Rest in peace to my mothafucka anonymous bird.
It was a strange experience; I saw the bird fly in front of me, swoop down with grace, and either the world became slow motion or it was engulfed in the slipstream of the car. I watched it slowly flapping its wings and tumble out of control and then strike the nose of the car at a hundred miles an hour with a small thud.
Don't worry if you see God first; tell Him shit got worse.
Sorry I haven't published that article yet — I had to give Jon a ride in to the train station. Traffic was really heavy, and when I saw a young couple hitchhiking (in the opposite direction of the way I was driving) I assumed they'd be picked up momentarily. I told Jon that I always pick up hitchhikers and it shocks me that others don't.
Anyway, big surprise… When I left town they were still walking and no one had picked them up. It was kind of crowded in my little car but the guy's girlfriend fit no problem; they were a nice quiet couple that just needed a ride. I drove a little out of my way to get them where they needed, but hey, I was in a car and they were on their feet — any decent person would have done so in my opinion.
About three years ago after some dude got robbed by a hitchhiker it started getting really hard to get picked up around here; they might have had to walk all the way to town (about three hours). It's just really sad that decency and common courtesy so often lose out to fear.
I just finished writing the first draft of my newest column, “Emulating and Idolizing Indigenous Cultures is Stupid and Dangerous,” which points out that the Modern Primitive movement actually has very little to do with indigenous cultures, but more so with a strange (and deeply inaccurate) romanticized notion of them — and that actually holding up indigenous cultures at this point in history could be disasterous. I'll probably publish it tomorrow after proofing it and all that.
Anyway, I wanted to share one of the quotes I use in it.
It is better to do your own duty
badly than to perfectly do
another's; when you do your duty
you are naturally free from sin.
- the Bhagavad Gita: ch.18 v.47
My core premise is that we have reached a point in our cultural evolution where we should shift our emphasis from empowering society to empowering — and ennobling — the individual above all else (“primitive” cultures tended to use body modification and ritual as an act of social control — it was system sustaining behavior).
And I'm not too cool with the system and it'll be a cold day in hell before I smile at watching body modification fulfill that role in modern times!
I've been fiddling with another rendering engine; this one is just another comparison engine, but with the advantage of juxtaposing the data in a single grid. The color of the squares at present is an average of the size of the value in comparison to the row average, the column average, and the overall average (but I'm experimenting with some other schemes as you can see by the third image).
I'm hoping that it'll be useful for identifying “hotspots” that might not otherwise be apparent, but so far I'm not convinced it's useful. Well, I really should get around to the interface, right?
OK, I've got the rendering engine complete for the survey system. It's not really the prettiest on some factors, but it's functional and ultimately if someone wants to use the data they're going to use their own art department anyway… So I figure as long as it communicates effectively it's cool.
Those are actual unaltered screen shots of the software running live on my local machine… Now to upload the data files and build the web interface. You will definitely be able to start playing with this today unless some sort of local apocalypse hits.
Guess who's playing tonight twenty minutes down the street?
