Overthinking Things

A proposed art theme for SOAK 2012, the Portland/Oregon summer regional Burning Man event:

Time Travel Field Trip

Our scientists have reported the discovery of several chronocosmic time waves of unprecedented size converging on [venue] on [dates]. The sheer magnitude of these waves practically guarantees the opening of several large cross-time rifts connecting the Jurassic period, Steampunk Europe, California 1987, and twenty-third century China, all in the space of a weekend in the Oregon forest! Your mission is to use your timeship to participate in this unprecedented creative clash of cultures, bring back evidence of your discoveries, and, of course, leave no trace...

Effigy: why, a dinosaur, of course!

Suggestions for polishing this pitch welcome.

If my New Year's Resolutions were so important, I would have resolved to pursue them before now. And, what do you know - I have! But somehow, someone got the idea that what we needed most in order to chase our dreams was the time, institutionalized in a holiday, to get away from the habitual slavery of our everyday lives, the better to actually think about what it was we actually want with our lives.

But long ago, I resolved not to live in such a dreary, habitual fashion. I don't need a holiday as an excuse to celebrate, though I always welcome those who could use one to join me. Long ago, I resolved that holy days would be so out of virtue of having opened my eyes in it, rather than not having happened in a while. Every day is worthy of living in celebration, and every day is a good day to recognize what you want out of life. And ever since then, my New Year's Resolutions have never come at New Year's.

Heavens help me, I think I might be getting back into reading syndication feeds again.

Years ago, I used to use an application called Rss2Email to read RSS and Atom feeds during the Web 2.0 blogging explosion. I wrote a little scripting glue to pull syndication feeds from Firefox's live bookmarks, and had r2e periodically email updated items to my inbox. I have collected dozens of feeds over the years, but I reached a point where I became so overloaded that I just stopped using it.

That was about the time that I started social networking in earnest. That is to say, Facehook, where syndication feeds are forbidden. Facehook shuts down applications that make user's activity streams available for syndication - not because they're really concerned about privacy (which is a solvable problem), but because it breaks their business model.

But my livemarks have been sitting in Firefox, dormant, patiently keeping themselves up to date. Many times over the years, I checked out numerous feed reading extensions, but the lack one feature kept me from using them. What I really wanted was to aggregate all feed items together chronologically in one feed. You know, "aggregating". You might call it "Planet" style.

Then I found Brief. Just the features I want, and not much else. Clean design, intuitive interface, and comprehensible options.

No one knows how much time this application will now devour in my life.

I've been sticking to Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat since I built my latest PC last winter. I keep hearing how aggravating the changes in Unity and GNOME3 are, and I have just decided to ride out the last days of the release (software updates for it end in April, and certain packages have slacked off and out entirely) until I can figure out what to do about these jerks who keep breaking established desktop environments.

So I took a cue from Linus Torvalds and moved back to XFCE4. Hell, I've been using the XFCE4 Panel even when I was using GNOME2 anyway. That was a few months ago.

Last night, I created an installer USB stick (I can't remember the last time I used an optical drive) for Xubuntu's latest 11.10, Oneiric Ocelot, the XFCE4 version of Ubuntu. It went fairly smoothly. In the past, I set aside two 16GB OS partitions separate from my HUGE data partition for /home , so that I could easily fall back on the old OS partition if things ended up sucking.

I have been pleasantly surprised by a number of things that have changed after a year of releases. I've been running this hybrid XFCE4/GNOME2 environment for a while, wherein I use both XFCE4 and GNOME2 panels, and a number of XFapplets that let you run GNOME2 panel applets in the XFCE4 panel. But many of the XFCE4 native panel applets have improved and matured to the point where I can ditch GNOME2 entirely.

For example: XFCE4's clipboard manager now supports actions. I've been using GNOME2's Glipper stuffed into an XFapplet for a long time, and it sometimes fails to start with my desktop session for some reason. Actions are a way you can define commands to be run instantly when a certain pattern of data is copied to the clipboard. When you copy a URL, for example, a menu instantly pops up below your mouse giving you the option to open it in Firefox, or Chromium, or do something else. This feature has added a LOT to my agility on my desktop. I can do things like recognize transaction ID numbers or emails, and pop up an option to search the backend of my ecommerce web sites. It's a BIG time saver.

