anansi133

I got lazy. Facebook was easy, I was able to update "everyone" with one post, it seemed to be the default.

But I just hated that I could never get the same feed twice. Zuckerberg is more evil than Google, without promising not to be. I would never download their app, and I got tired of being punished for that. Yadda yadda, you're here and not there, so I have to assume theres a reason.

My friendslist is much shorter here. Gotta do sometging about that.

 A fee weeks ago, I was miserably riding around in the back of a car, wishing I had a better idea. And it occurred to me, I was perfectly capable of getting out, catching a bus home, and opting out of the entire experience. But when I did the math on that one, it was barely a break-even, maybe. I didn't have proper cash fare, so I'd need to make perhaps two more stops for that. I'd need to find my way back on a Sunday, which takes twice as long as on a weekday. And by the time I made it back, the car ride would already have wrapped up in all likelyhood. So I spent the rest of the ride still miserable, but no longer harboring the illusion that I could trade it in for something different.

Then earlier this week, a friend of mine is in the hospital, and there's nothing I can immediately do to help. The worry starts to eat away at me. Is this it? Is this the illness they can't recover from?  I genuinely can't tell if I am having a premonition of their death, or I'm simply picking up on theira(andmy own) existentiallfear.
lfinally I realized that there was no difference in actions between being there for them to help them die well, versus being there for them to help them get better. And since I have no influence over that outcome, it serves neither of us to even consider worst case.

In both of these instances, I found myself figuratively ripping up an imaginary menu of beneficial choices. Youiknow what I mean... The ternate reality where buying a lottery ticket means you will probably win something, and why not thejackpot? That version of events where you're a superhero swooping in to save the day. The good place. Where everything goes right.

I believe I've stumbled onto a deeper truth about happiness. It's impossible to be happy when my mind is loaded down with a bunch of pointless regrets, and unrealistic goals. 

Which implies that in order to be in the sweet spot of productively meeting life's challenge, I must also understand and accept my own limitations. 

I'll have to remember this, next time I beat myself up for not having correctly guessed the thing that would make me the most happy. 

For as long as I can remember watching television, nature documentaries have always depicted animals and plants on the verge of extinction, and they've always ended on a hopeful note. "Just heed this warning, and there may be a chance to avert tragedy".

 I remember the science fiction convention where I attended a lecture and slide show about global warming, and I had to leave halfway through. No doubt, it ended on that same hopeful note, "If we just spread enough awareness, we can change things".

 Even after decades of this kind of message, I still see this idea being hammered on: We need to become more aware of the problem.

 I've come to believe that this is an irresponsible message to be spreading. It's based on the assumption that the united states is a true democracy, that if enough people speak, there will be a meaningful response. And that human beings are different from animals which will overgraze their habitat and starve to death.

 The cold hard truth is much more cruel than this. We know how to eradicate smallpox, and that's given us great hope for other diseases... yet we don't know how to stop MRSA. We know how to (in theory) eliminate child poverty and overpopulation and homelessness.... yet it's not considered an important enough problem to act on. And let's get real: Sandy Hook was enough of a wakeup call for any real democracy to respond to. The silence has been deafening.

 If my generation tasks itself with reversing five centuries of bad habits, we will only disillusion ourselves. I've stopped believing it's in our collective power to change our fundamental behavior when it comes to life support. It's not my job to change things. It's become my job to remember how things used to be, and bear witness to the great change.

 As a child I remember wandering the downtown Seattle waterfront, going out on a small public dock and looking in wonder at the sea life clinging to the piers, just barely out of reach. The last time I passed that place as an adult, it was closed off, boarded up, and a homeless person was camped out just on the other side. Now after starfish wasting diease has torn through elliot bay, it's not clear if that ecosystem will ever return. But it's important to remember what was once there.

In another corner of the sea, I recently got back from snorkeling in Hawaii. The bleached coral was almost as pretty as the live coral, and I had nothing to compare the fish abundance to- yet I have no reason to believe it will be any better next I visit.

 In _Chasing Ice_, James Balog gives us all a chance to witness the last big glaciers as they melt and calve off into the ocean. Can something this huge really be wished away?








