How did somebody make you apologize? Did they literally hit you on your body? Let them be upset. It’s not the worst thing in the world.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/07/arts/for-louis-c-k-the-jokes-on-him.html

I got used to your body

and now it’s gone.

Citizen Pulls Over Police Officer

The guy is a Libertarian nutjob, but this is fucking awesome.

Found a new site

Frankly I have ceased to care what devout Muslims mean by un-Islamic. The phrase no longer means anything at all. It is absurd beyond absurdity. In many Islamic countries, the imams and mullahs use it when they talk about the education of women; liberal Muslims use it when they disagree with extremists, American and European Muslims when they are trying to establish their liberal “democratic” credentials over and against the patterns of the Islamic world. “Un-Islamic” means what the last charismatic preacher says it means, what the imam with a sixth grade education tells you it means, what a professor at SOAS tells you it means when he tries to discredit the imam with a sixth grade education.

Morning dream where I ended up finding/being introduced to her and JD was there and he was, I think, a LaRouchie or something similar, saying it was a sin to "mathematically vibrate your face in reverse at the frequencies of Rebecca" something-or-other, but now I can't remember if that was before or after I kinda-sorta-accidentally took LSD, and I was a temp projectionist, and I was running from La Migra and there were gunshots but I'm not sure if they were real and maybe not because they slowed like a movie and someone tried to watch it on their Disney channel playback device but it was blocked for age restrictions and there was a big ship and she ended up having fucked up teeth and being shy and having been in an accident, but I still wanted to find out/give it a shot anyway.

Kicking myself for not reading the nametag.

I don't know what to say. Thinking about the girl/woman from the wedding. Me desperté como a las 5 después de dormir 3 horas sin poder dejar de pensar en ella, al fin me levanté. I ended up hanging out with Café after work last night and it kind of almost ended up being a date, but I couldn't enjoy it as much as I should have because I was still hung up on the wedding girl—in fact I was thinking of trying to post the MC ad from my phone while we played on the playground.

She offered to give me a ride home, and I really didn't want to impose, but on the off chance she actually wanted to spend time with me, I said what the hell and tried to graciously accept. After she dropped off the other rider she said, "OK, well, here are our options - I can take you home, we can go slack lining, or we can get a drink." Was a bit amazed, opted for slack lining because even though it seemed like a stupid white people thing, I thought it would be fun and I'd never done it. I ended up short stopping us at a playground, going on the slides, longboarding; we walked over to Tosa Fest for ice cream at Baskin-Robbins but they were closed. Met her friend from the trainride, talked for a while and tried canvassing her hard to go to Wal-Mart and read Dr. Seussbut she was tired. Brought her back to the house for ice cream, she declined and had water, let her hold the cat, which took a swipe. Got a hug and she said she'd see me soon.

Still thinking about some mousy nerd at a stranger's wedding more than a ridiculously beautiful girl.

Dreamt that Lefty had come out as gay; of course in the dream there was nothing between when we stopped talking and now—I mean that is to say he’d never gotten married. I didn’t really love his new boyfriend that much—both of them seemed very straight, and he smoked. I think they lived in some house that was like near outdoors, a creek, like Cameron’s FBDO house or something. We talked about Kate Bush.

Love this:

[M]aybe even Neruda got exhausted sometimes from the great pressure to be original and not cursi–after a long day of racking his brain for inspired, fresh symbols of love for his poems, perhaps the most he could muster up for Matilde was a little teddy bear he’d pick up at a nearby store.

Each set of lovers forms their own language and lexicon composed of their significant symbols and code words

Te extraño, snugglepumpkin.

Another therria dream

Not exactly a chat, not exactly e-mail, leaving messages for her like in the sentence correction interface. I said something to her first and she was nothing but nasty to me, but I figured if she was giving me withering replies, she still wanted me to try to get her back.

Another therria dream. This time likely prompted by wondering if she saw my pic. We kind of made up; she held my hand, and it was very good. I got her tickets to Stanhope. She had changed; we all have.

Another thing I’ve been saying forever

[Corporations] are amoral. They're driven purely by their constitutional requirement to turn as large a profit as possible for their shareholders. People can be good or evil, ambitious or lazy, angry or fearful – plcs are none of these things. They unthinkingly, unswervingly, pursue money – that is their programming.

