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this is also the first toe in the waters of: how far does this all go before it's maxed out? the notion layer represents the grey area between conscious ramble and the dark alley radar that sends out a bad vibe if you're in imminent danger of getting stabbed. perhaps in the face the notion layer has a limited number of CPU cores, we'll say, and time rapidly renders previous work irrelevant. threading, optimization, and praxial fine tuning can do wonders, but you're up against the hardware soon enough. this leads me to weirder questions: if i manage to get wicked adept at gauging an incoming notion -- like i do with other cars i see on the road, say -- then it will be because i know enough about how they're generated to be aware of the generation. put simply, what if the entire notion-layer got wired in 1:1, and it ceased to become a seperate entity? pranayama says this is a normal course of events when any hacker hacks himself |
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dim but not impossible hope: i continue my path as an out-of-control debug module gradually consuming the host computer it was installed to babysit/optimize. eventually, i have plumbed the depths of the notion-layer so thoroughly that i begin to actually be able to tell you how i got four traffic lights in a row to turn red as the track ends. i already have a few wild ideas. today i was just grooving along in time. nothing ostentatious. nothing that's a rubberneck vector. just driving in time, perhaps tapping on the wheel. i notice that the pickup truck in front of me is tapping his brakes in time as well. i was squinting, trying to figure out: did he catch my hand dancing? no, i'm not really even doing that. i'm tapping the wheel a bit. did he see my rhythmic driving, then immediately start riffing? it's possible, but extremely unlikely. most people aren't that weird, and those weird enough rarely drive pickup trucks. what i concluded was that it was probably subconscious. he was not consciously aware that he'd been swept up in the wake of my rhythms. his subconscious mind latched onto my groove through flickers in the rear-view mirror, ambient engine sounds, occasional outright conscious glances at me.... and promptly began driving a tad like i do. i had a thought a while ago that moving traffic forms a live, living cache of sorts. your actions cause reactions in the other cars, and any action ripples outwards, bounces around, comes back. the ol' zen "mind as a pond" thing, except it's a pool of minds in a strict, well-defined context that i know as well as i know my left foot. if i am steadily pumping out groove data, perhaps it builds like swinging on a swingset. over a few minutes of intensely expressive driving, more and more drivers have subconsciously begun moving to my groove without even realizing it. it's a wild idea, yeah. but it's the only thing i've come up with so far that doesn't make bullshit weasel superbly cross. |
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that's a scaled-up version of something i hinted at. lewis and i are tight enough that we've admitted stuff to each other we've never told another single human. it is a supremely deep level of trust, really. one result of this is that we're not interacting through the layers of posture and expection as much was we would with anything else. hell, he gets my conscious monologue right out of my mouth, zero filter, continuously. i get the same back, in discrete bursts (simply our respective styles). it's almost like giving someone your root password. i've heard what sounded like a recording of myself tumbling out of his mouth, and caught his words coming out of me in the same way... the Altar of Chaos? i hate it, grrr? when i wrote both of those, i was dimly aware that lewis was coming out of me. but that's how it all is. bits of your parents and your favorite authors and obama's scripted baritone are blown up and pieced back together in a collage that represents whatever you're trying to communicate. parts of lewis and me drift into each other and become part of our respective selves. it happens always, everywhere, but we've gotten so densely interwoven at moments that it's given me a brain fart. what did i just say? oh, shit, that's just a playback of lewis coming out of me like it was entirely my own thing. |
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a long-running parallel project is helping lewis dig his way out of the huge mess he's made for himself. i have a lot of experience with this. i have a toolbox of battle-tested strategies to give him. i have it together a bit more than he does -- i catch him when he's about to shoot himself in the foot. my tone of voice becomes cross, and he pulls his finger off the trigger. i switch from the stick to the carrot and start amping him up about how, darn it, he can get it done the right way with my help. it's exactly how i berate myself into improving. i've never turned it on anyone else, really. so, when i catch himself berating himself about a spot of lazy thinking, and it sounds exactly like me berating myself for seriously entertaining sloppy thinking, there is a tingle of hope that something very deep has been going on. parts of his brain are broken. anything broken bothers me immensely, and seeing my friend being broken pushes me almost to the level of desperation. i want to fix my friend. i want so badly to fix my friend. some nights it's not my own problems that keep me up, it's his. it was purely a lucky accident; a byproduct of all this... but, shit -- did that just happen? he'd usually spit out a broken result in this situation, and then i would feel compelled to get on his vest about it. he's skipped a step, though, and gone right to berating sloppy thinking without me being involved at all. it's been internalized. he has an emulation of me with him, now, and all day long, it's throwing shitfits: no, don't do that. don't shoot yourself in the foot. think it through. draw it all out on paper if it's too big to keep in your head... like a part of my consciousness has been grafted into him in the right spots and he's started to rise out of the muck. perhaps i've begun to teach him to think. if so, it would probably be the most wonderful thing i've ever done. |
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he is also doing the same to me. the longer i've known him, the more i've begun to galavant, and stressing has become a little less full-on. a week ago, i hadn't noticed any of this going on, in either direction. it's nascent, but promising, and i will be keeping an eye or four on it for sure. the tone of voice is key, i suspect. it's like i have an angry red pen and a happy green pen and through liberal use of both (years of ranting at myself) complexity emerges. the voice of mum, yelling, mad as hell, gets a rise out of a man even after she's been underground for twenty years. deep, old shit wells up immedately. angry voices got mad when you peed on the rug, and then gave you candy when you peed in the toilet jr. like a good dog. eventually, you developed the bladder control every human takes for granted. until they discover weasels |
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after a while, i'll have built up enough connections manually that a computer will be able to compile the whole of the law. back to the automationmaton, mon i was mostly stewing on a way to take the manual labor out of building a tree of dependancies for this thread, so i could use that to have the computer spit out a nice, clean wad of hyperlinks tying it all together. i realized today that this is tantamount to isolating a pocket of order inside the computer until the brew is sufficiently thick for that the entire structure will spontaneously . it's much more profound that i realized at first. it's also a graph theory problem. i'm delighted, because i theorize graphs pretty good. not john carmack good, but good. yes: take this frozen slice of my conscious ramblings, feed it into a computer. the computer dredges up patterns i'd never spot on my own. some graph theory. spend some quality data entry time entering the relationships into the computer. a critical point is surpassed. some graph practice. a 1/15 scale model of weaseldynamics will materialize on my coffee table. it will serve me well as a conversation piece, but it won't fix my haphazard life skills. much. |
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of class: needle drop |
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^^ i was thinking of this track as i wrote it, and it's amusing to compare the actual lyrics to what i wrote. it's close, but it's drifted. president goes to obama's scripted baritone... yeah, that's about how all of memory works. close, but no cigar. that was a clinton thing. a notion says: write some code! ...but, no weasels, no graph theory. no, it's the thing i get paid to work on. the thing that's actually useful for non-weird sorts. sigh. that's not my favorite notion. it's dull. i'd have begun consciously bothering myself about it it soon enough, and i've gone and made it even sooner. perhaps these notions are getting too efficient. the whole place is running so well management is talking about downsizing |
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there are all sorts of ways to create blockages. people dupe themselves into berry goop poop pills because -- unless it's medical -- the core answer is to (stuff less crap down your gaping maw) && (take a walk every evening after dinner); give it a year with that instead of biffidus regularis, colo-rectal carwashes, ground up kidneys (of white males who [drink {1-2 nips}] of scotch per chron [hat tip: ]); is there an xlt mode for emacs? just wondering |
