and here we are.



 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 18:45 [#02501568]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



no, wait, it's not a huge mess. it's just a freaking
firehose. no, wait, that's not the right metaphor, either,
because that implies the thing a firehose does when no one's
hanging onto it, and it turns into a dangerous whippy snake
and gets everyone wet and jesus frank get ahold of that
thing.

over time, all these leaps from thing to thing leads to the
formation of connections between the things that didn't
exist before. this is the real nursery, i suppose.
nursery, really. then the big greenhouse is trying to
communicate these thoughts.

writing something up, explaining it to a friend, etc. forces
me to deliberately move through the whole architecture in a
more linear manner. hearing myself talk, or reading myself
write, i come up with new angles or fill in bits i missed.
explaining it forces me to explicity walk through things
i've just glossed over.

i also have this moment all the damn time: oh, hey, this is
not going to make any sense to anyone other than me unless i
explain [tangential thing]. then [tangential thing] may
quite possibly be even more complex than whatever i'm
attempting to explain in the first place, and has [other
tangential thing] as dependancy for compiling a monologue.
pretty much, exactly the same as in my head, spiraling
forever. but slower, and more thorough. continuing my
[not a farm] analogy, i suppose this constitues pruning
and fertilizing and other things, like putting those little
sticks in to prop up the bendy ones.

at this point, it occurs to me that a few spare thoughts i
missed from the tail end of the thread "terrence: tangented"
have spawned a massive architecture of things. i also thank
the universe every day that i love doing this more than
anything, because if i didn't i would probably stab myself
in the head.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 19:00 [#02501569]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



this gets us into a very relevant tangent: now i have
another challenge, and that is to present this in a way that
doesn't make anyone reading it want to stab themselves in
the head.

i dug around and very quickly found all sorts of
optimizations. there is the very common, "this is a
wonderful thought and i'd like to include the whole arc, but
now that i am pressing myself, i have to admit just this
small slice of it will do." then there's compression. by
carefully picking words you can shrink-ray a paragraph into
half a paragraph. maybe even just a sentence. splicing:
these two things can be glued together with the middle parts
overlapping and that saves me half a thing.

then i realized i was fucked. i wandered down some alley and
discovered that what seemed to be a nicely optimized bit of
whatever was doomed for some reason or another. a critical
design flaw that blows up the whole thing into fragments
again. pretty much, what i was going for when i groped
around and grabbed [firehose] was that it's like
drinking from a firehose, and not only am i fucked, but you
are too.

then i hit on a beautiful an elegant answer. wait a
minute... this is a fucking web site. just write it up in
modules and use hypertext.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 19:29 [#02501570]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



i was going to start off by saying that ted nelson invented
hypertext, until i realized there was that vancouver bush
guy and a tim berners-tangent. so instead, there's that
disclaimer first, because a lot of people invented
hypertext.

anyways, ted nelson invented hypertext. if you'll click
on him, you'll find a long and beautifully written portrait
wired published in 1995.

it's entirely possible ted nelson hates the wired article,
because parts of it are particularly unflattering. on the
one hand, no one looks good under a microscope, and this
shit is seventeen chapters. i'd look terrible after three or
four.

on the other, the interview drops a bomb right in the
beginning. as someone who also writes seventeen chapters, i
know the opening bit is prime real estate, akin to the first
30 seconds of a pop song. it has to sell itself a bit if it
wants you to slog through. it also sets the tone for the
whole piece, and the tonality is thus: "ted nelson takes ADD
meds for his ADD, halcion to sleep, and prozac to stabilize
things. he has a spot of aphasia from the halcion, sure, but
otherwise he's surprisingly lucid." yes, this man is
on druuuugs, folks, but he's actually pretty together. i
figure it's just cheap explotation for a good pop hook...
because, after that, it's generally pretty gentle. ted
nelson could have missed that, after it pissed him off on
the first page.

when i first read it, i felt like i was reading about
myself. just in the broad strokes, not the details. orbital
made a strong case against taking halcion, and i don't take
halcion. but i do know self-medication to combat insomnia. prozac? i'm a weed
man. i've also consumed enough psychedelics to power ibiza
for a whole summer season. but, still, i'm surprisingly
lucid
. and i've never even tried cocaine; sorry michael
bay fans.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 19:48 [#02501571]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



also towards the beginning of wires "the curse of xanadu,"
you'll find that ted nelson says he suffers from
"hummingbird mind." yes, sure, it's more of a firehose
spewing hummingbirds, but that ruins the elegance of his
word contraption. pretty much, here is a man who has a very
similar brain with similar problems of similar emergent
complexity, and with hypertext, things have a little more
potential to stick together, make sense, get out of the
big greenhouse; maybe even make it to thing i referred to as
a sales floor. even though i know that's almost certainly
not the right term for it, and it's not really a sales
floor, it's a living carpet made out of weasels and
tangents.

i never really took a moment to appreciate all this. what
this man has done for me. how hypertext is essentially
spawned from a man who is compulsively driven to never lose
a single detail, but so completely drowning in details that
he's spinning around in circles. it's attention-defecit
disorder, on drugs, in a nutshell, to a t. i'm drowning,
too, and he's thrown me a life preserver. it's probably one
of the nicest things i've ever been given, and i never even
thought about it until now... because, on the surface, it's
incredibly simple. it feels trivial. i knew about hypertext
before i read the wired piece, and when i did read it, my
previous knowledge of it blinded me, in a sense. writing all
this up, though, i see it now, because i had to
walk through it explicitly in order to write this up. and, no joke, i am
crying about it. it's absolutely beautiful. it does so much
to explain the internet.

