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November 23rd, 2009
12:25 pm - grinding your morals
Hi. Let's talk about morality!
I want to write out my incompletely formed ideas on the subject, and maybe doing so will make them better formed. Then maybe people will want to discuss it, and that might help us understand things better, and then it will devolve into a shouting match over stupid things where everyone pretends they're not angry, because this is the Internet.
I'm pretty sure I'm a nihilist, by which I mean I don't believe anything has intrinsic value. Everything is just a complex ordering of protons and neutrons and electrons, according to what I remember from high school science classes. Even if I'm wrong about this, even if science is wrong, even if we're actually living in a simulation controlled by evil computers (unlikely, but still), it's all just stuff; everything is matter and it doesn't matter. Actually, our minds are what give us everything we know about the world, and that's just a bunch of neurons firing. Even if God exists, and souls and ghosts and stuff like that (I'm agnostic so I won't say they don't), they are bound to this as well. They have to be made of something, and that something is really nothing. I'm not certain about much, but this is the only outlook that makes sense to me.
However!
In terms of morality, this is really irrelevant. I'm a human with feelings and emotions and all that crap, and to try to change or deny this would require a kind of effort that doesn't seem nihilistic to me at all. I care about people, probably more than most, or at least more than most people I know. I hate immorality (opposition to morality), and amorality (lack of morality) makes me nervous. Each person's moral code can contain wildly different things, but I feel that it should always include being decent to other people: in other words, compassion. Rejecting this, as so many of us do, seems totally illegitimate to me. I guess this means I'm intolerant of beliefs that are different from mine; this is another thing I think is wrong, though not as much. Any thinking person is a hypocrite, but that's no excuse.
I see three kinds of harm: null, warranted, and unwarranted. Null is pretty much lack of harm, so maybe it doesn't belong here, but I can't think of another way to group these. Warranted is harm in reaction to harm; unwarranted is just someone being an asshole. Naturally since I'm so peaceful I try to be null (I could call this nihilist to be clever, but it's too late now...) and unharmful, though I'm sometimes unsuccessful. The warranted kind I can understand. It may be necessary to prevent someone from doing something, or it can be revenge. If someone hurts you, you want to make things even and hurt them back. This is very shortsighted, though (pun intended). The person who harmed you likely thinks that they've made things even; if you harm them back, they no longer think so and they want to make things even again, and so on, and then your tribes are at war for centuries. I think wanting revenge is a natural human emotion, but it's something that should be contained in favor of compassion and, you know, not being stupid. Speaking of stupid, the unwarranted harm: harming someone who hasn't harmed you and poses you no threat. How I loathe this! Generally I think people are great, but this despicable aspect of humanity almost cancels that out. I see this all the time and it angers me. What makes it worse is that it can't be justified; we know it's foul but we do it anyway. Also there's the culture of "evil is cool", so if you oppose terrible behavior, people might not like you, and I guess that's just too much for many of us to handle. Naturally, my preferred response to unwarranted harm is to convince someone their actions are wrong, not to harm the offender, which means I'm a huge wimp in many people's eyes.
Of course, it's fine for people to treat each other badly on the Internet. It's all just a bunch of data and pixels, so none of it really matters. (I AM BEING SARCASTIC.)
Current Mood: overbearing
Current Music: Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here
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November 13th, 2009
06:33 pm - a short short story I wrote... or maybe part of a long short story that I'll never write
"If you could wish for anything, what would it be?" she asked.
"Hmm. I think I'd end world hunger," I said.
"That's a waste of a wish," she said.
"Really? What would you wish for?" I asked.
"I'd wish for a thousand more wishes. Then I could get rid of hunger and still have nine hundred and ninety-nine wishes left," she said.
"Wow, that's a good idea! What else would you wish for?" I asked.
"I'll wish for food and clothes and make-up and a nice house and for people to make my food and wash my clothes..." she said.
"You'd run out of wishes soon enough," I said.
"Don't be silly! I can just wish for more wishes with my last wish," she said.
"Oh, I didn't think of that," I said.
"Of course you didn't, dummy. That's why you don't deserve to have all the wishes," she said.
"Would you give me some of your wishes?" I asked.
