pareidolia

Best Kid Part II

The Karate Kid Part II is my favorite movie. 

It is cer­tainly not a great movie. But I love it anyway.

I’m watch­ing it now, prob­a­bly 20 years after I last saw it. I had it on VHS when I was younger and prob­a­bly watched it 200 times. I still remem­ber every note of the sound­track. It beings up many strong feel­ings. I’m sure I’m just being sen­ti­men­tal. But what­ever. I still love it.

I lived in Japan for a year, dur­ing my “junior year abroad.” Or what­ever. I strongly believe that this movie was what made me inter­ested in Japan in the first place. For that, I owe it a large debt. If you can owe movies debts, that is.

I suddenly have much more free time

So, as of fri­day, I’m unem­ployed.

Expect there to be increased activ­ity over here on the blog. I’ve already imple­mented com­ments (some­thing I’ve been mean­ing to do for a while any­way) and I’ve got a new design in the works.

Also, and I think this goes with­out say­ing, if you have any money you want to throw at me for doing some “work,” please, send me some elec­tronic mail.

Muji

They are finally going to start open­ing Mujis in Amer­ica. This excites me greatly. Dur­ing my time in Japan, Muji was one of my favorite places to go.

My favorite Muji pur­chase was this set of col­lapsable card­board speak­ers. I wish I remem­ber what hap­pened to them. They would be even more use­ful now that we are liv­ing in the era of the iPod.

Hi – I’m the mid-​​to-​​late 90’s

Hi, I’m the mid-​​to-​​late 90’s. My hob­bies include look­ing desat­u­rated and pre­tend­ing that I’m much more impor­tant than I really am.

hey asshole

Stop shar­ing your rips of cds with scratches on them. You almost make me want to pay for shit. Christ.

he’s implying that they smell worse on the inside

It’s always both­ered me when peo­ple use the word “guts” to describe things other than guts. Like the inner work­ings of a machine, or the con­tents of a book­let (as opposed to the covers).

It’s not the turn of phrase, I actu­ally find it sort of clever. It’s just — gross. Makes me feel like when Han slashes open the tauntaun in Empire.

blogs

I really dis­like see­ing this on a blog:

“Check out the rest of our [what­ever] after the jump.”

This is annoy­ing for at least 5 reasons:

1. This is intended to let peo­ple know that there is more con­tent in the “full” blog post as opposed to the “sum­mary.” The only prob­lem is that I often only read the full blog posts, because I am directed to the blog — not from the front­page — but from another web­site that links to the full post. To me, this is just annoy­ing and makes me want to stop read­ing your worth­less blog.

2. “the jump” — who decided to call it this? It sounds fuck­ing idiotic.

3. This can be done in a much more effec­tive way, and I know it, I’ve seen it in blog soft­ware. You could have a sim­ple “read the full entry” or “read more” or even, god for­bid, “read more after the jump” pro­grammed as the text to the link to the full entry, which would GO AWAY when you get there. The only dif­fer­ence is that you don’t get to cus­tomize it per page. No more “check out more of my stu­pid use­less links to free soft­ware you already know about after the jump” or “see more pic­tures of my stu­pid cat after the jump.” Big fuck­ing loss.

4. One of the advan­tages of a blog/​cms is that your con­tent isn’t nec­es­sar­ily tied to the html — poten­tially, your writ­ing could be for­mat­ted for a new blog­ging sys­tem, or a book, or what­ever the inter­net will become in 30 years. The point is, you’d have to go back in and take that out, because you’re a fuck­ing moron. Look toward the future.

5. I’ve never under­stood why you would want to do this in the first place. What’s so wrong with just hav­ing the full post on the main page? Maybe your stu­pid con­tent aggregator/​evil alien over­lord of a boss forces you to com­ply with some arcane ad place­ment algo­rithm. I don’t care, the point is -

Don’t do it. It’s dumb, and it makes you look dumb.

phlegm

I’m really bored, mostly because I’ve been sick and haven’t felt like leav­ing the house.

The house being a base­ment room my friend John has gra­ciously allowed me to stay in until my new lease opens up.

Things haven’t turned out how I wanted. In gen­eral. I have try­ing to come up with ways to fix that.

1) Get off my ass and work on the var­i­ous artis­tic projects I’ve been mean­ing to do for years
2) Be more social
3) Get more sleep

I feel like if I suc­ceed at these things will solve a great major­ity of my problems.

The main rea­son I haven’t already been doing these things is because they are hard. If I didn’t try to stop myself, I would stay at my house all the time, doing noth­ing, talk­ing to no one. This would not make me happy, but it would at least be easy.

That needs to stop. I need to sleep more, so I have more energy to do the things I want. It is a way of mak­ing them easier.

