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lol |
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i just had this moment where my mind was so fed up with the word weasel i couldn't remember how to spell it. i had to look it up to see if it was weasel or weasle. it certainly wasn't waesle |
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the end compromise was this: i wrote three simple commands. weasel, lazy, and weaselink. the third was where my brain farted and suddenly i couldn't spell the word before. this caused me considerable issues when attempting to creating a symlink in /usr/bin all three are PHP scripts because i have that memorized best when it comes to scripting. C++ is more for big things and desktop apps and it would overcomplicate this. with PHP i have to look up plenty: what's the argument order of fopen again? do i want system() or exec()? then duckduck go has "bang syntax" so i fire up my web browser, to the home page, and type "!php exec" and it sends me right to the documentation for the function. this is why duckduckgo is my home page for the forseeable future. no other start page offers such brutal efficiency (i could do my own, of course, but it's more efficient to use theirs). it makes me feel a tad cybernetic, like the internet is part of my memory. it also makes me feel like i'd remember it better if i didn't have the internet. anyways, weasel sources from a text file with a format of "weasel_name|||relevant url dot com\r\n" and writing a php script to parse a file like this is something i've probably done more times than i've had sex. a text file like that as a source is easy to maintain and double-birds the fallback idea of a text file i just copy/paste from. i had it working in fifteen minutes. > weasel traffic_synchronicity http://xltronic.com/mb/122579/150#02501784 lazy is just the lazy_link syntax with the name and link glued in. > lazy test fing <a href="fing" target=_blank>test</a> weaselink combines the two: > weaselink rainbow_ribbon_cable <a href="http://xltronic.com/mb/122579/100#02501646" target=_blank>rainbow_ribbon_cable</a> satisfies my conditions of equal parts elegance and brutal reality. modular, something i can build on later. focused. unlike me |
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i should note the scripting took me an hour. thinking it up was in the car; probably ten or fifteen of minutes if you add up the time quantums. i was pleased with that, too. not about how fast i did it, but that it didn't spiral out of control. the rest of the time tonight: dealing with explosions, driving, and coming up with a huge data backlog for myself to type up |
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this thread is . earlier i the when i meant to reference the , but the first is worth a revisit now: all spaced-out interludes of bizzare science are genuine and heartfelt, but poorly thought-out. i could google the xlt archives; find myself confidently stating something as truth. and now, i know it's wrong. so very wrong. i could google it right now, but i won't -- it doesn't matter. that is just how science works it's very rare that a upgrade is due to something i've gotten completely wrong. usually i've gotten it kinda right, sorta, and i find a more precise way to describe it; refine the weasel. it's not even wrong. i just put it on the shelf because i've got a power tool with better batteries but i've still got it in case that conks out. i feel like an idiot a lot of the time, but it took me until now to realize that i always exercise with s on. my clicky is a big pile of confusion; is pretty darn confunded and his function call may not return unless i cave and seek actual information about biomechanics from the internet. that's a huge can of worms, and i like to roll my own, so i've been putting it off for later. like: this is thread that will be relevant in the future, but not now. how could i miss that i was wearing socks? after all that about my toe. i'd say it's not my best day for science, but really it's all the rest o |
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f the days that got it wrong. i also feel like an idiot that i didn't tear into breathing and such more until now. when i said, "oh, having thousands of little tuned neural that are phased locked to thousands of things sounds too resource-hungry, and it's probably seven or eight of them that function as working memory for rhythm." when it wrote that it passed my mind that there are brainwaves. i speak of alpha waves here and there; clearly i knew it. but, the heart and the lungs are pretty important oscillators, and they definitely do their darndest to sync to the beat sometimes. i spent some time on breathing years ago. now, like all this, i tear in there and find it's a whole universe of tangents and my old solution was a mess. an ugly hack. more weasels to debug. |
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patterns of patterns of patterns. deep mind turns a stock image of a pagoda and some eyes into an acid meme phenomenon |
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so i realized there was some old leary-grade old battletank hippie architecture called intelligence squared, or i^2. some debate club for nerds like me has eaten the relevancy and bad boy wiki-p has nothing for me. nothing for SMI2LE, either. jimmy, man, what are you doing? i read some blurb about it in 2006 and it seemed fancy in the same way as 's . like, oh, i'd really like to buy into this, but i can't let myself. are probably full of confirmation bias. however, synchronicities are something i've studied and attempted to dissect for years (along with synaesthesia). i haven't even written a tenth of it up. traffic synchronicities are a thing in a long chain of things and why i'm allowing myself to buy into it has everything to do with the fact that it logically follows from all sorts of other stuff. pretty much, it feels like it's working, it's a logical step in a progression, and the brutal but honest has not yet garbage-collected it. calling it a daemon was nice to properly explain it for the hyperlink, but i'll move this over to being called bullshit weasel now. like: when i'm hassling myself about slipping up on a superstition, i ask myself: am i cursed? bullshit weasel throws a shitfit and tells me this is irrational dreck, fire up the debugger, figure out what's really happening you |