"oh, i'll use hypertext to write up my xlt posts without
driving myself insane, then i'll write an xlt post about
that." and here we are. thanks, ted.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 19:52 [#02501572]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



walk through it explicitly and find things i've botched or missed, like
hypertext.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 20:04 [#02501573]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



a massively recursive function call has just returned, and
now i'm back to the original few odds and ends from
terrence's tangent. so, yes, let's go over there and finish
that.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 20:50 [#02501577]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular | Followup to EpicMegatrax: #02501567



done. now you can see approximately where my brain went from cleaning up odds and ends to
a crazy pile of head tentacles about hypertext. ideally, there will be at least a vague
whiff of a glimmer of a sliver of a noodle of a bit of an ok
maybe, EpicMegatrax is all over the map, but if he is
surprisingly lucid once he stops posting piecemiel and
synthesizes it together with hypertext. i almost, like,
understand that thing, even. box tentacles, though? i don't
get it


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 20:53 [#02501579]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



and his posts are full of typos he can't fix, but that's not
his fault. perhaps he's not actually a robot like sean
booth.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 20:59 [#02501580]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



alright, now that i'm finished replying to the mckenna
thread, let's check the index and see if anything else needs
a replying-to.

i could avoid checking. enjoy the vacuum of ignorance; like
i did for not-a-farm,
neither-called-a-sales-floor-nor-actually-analogous-to-a-sa
big-greenhouse-not-actually-called-big-greenhouse, and
les-floor. but that's no fun at all


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 21:00 [#02501581]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



i'm not sure how those bits got transposed, but i rather
like the effect.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-07 21:54 [#02501584]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



alright, that's that. my brain is unusually quiet because
i've divested myself of all the stuff i'd been chewing on
for hours and hours. but, still, not silent. "i've wasted
most of a sleep cycle on this crap," says one spiral. "it
was worth it!" yells another. i'm not really sure which of
'em is right; i couldn't sure without battling them like
pokemon. they would begin to expand, trying to become the
feedback loop that blows more out of control more quickly.
they would form little baby spirals, which they would they
would then battle like digimon.... suffice to say, i think i
should quit while i'm ahead. i am tired. i am going to pack
it in; have another two fingers of scotch and watch
television. television is the halcion of the massachusetts,
and falling asleep tonight should actually be pretty
alright.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-08 13:44 [#02501600]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



here is my album human controlled with my pg-300 and pajama
pants on the cover.

definitely a summer album.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-08 13:54 [#02501601]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



the sort of mind i have means i am incredibly good at a
certain class of things and hopeless at everything else. i
can build giant and complex machines in my head, but when it
comes to accounting, schedules, situational awareness, not
blathering, etc. etc. i am pretty awful. it's like putting a
five-year old child in charge of your schedule and
accounting. if i ever become rich, the first thing i think
i'd do is hire a personal assisstant, essentially to be my
minder. it's not like i need to be worried about, i just get
so wrapped up in things that the juggling a lot of adult
life requires goes to shit. it also really damages the good
stuff i do at times, because things are constantly exploding
and my brain machine falls apart. having someone to keep
track of a schedule and isolate me from that noise would be
amazing.

i have been through so many different systems for
note-taking and organization. dumping my thoughts with
charts and bullet-point lists is more or less a solved
problem, but to-do/agenda is still pretty thorny. as is
keeping track of references, "list web pages for ffmpeg"
etc. i've tried all different types of software. outlook
style calendar, portable calendar on my phone, a real
physical calendar, a post-it note cloud, a notebook with a
list of dates, a notebook with segments pre-drawn at the
start of the week, and that's where i'm at now. but i'm
already behind and i haven't even drawn up this week's
sheet. it's a mess.

