My computer, after 8 years of proudly rocking a pre-release, non-sevice pack-able, pirated-before-Napster version of Windows XP Professional, finally fell to a virus. For a few days things would get more unstable than usual, but the virus scanners I could run didn't pick up anything. Then random things started getting corrupted, and before I knew it I couldn't do anything even in safe mode. Luckily I have held on to my bullshit HP system recovery discs for the past 9 years, so I'm now using Windows ME with the factory settings and trying to bittorrent a new operating system. No new video drivers, no nothing but the bare essentials and the retarded cartoon scientist on the desktop trying to get me to use AOL 5.
Unlike most people, I am frequently disappointed with the amount of information of the internet. The total let down that serves as my subject heading got me thinking about this and I'm in the mood to write. I keep trying to read about transhumanism, but I'm disgusted by its human-centricity. I am frustrated with the notion that there aren't ideas that can't (not "haven't", but "can't") be thought. Or maybe I'm frustrated that people are debilitatingly fixated on the fact that they are people. It's as if with everyone Earth, except the handful of countries that don't allow the internet, we're still only capable of putting out a fraction of the ideas possible. I'm finding the human condition very confining, I mean. I always had this notion of human behavior being just subtly different from that ofother animals. Ignoring the scale and complexity with which we do things, we still just eat and stay warm and get in fights and pick nits out of each others' hair and shit. When I first read about behaviorism I was mildly offended. I think I was a Marxist, or something. But nowadays I'm thinking that everything everyone does and thinks is boring and predictable. Behaviorism has given way to cognitive psychology, and I find it just as pessimistic.
"The only way out is to go way out." I wish I knew how to express this better than through an over-tired, terse and opaque motherfucking livejournal entry. Maybe if I stayed in school I would know that people have expressed this somewhere other than vague themes in the Tzimisce from Vampire: the Masquerade, but that's how the cookie crumbles. I'm going to make it a point to over think every even mildly interesting idea I have, study everything about it and distill it, even if it comes out only making sense to me. Maybe it will be new and cool, unlike this one. Too obtuse! I'm either finally drifting into schizotypal psychosis or merely becoming an artist. Only concrete thing in this entry: I just got a job as a third shift cytopreparatory technician. It isn't as glamorous as it sounds.
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Zero (found out about this in the waiting room)
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Upon seeing your planet I wept at how you treat information. Throwing it away with careless abandon, and some of your towns don't even have libraries! Where I am from every idea and work is precious and enshrined. You have scientific and medical journals, but I didn't see a single one at Store 24. I bought each periodical they had. We'll make an exhibit out it. Sarcastically.
Most of us spend weekends at museums, or visiting cemeteries. They are rather similar, actually. Our cemeteries contain the life stories of the deceased, as told by themselves and their loved ones, but each is his own editor. We dread the prospect of dying without our memorial records completed.
Also, we are far ahead of you in the fields of anesthesia, climate control, and logistics management. However, it never occurred to us to develop a computer programming language beyond machine code. I'd bring back a higher level language, but half of us would be out of work.
I recently read that the U.S. military has been struggling with data proliferation since the 70's. Get a set of balls.
In other news, I saw a dentist today for the first time in at least eight years. Part of a tooth fell out and I spent the weekend in grievous pain. I'm on a pain killer called diflunisal right now. I'm going to have a root canal, if they pull it it's going to expose my sinuses and I'd need surgery to move them. They can actually do that! It's all very exciting.
Hey there, I am Gigby Raption, a sophomore foreign relations major. My people have very short lifespans, which was compensated by females producing 2 litters a year with large numbers of children. When we became the dominant species on our planet the population boomed quickly, and through progressive legislation higher education was made available to everyone. Most of us do not graduate until we are nearing the end of our lives. Our history and mathematics professors have taken the reigns of society, abstractly calculating decisions in a classroom setting. My brother, Rippily Raption, was interested in meteorology but became a futurology major, and his thesis on the optimism bias was very well received. He theorized that a totally abstracted "ivory tower" society can not address every facet of life. Unaccounted variables may gradually become our ruin, as we focus our short lives on specific pursuits, otherwise we feel we have done nothing. Posterity is important to us.