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why study traffic synchronicites? or any of this? a worthwhile question. the answer is: why not? my mother probably said something to herself like, "EpicMegatrax is really good at computers, but he is also weird in a way that is so deeply foreign to me that i feel like he needs some new spark plugs or something." so she took me to all sorts of doctors, which i quickly grew to hate. i have been "diagnosed" with ADD, then depression, then bipolar-disorder. next i was told i registered on the "autistic spectrum" -- a whole rainbow of dysfunction! -- but that i didn't actually qualify as autistic. then some sort of anxiety disorder. all of these are at least a little right. none of them really sum up what a weird-o i am, though. i generally go with ADD because it's about right to warn people about what they're in for. meanwhile, i have met people who are autistic. or even autistic-lite, aspergers. at a party this guy was playing back the trumpet part of some bach something-or-other. i was absolutely enraptured by it, mostly, because, well, i was a tad jealous. not very, though, because everyone else in the room was staring at us and less amused. he nailed the trumpet part but he was not using his indoor trumpet. it was loud. i get so wrapped up in something like playing with a doorstop spring that i don't realize it's making people cross. but i do understand politeness, and indoor trumpets, and i've generally trained myself to look around sometimes and make sure i'm not doing it. again... but, it's much better. almost to the point where looking around to see if i'm doing it is a wasteful weasel; no longer needed. no, i am not autistic, but i'm on the, er, spectrum. ADD works, kinda. depression feels like when i've thought myself into a deep hole. bipolar disorder produces similar trainwrecks, but no, i am just terminally excited and rush in without thinking and then get myself in a fine mess, and yes, then i feel like crap |
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pretty much, these things don't fit. the idea of being taken into a shop like a car and have a part of my soul swapped out and "fixed" was always offensive to me. now, there's a lot more depth to that offense. bottom line is: alright, shit, i'm weird. . there is no escaping it. so let's it in a room with it and hug it and figure out what it likes for lunch. there's some genetics, some bits of what all those disorders what they are, but more or less what i decided is that this is what you get when you take somone who is compulsive to the point of being on "the spectrum" and have him spend more time with compilers than people until college or so. makes sense i'd have a pretty magnetic inner world always sucking me off to tinker with things in a bubble of beatiful perfection. now i'm off in some purgatorial plane where i've turned the machine on itself. jung said something for his "red book" -- drawing it out paper will seem crude; banal. but it's vital to get it down, even if you can't draw for shit. it's necessary for the red book's use of . like my ugly php weasel scripts |
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i was always waiting for the next doctor to tell me i have OCD, just like my mom was always expecting them to perform some mysterious doktor magick rite and "Fix Me." i see this like considering a school bus broken because it can't drive underwater. like: look, mom, my brain is what it is. there's not some mad scientist switch in there to flip. it was meant well but it was doomed and only made me weirder. i had some deeplying harrowing experiences on things like scary old tricyclic antidepressants and more. when i was ten, i was out of sorts. my mom wanted this solved, like, right now. my doc was on vacation, and the on-call doc gave me... something. thorazine, was what the thought. maybe i promptly had a seizure. the doctors all collectively said: shit. we're gonna get sued. quick, blame a diagnosis! thus, it was proposed to my parents that part of my brain was not actually there. that i was born without whatever lobe. or aliens took it, perhaps. consequently: your child needs to sit in a bed with EKG leads all night and have his whole brain MRI'd. pull him out of school for a week. all of my brain was there. i know, because i had it all scanned. the doctors faded out their bullshit solo with: well, er, call us if it happens again, but it probably won't. because we fucking caused it; whoops. i am more or less a mad science experiment from day one. i have always compared psychiatric meds to watering a garden with a firehose. i said this when i was eighteen as my parting words to the last one i'd ever have to suffer; off to college. i still feel that metaphor is succinct. something like risperdal shuts off a lot of things that could be salvaged, and then part of your brain is missing. has become a metaphor that clicks into this perfectly. i now hate the firehose approach with a nuance and depth that only i can manage |
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if you tear down the aspects of me that sync up with OCD, it works like this: coding, machines, and such are controllable and predictable. the only limit on this is yourself, your mind, and if the code fails because you messed up somehow. the outside world is messy and unpredictable and overwhelming. an alpha wave state becomes my safe place in an attachment theory sense, and, well, that's why i probably spend more time in there then sleeping. compulsiveness about things like variable names, brutal honesty, and making sure everything in my car has a dedicated home... it's anxiety meeting code/engineering in the middle. all these things give me something i can count on in an unreliable world, and this is why i freak. out. if someone uses a style of variable names i deem to be sloppy, or , well, then you're having me simulate how this would pan out in my mind and seeing disasters and explosion and doom. it is why nerds have pocket protectors and arguments about whether the millenium falcon could be the entireprise. it is also why they are so easy to troll |
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i don't have OCD, though. i have that dial set to seven and people with OCD have it set to twelve. it is all centered around logic and argument. it's why i'll be indistinguishable from someone with OCD in certain context... until i realize it's wrong, it's my fault for getting it wrong, and i need to fix it, dammit. it is extremly similar to what i've done with notions. irrational compulsiveness is filtered through a brutal crucible of logic. OCD people just do the thing because they can't help it. i do it because i almost feel like my life depends on it. this is not absolute, though. if logic tells me: well, yes, this matters, but this other thing matters more, then i go for that. a lot of my indulgance in superstition and all of it boils down to: why not? again. i consciously sat there and decided that i'd now have a lucky lighter and this would be it, yessir. then when it began to run low, i was biting my nails. how do i hack my way out of this corner? i went to the same exact store, bought an identical lighter, and threw out the old lucky lighter before it ever ran out of luck/butane. then when i slip up on it for the first time in ages, i'm arguing with it: this is a 70% yes, bad news, but no, not a 99.9% vibe. it also may not even be one. i'm pressing on all these angles the way most people tense up when they're worried they're about to get into an accident. compulsiveness is channeled, garbage-collected, refined. like my life depends on it. now i'm so deep in that it essentially does. |