 My younger self used to think of the problem as a kind of big graph on the wall, comperable to Al Gore's CO2 graph.(the one with a forklift at the end) Mine had a curve on one side depicting environmental degradation, and a curve on the other side, depicting people's social awareness. It was a simple, beautiful idea, that as things got worse, people would wake up. When enough aware people were mustered, the degradation would begin to reverse, and we'd reach some kind of equilibrium.

 World events have falsified my theory: As the sea ice melts, Big Oil is venturing farther north to accelerate the damage and monetize it before it all goes away. Even as the dangers of Frakking are well known, I still see natural gas powered busses bragging about how clean-running they are. The cheap chemicals coming out of these newer wells are making it economical to build new plastics manufaturing in North America for the first time since the war.

 And on the political front, Donald Trump is teaching me how hard it is to interest the voting public in the truth... about anything. The Syrian refugee crisis has its roots in a 2007 drought that is still being felt today. It seems easier to stir up fear of its victims, than more awareness of its cause.

 I guess my first exposure to human stubbornness of this type, was back in the 80's when the spotted owl was being blamed for the decline of the timber industry in Oregon. The fact that all the easiest, most profitable wood had already been harvested, had little impact on those who wanted to exploit what was left.

 We're just not very good, as a species, at rationally thinking about problems that are bigger than us.







 I don't want to be misunderstood: I have not given up hope. I still believe that an alternative exists to the corporate agenda, that people's voices should and do matter. It's the false hope I am giving up on. I no longer believe there is still time to avoid the worst of it. There is only time to say goodbye to the world that was, and build anew on what is.

A friend of mine recently taught me about the film genre, "Fem-Jep". A woman in jeopardy. The film, _Gravity_ was the example she used: our main interest in watching this movie, is seeing our heroine, Sandra Bullock, be placed in jeapardy, again and again, until by luck and persistence, she reaches the conclusion of the film. It doesn't make for much depth of character development.

 So too with the setup for Ex Machina. We're told that the woman in jeapardy, Ava, will be dismantled at the end of the experiment, no matter what the outcome, thus justifying pretty much any action she chooses.

And this is just one of several plot points that just doesn't hold together, *especially* for an audience versed in modern computer technology. We know about backups, we know about memory storage, and it's only by waving his hands and introducing some techno-babble that the maker explains to us that this situation is different, and the only way for our lone genius recluse to save Ava's code, is to end the instance of her particular program run. It's not a very efficient way to build a robot, but it sort of sets up a dramatic conflict, which is what we paid to see.

We also paid to see boobies. Robot boobies. Since her native design doesn't really include proper skin, there's another troubling sequence where Ava does a reverse strip tease-  she's got to put on proper nipples, long hair, supple flesh, all the expected female anatomy- before she even can put on clothes. We're not supposed to wonder how she's going to charge her batteries out in the wide world, it's more important for her to be seen than for her to actually function.

As I'm walking out of the theater I'm wondering what this is supposed to teach me about people. Ava is people, for the purposes of the film, she's human enough to fear for her life, and to exact revenge on her abuser. So a crude kind of justice is supposedly served on our evil genius. (with some rather pointless collateral damage to her rescuer, which made no sense to me.)

 Which has me wondering, how much control did Nathan supposedly have over Ava's programming? He presumably wrote her behavior before we join the story, but during our time with him, he has no more access to her responses than Caleb, or any other male confused by a woman's behavior. He's so opaque to her inner workings that he can only try to turn her off with a crude club: wouldn't a real robot have some sort of spoken ovveride code? maybe a restraining bolt, like in Star Wars? For a twenty first century setting, this robot is no more advanced than the robot from _Metropolis_, nearly a century ago.

Finally, there's one more unforgivable distortion made for the sake of the plot: A true turing test has not one, but two human components. One serves as judge, like Caleb. But the other serves as control, as a benchmark to compare the machine's behavior. This would have been inconvenient for the plot, because Nathan has to be completely alone in his remote fortress of sciency solitude. OK for a horror movie, but don't try to call it a Turing Test!

 Don't get me wrong, it's a good looking movie, it's even pretty watchable from a male's eye view. It's just not a very good *story*, and at the end of the day, that's what I go to a movie to experience. As it is, if I'm in the target demographic of male, computer literate, awkward with women- if I can relate to the protagonist Caleb- then I'm likely to have my prejudice about smart pretty women confirmed. They're dangerous not just to the men who abuse them, but also to the men who try to help them.

