When the ignorant mind looks at a card trick, it sees magic.
When the thinking mind looks at a card trick, it is deceived,
too trapped in the thoughts of how it all works, what the gimmick is.
An awakened mind is more likely to find the card stuck underneath the table, the same card the thinking mind deduces through limited reasoning must be up the magician's sleeve.
This is a whole other kind of magic, the kind that can be seen in reality.
Thursday, February 28, 2008
Thursday, February 21, 2008
Rent A Kitty
Disclaimer: I actually like cats and care about animal rights, and would never do this in real life... well... unless it made me really rich :)
I don't know if I've managed to find weird friends, or if this is just something a lot of people do and avoid talking about it, but one of the most entertaining boredom killers for me is to think of absurd, disgusting ideas and discuss them with friends. I often do this simultaneously with various friends over chat to see what their similarities and differences in reactions are. Here are four anonymized conversations to give you a sample.
Conversation 1:
me: I had an idea for a service
A: heh
me: I actually didn't think that part through
me: hmm... just parked
A: maybe someone else had the same idea and got stuck on the logistics of handling that many cats
me: Well if you think about it
A: heh
me: and if you could sell a few from 'thematurekitty.com '
A: that doesn't sound good
me: for people who don't want the burden of a baby kitten
A: true
me: try to keep it at a constant growth rate proportional to the demand
Conversation 2:
me: idea for a web 2.0 money fest
B: what do you do with grown up ones?
me: Oh... I don't know. Give them to the Icanhascheezburger people?
B: I had an idea for a website a while back
Conversation 3:
me: I have a great idea that will make money flow like water
Conversation 4:
me: Get rich scheme...
I don't know if I've managed to find weird friends, or if this is just something a lot of people do and avoid talking about it, but one of the most entertaining boredom killers for me is to think of absurd, disgusting ideas and discuss them with friends. I often do this simultaneously with various friends over chat to see what their similarities and differences in reactions are. Here are four anonymized conversations to give you a sample.
Conversation 1:
me: I had an idea for a service
rent a kitty
you get a kitten for 6 weeks
and when it gets old
you return it for a new one
perpetual cuteness!
A: heh
I'm afraid to ask what you plan to do with all of the 6-week-old kittens. I actually like cats.
me: I actually didn't think that part through
give them to you, I guess
you got room for a few thousand cats?
A: I'm also quite afraid to try rentakitty.com... rule 34 being what it is
me: hmm... just parked
A: maybe someone else had the same idea and got stuck on the logistics of handling that many cats
me: Well if you think about it
you'd need breeders to keep up with demand
A: heh
me: and if you could sell a few from 'thematurekitty.
A: that doesn't sound good
me: for people who don't want the burden of a baby kitten
A: true
me: try to keep it at a constant growth rate proportional to the demand
I'll need some scientists and shit
and economists
it'll be a very complicated operation
Conversation 2:
me: idea for a web 2.0 money fest
"RentAKittie"
I mean... everyone loves how cute kittens are
but then they grow up
we solve that by swapping out your cat once every 6 weeks
B: what do you do with grown up ones?
me: Oh... I don't know. Give them to the Icanhascheezbur
B: I had an idea for a website a while back
Basically it is like American Idol, but with puppies
and people vote by donating money
me: ahahahaha
B: and the puppy with the least amount of money loses..... its life....
I wouldn't actually kill the puppy
just tell everyone I'm going to
then tons of people would donate
and I'd get lots of publicity
kind of like that dude with the bunny
me: lmmfao great idea
Conversation 3:
me: I have a great idea that will make money flow like water
"Rent A Kitty"
you give people a kitten for 6 weeks
and then when it gets old
replace it with a new one
perpetual cuteness
C: What will you do with all those cats?
me: you mean the leftovers
?
C: Yes.
me: idk. I guess I'll run the business in Calcutta
then it won't so much matter, now will it?
C: /me laughs.
me: maybe I'll run another site
'the mature kitty'
for people who don't want the burden of a young kitten
C: I'm sure your could work an affiliate deal with householdpetporn.com .
me: ahaha
actually... I'd probably keep the cats
We'd need breeders to keep up with demand
C: True.
me: ahaha... I told 4 people about that idea
and without hesitation
everyone asked
"What will you do with the cats?"
Conversation 4:
me: Get rich scheme...
rent a kitty
everyone loves cute... loveable kittens
but then they grow up!
so... 6 week rental then a replacement comes to your door!
