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i see the world

no one else sees it for me

…well then. it’s been three whole months, hasn’t it? it has been exactly 83 days since i wrote my last post of the ’23 school year. and now it’s 284 days until i do it again. strange, innit?

i’m currently writing in the cafeteria. it’s been a while since i’ve been here, and i don’t think i missed it. questionable food, cold air, and loud people. i’d expect this from a bar, not here.

of course, that’s not what i want to focus on today. right now, i feel like talking about some things i learned over the summer. maybe you’ll be interested! (read: this is totally just a link dump 0_o)

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a summer countdown post: day 3

no tears, no fears

no ruined years, no clocks

see, what’s interesting about this post is that i’m writing it the day of. just writing along. today’s post is about procrastination. it’s funny because that’s what i’m doing.

those of you who frequent my little corner of the internet might know i have a hate-hate relationship with procrastination. i do not like it. i don’t enjoy watching my grades drop. i do not like green eggs and ham, i do not like them sam-i-am.¹

procrastination is a killer catch-22.² you know that the work needs to get done, but you cannot do it due to some irrational restriction of the mind. you get two choices: try to do the work or just don’t bother.

if you don’t bother then it’s the path of least resistance. if you try, you will likely fail due to a distraction i.e. social media or hunger or someone coming to bother you. once you are off task, it’s hard to claw your way back and you fall off into the same outcome as if you never tried. you understand the problem here yes?

so what’s the solution? we can’t reach for the sky as we’d fall right back into the loop. if we go bare minimum then it’s the path of least resistance once again, and nothing happens. so here’s what happens. we go slightly above the bare minimum. not high enough to never start, not low enough so that we don’t have to try anything.

our goal has to be a s.m.a.r.t. one. wait an acronym NOOOOOO-

  • specific
  • measurable
  • actionable
  • responsible
  • time-bounded

your goal has to be specific. you cannot clean the whole house, but you can pick up that laundry pile and move it into a basket.

it has to be measurable, in that a difference is noticeable.

it has to be actionable, which is something you can do right now.

it has to be responsible, something that is an actual goal rather then “i will play an 80 round game of btd6”

and something that’s time-bound, something with a reasonable time limit. you cannot get anything done if you want to do it in two months.

and most of all, you cannot lie to yourself. you must be able to acknowledge the problem.

this post has become very serious and i’m not really happy about that so we’re going to go on a sudden tangent about trains and then an outro.

so trains. they go chugga chugga. maybe even choo choo. they are better than cars in every way and the fact that we went for the interstate system is a shame. you can sleep on a train or have tea on the train all the while going up to 110 an hour. faster than cars! and you can have more people on a train than in a car!

people complain about high speed rail being too expensive to put throughout the country. but counterpoint. the highway act of 1956. we dropped twenty-five billion dollars to build forty-four thousand miles of road. some of those roads are more neglected then the 9 key on your microwave.

if we did it before, then we can do it again. i want trains. ok bye.

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1: wow i really did put that in here. hmm. clearly i am mentally stable.
2: am reading this right now. catch-22 is a very good book.

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a summer countdown post. day 5

so. how’s everybody doing? having fun? i’m currently waiting for this webpage from 1997 to load so i can do my biology lab. you would think that a gif from 1997 would take milliseconds to load but noooooo we can’t have good things. this blog, the one you are currently reading right now, has a first meaningful print of 2.2 secs. that’s the first bit of content you care about if you’ve never visited this site before. in comparison: i’ve been waiting for a couple minutes. for one image.

anyways i’m talking about technology. surprise?

it’s incredible what we’ve done. take computer components! we have taken rocks, smashed them, infused them with electricity, inscribed runes onto them, and fooled them into thinking. we went from massive mainframes to the chromebooks you are likely reading this on right now. a raspberry pi, a 35 dollar little credit card sized computer, is several million times more powerful than what sent man to the moon.