I'm next going to seek out some real human women's perspectives on this film, to see if they're as annoyed by it as I am.

Three vaguely related stories have collided to create a perfect storm in my mind.

boingboing.net/2014/10/08/20-meaningful-things-you-can-d.html

This is a thoughtful response to all those glib, shallow checklists that we routinely see in women's lifestyle magazines, designed to let people believe they're actually paying attention to important problems, just before they click the remote to watch the shopping network. It's the first indication I've had that someone out there feels the same way I do about this stuff.

nextbigfuture.com/2014/09/ocean-acification-mitigation-deatils.html

This helps me let go of images of starving polar bears, and let my mind consider the truly epic scary shit. Existential Threat. 30 years ago, I was paying close attention to the threat of nuclear war, it seemed great enough to alter the way I lived my life in response. The implications of Ocean Acidification are truly, deeply, horrifying. And while Nuclear War was something unlikely to happen unless someone had a very bad day, This shit is going to play out whether anyone notices... or not.

www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/scientists-zero-whats-causing-starfish-die-offs/

Starfish Wasting Disease may not have anything to do with global warming. It also may have nothing to do with anything that humans are doing. And yet... It's far more unsettling to me than any Ebola scare. The coastal ecosystem is going to be changing a lot in the next few decades, and it seems doubtful that this is going to be good for humans.















 The storm in my head is still raging, I don't know what to do with this stuff... Yet in the larger sense, it never really died down just because the Berlin Wall came down, from the nuclear nightmare. It just changed. I'm left with a very powerful resolve to make one single change in my life, and that's to become a better politician than I've ever tried to be before.

"politician" in contemporary American colloquial syntax, means someone whose job it is to tactfully ignore you. I'm thinking of it in the older sense, of someone whose  job it is to really *listen*- and then act accordingly, in equal measure. It may not be the best word to describe what I want to be as I grow up, but it works for now, and it gives me something different to think about from starving sea birds, or undersea creatures pulling themselves apart.

Night before last, I went to go see _(Robin Wright at) The Congress_, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Congress_%282013_film%29which turned out to be a film adaptation of Stanislaw Lem's _The Fututolgical Congress_. I didn't catch that angle until the end credits, and somehow that helped everything pop into place.

 Originally I was content to enjoy a quriky, difficult film. But the more I thnk about it, the more I appreciate what they did with the source material.

Here's wikipedia on the novel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Futurological_Congress

It sounds a lot like _The Matrix_, doesn't it? Except where The Matrix is built upon software running on computers, running on hardware controlling human minds, The Congress runs on psychoactive drugs running on human brains still operating in the real world.

All this would have sounded far fetched to me, not that long ago. But a while back, I came into possession of an E-cig setup, and it still had some charge and some juice, and one day on a whim, I took a substantial drag. And I didn't feel anything, so I took another drag. It was unlike any cigarette I'd ever had before. And the effect was subtle enough, I told myself it hadn't worked. Except that 24 hours later, the same time of day, I found myself craving another puff on that E-cig. This wasn't so much a recreational drug as it was a programming device, for programming *ME*.

In 1971, when the Novel was written, Robin Wright was 5 years old. She was 16 years away from making The Princess Bride. The state of computer technology at that time was... primitive. The premise of scanning this actress' performance into a CGI machine was a long ways off, and Lem's book doesn't go anywhere near the first half of the movie.

What so impresses me about the film, is how they re-worked societ mind control in the 70's and played it out into American mind control in the teens. We don't just use drugs to program our minds, we don't just use computers, we use the concept of celebrity itself... and whatever celebrities make themselves available for that purpose.

 When I saw the matrix, I didn't see it really having very much to do with computers at all, they were just a metaphor. The real idea behind it was all about changing the meaning of what we witness, into something more acceptable to those with the power to care.

And in that sense, The Congress gets much closer to the core of what The Matrix was trying to warn us about. How many of us really believe it's possible to do anything to slow or stop anthropogenic climate change?  We may accept what scientists are telling us about what's happening, but there's no one out there with a convincing narrative of how we can alter the way we live on the planet in order to leave the place better than how we found it. So much easier to talk instead of the distractions being put in our path by those getting rich with the way things are.

