alive : miriku

tSS – like beasts fucking, sketch

Originally published at miriku.com. You can comment here or there.

in one of umberto eco’s collections of writings he mentions seeing a man in a restaurant who during dinner would loudly talk on his cellphone about large (iirc mafia-related) business deals. the man’s intention was to communicate that he was an important person of significant power. eco then points out that the man got one thing precisely wrong: an important person would never be interrupted during dinner.

power is about being able to do what you want, when you want to, not simply being responsible for greater and riskier things.

i recently thought about this upon receiving a random internet alert. i spent a large chunk of my life thinking that to be more technologically advanced you need to be more hooked up, with all your programs reporting status updates to you constantly. in reality this does not empower you, just scatters your attention.

instead, i’ve now actually made an effort to disconnect myself and hide things away from myself. i have enough trouble concentrating without a periodic ‘beep’ that, upon investigation, will inform me that someone has become the mayor of a new eatery in foursquare. my phone and computer have no twitter/facebook/rss alerts at all anymore, instead i read those when i feel like it using web browser bookmarks. my phone now receives nothing that makes noise, except calls which still require immediate attention unfortunately.

my only exception is emails that go to my work account show up in my computer dock. that’s a work obligation. nothing else does.

technology should never interrupt you. technology should politely wait for you to look in it’s direction, then quickly, clearly, and efficiently say to you what it has to say, and when done move back and wait on the side.

Originally published at miriku.com. You can comment here or there.

if there is one thing that programmers can almost uniformly be accused of is coding for the best case: wanting to write programs designed around all things behaving correctly every time.

one random facet of this is the assumption that crowds and their voting can be trusted to behave in a productive way. let’s say you have a website where people vote on who is the best poster / reviewer / uploader / whatever, and rewards them in some way. simple to implement, simple to test, and you’re done, right?

well, never underestimate the willingness of crowds to behave maliciously. getting 1000 people to do a prank on a system like that is trivial, and it’s even easier to get one person with a bunch of zombie machines all over the planet.

attacks like this are really common: websites raid amazon review / recommendation pages for fun, 4chan obliterated a “person of the year” TIME poll, and twitter “trending topics” seem to be raids more often than not.

the last one in particular strikes me as funny. businesses are now using personal hash tags to let people talk about them using hashtags, and in some cases display the results real time in the lobby or on their page. i’m astounded at this. all it takes is one message board post asking everyone to twitpic porn to the hashtag and voila, instant PR disaster.

always program for the worst case, not the best case. unless you have some method to block them, assume that at any point in time there are thousands of bored suburban teenagers who would love to abuse any ranking system you have for laughs.

Originally published at miriku.com. You can comment here or there.

the catholic church decided to bar a congresscritter from communion cause he failed to vote against abortion. to be honest i hope this practice takes off as america still has a huge bias against atheism and this makes it clear that atheism is not just not believing in god, but also a conscious decision to eschew religion as the gods available all seem to behave like very human spoiled children

in less serious, i heard a cute response to “god asked me to pray for you” which was “well tell him to man up and talk to me directly and not go behind my back like this spreading rumors”.

Originally published at miriku.com. You can comment here or there.

what i learned from the game Modern Warfare 2:

• the CIA is perfectly willing to slaughter hundreds of civilians as part of undercover op
• all brazilians are armed to the teeth
• the russian military gives each person a totally different brand and caliber gun
• heartbeat monitors can detect if you’re friend or foe
• and so can UAVs. they even mark foes with little red rectangles in real time
• specops can drive snowmobiles one handed while shooting and reloading an uzi, but is completely befuddled by chain link fences and barb wire
• it’s possible to get good consistant bandwidth in a remote mountain house (note! this one might not actually be true)
• russia can launch a full land invasion of america with 1 day prep

and that famous part to MW2, the “kill the civilians” bit, it’s funny to me that it’s that big a deal. you’re playing a shooter and have already shot dozens of random people, will continue to shoot hundreds more, and because some of them are unarmed it’s a big deal? yes, they get hit in “realistic” means (as much as that applies for computer games) but so does every other character

cmon now, you call in airstrikes in crowded cities and grenade marketplaces, but apparently all those are abandoned and/or no one cares about brazilians.

eh, whatevs.