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i'm contemplating . it's half-assed C++ with PEMDAS brackets ([{<>}]) for situations where C becomes O(bees). PEMDAS brackets kick us down to O(bees - honey). a little sweetener to take the sting off... because, well, do all the brackets match? my perfectly good train of silly string goes off the rails. it screams down a sharply banked hill, hurtling into the solution space whisperingly referred to as ~weasel country~ oh, hmm: counting the nested layers of ()'s in C code is a weasel. i never thought about it before this very moment. bracket matching weasel is just so very old -- ancient, by weasel standards. he's old enough to vote. as usual, i ask myself: is bracket matching weasel optimized? it's weird. i almost feel like bracket matching weasel is a giant redwood in a forest full of saplings. rushing in to cut it down feels somewhere between cruel and tasteless. my brain actually seemed to rebel at the thought. mama bear protecting her cub again. is bracket matching weasel as all-over as two-bar weasel? is bracket matching weasel a crucial support member of any old/weird/deep chains of dependancy? do my driving weasels ever chat with bracket matching weasel? do they let him take the wheel sometimes for a laugh? bullshit weasel tears out: that started off merely coasting. soon, it entered a gradually accelerating plunge, which sent it slamming into a wall of cheap lol at terminal velocity. the weasels don't play pool, they don't talk about sports, and they don't execute blue-collar tomfoolerylrie algorithmics. bullshit weasel tears out, at this point: you just did to me what you did to the paragraph i was trying to explain as i was trying to explain what you've done, and now you've gone and done it all over again. bracket matching weasel has a giggle fit off in the corner. he refuses to explain what's so hilarious |
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when i can refrain from amusing myself into a terminal spiral of giggles and distraction, it's actually an absurdly elegant and deep issue to think about. obviously, computer algorithms to count brackets exist. it goes right down to the very basics: bits on a stack. opening bracket? add one bit. close bracket? remove one bit. another close bracket? there are no bits left: error. you made a typo. language translation layers then take over, allowing for the compiler to scream in over forty different languages. normal, spoken-word human languages. the way i do it in my head is actually not very different, at least at the start: i find the start of the line at the left. i skim along and count up the number of opening brackets until i hit a close bracket. from then on, it gets a bit complex. if the line is neat and tidy, i can just sort of skim it and say: yes, ok, three open, three close. but if it's a mess: if((algorithmics(tomfoolerylrie) && driving()) || (weasel_active(coding))) {} it rapidly becomes more akin to dashing down a hill in the park at a 180bpm gallop. there's no singular technique. instead, it's more like an unfathomable hive mind that networks together hundreds of weasels together once. heck, my whole brain is an unfathomable hive mind that networks together hundreds of weasels together once. it's a paradigm that repeats itself in the layers of layers in a self-similar manner. it is... wait for it... fractally accurate pwacticly immactulate. quack. badger. no, stop. don't make that face. if you gurn spelling too hard it could stay that way. don't breathe like that, it'll make you feel reaalllly funny |
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if((algorithmics(tomfoolerylrie) && driving()) || (weasel_active(coding))) {} painfully exploded into english: A) two opening. remember the number two. B) the call to algorithmics closes immediately; ignore this whole cluster. C) the call to driving closes immediately; ignore this whole cluster. D) scope out to the context of the && and close the expression. down to one. remember one. E) decide to evaluate right operand to || as a cluster F) weasel_active, one. coding, two. coding close, one. weasel_active close, zero. a spare closing. G) we have one open from before to eat the spare closing. H) i make sure the close bracket and open bracket that just obliterated each other are the outer ()'s of the "if" statement as a double-checking measure. I) i skip around a bit and eye things quickly to see if anything leaps out at me as wrong. as for I) -- quite often, it's about as subtle as stubbing my toe: oh, this bit is wrong. it's glaringly obvious. but i can't know why until i sit there and consciously evaluate whatever sub-nugget grabbed me as wrong. count the brackets.... |
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how does bad syntax weasel know what bracket matching weasel seems unaware of? it's some clusterfuck, i'm sure, like "the accumulated memory of the 2^5 most common ways i tend to hamfist my control logic, should i get sloppy and hamfist my control logic." i'm consciously watching for mistakes as i type. i'll get a notion that i've a history of messing up this exact situation, and here you are sir, bad news on the syntax tip. i respond by tensing up like a bamboo shoot. as if this were an impending car crash. i can't hamfist this. i can't. if i can't trust my control logic, i have nothing. i have to get it right. i tense even harder. focus i promptly hamfist my control logic. my hands are focused on finding moorings for a death grip, and i can't type brackets as well as i can when i relax a bit. but, relax? hell no -- messing it up justifies the worry. i double-down. mash all the faders to the red. like i'm about to die and giving it everything i have until i collapse.... this is how bad syntax errors are, to some part of my mind. i can be perfectly calm and laid back and i'll catch myself going white-knuckle tension quite often. by my twenties i could have been swapped in with one of the legs on the family dinner table, folgers taste-test style. neither i nor the family of four would notice the difference.... until i had to pee. then, for a confusing and terrifying moment, the family of four has to cope with the sensation that the cable just came alive. there is a half a second of supremely terrifying disorientation that arouses the primal weasels responsible for reacting properly to the fact that you've just stepped on a sleeping bear, or something that feels pretty close to it. by the time baseline reality has reasserted itself, i'm long gone, locked away in another safe zone, zeroing out about two kilos of data from my kidney cache. |
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it goes back to when i was a depressed, anxiety-consumed kid. i discovered that programming is to me what heroin or halcion is for some. the whole world, all of its bullshit and bad thoughts -- simply disappears. a personal nirvana to hide in while everything else goes to shit. thank god it pays better than whatever smackheads get paid... imagine it: i'm sixteen, home from school, and chasing the dragon. i need my first hit of computer. my body is curtly jammed into position and never tended to. any complaints were met with a crabby red pen: fuck off, you're part of that fucking reality out there with explosions and chaos. can't trust it. all i can trust is my control logic, and i can only trust that if i type it properly. i have to type this properly. i have to... red pen all over. a lot of my best code and forum posts are written in a quasi-catatonic state. i'm so into my it that the body has been switched off as much as possible to focus my mental resources. i'll stand on my toes for 45 minutes, writing or coding, unaware i'm standing on my toes until something hurts so bad i yelp aloud; fall over with a whomp. obviously, i've long recognized that this is probably not an ideal way to do things, but i was never sure what exactly i should do about it, until the monoid tip. bed rolling was born. the genesis: one day, i start typing before i sit down. since i'm typing, i don't notice this. for four hours. now there's this ball of tension in my back like you wouldn't believe. let's get up and stretch... there? no. shit. i can't get it. how do i get that spot? what is that spot, anyways? what's it do? it's driving me insane it bothers me so bad that sheer frustration leads me to behave strangely. like a bear rubbing itself against a tree, interwoven with an autistic child's uncontrollable urge to press a particular spot of his face against the top left metal bureau handle because... i dunno, this just has to happen, out of my way |
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more or less, i'd managed to cause a ball of tension to form in a muscle that i'd never had a meaningful conscious interaction with before. finding it was not a simple thing. it was bothering me and i went mad trying to find it. lift myself on the counter. no? how about backwards? no? lie on my back and kick my legs in the air? a fetal ball? hang off the edge of the bed upside down? ...and flop? and bounce? roll my leg ov- hey, weird... that's not what i was looking for, but i always wondered how to stretch that bit... soon, i'm using absolutely any bit of furniture: get the coffee table right into that disc in my back. POP! aaah. mash my face on the floor in a slow slide, so the friction between the rug and my face can be used to precisely control tensions. i'm trying to suss out how a thing in my neck works, and nothing i've tried has gotten me anywhere. alright, yes, sliding my face along the carpet is super gross, but it worked. who mashes their face on the floor? children. autistic childen. household pets. me... my body had finally thrown me something that could compete with the computer. it was challenging. it still is. i have to concentrate on it just as hard as i would on code. that sorts out our hide-from-reality microcosm requirement, check. soon enough, i was finding how to stretch out all sorts of dead zones that i'd sort of accepted as impossible to stretch, and then i was properly hooked. my posture has gradually improved. i know my body deeper than i ever thought i would. some tension has been carefully programmed away. i still will murder my toes by accident if i begin to type before i sit down properly. that shit needs some darn complicated pants. |
