Archive for June, 2015
Muster… something
Tomorrow, I’ll muster… something.
Comments are off for this postLooooooong Day
I had a long day. I’m… nervous… I’ve been having really bad dreams.
1 commentNothing, not a thing
I don’t feel much like writing.
1 commentChasing butterflies!
I still prefer my flowers… I think.
Tomorrow, I test my Apple Watch with a car audio system…
1 commentApple Watch is here!
So, I got my Apple Watch, and it’s spectacular. As far as time-pieces go, it’s like owning a dozen watches in one. A watch’s personality, smart or analog, is its face. No matter a watch’s bells and whistles, its face gives it character, and the functionality that sets it apart from a sun-dial. Apple Watch comes with a variety of different faces, everything from a 3D model of the solar system that plots planetary allignment, as well as date & time, to the iconic Mickey Mouse face, with Mickey pointing out the hours and minutes. I tried them all, but settled on something of simple elegance, a face called, Motion. Whenever my watch awakes from sleeping, a gorgeously rendered flower opens from shy bud to full-bloom, with a crisp digital display of the time and date. Clean, sophisticated, beautiful, my ideal time-piece. To keep things interesting, a different flower comes alive whenever the Watch wakes. Now, some may be questioning my masculinity at this point, which is not a problem for me. A fellow can enjoy flowers!
Of course, the Watch does a zillion other things… I’m experimenting still.
2 commentsLetter to Chuck
Dear Chuck Palahniuk,
Could you please, please for the love of the tiny infant Christ, stop writing stories in faux broken English. It’s jus not funny, it’s boring, and annoying to read.
“The reality agent, she persist on promenading Randy through the futility room, the pouter room, a walled-in closet, the reckless nook, the tedium room, and the nifty home offense, when Randy already be sold.”
Like, we get it. The “reality” agent rather than “realty” agent, selling commercial plastic reality to the masses, the sheep. Mass media is for the proles, it’s dull, empty, too low-brow for intellectuals, anarchists, anarchist intellectuals, hence the “media room” becomes the “tedium room.” Shocking. Shocking satire. I’m just bl- Oh, wait, these ideas are in almost everything you’ve ever written, faux broken English doesn’t change these ideas, doesn’t make them exciting again.
I know you can use our craft, I’ve seen you do it. If your use of craft is strong enough, recurring ideas, recurring themes can work. Look at Franz Kafka, Michael Cisco. Kafka could always write bureaucracy turned personal Hell, Cisco can always write fever dreams, abstract nightmare translated into words, because of a strong, commanding use of craft. Faux broken English isn’t the way to go, it’s not a use of craft, it’s a waste. You realize we can only write so many words before we quit breathing, that the number is finite, not limitless? That being so, and it is so, why waste so many?
Michael
1 commentUnintelligible
I’m writing like shit.
4 commentsCHAPPiE: An interesting parallel
So, I saw CHAPPiE, the story of a robot given something akin to life, true Artificial Intelligence. Overall, it’s a fount of missed potential. It really could have been something great, the potential was so right there, but in the end, it was all just a sad waste. I don’t want to get into a full review, it’s not worth the writing. I’d rather write about the essence of an idea that I found interesting.
In the late 1940s or early 1950s, Alan Turing was sort of waxing romantic about “machine intelligence,” and how you might teach an “electronic brain.” He wasn’t being absolutely serious, but he talked about giving a machine wheels for locomotion, video cameras and servo-arms for input, speakers for output, and allowing it to “roam the countryside.” He was just thinking about the fact that learning doesn’t occur in a vacuum, that we’re the sum of our experiences. We have things done to us, do things to others, and we learn. He spent a lot of time thinking about how one would educate a machine.
In CHAPPiE, some gangsters get ahold of CHAPPiE when he’s basically a child, and that doesn’t suit them. They want to use him for crime, particularly one very large robbery a few days hence. They need CHAPPiE to “grow up,” fast. So, they trick him into a car ride and dump him off to, well, “roam the countryside.”
It’s an interesting parallel.
2 comments