"No... but since we're friends I'll let you do something to earn a few wishes," she said.
"Like what?" I asked.
"You can clean my room or take the garbage out or brush my pony. By the way, I'll have a pony," she said.
"Then I can wish for a thousand wishes!" I said.
"No you can't. I won't let you. I'll wish you didn't have them," she said.
"Why not?" I asked.
"Because I want to be the one with all the wishes!" she said.
"You're mean!" I said.
"No I'm not. I'll wish I'm not mean," she said.
"That's not fair," I said.
"Doesn't matter. I can make you think it is," she said.
Current Mood: allegorical
Current Music: Rammstein - Mehr
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November 8th, 2009
09:28 am - This post is about sex!
Sometimes things make me angry; for example, this comment in ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/syndicated.gif) postsecret. The comments will probably be gone in a week (LiveJournal doesn't hold on to comments to syndicated feeds), so to summarize, a man of 19 is caught with a picture of a naked 17-year-old. Because of this he's a registered sex offender and his life is pretty much ruined. I was aware that this kind of thing happens, but reading a personal account forces me to pay more attention to it. The way our laws and attitudes are, a 50-year-old who rapes a 10-year-old can be treated similarly to a 15-year-old who takes pictures of herself. (The laws are probably different in each state and I've heard of other such cases, but I'm having trouble finding links.) I don't think it's unwarranted to suggest that the attitudes of this country (and others) towards protecting children are rather messed up and counter-productive. I have a friend whose father was convicted of having sex with an underage girl, and the impression I got was that it's pretty much impossible to defend someone who's accused of this; no lawyer wants to be known as the person who let the rapist go (because if you're accused of this, lots of people will believe you must have done it, because people suck).
In the spirit of "full disclosure", I should mention that I had a 15-year-old girlfriend when I was 19. I don't think this makes me a bad person. (If I were the age I am now, well, that would be a bad thing.)
Also, if you think I'm defending child molesters here, you are an idiot. Please stop being an idiot.
It's probably unhealthy to care about certain things. When I'm in a good mood, that just means I'm not currently paying attention to all the horrible things in the world. It must be nice to just stop thinking and believe whatever the television tells you.
Current Music: Serj Tankian - Praise The Lord And Pass The Ammunition
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November 1st, 2009
10:03 pm - mein Herr
I let my hair grow for a long time, then today ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) kotra cut it and I trimmed my beard. I seem to be interested in preserving what I look like before and after haircuts; normally I take pictures but this time I made a video.
I am goofy sometimes.
Current Mood: tired
Current Music: Captain Beefheart - Big Eyed Beans From Venus
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October 23rd, 2009
11:12 am - eru trot, teg reggib reggib
At the recommendation of neuk, I watched a documentary by libertarian conspiracy theorist Alex Jones called Fall of the Republic. It contained a lot I disagreed with or had a hard time believing (particularly the insistence that global warming isn't caused by carbon dioxide, although this is interesting) but there was also a lot that I agreed with. In any case, it's good to get a wide variety of perspectives on things, which is something I don't do enough.
The whole thing is available, poorly edited, on YouTube (EDIT: I found a full version here). Here's a section that I particularly agreed with, concerning President Obama and his continuation of many of George W. Bush's evil policies:
I was a bit flummoxed to hear Obama saying "we do not torture". Wasn't that regarded as one of the more ridiculous things Bush said? It's a constant source of frustration to see liberals give unquestioning support to someone who's not much better than George W. Bush.
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October 5th, 2009
02:17 am - Well, it sure beats raising cattle.
I'm attempting to learn to play bass guitar, which includes playing along with songs. I made some YouTube videos of me playing along with songs, as people do. Watch them!
First is a somewhat obscure song: Why Must I Be Sad by They Might Be Giants. It took me several weeks to learn, even with the help of the TMBG wiki.
This video also contains goofiness provided by kotra.
The other is the least obscure song ever*: Smells Like Teen Spirit by Nirvana. It took me about an hour to learn. I wanted to make this more visually interesting by swinging my too much hair around, but that messed up my playing.