hypertext will not solve that. i've realized, though, that
i've missed its deeper potential to communicate a large
structure of thought. trying to jam it all into a linear
monologue explodes with complexity. breaking it up into
modules and then linking them in other modules collapses it
into something much more manageable. i'd never even
considered how it'd be as a tool for writing. cool. anyways,
something like a wiki is in order.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-08 20:17 [#02501611]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



driving is one of the things that i am good at. "perhaps a
bit too good," i've admitted to myself. lots of "i shouldn't
have done that, but the mathematics said i was clear and i
did it." being on myself about it a bit keeps it under
control. my general policy is that if you're going to do
some sort of aggressive manuever, do it properly. if you're
going to whip into moving traffic rather than wait for an
opening, don't drive like a grandma after you do it. pretty
much, i won't punch out if i feel like i'm going to hold the
other drivers up. this is a layer on top of basic safety; i
definitely don't want to have everyone suddenly stomp on the
brakes. but if i see a grandma holding everyone up, and i
have a decent window, absolutely, yes. hurry

i have a little car game i play where i give other drivers
letter grades for their manuevers. giant pickup trucks are
typically C- students.

i used to worry about doing some crazy architecture in my
brain while operating a two-ton piece of machinery. i've
done things like walk into a tree because i was trying to
visualize music and ignoring my eyes. i still worry, really,
because i do have it in me to fail that hard. without fail
(so far) if anything drastic happens -- someone pulls an F-
launch from a side street -- i react exactly the same as
everyone else. i say: "shiiiit" and slam on the brakes.
pretty much, it's been reliable, and i've come to trust it.
not entirely; i always have an eye to see if it's getting
sloppy. the worst my autopilot seems to do is drive too fast
when the track on is good, and, well, i do the same thing,
so i can't very well criticize it there.

it's convenient to call it an autopilot or anthropomorphize
it as a weasel, but in truth, it's years of things i learned
with conscious focus that have been digested and lovingly
assembled into a giant tree of actions and reactions.

i figure it's a matter of degree; different people different
levels of autopilot.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-08 20:25 [#02501626]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



so i was rambling about dreams and how i rarely
remember them, and when i do, it seems to be because they're
important. well, i don't remember anything else, but a part
of a dream i had last night involved my mom telling me not
to cuss so much. this is the first bit of dream i've
remembered in at least a week, probably longer. i remember
looking at a few of my posts and going :/ face because there
was a bit much fuck shit. i didn't really do much about it,
though.

so, first time i remember a dream in ages and it's a bit of
writing feedback about something i already had kind of
admitted to myself. fine, mom. i'll fuckin' try. wait, shit


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-08 20:56 [#02501646]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular | Followup to EpicMegatrax: #02501626



"important" also covers a good range of ground. yeah, that
was important. not life-threating important, or cosmic
important.

probably one of my favorites was when i had the rack power
module for the crusty soundcraft board i was using at the
time die on me. i was a lot less-experienced at electronics
and i could tell vaguely what the issue was, but i was
having trouble pinning it down. i brought it to my dad, who
has a masters in electrical engineering, and it was
essentially a much more informed version of my reaction: it
could be [thing i guessed] or [other thing i guessed with
more detail] or [thing i didn't guess because i didn't
understand enough about electronics].

it sat in my parents' basement for weeks, until finally, i
had a dream about it. there it was on my parents' kitchen
table, cover off, and i look it over. most of it was
actually more or less as it was in reality, but there was
very flagrantly a rainbow-wire ribbon cable that didn't
actually exist. i looked closer, and it was disconnected.

when i woke up, i essentially ordered replacement parts
because a dream told me to, and when my dad put 'em in for
me, the thing fired right up.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-08 21:13 [#02501647]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



it was on the workbench in the basement, not the kitchen
table. it went with the kitchen table. why? i figure it's
because i spent way more time at the kitchen table, and my
brain knew it better. the rainbow-wire ribbon cable? i had
spent a lot of time staring at the schematics for the thing
and it's more or less a bus line of wires. it was
rainbow-wire because there had been a few spools of them
kicking around the house when i was growing up, and out of
all the wires, those were definitely my favorite. no reason
for that, just like ice cream preferences. i usually don't
get dreams that direct; quite often it's choas and very
coded and takes me a while to figure out. some have puzzled
me deeply for years and begun to make sense, others still
puzzle me. but i do feel like it all comes from somewhere,
and even if i can't pin it down like i can the kitchen table
or rainbow wire, i am certain there is an answer along those
lines for all of it. but it's too complex. i'll never know.
the black spots in a fractal.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-08 21:45 [#02501650]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



maybe moving it to the kitchen represented getting it out of
my parents' basement (fixing it). obviously, the rainbow
ribbon cable was very obvious and look-at-this-you-idiot.
also, like the kitchen table, my brain knew it well. some of
it is in my SK-1.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-08-08 21:55 [#02501653]
Points: 25264 Status: Regular



the idea that i would never know something used to bother
me. someone suggesting it could even bother me, depending on
what it was. i've come to accept a compromise: there is an
answer, but the level of complexity required to get there
walls it off from me. then, eventually, a layer on top of
this grew out of practicality: i probably could figure this
out, but there are a lot of more important things i should
be figuring out instead. it all lives a little glimmer of
hope in there at the end, though. this is something magick
really helped me clarify. to accept you will never be able
to get your head around a particular system of whatever, but
that doesn't mean you can't interact with it in a deliberate
and constructive manner.


 


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