in time – clock design

today was a good day for interesting time keeping design.  i came across these three different time keeping devices, which have a really interesting parallelism in their features:

we know the time
the tree tells the season
industry, the hour
and with robotic precision
an instant is born

a little musing on the wonderful juxtaposition of materials and fidelity that were used in all these clocks.  also, it’s the fault of Google+ that i didn’t just share the clocks and get on with my life, since you can’t share more than one fancy link in a post.  now i had to make a big deal out of it and waste a bunch of everybody’s time.

in your brain – you are not so smart

in the spirit of both “defeat[ing] procrastination now by giving the gift of humility to everyone you know” and entering in raffles, i’d like to present you with some beautiful kinetic type on the not so beautiful topic of procrastination.  not only is this a good watch, but the new book should be a good read, and the original content on the website is incredibly enlightening.

also, if you thought that I was ass-kissing there, then you are not so smart.  and neither am i.  On with the show…

on your ebays – dead baby pictures

Sitting in the laundromat, indulging in the procrastination of this warm, Southern California afternoon, I happened upon that which I wished to share with you all many months ago.  In the spirit of not procrastinating any longer, and not feeling the need to write any more about this topic than what is already present in the article, I’ll simply share the following link with you all–a story about the trafficking of old photographs of dead children:

Ghost Babies – from BoingBoing

In the spirit of reigniting the playful and creative flame of those of people who come to read this, I’d like to open up the comments to any form of short poems that you’d like to share on this subject.  I’ll get that started…

in your heart – the guilt of social networking

it’s been a blurry, hot, and sweaty morning afternoon day here on my nasally congested and scratchy throated coach, which means it’s a great time for me to connect to the internet.

here i mean “connect” in the most active of senses, in that one can from the internet most certainly, and willfully, “disconnect”.  you can still be looking at facebook and twitter and sports scores and emails and song lyrics and updates, but it can be done from behind a mask: the veil of disconnectivity.

from behind this veil, we disconnects wander our own personal corner of the internet.  are you a cheezburger cute-overloader?  or are you a boing-boing maker?  or maybe a redhead-loving pornhubber? (you’ll have to fill in with your own links there) whatever you are, that’s the internet you see.  the sawed-off arm of the internet upon which you personally feast metonymically is all that there is.  cnn.com?  amazon?  your friend’s blog?  another’s facebook photo album?  that’s all on the outside.  you’re here, on the inside, where it’s all warm and cozy.  this is where it’s happening, man!  you don’t need to tell people you’re here.  if they want to find you they will.  don’t make it too easy–the breadcrumbs are too tasty and delicious to leave behind for others…

this disconnectedness is part of a vicious cycle, as from it i derive a source of disconnectedness, one of my thickest humors: guilt.

without rolling for you the tape of my not-yet-filmed autobiography (though a serious man is a close approximation, in some regards), guilt and i have a long history.  i am a connoisseur of the jewish strain, though with the italian, russian, and irish i am also somewhat versed.  the thing about guilt is that people don’t make you feel guilty.  you make yourself feel guilty.  it’s this horrible self-starting automaton connected on the inside, and once it’s taken hold, you are bound as its host.

oh sure, there are ways to cope.  well, there’s really only one way:  that’s this disconnection.  if i stop reading twitter feeds, then i’m not noticing that i’m not tweeting on my own.  if i stop looking at photo albums, i can neglect that haven’t sorted and filtered and captioned and uploaded my own photos.  if i stop chatting with my friends and family, i can forget that i’m not chatting with them!

you can see that this comes from a good place*.  i only want to contribute to the world in which i embed myself in ways that are appropriate and benefit others.  when i don’t feel fully capable of doing that, i just check the f^@& out, and then we’re all happy, right*?  i’m not disappointing myself and other people aren’t being disappointed.  perfect*.

however, our social networks are so intricately interlinked, you can’t actually check the f^@& out.  the veil is all but opaque as the search for neglect and forgetfulness fails in the face of facebook, twitter, and now, google+.  the tentacled and zombified social networks that bind the rotting corpse of the internet together have woven their way into your perfect little cul-de-sac of DIY kitten fetishism.  your escape has been tampered with and now it’s your move.

pulling out from that not-a-through-street, i remember that the reason i’m here at this moment is that i’m sick.  nasally congested, and sore throated.  and that today i connected to the internet.  and what was i driven to do? posting a gripe about the circularity of guilt, the inevitability of the internet, and the dangling adverb of another immaterial noun.

this is an interesting cycle as well: where my connectedness has spurred on a guilt-deterring maneuver.  which has indeed kept me glued to not only the starred items in my google reader, but also to second, third, and fourth clicks away.  i’ve left my g+, twitter, and facebook tabs open and read through them the old-fashioned way (no tweetdecks or iphones for help), and i even chatted with a friend or two.  this connectedness felt amazing, and now i’m writing about how amazing it felt, which makes me feel amazing!

but wait…is this post too long?  will people read it?  oh you’re so stupid david.  you haven’t done anything today!  this aluminum leech sitting on your lap has just sucked time out of your very breath.  just save this as a draft and rework it for later.  once it’s a better piece you can share it with the world.  until then, just go back to your home-made cute-and-furry handcuff designs and forget you were ever a friend with the internet…

 

* this is some A-1 guilt talk coming up.  future instances are *starred* for reference

in visual studio 2010 – violence and drugs

i was skimming this article on some esoteric nerdy bs and i discovered that someone at microsoft claims to know about being a fighter*

<Dictionary>
      <Words>
         <Recognized>
            <Word>knokker</Word> ...

but denies a history of drug use

<Dictionary>
      <Words>
         <Unrecognized>
            <Word>meth</Word> ...

making these the top two completely unexpected things in this article.