D: whereas we, with no moral scruples about destroying the adult cats once they have outlived their usefulness, can take on the moral burden of doing so. A valuable service! kind of like confession.
me: ahahahaha
and to be fair, many will be needed to be retained for breeding
especially if the service takes off
D: true, only the cutest survive
me: We'll have a scale that measures how wuvable they are
maybe even a post-rental survey
is this kitten the most wuvable kitten you've ever seen?
we sort them in boxes based on that
and the ones that say "NO" just go into a giant pit of fire
and the ones that say "NO" just go into a giant pit of fire
D: also have an un-cute kitten service. Someone out there must need that.
me: and a mature cat service
so actually... we could probably cut down on disposal costs quite a bit
D: or just a service for peple who like to throw cats into pits of fire
me: if we learn how to operate in many niche markets
D: gotta run to class...
me: ooh, right, we could get paid for their labor
D: but this definitely has potential!
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Fuck the awesomebar, pass it on.
I'm enjoying the Firefox 3 builds, but the Awesome bar generally sucks, all around.
The reason?
Most hackers will expect when they type something like:
gma
you will get back a list of urls beginning with gma in your location bar. This is similar to the way that completion works on the command line and in our text editors, and is how Firefox has always worked up until now.
Instead, FF3 searches page titles, bookmarks, tags, recently visited urls, most visited urls, and does a full text search on these string rather than starting at the beginning of them. Great for people who don't know what a URL is, fucking unbearably annoying to someone who just wants to type two or three characters and be done with it.
I think the awesome bar would be quite awesome for some people, so long as it could be disabled. However, from the rumor-mill, it sounds like the FF2 url bar has been scrapped to avoid code bloat.
To me, this is just a sign of how Firefox is increasingly becoming an end user commodity, which encourages ass-raping developers in the name of more downloads. Sad... really
The reason?
Most hackers will expect when they type something like:
gma
you will get back a list of urls beginning with gma in your location bar. This is similar to the way that completion works on the command line and in our text editors, and is how Firefox has always worked up until now.
Instead, FF3 searches page titles, bookmarks, tags, recently visited urls, most visited urls, and does a full text search on these string rather than starting at the beginning of them. Great for people who don't know what a URL is, fucking unbearably annoying to someone who just wants to type two or three characters and be done with it.
I think the awesome bar would be quite awesome for some people, so long as it could be disabled. However, from the rumor-mill, it sounds like the FF2 url bar has been scrapped to avoid code bloat.
To me, this is just a sign of how Firefox is increasingly becoming an end user commodity, which encourages ass-raping developers in the name of more downloads. Sad... really
Thursday, February 14, 2008
This kind of thing cannot be tolerated
Disgusting. I'm glad this guy got suspended, and that's the least that should be done.
Friday, February 8, 2008
Rewrite
In a paper boat on a sea of ink I float along,
Waves of inspiration and clouds of doubt
see-saw at my heart's fulcrum
With a pen, no... a quill,
And a parchment, no... papyrus
I write the stories of 1000 men, no...
I write the story of a boy and a girl
The cute couple, they'rein love, infatuated, inordinary friends.
Not quite extraordinary, but far from normal, they dance.
And he is I and she is her and my only gift is the soul of a poet,
A gift weak enough to never pass as a day job!
And she is an enigma, a dark and beautiful marble soaked in fog.
Through our trust and honesty, I can still see her face staring back at me.
But what lies beyond the horizon?
I want to write us a love story, but maybe our destiny
points to simple companionship
They say it's not the writing, but the re-writing that counts.
They say that one should not ride magical sea tortoises at dawn.
But they seem to have forgotten, it's all turtles, all the way down.
Waves of inspiration and clouds of doubt
see-saw at my heart's fulcrum
With a pen, no... a quill,
And a parchment, no... papyrus
I write the stories of 1000 men, no...
I write the story of a boy and a girl
The cute couple, they're
Not quite extraordinary, but far from normal, they dance.
And he is I and she is her and my only gift is the soul of a poet,
A gift weak enough to never pass as a day job!
And she is an enigma, a dark and beautiful marble soaked in fog.
Through our trust and honesty, I can still see her face staring back at me.
But what lies beyond the horizon?
I want to write us a love story, but maybe our destiny
points to simple companionship
They say it's not the writing, but the re-writing that counts.
