furtive explorations

Engage dream sequencing algorithms...

[cut to scene of large natural stone amphitheatre] Large number of people enter the doorway in high spirits, most are just humanoid with no discernable features, but one is representative of Zeus, ala Disney's Hercules...{background information -- the gods are assembling for the summer solstice celebration, the peak of their available mana, which they blow in a veritable orgy of gift-giving, miracling, mortal-baiting, and incestous joy}...there are cheerful greetings to one another and decorating begins for the festivities. All seems well and/or good until the God of Music (looking oddly like the rocknroll guy in the JusticeFriends segment of the PowerPuffGirls show) and his backup singers (the singing women in Hercules) begin rehearsal of their songs for the evening. Being godly, and having a fine appreciation of their talents, they immediately notice that something is amiss. They suck. They sound like mortal musicians... THIS WILL NOT DO! They begin to query the other gods to see if they also are having problems. During this round of questioning, Zeus approaches a niche in the wall holding a large stone well/pond and glances within it. His face turns stark white and he rumbles loudly to the room at large, "WE'RE FUCKED..." Complete silence now in the room, for Zeus is known to almost never curse at a party, barring teeth dragging, but we're not gonna go into that right now. Timidly, one of the faceless members of the group asks Zeus, "What was that, great one?". "WE'RE FUCKED," Zeus replies and gestures into the well, "LOOK AT THIS..." The party-goers shuffle to the well, look into it, and gasp in horror. Instead of the large amounts of seething, sputtering, StevenSpielberg-esque mana expected, they see only a tiny bit of weakly glowing liquid lying quietly in the lowest section of the well, where one would almost expect to see a drain. As the implications sink in regarding this turn of events, the doors to the room smash open and with much slinking the Gods of Evil ooze into the open space in the center of the amphitheatre. They stand defiant in the face of Zeus and his ilk as Death, the spokesman, flips back his cowled hood to glare at one and all. {The effect is somewhat lessened since Death looks like the member of the Kids in the Hall who played Death during the Louisville stop of their latest tour...you know, the one who was "squishing people's heads"} He pins Zeus with an angry stare and demands, "All right, which one of you fuckers stole our mana?"

At this point I realize that my subconscious is telling me to wake the hell up and go to work...so I bound from bed and bust ass to make it to work. While telling my friend who owns this website about the dream, he tells me that I am now required to access his BLOG file and share my dream, so here you have it...

Best Raging Against the Machine Award I think that last bit was accidentally cut'n'pasted from something else.

Best Fantasy Moment Award but if you try sometimes (with photoshop) you'll find, you can get what you need, aw yeah. no example here because I have SOME taste

Most Humorless Chump Under 4'6" Award I would lean toward Fame Fever. And for the Differ'nt Strokes types, Post-Fame Traumatic Stress Disorder. Or maybe just "ASSHOLES!"

A pull quote for your further edification:

Best Fast Food Franchise Commercial Tie-In Award As Selected by Kid Rock Award

I can't really comment on his choice of the N'Sync/McDonald's spots over the Backstreet Boys/Burger King campaign, but something tells me that if Bob's Big Boy drove up to his wider than double wide, platinum fixtured trailer with a dump truck full of money, America's Favorite Early Mornin' Pimp would be pitching Grand Slam Breakfasts on TRL.

Opinions are like assholes, everybody has one, and only a few really sick individuals really care about yours.

We'd been stuck for months, knowing something was off, but you get so deep inside you can sometimes lose the whole. This is the hardest thing: maintaining the macro while enmeshed in the micro. Holding the whole movie in your head as you finesse its smallest components is the job of a few of us: the director—creatively he has the job of piecing all together in post; the script supervisor, who keeps it consistent within the scene, and scene to scene; and me because I got the studio to give us the money, and they better get some version of the movie they paid for. So, changes midstream are perilous.

Change the nouns in that to software concepts and you have almost the exact description of what I feel I bring to software development. The ability to balance focus between the macro and the micro at the same time.

Wow, you know how bad I wanted to make a pun on Macro and Micro?

• Goth Hunting What more can I say.
• WIPO rules on bodacious-tatas.com It seems the House of Tata doesn't like American slang. Bump that first link back and check out all the other WIPO domain disputes
• Transformers more than metes the fates.
• Urticator I approve of anyone making up new words.
• dev/null rant heavy new blog, I likey...

There is a politics list I read frequently and post to rarely. This is my most heartfelt post ever I think.

> Eek.  While I believe we as a people need to make ourselves heard, 
> as per our Constitution and Bill of Rights, it is never, EVER our 
> right to harm other human beings.  Dr. King and Gandhi did not sport
> guns. 

What? It most certainly is our right to harm others. Neither Dr. King
nor Gandhi wrote the Constitution, the Bill of Rights or set American
policy.
 
