(chris’s) blog

i’ll post picts when i finish. it’s going to take a little less than 100 square feet of paper and a lot of ink and hours time with an exacto knife but boy will it be sweet …

neuro-science tells us the brain works by forming networks of neurons. learning is accomplished through repetition, with each iteration strengthening the neural network that composes the particular piece of knowledge in repetition. this is also the basis for habits and addictions, with the mind more easily following a strengthened path of behavior before trekking upon another. does this mean we will reject supreme forms of happiness because they are not usual? certainly this means negative thinking begets negative thinking.

—–

other people are people too.

lonely bird
Originally uploaded by rahen z

the lonely bird is kept teathered to the ground by the weight of her own avidity. she flies south with intention only to become aware of her own northwardly flight. she smiles with frustration only sometimes and we see this as a tragedy. it is a wonder she hasnt been torn in half by her own diametric dreams.

and a diameter indeed! she is lonely in her circle, teathered to the ground by the weight of her own avidity.

Millennium Bridge, London 2004. Rain.
Originally uploaded by Spookygonk

The forecast is rain, all rain, if you believe in the forecasts. Otherwise your future might be bright and sunny.

Where I kill(ed) time
Originally uploaded by Simple Dolphin

I’m chugging coffee at work. I’m chugging black coffee at work. I used to hate black coffee. I would fill 1/4 the cup with milk. Now I fill 4/4s the cup with straight-up, black coffee. It’s gross at first but you get used to it, at least I got used to it. It’s much cheaper than sugar-coffee (mochas and the like) and doesn’t contain sugar and fat like most milk-coffee concotions. It’s bitter.
I remember my first coffee. It was my freshmen year of high school and I was meeting my then-girlfriend Tina at a football game. The cup she offered to me was full of sugar to cover the bite of espresso. I didn’t take to it immediately, but immediately it seemed special. It was different than anything I’d had before.
Coffee isn’t a juice or a soda, or milk or water really. It seems like a really strong tea perhaps, at least it’s similar to tea in that its brewed, but if you drink coffee and tea you’ll find little similarity beyond that. Coffee is special. Coffee is an adult drink.
Fourteen in the world of high school dating, drinking coffee: a suburban mama’s boy sort of rebellion.
Twenty-one and the sugar is gone, gone missing around the same time the sweet scent of childhood stopped following me. This is adulthood and adults have to work. It’s a bitter life with bitter work that requires a bitter drink. Right.

I don’t know if there’s a correlation between aging and drinks tasting worse, but my first beer was far from delicious.

Holga a painting artist in Montmartre Paris
Originally uploaded by Vick the Viking

One of my favorite radio shows is back on the air (and the Internet!): The Dusty Show with Clay Pigeon on WFMU out of New Jersey. Clay Pigeon is the broadcast name of a man who lives in Wisconsin and interviews people from all walks of life with his tape recorder, then splices the interviews up with music from many decades, sound bites, and throws in a little tape speed manipulation for good fun. The program airs once a week and is an hour long. You can listen in from anywhere in the world at this page.

Also, a promising application, Songbird, has hit a new milestone: the release candidate for their 0.3 release. Songbird is a program derived from Firefox but aimed solely at the Internet music browsing experience. It has features (and looks) from iTunes, such as the ability to maintain a large music library, play many formats (something iTunes cannot do), sync with your iPod, etc., all the while letting you bookmark web pages and browse to them from within the program. Another interesting feature is this little pane that pops up while you’re browsing any webpage that has MP3s in a link: the pane lists all the MP3s, reads their tag information, and lets you one-click download them into your library. Cool stuff! Note the current release is not a finished, stable piece of software so if you don’t know much about beta testing or haven’t used a lot of unfinished software, avoid this until a later, more polished release comes out.

change.org is a website that lets you type in what you want to change about the world, and it will link you to articles and communities to help you get started in your activism or education about that particular topic.

And finally, luckofseven.com is the blog of a man who is making his way around the world on cheap and blogging/vlogging/plugging-you-in to the experience. I haven’t followed it much but it sounds promising. He takes donations to help him out though, which is alright, but I’m weary of any website that asks for money - even if it’s just a donation. Shady Internet people …

life seems to stagger blindly through stages. i receive influences from all around and like squirting different paints onto my palette, it isn’t until they’ve been mingling together for a while that i can tell the color i’ll get, that is, i cant tell what my new general philosophy on things is until ive had my changes/influences for a while.
ive been giving a lot of thought lately to the question “what am i doing?” in its application to hanging out with friends and working for what i want. its not a clear thought though (unknown color?).
how often do people “talk” to very specific people in blog postings? like this:

to a girl) did you really shout the sgt peppers lyrics? call me.

to another girl) i dont believe you sometimes and the other times i feel like you’re pulling the woll over my eyes.

to a boy) we live far away but we stay connected well even though we only talk every once in a while. you inspire me to learn technologies.

to another boy) you epitomize what i find wrong with myself but luckily i dont know you that well.

you gotta wonder, that’s the point.

the computer science department computer labs are located in a basement on campus, an important feature to the pale computer scientists who would prefer the safety and comfort of the unchanging underground environment, the human-controlled underground environment, rather than the chaotic situation occurring on the ground level.
take then the poet, who would consider it an accomplishment to merely convey the sensation of underground living in a poem of his, who he may likely intellectually drown in man’s giant hole. brick, mortar, empty space, tiled ceilings, screens flickering at 60 HZ in the corner of your perception. there’s little to glean from the artificial world here.

I started recording and writing music again. The static/noise/fuzz is intentional/welcomed:

untitled 1.mp3 (128kbps MP3, 1.4mb, 1:26)

Comments not especially welcome; it’s not a mind-blowing track.