They say that one should not ride magical sea tortoises at dawn.
But they seem to have forgotten, it's all turtles, all the way down.
Monday, February 4, 2008
LJX: Looking Backwards, Looking Forwards
There is always something magical about art projects that seem to spring from the void. The LiveJournal Experiment (LJX) that has spilled across my blog for the last several days is one of those projects.
Now that the 'story' has been told, I can take you behind the scenes and explain what I was going for here. It may not make your jaw drop, but maybe a little insight will reveal that I wasn't just trying to avoid boredom; There was a message or two in this, after all.
At this point, if you haven't read the entire story, you really need to do so if you want this to make any sense. Here are the posts, in order:
As it turns out, at least in the meta-sense, this story was extremely present-tense. Throughout each post, typically any true event listed had actually occurred between the time of the previous post and the creation of a new one. In this way, you actually were viewing my life through a kaliedoscope for the last week and a half or so.
Because of this, all the ideas were fresh and unfiltered, which gives the story the unsettling realism that many people have commented on and at least a few have been fooled by. I wrote the first post originally without any disclaimers beyond a 'fiction' tag, which did result in a couple apologetic emails being sent, me being a bit embarrassed and not realizing how I probably tugged on some heartstrings by accident.
At the time of writing River of tears, I didn't have the idea for a continuous series in mind. I mostly thought that maybe I'd write stuff like that from time to time, in a LiveJournal style fashion to entertain folks. The idea was that drama like that *is* interesting, but it's usually quite unpleasant to look at when it involves real emotions. I figured, I could give people a glimpse of a train wreck without making them feel guilty for taking a macabre interest in the blood, guts, and burning bodies.
Ironically, fooling a few folks is what made me realized maybe there was something deeper here. The second post, River of Honey, was clearly marked fiction, but only at the end. My idea here was that everyone would have to remember the famous saying: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me"
Surprisingly enough, I did manage to fool some folks twice. This is when I started talking to my friends about maybe expanding the story to prove a point, which I hazily described as a desire to gut-punch the LJX readers until they gasped for an air of truth. Though the sentiments were generally similar among friends, Mark's words of caution stood out the most.
"People tend to believe they own their interactions with people"
Being me, my response was something similar to:
"Fuck them, that's not true. People own their reactions"
With this in mind, the actual motivation behind the LJX project was born. The goal was simple: to make the story mix enough reality and fiction so as to be impervious to analysis. It feels like human nature to try to rationalize other people's feelings and thoughts. It is all too tempting to take something that is said by someone you know and say "Oh, even though she said this, I know this is what she must really be feeling." Though that may feel like the natural approach, this is what permits us to apply our own ego to a situation and come up with a reaction that is appropriate for what *we* conceive the problem to be. My goal with LJX was to create a scenario in which it would be difficult to follow this common social dynamic.
My friends seemed sure that it'd be tough to get anyone to really trust me that any particular event had occurred in the remaining parts of the series, and they had an easy time convincing me of this. Instead, I chose to set up a believable tone, which was that this whole story was some sort of calling out from me, expressing my deep concern for an increasingly chaotic, even delusional, frame of mind. Whether people bought this or not, I think it was at least plausible, and that the effect was sufficient to keep people guessing.
The fourth post, Writing All Wrongs, managed to set this hook in deep. While the previous three posts had been romantic, this post broke down into some highly meta, highly self-doubting commentary. At this point, I realized that this was probably the climax of the work, and wished to put together 3 more posts so that there would be a nice symmetry and then kill the story off.
The fifth post, I had trouble coming up with a topic. I finally asked Jia, who some of you will know (through the kaleidoscope) as Bertha by now, and she told me Valentines Day. This brings us to the point where I got myself into hot water. Though I had been keeping Jia in the loop about this whole thing, and she seemed to be taking it in stride, this "Heart It Races" post I guess succeeded in the gut-punch effect I was going for, but on the wrong person.
We talked about this a lot, and I finally got around to explaining to her what I'm explaining now, which is the motivation for this whole project. Though I'm not quite sure it fixed the problem, giving her a clear sense of what I was doing and allowed her to at least tolerate my strange behaviour. Right now, you might be wondering to what extent this thing was a secret love letter to Jia, held out in the public for all to see. Anyway, Fuck all y'all who want to know that, one thing I'm glad about is now that LJX is finally done, I can keep parts of my reality private, where they belong. :)
However, I couldn't have the lead supporting character in this story fall out from under me, leaving me with nothing but a sad ending, so I asked Jia to write the 6th post. With this kind of arrangement, I knew for sure that I couldn't be blamed for anything sounding too real, or awkward. Without revealing too much, I was pleasantly surprised that she kept the theme of romance.