 I guess I'm too stubborn to accept the logical conclusion here, I should give up and try to live my remaining days in as much dignity as they system will allow me. I'm still hunting for bread-crumbs, clues to what's *really* going on. This movie smells important to me, far beyond its entertainment value.

starkstreetmarkers.blogspot.com/

Mystery solved! I've been walking past Portland Milepost marker P9 for almost a year now, and I finally know what it is!

(I've found two other milepost markers that were in better repair, with explanatory plaques and everything. The puzzle pieces finally came together!)

I suppose one is never too old for a mid-life crisis. Today was the first time in my life it ever occurred to me that I might want to be able to pass for "normal" in certain circumstances. I feel certain that this is an achievable goal. My only question is how hard the disguise is going to be to remove when I want to.

So the next chapter in my story of stuff isn't nearly as dramatic as last time. (Which is a good thing) But I want to follow this arc all the way.

Over the course of March, I visited my storage units(s) a total of 8 times, it looks like. Every visit, I tried to limit my ambition to one single facet of the block of cheese, since it's so easy for me to get overwhelmed.

Typically I'd start in the main storage, and try to consolidate and winnow and re-stack things. If it generated enough waste, I'd open up the overflow storage and put it in there. (the overflow was a 5x10, that wasn't even half full to begin with.)

After a few times of this, I noticed that the possessions I really wanted were in the back of the unit, and the trash was up front. So I ended up having to pull everything out and re-pack, as new openings became available in the main storage.

(Yes, I know I have too much stuff. The point of this project is to see if I can lose some weight in a moderate, realistic way, and not do the purge-binge thing.)

The best thing I have had going for me, is 5 rolling shelf units. I can pull out the guts of the main storage in a few minutes, exposing all the perimeter shelving inside. It's the only way I could have gotten so much done so quickly.

The main focus was speed and space-efficiency, not necessarily sorting or labeling the stuff.

But As I culled the dead projects, it illustrasted a lot of identity issues. What projects have I finally given up on, and what ones do I still consider "Live"? My lego reletivity project has been going on for over 15 years, and I still consider it worth pursuing. The Medicine Man Glider I was making from balsa sticks, I let go of. It was a gateway drug to foamy aircraft, and I'm keeping a lot of that stuff, so it's not a total loss.

Finally on this last Sunday, I got my girlfriend to lend me her van so I could make a dump run. She even accompanied me, which was a pleasant surprise. I didn't want her to help me move things, because it still felt kind of personal, and I wanted to be the one doing it.

The final tally from the dump was a little over 500 pounds of junk. The physical mass of it seemed extreme, but the psychological mass of it was even heavier.

And then Monday was the last day I could return the overflow storage, without getting dinged for another month's rent. I had to really stay focused on handling the stuff as little as possible, it was all about the stacking. Amazingly enough, the whole package fit so well back in the main 10x10 unit, there was essentially an empty column left over- room for the empty cardboard boxes I had generated. I'll save those for future dump runs. All the lowest hanging fruit has been picked, but there's plenty of fat left to cut. (talk about metaphor salad!)

Down to a single storage unit, I've decided I'm okay with keeping this one long term. I simply don't have enough elbow room where I live to keep the things I still want to keep.

But I still think it would be groovy to pare this unit down to something smaller, maybe a 7x10 or a 5x10. I'll have to ask what's available, to give myself a weight loss goal.

Today I took a bus I don't usually take, into a part of town I don't usually go. It wasn't the most efficient way to get where I was going, but I wanted to see what it was like, so I went.

I saw a woman get on the bus who was missing her front teeth. She grinned a lot, seemed quite happy, and the effect was unsettling.

Once on the bus, she stated talking to another woman who she clearly knew, who wasn't missing her front teeth, she was just missing major parts of most of her teeth. it took me a moment to realize I was seeing what Meth can do to one's mouth.

In that moment, it was like that strange sense of focus they do in the movies sometimes, where the lens goes zoom at the same time the camera dollies backward. I realized what a sheltered life I've lived. Is this what Siddhartha felt like when he ventured outside the palace and saw old and sick people for the first time?

For a while now, I've been thinking that the real problem with the 1% owning so much of the world, is that they can wall themselves off from the people whose lives they impact. That's all well and good to think in a theoretical sense, but being confronted with the 'cure' today was unsettling. I'm not in the 1%, but I could easily have gone my whole life without seeing a meth-mouth for real. I'm not as sure that I know what to do about it, not like I used to be.