> This is an issue that needs to be examined, however.  Many friends 
> of mine were arrested for "resisting arrest" the night *before* a
> planned peaceful protest at the RNC using very large puppets.  How can
> you resist arrest when you haven't committed a crime for which you are
> being arrested?   They languished in busses, city jail, and finally a

Um, look up the word arrest. They can arrest you without there being
a crime committed.  They just can't hold you very long without listing
some crime.  If you resist getting arrested, you commit a crime. And
yes, non-violently sitting and chanting with your arms links and 
curling up in a ball when they touch you IS resisting. Look up the
word resist.

> state prison, some for two weeks, with bail set on some as high as 
> $1m.   Some were beaten, women's clothes forcibly taken from them, 
> they were denied water and food for almost 20 hours...  what is going

They WERE mistreated and quite outrageously so.  In more than one
"alternative" media there was quite good coverage.  Well informed
people knew it was going on.  And well informed people knew there
was a plan in place, developed in the previous weeks to encourge
spontaneous blocking of traffic, hindering entry into and out of
buildings and more.

The puppets were large, potentially disruptive (they would be
worthless as protest items if not disruptive), and highly touted
in the hours before their release.  I can see them being the 
target of some reasonable overzelousness.  There are hot-heads on
every side of these issues.

> ON, folks?  I think it is pretty obvious some overzealous official
> decided that the media would not be able to ignore such an organized
> and colorful protest, thus making Philadelphia, its police, and the
> RNC look pretty darn bad.  Especially after the city had gone through
> so much trouble in the last two years to clean up the place by
> demolishing all public housing (i.e. projects) in the downtown area.
> So they nipped it in the bud.    

Exactly, some scared cops, afraid for their jobs getting in over
their heads more and more.  Their bosses are all sucking up to the
media, they are government employees, their jobs are on the line,
they don't need to be told to keep things like giant puppets
out of the lime light.
 
> BTW, this was not covered by the traditional houses of media.  The
> only coverage I heard on it was on Democracy Now and my husband's show.
> Gee, I wonder why.

Because there are ALWAYS nutcases and people screaming at the media
for their pet cause.  12 years of John 3:16 in the stands of sports
events teaches you that.  They are there for the real story.  The
only way the protests become the real story is if it turns violent or
there is a single clear word coming from a majority of the people
protesting.

I am reminded of a line of reasoning from a Sci-fi author I like:

  If there are twelve clowns performing in the center-ring, you can
  step out among them and recite the purest, most beautiful 
  Shakespeare but to the crowd you are just the thirteenth clown.

Most protestors seem to be under the impression that one will
hear their words and be instantly moved to take up their posistion.
Too many different protestors with different wacky messages and
they become a bunch of clowns. Engineers call it the
signal-to-noise ratio, and the filter that you use to determine
what is noise and what is signal a squelch.  Like on CBs of yore.
Upping the noise just gets you squelched that much quicker.
 
> Force is never the answer, either in the hands of the government
> or citizens.  I admire my friends and their cohorts for sticking

worked well in Hiroshima...

> by the code of non-violence, even in the face of gross injustice.

I don't admire them all that much. Many had plans to strip the
Republicans, Democrats and more from one of their more important
rights...  The right to assemble peaceably.  Considered so
important that it was in the first of the Amendments:

  Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of
  religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or
  abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the
  right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the
  Government for a redress of grievances.

These are rights so important no Congress should be allowed to
abrogate them.

I don't respect them because violence and the denying of rights 
isn't synonymous.  Gandhi's followers were effective non-violently
but they disrupted an entire culture.  I'd rather not have my
culture cheapened or destroyed, even by non-violent means.

I don't respect them because they KNEW they were going to get
a reaction from the authorities trying to keep things calm and
planned their acts accordingly.  And they have the gall to act
suprised when it happens and decry it in what press they can
get as a horrible thing.

I don't respect them because the act as though they should have been
allowed to bring a city to it's knees for three days simply because
a political group chose that city to meet.

I do HOWEVER respect them for having courage in their convictions,
and for doing their best to call attention to what they believe
is a problem.  I even took the time to read some of their writings
and opinions.  I went so far as to study the clowns in hope of
spotting a thespian or two, and did!  In the end though, they got
my attention much more so than they deserved, not less, and in
the general case, they miserably failed to convince.

> It frightens me to think that events like Kent State and the Watts
> Riots could happen again.  

Me too but it will. Again and again, because people are emotional 
and scared and worked up, on every side of every issue.  Putting 
them together is always a chancy thing. Take away all the guns, the
knives, the big sticks and the cops and there will be people at Kent
state strangling each other.  The murder isn't in the weapon, it's in
the hearts.  And there are very human hearts out there, on every side
of every issue.

--mark mills