About

Wel­come to the per­sonal web­site of Kevin McGuire. The writ­ing on this web­site expresses his opin­ions. They rep­re­sent no other per­son, cor­po­ra­tion, mon­key or arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence. Got it? Because there are swears on here and I don’t want you to get the wrong idea. I like my swears. Not every­one does. Free speech, motherfucker.

This site was cre­ated with Word­Press and Tex­tWran­gler. Pho­to­shop was involved in the ini­tial lay­out and export­ing some images. I also used a few mis­cel­la­neous plugins/​bookmarklets, such as XRAY and Web Devel­oper Tool­bar. I should also give props to this Word­Press theme. This was the one that finally got me to under­stand how Word­Press tem­plates work, mostly because it is so dead simple.

About the name

Cydo­nia Men­sae is a region on Mars. Mensa is a mesa, men­sae is plural. One of the mesas looks like a face. Per­haps you’ve seen this before. Per­haps not.

The mesa isn’t really a face. No one built it. It occurred nat­u­rally. But peo­ple believe there is a face. The same thing hap­pens with tor­tillas, stains, and potato chips. It’s a type of delu­sion called parei­do­lia.

This is an impor­tant con­cept. Peo­ple con­struct mean­ing, out of thin air, when­ever they see fit. I use it here as a metaphor for all human behav­ior. Peo­ple derive mean­ing from from words, which are really just pat­terns of let­ters, which are blots of ink on shred­ded wood pulp, or light reflect­ing on glass.

The Get­tys­burg address is just wind blow­ing through flaps of skin. But peo­ple derived mean­ing from this wind (what we con­ven­tion­ally call speech.) Am I really try­ing to say that the Get­tys­burg address is the same as the face on Mars? Fun­da­men­tally, yes.

I sup­pose this means that I don’t really believe in any­thing. If every­thing is fab­ri­cated from thin air, does that ren­der the world com­pletely mean­ing­less? Yes, but that’s part of the fun.