Anyone have a pandora station they love to listen to while working or working out? I would like a change from what I listen to. MUST BE UPBEAT OR I WILL FALL ASLEEP AT WORK, AND YOU DON’T WANT THAT.
:D
Almost a decade
•July 15, 2010 • Comments Off on Almost a decadeAround mid-March next year, I’ll have had an online journal with LJ for ten whopping years of my life. If you include the journal I had at a small site before that, we passed a decade of online journaling a long time ago.
… of course, it’s too bad I don’t have archives of all the asinine crap I said on the local BBSs when I was 15. Srsly priceless. And embarrassing.
Ah, the week begins again
•July 11, 2010 • 2 CommentsSo, I spent the weekend at a convention i’d been flirting with attending for some time now. I definitely enjoyed myself, and I definitely regret it on a physical level. While I did behave reasonably vis a vis caffeine, I slept almost never, sat in one place for almost an entire day, and ate so tremendously badly that I think I woke up with a junk food hangover.
Today was better. While lucy helped our friends move, I cleaned the kitchen, dining room and livingroom. I ate an apple and mozz stick for breakfast, a roast beef sandwich for lunch, and a nice and reasonable bowl of mac n cheeseburger for dinner. We bought office supplies and ingredients for dinners at home, and when we got back I finally unpacked three boxes of books that had been giving me the evil eye over the past month.
I did a few more things around the house that were very minor but had been left aside since the big move. We are working so well together – almost everyone says “how’s married life treating you? ” And I invariably say “it’s the same, except better!”
Lucy woke up for about ten seconds when I got to bed and said she was lucky to have me. Later, there was a huge thunder rumble that woke her long enough to turn to see me (typing on my cell in the dark), and immediately dropped off to sleep.
I think we both have it pretty good.
“The Price of Apathy towards public affairs is to be Ruled by Evil Men.” – Plato
•July 2, 2010 • 3 CommentsEbert made a new blog entry about gaming as art and admits he was a fool for saying games could NEVER be art and for weighing in on something he has no intention of participating in. Which is just like reviewing a movie you’ve never seen.
He has not changed his opinion, but that is just fine by me. With this, I’m satisfied.
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In other news, people from ages 16 to 76 who were in the wrong place at the wrong time (as well as legitimate protesters) were arrested in Toronto during the G20 summit recently.
This first-person account is pretty amazing. Not allowing people to disperse, setting up bait cars, pepper-spraying people who have given their hands up to you to detain them – this is upsetting behavior. Our right to peacefully protest injustice, whether it is injustice or not, is very important to me. I do not automatically come to the conclusion that police are cruel, or have ulterior motives, or would behave without due process, and so when it happens on such a large scale, it leaves me feeling very disappointed. And angry.
They were put into cages without having been read their rights, left without water, proper sanitation, sanitary equipment for the ladies. They were abandoned when they needed medical treatment. A teen with Cerebral Palsy was mocked, they were threatened with violence by police officers when they were just sitting quietly.
15 hours in police custody, bleeding from plastic ties around the wrists, with an open stall bathroom, all for having been standing on the wrong street.
… you know, I didn’t know how affected I was by the story I was reading until I got to the end, when the guy was shoved back out into the pouring rain slightly a little less than 24 hours later to the cheers of people under tarps who had apples and water ready for the people finally let go. That’s when I felt tears on my face.
I know I can be a pretty emotional person, but the idea of witnessing a peaceful protest, and for that crime being tied up, thrown in a small cage with 40 men, and left to rot for a day with no one knowing where I am and no indication of how long it will last … it’s very upsetting. “Due process” is perhaps the most important human right.
It’s the kind of thing I’d want everyone to know about, because it isn’t right. It isn’t right for anyone.
20 accounts of arrest at the G20 – “I will not forget what they have done to me.”
Random thoughts
•July 1, 2010 • 1 CommentI like words like “generation” that, on the face of it, are very ordinary definitions (all the people living at the same time or of approximately the same age), but really have a different feel when you concentrate on it – in this case, it makes me think of some sort of simultaneous clinical reproduction a la Matrix – incep date 6.30.2010, if you will.
