ㅁ No time like now for dull despair, for setting up bland rationales. We architect our disrepair. No time like now for dull despair. Our moodiness disturbs the air, our monologues destroy morale. No time like now for dull despair, for setting up bland rationales.
– a triolet.
Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.
An illustration from the internet.
A quote.
“Every time I have to solve a captcha I’m forced to confront unresolvable semiotic edge conditions. Is the post that supports a traffic light itself part of a traffic light? I just don’t know. I am inadequate to log in.”
ㅁ The bear decided to head off west. I watched her pass by on the road. I saw a dog following. So they met each other, out along the road. And then the dog, looking scared, ran east, fast.
– a nonnet.
Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.
An illustration from the internet.
A quote.
“Knowledge kills action; action requires one to be shrouded in a veil of illusion – that is the lesson of Hamlet.” – Nietzsche
ㅁ so. these words don't mean what you think they really mean. instead, they just fade.
– a pseudo-haiku.
Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.
An illustration from the internet.
A quote.
“Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Give a man at a lake a hand grenade, and he’ll kill a lot more fish, but still just for that one day.” – someone on the internet
ㅁ It's four forty-one, so early in the morning: unmotivated.
– a pseudo-haiku.
Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.
An illustration from the internet.
A quote.
“But there is a trade off. At a societal level, we can be rich, or we can be communitarian. I don’t think we can be both – at least, not for long.” – Louise Perry.
I believe that this is quite wrong. I lived in South Korea. A surprisingly communitarian society. And we can’t accuse them of not being rich. Which they achieved in record time, as nations go – arguably, BECAUSE of their communitarianism.
ㅁ I'll be happy when the sun is gone. Summer here disagrees with me. It's plagued with obligations. Too many visitors. Chores around the house. Social neighbors. I'm annoyed. Lazy: Guilt.
– a nonnet.
Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.
An illustration from the internet.
A quote.
“I work for the government as a tax auditor. Obviously, it’s a bit of a conversation killer at parties and social functions when people ask what you do. So now, I tell people I am a fundraiser for schools and hospitals.” – some guy on the internet
ㅁ white flashes from the leaves of the alders as wind suddenly omens season's change
– a tetractys.
Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.
An illustration from the internet.
A quote.
“The best way to spot an idiot? Look for the person who is cruel. The kindest person in the room is often the smartest. Empathy and compassion are evolved states of being.” – JB Pritzker
ㅁ The silence captured the day, subdued it. Up here I sit, in dismay. I realize I've lost my way.
– an englyn penfyr.
Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.
An illustration from the internet.
A joke.
“Q: What did the salmon say when it banged its head on a concrete wall? / A: Dam!”
My personal blog turns 20 years old today. Which is to say, 20 years ago, on this day, at this hour, I posted this: Caveat: Dumptruck.
The first few years were a bit sporadic. There was a whole elapsed year during which I failed to post to it at all.
But when I moved to South Korea for my first teaching job in September, 2007, I made a commitment to myself that I’d try to post at least once daily, and I’ve kept that commitment since then, without fail (as far as I can remember or figure out).
I’ve gone through some long periods, even years long, where I consistently posted twice daily. Other times, I’ve slacked off. I’ve even had a few stretches of a month or two where I was consistently posting three times a day. I’ve journaled the minutiae of some quite intense life experiences here – perhaps most notably, my battle with cancer in the summer and fall of 2013. I’m also proud of the way that I managed to blog a 10-day stay at a meditation retreat in December, 2009, despite the fact that phones and computers and internet and note-taking were banned. I did it by compiling the entries in my mind, a kind of temporary memory palace, and then writing it all down once I returned “to civilization,” back-dating the entries.
This blog has had some fairly dry spells, too, in terms of stimulating content. But there’s always been something. I’ve had a lot of luck with a few “daily features.” Since 2016, I’ve had my daily poems. And for my first 5 1/2 years here in Alaska, I was posting my daily tree pictures. Really, those enumerated trees were just pretexts to keep myself posting. More than anything else, this blog has become my own “aide-memoire“: a kind of public-facing version of the type of journals (diaries) that I had maintained with quite a bit of consistency throughout my life, since my teen years. In that sense, this blog’s primary target audience has become my own future self.
