X2? Fuck you! – An Analysis of Regret
After brutal day work today, I wanted to let my brain relax so I did what any adult who is young would do – turn on some Mahler and stare at an absurdly large clock on the wall (JOKES… I am actually an eighty year old German farmer living in New Zealand (I am not)). Because I am weird, I do this boredom break for fun. Traditionally, instead of enjoying the clock on the wall, I would actually be staring at the weird brown stain that goes across the ceiling in my living room, but I am visiting family today (by the way, that stain in my living room is a constant confusion and has led to wonderful discussions). In general, boredom time is a structured event where the only thing I can do, other than think, is listen to music. As such, my brain gets to jump through some interest thoughts… like: infinite regret of day dreaming about real events.
So, without further introduction, let’s dive into pure sadness! To be fair, some of these concepts are close to Bergson’s view on hope and how one shouldn’t have it– fun stuff, right! Either way, the concept is simple but it is easier with an example. So, just like at work, let’s define a scenario. [Click “Read More” to find out if I am actually a German farmer]
Read MoreHaiku – During Yoga
So I walked into the coffee shop to work on some outlines for Manuscript 9 (Crack the joke: typical writer, get on your laptop and scroll through facebook, but jokes on you! I don’t bring a laptop, I bring a notebook and pen!), ignoring the tangent, I was there around 6:45 (normal Sunday to avoid the crowds) but the entire store was converted over to a yoga studio. With a free Americano (since I had to listen to the class), and my mind distracted from outlining, I decided to write some haikus; some were influenced by my mindset and others influenced by the baristas’ insights.
Just to level set, I’ve just arrived and my head has been filed with plots and dystopian scenarios and now I am facing people doing yoga. One the primary themes of dystopia (other than hope) is the near constant representation of human beings as being sheep or following orders (in yoga, if you’ve never been, a leader gives commands and you follow them). These were the outcomes:
~On Commands~
Torrent of fears/ideas
harp, serenity, zero thoughts
chaos over order – freedom
discarded shoes – pile
find inner peace, listen to guide
stop thinking – give in
~On someone pointing out the smell~
smell of ignorance
harps sing, commands, obey the yogi
It’s human nature
Divergant Pathways and Engrained Behaviors
At some point in time, humanity made a sit down toilet. Once that invention was on the market, something amazing happened… we diverged. Now, it probably didn’t happen immediately, but over time, people decided how to wipe. So I guess, it would have been with the advent of toilet paper that the grand split happened (sit wipers versus standing wipers). You obviously think the other is gross, I’ve had this conversation enough to know that people are extremely aggressive over their wiping position.
But, the point is that in history, someone decided to eradicate the stinky residual excrement while standing up (more than likely the European based society, as you had to move from the toilet to the bidet, in Japan (where Bidet’s became heavily used in the 1900s, they were directly incorporated into the toilet not a secondary fixture you had to move to in the bathroom)). While those humans made a decision to stand up and wipe, another group of society cocked a cheek to the side and scrapped away. So maybe it was a cultural thing, Italians were already standing when they shifted from toilet to bidet and decided this was the easiest way to wipe, or perhaps, it was just an arbitrary decision someone made after taking a dookie.
The outcome is that generation after generation has been ingrained in whatever their first ancestors to use a toilet had done. If the first toilet user in your family line leaned or stood, that decision was passed down through all of your ancestry because you don’t learn wiping your ass from a central power, you learn it from your parents when they potty train you.
Read MoreHaiku – Jazz Night
While enjoying some jazz and growing sad while hanging with my friend Rachel before she leaves town.
~A Moment About Tea~
Million yellow buds
chamomile and hot water
sooth the human’s soul
~A Moment on John’s Guitar~
some Jazz riffs, a scale
from a breeze to a torrent
musical emotions
~A Moment Lamenting about Rachel Leaving~
Breezy plains, Midwest
a coffee shop see’s a shift
with no wind, sad day
~A Moment Reflecting on Adults Feeling bad about Toys’R’Us
Adult tears – Nostalgia
purple sky – a giraffe dies
fittest survival
or
Adult tears – Nostolgia
purple sky – a giraffe dies
liquidation sale
How to Fuck with Company’s Tracking
So I had this drafted out like a year ago, but with the whole Facebook stuff going on, I guess it is about time I actually posted it. This is a practical guide to really scrambling the internet’s knowledge of you. There are three primary camps on a spectrum for data privacy: 1) Hide all the data pertaining to me, 2) Accept and embrace our new overlords (this person believes they benefit from corporations knowing as much about them as possible), 3) fuck with the algorithm. I am of camp three.
Now, it isn’t hard for me to mess with data collection systems because I am constantly seeking information for a novel or short story. This leads to a weird set of bad data as I am doing searches as a character I created not as Theodore. Thus, Theodore looks like hundreds of different people all rolled up into one. Which is what I want, I want tracking companies to have difficulties understanding what I am interested in. As someone who consistently has to analyze millions upon millions of datapoints for work, I can tell you that bad data is the worst thing to have for an algorithm. Often, if I had a bunch of bad data, I just excluded it from my analysis instead of attempting to clean it (depending on the sensitivity of the data) as my computer can crash during this process. At a certain point, when the incorrect data is a significant amount of my dataset, I will dig into why this bad data exists and then correct the collection point upstream. However, when looking at 100,000,000 data points, the last thing I want to do is correct 1,000 of those. [Click “Read More” to find my plan to take down AI]
Read More