how about the internet, huh? the massive, revolutionary little technology that made everything before it completely obsolete. the telegraph is dead. the phone lines are dying. so is radio. hell, even the internet is dying.

let me explain. here’s a photo of the first ever website, still accessible at info.cern.ch:

this was web 1.0. this was tim berners-lee’s original dream; an interconnected service giving access to information across the world. pages not built for style, but for raw access of information.

but then we evolved. we wanted more, we wanted better. so on we march to web 2.0: where everything is interconnected. again. now understandably this seems like web 1.0 yet. but the major difference was in web design. 1.0 was all about static pages, guestbooks, the browser wars. 2.0 brought social media to what it is now. the personal web page became outdated, and facebook pages became the new. there was an emphasis on user-generated content, ease of use, interoperability.

but now here we are again. it’s always such a pleasure. web 3.0 is, what looks to be the next evolution of the internet. and it’s such a disappointment. you heard of nfts?

nft stands for no f!cking thanks
AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

these are monkey jpegs. that are selling for more then a new car. you must understand my displeasure here. this idea that everything must be decentralized, written permanently on the blockchain. so here’s what i propose.

if we can’t go back to web 1.0, then let’s at least stay in web 2.0. don’t buy nfts from crypto bros.

hey, we have the ability to change things. we’re the next generation and all that. so let’s veer far, far away from all that threatens this valuable resource. thank you.

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this is the way that it is

this is the way that it always will be

so. it’s almost summer break. i may look inactive, but i’m currently writing a countdown for the last week of school. that’s write baby (pun)

but you goblins need content now. so here’s your content.

it’s weird to think that school’s almost over. how many of you remember the first day? week? month? how many of you remember that test you aced? how about the one you failed? how many of you can say they know what happened this year?

in this day and age, how many of us have slowed down? it’s almost impossible with assignment after test after assignment. how many of us have taken time to engage in our passions? we don’t have money. don’t have cars, don’t have time.

until we do.

but when will that be? only a few of us have jobs. only a few of us have permits. and time’s coming like a freight truck.

but how about time? time moves on and on and on forever taking us from a certain past to the uncertain future.

the amount of possibilities every day should stagger the mind. the sheer number of things i could do at any moment is impossible. and i’m sitting here refreshing my inbox. we relive the same few days over and over. when did we forget our dreams? we act as if we get through today our dreams will come back tomorrow.

and no, i don’t have all the answers. i don’t know how to start seeing what could be. but i do know that watering down life’s experience, watering down every little idea and thought to fit the mold isn’t it.

let me pull you aside for a moment. take wrong turns. talk to strangers. open unmarked doors. you are curious, you are smart, you are bored. all you can see right now is a choice between slacking off and working hard. there are so many tiny interesting choices that we could all make and we can’t because we just want to get to tomorrow.

something tells me that you’re never gonna stop
until you get what you want

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and the moment you stop thinking,
you come into immediate contact with what Korzybski called,
so delightfully, ‘the unspeakable world.’

alan watts, 1967

it’s christmas. i don’t really know what to say except… wow. we made it another year. of course, we’re writing down more things for we didn’t start the fire v2.

but that’s not important right now. right now, we’re in the best part of the year. except for the blizzard coming up but that’s not important.

it’s interesting just what the end of the year means. logically, it means nothing. just another loop on our imaginary time system. another trip around the sun.

emotionally, it’s a reboot. a fresh start, new things to be had, new places to be seen, new memories to be made.

there’s others who can describe it better then me. i leave you with alan watts, a writer, speaker, and philosopher. you can hear and read the full talk here.

“But you know, if you talk all the time, you will never hear what anybody else has to say, and therefore, all you’ll have to talk about is your own conversation.

The same is true for people who think all the time. That means, when I use the word ‘think,’ talking to yourself, subvocal conversation, the constant chit-chat of symbols and images and talk and words inside your skull.

Now, if you do that all the time, you’ll find that you’ve nothing to think about except thinking, and just as you have to stop talking to hear what I have to say, you have to stop thinking to find out what life is about.

