Music Video

Made my first music video this past week, and posted it on YouTube. Man, sharing art with people is absolutely the worst feeling in the world for me, and I empathize with hermits whenever I attempt something like this. It is difficult for me to be simultaneously sensitive and callous to the world, so that I can pick up on creative tremors in the ether, and then raise a protective shell to hide away from the demons lurking in the shadows.

Metaphorically speaking of course.

Various Distractions

You must watch this:

http://www.comedycentral.com/tosh.0/

Or this:

http://dsc.discovery.com/tv/time-warp/time-warp.html

Or lastly, this:

http://www.history.com/content/pawn-stars

Death

I have no idea what happens when we die.

I mean that not in the physical sense, of course, since it's pretty obvious that our skin and bones and meat get churned up into the earthly soup, one more ingredient in the food chain.

The question of whether we have a soul or mind or self or whatever you want to call it is unanswerable, so too is the question of what happens to it when we cease to exist inside a body. I haven't seen anyone come back from the dead, and the few reports of this happening are either religious in nature (and thus a matter of faith, regardless of your take on that), or in questionable circumstances. I've never seen someone get squished by a truck, for example, and then immediately pop right back up again and exclaim, "I'm fine! Don't worry about death, it's cool, I've been there!"

It just seems a waste that we spend our entire lives caring about ourselves and our family's selves, and our friends' selves, and then have them mean absolutely nothing in the grand scheme of a multi-billion year universe.

Granted, we only live in the here and now, so attempting to perceive the expanses of an infinite existence (apart from a physical universe), is an exercise in arrogance. How so? Because only an omniscient being can know everything, and since I am not omniscient (at least as far as I know), I am presupposing that I can even understand everything in the universe, let alone anything on a macro scale. And by macro I mean what is beyond this universe, and what is beyond that, and so on.

Regardless, however you look at it, death sucks.

The Language Barrier

I took my son to the park this evening. I love Cupertino, since I get to hear ten different languages spoken all around me, a river of unintelligible sounds. I'm too lazy to learn any of them, and I'm betting on the day when some smart person finally makes the Star Trek communicator, since barring us finding any intelligent extraterrestrial life, I most need one to converse with everyone who doesn't speak English.

I think that any device that can break down the language barrier would revolutionize all human contact from that point forward. Some sort of instant recognition hearing device that translates all incoming voices would be a possible first step, and anything beyond that would be amazing.

Granted, I could get off my idle butt and learn a language or two, which would not only make me smarter, but expand my worldliness quotient considerably. However, until I somehow manage to find a catalyst, I think I'm much more content to wade through the park, never really connecting to any of the people come into tenuous contact with.

At least until a gadget fixes it.

Dreams

I have a difficult time believing that dreams are special. I suppose some of the dreams we have could be our unconscious brain trying to tell us something, however, the mechanism for this communication is inherently flawed.

How exactly am I supposed to ascertain the difference between a worthwhile piece of information and an utter piece of crap? I mean, last night I dreamed that a giant flying space alien squid wrapped one of its tentacles around Ron from Harry Potter and then ate him.

What is my subconscious trying to tell me, and how do I separate such meaningless dribble from anything that might actually matter?

Now I'm not saying that dreams are unworthy of study, because maybe down the line science can help us decode these night vomits. Right now though, I'm loath to give dreams any credible weight, unless I want to drive myself crazy and start acting on these scenarios: maybe I'll erect defenses against space monsters and send in my application to Hogwarts.

Lawns are Lame

Lawns and pavement have got to go.

Let's make this clear from the beginning: I am not advocating a government response to suburban sprawl. I think the price of transportation will soon outweigh any benefit living fifty miles away from your job provides. Also, people tend to get rebellious when seemingly trivial details about lifestyle are enforced by government regulations. (It's my land and I'll do what I want!)

We as a society need to shame everyone into change. We need to embarrass the pants off wasteful people. Just as comics mock anyone driving an SUV, we need to make absolutely certain that we get ticked at people (and institutions) that value unsustainable aesthetics. Just like any other fad, lawns and pavement have to fade, and the only way that will happen is if they are made undesirable through societal consensus.

So from now on, anyone with a lawn is a dork.

Flash Games

Not much to say. The kids were crazy today, so I spent my free time playing flash games on Kongregate. If you get the chance, I'd check out some of these, they are pretty neat.

http://www.kongregate.com/

Warcraft Movie

The official link here:

http://www.blizzard.com/us/press/090721.html

The movie will probably suck, as I have never seen a decent video game adaptation before.

However, that doesn't mean they will always suck. If it were to ever change, a Warcraft movie would be the ideal place for it to change. The lore is expansive, the characters are compelling, and Blizzard wouldn't push out a crappy movie just to make a buck. (Or at least that's my impression.)

Ever since I quit World of Warcraft though, I'm less inclined to be a fan of all things Blizzard, and I don't know how I feel about supporting a movie designed to drag more people into their MMO. Rationally, I realize that the movie and the video game are apples and oranges, but irrationally I feel that I would be akin to an alcoholic going to a drinking party.

This is also making me question whether I will want to purchase additional video games in the future, from Blizzard or at all. I spent four years of my life within the Warcraft universe, and I'm finished with that level of immersion. So any future game has to simultaneously be better and worse than WoW, which is an impossible feat.

I suppose I will have to take a "wait and see" stance here, however, this is not really appealing: my identity has been tied up with the "gamer" description for so long. To continue calling myself a gamer, while shunning the video game category, seems a little hypocritical on my part.

