This drink looks deadly — 2750mg taurine, 686mg D-Ribose, and 343mg Caffeine and a whack of vitamins. I can't imagine it's that healthy. I drink these things in part because I basically don't sleep unless I'm on painkillers (last night I took one of my last two codeines, which are just enough to get me about six to eight hours of catch-up sleep)… But really the reason I wanted to post this is that I think it's brilliant packaging and cross-marketing.
Anyway, maybe that stupid funeral home got told by the city they have to stop parking (illegally, I presume) their hearse on a snow route and during rush hour, so when I drove past them today, they just had pylons out in the street “claiming” the spots. Oh, and to put it into context, they do have a massive parking lot in the back, so this is not required or anything.
If I'm not letting 3' snowbanks stop me, I'm not letting pylons stop me. So yeah, they're out a few pylons now. I'm actually getting curious about it now, and might call the city and find out of funeral homes have religious exemptions from parking codes or something. If not, I'm going to demand that either they start towing their vehicles, or I get a $150 refund for when they towed me for parking in essentially the same spot. I don't care that they have more money than me, and I don't care that they have more corpses in their basement than I do.
We've got fresh snow, and many of the side streets haven't been plowed yet so it's a lot of fun to be a big truck today! I'm in full-time 4WD of course and have enough clearance that pretty much nothing will stop me — it's enormous fun being able to drive in the side lanes that normal vehicles can't handle, so in this weather I can sometimes get lucky and get places twice as fast, as if there's no traffic… And you can't beat powersliding and doing donuts in parking lots!
So yesterday at supper I was getting talked to slash hit on by a sort of drunk, possibly low-functioning (or high), hippy. I was really tired and didn't really feel like talking so I just sort of said “yeah” to whatever so she kept talking which was very awkward but sort of fun. At one point she asked if I was from Africa and I just kept the “yeah” going. So she explained the cultural differences between Canada and Swaziland and that here apparently it's ok for a woman to buy a guy a drink. After she finished talking to us, she centred on the next guy to come in, and then eventually an Indian woman who I think had trouble restraining her laughter when she was told that I was an African warrior.
That said, my memories of childhood are such that if I actually had to tell this lie to someone who wasn't drunk, I could probably do it and believe it while doing it. My father really did drill into me not only warrior culture and my only experience with tattooing as a child was the understanding that you earned them through challenge, and my mother, who really is from Africa, exposed me to graphic “how-to” books on African body modification… and the whole time I was being told I could be anyone I wanted to be. So who knows what role that played, but it's certainly a foundation I could use to tell the story, especially if I transmogrified a few (also true) stories about not having English as my first language and so on.
Anyway, it was all friendly enough and nice, but I don't like it when potentially crazy people approach me and start telling me about my aura (because so-called “crazy” people see the world unfiltered, so they can full-on see things that others can't see consciously, but can only experience as a sort of a “vibe”). Laugh it up all you want but I've been able to see auras naturally all my life, and megadosing psychedelics certainly amplified that. I was talking to a friend the other day trying to explain how to do it, and for me, the visualization thing is just “turning my mind inside out”… It's hard to explain but basically you relax completely so you feel really swollen but empty and then you let that space all fill up with energy, which will bring you to a point where you feel like you're going to have a seizure (sort of like the feeling of a really big sneeze building), and then you pull all of that up into your head and use it to sort of push in from the outside of your brain toward the center while at the same time rolling the outer edges of your brain down and pulling them into the hole you're making with the energy you're pulling up, and in the process “turn your brain inside out”. I don't know if that makes any sense at all. It may only to others that do it. Anyway, my theory is that these visualization exercises allow me one to transfer the seat of consciousness (the part of your brain that's currently dominant in terms of defining your relationship and understanding of the world), and by pushing consciousness into areas that would normally be subconscious, you get to watch all the behind-the-scenes image processing (which is of course based on intuition, experience, memory, knowledge, data from the full set of senses, and much more than just visual stimuli)… I don't think that what I do is in any way abnormal or unusual, and I certainly don't think it has supernatural overtones. But anyway, it's not something I like to be approached about.
Today is going to be a long day. I went to bed early but only got about four hours of sleep because my knee kept me up. I think that having no sensation for a while has reduced my pain threshholds. Anyway, after I post this I'm going to head off for an hour at the gym, first time since the surgery… And after that I committed myself to serving pizza to kids at Nefarious's school because one of the other parents previously scheduled bailed, and literally every single other person refused. So I'll probably be pretty dead by the end of the day.