Originally published at miriku.com. You can comment here or there.

it happened again.

guy on bike: hey, a bridgestone
me: o.o?
guy on bike: nice bike
me: oh, thanks man

i’m still dubious of their sincerity

Originally published at miriku.com. You can comment here or there.

the first finished, complete song of mine is 15 years old. it’s a 3 minute or so demo/tracker/techno thing

v|scosity – gl

v|scosity was one of my first writing pseudonyms, and the song was gl cause at that point i decided that i would name all my songs with as few letters as possible to make them unique. i gave up after one more, called ‘fl’, trivially.

the song was originally called “glimpse within”.

(it was originally an .IT file, i converted into a mono mp3 using interpolated sampling)

Originally published at miriku.com. You can comment here or there.

i watched a debate between a bishop, catholic mp, a writer, and stephen fry on the subject “is the catholic church a force for good in the world”. if you’re curious, it’s here.

it’s quite good and very british in style in that everyone first gets uninterrupted long statements, then the audience asks questions in ‘bulk’ so to speak, after which people get time to respond to the questions in any way they see fit, and when that is over, a closing statement is made. no cross talk and yelling.

what jumped out at me is that at one point stephen fry makes a very valid point that i never quite formulated clearly about the fact that catholic church has been on the side of what it now considers to be poor moral choices, including being pro-slavery and killing people who owned non-latin bibles. the excuse it used for not apologizing for all those times was that this was a product of it’s time and should be judged as such.

the problem, as stephen fry points out, is that the catholic church is supposed to be an absolute moral compass, and if your moral compass isn’t able to tell you that slavery is wrong until society catches up, then it’s not a compass, it’s stick floating downstream.

- -

one thing that goes unsaid in the debate btw is this apparent belief on the MPs side that without the catholic church people would absolutely lack guidance and devolve into an animal world of murder and rape, while stephen fry thinks we’d transcend into a humanist morality. both are probably wrong, but i think part of their lack of communication has to do with that issue.

i’m biased here in that i do hate the “oh, you’re atheist? so you’re immoral then right?” train of thought, but i also think that religion is often just a veneer for simplistic phobias that won’t disappear even after you admit that they’re not divine in nature.

which is why i’m glad that the debate concentrated on the actual actions and policies of the catholic church (condoms, hiding child abuse) since those are the actual effects the church as an entity, and not religion, has on the world.

- -

i will also say that the final result was heartening, and separately that the british MP sounds like a monty python parody of a woman. it’s that voice they use for “i don’t like spam” or “penguins don’t come from africa”. i’m amazed anyone has it in real life, i always thought it was a silly bit of overacting.

Originally published at miriku.com. You can comment here or there.

geocities got shut down. i tried to find the two websites i had on there but for the life of me couldn’t remember anything about them. no idea what the urls, subject matter, or title were, and really, i probably wouldn’t have recognized them even if i saw them. it’s funny, all the various liquidspin.coms i remember at least sorta clearly, but zero for the geocities/angelfire stuff. i don’t think i was quite self aware of my own web-actions at that point

so yahoo bought that site for 3 over billion dollars. at the time that was the content center of the internet. this was the future, this was user generated content, a beginning of a new world where we all build our own amusement, learn, and share.

so went wrong? at that point it didn’t dawn on anyone that none of us want to create content. not really. that’s work, requires effort to maintain, and skill in setting up in the first place. we don’t really want to create content, we just want to post pics of our cats, say what we had for dinner, and link people to funny videos. we’re a consumer society, not a creator society. don’t bet against that.