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it's not hard to flip over and demonstrate this can be a superbly functional thing (at the price of driving myself insane all day long). when picking a scheme for your variable names takes on the urgency of life and death, well, you pick a good scheme and you stick to it. then it becomes a reliable structure you can build on. your code works, the other guy's code doesn't. he hates you because you've schooled him and you hate him because his variable names suck. later, on the internet, you scream at someone for using a sampler you view as shoddy and unelegant. i've never suffered fools gladly, as the saying goes. i never considered that this could be a functional thing instead of a character flaw. it is both at once, really. in driving a car, for once, my life actually does depend on it. poor tactical decisions in my structure of automatic habits could lead to real, literal, explosions. conscious focus is a precious and limited resource; i can't stand wasting it. good habits decrease the cognitive burden and free me to focus on driving more. to dissect it; do it better. and since i could really, actually, die, i've gone suitably overboard. driving wouldn't be so automatic if i hadn't done all sorts of compulsive shit: all the widgets have a home. when i turn on my headlights is a function of A) do i need 'em? and B) do 2/3 of the other people have them on? etc. these things are urgently maintained and watched. are the widgets in the right place? i've checked six times, but i might have missed something, and that would be a disaster. i check again. i annoy the living shit out of myself every day over things like: is the lighter on top of the cigarettes? this is how i lie in bed stressing i missed a single semi-colon and finally drag myself out of bed to find i was completely right. i did miss it. i got out of bed for it because i am right about this sort of thing quite often. this was all pretty standard nerd shit until rhythm got mixed in |
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i am furious with the level of typos in there, but i am equally furious where i've only covered two items of seventeen or so. mostly, though, i am furious that i've managed to screw both up at once, and the only reason i have is because i wanted to write it down now instead of tomorrow. i understand my insomnia very well, even though i can't flip some mad scientist switch and turn it off. i can drown my whole brain in booze until it stops, but that's like getting a time-share condo in risperdalville. i am sure xanax and benzos would fit like a glove; they appear to be even more horrible and addictive than alcohol and i've avoided benzos like i have the boss sp-303. tripping, though. someone at baseline might ask: "oh, hey, EpicMegatrax, how are you?" this is a very complicated and serious tangent on psychedelics. "how am i? like, really, really how am i?" i first think. next: "i would usually say i'm good, but now i'm realizing this is a white lie i tell others." afterwards: "not only do i tell this lie to others, but i tell it to myself as well." then, rewind and explode a different branch of complexity: "did this person mean, like, 'how did i come to exist'?" or, perhaps they could have meant, "how are you managing to continue to exist despite all this mess?" that one sounds proper. look at my studio. it's a mess. all these wires. how do you i anything done with all these wires? i'm not sure, but i get less done without them. |
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yep, my shout-out to reality: i should be asleep, but i am not asleep. i know i'll fart things all up if i write about it now. i try to sleep. lying in bed, i bother myself about unwritten things over and over because i've been bothering myself about them all day, solidly. then i get up, write, fart it up, try to write an apology, it comes out three paragraphs of salad and typos, i've botched the dependancy chain, now i have to write an apology for the failed apology, now i am going to try to sleep again |
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there is exactly one reason why i hadn't torn into breathing + the ramifications of breathing is because it is a huge and complex thing. i have walled myself off from it because i know i can only do so much at once. i could tackle it, but i have plenty of other choices. so i put a bit into it to get the flavor and left it alone until now. heart rate and breathing are sort of like a carnival game where you have to throw a baseball through the treads of spinning wheels with regularly spaced holes. like one of the center wheels from some construction toy which consisted of that wheel, and sticks. this is a vague metaphor that will be tuned up sure enough. anxiety, tensing up, automatic behavior, and breathing are all intertwined. old memories live in your muscles and body like a dog a bone buried and a sock you can't stop mentioning but still haven't taken off. so i've been untangling it a bit at a time. exhalation is the start of the beat; there's my PLL mechanism. i've been looking at unconscious muscle movement and consciously analyzing whatever i dig up. i see a charted course from the roots of that into particular stages of breathing. breathing touches everything at once, and all the old ghosts wake up, very slightly. but it's a huge pile of and if i break something the whole system could get down and i'll get fired and this would be unacceptable. i have to walk around it consciously and figure it out, then things i might need to fix will propose themselves naturally. after enough of that i'll start to see ways into the fixes, and which fixes matter. then whip in at 12am and swap out a targeted piece that constitutes 1/10 of the project, maybe. people will be flooding in tomorrow and they will all be trying very hard to break it. also, now that i am fussing with it, anything that's not my fault can now be blamed on me as well. unacceptable |
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i've had the moment where i was suddenly unable to a thousand times before. at least. it's similar to the moment when you're walking up stairs, and think there's another step... but there's not; your foot comes down on dead air instead of a step. i have absolutely never been able to fool myself into doing this deliberately. this has only happened to me a few dozen times in my life. i collect these things. they fascinate me. i'd type up a post in yugo where i'd type up duntst duntst like a techno beat, to a techno beat, or just rhythmically keysmash to an autechre track. i tried to find the latter to link it, but i can't, since i can't remember enough. i remember the title is the song i was mashing to, but i can't remember which songs i did and so i'm up shit creek. it's very heard to keyword search for autechre translated into... that. but, anyways, i'd type onomatapoeia or something and there's when my brain would reliably glitch. suddenly i was looking at the correct spelling and i was seriously worried... is that spelled wrong? that looks so weird. is that right? and then i snap out of it quick enough. this time i had to internet search for weasel. so i suppose a really, really long staircase is most likely to get you at the top. weasel is a metaphor, and metaphors are like that construction toy with which you procedurally plug the toruses into the sticks. metaphors are the toruses, obviously. the sticks are neural connections, and then this is built into something that's about the size of russia, if you adjust for scale. weaselink. weasel. link. weasel is a link. an abstraction linking to a deeper, poorly-defined structure that, like plutonium, i cannot handle directly. i need something fussy like those fish tanks with glove hands to proceed with science. |