There's a lot I don't like about my performances here (especially how bad my timing is) but oh well. I'm glad I at least got them made after planning to do so for a long time. I played each of these a great deal of times before I could get them to this level, and now my fingers are very sore. Poor fingers. I think I do a lot better when I'm not making a video, but somehow when the camera (that is, the webcam) is turned on my thought process gets jumbled and I forget things. Well, I will presumably get over this if I keep practicing all the time.
Current Mood: accomplished
Current Music: A denial. A denial. A denial. A denial. A denial. A denial. A denial. A denial. A denial.
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October 2nd, 2009
06:02 pm - Kevin Nealon will save us!
Here's an icky but humorous dream I just had. I submitted it to Slow Wave.
( Read more... )
Current Mood: yawny
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September 28th, 2009
03:54 am - Women and men
Today's xkcd was nice, but I found the discussion on the LiveJournal feed (which will disappear in 2 weeks) to be frustrating. Many of the commenters, presumably young women, expect men and women to communicate in exactly the same way. I thought it was common knowledge that there are stark differences, especially when it comes to hinting: for example, a girl expecting a guy to know she doesn't want to talk to him without her actually saying it. Men have a hard time understanding women's hints, not because we're deliberately obtuse but because we're wired differently. (Then there's me; I don't even understand hints from men.) I unearthed this article which explains it better and with more authority than I can:
Women's perceptual skills are oriented to quick -- call it intuitive -- people reading. Females are gifted at detecting the feelings and thoughts of others, inferring intentions, absorbing contextual clues and responding in emotionally appropriate ways. They empathize. Tuned to others, they more readily see alternate sides of an argument. Such empathy fosters communication and primes females for attachment.
Women, in other words, seem to be hard-wired for a top-down, big-picture take. Men might be programmed to look at things from the bottom up (no surprise there).
Men focus first on minute detail, and operate most easily with a certain detachment. They construct rules-based analyses of the natural world, inanimate objects and events.
Aside from what the psychologists say (and maybe you don't trust them), I think that it's just plain obvious so I'm surprised that so many people feel differently. Of course, "LiveJournal users who read xkcd" is probably not representative of the population as a whole, and maybe it's just a vocal minority who happens to be commenting on this. Also I probably shouldn't expect to be aware of what's common knowledge. What do you think, dear reader?
I think we humans in general are, by necessity, incorrect about most of our assumptions (which is aided by selective memory), but that's a subject for a different post which I'll probably never write.
In any case, I'm going to continue not approaching young women on the bus.
Current Music: The Mars Volta - Desperate Graves
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September 14th, 2009
01:56 am - Adventures in Computing
I feel like I should write something here, so I'll write boringly about my computer. Oh boy!
A few weeks ago my computer stopped working. This happens occasionally, but I was hoping it wouldn't happen for a while since most of my computer was new in April. The major exception to this was that both of my hard drives were about 6 years old. I unplugged my secondary hard drive, which contained my music, and the computer worked again. I looked for a new hard drive and meanwhile could only listen to the stuff I'd copied to my main hard drive in order to put on my mp3 player (which, currently, is one of those things that I don't know where it is). Then, a week later, the other hard drive stopped working! I fiddled around with it for a while, looking stuff up on the slow computer in the living room. Whenever something goes wrong with my computer I search Google for the error message. The results I get never help but I still do it. I looked at a few things, and then that computer stopped working! Gosh and golly! Eventually I decided to reinstall Windows XP on my computer, and that fixed it. I lost some data but most of it survived.
Finally I had enough money to get a new hard drive (250 GB for $45 from newegg.com). It arrived to a chorus of imaginary huzzahs, but my troubles weren't over just becase I spent money on something. It's a(n) SATA hard drive, which I hadn't even heard of before I was looking into getting a new computer this March. The computer came with SATA cables, but I didn't need them then so I put them somewhere safe so I could use them in the future. I do not know where that was. I looked everywhere in the apartment but couldn't find them. I was unhappy. The next day I went to the thrift store at Free Geek and got the appropriate cable for $1. Hooray for free geeks! I connected my new hard drive to my computer, and then it worked, right? NO!!! Of course not!!! Computers are too difficult for that to happen!!! The BIOS recognized the hard drive, and XP's device manager said it was working, but it wasn't! Well, installing XP on the hard drive caused XP to recognize the hard drive. I have installed XP a great many times. When I was in college I had the product key memorized.
