Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

From an entry in my series on evolutionary psychology, which resulted from finishing The Moral Animal, by Robert Wright, at the beginning of this year.

This is the bootstrap of virtue: If we must desperately convince ourselves of our own altruism in order to serve our own selfish motives, and science allows us to deceive ourselves or others less and less, then the only way left to perceive our own virtuousness is to actually become so.

i can't stop listening to this song. a boy i've been talking with sent it to me, they are a mostly HP lovecraft themed 'geek rock horrorpop' band based out of chilliwack and i'm in love with them. oh yeah, we write songs in middle egyptian, no big deal. haha.

i am not making very good use of this day off. so i should go do that. i need to

- flash my router to dd-wrt firmware
- punch windows 7 in the face and make it run at wireless n speed (instead of crappy b that keeps dropping)
- go buy some brake pads and get dave to help me change them
- find a snow board wall hanger thing and mount that shit
- clean the schmeng off my couch
- study
- play records

more later on how much of this i actually accomplish. also i havent had an nrg drank for two days... thats some sort of record for me. i am sooooooo tired. -_-

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

A god is always most vulnerable in his home. Because there is where you find all the anxieties and uncertainties and precarities that prompt him to create the worlds he rules.

This here (amylopectin) is what makes sticky rice sticky:



It is a component of starch, and is a big old chain of glucose molecules. And these organic polymers, they do such a thing for everything. Nature has such a neat way of stacking and sorting and chaining stuff. It's almost smart-like. I can understand how creationists can think an intelligence is behind everything in spite of science, even though me I don't really concern myself with things like that. I'm a bretherenationist, yeah. And I like how polymers are neat and stuff.

Hope you folks go out and make proper bretherenation with your bretheren on New Years, so that you all have a good happy one. Because a happy don't happen without the homiage and bretherenation of one's happy homies and bretheren.

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

Thank God we're all going to die. Now let's destroy the planet while we still can.

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

Because it was dominated by cowards and fearmongers, over threats both real (war, climate change) and imagined (terrorism, gay people), I propose we name this decade "the scaredies".

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

I managed to make it to Boxing Day without receiving or giving any Christmas gifts. WIN!

Yesterday, my mother confessed she was upset that I spent the last two days by myself. If only she knew...

I am procrastinating, in a good way, and, now, on purpose. I hereby dub this activity "eucrastination".

I tried to read Industrial Society and Its Future again yesterday, and still couldn't make through the first few sections. Either I'm deluded, or Kaczynski wasn't as insightful as people make him out to be. I suspect the real insights are still buried in the bullshit. It's hard to justify reading long arguments when you don't accept the premises.

We scavenge our lives in the shadows of slowly falling giants. It's true that the bigger they are, the harder they fall; but a giant will almost always pick itself up and dust itself off - which is more than can be said for the human beings crushed by the landing.

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

I called my family in Arizona. After bemusedly wondering allowed when my new sister-in-law, who has set herself a mission to get me married again, had actually planned to even ask what kind of wife I'd like... she still didn't. How amusing!

I hope when this stops being funny I don't find myself suddenly married again. Because I don't know if that would be funny all over again... or not.

Arranged marriages - as we all know - are hilarious, after all.

Were I not as self-possessed, I might take her for being pushy, busybody, influential type. But I don't need to resist moving back to Arizona, or resist marrying or dating anybody she introduces me to. I just have to not do it. Not doing things is really easy, when you realize the easiest way to not do something is to do something else.

-

I'm not into Christian birth-of-Jesus Christmas any more than I'm into Sants Claus buy-more-crap Christmas, but I don't think I really care to hate a lot of perfectly good, inspiring, artistic works just because the artists who created them believed the fictions they were inspired by. I mean hell, we have lots of great artistic works whose artists KNEW they were fictitious (that was the point!), and it doesn't seem to have diminished them one bit.

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

Mandating that people buy private health insurance is the wrong thing, but I don't think it's so bad that it overrides the counteroffers of a rescission ban and an expansion of Medicaid subsidies.