Unfortunately, I actually had to apply some bugfixes to Glipper to get it to work the way that I wanted, which meant maintaining the thing myself every time it updated (my use case was weird, so I never got around to submitting a patch). Luckily, it's written in python, so the patch was trivial.

But now, XFCE4's clipboard manager does what I want by design, and with a better management interface. Nice.

Then there's the Directory Menu plugin. I've always wanted a customizable menu that could based on arranging files and folders in the filesystem. This is one reason why I've always hated iTunes and all the wannabe music library apps that imitate it - I've ALREADY organized my music into a categorical hierarchy in the file system; I don't need YOU telling me I have to do it all over again every time I migrate to a new music "player" just because OMG your db schemata are SO much easier to use. And then, we have the Freedesktop application menu specs, which, after much study and struggle, are just plain incomprehensible.

So for a while, I made do with faking a menu by using GNOME2's file browser menu applet, anchored to a custom directory where I toss symlinks and scripts. That's OK, but tied to GNOME2, and a bit inflexible in terms of sorting your menu items.

Enter the Directory Menu plugin, which ties into the faster, leaner XFCE4 environment, and interprets .desktop files in such a way that you can sort by the file name, but the menu item's displayed name can be customized. You can also set a filename pattern to filter out files that you don't want showing up in the menu at all.

I am happy to be delighted by small, incremental changes in desktop environments, as opposed to Unity and GNOME3's wholesale pulling of the desktop rug out from established user bases with inadequate thought for forced upgrades. If we ever see an XFCE5, I hope they design it so that it can live peacefully alongside installations of XFCE4, so that people can manage their migrations a little more gracefully than these projects have.

The DMCA includes penalties against companies that file DMCA takedown requests with content publishers against content that they don't actually hold the copyrights to. Fair enough.

So in the case of Universal Music Group's censorship of the MegaUpload song posted on YouTube you would think that MegaUpload's lawsuit would warrant just such a hand-slapping. But it doesn't.

The reason is that the interface YouTube exposes to major labels is //not// for filing DMCA-compliant takedown requests. It's just part of a private contractual agreement between YouTube and UMG. Pretty slick, hey?

Private contract law, ladies and gentleman, trampling free speech right before your eyes. Why obey the law when you can just collude with the Internet Oligarchy and create your own?

Google should think about requiring rightsholders to accept liability under the DMCA for bad faith takedown requests. Otherwise this kind of abuse will continue, not as a response to copyright infringment, but as //competitive censorship//.

I am well. I have a girlfriend. I have a plan. A private plan. I am executing.

Trees are doing well this year. I'm about to inflate my rent buffer to six months.

Fuck Yeah.

There's a certain interesting irony in the way the Occupy Wall Street protests have prompted the use of language as they have spread throughout the world. While New York's original protest calls for the occupation of Wall Street, and is called exactly that, cities where sibling protests have been inspired call for the occupation of exactly the city they take place in: "Occupy Portland", "Occupy LA", "Occupy Vancouver", etc.

The irony, to me, rests in the language of suggesting that the protesters must conduct a military occupation, as if they don't even live in their hometowns. As if the plutocrats and industrial behemoths they are criticizing are the native rulers of the landscape, forcing them to conduct an invasion and foreign occupation of their territories in order to assert that they, in fact, should take priority over those of a minority of fictitious person.

I have a new design for a shade structure for Burning Man. This is purely theoretical, at this point. I will be attempting to build this one, unless I am ambushed by yet another different idea.

Originally, I was inspired by Rob's PVC "dinosaur bones" structure, which he used in camp at the burn this year, and re-used for our Ninja Star Throwing Gallery at BurnOut. But, in designing something similar, I kept being stymied by trying to make the cover/tarp material conform to the curves of the pvc. It would be easier to just keep the angles straight, so that things don't sag. This design attempts to achieve this balance. In the bargain, it seems to be simpler, and lighter on materials.

