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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. |
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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 |
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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.... |
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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. |
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^ 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, |
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im definitely not an alias of anyone famous i can assure you of that |
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lies. you're aphex twin |
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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. |
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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. |
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^ 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 |
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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. |
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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. |
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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 |
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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. |
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for whom the bell trolls |
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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. |
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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. |
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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 -- goes back to my comp sci classes, one of the ones on AI. comp sci has this thing 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). . |
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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. |
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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. |
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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 |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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 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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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. , 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 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. |
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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 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. |
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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, 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 . 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. |
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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 ; 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 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. |
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and find things i've botched or missed, like . |
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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. |
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done. now you can see approximately where to . 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 |
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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. |
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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 |
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i'm not sure how those bits got transposed, but i rather like the effect. |
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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. |
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here is my album with my pg-300 and pajama pants on the . definitely a summer album. |
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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. |
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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. |
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so i was rambling about 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 |
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"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. |
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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. |
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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. |
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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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