- -

this is a pretty funny video, i just had dinner that was potato with some random fixings, and here’s a pic of my cat hanging out under a stool where he can still comfortably keep an eye on his food bowl:

Originally published at miriku.com. You can comment here or there.

some people seem to be surprised by al franken’s actions as freshman senator. he’s been very sharp during questioning, aggressive in pointing out ridiculous political stances (like the pro-rape block), and overall just sharp and active

i think a part of it is just how insanely lethargic by comparison the political culture is. it’s understood that things won’t change and you’ll know (and work with) these same people another 30 or so years, so it’s no time to make enemies. you come into this culture in your teens as a volunteer and live your whole life in it, and franken missed all of it.

the other reason is that people confuse characters played by an actor with the actor. franken plays confused, meek, and soft characters, when in reality the man is a stand up comic with decades of experience. if you’re a stand up comic, you must know how to control hecklers, and it’s usually by tearing them down. you take those same skills, the ability to quickly take what someone says and turn it against them in a way that shatters their ego, and put them into a committee member, and suddenly when someone makes an indefensible claim there’s now a senator calling them on it.

not that democrats will somehow manage to not fuck it up anyways. cause of franken there’s now a list of 30 republican senators who quite literally voted to facilitate the rape of US service members, but i’d be surprised if any campaign ads will run that will mention this. afterall, that might ruffle the feathers of those senators.

in any case, a short clip of franken questioning an anti-health care activist during a session on medical bankruptcies. it might not seem like much to people used to normal conversations where dumb statements are pointed out as such, but this is the land of no one ever being called on anything

Originally published at miriku.com. You can comment here or there.

a short list of song names worse than fall out boy’s “Carpal Tunnel Of Love”

1 – Leg Brace Yourself For Love
2 – Arm Cast Away In Your Love
3 – I Will Love You Tumor-row
4 – Oh God You Stabbed Me In The Face With A Gun And Now I Keep Bleeding Love
5 – This Ain’t a Scene, It’s an Arms Race

Originally published at miriku.com. You can comment here or there.

a personal linux milestone: i now have hardware that works in linux, but not windows

the device in question is a generic linksys usb wireless card that works just fine in ubuntu, but windows refuses to let install any driver for it claiming they’re all the wrong one

best part? i’m using that wrong windows driver in linux to operate the card.

Originally published at miriku.com. You can comment here or there.

objectivism is popular cause 95% of us think we’re the top 5% smartest

Originally published at miriku.com. You can comment here or there.

migrating away from this thing another step: i probably will stop checking my friends list.

those of you who posted actual non-mirrored content in the last year or so i added to an rss feed, but fyi you post friends only i wont see those.

o/

1. You can ONLY answer Yes or No.

2. You are NOT ALLOWED to explain ANYTHING unless someone messages or comments you and asks. And believe me, the temptation to explain some of these will be overwhelming…nothing is exactly as it seems.

3. It is harder than it looks. But no explanations !!! You will want to…but don’t!!!

What is your name? Yes
How old are you? Yes
What’s your favorite three letter prog rock band? Yes
How about your favorite doctor? No
How many digits of pi do you know? Yes
What city would you like to be living in? No
If you could be any member of Hitler’s inner circle, who would you be? Yes
What would you name a crow? No
Finish this line: I never eat a pig cause a pig is a ___? No
Mugabe: good dictator or bad dictator? No
Why did John Wilkes Booth shoot John Lennon? Yes
Twas brillig and the slithy toves? No
Tea or coffee? Yes
What’s your favorite number? Yes
What Cannibal Corpse song best describes your current mood? Yes
What’s the stone in the middle of an arch called? Yes
What plant is canola oil made from? No
Palm? No
Olive? No
Seriously, I want to know. Yes
You’re good. Yes
C’mon, just tell me. No
I hate you. Yes

Originally published at miriku.com. You can comment here or there.

so life is a performance. yes, we choose our role moment to moment, and yes it would be disingenuous to say that our choices are really limitless. being human and herd animals we are limited but what we feel is the limit of what others expect of us.