Maybe it's akin to having a drinking limit, and staying away from the hard drinks.

No Impact Man

Just saw the trailer for an independent eco-documentary called No Impact Man.

http://www.apple.com/trailers/independent/noimpactman/

What interests me about this movie is not the ideology behind what this guy is attempting, but how he has to convince his reluctant wife to go along with his plan. Marriage is all about compromise, and when one of the two people chooses life-changing radical path, the other person has a difficult decision to make: do they follow along?

The more extreme the decision, the harder the choice. It definitely seems like the guy in the trailer didn't fully think about the ramifications of this experiment beforehand, and the wife seems shell-shocked through most of the trailer.

An excerpt:

Wife: "Your project."
Husband: "I thought it was our project."
Wife: "Oh yeah."

Those are fightin' words right there. If he can't convince her to wholeheartedly change, how can he realistically expect anyone else to?

Other documentaries focus on The Man and Big Business as scapegoats for the status quo: No Impact Man focuses on ourselves, which are more difficult opponents to face.

Alien Zookeepers

With more than 100 billion galaxies in the observable universe, with each galaxy containing 200 plus billion stars, not including the hypothesis that there are other universes parallel to our own, one would think that the universe would be brimming with alien life.

Are we the first lifeforms in our vicinity to drag ourselves out of the primordial muck (which seems egotistical and unlikely at the same time) or are we under the galactic supervision and protection of some mildly sympathetic alien race? Perhaps all of the advanced civilizations with a million year head start on technological advancement have become a certain type of god, unshackled by the earthly constraints of resources and space. They may have the ability to form energy into matter and back again at will, so have no need to fight over territory.

They might see us as we would see ants: worthy of study, but of little consequence. Until, at least, we threaten to invade their celestial home. However, we probably have millions of years to go in that direction, if we even make it there at all.

One Bedroom Apartment

Sometimes I feel claustrophobic in this place, especially when I compare our situation to other people. I see houses and mansions, and I think, "Why don't I have that? What is wrong with me that I don't do what is necessary to make enough money to acquire the proverbial American Dream?"

Justin broke the mirror in the closet today. I heard the crash from the bathroom, less than ten feet away. I got to him in three seconds, and rescued him before he could hurt himself.

Five minutes ago, Harmony was playing with the vacuum cleaner cord. She looped it around her neck, and since I was within two feet from her, something like

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_Tyson#Personal_life

didn't happen.

She's currently underneath my desk, undoing the Velcro on my sandals, and Justin is in the other room on his computer. I can hear everything they do, and as long as I don't leave my apartment, I feel like the richest person in the world.

Omniman

I imagine that a future step in evolution for humans is to create a meta organism comprised of all of us. Just as cells banded together to form colonies, and then specialized to the point where a muscle cell couldn't replace a brain cell, humans could form a creature with a meta consciousness.

Let's give this creature a name: Omniman. Let's suppose that this creature has systems something like current life as we know it, but not exactly. Perhaps it has avenues to transport resources, a skeletal system of sorts, excretions, ingestion, perhaps it can even reproduce.

Maybe this thing we call the internet is an early attempt at a nervous system. Perhaps Omniman will have a consciousness. Individual humans will be connected via a web, much like how our brain is connected, and Omniman will think thoughts that humans seperately would be unable to fathom (much like how bacteria are unable to dream up and create books and automobiles and chess sets.)

I wonder what Omniman will look like as a species? Will their bodies have a definite skin, with their skeletons limited to a planet? Or will they float through space, like giant amoeba, asexually reproducing using the raw resources of stellar dust?

Will Omnimen form tribes and allegiances that span solar systems at first, and then nations across galaxies? And will we as humans be able to comprehend our place in the heirarchy, just as a cell in our body might wonder whether their is something more that they just can't quite put their psuedopod on?

Will humans always be fundamentally equivalent in such an organism, or is it the nature of evolution to shape us into cogs, with definite non-interchangable parts and functions? Will my kid's kid's kid's kid's kid's kid be limited to a caste, much like our cells in our bodies, with brain people and muscle people and blood people and sweat gland people and on and on?

My hope, and possibly an unfounded one, is that Omniman will have compassion for humans. However, I doubt this, since humans have zero compassion for the individual cells that make up our bodies. Who cares about skin cells that fulfill their function and then peel? What heaven do cells go to when they fall to disease or trauma or die to old age?

And if they don't, then why do we?

Why Chuck a Monkey?

I must admit, it seemed good at the time, and I'm too superstitious to change it now. Apparently hurling primates through the air is in the forefront of my mind. That and macaroni and cheese. My toddler is camped out under my desk, ripping paper apart. It's midnight and she's still up, while my three year old and wife are asleep in the other room.

I guarantee that I have zero desire to truly throw a monkey. I'd assume the monkey would retaliate. I know I would. I mean, if someone decided to lift me up I'd probably knock them in the head, so I can only imagine that most mammals would have a comparable reaction. At least the wild ones.

Though a whale would probably just laugh. Unless multiple whales ganged up to push that whale out of the ocean. I suppose that counts as chucking, at least in whale linguistics.

She (the toddler) has got a box. She gave me a smile like sugar butterflies when she realized I was watching her. Now I'm doomed. A hand reaches up from under my desk and contorts to press the keyboard. "Mama!" Which means "I want that and if I don't get it I'm going to fuss."

Time for macaroni and cheese and a hug bug baby.