I don't buy the argument that allowing the Senate bill to pass into law will somehow diffuse people's dissatisfaction with the health care system. This bill is garbage, and I don't seriously see active progressives or significant numbers of polled voters satisfied with it. A public option was a clear majority priority, and there isn't one. Even the House version's public option wasn't one.

It seems the first thing you have to learn about politics is that the fight for justice never, ever stops. It doesn't matter whether that stop is based on winning or losing. Satisfaction and discouragement both accomplish nothing.

I think the effort that would go into opposing this bill would be better spent improving it, and pushing the next bill. Because there will be another one. We might have to replace some conservative Democrats to get the votes first, but there are elections with which that can be done.

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

After I went to bed, I heard some strange noises coming from the living room. Turns out, some asshole broke into my house and was fiddling with the Christmas presents. So I grabbed a pole and started wailing on him. It was hard to see in the dark, but this dude was even bigger than I was. We both took a few hits, but he managed to get away before I could restrain him. I'm still waiting for the cops to get here. Maybe they can identify him by some of the stuff he dropped in his haste to get out. I don't think he managed to steal anything important, though. Fucker gave me a black eye and a nosebleed, though.

Damn. Some people never learn, do they?

stolen from jenunderscore_ 

1. What did you do in 2009 that you'd never done before?
fucked around with batteries the size of a car
walked around on the roof of harbour centre
biked the seawall in every month
punched the internet in the face

2. Did you keep your New Year's Resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
yes, and yes.

3. Did anyone close to you give birth?
uh... i guess not.

4. Did anyone close to you die?
thankfully no

5. What countries did you visit?
haha travel fail. i just realized i dont think i left the country in 2009, oops. i went to winnipeg!??

6. What would you like to have in 2010 that you lacked in 2009?
better control of my finances.
write CCNA exams by the end of january
more creative outlet
get out of the city more, and TRAVEL!

7. What dates from 2009 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
uhhh..... dec 24th i took this quiz thing once. first week of march i started @peer1? seaballing? soundwave? some other days? cayley and i's first date?

8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
getting drunk alone while re-doing my resume and then applying for the first and most awesome job posting i came across after my jerkface of a previous job fired my minion coworker IT muscle along with half of the rest of the company . also getting said job and loving it!!
finally finding a home i love in and area i love while working a job i love and being surrounded by friends i love?

9. What was your biggest failure?


fucking around with stupid consumer debt
going to the lotus for halloween

10. Did you suffer illness or injury?
couple bouts of flu and a couple more of crazy, but nothing too epic.

11. What was the best thing someone bought you?
sparkley kitten notebook
I AM A DDOS OF AWESOME tshirt

12. Whose behaviour merited celebration?
simon's
all my best trolls

13. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?
yours

14. Where did most of your money go?
rent, bullshit, drank, savings

15. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
the internet
psychedelic nerd fae unicorn bitchery
soundwave / lwsd shows / seaballing / etc
simon
the noc

16. What song will always remind you of 2009?
here's 10... mostly NOT released this year hah

epsilon - no try
venetian snares - konut kalliffee
cloud cult - everybody here is a cloud
deadmau5 - moar ghosts n stuff
mr oizo - z
prodigy - omen
geiser - nasty girl
lwsd - playa trolling song
enduser - Vishnu's Eastern Block (Line 47 remix)
elliot smith - sweet adeline
also the theme from 'i dream of genie' and that stupid 'celebrate good times come on!' peice of shit song (its the noc friday song)

18. What do you wish you'd done more of?
yoga

19. What do you wish you'd done less of?
facebook?

20. How do you plan to spend Christmas?
working

21. Did you fall in love in 2009?
yes / no / etc

22. How many one night stands?
some nights i was standing, other nights i fell down. what's your point?

23. What was your favourite TV program?
30 rock

24. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?
not that i can think of

25. What was the best book you read?
i got stuck on like two really shitty novels like all year. perhaps this year's resolution will be FUCK BOOKS THAT SUCK.

26. What was your greatest musical discovery
waffles.fm

27. What did you want and get?
a home that's organized

28. What did you want and not get?
nothing

29. What was your favourite film of this year?
coraline

30. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
i turned 25 and i have no idea what i did. nothing, i think.

