| Eyyy |
[08 Jan 2009|05:41pm] |
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[26 Dec 2008|09:20pm] |
"Trying to hold what slips through hands,
like using a sieve to move the sands
over, under, inside, and out.
A fanatic's zeal erases any burden of doubt."
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| All I can say about this weekend. |
[22 Dec 2008|02:41pm] |
She asks to see my utility knife. She not only figures out how to close it within a few seconds (something that has confused dozens of people), but she says she can sharpen it for me.
Happy holidays, everybody.
Edit: And tiny shark figurines. Goddamn.
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| the mountain goats - half dead |
[17 Dec 2008|03:10pm] |
it was raining outside, so I cleaned house today.
spent half of the morning throwing old things away.
try not to get caught up,
try to think like a machine.
focus in on the task, try not to think about what it means.
can't get you out of my head.
lost without you,
half dead.
took my spot at the window, looked out at the road.
dots and dashes of traffic, like a messaging code
of whole boxes of memories wrapped up at the curb,
I sang songs to myself that didn't have any words.
can't get you out of my head.
lost without you,
half dead.
stole out to the backyard late last night.
pine trees frozen in the silvery moonlight,
rising like giants from the cold earth.
what are the years we gave each other ever gonna be worth?
can't get you out of my head.
lost without you,
half dead.
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| 3 days. |
[07 Dec 2008|09:23pm] |
I don't know everything about life or love. I don't know if fate exists, or if we just need to delight in the positive experiences of random chance. I will never know these things. I am moving to Minneapolis. I am traveling across the country in June. Life is for the living, life is for l-i-v-i-n'.
Edit:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synchronicity
http://ezinearticles.com/?Parallel,-Synchronized-Randomness&id=938066
Oh, okay then.
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| Oh, purple |
[27 Nov 2008|03:41pm] |
T tetromino, you have won my heart.
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[03 Nov 2008|01:14pm] |
I broke free on a saturday morning.
I put the pedal to the floor.
headed north on mills avenue,
and listened to the engine roar.
my broken house behind me and good things ahead,
a girl named cathy wants a little of my time.
six cylinders underneath the hood crashing and kicking,
ahhh listen to the engine whine.
I am going to make it through this year if it kills me.
I am going to make it through this year if it kills me.
I played video games in a drunken haze
I was seventeen years young.
hurt my knuckles punching the machines
the taste of scotch rich on my tongue.
and then cathy showed up and we hung out.
trading swigs from the bottle all bitter and clean
locking eyes, holding hands,
twin high maintenance machines.
I am going to make it through this year if it kills me.
I am going to make it through this year if it kills me.
I drove home in the california dusk.
I could feel the alcohol inside of me hum.
picture the look on my stepfather's face,
ready for the bad things to come.
I downshifted as I pulled into the driveway.
the motor screaming out stuck in second gear.
the scene ends badly as you might imagine,
in a cavalcade of anger and fear.
there will be feasting and dancing in jerusalem next year.
I am going to make it through this year if it kills me.
I am going to make it through this year if it kills me.
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| Hey. |
[06 Oct 2008|05:22pm] |
"As an anarchist, I really think that the movement needs to drop this "it's time for war" rhetoric unless it's actually prepared for it. The movement is not and will not be prepared for war any time soon. At all. At best, this current crisis will give folks opportunities to understand a bit more clearly that their interests are not always aligned with those of the classes above them, and, in turn, this consciousness will allow a denser network of activism and mutual aid. A lot of these suggestions in the article are unfortunately oriented to people already in the movement, who tend to be young and not broke as fuck.
It's a lot easier to squat in buildings and work on maintaining the militant borders of an autonomous space when you don't have kids or when you don't have to work to pay your way through college or, say, a family member's medical bills. The anarchist movement unfortunately has very pathetic solutions at this point in time for these real material problems, which is not to say that it couldn't create decent solutions. I just happen to think that creating an autonomous network of free medical care, for example, is going to take a lot longer than a few years and that anarchists who think that this is their "big break" are mostly dabbling in out-dated Marxist economic theories."