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a bit more on . i was in there, doing what i've . for like, two hours. perhaps more. my neighbors were being dicks and this seemed like the perfect time to do nothing but be still and hack another system. i put on "consumed" by plastikman. i've never heard a single plastikman album before, ever. i have no idea what his music sounds like, but i've downloaded a bit, appareltly. sometime; can't remember when or why, but i presume it's either because of reputation or recommendation. that's how connections go. i saw that lurking in my music folders two or three days ago. i wasn't sure what i wanted to listen to, and i was just walking around. i consciously analyzed the existance of plastikman on my hard drive, and thought, "hmm." then i said "nah" and put on something else i can't remember. it caught my eye a second time after examining the weasels within breathing. i simply thought: "oh, i almost put that on again a couple days ago, but i didn't. so let's put it on now." then i found i actually had multiple plastikmen on my hard drive. if they all had dates i'd have gone with the first album, but only one did. maybe two. so i just went on the words. i had no idea what i was in for. didn't even know the style or genre, just "electronic." turns out it's a minimal album that was perfect for continuing to hack on breathing... and superb, aside from where he rips off a SAW II melody (pitched up a half-step or three). after a while i noticed the AC unit's complex signature of bassy oscillations and rattle was in sync with both my breathing and the track. not bad. i'll have to try one of the other albums |
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so there's the obvious thing i've mentioned casually but never discussed: i am forming new weasels/habits all the time, and not all of them are good. many are unconsciously soaked up and accidental and alright but not super. i catch myself trying to develop bad habits all the time. tapping the gas pedal in time is one thing i have to fight a lot to stop myself from getting into. maybe i should just give up and let it go do as its weasel mind wishes. most don't fight that much then the less-obvious thing, which is that my body/mind stuff is obviously bleeding into how i drive, gradually. this is part of what made me feel comfortable looking at breathing now -- the music machines soaked into dancing and the car, now dancing has soaked into the car as well, so i figure if i just continue as i've been doing then what soaks through into that by accident will generally be pretty good. |
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it's not one-directional, though. it all starts to salad and goulash. i felt some of the things i noticed focusing on breathing leap out while i was driving tonight, mostly centered around anxiety. i was lying on the bed tonight and messing with it, and something startled me. but it was a lot like a myoclonic jerk -- when you almost fall asleep, but don't. perhaps that what it was. but the way it made my legs feel was the same as when something startled me driving tonight. this has just happened once, so let's not make it a weasel yet, but it's interesting. i feel like i've crafted a detector for that thing and it caught it happening in the wild, so to speak. yes, that thing you noticed, i just saw it again, sir. it was probably always there, i just never noticed. then some things i've been on myself: no, don't do that. those things, well, it's even more interesting: i feel part of myself begin to do the bad weasel pattern and then another weasel runs in and shoos it off. it's like my self-heckling has half-internalized and the notion layer catches my weasels fighting. which is nice, because if the wrong weasel wins, i can always step in |
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so, if a weasel is a learned pattern, then a ferret must be a pattern detector. |
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myoclonic ferret. that sounds like a metal band |
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i put on a one day on a road i love to drive somewhere between briskly and too briskly. my program crashes and i'm kicked back into reality, stuck behind a giant truck. i was annoyed at first, but i decided that, well, that's more or less an elephant, and this song fits a slow pace pretty well. i slowed down and it was nothing too memorable, just lovely. tonight i'm driving the same road in the other direction. i was skipping past the end of another album i was no longer in the mood for and the playlist looped to the start and that came on. sure, that's good. i also drove like the truck forced me to. then i drove by a row of four or five of the exact same giant truck parked on the side of the road. it gave me the giggles. yes, it's the same road, that truck was on it before, and, hell, they're doing construction on it. and now i'm at night and they're parked. but skipping past the end of an album idly with no intent and landing on that song again at that moment... and, at the end, without thinking, i opened the windows at that little "aaah" flute melody comes in at the end of the song, and air rushed in there are so many reasons for these coincidences that it's really nothing earth-shaking or mystical. it seems thoroughly explained... but, it still amuses me just as much as it did before i figured any of this stuff out. this is a relief. i wouldn't want life to get dull |
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so, yes, first i decided it was an elephant, and later i got the parade. somehow i set myself up for that. |
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i sent a text to one of my friends asking if he wanted to hang out. the phone wasn't getting a signal and said it would send it when it could, so i started driving. after a few minutes with no response i began to run numbers: it's close to the point where hanging out wound entangle us in the quantum interference of rush hour, and if he doesn't text me back by the end of this road, i'm going to fire of another text to cancel it when i get to the stop light and can send a text. it was a long road and this felt like a good compromise. i was tempted to do it early, but no, don't send a text while steering etc. and i didn't. i have a few hardcore rules, and #1 is: eyes on the road at all times. so i'm about thirty seconds from the light and he texts me back saying yes. i go pick him up. a few minutes later he told me he was debating calling some place to deal with some mess (he's as bad as me, that's part of why we get along) when he got my text. if he'd decided to do it promptly he would have been on the phone when my message got to him, and i would have sent him the "never mind" by the time he hung up and checked it. i guess i almost feel like he would have called promptly rather than waffling if i wasn't across town stewing on whether to come pick him up or not right as he was about to do it. he's like a brother to me and these sort of things happen quite often. |
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yesterday, i felt sharp as a tack. today, i woke up and felt groggy/laggy. i didn't sleep well; things woke me.... but, less tangentitudinally, the backlog of things to blather about is also using one of my CPU cores. cycling on stuff i meant to write already. yes, we've done that. shit; i'm not getting further because i haven't written about it. then also exercise, i needed a tad more. and driving, too, the adrenaline is cleansing and wakes everything up. i took care of the exercise, the car, and the adrenaline. now, i'm threading some laundry into some writing |