…I really don't think this amorality is a problem, as long as it's understood. If you walk into the lion's enclosure at a zoo and the lion eats you, it's your fault. When we expect large companies to act out of motives other than financial self-interest, we only have ourselves to blame.

Another therria dream

although it almost doesn’t count

And be sure that the scientific method is an invention as much as anything else, as much as any steam engine or chemical process. It wasn't done centuries ago, it had to be developed and invented.

—Lewis Dartnell

See also: Georgia Guidestones

The scientific revolution was different from the science that had been achieved in the Oriental world in a number of crucial ways, the most important being that through the experimental method, it gave men control over nature in a way that had not been possible before. Example, Benjamin Robin’s extraordinary application of Newtonian physics to ballistics. Once you do that, your artillery becomes accurate.

—Niall Ferguson¹

This man wanted to know where his cannonballs would land.

—Neil DeGrasse Tyson

¹ Rebuttal (via) (He does go on to say that developing nations adopting capitalism and “private property rights” “achieve what the West achieved after 1500, only faster”—it’s not really clear whether or not this is taken as laudatory or a warning.
Also, his account of “the average American” and “the average Chinese” involves a lot of hand-waving.)

(I think it’s also quite possible the Europeans were just a lot more bloody-minded and thusly got there first.)

It really made me wonder if I’ve been so starved for genuinely stimulating conversation lately or I’m just like that—that no matter what I have in my life I’ll always be greedy for more, always be wanting to see what else is out there.

So I had a gig yesterday. Ended spending almost the entire shift—as much as I could, anyway—talking to this Mexican girl from Acapulco—she was super-rad, talking about neuroscience and studying psychology and teaching… When she mentioned going to school while working weekends I had to make sure I was understanding her correctly—it turns out she’s a junior in high school (though is technically senior-aged) (I had obviously not pegged her as that young). Also after a while she mentioned a novio that is?/did? go to UNAM. So it didn’t matter that her mum seemed to like me. That didn’t stop her from being someone I’d like to know better, yes, platonically. Kept waiting till our shift was about to end so I could act somewhat nonchalant, like, “Oh! by the way, let me get your e-mail address so I can send you those Sam Harris &c. links.” Or give her mine. But I was too nonchalant—I was called to work on another task while the girls who worked there were clocking out; I should have just pounced but really didn't want to seem like a overeager/DOM, and of course I had no idea it would be so difficult to casually mention something as I was saying goodbye. Holy shit it just occurred to me she purposely slipped out so she could avoid that? God, I hope not. She was just really smart + fun to talk to although she’s probably like that with everyone by virtue of being smart + upbeat and also I might have once accidentally sort of flecked spittle conspicuously in her direction while speaking animatedly. Yeah, OK, I guess that could be a dealbreaker. Oh, and also I nicked myself shaving and after the shift when I looked in a mirror I realized I’d had a hardened, blackened blood bubble on the edge of my nostril the whole day. Alright, I know, I’m disqualified. I’ll shut up now.
(Still really secretly hoping I run into her again somehow; pushing away thoughts of “accidentally” running into her again outside of her place of employment, omg too stalkerish.)
Also there was this other girl, who I have no idea if she worked there or with us, who I quickly picked out as the cutest girl in the place and kind of wanted to holler at, she had that je ne sais quoi that said, like, we’d get along, I’m cool, you know? But they assigned her to work a totally different floor and I barely got to say two words to her. Leaving at the end of the day without knowing anything about her + having no sense of whether or not Acapulco would have liked to continue the conversation left me feeling really frustrated and un-centred, still today.

Also planning on going back and finishing my conversation with Target girl, possibly/hopefully continuing it after she gets off work.

I’d forgotten I’d seen someone talk about the concept of cultural immunity—specifically to Western/consumer culture—elsewhere.

Weddings/brides are so fucking sexy

This comment from David the Aspie kind of blew my mind.

I think your opening line demonstrates just why Republicans love their "individualism" canard so much. It is much easier to impoverish us until we are rendered into neo-feudal serfs working for peanuts for their corporate masters when we are atomised. It is only through collective action that progress can be made.