One probably unusual feature of my blog, compared to other personal blogs, is that I’ve made at least a small effort to “back-post” some entries to epochs prior to its founding, using the backdating feature of the blog-hosting software. So I have entries in the blog going back to the date of my birth, in 1965. I dubbed this effort “retroblogging.” These entries are either retrospective observations of my life at a given epoch, or else transcriptions from those once-upon-a-time paper journals. I still harbor ambitions to post a great deal more of this material, but it’s hard to find the motivation to do so, and there are many other important blog-maintenance tasks that end up taking higher priority. “Link rot” (that internet phenomenon where old links to websites, videos, etc., tend to stop working over time) is harsh taskmaster when you have more than 10,000 blog entries to maintain.
One seemingly never-ending blog-maintenance task provides a good illustration: I am STILL struggling (after nearly 6 years of self-hosting, now) with transitioning my 1000’s of pictures off my old, subscription-based blog-hosting software (typepad). So… I’m still paying that old blog-host’s annual fee. Even as I write this, I have “September, 2012” open in my browser, where I plod along, grabbing photos and images from the old site and transferring them over to my own self-hosted server, and manually editing each link, in turn.
Here’s something notable: this blog is older than facebook, as we know it. Zuck’s facebook existed as “thefacebook.com”, a social network limited to only college students, in 2004, but it didn’t become a worldwide phenomenon open to the general public until at least one or two years later. My blog is only one year younger than Tyler Cowen’s MarginalRevolution, one of the longest-running blogs on the internet – and which I have read on and off continuously since that era. Not that I’m comparing myself to Tyler Cowen – he’s a public intellectual with hundreds of thousands or even millions of readers.
My blog maxed out at about five regular readers, in the mid 2010’s, but is now back down to a much-more-manageable one or two regular readers. That’s definitely a comfortable and sustainable level of engagement.
In the celebratory spirit, I’ll break my facebook embargo and post this entry, in toto, to that platform. *waves hello to facebookland*
I enjoy getting those spam emails from website search optimization consultants: “we can improve your reader engagement!” I receive several every day. I want to write back, simply, “oh rly?”
It’s not worth the bother, though. Hope you’ve had an interesting 20 years. I have.
ㅁ I love it when the storms pull in, they swing around the point and park their blowy winds, like ghostly grin... I love it when the storms pull in, the trees' broad branches dance and spin and whitecaps thrash the predawn's dark... I love it when the storms pull in, they swing around the point and park.
– a triolet.
Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.
An illustration from the internet.
A quote.
“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.” – Edgar Allan Poe
Moratorium
So, in this story, the big news was that people had stopped dying.
It never seemed to violate any causal laws – it was, rather, just an accumulation of “good luck” of various kinds. Hospital patients experienced recoveries, bullets missed vital organs, things malfunctioned in bombs, and automobile accidents were just freakily free of casualties. It took a while for people in general to take it seriously, though statisticians, doctors and the like became aware pretty quickly that something strange was going on.
The first to “test” it were the suicide attempts: these simply always went wrong in some way, as many suicide attempts do anyway, but now, such attempts always went wrong. Psychopaths soon were soon testing it too: attempting ever-more grandiose murders or massacres, only to have things go wrong in weird, Rube-Goldbergesque ways. Likewise, combatants in wars simply couldn’t succeed where death was inevitable.
All of this is to say that in fact disease and misery failed to disappear. Many people continued suffering, but for any case where such suffering neared death, things just “went amiss” in some way: some bit of luck came along and they stayed alive after all. Famine victims would suddenly find food relief, and anorexics would suddenly just lose the motivation to starve themselves to death. The mortuary industry, the first to actually notice, suffered quickly. Less quickly, but over time, hospital ICUs noticeably filled up with people who should have been dying. Instead, they were just stringing it along.