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Ingredients:

* select a strong tarp. almost any size is usable, but keep it as square as possible. Rectangular tarps are perfectly usable.

* acquire enough PVC pipe to go around the edges of the tarp. if you can't get it in lengths long enough to cover a side, make sure all the poles assigned to a given tarp side are be in //pairs of the same length// (??). eg, if you have a 20' tarp side, get 2 lengths of 10' ppvc, if you have a 16' tarp side, get two 8' pvc pipes (cut them if necessary).

* if you need two pipes to cover a side, get a pipe knuckle to join them straight. Do not get pipe knuckles to join the pieces at the corners of the tarp; these joints will need to remain flexible.

* Get about twice as much length of rope as length PVC pipe.

* get a dozen or two bungie balls to attach the tarp to the structure.

* get four thick 2" metal rings.

* four rebar stakes, 1.5' to 2' long. 1/4 inch to 3/8 inch thick.

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Construction:

Lay out your tarp flat on the ground, and lay out the other materials around the tarp:
- the pvc pipe and any pipe knuckles, as if you were going to attach them to the edges of the tarp.
- the metal rings, one on each corner.

Cut a length of rope a bit longer than the total length of the PVC pipe acquired. thread this rope through the pvc pipe, pipe knuckles (without joining them to the pipes), and metal rings. once you've threaded all the pieces, tie one end fo the threaded rope to the other, leaving about a foot of slack you can tighten up later. A square knot should work fine.

Presuming that you cut any pipes the same length where more than one was needed for any tarp side, and that the pipe knuckles are not attached, you should now be able to fold the entire collection of pipes together into one pile, with the rope threaded through it. This keeps all the parts together, and in order, so you don't have to re-thread it together in the right order on site.

Now you just have this to transport to the site.

You will probably also want to bend a few inches on the ends of your rebar back to make hooks. A length 2'-3' length of hollow metal pipe makes an excellent lever for this task. Don't bend back too long a length, however - this thing is going to have to go all the way into the ground.

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Assembly:

On site, most smaller structures of this kind can probably be assembled by just one person.

Unfold and spread out the the pipe assembly. Attach any and all the pipe knuckles to the pipes they're adjacent to. You should now have a parallelogram (and maybe a rhombus) of pipe, with a metal ring at each corner.

Rotate the structure to optimize your shade angle. Generally, two corners - known as the high corners - should be pointed north and south. The other two corners will be known as the ground corners.

Select one of the ground corners and pound it into the ground with rebar stake. Pound the rebar through the center of the ring, hooking the rebar hook over the outside of the ring.

Cut a new length of rope that is a little longer than the diagonal length of the tarp. Then tie this length of rope to the rings on each of the high corners (you probably need to pull the remaining free ground corner out to get them close enough). Once tied, pull them as far apart as possible while still keeping them on the ground. You should now have a rectangle (or a square) that matches the shape of of your tarp on the ground.

Now, you need to tie guy lines to the high corners. The lengths will vary depending on the angle you want to tilt the structure at once it's in the air, so once one end is attached, don't cut the other end to length just yet; give yourself plenty of slack.

Next, spread the tarp out on top of the structure and attach it to the metal corner rings and (optionally) the pipes with bungie balls.

Now, grab hold of one the pipes farthest from the anchored ground corner, and lift the high corner of it into the air. As you do, pull the end with the free ground corner in while keeping it on the ground, along with the opposite high corner. you will be lifting the pipe on the other side of the high corner you're lifting in the process. continue lifting until you get about the angle you want for the structure - any angle that works for you, works. You'll want to keep playing with it (optionally with friends) until you find something you like. Then, pound a rebar stake through the ring in the remaingin free ground corner to secure it. You should have one high corner in the air, and one on the ground.