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I’m considering making a corporation just so I can make decisions for two legal entities. That way, if I decide to do something douchy (douchey?), I can blame it on my Other Self, SkennedyCoTM.
The frightening thing is that would be, in many ways, a pretty effective tactic.
Corporations are “special immortal persons designed by law to be concerned only for their stockholders”. So if I can arrange to be the only stockholder, that would work out just fine.
Just thought you should know
•June 30, 2010 • 6 CommentsYou matter to me. Even if we only speak rarely, even if I’ve never told you before.
Whether I have been right there to experience life with you or we only communicate through social media, I care, and I want the best for you.
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•June 24, 2010 • Enter your password to view comments.•June 21, 2010 • 7 Comments
(stolen from slashdot via The Bright Side of Wrong)
Hugh Pickens sends in an excerpt in last week’s Boston Globe from Kathryn Schulz’s book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error.
“The more scientists understand about cognitive functioning, the more it becomes clear that our capacity to make mistakes is utterly inextricable from what makes the human brain so swift, adaptable, and intelligent. Rather than treating errors like the bedbugs of the intellect — an appalling and embarrassing nuisance we try to pretend out of existence — we need to recognize that human fallibility is part and parcel of human brilliance.
Neuroscientists increasingly think that inductive reasoning undergirds virtually all of human cognition. Humans use inductive reasoning to learn language, organize the world into meaningful categories, and grasp the relationship between cause and effect.
Thanks to inductive reasoning, we are able to form nearly instantaneous beliefs and take action accordingly. However, Schulz writes, ‘The distinctive thing about inductive reasoning is that it generates conclusions that aren’t necessarily true. They are, instead, probabilistically true — which means they are possibly false.’
Schulz recommends that we respond to the mistakes (or putative mistakes) of those around us with empathy and generosity and demand that our business and political leaders acknowledge and redress their errors rather than ignoring or denying them.
‘Once we recognize that we do not err out of laziness, stupidity, or evil intent, we can liberate ourselves from the impossible burden of trying to be permanently right. We can take seriously the proposition that we could be in error, without deeming ourselves idiotic or unworthy.'”
When I think about my childhood, I may have been punished brutally by other kids for making normative mistakes, but when it came to thinking in general, or learning to read, or anything else, I think I was pretty lucky to have been brought up by a family that not only didn’t dwell on mistakes, but seemed to use them as springboards to other thinking.
That is probably why I love love love gnawing on a problem today. I love to think for fun! Some people get exhausted and frustrated by trying to work on a problem where the solution isn’t easily at hand – I get a lot of pleasure from it. Whether or not I accomplish anything more in life because of that is probably debatable, heh, but I bet it’s a large factor in my (self-reported) low stress.
It may also be a factor in my motormouth and my general inability to enjoy something without thinking of ways I could make it just a tiny bit better. :D
… that’s another interesting thing to think about – it is difficult for me to explain how I can -both- be very pleased with my food -and- see how it could be better. When I bought my Wii, I was explaining to Lucy its shortcomings on the way home, before I had even unboxed it. I was excited, not even a little unhappy, but if you didn’t know where I was coming from you’d think I was pissing in my own cereal.
If I am a good video editor/graphic designer/web designer, I believe that way of thinking plays a big role.
•June 20, 2010 • Comments Off on
An interview with Matthieu Ricard, the “happiest man on earth”
I enjoy listening to him talk about why people should show compassion for people who you do not like or who are obnoxious or even those who are causing suffering for others. People are greedy and selfish due to their own suffering, and that seems to be true when you get down to the psychology of asshole-ishness. Moreso, it is a purely self-interested act to only care about the happiness of those who do something for you.
That said, of course you have to take into account your own suffering – having compassion for someone doesn’t mean you have to like them, and it doesn’t mean you have to enable them creating suffering in yourself or others. I think that’s the tough thing that many people get mixed up – thinking that caring for the happiness of others means letting them walk over you or other people.
It’s a great thing to consider – the idea of justice as revenge is so deeply ingrained in our society and our fiction, it is nearly impossible to even express it without someone feeling outrage because of something terrible done to them, and the perceived “wrongness” of feeling anything but a desire for retribution for them.