Once again Sam nails it. But he also touches on something I’ve recently been writing to the Jewess about. The (in?)famous “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” article and Faye’s (as always ;) contrarian response.

Relevant to excerpt from Jaron Lanier interview from other day: surprised I don’t think I’d read this before.

Of course, the solution, I think, is that everything should be free. I don’t say this facetiously, but believe that, in a world where digital exchange makes all intellectual property immediately available to all at little or no cost, the whole of society is best served by providing its thinkers with a minimum guarantee of food, shelter and healthcare. But again, I think those are basic human rights, not just for the intelligenzia.

o btw, the crux was that I think it was inspired by the girl from the time bank meeting.

Oh, and I had a dream where I was with a group of other kids (but of course we’re all like grown-ups) and I had my eye on one + we ended up all going to sleep on mats and I ended up getting one sort of next to the girl I liked, I think maybe with like one person in between us, but there was someone behind me who ended up putting her arm around me and snuggling up and it was not unpleasant but the girl I liked raised her eyebrows like, “Heeeeey, you go,” and I sort of gestured like raising my hands like a shrug because I really didn’t want her to get the idea I liked this other girl.

Also, the moon was rising quickly enough to be perceptible, then as it neared the horizon it turned out it looked like a (still that peachy colour) cricket ball, then it turned out it was a balloon. My aunt got it and put it up in the yellow room at her house.

Todos nos sentimos little boys y buscamos a MILFs para salvarnos.

I need to blog this somewhere

To me a book is not just a particular file. It’s connected with personhood. Books are really, really hard to write. They represent a kind of a summit of grappling with what one really has to say. And what I’m concerned with is when Silicon Valley looks at books, they often think of them as really differently as just data points that you can mush together. They’re divorcing books from their role in personhood.

I’m quite concerned that in the future someone might not know what author they’re reading. You see that with music. You would think in the information age it would be the easiest thing to know what you’re listening to. That you could look up instantly the music upon hearing it so you know what you’re listening to, but in truth it’s hard to get to those services.

I was in a cafe this morning where I heard some stuff I was interested in, and nobody could figure out. It was Spotify or one of these … so they knew what stream they were getting, but they didn’t know what music it was. Then it changed to other music, and they didn’t know what that was. And I tried to use one of the services that determines what music you’re listening to, but it was a noisy place and that didn’t work. So what’s supposed to be an open information system serves to obscure the source of the musician. It serves as a closed information system. It actually loses the information.

So in practice you don’t know who the musician is. And I think that’s what could happen with writers. … And if we start to see that with books in general – and I say if – if you look at the approach that Google has taken to the Google library project, they do have the tendency to want to move things together. You see the thing decontextualized.

I have sort of resisted putting my music out lately because I know it just turns into these mushes. Without context, what does my music mean? I make very novel sounds, but I don’t see any value in me sharing novel sounds that are decontextualized. Why would I write if people are just going to get weird snippets that are just mushed together and they don’t know the overall position or the history of the writer or anything? What would be the point in that. The day books become mush is the day I stop writing.

—The Internet Destroyed the Middle Class

Tangentially related, that day I had looked up the Onion article “Clinton Deploys Vowels to Bosnia” article for angel, and found that it was no longer hosted on The Onion’s site, likely because it had been collected in book form, for $ale, but it was still available electronically, had been archived on several pages of “Internet humour.” Invariably, material had been truncated or added to this seemingly anonymously penned piece—which had in fact become a collective work—invariably not an improvement on the source material. But this isn’t even some snippet that originated from some long-forgotten poster on USENET in the ’90s—this is from The Onion, America’s Finest News Source! It should not be that hard to attribute accurately, and yet here it is, intermingled with the undifferentiated content pile-up that is the World Wide Internet.

Dreamt about the girl from class. It was wonderful.

I catch Laura look-

Some pages are omitted from this book preview.

I still, though, don’t think anybody else’s ever looked at me like that.

My favourite book

High Fidelity making me realize/think, stupidly, that maybe me and Speedbump could have worked out after all

Mujeres de IRC con las que me he enamorado, que luego desaparecieron

• Holly
• Liz (teacher)
• Liz (jammies)