The original plan was that she'd send me a rough sketch of a post, and that I'd 'voice' it to make it more believable. However, after reading what she wrote, I decided to run it unedited. I thought the juxtapose was wonderful. I'm not sure what the reader's reaction was like, if you've been following this work, please share your thoughts. Nevertheless, I thought it was great to have a subtle shift in POV, which at least in my mind, forces the reader to completely and utterly give up on trying to 'figure me out' through this work. This red herring was a great set up for the final trick, which was to bring Mark into the picture.
Mark is my Go teacher, which somehow makes him my life coach as of late, whether or not he likes it. However, he was in an ideal position to serve as a quasi-independent observer, because he knows both about the goings on in my real life as well as this fictionalized account of it. His last post is a beautiful mockery of the whole thing, managing to continue to use bits of my real experiences and mash them up with other crap and a lot of sarcastic and ironic humor that shows the true spirit of this project.
Now I must admit, I highly doubt I've reached the lofty goal of totally changing your perception of the world. However, if you've gone through this whole thing, I bet you've felt *something*, and that's probably good enough. This was, first and foremost, an attempt at a 'nerd love story' in which the story itself is one big hacking problem. If it manages to make you think about the way you react to events in other people's lives that you witness, then I've really gotten more than I bargained for.
Thanks so much to Mark, Jia, and the several folks who have been giving me tips and ideas as they've read along. I'm actually glad most of that discussion went on outside of this blog, as it added to the shock factor in a number of places, or at least, so I hope.
Now that the story is over, Meta-Metta will now resume its regularly scheduled program of less whimsical persuits.
Now that the 'story' has been told, I can take you behind the scenes and explain what I was going for here. It may not make your jaw drop, but maybe a little insight will reveal that I wasn't just trying to avoid boredom; There was a message or two in this, after all.
At this point, if you haven't read the entire story, you really need to do so if you want this to make any sense. Here are the posts, in order:
- River of tears
- River of Honey
- The Trash Barge
- Writing All Wrongs
- Heart it Races
- Full Disclosure (non-fictional interlude)
- Knock, Knock, Knock (written by Jia W.)
- The source of the Nile (written by Mark M.)
As it turns out, at least in the meta-sense, this story was extremely present-tense. Throughout each post, typically any true event listed had actually occurred between the time of the previous post and the creation of a new one. In this way, you actually were viewing my life through a kaliedoscope for the last week and a half or so.
Because of this, all the ideas were fresh and unfiltered, which gives the story the unsettling realism that many people have commented on and at least a few have been fooled by. I wrote the first post originally without any disclaimers beyond a 'fiction' tag, which did result in a couple apologetic emails being sent, me being a bit embarrassed and not realizing how I probably tugged on some heartstrings by accident.
At the time of writing River of tears, I didn't have the idea for a continuous series in mind. I mostly thought that maybe I'd write stuff like that from time to time, in a LiveJournal style fashion to entertain folks. The idea was that drama like that *is* interesting, but it's usually quite unpleasant to look at when it involves real emotions. I figured, I could give people a glimpse of a train wreck without making them feel guilty for taking a macabre interest in the blood, guts, and burning bodies.
Ironically, fooling a few folks is what made me realized maybe there was something deeper here. The second post, River of Honey, was clearly marked fiction, but only at the end. My idea here was that everyone would have to remember the famous saying: "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me"
Surprisingly enough, I did manage to fool some folks twice. This is when I started talking to my friends about maybe expanding the story to prove a point, which I hazily described as a desire to gut-punch the LJX readers until they gasped for an air of truth. Though the sentiments were generally similar among friends, Mark's words of caution stood out the most.