Previously, I had downloaded Windows 7 Ultimate. (Note to FBI: Don't read this.) I wanted to save it on a DVD, but the disc drive I absorbed from kotra has lost the ability to read DVDRs. It can do everything else; presumably it can write to a DVDR, but since it can't read it it gives errors when I try to write something. It would have saved a lot of trouble with the hard drive if I'd had a DVD, but instead I had to load it from the .iso within Windows XP. At first it gave a few errors, which is to be expected because computers are evil whores, but eventually it installed fine so now I have Windows 7. I've never used Vista, but since I was getting a new hard drive and 7 just became available, I thought it would be a good time to upgrade... illegally. Windows 7 sure is purty-lookin', and I like some of its unnecessary features, like the thing on my desktop that tells me what the temperature is. (I'm sure I could get something like that in XP, but... shut up.) It's also faster, though that may be partially because I have a lot more hard drive space free. My computer has 4 GB of RAM, but it only reads 3 GB; I was hoping it would read all 4 in 7 but it says "4.00 GB (3.00 GB usable)". Oh well.
There are, of course, problems, but I've mostly gotten around them. I hear it's not as unwelcoming of hardware as Vista was, but the decent sound card I got from Free Geek doesn't work. When I plugged my bass into the motherboard's default sound card microphone whatsit, I discovered to my annoyed horror that there was a delay of about half a second from when I hit a note to when it sounded in my headphones. I attempted to fix this by using Microsoft Virtual PC to install XP inside 7 so that I could use my sound card, but I guess it only allows virtual hardware instead of access to actual hardware, or something, or something. I found some software that works with my motherboard's sound system, and so now it works okay, except the sound only comes through in the left channel (which I think is normal but my sound card got around it) and my left ear don't work too good. Other complaints to complain about: 7's file system is a bit complicated, at least for me; I'm sure it's much simpler for someone who isn't used to file systems, but it took me a while to relearn where everything was. I find it a bit annoying that it won't let me access my Documents and Settings folder, but not as much as when I thought I still needed to get to My Documents from there. Also, MS Paint is greatly improved, which sucks for me because I can't use it to do my comic or else the lines will look smooth. Ew. It can't correctly save the gray I use to GIFs, which the previous Paint also couldn't do, so I used to save to BMPs and use IrfanView to save as a GIF. Strangely, IrfanView can't save the GIFs correctly either now! My solution was to copy mspaint.exe from XP and use that, then save the files as PNGs. Ping!
In summary: Computers exist to make me miserable.
Current Music: The Mars Volta - Desperate Graves
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September 1st, 2009
12:37 pm - here rests a woodman of the world
Friday I went to the plasma center, thinking I was getting there just before it closed. I didn't remember until I saw the almost empty parking lot that they close earlier on Fridays. To make the trip not a waste, I went to the cemetery across the street and took pictures of tombstones I found interesting. I sent these to Twitter but I think it would be good to put them all on one page so here they are. These were taken on my camera phone so the quality is non-great, but I think they're still worth looking at.
( Immortalized )
I left feeling pensive and a bit depressed, and also uneasy about our rituals for the dead. I feel separated from mainstream society especially in this regard. Joining together and talking about the dead person makes sense, but to gather in a room with the painted corpse ("oh, they did a wonderful job with her!") and then bury them in a casket below a granite slab that tells us who once occupied the remains... that seems wrong to me. I like the tombs but it's not how I'd want to be remembered (burn me, but take anything useful out first), though the rememberance isn't for the dead but for the living, so it should be up to them.
I worry I'm being creepy or morbid with these pictures. I guess I don't mind being weird as long as I know if I'm being weird or not. I don't generally see collections of pictures of tombstones (my sister did this once, but that doesn't tell me anything). They're there to be looked at... or is it just for people who knew the person? I don't want to be normal but I don't want to creep anyone out too much. (People who stop liking me tend not to think I deserve to be told why, so then I just worry about everything.) Maybe this is just not interesting. Sometimes I'm interested in something and then hit with the disappointment of seeming to be the only one.