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a new metaphor: suppose you're one of those recursive russian-nesting dolls with the other dolls inside the dolls inside the dolls that's you, and the layers are everything you've ever done and experienced. these are older versions of yourself frozen in carbonite like han solo. they're wired into a giant pattern-hunting mechanism and things from third grade as unconscious behavior in high school. my metaphor breaks down from here, because writing about the doll getting a hand drill and boring a hole in itself is a bit gruesome |
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i feel more like what i've been doing is forming neural connections from my conscious mind to subsystems that were previous unconscious. my basic goal at the start (and it continues now) is to figure out what's in there. clear out what crap i can. fix what i can. but as i've put more time into consciously analyzing my unconscious actions, i've started to catch glimpses of how the mechanisms of attention, memory, emotion, breathing, etc. push all the trains of thought around. so, not a russian-nesting doll boring a hole. i'm boring, sure, but i'm more like a small debugging module that has spiraled out of control and begun taking over the host computer this all roughly jives with pranayama, from what i remember of it. oh, when it's eaten the host computer, that's where the feedback loop will max out and i'll be forced to optimize something else. breathing and heart rate stirred up images of the caduceus in me today. yes, sure, heart rate spirals around breathing and there are certain branch points archaic traditions refer to as "chakras." the chakra api is too spicy for me and bullshit weasel didn't like it much either. he told me: a stopped clock tells the right time twice a day. figure out what's crap and what isn't or you'll go full ken kesey |
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my first car moment of adrenaline today was chasing a motorcycle. i could tell he was itching to burn it out. many guys on bikes are, and the lines of the bike tell you if this is some leisurely guy on a harley or a young guy on stimulants. this was the latter. i couldn't even see the bike, but i could tell from the engine which class of motorcyclist this was. i kept up a moderate clip because we were inching through a twisty narrow side-street that many people blast through. lots of near-misses. from experience, i know this. i also know which parts of my lane are effectively not my lane -- they are a warzone. at best, occupied territory. the bike is not going to do his imminent crazy shit on this road. if he were that suicidal, he'd have done it already. so let it be for the moment and focus on hugging my side of the road, doding incoming cars, and listening to v-proc by autechre. my rough plan is this: sandbag it until the part at 1:20 when sean and rob drop the hammer, then drop the hammer. i figure we'll both get a good run out of it and i'm only sandbagging to wait for the right moment in the song. anyways, we're about 20 or 30 seconds into the track when i'm on the narrow warzone of a side-street, turned at 45 seconds (guesstimate, again), and i'm sandbagging from 50 seconds; i have to hold him for 30. sandbagging is an art. too much and the hammer has been dropped early. you need to build anticipation. too little and he'll cut around me illegally. i lose him early around 1:05. dammit. he snuck it in early. i shrug and wait for the next downbeat to chase after him. he was pretty quick and i really had to gun it and focus to keep up. all my systems tell me this was stupid, but for once bullshit weasel has a positive word: that was worth it never chased a bike like that before. may never again. i didn't get too close and i didn't do anything flat-out stupid. call it a systems check slash test/debug run |
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my second moment of adrenaline was when cheesy rave music was getting into me hardcore and stuck the gas to the floor like chewing gum. my notions were thick and accurate. beautiful moments of spotting the precise moment to cut around the occasional slow car, keeping everything in time. this is where notion-layer gets into the grey and becomes a greydiant instead of a singular result. i'm consciously tearing through it all and looking for a way out. faster. plans come together consciously and are implemented consciously, but notions are yelling from the backseat here and there with something i've missed. a traffic light stops me; i refuse to let it stop me entirely. i lose my shit dancing. the song on is special to me. it's incredibly fruity and cheesy, but i was listening to it alone one day, and i figured: fuck it. it makes me happy. i'm alone. who cares? and since then i've been making an effort to enjoy this track when i'm not alone. i'm getting better at it, but completely losing my shit to the point where it probably looked like two people were fucking in the backseat of my car (wwwobbble) at a very crowded intersection is more than i'm usually able to manange. the adrenaline had me, though. the green light did too, perfect. as it was winding down notion-layer told me to skip back a few to a previous track; i did. i pull up to a red light as it's opening, and it goes green precisely in time with the bassy boom of the song clearing its throat. i don't floor it a lot, but i floored it. the details are exciting but irrelevant sans one part: even in all this, i was seeing the mechanisms a bit. how i was observing three lanes and the cars: oh. the lanes are faders and the cars are sonic impulses on the fader's track. i wonder what else from music glued itself in there |
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knowing when to change the track to sync it up with the green light is something i could probably learn to do consciously, for a handful of lights. it would take me days, weeks, even months. my subconscious mind is observing this intersection for the 912th time and it's been through these patterns so many times it's bored. i'm consciously working on driving to a beat and it pitches in by lobbing me pattern matches to glue into the weasel that presses the bluetooth controls on the steering wheel, and i'm synced up. my subconscious is then slightly less bored, but still bored, so it figures out some lights i've only been through around 400 times and how to generate playlists to match them. the next day, when i'm saying, "hmm, what tracks do i want?" the notion-layer more or less spews me a printout. then i say, "what roads do i want to take?" and it's a mix of consciously chewing through data like time of day, traffic, mood, agenda, etc. but it is undoubtedly unconsciously influenced by other things, like the playlist i've programmed in. so then i go off with the notion-printout playlist programmed into my smartfone and the route (a team conscious/subconscious effort) programmed into GPS weasel, and focus on refining the way i hit the manhole cover i know is coming around the next curve so it's in time to the music. like the , this all seems pretty explainable to me, even if i'll never pin down precisely how i'm doing it. and it's still delightful when it happens, even if it's not as much of a mystery to me any more. |