"People tend to believe they own their interactions with people"
Being me, my response was something similar to:
"Fuck them, that's not true. People own their reactions"
With this in mind, the actual motivation behind the LJX project was born. The goal was simple: to make the story mix enough reality and fiction so as to be impervious to analysis. It feels like human nature to try to rationalize other people's feelings and thoughts. It is all too tempting to take something that is said by someone you know and say "Oh, even though she said this, I know this is what she must really be feeling." Though that may feel like the natural approach, this is what permits us to apply our own ego to a situation and come up with a reaction that is appropriate for what *we* conceive the problem to be. My goal with LJX was to create a scenario in which it would be difficult to follow this common social dynamic.
My friends seemed sure that it'd be tough to get anyone to really trust me that any particular event had occurred in the remaining parts of the series, and they had an easy time convincing me of this. Instead, I chose to set up a believable tone, which was that this whole story was some sort of calling out from me, expressing my deep concern for an increasingly chaotic, even delusional, frame of mind. Whether people bought this or not, I think it was at least plausible, and that the effect was sufficient to keep people guessing.
The fourth post, Writing All Wrongs, managed to set this hook in deep. While the previous three posts had been romantic, this post broke down into some highly meta, highly self-doubting commentary. At this point, I realized that this was probably the climax of the work, and wished to put together 3 more posts so that there would be a nice symmetry and then kill the story off.
The fifth post, I had trouble coming up with a topic. I finally asked Jia, who some of you will know (through the kaleidoscope) as Bertha by now, and she told me Valentines Day. This brings us to the point where I got myself into hot water. Though I had been keeping Jia in the loop about this whole thing, and she seemed to be taking it in stride, this "Heart It Races" post I guess succeeded in the gut-punch effect I was going for, but on the wrong person.
We talked about this a lot, and I finally got around to explaining to her what I'm explaining now, which is the motivation for this whole project. Though I'm not quite sure it fixed the problem, giving her a clear sense of what I was doing and allowed her to at least tolerate my strange behaviour. Right now, you might be wondering to what extent this thing was a secret love letter to Jia, held out in the public for all to see. Anyway, Fuck all y'all who want to know that, one thing I'm glad about is now that LJX is finally done, I can keep parts of my reality private, where they belong. :)
However, I couldn't have the lead supporting character in this story fall out from under me, leaving me with nothing but a sad ending, so I asked Jia to write the 6th post. With this kind of arrangement, I knew for sure that I couldn't be blamed for anything sounding too real, or awkward. Without revealing too much, I was pleasantly surprised that she kept the theme of romance.
The original plan was that she'd send me a rough sketch of a post, and that I'd 'voice' it to make it more believable. However, after reading what she wrote, I decided to run it unedited. I thought the juxtapose was wonderful. I'm not sure what the reader's reaction was like, if you've been following this work, please share your thoughts. Nevertheless, I thought it was great to have a subtle shift in POV, which at least in my mind, forces the reader to completely and utterly give up on trying to 'figure me out' through this work. This red herring was a great set up for the final trick, which was to bring Mark into the picture.
Mark is my Go teacher, which somehow makes him my life coach as of late, whether or not he likes it. However, he was in an ideal position to serve as a quasi-independent observer, because he knows both about the goings on in my real life as well as this fictionalized account of it. His last post is a beautiful mockery of the whole thing, managing to continue to use bits of my real experiences and mash them up with other crap and a lot of sarcastic and ironic humor that shows the true spirit of this project.
Now I must admit, I highly doubt I've reached the lofty goal of totally changing your perception of the world. However, if you've gone through this whole thing, I bet you've felt *something*, and that's probably good enough. This was, first and foremost, an attempt at a 'nerd love story' in which the story itself is one big hacking problem. If it manages to make you think about the way you react to events in other people's lives that you witness, then I've really gotten more than I bargained for.
Thanks so much to Mark, Jia, and the several folks who have been giving me tips and ideas as they've read along. I'm actually glad most of that discussion went on outside of this blog, as it added to the shock factor in a number of places, or at least, so I hope.
Now that the story is over, Meta-Metta will now resume its regularly scheduled program of less whimsical persuits.
The source of the Nile
As far as I know, this is the end of this; consider this speck of world fully explored. Possibility will have to encompass something greater.
As I sat down with my coffee and muffin, I read over again where I've been recently. It's funny, I've been in on the secret from almost the beginning, and so have you, but trying to see it all from an outsider's perspective is still daunting. Hell, even seeing it from my own perspective is daunting.
For example: "I" know that I hate coffee, but *I* don't know that. Or is it that I gave up coffee, and have just been trying to tell myself that I hate it? Either way, here I am, drinking the coffee, hating it. My relationship with the remaining half-muffin is even more complex.