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a lot of what proper science (guys at princeton with credentials, not weirdos on the internet with weasels) knows about the brain has been gleefully mined from personal tragedy. art is similar, except the tragedy and mining exist in one person in diachronic tandem, and fight in a dysfunctional feedback loop. like a car engine with a busted harmonic balancer. the most famous example is . the purportedly safe profession of dynamiting shit in the middle of nowhere for the rail barons backfires: oh, shit! there's a railway spike lodged in my skull. doc, ya got any tweezers? this spliter is killing me! 99% would have died or been totally braindead, but it hit gage in the perfect spot -- the spot where things live, like "don't start fights in a bar" or "rubbing your balls on your friend's wife might backfire on you." doctors knew this because gage began doing these sort of things, and his friends reassured the doctors: yes, this is not how he was before. this is how neurology was born. other fields are similar: there was some man in pre-revolution america who had a bayonette incident that left him with a perfect little access port to his stomach. doctors adored the man; visited from all over the world to see him and suck a little juice out of the hole and look at it and go "hmmm" thoughtfully. what descriptive adjectives will sell an article on this hole to science magazine and get me the grant that will allow me to buy twice the usual ramen rations? the simpsons were onto this too: in every crisis is an opportunity. a crisitunity. thanks, homer. anyways, when things go wrong -- if i screw up, if the weasels screw up, if i screw up at not screwing up -- i mine it for data. mostly because intellectual curiosity is one of the few things that sweeps my neurotic mental picking aside like a spring leaf, but the data is also cool |
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a new metaphor: my subconscious mind is, actually, not a mind at all it is a ginourmous that someone or something with an extremely strange sense of humor has trapped me in, fantastic voyage style. as before, this metaphor is fractally accurate (same link). i have two manipulator rods. one delevers a sharp spark that weasels dislike intensely. the other delivers weasel eats, which weasels love to eat. they will eat weasel eats until they're unable to eat another eats, and then cease to eat for a suitable refractory period. during the refractory period, weasels take nap. next, poop off somewhere -- somehow, i've never actually caught them in the act. like the terrier mix in cape cod i shared a house with for nine months -- that dog was houdini reincarnated, i swear. i study the refractory facts of the fractally accurate weasel hive architecture from inside my fantastic voyage pod. the interior seems to have been designed by alec empire, and texture-mapped with the ridiculous amount of data i've accumulated from seeing cube 2: hyper cube 2 times. one was pretty intense. the other was alright if this were a movie, it'd be like if weird al were commissioned to re-boot cube 2: hypercube as he saw fit. script, directing. kinda. maybe if it was a cybernetic weird al... and then andy kaufman was inside his mind -- physically, like the brain worms from wrath of khan. then you put in the contract that weird al has to please steve jobs, whose angry voice will relentless tear anything that isn't such flawless elegance it leaves the consumer verklempt... then, for the video-game tie-in (the video game about the movie), we'll get peter molyneux |
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peter molyneux will gather funds for the video game via kickstarter, because this shit doesn't really pay very well. it's a rambling acid-head metaphor that iterates deeper up its own behind at an incredible rate, which is depressingly close to a rambling grandpa story that goes nowhere. at least i'm going somewhere, though, you know? the rambling component is seen above, where "peter molyneux gets the funds on kickstarter" is bullet point one in the outline of today's intractable blather. as always, composed in my car during moments when driving the car is neither fun nor complicated. i didn't have the grandpa story thing, though. i dutifully fufilled the bullet point's whim, and it simply kept going. it went long enough that it grew this paragraph to explain itself. anyways, peter molyneux gets funds for the game on kickstarter. the game is essentially black and white, but with weasels, and you're in a fantastic voyage submarine (interior: alec empire meets the set design from cube 2, etc) and the plot is this: (dfkjgdfjgfg forked off to a multi-part series i will write up to riced out yugo, now replacing with a bodged-up reader's digest version) ((()00))_F)q you are ken kesey, and you're trapped in your own plotline. in the psych ward. the 'O ward. breezin with nurse R. that's BIG O, and nurse risperidrome. finding this unacceptable, you wait for a chance to bolt. it comes. here it is! making a bolt from the burly chaps responsible for making your existance unboltable, you see the door open. you see the sub, and immediately you know what it is. wow, heavy. do i really want to get in that thing? footsteps are coming down the hall. this is what homer would refer to as a crisitunity -- and, fuck it, it beats playing checkers with the screaming tourettes lady on six lids of risperdal. you board. klaxons klax on, cop lights rotate. the orderlies get there. haha suckers! so long! but, no. they're smiling. they planned this |
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you are shrunken, beneedled, and sneeringly laughed at with audio sample data my brain has extracted from movie scenes containing smug thugs. what's going on? what is this? what are they going to do with me? you are a believer in self-improvement, even in grave times. yessir. so, you reflect on the situation: you seem to have blindly hurled yourself into the cockpit of a physically impossible submarine from a movie you saw precisely once, in seventh grade. how do we feel about this? oh, alright. it could be better. it's not like there was a big door marked EXIT, you know? it beats helping the psych ward keep that bristol von meyer-squid chap flush in dollars, and you feel proud to contribute, you just wish the doctor would move you down from nine risperdals to, well, none. so: not the psych ward, no more risperdal. i'm feeling much better. oh, wait, they're going to inject me into the chap now. who is it? i'm squinting. oh. shit. it's me. they're injecting me into my own brain |
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anyways, peter molyneux gets funds for the game on kickstarter. the game is essentially black and white, but with weasels, and the plot is this: you're an actively escaping psych inpatient impatiently attempting outpatient manuevers. almost cornered, you take your one option: a fantastic voyage submarine, in the black ops think tank smart farm in the secret lab the NSA has set up in the psych ward (because, you know, it's the last place they'll look). you begin to reconsider, but the door won't open. you start to mumble to yourself: "hmm, debug... oh, the child locks are on. let's just switch it" and then a curious thing happens: instead of the word "off" coming out of your mouth, it's like some indescribable ascending FM warble (extra sass). you ponder this: "i'm getting better at singing, but, jeez, what? oh, no, that's just the shrink ray." yeah, you've gotten yourself in pretty good this time. your brain loads low-poly stock orderlies from squarepusher's "come on my selecta" video and processes them through a google deep dream photoshop filter entrained on terminal velocity, which is a DOS video game you love more than ice cream, even today. the orderlies lift your needle-stuck-in-self and stick you in yourself, and you're stuck with the situation, yada yada |
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anyways, peter molyneux gets funds for the game on kickstarter. the game is essentially black and white, but with weasels, and the plot is this: you're a cybernetics researcher. you are researching experimental cybernetics during a thunderstorm. not only does this provide the appropriate mad scientist atmosphere, it handles a crucial plot point: lightning strikes the lab. it's a plot device akin to dougless adam's improbability drive, and, improbably, instead of the expected rabbit (you named him phineas) you are injected into your own brain. this has nothing to do with the lightning. your assistant (janine from ghostbusters) simply walks past the rabbit, and there you are, boom, wham. inside your own mind, improbably, is not a brain, but a massive city of weasels. you circle it for an hour or two. you think: "maybe this is like lawnmower man, and in all this dark void around the weasels there will be something labelled 'maintence port,' through i can escape this diseased mainframe; ssh to my linux box." afraid not, wandering point of view. this is not lawnmower man at all. you just wandered into this writing the part about circling the weasels and you're having a lol about it. frustrated and bored, you take a nap. maybe you're just having some wicked acid trip in your dorm room in 2006 and it'll wear off sooner or later. afraid not, wandering point of view. when you wake up, your brain has lifted from the plot of the sci-fi mini-series "The Room" and the entire submarine has reset, groundhog-day style. you'll come to realize it always does this. you also don't need to eat, drink, or pee. you don't need to pee, but you try to anyways to see what happens. "oh," you say, "a blindingly confusing out of body experience. perhaps you're in a K-hole in your duplex in 2009 and it'll wear off sooner or later. afraid not, wandering point of view. a week passes. you're bored. fuck it. you plunge into the weasels |