31. What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
nothing, my year was full of growth and learning, it was incredibly satisfying, and if i can keep this momentum up for even half of the rest of my life i will be the happiest old gramma trance evar.

32. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2009?
mangi with a dose of random

33. What kept you sane?
simon, cayley, yoga, rendering, the seawall, my bike, alcohol, grass, trees, trolling, dancing, the noc

34. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
http://community.mania.com/ver1.0/Content/images/store/8/6/e84d7f6d-f465-4d98-a6be-de33db7083db.Large.jpg

36. Who do you miss?
my dad

37. Who was the best new person you met?
i met many incredible people this year but i'd have to say remeeting cayley_jane was about the most rad thing ever, and also all the nocboys rule.

38. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2009?
if you don't like something you have the power to change it, but you have to grab life and punch it in the face, because no one else is going to do it for you. self pity gets you nowhere. GET THE FUCK OVER IT. people are retarded (myself included). never live with your brother. always make sure to be sleeping elsewhere when the windows are being upgraded.

39. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:
"never made it as a wise man, couldn't cut it as a poor man stealin"

haha now you have nickleback in your head.

and also because i think this is relevant i'm adding in this question:

40. best meme / favorite internets of 2009

your agument is invalid - http://yourargumentisinvalid.com/
obama + unicorns http://wildammo.com/2009/07/27/unusual-paintings-of-obama-naked-with-unicorns/
surprized kitteh -http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Bmhjf0rKe8
http://www.unnecessaryquotes.com/
keyboard cat - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e2Th2QoHd2o
everything is amazing and no one is happy - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8r1CZTLk-Gk
tech support cheat sheet - http://xkcd.com/627/
ACL debate - http://community.livejournal.com/techsupport/2020695.html
followed by more - http://community.livejournal.com/techsupport/2021223.html

and probably lots more, but i gotta go to bed and wait for santa.

goin seaballin tonight. not feeling as crazy as i was last week. bla bla bla holidaze. i celebrated last weekend on sleizure playing breakcore. it was lots of fun. then i got to work pretty much all weekend. and then all week. and then and then i study and work and its dark but at least i'm riding my bike again. a girl from the 10th floorh is bringing us xmas dinner at the noc, and i'm actually pretty excited! how sweet is that.

is it lame that i want to buy lululemon olympic parody schwag? i wonder if they have it for kids, i should buy some for my nephew.

also this makes me lulz. noc = <3

From Mohandas Gandhi:

The machine should not make atrophied the limbs of man.

The body itself is but an extraordinary delicately constructed machine...
We are destroying these matchless living machines, our bodies, and trying to substitute lifeless machinery for them, machines that would displace human labor... and concentrate power in a few hands.

Nature is revenging herself upon us with terrible effect for this criminal waste of the gift she has bestowed upon us human beings...
It is the exquisite mechanism of the hands...

Why am I turning back the course of modern civilization when I ask the villager to grind his own meal and eat it whole, including the nourishing bran?

It is only the handicraft civilization that will endure...

Work and culture cannot be separated. Man cannot develop his mind by simply writing and making speeches all day long. I cannot imagine anything nobler than for, say, one hour in the day we should do the labor the poor must do, and thus identify ourselves with them and, through them, with all mankind.

In industrial society... man is made to obey the machine. The wealthy and the middle classes become helpless and parasitic of the working classes. And the latter become so specialized that they also become helpless. The cities become parasitic on the country, industrial nations upon agricultural nations, governments upon the people they govern... people even become parasitic in regard to their recreation: they want to be amused instead of amusing themselves.

All labor, when done intelligently and for some high purpose becomes at once re-creation and recreation.

And with that, I am turning this thing off and going outside.

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

I could care less.

But I don't. I care more.

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

So Dave's IR LED arrays arrived today. He was using them for similar work, way back when. He also graciously threw in a couple of webcams that have already had their IR filters removed.

I tested them out with my laptop's AC adaptor (at a hefty 3.42 amps), and, sure enough, they light the area right up in the IR spectrum when connected.

Before:

and After:

that's the back of my left hand on the right, and the array itself on the bottom. You can see my right hand on the mouse in the background.