I don't like funerals as a general statement. Outside of not liking them emotionally, in general terms I find the process of corpse disposal offensive — the idea of spending tens of thousands of dollars, as well as valuable realestate, on a corpse, seems completely idiotic (as does pouring the equivalent of 320 gallons of fuel on someone to cremate them — which incidentally makes up 0.2% of all CO2 emmissions on the planet and aerates many other toxic chemicals). But, even atheists do this nonsensical and destructive religious act, in part because the government forces it.
Here's what I want for my funeral.
I want to get stuck in a freezer so I'm completely frozen solid all the way through. Then there's to be a big party in a forest, at the height of which my frozen corpse gets chucked in the wood chipper and I'm sprayed into the forest, where I'll be directly reabsorbed into the latticework of life on this planet. The bacteria in my body that make me who I am will go on living in other animals, and to a small extent I stay immortal… Much better than being embalmed (filled with poison) and placed in a sealed box to ensure that whatever miniscule part of me is left alive will not transition from life to death to life as has happened seamlessly until very recent human history.
Too bad it's illegal to be a part of nature.
Anyway, speaking of funerals, what I dislike more than the concept of funerals is the legal protections that specific forms of funerary practices receive. What I've described above (and even milder variations on it like getting buried on your family farm) would be very illegal in most areas. However, if some rich dude dies, the police escort a huge procession that shuts down taxpayer streets, runs red lights, and so on. Yesterday I was driving down the street and a suited woman stepped out into the street with a big stop sign, in front of the funeral home that always has its hearse parked illegally in front all the time. Oh, speaking of driving:
My truck got towed last week, but their hearse doesn't get towed. What, I transport a living three year old to school, and that's less important than transporting a dead eighty year old guy to get tossed in a hole in the ground???
So anyway, this woman steps in front of me with a big stop sign, literally trying to stop all traffic so their stupid hearse and support vehicles could all leave at the exact moment they felt like it. Fuck that. So I just kept going. I may have even sped up a little. She had to jump out of the street. Seriously, I have no patience for people who think they have special rights to use resources we all pay for (like the roads). That means if you're a hearse, you'd better respect cars, and if you're a car, you'd better respect bikes.
Seriously, next time I see that hearse parked illegally blocking rush hour traffic I'm going to hook my winch up to it and drag it down the street and dump it in the lake.
I was reading this “top ten ways you know you're an entrepreneur” list, and I was thinking that everyone (except people with a really low or unambitious self-image) would walk away from the list with the impression that they might be. That said, everyone might be so I guess that's fair, but then what's the point in the list in the first place?
The problem with the list is that it leaves out what you really need to be an entrepreneur — fairly relentless drive and almost pathological faith in yourself or your project (the willingness to do unlikely things because you so believe you can help make them happen) I'm saying “yes” to everything on that guy's top ten list, but I don't really feel that I'm an entrepreneur, because I have zero sense for business or corporate management… I really feel like I'm more someone who just likes making things — for example, if I finish my breakfast before Nefarious (um, always pretty much), I doodle pictures to amuse myself and her. That kind of sums me up.
That's her on the right, refusing to eat, and on the left is a doodle that half way through (which is why the eyes are not adult sized in relation to the skull size) she asked me to change to “Captain Jon Cárron” (Jon, but with a new last name for some unknown reason)… I think I need to start doing more life drawing. I'm pretty sure dogs, smart dogs anyway, might be able to draw better than me if a really smart vet gave them thumbs.
That's not a joke, I have a lot of respect for dogs.
I posted a new avatar image (also on the right; it's one of two I added today so it won't show as the top one on IAM). I've been stuffing myself the last few days so I managed to gain a few pounds (to about 165 I think). I want to start back at the gym this week and really focus on gaining weight. It's funny… Everyone complains that I don't post heavy people on ModBlog, but then goes and attacks anyone who's underweight. Trust me, and this is coming from someone who spent most of his life overweight, being underweight is less fun. I guess in part because “fat rights and civility” awareness promotion has been so effective, it's considered in poor taste to make fun of someone because they're overweight, but no such poor taste rule applies in reverse.
Anyway… Here's a funny thing I saw on Google Maps — some strange “Escher” like behavior in NYC, where the perspective on buildings changes from block to block. The reason that it particularly interested me is that I don't believe that this is algorithmic — I'm almost certain that this is patched together in a Photo editing application. I don't think this could be done automatically.
There are plenty of places where Google has overlapped different map sources of course… Even inside Central Park there are resolution overlaps for example, where one image has higher quality than another. For example, here's one not far from the pictures above:
That's most likely done automatically because it's just a blurline (that said there's a suspicious distortion in the bottom right building that looks weird to me), but it wouldn't surprise me if pretty much every high traffic location in Google Maps has been gone over by hand… It reminds me of the “college student algorithm” that was said to be behind fractal compression (ie. where a college student sits in a closet and matches up the math by hand).