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anyways, peter molyneux gets funds for the game on kickstarter. the game is essentially black and white, but with weasels, and the plot is this: you're a cybernetics researcher. you are researching experimental cybernetics during a thunderstorm. not only does this provide the appropriate mad scientist atmosphere, it handles a crucial plot point: lightning strikes the lab. via some improbable twist of fate, you find yourself being injected into your own brain. inside your brain is an unfathomably huge city of weasels. you wander into the fray, intending to just have a peek, and are promptly unable to find your way back out. ever. it takes a certain sort of almost-autistic bastard to have the stones to write "cybernetics researcher" on your 1040 form every year. you have to be neurotic, but not too neurotic. you make it to the lab, oh, five minutes late, dressed properly, with your socks on, and then turn into a catatonic statue reminiscent of "the thinker" except with terrible slouching posture. being this sort of person, being lost in a cloud of weasels that seems endless fills you with almost as much anxiety as you experience trying to construct white lies that balance the sharp requisite for brevity with your death-grip on the urge to ensure everything you say is completely, totally accurate. similar to that situation, there's three seconds of blank staring, a fumble, then an overly-complex thing that comes out wrong and you've made an ass of yourself again. just say the shirt looks nice or something, jesus shit get it together after that, there's panic. your brain constructs a montage of screaming, panicing, wall-banging, etc. using a simulation that simulates the requiem for a dream dilation montage at the tempo of a guy richie caper montage. eventually, that subsides. you briefly begin to consider reality again: well, here i am, maybe i should do something to deal with ighsdjfgkdjgjf" too soon. you're panicing again |
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anyways, peter molyneux gets funds for the game on kickstarter. the game is essentially black and white, but with weasels, and the plot is this: you're a cybernetics researcher that's been injected into his own brain containing a vast city of weasels. at a meeting, character design is tossed around: cybernetics? will people know what that is, still? can't we just use virtual reality? oh, no, facebook trademarked that. sure, cybernetics, whatever as a cybernetics researcher, you're the sort of chap who keeps his cupboards ordered with the level of care of the guy at the lourveamyd responsible for the room where mona lisa is displayed for jetlagged tourists and professional pickpockets. the mona lisa is a little postage-stamp piece of shit that everyone flocks to like flies on poo. yes, now the board meeting is a curator slash professional fact shouting person: if you'll look to the left, there's this other painting by the guy, and it's the size of a small house. wandering point of view tries to interrupt. wandering point of view also works in cybernetics, and is dying to know: how did they get that in this room? it's six times the height of the door. did the- shush. shush! no talking. anyways, this painting has an interesting story: it makes the mona lisa look completely pathetic, it's right next to the mona lisa, and everyone ignores it. at once, you feel both supremely special and completely alone. you decide to become peter molyneux in order to effectively channel this particular air/fuel mix of beauty and reality. |
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anyways, peter molyneux gets funds for the game on kickstarter. the game is essentially black and white, but with weasels, and the plot is this: you're a cybernetics researcher that's been injected into his own brain containing a vast city of weasels. it's chaos. it's a mess. weasel anarchy. and, fuck, you're stuck here, and it's not like this freaking plotline submarine gets cable. the weasels are going absolute romp-a-room. fast food weasel wrestles with self-loathing weasel for control over a potato chip. self-improvement weasel tries to break it up and gets an elbow in the face when he tries to stand in between them. his glasses fly off and his nose bleeds. he curls into an autistic ball on the ground and tries so very hard not to cry. bad idea weasel knows this is his chance, and tears out, talking mad shit about self-improvement weasel and collects the dividents of all the catch-22 i-told-ya-so's he was setting himself up for via catcall protocol as self-improvement weasel tried to instill good manners and explain something about some robert chap and his rulers. but he can't stop you now, bad idea weasel |
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anyways, peter molyneux gets funds for the game on kickstarter. the game is essentially black and white, but with weasels, and the plot is this: you're a cybernetics researcher that's been injected into his own brain containing a vast city of weasels, and you can't escape this plotline without being able to rally the weasels together as a collective machine. you piece together this machine using data your brain has from the megazord in power rangers, and then that derails too: power rangers. saban. inspector gadget. shiuki levy. inspector gadget soundtrack on vinyl. jesus shit, this mops the floor with brett favre. no, wait, bernard favre. brett is the quarter note back beat you must train all the weasels to self-assemble into a multitude of carefully designed sub-units. these sub-units are fractally identical to an individual weasel, and must also be trained. and we're glossing over things, here -- you need at least 2^14 weasels for your big toe alone eventually, theoretically... maybe, if you're lucky... you have enough parts (legs, arms, an energy sword as tall as a skyscraper... you know, the basics) to form a weasel megazord as cheesy brass horn techno (which you find vastly inferior to the music of inspector gadget) blares deafeningly. then you've got yourself a megazord weasel, and, well, you've got to train that weasel too. but this one's not hard, it just has to cut a maintainence port in your skull for you to climb out through. doctors will adore the mysterious, catastrophic sword injury and discuss writing a paper on it, and fail to notice a weasel megazord wandering out of the OR towards the sign marked IZLAZ. the weasel megazord is heard mumbling: "shit, that was it. i should have gone right. izlaz means stairs. remember izlaz means stairs" |
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anyways, peter molyneux gets funds for the game on kickstarter. the game is essentially black and white, but with weasels, and the plot is this: you're a cybernetics researcher that's been injected into his own brain containing a vast city of weasels, and you can't escape this plotline without training all the weasels to dance. at your disposal, you have: -- two (2) operant condipmulator arms designed by your friend and collegue, b. f. skinner. one delevers a sharp spark that weasels dislike intensely. the other delivers weasel eats, which weasels love to eat. they will eat weasel eats until they're unable to eat another eats, and then cease to eat for a suitable refractory period. -- one (1) massive sound system. weasels hear it for miles. or, well, what would be miles if you were normal, you know what i mean, hard to peg distances with this much space dilation. the weasels are sometimes curious about the music, but in general, they pay it little mind, unless it's loud. then it scares them, or annoys them. -- one (1) ship's computer of sufficient power to simulate a wandering point of view attempting to simulate a wandering point of view writing a wandering plotline. -- one (1) internet connection, providing pirated MP3s and wikipedia, except on the NPR pledge drive days when jimmy's feeling skint. -- one (1) . it is vastly out of place; totally incongruent with the way a simulated alec empire designs submarine interiors. you suspect it was left here by mistake. you are extremely grateful for this, because it allows you to turn the stark white walls into an evolving canvas of bullet-point lists and mushroom phone doodles. -- one (1) wandering point of view with which to implement a weasel megazord capable of escaping a re-boot of cube 2 written and directed by a cyberized weird al |