Good evening, my name is unimportant. Being of avian nature our understanding of spatial relations is far superior to yours, and we are skilled architects, though none of us like being indoors for long. Since time immemorial my people have made use of cloning technology. Some say that before this we longed for immortality and found it through giving everything to our community, but for as long as anyone remembers group interests have been unimportant to us and our social structure is extremely loose. Everyone who likes has their genetic information and memories stored and frequently updated, and when they expire they are remade the next morning. Murder has become a hobby for some of us. Two or more will organize killings however they like, and when the loser awakens the next morning he has no memory of the event and learns from it through the taunts, or praise, of his or her peers. Our philosophers have much to discuss with you.
My name is Sweetly Drifting and I come from a gas giant similar to Jupiter. My people's culture and language is centered around emotions, and I am interested to research the differences in the range of feelings of you and I. Humans have always associated death with becoming less corporeal, though for us it is the reverse. We have a superstition that when one of us is wronged, in the afterlife he may become more dense, and attack the wrongdoer and drag him down to the crushing depths of our planet's core. Take care, now!
Hello! I go by Mr. Garivelsok and I am glad to make your acquaintance. Upon my arrival I was surprised by your people's lack of cannibalism, for it it is common to eat the undesired young where I am from. In my home roughly %70 of our citizens are incarcerated, perhaps this is more acceptable to us because we hibernate for two thirds or the year, but our laws are also what you might consider draconian. This is acceptable to us, and dissent is so unheard of as to be considered a myth. We eat raw flesh exclusively and flourish in dry, hot climes. On my world there are marshlands into which we never venture. The elders say thousand year old mollusks live beneath the rushes, but this is widely disbelieved.
Hello, my name is Umnabiluut, and I am pleased that you have brought me here to speak. My people can see about half the amount of colors as you, and our visible spectrum begins at your carmine red. The often lavish markings that adorn my people developed as a defensive mechanism, and in our evolution contributed to a culture that values deception in a way similar to how you value compassion. You may be surprised to learn that our political systems are unabashedly corrupt and we have as many synonyms for disinformation as you have for intoxication. On my world I was a farmer, much of our dieted is farmed from by removing insects from carnivorous plants during the late stages of digestion. I hope to speak with you again when I have more time!
From a Biblical quotation, scorpio 'scorpion' is Latin for a Roman flagrum. Hard material was affixed to multiple thongs to give a flesh-tearing 'bite' [1 Kings 12:11: ...My father scourged you with whips; I will scourge you with scorpions]. The name testifies to the pain caused by the arachnid. To its generous Roman application testitfies to the existence of the Latin words Flagrifer 'carrying a whip' and Flagritriba 'often-lashed slave'.
Sunset Rubdown - Up on Your Leopard, Upon the End of Your Feral Days
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. I have whooping cough. No, I don't whoop, I'm too thin. . I gave my girlfriend pneumonia. She's "sick in bed". . Soon I'll start LJing for real again. I've had this for almost 7 years!
of Montreal - Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse
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On Friday I saw the doctor, she thought I might be anemic and bipolar, so I had blood drawn and went on Prozac. It turns out it's not anemia, but maybe sleep apnea.
I spent from 4pm to 3am on Friday moving things out of my mom's apartment. We got a storage unit, which is so cool. There's a big building with endless halls full of doors and the lights go on when you walk by. Then there's a little door with 301 on it and it's mine. I want to go there and pull out the rocking chair and just hang out.
I spent forever trying to find the dance number that followed this featuring Chita Rivera and Jack Cole, which was what I was really looking for, but it didn't turn up.
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spqrradio's journal
gloomy