Wait... what's that inside the muffin? A slip of paper? It's a chinese fortune muffin? But my fortune is just a bunch of random words, strung together. It's too early in the morning and late at night for this. I almost gave up and asked a bro for help. In fact, I tried to, but fortunately inspiration struck, and the bro was pretty useless anyway.
7:00 AM me: fuck! I totally don't get this puzzle Bertha sent me
7:06 AM me: whoa
solved it :)
7:14 AM bro: hiya bro.
what's the puzzle?
7:15 AM me: holiday commemorate continue somehow acceptance military
sometimes
revolve pretend truthful breakup without everywhere computer downtown
girlfriend cuddling thought nineteen counterpart
I was trying too hard
:)
7:17 AM bro: hm, I'm not getting it...
7:19 AM me: it looks too much like spam!
but the solution is dead simple
7:32 AM bro: still nothing, unless she's saying she wants go out with
you on valentine's day, if the answer has anything to do with the
semantics of the words.
but I doubt that it does. still overthinking on the form of the words
me: hah, I didn't get that if it's in there
The answer is simply a numeric reduction
only one letter from each word is used
bro: hm. I've tried like 8 forms of that :)
me: But I think you got stuck in the same trap as me
bro: probably
me: but it's because I was looking at the whole sequence
not the individual words
as it turns out, she just uses G as a mask on each word
so you pluck the 7th letter out of each, and you get it
7:35 AM bro: awww
I had tried up to the 4th letter. I suck.
It's hard to keep up when the messages are like this, a perfect combination of obscure and obvious, trite and profound. And the messages are everywhere now: the bottom of the cup of coffee has a rot13 sonnet. The slight disturbance of the fabric of the futon is a calligraphy that demands interpretation. If I just think about it long enough, everything will make sense. Last night's rooftop vision will mesh seamlessly with my breakup with Alyssa which will tie back in to the view from east rock and the arrangement of cranberries (or is it chocolate chips) in the muffin. The knots in my hair contain knowledge the world was not meant to know.
But then, it's all at a bit of a remove, too. I'm seeing the whole world wrapped in its significance, but then it breaks down again into the meager stream of bits with which I interact with the world. The thin gruel of a chat room through which I can query why things are and how they became, but never truly experience them as they are. I can influence events only indirectly, as if by suggestion, but never truly choose. The action is always flowing at least two steps ahead of understanding.
There is knocking at the door again! It's some kind of pattern... no... not morse code... something a little bit trickier than that.... My mind whirls with the possibilities.
But then, I suppose I could just open it and find out.
Helle ilotes!
As I sat down with my coffee and muffin, I read over again where I've been recently. It's funny, I've been in on the secret from almost the beginning, and so have you, but trying to see it all from an outsider's perspective is still daunting. Hell, even seeing it from my own perspective is daunting.
For example: "I" know that I hate coffee, but *I* don't know that. Or is it that I gave up coffee, and have just been trying to tell myself that I hate it? Either way, here I am, drinking the coffee, hating it. My relationship with the remaining half-muffin is even more complex.
Wait... what's that inside the muffin? A slip of paper? It's a chinese fortune muffin? But my fortune is just a bunch of random words, strung together. It's too early in the morning and late at night for this. I almost gave up and asked a bro for help. In fact, I tried to, but fortunately inspiration struck, and the bro was pretty useless anyway.
7:00 AM me: fuck! I totally don't get this puzzle Bertha sent me
7:06 AM me: whoa
solved it :)
7:14 AM bro: hiya bro.
what's the puzzle?
7:15 AM me: holiday commemorate continue somehow acceptance military
sometimes
revolve pretend truthful breakup without everywhere computer downtown
girlfriend cuddling thought nineteen counterpart
I was trying too hard
:)
7:17 AM bro: hm, I'm not getting it...
7:19 AM me: it looks too much like spam!
but the solution is dead simple
7:32 AM bro: still nothing, unless she's saying she wants go out with
you on valentine's day, if the answer has anything to do with the
semantics of the words.
but I doubt that it does. still overthinking on the form of the words
me: hah, I didn't get that if it's in there
The answer is simply a numeric reduction
only one letter from each word is used
bro: hm. I've tried like 8 forms of that :)
me: But I think you got stuck in the same trap as me
bro: probably
me: but it's because I was looking at the whole sequence
not the individual words
as it turns out, she just uses G as a mask on each word
so you pluck the 7th letter out of each, and you get it
7:35 AM bro: awww
I had tried up to the 4th letter. I suck.