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long ago, i was studying cellular automatae for a class. i loved the lil' buggers then, and i still do now. one bit was particularly beautiful to me, though: using it to simulate realistic traffic patterns. i was going to high school in the city; i didn't even have a learner's permit... but, i was already watching all these things from the passenger seat. the bit that stuck out amongst it all is this: traffic looks a lot like a school of fish. slow cars, red lights, will cluster cars together. gaps in between. it's simple and brilliant and more the rule than the exception. when i learned to drive, i was already watching for this pattern. either you're in a school of fish or in between. in between is where you can cut it loose, but also where you have to worry about cops. the cops don't fuck with a school of cars going 85 in a 60 zone, but a single lone car doing the same might pull them out and they'll light you up. it also became familiar as an obstacle on the highway: look at the head of the cluster. who's holding everyone up? where are the snoozers and where are the guys itching to get ahead like me? how can i chart a course through this nonsense so i can go faster? meanwhile, when i learned about the school-of-fish metaphor, i could barely even bang a tambourine in time and was just starting to mess with sonic acid and fruity loops. i wish someone had taught me about rhythm along with computer algorithms |
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i expect vastly different behavior from the black acura i encounter on a popular route to a main artery at 9am than i do from a light-forest-green subaru forester on a back road at 11am. it boils down to this: can i trust this car/driver? can i trust them to act the way most drivers do? beyond that, what particular quirks can i expect? i never set out to create this massive library of personality types, car make/model, and "car body language" but i have. it's very important to driving, and that's why it's there. today i encounted a real goulash of a thing. a rather large, white, toyota... but, no, that's the big rav4, not nearly as big as a landcruiser. they're somewhere in between "i'm wasted" weaving and "i'm sending a text" weaving. the car says mild soccer mom but the driving says something else. is it dad texting after two beers? is it junior, 17 with a new license, and a bunch of his buddies, goofing off so much it's as bad as texting? i never found out. |
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let me tell you the story of my, er... well, it's where the car would have an ashtray if cars still came with ashtrays, and would still haven an ashtray if i'd bought one from the car's manufacturer. i didn't i bought a cupholder one from walmart for $1.67 instead of their less-convenient one for $45 or whatever. these are the sort of stupid trivial things i've always agonized over, and then given myself grief over it (for wasting valuable agony). anyways, it's a 2 high by three 3 wide by a pack of cigarettes plus ~$2 of spare change in depth. at first i kept lighter, cigarettes, and gum in a perfectly-fitting rectangle. cigarettes on top, gum bottom left, lighter bottom right. taking out either the gum or the lighter left the pack of cigarettes sitting so that removing either left enough of an opening that i could easily mash it back in with no fuss. but, there were bugs: the pack of gum gets mashed after a while; snags the lighter. then it's a mess. lighter won't go in, gum everywhere. and i'm mad at this shit happening for the fourth time in a month and i stop putting the gum in there. but then the lighter's on the bottom and always turning to the side. finding new awkward ways to annoy me. so i began to put the lighter on top of the cigarettes, and that's where we are now, until something annoys me enough to change it. irritation, frustration trigger the conscious mind to step in and reconfigure unconscious patterns that are repeatedly sending you into a wall. i do this for everything. all my stuff goes into a particular pocket. wallet and keys right. phone left. then i got to stewing on how another bug happened again; pocket crash. disaster. can't get a darn thing out of there. "i need a solid plastic box or something," i think. then i realized i'd just re-invented the pocket protector. i had never sat down and stewed on that old nerd stereotype, but it makes perfect sense. this is not OCD. this is run-of-the-mill nerd. |
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oh, yes, there's one of but remembered because i wanted to write it up. then i lost it again; forgot i'd made a note to write about it. the data was recovered while i was taking a shower just now. i was doing something complicated like unwrapping a stick of gum, driving to music, and thinking about my nonsense when a deer ran into the road. despite all this, i came to a screeching halt faster than most people would even when completely focused. it's a huge relief when something goes wrong like this, because it allows me to see: yes, this still works. despite all this. works super. then bullshit weasel tells me there are certain things i know i should leave for when i'm at a traffic light, and perhaps these is one of those things. my foot had the brake no problem, but if i'd needed my second hand on the wheel to go evasive it could have been an issue. always arguing about where the line is tends to lead to better mechanisms and overall innovation. it pushes me to improve without pushing me so hard i overdo it and cross over into stupidity. i cannot stand stupidity; especially in myself |
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so that's about a third of my backlog, above. then i go for a drive; now it's only a quarter. and i'm arguing with myself about infrastructure again: the weasel scripts are good, but i'm not using them. too many things go unlinked. my thread has a leg-wound; coherency gushing out all over the carpet. problem A is that i don't have it all cataloged and if i don't have one in my library, then i get lazy about linking. problem B is that copy/pasting from the terminal is awkward, suggesting that i reconsider using some more automation. i made them commands so i could do something cheeky with grep later, so there's a path into that. doesn't solve the terminal issue, though. or the incomplete index. the codex waesle. we needs that too do i deal with the backlog or work on this? do i at least sort out the dictionary, but leave the script upgrade for later? yes, sure. or should i just clear out the backlog first? i'm back to the initial question. the answers: no, now. yes. it's bad enough. it will only continue to bother me. i'll sort out the dictionary by mining through one by one... hey! i think i'm caching my consciousness to hard disk in a forum thread. reading it all back linearly is a great idea to improve general coherency trends. i really should. but i should fix the scripts first. either axe it or do it right; and i don't want to axe it. now that i know it's a caching mechanism, a lookup table is no longer a casual question. i wrote them in php, so gluing a web interface onto it is trivial. that solves the terminal. then portability; i am hosting this on my local box and debated putting it on a xen vps. but then i'd have to login to a terminal... but, no, not with a web interface. there's the next metaphor |