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anyways, peter molyneux gets funds for the game on kickstarter. the game is essentially black and white, but with weasels, and the plot is this: you're a cybernetics researcher that's been injected into his own brain containing a vast city of weasels, and you can't escape this plotline without training all the weasels to form a structured society. the game is delayed. the kickstarter comments become disappointed, then dejected, and finally, a troll constructs his bestest, most high-poly simulate of a butthurt True Fan. this True Fan has put up with this mess like only a man who lives in his mom's basement, and now he's lost his religion, now let's add a mitigating comment to see like i'm opening the door to forgiving him to legitimize the whole feel of it, yes the troll sparks a feedback loop, and all the comments become angry. peter molyneux hasn't noticed, because he's found the new tetris. the game is delayed because it's freakin' owsum. two years later, the game comes out, with a post-it note: "yes, there's some mind-blowingly deep math in there, and it turns out 2/3 of the promised features will be impossible without a quantum computer with an O(n) greater than 2^14 cube hits. i am so terribly sorry." while "weasel & dynamics" is next-tetris to peter molyneux (so addictive he almost never finished never finishing it) it made absolutely no sense to anyone else. peter molyneux caves and hints on his twitters: "the first thing you have to do is teach the weasels rhythm. without that you're fucked. you're welcome guys" brief hope as a few people get a weasel to tap its foot in time; progress stops. frustration. depression. the non-autistic are weeded out. six months later, one of the few left standing on his toes has trained nine weasels to dance, and it's like a nine cube-hit supercomputer. quantum? sure, yes. useful? fuck no. steam quietly de-lists the game. |
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finally, the stack returns. peter licks his wounds and returns to the internet with a plan he believes in solidly: "i heard your feedback on my game, and i get it. it's fun, sure, but it's not quite challenging enough, so i'm founding a quantum computer company to build hardware capable of running the game i envisioned the first time. you know, do it properly. trust me, you guys will love it. but, hey -- i need funding, so please donate to my kickstarter" |
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if my subconscious mind is the world's longest PHP joke (evolutionary, get it? ya! hahaha ha... ha..... wait. fuck) then this thread has gone fractally accurate and provided us with the world's longest peter molyneux joke. peter molyneux designed a game called black and white. i remembered it, and thought: oh, yes, operant conditioning and some weasels, except he's gone and larded it up with religion. no wonder his kickstarters are late and full of angry red pen. that happened after i was working on cybernetic weird andyaldroid kaufcube 2.... alright, this is the sound of me climbing up my ass. tighten it up. summarize this. i try again. i ham-fist my control logic, and a wild pointer sends my consciousness's instruction pointer into the graphics memory, and i begin running texture data as if it were program data. the sky in quake one's difficulty selecta level, i later found out... but, that was later, it took quite a few thought loops to build that megazord and cut my way out of a peter molyneux joke run horribly amok. now that i'm out of my head, i need to talk my way out of my ass. i hope you guys appreciate this. do you know how hard it is to simulate a simulation of how terminal velocity would render low-poly models of the orderlies from a squarepusher music video? oh, sure, i guess you could use google deep dream and some guy's web interface for it. shit, ok, i guess that's not so bad.. but try doing that while thinking in 64x64 bitmap tiles from a john carmack game... oh, harder? ok. they're all purple. they look very similar. few are distinct. it's like the part of a jigsaw puzzle where it's the sky and clouds and all the pieces look the same. this is your whole mind, and you can't adjust your sock until you learn to commicate with your limbs in squares of indistinct ninth-generation mimeographs of something john carmack probably outsourced |
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anyways, i anyways anyways, even though i know i anyways way too much. i spotted my unconscious anyweighing quite a number of times. no, this is a bad accidental weasel. let's turn it into a joke at my own expense, do it all over so hard it melts down into aphasia, then i can use the melted-down letters to get back from the world's longest peter molyneux joke a bit quicker, because this PHP joke is getting pretty long, and i feel like i should do something other than this bizarre writing. but, no, i've screwed up at not screwing up. let's analyze this. quickly, though, let's be quick here |
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there is so much stuff to figuring out my own internal structure that i need to work it out on paper, so to speak. flowchart it out like code... but it's too big for a flowchart. accidentally discovering i could cache my consciousness to a forum on the internet improved things exponentially. it was quite a rush... until data began piling up. sometimes, i'll chat with myself. sometimes, also, john carmack writes C++ code... but, yes, i was all "EpicMegatrax, you have, what, seventeen seperate things to post? if you don't get it all out you'll begin to lose track of it." i was making progress rapidly after a slow climb for six months. so i contined: "EpicMegatrax, you've made it so far up your butt that you have a weaselzord leg (bugs: sock wrong) and a robot arm. you're starting to actually get the whole unfathomable-weasel-homunculus-do-my-bidding thing to be reliable. so, jesus shit, don't let the engine of it stall. this cache backlog is bad news. how about you stress over it?" that sounded good, so i did. today, i realized i forgot to write about something: handedness. my left hand is my dominant driving hand, but i'm right-handed. that certain skills/weasels live in a particular hand... well, we're right into left vs. right brain. crowley made all his students practice writing with their non-dominant hand. i did that class when i was bored as a kid, and then again once RA Wilson said Crowley said it's hot shit for this sort of thing. i never got very good at it. obviously, if my driving's wired into my music, perhaps that bootstrapped itself through my left hand, which usually doesn't get to drive anything except music equipment... i realized: the things i've written up and rambled about have developed. the things i've thought of, forgotten, and re-remembered have not developed, because they're just bullet points i lost track of. so, let's cache my cache and write about what i want to remember to remember to write about |
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+0 ~ i finish my McCannically Seperated McChicken. i pull out of my parking node and roll towards the highway. for reasons that need to be written up into posts, i decided it was a good time to hang out with lewis. +02.10 ~ deciding hand with lewis is a decision that triggers the protocol that i've engineered to make hanging with lewis low snag and good time-y. +04.20 ~ i send "wanna cruise" over SMS. then i tap out "15m" but do not send it. this is so i can just press "send" after he replies and don't have to type chickets while driving. +09.11 ~ cruise sent, ETA prefetched. sorted +11.11 ~ i notice i was about to execute the protocol. if i hadn't, well, i'd have a lot less to write up. essentially, once i noticed i was using the protocol, i said "i've written about the protocol, so i should write about using the protocol." +12.00 ~ now i'm rolling onto the highway, and i drop the writing thread for route planning. i will write this later. +14:00 ~ i've figured out what i want and GPS weasel is programmed. +14.20 ~ just as GPS weasel finishes, my fone ba-boops and i turn it on; glace at the reply: "ok". send back my prepared ETA. +15.00 ~ autopilot weasel has a malfunction and tells me he needs help; take the wheel because what is this i don't even. +16.05 ~ the autopilot glitch has been consciously debugged. i add: "weasel glitch + typical patch" to my list. +19.35 ~ i turn off the highway and begin composing a post about how: yes, i was protocallin' one day and decided to log it, and then autopilot weasel screwed up. in twenty seconds, i: set up a parlay, planned a route, encountered+fixed a weasel bug, planned a route, programmed GPS weasel, and in between some of this i'm getting a writing outline together. oh, yes, and i'm driving a car, too. i have no conscious awareness (and no recollection) of the 10 minutes after those 20 seconds. until... +10:19.35 ~ GPS weasel encounters a bug. i need to write about it. |
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i'm just goofing off, sometimes. writing loads of stuff because i love it. but there is a very real feedback loop between logging my weasels to xltronic and the rate of disruptive innovation within the field of weaseldynamics.... and, well, writing about weaseldynamics started off as goofing off, it got serious, so i got serious about it, and then it got really serious. then i'm all up my nose with this huge cache backlog and i'm hiking and i remember: handedness! hemisphere dominance! i thought of this two weeks ago and i've done nothing with the idea because i didn't write it on xltronic! but i should try to be brief what a quaint thought. i wrote a single post at 7am. dense, tight. almost readable, even. this is because i'm not letting myself write more. then i went for a hike, then i got some actual work done. then i took a break, figuring i'd go back to work after. i'm driving around, then, and i convince myself: since you need to keep working, and the cache backlog is massive, and you've caught yourself losing a reasonably important avenue you meant to explore, so how about we just write up a little list of things on xltronic and get back to being an adult? but, no, it's the hyperbole and a half thing where my brain has rebelled. internet. forever i switched off leechblock to write my minimalistic list, and, well, it's easily been three hours. in retrospect, that was like telling your dog, "ok, we can go to the park, but we can only stay there for two minutes." this is not something a dog will ever understand. nope. and i should very well know this, by now. so, i've done screwed up at trying not to screw up. the bug was convincing myself i could keep it brief for a long enough period that i was able to remove my complicated pants. now i'm going to switch leechblock back on, and program up a do-over in which bullshit weasel catches me telling myself i can keep it simple, and stops it. then leechblock stays on. then work |