It's hard to keep up when the messages are like this, a perfect combination of obscure and obvious, trite and profound. And the messages are everywhere now: the bottom of the cup of coffee has a rot13 sonnet. The slight disturbance of the fabric of the futon is a calligraphy that demands interpretation. If I just think about it long enough, everything will make sense. Last night's rooftop vision will mesh seamlessly with my breakup with Alyssa which will tie back in to the view from east rock and the arrangement of cranberries (or is it chocolate chips) in the muffin. The knots in my hair contain knowledge the world was not meant to know.
But then, it's all at a bit of a remove, too. I'm seeing the whole world wrapped in its significance, but then it breaks down again into the meager stream of bits with which I interact with the world. The thin gruel of a chat room through which I can query why things are and how they became, but never truly experience them as they are. I can influence events only indirectly, as if by suggestion, but never truly choose. The action is always flowing at least two steps ahead of understanding.
There is knocking at the door again! It's some kind of pattern... no... not morse code... something a little bit trickier than that.... My mind whirls with the possibilities.
But then, I suppose I could just open it and find out.
Helle ilotes!
And that marks the end of the LJX fiction. I'll have a post-mortem up soon explaining the whole thing.
Thanks for reading!
Thanks for reading!
Saturday, February 2, 2008
Bro poem
Many many months ago
I found a bro, his name was Moe
It wasn't a pleasant meeting though
this poor bro, he stubbed his toe.
How he did it I'll never know
But this sad bro was full of woe.
I found a bro, his name was Moe
It wasn't a pleasant meeting though
this poor bro, he stubbed his toe.
How he did it I'll never know
But this sad bro was full of woe.
Friday, February 1, 2008
LJX: Knock Knock Knock
I know the last post said 'To Be Continued', but that was part of the meta-fiction. Besides, that stuff was getting too intense for comfort. So for now, let's go back to another time.
11 o'clock. Who's knocking? I get night visits sometimes, but neither Pete nor John called today.
I open the door, just enough to stick my head outside. There she is; holding a computer and a box, Bertha is standing in front of me.
"not right now!..."
I am shouting to myself in my head. My apartment is such a mess, with stuff everywhere; half-empty bags scattering on the floor; and some unidentifiable stuff stinking in secret corners.
"As a rule, unexpected visits should be blindfolded. And it's safer to also cover your nose."
As a good girl who always listens to her parents, Bertha covers her face using the pink sleeve of her pajama and steps into my apartment.
"I think my router is broken. And for some reason my laptop can't connect by Ethernet. I figured you probably were still up and can take a look……"
"Yes sure I guess I can give it a check".
I settled her down on my sofa-bed; fortunately the bed is still clean. Her computer works apparently in my apartment. Her router was messed up on a strange parameter; I would say it's a trojan but probably not a good idea to make it so scary. She left happily with all the
problems fixed.
Worked for a little bit, and had my routine 3 hours of sleep, I woke up following another soft knocking, knocking.
"I'm doing some work but my system suddenly crashed! I'm afraid I lost all my work."
She looks pretty miserable this time. I checked her hard drive. The system file is pretty much messed up. Fortunately there is still a way to recover the documents. I burn the file she needs on a disk, and that was that.
It's late in the night. Everything is very quiet, except my forever-moving machine still swinging; and I swear I hear the bamboo growing. She is sitting there reading my book, like an angel. My heart is beating like crazy. It might be a perfect time to grab her in my arm. But we are only friends, and I should let her go. So I just sit remotely to the door and watch her leave.
Worked for another 4 hours, the work is almost done and my head is ready to explode. Knock, knock, knock comes again. I open the door but this time nobody is there. On the floor is a tray with a glass of coffee and a huge muffin.
"hey, you know I hate coffee".
I manage to get along with the usual discomfort to unexpected kindness.
This is a very bright morning; I refill myself with the fresh air, as I explore the world full of possibilities.
11 o'clock. Who's knocking? I get night visits sometimes, but neither Pete nor John called today.
I open the door, just enough to stick my head outside. There she is; holding a computer and a box, Bertha is standing in front of me.
"not right now!..."
