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| Saturday, March 29, 2003 |
| Quantum Toast |
| posted @ 05:34:00 MST by bryn |
| Some of my earliest memories of school are of the air raid drill alarm going off. Most of the time we just ducked under our desks and covered our heads but sometimes we would file down the hall to the doors with black and yellow fallout shelter signs next to them. It was an almost magical transformation from what almost all of these locations normally served another purpose in our daily lives - a cafeteria, gymnasium, or even library or coat room. The siren blaring was the incantation that brought about the change. Generations of us have grown up this way. I've seen some of the old wartime and Cold War era films with all-too-familiar phrases like "duck and cover" backed up by snappy jingles as jolly cartoon characters happily dance off to horribly inadequate refuge with ear-to-ear grins. Obviously my recollections are not unique. I'm not sure but I'll bet that even today's schoolchildren are going through nearly identical drills. I suppose that school is there to teach us and prepare us. Anyone can tell you about the "three R's" - Reading, wRiting, and aRithmetic. I included the actual spellings because I simply can't bring myself to actually start them with an "R". I think there's one missing from the list even though it's "R" comes at the end... feaR. What is one of the cornerstones of Western modern society? Discipline. Discipline is not a bad word, in fact I consider it a good one. Even a practicing anarchist is usually disciplined at exercising their anarchy. From the outset, school is about discipline and most of this discipline is reinforced by fear. It might be as simple as fear of a lack of reward for being good but at it's most intense and purest is dark, physical fear. School prepares us not only to function in normal society as a productive member of it but also to be afraid of those who dictate the meaning of "normal". To me it's also no mystery that these people also hold in their hands the power to do the most physically frightening acts in the world. Stealing, murdering, destroying, and lying are rendered nearly immaterial compared to this basic corruption of nature at it's very core. It's all relative. The same stardust that makes up my physical being, that forms the face of a loved one, that cradles a single thought deep in one's mind also shapes the tip of a bullet or rips apart the molecules of anything next to it in a blinding moment of fiery destruction. Thanks, universe... you fucker. Well, at least there are a couple of good things stuck together with gluons. They just don't seem to carry much weight... HA! I kill me. |
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| Thursday, March 27, 2003 |
| Slackware Rules |
| posted @ 00:52:00 MST by bryn |
| Okay, now it's official... Slackware is THE best Linux distribution in my opinion. I just tried my latest experiment: Gentoo. These people obviously have far too much time on their hands - however not enough to apply to implementing consistency and sanity in their work. I think installing Slackware from floppies was less painful than Gentoo with all the broken download mirrors and days of typing "emerge" and "etc-update" or re-sourcing your shell profile. The end result is the big deal, the idea being that you have this highly and specifically optimized Linux system when you're done building everything. If you have a Pentium 3, 4, or Athlon you'll have binaries built for speed on your architecture and the *funny* thing is that you're going to *need* them with all the building you're going to be doing. I was originally interested in Gentoo because of my BSD background but if you want BSD, run BSD. Gentoo is a mess by comparison. I also think it somewhat defeats it's focus by somewhat obscuring the build process just enough to not really teach you about building your own system. Remember kiddies: You can compile your own Linux system *without* Gentoo... and you might just learn more and have a better time. Oh, if you run Slackware and Gnome do yourself a favor and try Dropline Gnome. It rocks. |
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| Sunday, March 23, 2003 |
| Non-Sequitur Week Continues |
| posted @ 22:16:00 MST by bryn |
| Q: What's the difference between a stove? A: No, meatballs don't bounce. |
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| Channel Saturation |
| posted @ 03:56:00 MST by bryn |
| 'tis only a flesh wound. But... what ain't? (By definition.) |
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| Body |
| posted @ 03:03:00 MST by bryn |
| No gushing schnit. Welcome to < 0 0 <- @ * If'n j00 637 1|- congratufuckinglations. |
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| Saturday, March 22, 2003 |
| Spring |
| posted @ 04:27:00 MST by bryn |
| Did you ever notice how hard it is to collect raindrops in the palm of your hand in the middle of a spring rain? Yeah, not too important in the grand scheme but what is? Sometimes when I'm walking home at night and it's raining I want to stop and watch the rain as it comes down next to the streetlights but that very same streetlight is also casting its light upon me. While I might not be self conscious generally (obviously) it always seems more sensible to just keep moving... as much as I'd like to just stand there and watch the limitless patterns of droplets spend their last few moments. No, I'm not on drugs. Drunk sometimes, yes, but only when life permits. Why do I say that? Well, I guess it's probably because if I read the same thing somewhere else I would think that whoever wrote it was on some kind of airplane glue or better bender. Glue and beyond. Aim high. Ha, I kill me. I remember I originally had a point in all this. Too bad it doesn't get anymore specific than that. I might well be on my way to making sense by now otherwise. Several weeks ago I decided to take the bus as my truck was in the shop having the fuel pump replaced (oh yeah, here we go) and I found myself standing in the dark in the early evening in a parking lot next to the bus stop. It was raining and it was cold. I was wearing an all-cotton sweatshirt with a hood and a button-down insulated shirt on top of it instead of something smart like a raincoat. Even better, I was also wearing a set of headphones. It would be hilarious if they weren't connected to anything but I was listening to a CD I had just burned of several different versions of a piece of music I was working on at that time. I could feel the wet weight of the cotton hood even before I reached the bus stop but I was intent on being a moron. Sometimes I consider it a career choice. Nothing struck me about the whole thing until I turned facing uphill to the corner. I was standing in the middle of a blacktop parking lot on a corner with a single large lamppost right at the intersection that was turned inward toward the lot. Immediately at my right was the grate to a storm drain. Amidst the street traffic cutting it's way through the sheets of rain and the other immediate noise of being I found myself in a closed moment. Rolling toward me in unending variation were fluid torrents of effervescent rainwater. Against the black of the lot and highlighted by the xenon white of the overhead light continuous waves of water rolled across the lot to the drain nearly at my feet. The thing that really had me taken was how the sparkling splash from every single drop rolled with the water. Anyone who has thrown a rock into a fast-moving stream has seen how the rings travel outward relative to the moving surface of the water so this was no surprise in and of itself but one would have to throw thousands of rocks into a stream continuously to latch onto the zoneboner I was floating. (NOTE: zoneboner is a highly technical term that one should not float carelessly.) This wasn't even the amazing thing about the whole thing that I'm trying to relate in this whole thing. Every one of those droplets and the splash from the resulting splash droplets was flowing downhill in those sheets of rain funneling into the drain next to me. It felt like standing on the rim of a champagne glass with the bubbles rising below my feet. With music blasting in my ears I spent an immeasurable amount of time wandering a few feet at a time to take in this scene from different angles. It was beautiful. Never is one view enough. It would be really goddamned nifty if all of this led to some kind of higher understanding wouldn't it? Every day I keep running into this same thing in different forms. Even tonight I saw it. There are countless moments like this in the smile of a beautiful woman. Yeah, I figured I'd figure a way to get to this at some point. Heh, I kill me. I've found these same kinds of moments in someone's smile. Every time she smiles at me I swear time stands still. It sounds like complete sappy shit I'm sure but, believe me, I'm someone who can appreciate this kind of thing. Time stands still. Really, it's like the whole damned world just stops. Everything else is a shade of gray and those moments are white light against empty black. Hell yeah, I could live the rest of my life floating on those ripples in time. Oh yeah, it turns out that the bus I was waiting for doesn't run on Sundays. |
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