But get­ting to sleep is hard.

The sem­blance of logic I have applied to this is ten­u­ous at best. It is an emo­tional rant cov­ered in a thick, cor­ro­sive layer of pseudologic.

independence

I think the sound of fire­works has finally stopped. It was pretty loud around 10:00.

I actu­ally saw a man try­ing to teach a tod­dler (by that I mean a child wear­ing noth­ing but a dia­per) to light some fire­works. I sat there, watched the child light it, and saw the rocket shoot into the sky, above my view.

I remem­ber there being an sort of unwrit­ten rule, back home, when­ever any­one was try­ing to oper­ate fire­works. There was a cer­tain age where it was only safe to let kids play with sparklers. I don’t know what that age was, but I am fairly cer­tain that you had to be out of dia­pers to light any­thing that would cause a bunch of noise or explode in any way.

And what is the deal with fire­works? I haven’t been excited by fire­works since… well, prob­a­bly never, but I’m sure I grew out of it before I started shav­ing. Granted, I didn’t start shav­ing until after most peo­ple had started hav­ing sex, but that does not dis­prove my point.

Fire­works are bor­ing and waste­ful. They do only two things — 1) make the air smell like gun­pow­der (which I find unpleas­ant) and 2) make large explosion-​​type noises (which I also find unpleasant.)

I sup­pose you could prob­a­bly add a third — 3) They make some­one rich around this time of year. And that, of course, is why I have been annoyed all day long. Fuck­ing fuckers.

noise, personal space, and Utilitarianism

Where I work, our offices are near the back of the build­ing. The alley, right out­side our door, is quite busy and we often hear noises — trucks bring­ing ship­ments of food to restau­rants, yup­pies park­ing their cars in their garages, that sort of thing.

Today, the guy who owns the apart­ment build­ing directly across the alley from us was doing some­thing with his motor­cy­cle. I don’t know what it was, and I don’t care. It was loud and it both­ered me. So I started mak­ing com­ments to my cowork­ers about how peo­ple are incon­sid­er­ate and why do motor­cy­cles always have to be loud, etc.

I asked my boss if his motor­cy­cle was that loud. He told me it wasn’t. So then I asked if the dude that owns the apart­ment build­ing fixed his up to make it louder, and if so, he was an ass­hole. My boss wouldn’t really say. He just kept repeat­ing “some peo­ple just like the way it sounds” when I asked why would any­one want a loud motorcycle.

I gen­er­ally have this idea that you should never do any­thing that’s going to bother somone else, espe­cially if that thing is just small mun­dane activ­ity you do to make your­self feel bet­ter. Like the guy who sat next to Elaine and made the lip-​​smacking noise after every sip of coffee.

It’s not worth it. I just plain think it’s wrong, but even from a Util­i­tar­ian stand­point, the num­bers are just staggering.

Say you work with 10 peo­ple, all within earshot of your cubi­cle. You really enjoy singing, espe­cially the pop­u­lar songs of past decades. Chances are, those 10 peo­ple aren’t going to enjoy your vocal stylings.

So you shouldn’t sing because you are going to annoy 10 peo­ple, and only make 1 per­son happy. And really, does that make you happy? Shouldn’t you be spend­ing your time, doing, say, work, instead of singing James Tay­lor songs? But the point is — you shouldn’t do it because 10 is larger than 1.

This brings up another inter­est­ing point — if I ever start doing phi­los­o­phy seri­ously, and I want to be remem­bered, this would cer­tianly be a recur­ring theme of mine — the ethics of the mundane.

Util­i­tar­i­an­ism is gen­er­ally con­cerned with doing the thing that will ben­e­fit the most peo­ple. The exam­ples given in a class­room set­ting are gen­er­ally of the mur­der­ing your rich neigh­bor to get all his money and save the poor chil­dren, speed­ing train­car headed toward a group of old peo­ple variety.

I don’t think this is a very good way to go about teach­ing ethics. I see, every day, peo­ple doing things that offend me on moral grounds, but they aren’t life or death sorts of things. They’re things like hold­ing doors open, and get­ting off at the front of the bus. Stuff that doesn’t really mat­ter, on a bib­li­cal scale. But this stuff impacts my life. And yours. And every­one elses. And it hap­pens to you every day, time and time again.

If peo­ple can’t be trusted to hold a door open for you, then they cer­tainly can’t be trusted to save your life if a train­car comes rush­ing toward you and they’re the only ones who can throw the switch to make it jump to the other track.

So, because I heard motor­cy­cles in the alley, we are liv­ing in a moral waste­land. Fuck all this war for oil shit — let’s have a war for com­mon fuck­ing courtesy.