After the first several weeks, scientists, in a dead panic (undead panic?), tried to study things in earnest, at the statistical level. What they found was that suffering seemed to be neither increasing nor decreasing, in absolute terms. Though the number of people in ICUs had risen at first, it had simply leveled off at a higher number, and an equilibrium seemed to have been reached where spontaneous remissions and recoveries offset maladies. Anecdotally, fewer people were going to hospitals with previously life-threatening injuries or diseases, and simply recovered at home.
Confidence grew that death was no longer a possibility. Ecologists noted that the “moratorium on death” definitely did not, in fact, apply to any species besides humans. There was something strange and exceptional going on, at that level. The religious of all stripes became increasingly alarmed, or alternately, expressed that they felt vindicated. Clearly, it was some kind of miracle or end-times. The legal system had to adjust – with no murders to solve or prosecute, they had to satisfy themselves with lesser crimes. Concepts such as “attempted murder” began to seem ridiculous.
Philosophers argued about the free-will of murderers and suicides being thwarted by eerie powers. People began to panic about overpopulation again, whereas before there had been increasing concerns about declining fertility. Indeed, fertility continued to decline precipitously, in the same way that it had been for decades. Population scientists speculated that in fact the decades-long decline in fertility had surely been the first indicator that death, too, would be on the way out. It wasn’t that the decline in fertility had been able to find causes, other than vague sociological ones: people just weren’t wanting children.
And now, people didn’t need children, either.
ㅁ feeling desperate disappointment a seething mass of frustration just put on a happy face fake it till you make it delete that bad app ignore the signs go to sleep next day breathe
– a nonnet.
Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.
An illustration from the internet.
A quote.
“The Abominable Snowman gets a lot of bad press… Yeti carries on.” – someone on the internet
ㅁ I YELL A LOT NOW, WHEN I'M AT HOME ANYWAY: LIVE WITH SOMEONE DEAF
– a pseudo-haiku.
Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.
An illustration from the internet.
A quote.
“Communism jokes aren’t funny unless everyone gets them.” – dgar
ㅁ the disconnect isn't just deafness... but rather, jumbled perception, all the words get entangled maybe like unlearning the language you knew so that you're lost like tourists adrift lost
– a nonnet.
Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.
An illustration from the internet.
A quote.
“Why don’t you pray just in case there is a god? For the same reason you don’t cover your doorways in garlic in case there are vampires?” – Ricky Gervais
ㅁ Dreamed: phone call from my mom, and she complains, and complains some more, and then she announces her impending departure to another distant planet; I say goodbye but she ignores me.
– a reverse nonnet.
Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.
An illustration from the internet.
A quote.
“Rage Against The Machine never specified what type of machine they were furious with, but I reckon it was a printer.” – someone on the internet
ㅁ Fog rolled in before dawn, chewed on the trees, obscured the meaning of the rocks and sea.
– a tetractys.
Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.
An illustration from the internet.
A quote.
“There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” – Warren Buffet
An anecdote.
The other day, a lady came in with and bought a little hoppy toy chick (a wind-up baby chicken that hops around) for her little 5-year old nephew.
As they were leaving the store, she asked the boy, “What are you going to name it?”
“Zoltron!”
This seemed very important.
ㅁ A dream: I argued, angry, frustrated. The sky turned red - sympathy: gods agree.
– an englyn cil-dwrn.
Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.
An illustration from the internet.
A quote.
“Everyone wants elder gods to worship, but nobody’s willing to hire junior gods and train them.” – seen on the internet
ㅁ A Sunday came, all wan and dull, the sky was clear, the ridge turned gold. The dawn assaulted winds at lull. A Sunday came, all wan and dull, the tide was in, the bay was full. The sea was still and, always, cold. A Sunday came, all wan and dull, the sky was clear, the ridge turned gold.
– a triolet.
Here are some links I found interesting- without comment.
An internet meme (a terrible pun in Bill Hanstock’s remark, if you’ll notice…).
A quote.
“If you don’t know what introspection is, you need to take a long, hard look at yourself.” – Ian Smith
ㅁ "Well that was lousy," I mused, reading the haiku. "Still. It's out there, now."
– a pseudo-haiku.