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ah, screw it. i have to swap a bit more out to disk there are all sorts of mechanisms of reactions that i've been earthing that essentialy boil down to: well, yes. that works. that's what i decided. conscious effort to do this or that driving gets buried in russian-nesting doll layers. but it's weird seeing how they've grown, sort of like trees planted a long time ago. one rule i made up for myself after i began to get good (and did some stupid shit) was that if i'm going fast, abort at any sign of a problem. if i have to argue with myself about whether it's a problem, then that's still a problem, and i should still abort. stop, slow down, whatever. it's a very deep thing that got buried, like a tree growing around the edge of a fence. the adrenaline rush has the plug pulled at crucial moments, and that's exactly what i want. exactly what i decided. except it's automatic, and i don't have to think or fight with myself to drop the emotional high and abort. i was going fast on some road this evening. not very fast, just moderately fast, good for what was arguably a perfect night to drive. after rush hour has died down and there are far fewer cars. but also when bikes and such are out. and people walking dags. u like dags? i do, but not on the road when driving. i see a man and an SUV and a large dog of some sort in their driveway and i reflexively slow down. they aren't in the road, they are getting in the car, but you never know when a dog will get loose and dart into the road. this is something i'm sure i thought about years ago, decided how to handle, and it got buried with the rest. |
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the of an animal is constrained by its size, like the latency of your audio interface is constrained by your budget... well, also physics. a nerve impulse has to go from the nose to the tail and back, say. how long is that? bigger animal, higher latency. i realized there's a pyramid of things around animals running into the road. i've never spotted mice until recently, but now i see them regularly. i think they were always there and i've just been noticing more. they can take care of themselves too. squirrels are territorial animals. you can sit and watch them heckle each other from trees, this ugly "Haaaugh!" noise. like a little kid blowing a raspberry. they are genetically driven to play chicken with cars to defend their turf. just pretend they are not there. they can react far quicker than you. they are jerks. chipmunks can take care of themselves, but are too skittish to get near roads. cats are especially quick for their size, almost as quick as squirrels, because, well, they hunt squirrels. squirrels are slightly quicker, because cats hunt them. fox, dog, canines i am slamming on the brakes. some lumbering things like opoussm that take their time, too. birds, slam on the brakes. then you get into deer. deer are notorious for wreecking cars and killing people and for good reason. they are huge and slow and their first impulse is to freeze as you are hurtling at them at 45mph. then they travel in clusters and when they finally break more run into the road to keep up. they are awful and hell yes, i am slamming on the brakes, and remembering where i saw it so i can watch for them next time. |
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well, birds. i meant: turkeys, geese: stop, immediately. little birds like chickadees are so fast you pose no threat to them and you should ignore them too. let them handle themselves, pretty much. tune it out as noise depending on the species; hardcore interrupt for others. |
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simon travaglia, the BOFH guy, spoke of the "non-maskable male interrupt," namely a kick to the family jewels. wakes anyone right up from any train of thought, yep. lots of these ideas are little jokes i've had with me for ten or fifteen years. dinner is an interrupt to me executing coding this thing. bathroom: definitely an interrupt vector |
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driving combines the intellectual rush of speed chess and the physical rush of juggling chainsaws. having both fire at once seems to help things sync up a bit better. the sheer feeling of movement, too, is really something. something else entirely |
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a lot of what makes up a good driver is knowing what could be a problem and reacting in advance just in case it does. seeing a bike up ahead and a line of cars in front of you, then slowing down because you know the bike is about to slow all the other cars down. seeing a dag being loaded into a sport utility vehicle, slowing down, and watching it to see if it's going to become a problem to the level that you have to stop completely. but rhythm is also a required ingredient. the little waltz of timing that lets another driver tell the difference between "slow grandma" and "i'm waiting for you to turn." you wait, they wait. if they don't go fast, are they letting you go? then you both go at the same time, whoops! both brake simultaneously. like when, on a sidewalk, you move out of someone's way exactly when they do, like it's a mirror. then you both do it again i was the sort of person who did the sidewalk thing all the time, but now i realize i can't remember the last time that happened. but i could probably get it to happen deliberately |
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most of the stuff i'm writing about automatic driving is stuff everyone does. frankly, it's a marvel to me that so many people drive cars every day and the whole thing works as well as it does. it's absolutely amazing. when i point this out, though, no one really gets it. pretty much, once i cracked open the lid and found this fascinating architecture of well-trained weasels i'd unconsciously corralled somehow i was like a kid in a candy store. excitedly discovering things like the architecture of mammal danger as mapped to an abort vector, or that dogs get loose sometimes and i have a subconscious weasel that watches for dogs that could theoretically get loose. so, yes, everyone has this stuff. and i'm talking about it like it's amazing because it is. |
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i like hiking for the same reasons i like driving: movement, and the rush of navigating turf. jumping over branches and rocks, in rhythm to whatever. something in studying breathing has bled back over. i was sort of, i dunno, floating down a hill. i've always done that a bit on that hill; it's so steep you can't simply walk it. so i've experimented with altering my stance and stride and i'm having fun fucking around with dancing down the hill, around the rocks, and i feel remarkably synced up and calm for a fleeting moment. a lot it makes sense to me: i suppose i am genetically built to cover ten miles on foot, memorize the nuances of the turf, and compulsively optimize what i do on that journey because survival depends on it. driving fast, outhinking the other drivers, moving quicker, more precisely... as wilson said to house: do you steal lunch to annoy me, or is it just the thrill of beating the other hunters to the food? it is a primal urge that, through compulsive compartmentalization, i have channeled into this strange recursive engine of self-discovery. most things in my mind are not that well-tuned, yet |