And the moment you stop thinking, you come into immediate contact with what Korzybski called, so delightfully, ‘the unspeakable world.’

The most ordinary sights and sounds and smells, the texture of shadows on the floor in front of you. All these things, without being named, and saying ‘that’s a shadow, that’s red, that’s brown, that’s somebody’s foot.’

When you don’t name things anymore, you start seeing them. Because say when a person says ‘I see a leaf,’ immediately, one thinks of a spearhead-shaped thing outlined in black and filled in with flat green. No leaf looks like that. No leaves–leaves are not green.

That’s why Lao-Tzu said ‘the five colors make a man blind, the five tones make a man deaf,’ because if you can only see five colors, you’re blind, and if you can only hear five tones in music, you’re deaf. You see, if you force sound into five tones, you force color into five colors, you’re blind and deaf.

The world of color is infinite, as is the world of sound. And it is only by stopping fixing conceptions on the world of color and the world of sound that you really begin to hear it and see it.

I am not talking about the ordering of ordinary everyday life in a reasonable and methodical way as being schoolteacherish, and saying ‘if you were NICE people, that’s what you would do.’ For heaven’s sake, don’t be nice people.

But the thing is, that unless you do have that basic framework of a certain kind of order, and a certain kind of discipline, the force of liberation will blow the world to pieces. It’s too strong a current for the wire.”

from all of us everywhere, merry christmas, happy hanukkah, and a happy new year. ■

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well. we’re here again. here’s the shill bit, doing that early. here’s the newsletter signup, here’s the RSS feed. can’t really say any more in the intro that hasn’t been said in the first one, eh? enjoy.

if the sun should tumble from the sky

if the sea should suddenly run dry

god i hate this state. yeah we have the great lakes but oh my god we have two seasons: winter and construction. every now and then i contemplate “why am i here? why not move to california where it’s warm year-round?” and that’s a good question. i suppose i have friends, family here. everything’s pretty calm, and nothing catastrophic has happened.

some people think they gonna die some day

i got news, you never gotta go

liminal lim·i·nal /ˈlimənl/
occupying a position at, or on both sides of, a boundary or threshold.
where we are betwixt and between the familiar and the completely unknown

did you know you have rights?

constitution says you do

saul goodman

book review time

so i read turtles all the way down. good book, 9/10.

one day i know that you will be there

one day i’ll focus on the future maybe

one day, oh baby isn’t life so

i don’t know what i’m doing here. i’m trying to write something but i can’t.

you can just stack quotes

one quote
two quote
three quote
four quote
five quote
six quote
seven quote
eight quote
nine quote
ten quote
eleven quote

if there’s any thought

better think of me

for a little support

at a time of need

i’m starting to dig the hole again. i think i’m close to crawling out but… it’s scary. i really don’t want to fall back into the spiral and end the semester with 12 missing assignments.

we are interrupting our schedules for the following announcement.

buckingham palace has announced the death of her majesty queen elizabeth ii.

it’s very interesting, the life the queen has lived. and how long she’s been queen. people have been born, graduated, got married, had kids, watched their kids graduate, watched their kids get married, got grandchildern, and died during the time the queen has ruled.

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video games are pretty cool. knowing my audience you’d probably agree, but some games are a perfect blend of story, gameplay, sound, and are more an experience rather then a game.

section 1: story/lore

i’ll put it here: not every video game needs everything here. example: doom 2016. or really any doom game. there’s barely any story or deep lore, and more just says “here gun go there shoot thing”

some games also only do one thing, like hollow knight. there’s not really any deep story i think please don’t hurt me, but there’s something bad going on and you can tell.

however, sometimes you get a game which is the perfect blend. and these games hit different. example: titanfall 2. i won’t spoil anything, but it’s usually 20, 30 bucks on steam and you have no excuse to not buy it. the story and lore are a bit weak, but the ending kinda just makes you sit back the first time you play through it.

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