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on the plus side, after all that rambling about murdering my toes, i've managed to avoid doing it since. deliberately settling myself better. i set out to write up a quick list to help myself remember writing bits for later, and i promptly lose four hours on a recurisve peter molyneux joke. there are times when i'll say to myself: "i'll bang this out while the tea brews." i go over to the computer and crouch on my toes. "i'm coming back for that tea in five minutes, whatever, why sit?" by the time my ghost returns to my robot shell to pee, the tea is ice cold and toes have been murdered. typical form for me would have been to skip sitting down properly. i was dashing off a list and i didn't want myself to get too comfortable. it's so incredibly strange to me: i wrote some of the posts while murdering my toes, then i wrote about murdering my toes... and you know what? haven't murdered 'em since. and now i realize: if i had, i would have yelped aloud and fallen over around two hours ago, and that would have saved me some time |
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fucking christ. i didn't even realize i was still wearing my sunglasses. i walked straight from the car to my computer, settled properly. my pockets are empty, so i guess i got that right... but i forgot to switch to my regular glasses and i've typed everything up here through polarized filters. polarized lenses can be quite a trip and i'd love to write about it, but i won't. |
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there's so much flying around and tearing open in my brain now that it's a bit disorienting. nothing about my brain itself is disorienting, really. thankfully, i've been here many times before: in the world's most longest PHP joke, my brain was coded by... well, i never get the full story. the last guy was russian or bulgarian or something, and grew up in one of those enviornments that was depressing and genuinely dangerous in spots. he's retreated into the computer like me, but he's had so much experience with corrupt cops busting down the wrong door while he's writing malware. this has resulted a keenly-tuned dark-alley mechanism. it can be trusted with way more than mine, can, and i'm a bit jealous when i look at what i've been hired to fix. i say to myself: that is art. art. i have never seen a programmer quit mysteriously and immediately at such a perfectly designed moment. how did he know? did he know? this is pretty much a synchronicity, because this trend line says the flow of data into the system will cross a critical point in the O(n), like... shit. 36 hours. my first day, 36 hours, if it breaks blame the new guy, welcome to software consulting. it's art, i tell ya. how do i pull my chestnuts out of the mustard before the eggs scramble. if this is the shop class egg drop unit, and i get a bad letter grade if my eggs break, my egg has just been dropped off the roof that determines my grade point average. i've just gotten out of my car, idly tugging at weasel theory, and there's the egg. do i catch it? save myself some trauma in advance and let it happen? i could yell: "guy i barely knew in cube Z dropped the egg! look!" and everyone would look. they see what i saw. an egg falling. how could guy this guy barely knows have done tha-" splat. the thought is cut off. the event and the blame arrived showing correlation and there's no reason to suspect my weasel-y remark is wrong |
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i've been in situations like that, but never that bad. not 36 hours bad... and the pants are ever so more complicated, just a mere sixteen weasels down the real answer is this: by the time i get my fingers on the rancor beast i have to tame and teach manners, i already know a shitload about what i'm in for. how? the pants are ever so complicated i don't stress all day about my car's dyamics. it's not on a schedule. it's just fixed as things prove themselves that they can be relied upon to disrupt precious experimental weasel matrix. i took a solid twenty minutes to groom the whole tree of over-thought neurotic use-case optimization today because this whole week has been full of unoptimized use-cases. i adjusted some things two weeks ago, very slightly. it took five seconds to make the change in my program, and a day or two for the relevant weasels to re-orient themselves. end sum, perhaps it gets a week or two out of six months, if even that. but, then, it's always going. it's a stagging juggernaut that has been evolving for years. this is where i put my lighter and my pack of gum in my car. that's your baseline. compare this to the amount of anxiety you believe i would experience leaving my house and existing over-evolved machines of circumstance to sit down at a desk i've never been to and take responsibility for someone else's disaster and know there's always That Guy at every office who's a fucking busybody job-hed and doesn't understand that you're not employed to keep up appearances, you're hired to get results. results are gotten by catatonic stillness that mama bear fiercely protects with headphones and her toolbox of douchebag avoidance mechanisms no, i'll have grilled people about their problem PHP like i've grilled lewis about his problem brain, and the questions will have been thought up in advance to optimize answer quality making it look easy rarely is. dat homework |
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there's so much flying around and tearing open in my brain now that it's a bit disorienting. nothing about my brain itself is disorienting, really. thankfully, i've been here many times before: in the world's most longest PHP joke, my brain was coded by... well, i never get the full story. some easten-europe houdini. he saw the writing on the wall, calculated how many paychecks he had before the shit hit the fan, and quit before the shit hit. on the plus side, he wasn't too shabby. this mess is not his fault. it's . i fire up the GUI thing that colors the differences and scroll through madly. he's cleaned up parts of it, yes, ok... meh. he's raked the leaves because that's quick and highly visible. he polished the garden gnome, ok, sounds good. shit... all this is the good stuff i would reserve for those crisitunities when some fired-up shithead demands you "show something" like a geology major analyzing the ultrasound scan of some bit of nowhere, somewhere, i see magma tubes. magma tubes cut through all sorts of rock. so, if you see that, you know the magma tube cabe after the rock. if a rock interrupts the magma tube, well, the magma tube came first. you see eastern houdini has laid some rock across a magma tunnel, and follow the magma tunnel down to the guy who had the hot seat before houndi. it's a disaster. i can respect disaster with style -- houdini style -- but this is merely a disaster. his name was dr. bees, and he's eighty-nine and he talks a lot about FORTAN even though this company didn't exist when FORTRAN was a thing. one day he failed to show up. there's a betting pool, now. spontaneous return? obituary? found carved up and stashed in the coke machine? i put money on the last one for the lulz. they'll never find dr. bees. at least, i'm sure that's what he's trying to manage: absence so complete it's like physics had a glitch |
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it's important to learn from your mistakes. the above was starting to go peter molyneux on me, and yes sir, this time i grabbed it by its balrog tail. come back here. look at that. look what you've just done. what a mess. how do you feel? pride? what? oh... no, i agree. that's some next-level peter molyneux joke blather, i'll give you that. that's not my point, though -- writing about weasels is an import engine of weasel development. weasel development has been a reliable earner with the occasional big score. what will that recursive peter molyneux get you? what? ...a friend? no, peter is busy. yes he is. what? alright, fine, we don't have to regret writing it, we simply shant do it again. deal? deal. hemispheres and lobes alike put away the crowbars and batsnuckles. collapse the segment of the world's longest PHP joke that starts with the matroyshka layers: eastern houndi, dr. bees, indian man, clueless devry graduate..... alright, we've hit the snark layer; abort. you get the point. after carefully separating the individual layers of weasely consultant history, you discover the root culprit: yourself. it's a script you for a summer job when you were sixteen. ouch. at least it wasn't peter. like a cartoon snowball going down the hill, the code has grown. napkin math puts it at over 9000%. i quipped that an "evolutionary" codebase represents the collective mistake of many minds at once. my brain is this times a billion. spare incidents from 3rd grade that unconsciously influenced behavior in high school that have grown into spiraling physical ailments, and, yes, now what? oh, yes, the real clusterfuck: mom and dad's patterns are underneath. yours parents' spirals were initialzed by their parents spirals. it spirals into turtles, then, so i've to switch to weasels. there is a bright spot in this: if i follow the magma tubes, there's a distant chance i can figure out who's to blame for this pig of a content management database |
