existentialism breeds compassion

i mean

think about your individual experience. think about the times you've thought about life, the universe, and everything. tried to find meaning in the mundane. struggled to break out of the confines of your socialized accultured hereditary existence. maybe you have something to offer the future of our planet. maybe a thought you express, or a descendent of yours will be important.

then realize that likely over 60,000 of you were just lost to a wave.

jesus fucking christ. and the day after christmas no less.

donate what you have, man. please.

the source for information as it rolls in and effective places accepting contributions.

telebsession

so i haven't done the constantly watching television thing probably since i was a freshman in high school.

but now i'm home and have access to on demand and the idle time to bittorrent.

arrested development
drawn together
curb your enthusiasm
the sopranos
dr. katz
sifl & olly
twin peaks

damn yo. that's some entertaining shit. it's making me want to write screenplays again. the current idea is as follows: an elderly couple dies in a hospital, both of them at the same time in the same hospital room. as they die, memories flash before their eyes. their relationship was one of strife and conflict. they grew bitter and lost all feelings of love over the years. but now, in some sort of david lynch is it imagined or is it a magical realist warp in space-time thing, they step back, one conflict at a time, un-doing each one, and then playing life forward in attempt to change the future and allow them to die happy. they keep going back and back...don't cheat on her there, will that make it better? no, they die alone and bitter in that timeline. go on that vacation he wanted then, will that fix it? no, they end up having another child but have a furious divorce and die in car crash. this keeps going until it's the day that they met. but every attempt to un-meet and disentangle their lives from each other entirely keeps reforming a meeting between them. i'm not sure what the message is entirely. it's just that i keep thinking about relationships and watching how everyone's parents are divorced or they stayed together for the kids and they're unhappy and what the fuck is the point? but i'm such a goddamned idealist and romantic that now i'm trying to fuse that with my newfound cyncism. can there be beauty and fate and destiny and true starstruck intertwinedness in the most bitter and painful of relationships? my intuition is yes. i haven't worked out the details but i think a movie that throws you into the lifelong conflict of a horrible relationship but actually leaves you hopeful would be an important movie to make.

furthernoir

can't wait for these fucking movies.

frank miller's sin city (in case you don't know about the comic).

hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy. let's hope it's better than the old british tv miniseries, though.

whatever happened to jesse michaels?

after op ivy? did he really become a monk? did he leave op ivy because it was getting too popular? but didn't it not get popular until it was over?

oh okay.

so that means we can listen to\buy more jesse michaels here!

and god damn it. this person (from mit no less) should be shot for thinking that op ivy is "billie joe's band before green day," a clearly ignorant misinterpretation of billie's shout out to op ivy when he covered "knowledge" at this show, which i have a video of if anyone wants it.

early morning political musings

a friend just showed me what must have been bush's inspiration for that "those wmds must be somewhere!" joke: reagan's own standup comedy routine.

this has resulted in the following jumble of words spilling from my brain:

compare conscious thought (rationalizations, intellectualizations, facts along linear paths of causality) with unconscious influences on your actions (less verbal or explicit motivations, emotions, primal desires, etc).

then look at america and it's political system. each president FEELS like conscious thought, ie he gives reasons for what he does (germany is a threat, korea is a threat, vietnam is in the pocket of china, iraq has wmds, these tax cuts will help, etc). but in reality, being a part of a country that has so much POWER in the world really just makes it an addiction scenario where it's like "what will the unconscious mind do with your body if it's addicted to this drug?" but instead its "what will politicians do with our government if they're addicted to this POWER?" america has an unconscious mind that drives its interactions with the rest of the world. and it's not rational or compassionate in the least. it's the biggest most hungry monster birthed since the roman empire.

well that makes it easier, doesn't it?

search for (ahem) videos of any kind.

woah data

yesterday i realized that using the wrong solution had completely fucked any chance of me getting any good data from the molecular side of the project i've been working on. but then today, i looked at some data from the behavioral side, and saw some really amazing stuff. so three months of working with bengalese finch hasn't been a complete failure, after all! yay grad school. yay lab rotations. yay singing birds. yay dragon rolls!

bard reminds us

that the period of buddy-buddyness between government and industry throughout wwii and afterwards began boiling during the depression:

the business plot to overthrow roosevelt.

cynicism reaches into the past

one of those nytimes back in the day articles shows us a president harry truman in the 50s widely expanding the powers of the executive branch and the ability of government to regulate the economy during wartime. do you realize how soon after wwii we actually started drumming about "communist imperialism" and getting in over our heads in korea? and with the compressed timescale of attention deficited modern america, that means afghanistan to iraq to iran all in four years is actually a little slow.

dinosaurs speak truth

this is the best repetitive art-based comic i've seen since get your war on.

meta-analytical dinosaurs.

social consciousness

do you ever have a thought, and then wish you could suddenly figure out what other people in the world were thinking about that thought? oh okay.

google suggest.

paraphrase

from my neuroscience exam:

1) you don't know what blargin is. all of the tools you know of to investigate the identity of blargin are not available. what is blargin?

blaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaargin!

yum, technology

i just saw a commercial with elton john walking around with a wireless xm radio ipod thingie. it could record five hours of radio. from like a billion channels. i bet you can easily make it into mp3, too. technology is great. this is almost as good an example of capitalism working as these entenmann's donuts that i just bought at safeway. competition with grocery-bought krispee kremes actually created the best possible outcome for the consumer: glazed entenmann's with chocolate stripes. mmmmmh.

i want an ash tray computer

old computer equipment comes with cigarette lighter and ashtray.

now if i could just take a bong rip out of my laptop, i'd never have to leave my apartment!

moving right along

this week saw four days of me getting up at an ungodly hour and running three miles in the park. and today will be a second kundalini yoga class for the week. already this has increased my mood by a factor of 1.4, but has made me more tired by a factor of 14.8. in any event, i think endorphins might replace my nicotine, cannabinoid, and norepinephrine addictions, if given enough time. check back with me in a month. if i'm still keeping up the physical fitness and mental stability regimen and my crisis isn't over, i'll be running a lottery to see who wants to chase a bottle of prozac with a bottle of vodka with me.