Now you'll need to grab the guy line rope attached to the high corner that's in the air, and pull it down. The tension built into the structure will lift the opposite high corner up into the air. From here, it's necessary to secure the guy lines to the other two rebar stakes, at whatever angle you want the structure to remain at, so that they maintain the tension. Once the guy lines are staked in, your structure is complete!

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Optionally, you can use zap straps instead of rope for the guy lines. This will allow you to adjust the angle of the structure easily on the fly, by releasing tension on one, and taking it up with the other.

Desire dictates belief. It's not the other way around.

Here is "the Dreamlight", the lighting project I made for our ninja star throwing range installation at BurnOut. Thanks to Earache and Rob for materials, tools, parts, and advice.

The site I've been contracted to work on launched today. There's still more to do, but the time pressure is off, just in time for...

My other thing that overcommits me: Art! This time for Burnout, Portland's post-playa burner event. I have been working on a lighting gadget for a throwing gallery project a few buddies have been working on. Now that work has relented, I should be able to finish it tonight and tomorrow in time for the show tomorrow.

And, then, there's Jams. in between stress, and distraction, there's the new girl. She came down from Vancouver earlier this week for a few nights, and, well, changed my life. Or, rather, my plans for it.

Love is, as one is told, a powerful and motivating thing. It is both experience and activity. Funny things happen when you leave the door open: people walk through them.

I know a lot of you are looking out for us, and we know we shouldn't go as fast as we feel justified to at this moment. But those of you in Portland should know that we have many mutual friends from Vancouver that are doing the same thing, and generally giving us grins and big thumbs up. I also think that's why it's actually a good thing that it's a long-distance relationship - it forces us to pace ourselves. Regardless, thanks for looking out for us.

Onward!

There are still too many somethings happening.

Wonderful somethings.

Economists are the only so-called scientists, who, when confronted with differences between their scientific models and actual human behavior, insist that there is something wrong with human behavior. They level the accusatory label of "irrational" on people, when, in truth, it is their model of what makes us tick that is incomplete and flawed.

So, too, is the epithet of "irrational" too easily dumped on those, poor, poor souls who have fallen - hopelessly? nay, hopefully - in love. Love makes us crazy, they say. It makes us do crazy, crazy things, that wouldn't otherwise //risk//. But, like the economists, I cannot now help but wonder if it is those out of love who are truly the more wretched.

It is those so quick to judge the amorous "irrational", I think, who are simply oblivious, transmitting their ignorance of the power or purpose of love, for all to see, and pity. Or, perhaps they are just in denial of the righteousness of love.

Those so cynical as to denigrate the keen logic, the razor-sharp edge of wit wielded by those in the grip of human ardor with so poor, so flip a term, seem to say nothing at all of any substance whatsoever about the world. They simply declare to us, once and over again, the supreme and perennial mystery of love.

Overcoming poverty is the last challenge before me that is imposed upon me by my life. After that, the only challenges that will remain will be ones I choose for myself - and THAT is how life should truly be lived. Poverty is that thing that hangs, unbidden, immovable, keeping almost all of my doors locked shut. Poverty is not a challenge I chose.

But perhaps it should be.

The thought, after last year's wandering, of packing a bag and walking away from it all, just to dispel the fear of it, stays with me.

The guilt-ridden are those haunted by the past. The precaritized are those haunted by their futures.

I'm afraid that I already know how to dispel these ghosts. Is the way out, through?

Parties! Art projects! Girls! Happy! No time to blog!

Life has not stopped after the burn. Decompression has been lovely, but some things have been happening in the background so far that has changed a LOT of how I used to live.

Everything has changed. I'm caught, deer in the headlights, by the brightness of new, oncoming possibilities. Let's just say I'd like to propose a toast to new lovers.

I'm living presently, as usual, as the playa teaches us about immediacy. Doing this has been steadily cutting into the time I might otherwise put into writing about the burn, because it's in the past. But I'll get there. it's important stuff.

What happens in Vegas may stay in Vegas. But what happens on the Playa comes home with you, in your heart.

... and your hair. And your sinuses, your clothes, your tent, car, bicycles, shade structures, tools, costumes...