I am shouting to myself in my head. My apartment is such a mess, with stuff everywhere; half-empty bags scattering on the floor; and some unidentifiable stuff stinking in secret corners.
"As a rule, unexpected visits should be blindfolded. And it's safer to also cover your nose."
As a good girl who always listens to her parents, Bertha covers her face using the pink sleeve of her pajama and steps into my apartment.
"I think my router is broken. And for some reason my laptop can't connect by Ethernet. I figured you probably were still up and can take a look……"
"Yes sure I guess I can give it a check".
I settled her down on my sofa-bed; fortunately the bed is still clean. Her computer works apparently in my apartment. Her router was messed up on a strange parameter; I would say it's a trojan but probably not a good idea to make it so scary. She left happily with all the
problems fixed.
Worked for a little bit, and had my routine 3 hours of sleep, I woke up following another soft knocking, knocking.
"I'm doing some work but my system suddenly crashed! I'm afraid I lost all my work."
She looks pretty miserable this time. I checked her hard drive. The system file is pretty much messed up. Fortunately there is still a way to recover the documents. I burn the file she needs on a disk, and that was that.
It's late in the night. Everything is very quiet, except my forever-moving machine still swinging; and I swear I hear the bamboo growing. She is sitting there reading my book, like an angel. My heart is beating like crazy. It might be a perfect time to grab her in my arm. But we are only friends, and I should let her go. So I just sit remotely to the door and watch her leave.
Worked for another 4 hours, the work is almost done and my head is ready to explode. Knock, knock, knock comes again. I open the door but this time nobody is there. On the floor is a tray with a glass of coffee and a huge muffin.
"hey, you know I hate coffee".
I manage to get along with the usual discomfort to unexpected kindness.
This is a very bright morning; I refill myself with the fresh air, as I explore the world full of possibilities.
LJX: Full Disclosure
So, there are still two more posts left to be seen in the LJX story. I've got some tricks up my sleeves for those, and I'll explain them in the end, but for now, I'd like to take a short pause and give you a sight of the true complexity of the story so far, with respect to its truthfulness.
I'm sure you realize by now if you've been reading along that this is more of a psychological project than a literary one, so in that vein, I'd like to invite you to take a deeper look into what's going on.
I've taken the first 5 posts and compiled a single PDF which is color-coded to show 3 attributes on two scales. Essentially, this shows line by line which parts of the story have been either true, false, dramatized. I've split them up into 'thoughts/opinions' and 'events' so you know when a falsified scene reflects true beliefs of mine or when a true event has been dramatized or has an non-real reaction from me for effect.
Of course, without asking me a ton of questions, this isn't going to really allow you to 'make sense' of the story. What it will allow you to do is see how quickly I have been shifting between fantasy and reality, and the blurring effect it tends to have. I'll talk more about that when I finally wrap the project up and explain the motivation behind it.
Again, I hope this is fun or at least interesting for you. Since it's got a scheduled end time now, if you've been mostly ignoring my blog for the last week because of it, you'll be able to take me off the blacklist soon.
Please let me know if you have any thoughts about what you've seen so far, or suggestions for the final parts of the project.
NOTE: Please notice there is no fiction tag on this post. This is real, kids... no meta-meta-meta-fiction here.
I'm sure you realize by now if you've been reading along that this is more of a psychological project than a literary one, so in that vein, I'd like to invite you to take a deeper look into what's going on.
I've taken the first 5 posts and compiled a single PDF which is color-coded to show 3 attributes on two scales. Essentially, this shows line by line which parts of the story have been either true, false, dramatized. I've split them up into 'thoughts/opinions' and 'events' so you know when a falsified scene reflects true beliefs of mine or when a true event has been dramatized or has an non-real reaction from me for effect.
Of course, without asking me a ton of questions, this isn't going to really allow you to 'make sense' of the story. What it will allow you to do is see how quickly I have been shifting between fantasy and reality, and the blurring effect it tends to have. I'll talk more about that when I finally wrap the project up and explain the motivation behind it.
Again, I hope this is fun or at least interesting for you. Since it's got a scheduled end time now, if you've been mostly ignoring my blog for the last week because of it, you'll be able to take me off the blacklist soon.
Please let me know if you have any thoughts about what you've seen so far, or suggestions for the final parts of the project.
NOTE: Please notice there is no fiction tag on this post. This is real, kids... no meta-meta-meta-fiction here.
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