but that’s a tangent though. life is a performance, and as it is a performance there is a certain quality to it that we call authenticity. it’s hard to pin down, but i ran across a few things that got me to thinking about it

so let’s start by talking about alt-sex cause people love alt-sex or so i’m told. at the defcon jeopardy game (drunk social event for hackers) there was a girl there whose job was to basically dress up like a dom and hit people who answer incorrectly. she (and all the previous incarnations of her) did a great job, people had fun, cheering was had, but at the same time it was clear that she wasn’t a domina, not really, and i was wondering about why exactly.

it’s not a question in context in this case, i’m not speaking of attempting to subdue a room full of boisterous drunks, i’m talking about the reaction i had as she was still walking in before hand. it was one where the instant reaction was  ”aww, sweetie, i know what you’re going for and you certainly dressed the part, but you’re doing it all wrong. no idea how, but you are”

the dom thing isn’t attire or any physical action, in the end it’s something that’s an immediate emotional reaction. you either instantly understand upon seeing the person, or you don’t. if they don’t broadcast this authenticity in the first moment, there is no way to sort of back up and try again.

i guess i don’t mean in the first moment, but in the first moment it’s “turned on”. it is a performance and an act. keep in mind that those words don’t mean it’s “fake” to me, just that it is something we consciously choose to do. it’s fake only in the sense as our performance of being students, teachers, parents, or children is fake just because it’s possible for us to theoretically not act that way.

and i’m not saying that this is about some magical quality that comes from being in a culture. that’s stupid. it is absolutely possible to fake the performance with enough authenticity to make it real to anyone, but you would find that as you do so, you would no longer be faking it. yes, it’s catch-22ish. as soon as you pretend it well enough, you’re no longer pretending.

example 2: i was at a show not too long ago, 3 bands played. 2 of them were ‘normal’ to me, 1 of them the singer and frontman never felt like one. he dressed like a frontman, he spoke one, he sang into the mic, but at no point did i believe it. again, the authenticity wasn’t broadcast.

this is something i’m a bit hypersensitive to now that i’m fronting the band for real. the live show is a double performance, the band pretending to be the band, and the audience pretending to be the audience. if the singer can’t act like a band, soon the audience will feel stupid acting like an audience. there’s words that we use for it that vary from genre to genre, ‘energy’ being a common one, ‘feeling it’ is another, ‘getting us’, whatever. in the end it’s ‘we believed your performance, you believed ours, and we chose to have fun tonight’

another example: nerd core. yes, i’m taking, you kicking and screaming, from bdsm to geek rappers. let it go.

two rappers: mc chris, and mc plus+

mc chris:

mc++:

(what the hell, we don’t get pics of the girl dom but we get two nerd dudes?)

life’s a bitch, deal with it. btw, i originally wrote “pasty white dudes” but having googled him i now realize that mc plus+ isn’t very pasty. thanks for making me lose a great phrase.

so here’s the thing. i believe mc chris. and i don’t mean that i take what he says literally since that would include believing he owns a batmobile with a mcdonald’s inside, but the authenticity of his performance is there for me. i’m saying that when he talks about being a geek, i emotionally relate to him. i don’t feel it from mc plus+. and i’m not questioning mc plus+’s street cred, inasmuch as that term can possibly apply to someone who not only never claims to spend time on the streets but in fact claims to never leave their bedroom. i really believe he is a geek in real life, but his performance of being a geek doesn’t feel authentic.

“how can you possibly come across inauthentic at being yourself?”. because yourself is an act. because this requires performing a swagger and not just being geeky. and because there is more to this bravado than simply stating it and having the balls to hold a mic in front of a crowd of people, and that something is enjoying it to the point where you forget you’re only pretending to be enjoying it.

fourth and last example, this guy:

tim minchin performing “if i didn’t have you”, at the secret policeman’s ball.

btw, that’s officially my favorite love song of all time now.

there’s a geek culture thing to this song, like him trying to explain the word special as he’s using it, those 3 lines have more honesty in them than pretty much all other love songs combined. not just in what he’s saying (cause for all i know whitney will in fact always love you and is just as truthful), but in how honest his performance of it is. it’s someone who first screws up by saying his girlfriend/wife isn’t special, then tries to dig himself out, then realizes that even more importantly he’s now being ambiguous about what he meant by the word ’special’ and the best way to explain that is with statistical analysis.

