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EpicMegatrax writes more bullshit
 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-02 22:31 [#02502897]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-02 22:45 [#02502898]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-02 23:03 [#02502899]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-02 23:15 [#02502900]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-02 23:23 [#02502901]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-03 04:01 [#02502919]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict | Followup to EpicMegatrax: #02502808



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 self-organize. 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.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-03 04:07 [#02502920]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict | Followup to EpicMegatrax: #02502899





citation of class: needle drop


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-03 04:17 [#02502921]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



^^

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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-03 07:04 [#02502922]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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:
fleetmouse]);

is there an xlt mode for emacs? just wondering


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-03 07:49 [#02502923]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



i'm contemplating trashbat psneudorandalchode. 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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-03 08:15 [#02502924]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-03 08:34 [#02502925]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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....


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-03 09:09 [#02502927]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-03 09:44 [#02502928]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-03 10:15 [#02502930]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-04 11:59 [#02502979]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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 phineas gage. 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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-04 16:46 [#02502992]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



a new metaphor: my subconscious mind is, actually, not a
mind at all it is a ginourmous living fractal of weasels 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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-04 17:08 [#02503003]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-04 17:16 [#02503005]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-04 17:34 [#02503007]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-04 17:46 [#02503008]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-04 17:58 [#02503009]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-04 18:06 [#02503010]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-04 18:12 [#02503011]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-04 18:25 [#02503012]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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"


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-04 18:39 [#02503014]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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) color selecta pen. 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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-04 18:58 [#02503017]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-04 19:00 [#02503018]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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"


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-04 19:21 [#02503019]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-04 19:26 [#02503020]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-04 19:42 [#02503021]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-04 20:20 [#02503025]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



+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.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-04 20:36 [#02503026]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-04 20:51 [#02503032]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-04 20:56 [#02503033]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-05 17:36 [#02503061]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-05 17:50 [#02503062]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-05 18:08 [#02503063]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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
evolutionary.

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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-05 18:36 [#02503064]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-05 19:19 [#02503067]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-05 19:34 [#02503071]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-05 19:45 [#02503072]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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.


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-05 20:14 [#02503074]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-05 21:08 [#02503076]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-06 01:33 [#02503088]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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...


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-06 01:46 [#02503089]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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 indoor trumpet 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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-06 01:52 [#02503090]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-06 02:16 [#02503091]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-06 02:56 [#02503095]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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


 

offline EpicMegatrax from Greatest Hits on 2016-09-06 02:59 [#02503096]
Points: 23981 Status: Addict



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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