Haiku – 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
Haiku – 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 MoreWhy Reviews are Garbage – Part 1 of N
One of my favorite things about the internet, is how often people buy things based on the reviews. “Five thousand people have reviewed it and it is four stars! I am going to buy it.” Here is the thing, those reviews are bullshit. Even if some aren’t fake, they are not a good measure for a product. Reviews are a strategy to tell you that a thing is great! Except, is it? When was the last time you saw something with a thousand reviews and a 1 star rating? You won’t, cause the second the first set of ratings appear, they will be five to four stars. The reason is simple, anything that has 1 star will never be purchased. So manufacturers are compelled to buy their own product and rate it high to initiate a purchasing spree.
Now, it is important to note that there are many reasons that reviews are garbage. I plan to break down a lot of those over a multipart series. While reviews do help us choose a product, it isn’t necessary. In my mind, the reviews help you with satisfaction of a product. They let you be confident in a purchase; however, the ten major products on the webpage that all have similar reviews are all going to work just fine. That’s the trick, reviews don’t help you find a super amazing product, they help you be satisfied with the one product you ended up choosing.
Over the next couple of posts, I will go over why reviews are useless (except for customer satisfaction):
- Reviews are bought (maybe not directly, but just giving a person a product to review will drive certain behaviors)
- Updating reviews allow companies to respond to defective stock easier (if the product breaks, they replace it, you move review up based on how you are handled)
- Products are purchased in higher volumes if they are advertised by the manufacturer (Game of probability – more purchased, the better the reviews will go)
- People buy products based on their price point (aka, reviews are subjective – what is 4 stars for you is not the same as what is 4 stars for someone else)
- How many people buy multiple large items (no one buys 10 vacuums and then reviews them – they buy one, it works well, it gets 5 stars)
- New products will feel superior to old products (what we were using, are being replaced for a reason)
- ??? who knows, by the time I hit number six, I will probably have some ideas to hammer on
So, after I break down all the points above, I will hopefully have explained why reviews are useless. Even if I do that, I doubt it will matter. The reason is simple, humanity needs order to survive. That means, when faced with thousands of options, we need to be prepared to make an appropriate selection. In order to do that, we need to choose some criteria to narrow the options down. In the past, it was going into a store and touching the tangible object until we found defects or benefits that made one standout more than the rest. Instead, we now rely on other people’s tangible experiences with products to guide us to a selection. Which is silly, I am trusting someone I don’t know to make a recommendation to me. And it is insane that I accept that recommendation over my own mother. Yet, we all do it, we trust strangers on the internet to help us buy commodities instead of going and touching the real thing in person. So, if I can get one person to take back control, I will count this project a success.
Read MoreSmall Questions: Who Gets to Define Things?
I’ve got some beef. It has weighed heavily on me for sometime and I just want to know who gets to define things? Here’s where the beef comes from, there are things called scientists, and they create categorizations for things in our world. This organization of the world’s chaos has been a practice of humanity since Aristotle (probably way before him too). However, somehow we end up with crazy shit like pizza being considered a vegetable (cause of tomato sauce) or, even worse, watermelon being categorized as vegetable. That’s right, in the great state of Oklahoma, the humble watermelon is considered a vegetable – why… no one may ever know. And if you are wondering if the watermelon was made the state’s vegetable back in the 1800s, no… Oklahoma’s state congress just decided to vote and make it the state vegetable in 2007.
Now, I am not one to be bent out of shape for categorizing the world. I believe we don’t really need definitions around every little thing in society. However, if we are going to put something in a specific category, we really should follow some form of designation.
So, who gets to define things? Law makers or the scientists who hold higher level degrees in the field. I am going to go with the scientists, cause congress is playing too fast and loose with the designation of a watermelon to really be effective in a situation that is more serious.
Read MoreOn Parenthood, A Set of Haikus
The two below are focused on how parents are protective of their kids. The goal was to mix that instinct to protect and foster growth with the environment. Thus, forces try to wipe out life, I wanted to show that there are pieces of the world that will protect the youth. Nothing is as unmoving as a boulder, so it made sense to me that a seedling that spouts inbetween boulders would inherently survive. So when I see the new parents in my life, I can only imagine that they are rocks that will protect those children they made. To the parents!
granite on both sides
wind lashes, storms surge – Berry
safe seed – a tree grows
~Theodore Maestranzi
Unmoving boulders
lone seed protected – parents
sapling becomes tree
~Theodore Maestranzi
Because my buddy who is a new father loves to correct my grammar (even when I speak) and his son looks like him, I feel like I am going to have a mini grammarian correcting my speech patterns soon enough. Therefore, I decided to drive him nuts with this personalized haiku.
Oh no, another
me is I, I is me – twins
my grammar assaulted
~Theodore Maestranzi
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