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| "Rather I make of you song that will praise you." |
[22 Jul 2008|08:44pm] |
Since I drank, I crossed the border, sad fate.
Not harmless is a reckless heart.
Lavish the lion's feast you fashioned, many the hostile spears you routed.
When all fell back, you leapt to attack.
Were it wine, the blood of those you speared, for three years, for four,
a huge store for your steward, which you would decrease.
Heaven's bliss be yours for not yielding
http://www.missgien.net/celtic/gododdin/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y_Gododdin
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| She knew more ASL than I do. |
[07 Jul 2008|02:27pm] |
I posted an image of the book Next of Kin a few entries back. A good chunk of the book talks about Washoe, the chimp who could sign in ASL. I just found out that Washoe died on October 30th, 2007. Here's to you, buddy.
Washoe (c. September 1965[1] – October 30, 2007) was a chimpanzee who was the first non-human to learn to speak a human language, that of American Sign Language. She also passed on some of her knowledge to her adopted son, Loulis.[2][3]
As part of a research experiment on animal language acquisition, Washoe developed a modest ability to communicate with humans using ASL. She was named for Washoe County, Nevada, where she was raised and taught to use ASL. Washoe had lived at Central Washington University since 1980; on October 31, 2007, officials from the Chimpanzee and Human Communication Institute on the CWU campus announced that she had died the previous day at the age of 42.[2]
In 1967, Alan and Beatrix Gardner established a project to teach Washoe ASL at the University of Nevada, Reno. At the time, previous attempts to teach chimpanzees to imitate vocal languages (the Gua and Vicki projects) had failed. The Gardners believed that these projects were flawed because chimps are physically unable to produce the voiced sounds required for spoken language. Their solution was to utilize the chimpanzee's ability to create diverse body gestures by starting a language project based on American Sign Language.
ASL instruction and usage
To teach Washoe signs, the Gardners and their graduate students initially modeled their approach on operant conditioning, the use of consequences to modify the occurrence and form of behavior. For Washoe this approach depended heavily upon a system of rewards. When Washoe would spontaneously make a gesture that in some way resembled an ASL sign, the scientists would shape the gesture by encouraging and rewarding variations of that gesture until it became a true ASL sign. For example, the sign for MORE is made by bringing ones hands together and touching the fingertips. In the context of tickling, Washoe would naturally bring her arms together to protect herself. Noticing the crude resemblance of this action to the sign for MORE, the Gardners would pull Washoe's arms apart and stop tickling. Washoe then tended to bring her arms together again, at which point the Gardens would reward her with more tickling. Over time, the Gardners required Washoe to be more precise with her arm and hand movements in order to elicit more tickling. Eventually, only the correct ASL would cause the Gardners to continue tickling. After Washoe learned to robustly construct the sign for MORE when being tickled, the Gardners introduced the sign in the context of a game of pulling Washoe around in a laundry basket. According to Roger Fouts, a graduate student of the Gardners, Washoe caught on quickly to the idea that the ASL sign for MORE could be used to get more of anything, including food, games, and books. In this way, the chimpanzee showed the ability to spontaneously generalize an abstract concept such as "MORE" to a variety of contexts in which training had not occurred.
After the first couple of years of the language project, the Gardners and Roger Fouts discovered that Washoe could pick up ASL gestures without operant conditioning methods by observing humans around her that were signing amongst themselves. For example, the scientists signed "Toothbrush" to each other while they brushed their teeth near her. At the time of observation, Washoe showed no signs of having learned the sign, but on a later occasion she reacted to the sight of a toothbrush by spontaneously producing the correct sign, thereby showing that she had in fact previously learned the ASL sign.
In addition to individual signs, Washoe displayed the ability to combine signs in novel and meaningful ways. For example, she referred to her toilet as DIRTY GOOD and the refrigerator as OPEN FOOD DRINK, even though the scientists around her always called them POTTY CHAIR and COLD BOX. Fouts has written that this type of linguistic modification is similar to tool modification of wild chimpanzees.