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i wrote up a string of posts introducing lewis and talking over what i talked over. probably twice as many again are in the pool of: "i could write this, or that, but that's important too..." heck, it's all important. worse, it's rarely boring. figuring out a tough situation is a rush i've known forever, but elegance is largely my jam. somewhere in this thread is a moment that i'll abortively attempt to summarize: hyperlinks are important; i've respected this for fifteen years. no internet without hyperlinks, right? fuck yes, they matter. this was the voice of the six or nineteen bits from articles and books and conversations about hyperlinks coming out as a hive mind result. the hive mind result is precisely this: everything i thought was mustard, none of what i thought was crap. i sucked in the available info and kept what seemed important. respect and a functional understanding to meaningfully interact with hyperlinks. but, then, totally sober, comes the moment i've had countless times while off my tits: wow. i've never really looked at hyperlinks before. like, really, really looked. i see this ted nelson guy is a reasonably high-quality clone of me (~90%) and his "hummingbird mind" -- his phrase -- is a firehose pinning him to the wall with a rush of information. despite this, he's completely determined to not waste a single drop of it. he's doomed, and he knows it, but it's his nature, and he can't fight it. he can engineer it, though, into something that another engineer will recognize as a life-preserver for people with his sort of brain. the most thoughtful present one could imagine. not only has someone has he done me a favor, but he's done my soul a favor. i'm crying. and it's elegant. more tears. sobbing about hypertext. wondering who spiked my tea... in any case, it's normalzed. three times sobbing about hypertext, alright, that's enough. resource management, man. there's more elgance to cry over |
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i wrote up a string of posts introducing lewis and talking over what i talked over. probably twice as many again are in the pool of unwritten posts: i've written a lot today, but i've also not written a lot. i'm on the fence with myself: will i be cross with myself if i allow myself to cross this one off the list? no? damn. ok, what's something i can do to ease my raging frustration? driving? sounds good, except i'll come up with more things to write about... what? oh, no, i didn't say i'm not going to go. i'm all about engineering, and it hit me today: this is not engineered at all. what's happened is that i hit some lynchpin somewhere, and now i've discovered so much cool shit that i'm having an anxiety attack because i can't play with all of it, and which do i play with? i know even more cool shit will come if i keep writing about it, so i write about it. i reflect on how there's a weird gradient leading to the recent exponential big bang... painstakingly explaining something in my head with the requirement that it be (theoretically) digestable by someone that's not me sends me tearing into the subject in question, and suddenly i'm really looking at hypertext. what else is in there for me to find? well, faulty assumptions are discovered, and deleted to optimize the 2048 xlt characters. bolts are tightened. sub-assemblies are tuned, even replaced. rambles are relentlessly beta-tested, tuned, ad-libbed to, and apologized for at ten miles over the limit as an ever-patient lewis waits for me to finish my twenty-minute verbal torrent so he can blow up my whole worldview with a single sentence. then, it turns out i've misunderstood what he meant, and when he clarifies, what he actually meant blows my mind again in the end, i sat on lewis as a tangent for two weeks, then spontaneously wrote a few. it's just what grabbed me. i suspect the notion layer is at work |
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then i sat on whether or not i should tell lewis about writing about lewis. two days, maybe one, and, like the ones i wrote up in a cluster back yonder, i did it more or less riding a lightning bolt of pure impulsiveness. then, in cataloging what i told him had been written, well, it's a summary. parts of it i got wrong, things i haven't written up leaked into the things i told him i had... pretty much, it gets so easy to do this when you're lost in a grand trek to map some wicked complicated piece of shit codebase. there's all the layers in learning to cope. first time, it blows up before you even see it. second, you see it 36 hours before it blows up. the third time, you're ready for it to blow up, but when it blows up, it turns out you're not ready. after five or six you've learned how to avoid promising anything more than font colors while making it clear that unpromised will generally not correlate to undone at that point, you're past the beginning stages of software consulting. you start to get comfortable. this is the real shit: all your compulsively honed mechanisms are taken for granted as you go back to doing things like: i'm pretty sure i can glue the word squid into the tuple "school bus," so let's take a half hour to optimize a nonsense tuple, and then post it to the yugo forums. marvelous less marvelous is the familiar sting of "the thing has blown up, just want to let you know" in an email at 8am after a night you turned in at 6am. dammit, you got too confident. it ruined your discipline. tighten it up. you tighten it up. it gradually loosens up. it settles into a sort of ping-pong ball motion that slows in a logarithmic manner. three projects, no fire. five. seven. you notice it follows the fibbonacci sequence and wonder how you've david copperfielded yourself this time that's where we're at: after months of a snoozing plod, she began tugging at the reigns, and i was so excited that i got ahead of myself. |
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my suss marker has landed on elegance as best it can. fallen onto it, really... cut its chin on the simplicity of it a list of unwritten things so i can reference it; not lose any. it's a fantastic strategy. battle-proven... but it went south, because i opened an xlt post box to write it, and it eloped with peter molyneux into self-indulgent lolbanging. resource management weasel was screaming for hours. i was too busy shooting myself in the foot to notice since xlt won't work, i was trying to do it in my head, while driving. it was driving me nuts. it's too many for me to easily sort. then i hit it: shit, this is tech stuff, pretty much. and here i am, yelling at lewis to write his foot-shooting thing out on paper. oh.... yeah. shit. what's good for the goose is good for the gander. a rule is established: anything i write here gets outlined on paper, first. it's a granuality thang: typing it up on XLT is the high-power microscope. every grain of sand. a paper outline is the low-power setting on the microscope. rambling at lewis is an overhead projector with a child rushing up to galavant with a dry-erase marker over my whole archietecture. rambling in my head is standing there and staring at it... tiered levels of effort to create a tiered cache. the "my buffer is so full i'm starting to forget bits" problem is solved. now i'm left with optimizing which come on here, how, and when: what matters most? what are the dependancies? i have saddled myself with a huge amount of stuff: hiking, dancing, meditating, writing, rambling, optimizing the previous, optimizing the optimization... singing... wait, i've not been doing that much at all! it's officially at that point: not enough hours in the day. now i have to fly in tactical weasel from his fortified compound nestled in between my neocortex and my amygdala |
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before i sit down to play gandalf with a PHP balrog, i already know a lot: if my ass is in the chair, i've researched the company, asked around, squinted at the photos of future cow-orkers (judging them like cattle, making patently offensive snap judgments, honing this system until it's approached eighty or ninety percent accurate [while remaining offensive]). i do this magnificently with driving: a fucking teal mercury... well, that mercury, teal... crap lane merge that pulls me out of weaseldynamics, teal mercury... ok, turning into the corporate headquarters for a bank. the bank is large, but not that large. nowhere near huge. yes, it fits: this lady is in her forties and rocks that grandma-gone-fat-lady thing. pink power shirt. giant brooch. smells terminally of farts and talcum powder. the talcum powder is to hide the farts, but it doesn't. it is a little better, though. it's as if she said to me: "hey, it's not like i small of farts... nah, i smell of farts and talcum powder." perhaps i'm wrong. perhaps the farts are a fact of life for her and the talc camoflages body odor problems my sarcastic and offensive snap-judgement simulation has missed. this is not the sort of thing i'd ever walk up and tell someone. it's also something america has gone operant conditioning on: no, bad dog. everyone is a unique snowflake. everyone, america? how about the meth-head down the hall whose entire existence clings to some sort of mammal dominance of the building's public areas, like a feral tomcat? i may have the same sort of terminal situation going with engineering, but that actually makes sense to pwn ah, internet. share in my respite: i hate this lady. i will never tell her this. i thought about snappy fuck-off lines for a bit, then i realized that the truly magnificent ones would take twenty minutes of rambling. so, alright, not only am i not going to tell her, she'd probably just ignore the body of the insult and go on my tonality |