What startles me is, even though you can't help be wince at the brightness of the lights in the photos, my own naked eyes can't see anything different. That's kind of unsettling. What you see is just the view through the camera. I've also verified that the wiimote can see them pretty clearly, as well.

I am debating what kind of connecting plugs to build for these, since they're just raw wires. USB ports, perhaps? Could I wire them in parallel onto one AC adaptor?

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

Sleep is for the week.

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

There's been considerable debate on the Senate health care bill where it belongs: among democrats.

Some progressives want to scrap the bill - and start over, I guess. There's a sense that it reall is worse than nothing, since the mandate in the absence of some form of public option or other cost controls amounts to rewarding the industry's bad behavior, not only with taxpayer subsidies, but with citizens' own earnings.

I'm starting to get the idea that people simply can't get anything they actually want without carving it out as a compromise from the plutarchy. And really, once I look at it in that light, I become less concerned about whether the health insurance industry is getting something it doesn't deserve. It's (mostly) not my money, after all.

But I have to admit that we are getting something in return. It's not WORTH it, and it's not just, but it's something.

The more interesting discussions have to do with the political tactics involved in the debate of whether to reject the bill. How are voters going to react? If progressives kill this bill, and nothing passes in its place, will progressive voters really stay home rather than voting in the midterms, scuttling the (non-) majority they barely held together to pass this turd of a bill?

I have to admit this claim sounds absurd. Reid has been whining about not having 60 votes for years, bringing into sharp focus that the quality of legislation turns on the number of good legislators you can get in the Senate. If it's becoming apparent that we can't get what we want with as many votes as we have (and it sure as hell isn't 60), why in the world would people not continue voting for more and better Democrats? Wouldn't the first thing to cross people's minds in explaining such a failure be the same thing we've been told for years?

Maybe it has something to do with the fact that conventional wisdom holds that Reid has his magical 60 votes when he obviously DOES NOT. Despite the fact that Lieberman and Nelson are "in the caucus" (ever seen a liberal Republican?), they are clearly not constituting your hallowed 60 vote majority if you strip out the entire centerpiece of meaningful legislation just to get them to ALLOW A VOTE on the bill. Nonetheless, voters have been hearing this magical "we finally have a filibuster-proof majority", and still wonder why the fuck nothing worth a damn can get done.

Regardless, everybody is pretty much coming to terms that nobody is going to get what they want, and the debate has moved to the consequences for "fixing it in post". The discussion is about which outcome will get more left-wing voters to the polls in the next election, because the Senators we have are obviously not enough. One must compare estimates of base voters demoralized away from voting by the Senate's paralysis against estimates of those energized by the fact that, well, we got a bill, which is more than we've had in decades, even if it's worse than nothing.

Will more voters be demoralized if the current bill passes, or if it doesn't? THEN, compare to how many voters will be ENERGIZED by the argument (presuming this message, "more and BETTER Democrats", is pushed competently) that we still need more votes in the Senate, if the current bill passes, or not.

It's a complicated calculation. I have no damn idea.

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

I want to have friends
that I can trust,
that love me for the man I've become
not the man that I was.

And I want to have friends
That let me be
all alone, when being alone
is all that I need.

I want to fit in
to the perfect space,
feel natural, and safe
in a volatile place

And I want to grow old
without the pain,
give my body back to the Earth
and not complain.

Will you understand
when I am too old of a man?
Will you forget,
When we have paid our debt?
Who did we borrow from?
Who did we borrow from?

-

Okay part two, now clear the house.
the party's over, take the shouting and the people,
GET OUT!
I have some business, and a promise that I have to hold to
I do not care what you assume, or what the people
TOLD YOU!

-

Will you understand
when I am too old of a man?
Will you forget,
When we have paid our debt?
who did we borrow from?
who did we borrow from?

I want to have pride
like my mother has
and not like the kind in the bible
that turns you bad.

I want to have friends
that I can trust,
that love me for the man I've become
not the man that I was.

--The Avett Brothers - The Perfect Space

Cross-posted from n8o.r30.net:

I whipped up a little demo in python and libsfml, wherein the waving the wiimote around controls the angle of a lightsaber sprite on screen. Cute. I tried to add sound, too, but it doesn't playback right.

Ha! Fun. :)