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some man was branching off from somewhere as i finished floating down the hill. it drops off into a dried-up brook steeply and i allowed my tempo to do about what i'm aiming for when i take the dial on an mpc1000 and sweep it up from 145 to 300 in an arc like the doppler shift of a car whooshing past you; jump over the end. invert the previous pattern and slow to a halt. man branching! feel slightly awkward. then: no, fuck it, that was solid. he was asking me where the parking lot was. he was not the first person to do it. the first man i asked: which parking lot? oh, that one, it's that way. then i rattled of visual image markers i used for his reference. the second guy was right near the lot the first man wanted, so i said yes, it's over there. it's where i was going. then he gets there and says to me: oh, er, i wanted the other lot. whoops! i told him: here is the route i know, here are visual markers for reference. then i told him the trick was to make markers for yourself in your mind as you go, and he said he knew. i started to talk about drifting off into thought, caught myself, and recommend he ask someone else -- the other people walking up -- because there might be a better way. their reaction was: "you mean, on foot?" poor dude. it was a bit of a walk anyways, the loci -- "path" -- method of memorization. a route you know well, points in a bullet list glued to each one. remembering and actual path that way takes conscious focus. as you make each marker, run through every marker in order, once or twice, even backwards. otherwise you begin to lose them. if your mind wanders, they all begin to drift off, and you don't even make markers at all. weasles are fickle |
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i was sitting in my car, eating crisps, but i'm afraid i wasn't listening to augmatic disport. i had on "black plastic" by ladytron, off their second album, light & magic. this album is amazing and also intricately woven into the fabric of my life to the point where i think rather seriously about whether or not i feel like listening to it. emotional connections get dense and begin to resemble magick; david copperfielding myself. but i've realized it. being compulsive about when to put it on probably only accelerates the spiral... anyways, black plastic. touchy chair. with some time. to. spare. which, indeed, i had, because it was the ass-end of rush-hour, and i wanted to eat my chips and drink my starbucks milk bottle and this lot is perfectly designed for people watching. there is an extremely odd nook with exactly three parking spaces that essentially turns the nearby intersection into a drive-in movie theatre. and the intersection is reliably crazy from 6am to midnight... i was not parked there. i was in a large void of spaces off to the side, also a good spot for another purpose: looking at the people driving the cars, and seeing how my conception of them matched the cars. the most notable thing, really, was how long i had to wait to find a puzzler. most were obvious: 17 year-old kid in a nissan altima. either that's dad's car or his parents are rich, but don't want to spoil him and have gone with precisely the upper-edge of what a 17-year old kid can/should have. like, sorry son, you're not getting a BMW M3, you're getting a nissian altima. which is still way quicker than my car. i couldn't tell which he was, but i could have figured it out if i drove behind him for a bit. |
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i was rounding up my crisps, searching through the shake for stragglers, when pick-up truck dad and junior pull in next to me. i barely noticed, but in retrospect, why'd he park there? spots right next to the store dead empty. so many better spots. it's like the urinal thing: most men instinctively go for the urinal furthest open urinal from everyone else there. some men will do precisely the opposite, and ignore seventeen urinals in the rest stop men's room and pee right the fuck next to you. these people are either macho assholes and want you to be sure of it, or gay. perhaps both; not really where i like to pick up dates and i wouldn't know anyways, this guy had a kid and that was totally a macho parking move. i didn't think about this until later, though. at the time, i just finished my crisps and sparked a cigarette. it felt like a good moment; do it before i'm driving. then the man returned. i was watching the cars and not him; i was paying him no mind. don't want to meddle. the people i'm watching don't notice me and aren't bothered, but i don't want to stare and analyze some dad in a parking lot. so, yes, i make a choice to just keep looking. then i hear The Cough. it says: you are smoking a cigarette and i am bothered by this. it's a subtle thing to hear, but since i started smoking cigarettes, i've come to hear it pretty clearly from a normal, real cough. it is a theatrical thing and the timing/style is all different. then i thought about where he'd parked and, well, fuck off. i waited about as long as it took to make it seem like i'd not noticed he gave me The Cough and took a large puff of my cigarette. then i could feel him staring at me. i waited the proper duration, and took another large puff. he drove off in a huff. i'm not as deft at out-peeing the macho sorts, but i'm getting better |
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how do you know when someone is staring at you? i really can't tell how i knew, in that moment. i could have been wrong; maybe it was just a likely thing and i nudged it over into a sure thing. but, most people know the feeling that they're being stared at naturally. it can be wrong but it often isn't, and it's fascinating to me. |
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hiking today i got to thinking about how i write things up: a tree of a fence? why not with the fence through the middle? that's simpler and i went with a more cumbersome metaphor. why? it was what popped into my head as i was writing it up, and i've learned to look at what pops up and say either: A) sure, why not, or B) no, that's wrong for reason XYZ; tinker with it and repeat. the fence thing just came out and i saw no reason to stop it. today, i realized i was getting at something: the fence is the lizard brain and the tree is the higher-level mammal brain wrapped around the end, like the physical structure of the brain itself. i do this to myself a heck of a lot. some are unwittingly brilliant and i don't notice until a few days later. others nag at me like dreams: a ? again, it's just the visual metaphor that tumbled into my mind, and i dutifully wrote it up. a lot of the time these things are just adding color; a more interesting way to write something. but i feel like i picked a school bus for a reason and i can't quite figure it out. teaching? a bus in the electrical engineering sense? or was it just color? i'm still mulling on it |
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