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having a good memory means remembering your worst, most i'm-a-piece-of-shit moments available for replay. the word replay does not quite cover it: back with it comes the emotion. my strongly-connected brain says, "oh, yes, let's hop in a time machine and go through that again." or, well, maybe 30% of it. if it didn't happen a long time ago... if i have defused it... your own brain can become a minefield of awful mistakes you've made, even if you're doing alright overall. what clicked it in for me was some TV show on autism, of all things, as i was clicking through. mum was all, "when goldwyn has one of those moments six times a day when he's being relentlessly dogged by a painful past memory, we have a little [magick] ritual we go through: "it's over. it's just a memory. focus on the here and now." i got a little floaty weird feeling with that. probably the notion layer. before it had a name, it had no way to identify itself. notion layer provides a pointer to itself and the results it's found, but my consciousness had no way to reference it in a meaningful manner without a name. i had pretty much been doing something similar for years. i'd worked it largely out of self-defense; i don't actually remember. what i do remember is the TV show gave me the words "it's over," which gave the function's logic a bit more horsepower. here and now lives in the zen namespace. far away from tactical weasel in both location and style. one weasel lives in a bunker in a warzone, and the other lives in a non-existant C++ namespace. and inflammable means flamable. what a trip i had a giggle on a hike: "you know, i think this one might be terminal. it's just going to grow and eat my whole life. a function call that never returns." well... maybe... if i'm lucky... |
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other people often catch me in a feedback loop that has dogged me for years. at least since my teens. bootstrap: some social encounter happnes, and i remember something i botched horribly in similar social encounter. this puts me in a state of anxiety before anything even happens. anti-bootstrap: soon to be well-worn little word ritual that gradually defuses the memory. poking the memory fires off a storm of activity; enough to catch the emotions in. the body reacts; heart rate climbs. the brain feels the heart pumping and continues to panic. fight or flight is not particularly concerned with false positives. the body/mind feedback loop maxes out the gamma on your brain's projector. it's bright and intense and the experience lays down a ridiculous number of neural connections leading back to the same memory. if i had to describe this mechanism, i would call it a jerk. a fucking jerk. and not the physics one, either, even though notions say that metaphor might apply to the neural net mechanics of this situation somehow... moving along... you're goldwyn, loaded from the platonic ideal (stock models) lobe of my something or other. anywhere from twelve to twenty-seven times a week, you accidentally think of the time you forgot about and squarepushered the whole damn parlay. it's even begun to get territorial: you slipped up and thought about it on the train, one day, and now the whole mauve line runs it through your mind the whole trip unable to address the machine because it has no form, you select a high-res model of mustela nivalis, with a scale of 37.5 meters in length. an engineer starts talking about this weasel as if it were the giant hedgehog from monty python's flying circus. season two, episode one. do you need a time? i have a time |
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other people often catch me in a feedback loop that has dogged me for years. at least since my teens. some social encounter happens, and as it does, my pattern hunting machinery helpfully digs up a social encounter of this exact type that i botched in some horribly embarrasing manner. this puts me in a state of anxiety before anything even happens. this is bad enough. like: well, shit, i'm anxious. let's just live with it and work on it... i did, and i found it was not that simple: some social encounter happens, and as it does, my pattern hunting machinery helpfully digs up a social encounter of this exact type that i botched in some horribly embarrasing manner. this puts me in a state of anxiety before anything even happens. then the other person picks up on my nerves from, oh, i dunno, the white-knuckled inner tension. this is bad enough. like: well, shit, i'm anxious, and they know it. let's just live with it and work on it... i did, and i found it was not that simple: some social encounter happens, and as it does, my pattern hunting machinery helpfully digs up a social encounter of this exact type that i botched in some horribly embarrasing manner. this puts me in a state of anxiety before anything even happens. then the other person picks up on my nerves from, oh, i dunno, the white-knuckled inner tension. i'd notice that they noticed, and this made me even more anxious: shit, jig's up. fuck fuck fuck this is bad enough. like: well, shit, i'm anxious, and they know it, and i can't handle it. let's just live with it and work on it... i did, and i found it was not that simple... yes, they notice that i noticed that they noticed that i noticed and... something curious happens. in a sort of spontaneous, natural magick trainwreck, my personal problems jump the airgap, and the person i'm meeting is freaking out along with me. nice to meet you too |
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refactoring my muscle memory can be a real catch-22: "that's totally the wrong muscle to do that... the correct one exists in textbooks -- in theory -- but not here. mine is missing; buried in the ones i use to do what mystery thing should be doing." how do i bootstrap that? i build up the wrong muscles and stuff around it very carefully, and after six months, the right muscle grown up enough (along with the wrong muscles) that i can secure a pointer to its location. receiving a pointer is not like it is in C++. it's more like downloading a file my strategy is simple: first, to simulate me, spend six hours cooped up in the car, with at least two of them being stop and go traffic. do not stop to pee. do not stop. six hours. your butt falls asleep at four... oh, alright, that's good enough now, how do you feel? does someone asking you to please sit still seem like a reasonable request, or does it seem more like a cross nutter demanding you stop breathing oxygen? solution: get the house to yourself. get up. move around. do whatever you want. look inside yourself and find some ball of tension. massage it out via whatever means necessary. try various counters around your house; the different heights will generate a shocking array of variety when you do the same bear/tree rubbing motions and arm-hanging-off-of. explore how vastly different things work on the floor (hard surface) vs. the bed (springy). ~work out every other ball of tension. ~dance until something is bothering you. ~lie down ON bed. stretch gently. try to find it the tension. there it is. what's that do?! what are you doing to bother it? how should you change to not annoy it? ~massage the annoyed thing until it settles. ~ return to stage: dance of refactoring protocol, continue iterating until things are cookies. for extra robotic cookies, leave in oven an extra five chrons |
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i signed up for reddit and wasn't really sure what to do. in the lack of a plan, nonsense fills in the blanks, and i decided that everything i posted to reddit would be a tightly composed simulation of a wapanese with english the internet not very. ya know. three days later, no one else had showed up in my subreddits to return the favor. c'mon guys, this is supposed to be a ratio ftp, not freeleech! i showed myself out. here and there i've had a strange thing about potato chip stuck in my head: it was the cluster of neurons in my brain that remembered my subreddits that no one read, and that i'd forgotten about for weeks or months.... and, yes sir, the email you were composing just now has inspired the perfect additional member for this set of things. well, shit, fair enough. i recovered my password and found my subreddit, delivered the payload, and it fit perfectly. not bad, i felt like i'd wasted my time but my subconscious mind liked my subreddit, even if no one else reddit, it did. most people would never have recognized it as the unique verbal footprint of a joke cluster that got crickets on reddit a while back, but i knew it immediately. of the few people that aren't most people, well, most people that aren't most people would have shrugged it off and not invested any further time in reddit. you struck out on game theory this round, why pay another nickel? well, i'm not most people. and i'm not most people that aren't most people. it's crystal clear that i'm in possession of a brand new thing, and this is huge to me. even more huge is that this thing goes in a certain place, and ensuring it gets to the place is pretty much a life-or-death matter. so, not only should i post it, i should drop whatever i'm doing and post it immediately. there is a hard backstop to it all: if the house were on fire, i would leave, tap my foot until it was no longer on fire, then go back in to post it once the nonsense was over |
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if we go "everything has a price" i'd say you'd have to get up to at least $50, perhaps even $100 to bribe me out of posting seven words of fake broken english to my subreddit that will never be read. it'd depend on how good it was, really |
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