Current Mood: neurotic
Current Music: Serj Tankian - Elect The Dead
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August 21st, 2009
10:34 am - The Moving Of Things
On Tuesday I helped the guy known as HomeFries move into his new apartment. He lives 200 blocks away from here; technically it's not in Portland but I got there on one city bus. His apartment is right next to the huge community college he's going to (they should call it a community university). We unloaded stuff from his recently purchased van, which was somewhat troublesome because we had to carry things up the stairs in unusually hot weather, and his arm wasn't working right, and my arms are just not strong at all. Then we went to his mother's place in rural Oregon; this was the farthest I've traveled since I moved to Portland two and a half years ago. We hung around there for a while then put more stuff in the van, including some mattresses. The top mattress folded up and fit inside, but the lower wouldn't part wooden do that (uh, I think I got the "W" words mixed up) so his step-father tied it to the roof and we took everything back to the apartment and blah blah blah.
I took some pictures as we were unloading, but then the batteries ran out. ( Click, you! )
Current Music: The Mars Volta - Since We've Been Wrong
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August 7th, 2009
12:23 am
Twitter is down again. Um.
Current Music: Metallica - The Unforgiven
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July 30th, 2009
12:01 pm - waffling
Since I got this old waffle iron (here's a video) I've been having a waffle for a meal almost every day. I was vaguely aware that this was a cheap way to eat stuff (I was thinking I was doing well when I spent less than $2 for a meal) but I never really thought about it until recently, when I made vague estimations that surprised me at how cheap it was.
Now I will find out how much it is exactly.
Ingredients, followed by the price of the packages I buy and how much of the package is used (but not in that order!!):
- 3 cups flour: 16.5% of $1.60 = 26¢
- 6 tablespoons sugar: 10.5% of $2.13 = 22¢
- 6 tablespoons margarine: 18.75% of $1 = 19¢
- 3 eggs: 25% of $3.79* = 95¢
- 2 cups milk: 12.5% of $2 = 25¢
*I tend to get the "cage free" eggs, because the way factory farms get the normal kind of eggs is the very definition of animal cruelty, so I pay extra for at least the illusion of not supporting that. Of course the method of getting milk and the occasional ham I buy is probably not better, so maybe I'm just silly. A regular carton of a dozen eggs costs about $1.20.
(There's also 2 teaspoons of salt and 3 teaspoons of baking powder but that's so cheap it's not worth counting.)
Okay, so the final tally of a batch the waffle batter I make is $1.87 ($1.22 with cheaper eggs). This is a double batch so that I don't have to keep making it all the time; it yields about 10 waffles. Let us round up and call that 20¢ a waffle. Not bad.
This of course doesn't include the cheap corn-based syrup I pour on them. I don't feel like figuring that part out.
Current Mood: the one where there's a heat wave
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July 22nd, 2009
04:05 am - all my bass
I was looking at some older entries and I was surprised to discover that I haven't really written anything about my bass guitar. I got it in January from a guy who advertised on craigslist. He asked for $50 for it, which is quite cheap, but that was because it didn't quite work right. The nut, which is the part near the head that holds the strings up, was worn away at the bottom, making the bottom string unplayable. Here is a picture. Also, the guy recommended getting new strings. Well, it took me a really long time to get it fixed, because I'm that sort of person. Eventually, the top string broke so I sprung into action! I contacted a few nearby guitar repair places and was amazed at the prices; it would cost about $65 to have someone replace the nut and put new strings on. I decided I would do it myself, and I finally got around to it a few days ago. My friend known as HomeFries is staying with us as he sorts his life out, and he also likes stringy music things so we decided it would be fun to go check out a guitar store and get parts and play around with stuff. I got a nut for $8 and some strings for $18. (When asked what kind of strings I wanted, I responded, "The cheapest.") I took the old strings off and replaced the nut (well, Fries mostly did that part) and put the new strings on (with the help of a website that told me how) and now my bass is finally fully functional. HOORAY!
We made a video where I play part of Jupiter by Holst (something I like to play on various guitars; it's really neat how it starts on the lowest note on my bass and goes up to the highest, though not in the original key) and Fries acts goofy.