Confirmed ASL signs
It is reported that Washoe could reliably use about 250 signs[2]. For Washoe to be considered "reliable" on a sign, it had to be seen by 3 different observers in 3 separate spontaneous instances in the correct context and used appropriately. Following those observations, it had to be seen 15 days in a row to be added to her sign list. These criteria were applied in the earlier phases of the project. However, critics claim that, in strict sense, Washoe only learned a bit more than twenty words. Moreover, there is a great deal of controversy as to whether such usage of ASL sign sequence would constitute flexible adaptation of ASL combination to proper context or mere rote learning of different sign sequence due to repeated conditioning. The former case means that Washoe can use language while the later case means that Washoe learned many signs as a trick, which many other animals can do to various extents.
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| The List |
[30 Jun 2008|11:10am] |
The new Defiance, Ohio album is totally rad.
"The List"
8 blocks away would put you at the watertowers from my place,
What's the difference when you calculate,
by crunching numbers with crunched up eyelids?
Twenty-six hundred miles is 45 hours.
I tried to count the space in a million yellow dashed lines, and my gas tank's just empty.
I don't have the balls, or the where-with-all, or the cash to fill it again,
So I guess it's best I stick around the house.
Measure my days and metered my years in fear and muscle tension,
Meals and the beds that I slept in!
Tried to give a few decent gifts and scribbled a few things off the list,
but it still goes something like this.
Clean your desk,
Write your ex,
Do the dishes and your taxes,
Throw the shit you don't need away,
Call the airline 'bout the fast food scam,
Write to Adam,
Tape for Craig,
Throw the beer bottles and the cans away,
Mix some dirt,
Underline WORK!
There's never enough time, never enough time.
We don't have all the hands we need -
not enough you's or me's to be all the places that we want to.
There's never enough time, never enough time.
I'll siphon these anxieties onto to-do lists
and fidgets and things and things and things...
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| Desiderata |
[24 Jun 2008|06:58pm] |
I was finally able to get a copy of Against Me!'s first 12". The one that goes for $300 on eBay regularly. I got it for $10 from Sabot Records.
In the back of the small lyrics book, there is a quote credited as "Desiderata" - Found in Old Saint Paul's Church - Baltimore, Maryland. Dated 1692.
"Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be in silence. As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons. Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others. Even the dull and ignorant; they too have their story. Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexation to the spirit. If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter; for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your own achievements as well as your plans. Keep interested in your own career, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time. Exercise caution in your business affairs; for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue there is; many persons strive for high ideals; and everywhere life is full of heroism. Be yourself, especially, do no feign affection. Neither be cynical about love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial as the grass. Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do not distress yourself with imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself. You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with god whatever you conceive it to be, and whatever your labors and aspirations in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul. With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be careful, strive to be happy."
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| Tired of just carrying watermelons. |
[19 Jun 2008|12:14am] |
When you're at Best Buy for no real reason and the Dirty Dancing 20th anniversary DVD is on sale, you fucking buy it. I was glued to the screen the whole time.
I think I'm finally going to take dance lessons. Who's in? Seriously.
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| Achewood. |
[06 Jun 2008|12:14pm] |
If you do not read Achewood, the best online comic in existence. You should start now.
An excerpt from Molly's blog:
"Don't get me wrong. The Ramones have their place in things, which is usually on a cheap car radio while the sole occupant of the car gets out to buy a package of frosted Donettes and some Camels from 7-11 at six in the morning. It's frosty in suburban New Jersey that day, and he slips a little on some black ice, but doesn't fall. To me, that's The Ramones."
Molly's fiancee is named Roast Beef. They are both cats. Molly is from heaven. They live in California. Seriously, just read it. If you start from the beginning you get all the awesome storylines as they come.
http://www.achewood.com
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[12 May 2008|04:25pm] |
HEY.
You should read this:
I should re-read it.
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| Sick and bored |
[08 Dec 2007|11:23pm] |
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So...I'm stuck at Rachel's house tonight and tomorrow, still pretty sick. Anyone who wants to hang out with me would be very very welcome. I'm going to be cleaning up the house a little earlier in the day, but 12pm - 12am I'll be free and really bored. If I'm feeling better, I can be convinced to go find food or something close to do. Rachel's house is by Foster and Ashland.
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