Argh! Today's going to be a long and painful day… I only managed about two hours of sleep and am really sore, and it's off to the gym shortly, and then I'm getting my chestpiece finished (hopefully finished anyway).
I'm just really paranoid about getting hooked on pills… I already have enough of a drug problem.
So I think that I might be getting sensation back in my leg because every time I take a step, it feels like I'm slamming my foot down into the ground hard enough to rip the flesh off my leg… Sort of like a deep internal bruise being hit really hard. It's weird because I still can't feel anything in the skin, but there's a creeping agony in behind the skin that I think is probably a good sign in general.
It's funny — getting this new computer has actually made me feel quite a bit better too. Because I have about “three good hours” a day where I'm really thinking clearly, it's really really nice being able to use that time effectively. I think I was getting really depressed because I'd think of things I wanted to work on, and by the time I had access to a machine I could do it on, my pain levels would have caught up to me and I couldn't do it. And even though I'm probably in just as much pain if not more, it's a lot easier to deal with if you don't also have to worry about how debilitating it is.
That said, it's still tough keeping up! I have so many things I've told so many people I'd do for them that have been delayed too long… So hopefully my “feeling better” kick keeps going! Well, time to get Nefarious from school, then finish today's update, do a little painting, have sushi, and watch Survivor.
The levels have been corrected on this photo but other than that it's pretty much as it came off my camera. It's as close as I can get to wet plate photography with my digital camera, haha…
Anyway, in real weplate photography, I'll post a full review soon, but I got Matt's book in the mail this morning (a book of wetplate suspension photos) — a series of dreamlike images and portraits captured at ROP events over the past few years.
Other than that, this Mini billboard cracks me up.
Not that the Toronto police union is known for friendliness!
I taught Nefarious to braid a couple days ago, which is rapidly getting her play-doh all mixed up! Other than that I got a kick out of the recent outing of Todd Goldman as an art-thief (a la the various “tattoo plagiarism” articles that have run on ModBlog) — the Urban Counterfeiters and You Thought We Wouldn't Notice blogs look like fun follow-ups. That said, I don't really have a problem with art “theft” — my issue is that there's a total lack of credit (and that it's often an inferior copy being sold for the big dollars).
So yesterday a friend asked me, “what couldn't you live without?”
I thought about it for a minute, and couldn't think of anything. Don't get me wrong — I don't really want to lose anything, but there's nothing I couldn't lose. He asked me if that applied to my computer — I said sure, if you can find me a job. Hell, if I could maintain a decent quality of life for the folks who rely on me, I'd make the trade in a second! He asked me if it applied to people, which is harder, because obviously I don't want anything bad to happen to anyone I know, and I'd like to continue knowing them. However, it's true there as well.
The fact is that you will eventually lose every single thing you have. You will lose every single person that's dear to you. Even if you live your life “perfectly”, you will eventually die and the people and things around you will die. Whether you fight it or not, everything you love will be taken from you in time. So enjoy it while you've got it, because it won't last. All you have are moments in time that are gone an instant after you experience thtem. All ships are sinking ships (some just take longer than others), so really, if the band's still playing, keep dancing until you drown I figure? Assuming there are no free lifeboats.
Lifeboat = almost always better than drowning!
I read this story about dirt bacteria co-evolving with humans into an anti-depressant and thought it was funny because I've been telling people lately that I really want to move somewhere where I can safely eat the dirt. If I remember right, something like 90% of the biomass on the planet are various forms of soil biota, which we probably understand even less than the oceans, and they're far more deeply integrated into our day-to-day experience than other imperceptible life… I wonder if this dark era that's been evolving (where depression is chic) over the last four hundred years is actually just a byproduct of environmental damage?
Along those lines, I saw another story about declining fertility rates, but in this case, more women being born than men (from plastics, smoking, etc.). Men already produce half as much sperm as they did fifty years ago. Because male-producing sperm are weaker than female-producing sperm (which are slower, but far stronger), I think we'll see not only less and less children being born in general, but specifically fewer and fewer men. I don't know if I agree with various “grim visions” being floated around, because I think that we'll destroy ourselves before we destroy the Earth — or at least reduce our numbers enough to let the Earth recover while we reconsider how we've been running things.
Maybe I'm just saying that because I'm all weirded out by my heart pausing every fifteen minutes or because I can't remember stuff anyway so I try not to get attatched, but I do think it's true. That said, I don't think people should really think about it, because it's pointless to stress over anything you can't change, and you can't change the fact that your experiences on this world are finite (short of the singularity coming true that is — and I think that our deep environmental integration will make “downloading” or otherwise digitizing our essence much more difficult than expected).
I think I've done some fairly big things and been involved in pretty cool projects… but I've got to admit that when I watch Trailer Park Boys I really think to myself that I could be really happy on $17 a day, selling stolen meat in a parking lot, growing dope, and living in a car! Hahaha, if only I didn't have all these responsibilities that make that impossible.
Links that will be very interesting for nerdy folks:
The last article, especially if you couple it with ideas from the first two (which talk about new ways to interpret and use large datasets or unusual data overlays), is very interesting and I think will make some people think about a ton of other concepts (because the same concepts could be applied to audio processing and more).