Current Mood: thirsty
Current Music: The Neville Brothers - Way Down in the Hole
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July 16th, 2009
12:04 am - you shot my banana
This a thing I did where I was intending to take a picture of my face once a day for a while. (It lasted four months, March 18 to July 12.) This was mostly to document the growth of my beard. Unfortunately it didn't work out well: right after I started, my computer died so I kept using kotra's laptop for it, and the lighting kept being different for each picture, and I generally didn't know what I was doing, so the beginning doesn't look very good. I took out several pictures from this period. Also, near the end I kept forgetting to do it. For some reason I have trouble doing something once a day after a while, perhaps because I have trouble with any sort of routine (because of that sleeping thing that I don't feel like explaining again). Anyway, it still looks kinda neat and I hope it's enjoyable to people who aren't me.
Also, I want to tell you that opening a banana from the bottom is much easier than from the stem. It does mean you have to deal with the icky part on that end but I guess that's edible.
Current Music: The Colbert Report's theme, which is like The Daily Show's theme but more boring
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July 13th, 2009
02:10 pm
Hi, remember me? I haven't written anything in here in a long time and I'm not sure why. Oh well.
Here are some more pictures of the plants I'm growing. Previous plant picture postings are here and here.
( We are going to have so many tomatoes... )
Current Music: The Mars Volta - Desperate Graves
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July 3rd, 2009
08:14 am - pro-war is the new anti-war
NOAM CHOMSKY: In AfPak, Afghanistan-Pakistan, as the region is now called, Obama is building enormous new embassies and other facilities on the model of the city within a city in Baghdad. These are like no embassies anywhere in the world. And they are signs of an intention to be there for a long time.
Right now in Iraq, something interesting is happening. Obama is pressing the Iraqi government not to permit the referendum that’s required by the Status of Forces Agreement. That’s an agreement that was forced down the throats of the Bush administration, which had to formally renounce its primary war aims in the face of massive Iraqi resistance. Washington’s current objection to the referendum was explained two days ago by New York Times correspondent Alissa Rubin: Obama fears that the Iraqi population might reject the provision that delays US troop withdrawal to 2012. They might insist on immediate departure of US forces. Iraqi analyst in London—the head of the Iraqi Foundation for Democracy and Development in London—it’s quite pro-Western—he explained, “This is an election year for Iraq; no one wants to appear that he is appeasing the Americans. Anti-Americanism is popular now in Iraq,” as indeed it’s been throughout, facts that are familiar to anyone who’s read the Western-run polls, including Pentagon-run polls. Well, the current US efforts to prevent the legally required referendum are extremely revealing. Sometimes they’re called “democracy promotion.”
Well, while Obama’s signaling very clearly his intention to establish a firm and large-scale presence in the region, he’s also, as you know, sharply escalating the AfPak war, following Petraeus’s strategy to drive the Taliban into Pakistan, with potentially awful results for this extremely dangerous and unstable state, which is facing insurrections throughout its territory.
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/7/3/noam_chomsky_on_crisis_and_hope
Current Music: The Mars Volta - Luciforms
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June 27th, 2009
08:18 pm - hi
This is my fourth entry in June and the month is almost over. I don't like going too long without posting here but there's nothing I really feel like writing about. Um. Hmm.
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June 10th, 2009
01:22 am - Room Dog's Secret Santa (and all her hospital friends)
Hi, I did that thing I do about twice a year where I make a mix CD of stuff I want to hear or want myself to hear (there's a difference) and then I listen to it a lot. This will also be good to give some variety to my MP3 player because it doesn't hold nearly as much as it's supposed to.
If you want a copy of this let me know and I'll send you a copy of this (hopefully you live in the US; otherwise perhaps you could send me the equivalent of a few dollars) because I like inflicting my music on people.
Track list: ( Tracklist! )
Current Music: NOTHING
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June 5th, 2009
06:12 pm - wofl
My friend was wondering about the waffle making process, so I made a video of me making a waffle. It includes some non-great improvisation I did on my bass, which now only has two functioning strings; I should really get it fixed.
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