*originally this post was called “fetish and drugs” because i confused “knokker” with “knocker”, but i’m hoping this is still worth sharing.

on your roads

inspired by a recent dayriffer find, i shared my love of my native (Californian) highway system here:

Based on Simon Burrow‘s suggestion, we are going to have a freeway interchange beauty contest.

The rub is that I am a SoCal native, and I love it too much to be unbiased in my entries.  In the comments below, then, please submit your entries into the contest.  I’ll start with the two of mine.  The names of the highways should be enough, but if your submission is already notorious, then a link to photos or the it’s wikipedia page is also great.  You don’t have to limit yourself to one entry, but try and pick your favorite favorite.

Most importantly, please share whatever you want about the interchange: a personal story, a myth, a legend, an experience, a poem.  That will make this real.  I’ll later collect all of the entries and we’ll have a pageant of polls for our pageant, with awards like “Best In Show”, “All Around Great Interchange”, “Generalized Runner-Up”, &c…

gross from the past (two weeks ago) and for the future

this is something that i wrote approximately two weeks ago and am finally getting to post.  some thoughts on birthdays.  from the outset, note that the birthday celebration was a success, in that i do know these friends of mine well, as they me.  the birthday show is coming up in two days with a facebook event on our team page and everything.

a birthday is one of those occasions when your payment is due on the continuously compounded guilt you’ve been accruing about how little you really know a person.  rarely can you discuss this fact with someone as you present them with the thoughtless, generic, cheapo gift you’ve bought them as a weak gesture toward your spine as it runs away from you down a littered Hollywood boulevard. not that you ever had a spine, but one usually hangs out nearby, and some people recognize that it is yours just by the smell of rotting obsession and compulsion.

so on what better day than a dear friend’s birthday to be reminded of our improvisational theater team’s 1st birthday, which will be coming up in two weeks.  not only am I without a gift for my friend, just like I was for another dear friend two weeks ago, but I am without a gift for our team.  what do you buy a team of people?  a group gift, the same for ever person?  a single gift that you can, somehow, from all of the different cities in which you live, share?  or can you say that the greatest gift of all is a commitment to your anniversary show and just being emotionally present for your celebrations?

that’s the kind of bs that is smeared on the attempts to justify every thoughtless, generic, cheapo gift that’s ever been bought in junky souvenir shops all around the world and throughout history.  does that make it right or wrong?  I don’t know.  for how little it turns out I know these friends, they continually surprise me with how close we can be, on and off the stage.  does that mean they know me better than I know them?  I’d tend to think so.  but has that pissed anyone off enough to start hating me?  no, that hasn’t happened yet.  or at least not here, with these friends.

it’s not odd, but unfortunate, that this post lacks a consistent or strong vein of humor to latch on to.  or if it did, it doesn’t any more. but that’s partly the point.  thatsgross has for too long restricted myself from using it as the tool it should be…a place for me to talk without fear of saying too wrong a thing.  a place where I can save or share a longer thought.  a place that is actually useful to me, without being hurtful to too many other people.

i made some funny comics today with a friend.  well, they may not be funny, but I had fun making them.  I want to have fun making other things.  here’s to having fun making things.  now take a sip of your gin and tonic, scoot away from that bar, and go make something of your life, you lazy pile of trash.  you too can be a successful pile of trash!  all you have to do is try!  cheers.

so, there you have it. here is another renewed commitment to expressing myself, publicly, when i feel the need, instead of bottling it up only to eventually lose pressure.

gross on the tube and around town

thanks to @davidsiegel for this evil fart.  possibly nsfw [explosive and flying farting / 10]

also, you’ll find this at sprouts if you ever need it:

enjoy.

gross in my throat: a gogyohka

whistling past the potato chip
rips the great tornado
but come the season
the monsoon will bellow
frothing up the ocean spray

–

had a cough this winter? share a five line poem about in the comments. it won’t make your cold stay longer, I can promise that much.

a rotten start

Without being cynical about the arbitrary nature in which we herald in a new year every year (the circle group U(1) and Complex Logarithm come to mind) we as sausage-casing casings usually do need the luxury of a fixed branch (e.g. nightfall or death).

But apart from my cartoon view of the needs and cyclicality of my cartoon view of western culture (and maybe others), there is something to having an anchor.  As a mentor of mine helped me converse in light of confusion about existence:

Me:  Fuck you, Buddha!

Buddha: Fuck yourself, because I am you.

There’s a lot going on here but, in this moment, it motivates me to seek out new ways of expression, recognize the structures I have created for the barriers to creativity that they can be, and employ a catharsis that is melded with our modern age.  This is my radio station; thanks for tuning in.  Welcome to this year 2011.