this post probably would here go on to start talking about dimitri martin and his palindrome, and then finish on comparing the comics smbb and “the warehouse comic”, but at this point i finished showering and stopped pondering this.

oh, and also something about how our ability to detect authenticity being in part our exposure to the role at hand. i’m positive i have a different standard of authenticity of a domina than 99% of defcon, probably 95% one way, and 4% the other way. or thereabouts.

here’s a hacker jeopardy pic in either case:

Originally published at miriku.com. You can comment here or there.

dear internet,

i’m certain that you are just as big a fan of the new bands in the metalcore genre of music as i am, drawn in by many of its appealing factors, including:

• heavy use of autotune and vocoders
• whiny lyrics
• sissy-looking tight pants
• idiotic techno break downs
• tame as hell guitar

and many many others. bands like this one, brought to my attention by steve k:

thank you steve.

as so, internet, you might be surprised to learn that some older metalheads have a hard time taking this genre seriously and refer to it as Crab Core. i have made these original content gifs using the above video in order to help explain it. please use them wisely.

(mac users: my safari renders gifs too slowly. if the bouncy bouncy isn’t bouncy-ing as well as it should, use firefox)

Originally published at miriku.com. You can comment here or there.

long story short: i’m fine

long story long: woke up today and my right leg was still asleep. didn’t think much about it and went to work

got home, tried using the phone, fingers started spazzing around a bit and i noticed that now both right leg and right arm were numb and tingling. went “uh…”, tried to walk it off, leg got worse, so per shannon’s offer went up to hospital to make sure it wasn’t something bad in the brain

once there they said that it’s probably nothing serious since i’m not in any danger group and don’t have a other symptoms, but they’ll do tests to make sure. got tested for stroke and transient ischemic attack (ministroke), negative on both, and it basically looks like by coincidence i managed to somehow impede blood flow to leg (which btw is still annoyingly numb) on the same day that my RSI acted up and my hand on the same side went numb.

eh, better safe than sorry i guess. the cat scan machine is neat.

Originally published at miriku.com. You can comment here or there.

so in some games of mafia/werewolf people have cards that they look at, but more normally the mayor assigns the mafia/werewolves and the detectives/seers. if you’re as obsessive by mathematical pseudorandomness as i am, here’s a simple algorithm for doing so that will minimize your own selection bias.

think of a random word. “penguin” will do for this example. let’s say you have 13 players. you start by converting the first 5 letters into their corresponding numbers

oh. and be like me and have every letter of the alphabet’s corresponding number memorized. a=1, b=2, m=13, t=20, etc.

so now you have “penguin” -> “pengu” -> “16 5 14 7 21″. if your number is greater than your your number of players, subtract the number of players. in this case this yields “3 5 1 7 8″. now start at the person whose name comes first alphabetically (or whoever happens to already be in front of you, doesn’t matter), that’s how many people you will skip over as you go around assigning. so starting at your friend Aardvark, go 3 people, that’s your first werewolf. then go 5 more, that’s your second one, etc.

well, at least it’s a decent pseudorandom starting point for you to ignore while you assign them based on what you think will be funniest.

incidentally, would anyone be up for a game of werewolf if i set one up?

Originally published at miriku.com. You can comment here or there.

3 songs that are less cheesy than they first sound. first listen to the song and glance lyrics, then turn the page upside down to read the reason (edit: nevermind, upside down is not working, i’ll make it white text so select it)

atmosphere – fuck you lucy (youtube, lyrics)

reason: lucy is his alcoholism

common – i used to love her (youtube, lyrics)

reason: ’she’ is hip hop culture

assemblage 23 – disappoint (youtube, lyrics)

reason: the song is about his father’s suicide

- -

tangent, i used to think the lyric in disappoint was “i stood on your shoulder’s while you drowned” which to me is an even stronger line

Originally published at miriku.com. You can comment here or there.