Thunder again. Lots of walking, got to carry a very cute girl several blocks on my shoulders. Broke some stairs in an old house downtown. Walked right up to the water's edge and once again got the best seat in the house. Today: bruises.

Drink some coffee, head to work, get ready for next week.

Ever boggle at the numbers when people start talking about the government?

This is a visual view of how it all breaks down.

Fascinating stuff.

Maido has the best sushi in Louisville. Toki blesses her rice.

Mmmmmmmmmm

Today is one of those days that makes you believe. I walk in fresh from recovery from papers, taxes, and lots of sleep deprivation over the past few days. I talk about how the dryer is ghetto, but it keeps on working, and how we love our ghetto dryer. Within 1 hour, the dryer is not producing any heat. For those not familiar with screenprinting, it's the most important piece of equipment in the shop. There's also some other synchronicity-type events. Memetech is officially freaked out all day. Not to mention drying shirts temporarily with a hair dryer.

Later in the day, right as we have overcome all difficulties, the dryer begins to work again.

Life is freakin wierd.

The main decision made today is that we're going to go for the record of most tshirts worn at one time on one person. It stands at 160 right now. We're going to own it. The only question is which one of us is going to do it. And all the shirts we wear are going to be memetech printed shirts.

j2

There is a giant hexagon on the north pole of saturn. Voyager saw it 26 years ago and people thought it was a fluke. It's still there.

It has a weather system inside it.

Let's go check that out, shall we?

Last week was CRAZY. Lots of orders, lots of hustle, lots of school. Two papers done, skipped the rough draft on the third one. Just two papers left to go, one on the Singularity as Technologically Flavored Utopianism, and the Russian Military Modernization Led To Authoritarian Nightmare Country one.

My Russian history prof evilly suggested that that if Dead Souls was good, we should read War and Peace. So... I never got into it the first time, but now all the history background totally makes it make sense. You've got all these well educated, enlightened nobles, but the ugly truth is that they are all only able to fund their pursuits on the backs of slave labor. And of course, Napoleon shows up. The underlying contrast between elegance and brutality- it's underneath every society to some degree, but the more I learn about Russia the more I see what we take for granted here in the US.

So today is an alternation between first quarter data entry, and Tolstoy. And some writing.

I'm making peace with not being able to launch Untranslatable again at DEMF, but I'm still going to try. I'm just not going to really be able to do more than think of designs until after graduation. Oh well.

New concept/phrase:
post-retro: getting over recycling the past as a source of culture, and looking instead to the present or the future.

Ok, back to work.

My neighbor in the back half of the house has moved out, and no replacement has appeared, so I can be loud. I've got a slow aggregation of paper that's twice as long as it's supposed to be, and I think rather than chop it up, I'll just turn it in. I got a defective lamp to work. Macgyver would be proud, I used a laundry pole of a slightly larger diameter to go outside the stripped threaded made_in_wherever cheapness. I loaded it with energy-efficient tubey flourescent bulbs and now suddenly I can read in the front room. Someday, I aspire to have a comfortable chair, possibly a couch. A medially rotated lifestyle, apparently, is where you spend too much time hunched and slouched. I am the freakin poster child for this lifestyle. I wonder how much effort it takes to change deep rooted posture habits when you're already 37. Has to be tried.

School's almost over. I'm going to start talking to the void a lot now. You, the unnamed reader, are an unknown. Probably only AI's from the post-singular era will be bothering to read the whole web, trying to get your crazy posthuman mind about the twisted monkeys who turned themselves into you. But for anyone who cares, I’ll tell the story.

Next week I will accomplish multiple impossible things. This weekend, three papers to write:

Topic in Russian History: The Russian Army was woke up to the Rennaisance and found itself way behind Europe, to the point that even overwhelming numerical advantage just didn't cut it. Eventually they bought a passable military through foreign servicemen and began to adapt. The problem of playing catch-up militarily put additional stress on a country with the greatest geographical challenges in existence. In the rule of Peter the Great and later Catherine substantial modernization took place, but at the cost of exacerbating the gulf between serf and ruling class. How did the Russian military modernize over time and what were the side effects on Russian society and culture that resulted? (With one eye towards the Revolution)

Topic in Equine Business: The Standardbred horse industry is currently facing a demographic crisis along with the rest of horse racing. With an older crowd and competition from other forms of gambling, the industry faces the divide between the states which have slots at their tracks, and those who don’t. Ohio and Kentucky don’t, and face serious competition from states that do. With or without slots, what does the industry look like in five years? What can be done to promote the sport to the public at large, to catch the imagination of new enthusiasts?

Topic in Philosophy: If there is no substance dualism, and the mind and the brain are one in the same, how do we reconcile the experience of the human consciousness with what little we know of the mechanics of neurochemistry? Does the mechanical paradigm hold? What is the difference, if any, from a value held in the memory of a computer running a program and the presence of a thought in a human brain? Are computers eventually capable of thought? And if so, what is unique about the human brain that they would have to duplicate – Ie, the interaction of the senses and the body and language and all that. This one needs some work.

Clay Buffet was off the chain last night. It was full of people, Daveer’s fleur de lys stuff was awesome, and the band was so retro they brought their own bale of hay. Tight.

Lunchtime.

Two completely idiotic things I did today:

Complained about some song sampling Vanilla Ice, and how if Ice sold his soul he used a really good contract lawyer because his samples were still constantly being recycled. But no. I'm an idiot. It was a Bowie sample.

Actually mentioned in front of my philosophy class the Soviet Buran shuttle they found in some building in Bahrain. The shuttle's real, and at first internet articles suggested it had made an emergency landing at some airport in the Gulf and been stripped of electronics and abandoned. No, it was being shipped and the company doing the exhibition of it had gone bankrupt. I'm an idiot. I will believe anything sometimes.

Then again otherwise it was a really good day.