For the "Crue" that built Thunderbridge, Portland's CoRE project effigy, this year's Burning Man was not a week in the desert. It was more than half the year itself. Even though I was granted an early entry pass that nearly doubled the amount of time I'm accustomed to spending on the playa, the whirlwind moment still came on and passed away too fast, as ephemeral as that dust devil you chase around to stand in the midst of, before it collapses. But it didn't feel like that mattered, because, as far as I was concerend, my burn started in March, and took months. The Playa was just the final, though nonetheless critical, act. Thunderbridge was a nother legitimate answer to the question: "why can't we do this all the time?"

I knew we conceived, built, brought, and re-built the birds //to burn// Thursday night, from start to finish. That was the point. And, though intellectually and intentionally well-prepared for it, I was still startled to find my eye roving across the playa on Friday, attempting to navigate with a landmark that was no longer there. It was a little bit of Sunday, post-Man burn, had arrived early. I felt done; complete; satisfied. All the other burns were just icing.

And I would take offense at anyone who tried to keep it whole. It's an effigy; burning it IS it's art. Static visual and sculptural art is transformed, by fire, into performance art. The impermanence of it reminds us, that, ultimately, ALL art is impermanent. In the abyss of time, all art is performance art. It's not something that //it is//, but something that //we do//.

And that //doing// was, by far, the most masterful, artisitic, and valuable thing about Thunderbridge. Many of our Crue members made significant, essential, and highly personal emotional investments in this piece. Many of us, myself included, were at terribly low points in our lives when CoRE was announced. It was first a crutch, then a stirrup, then a battle cry, through which we, each in our own private or shared ways, stood, like people, then strode, like the Man, then flew, like birds, past our individual crises to the triumph of another joyous, raucous year of life.

We all had things to struggle with, to overcome. But without them, Thunderbridge would not have been the thing of glory that it was - that it is. Thunderbridge's success, for us, was not in spite of our challenges - it was made of them.

And now, it, they, and we, are free.

Since we didn't document it too much, many burners admiring the birds for the first time would crow about "what beautiful phoenixes" we had. We often had to gently correct them: "Those are thunderbirds, not phoenixes. Phoenixes rise from the ashes the next day, and then you have to load them back on the truck. Fuck that!" It may be gone now, but the most valuable things really did rise from those ashes, and were indeed loaded back onto the proverbial truck with the greatest of care: the human beings that built it; the Crue that survived it, learned more about themselves, and were made better for it. What happens in Vegas may stay in Vegas, but what happens on the Playa comes home with you, in your heart.

Artists don't just make the best art. They //are// the best art.

And because we have this Crue, there will be more effigies. Thunderbridge is just our debut. As much as we bitched about moving wood, and celebrated how, when the gates opened, we'd never have to lug this damned hulk of a bridge around ever again, we sure seem eager to roll this great wooden stone up that high desert hill one more time. Maybe if old Sisyphus had set his cargo on fire once he got it up there, he would have been in heaven, instead of hell.

My humble gratitude and love to everyone I worked and played hard with on Thunderbridge: Dan, Susie, Priti, Jackie, Lucy, Bribe, Ren, Rob, Paul, Earache, LizaJane, Pi, and Pope. You make me feel like I live here, now.

Congratulations on your loss.

The art theme for Burning Man this year was "Rites of Passage". The Man, typically built in a stationary, upright stance, was built in stride this year, stepping from one pinnacle of his structure to the other. This reflects a few things that are changing about the event.

First, Burning Man LLC is finally laying out and executing a plan to transfer operation of the event to a non-profit organization, from the privately-held company that has been running it since it's birth on Baker Beach in San Francisco in the 1980's. The new organization's futures are wide open, for better or worse, but for an event whose foundational values include radical inclusion and participation, greater input from burners sounds like progress to me.

On top of that, for the first time ever, Burning Man tickets sold out, in July. There were no gate sales (although I heard rumors that unclaimed will call tickets were somehow re-sold on the weekend, which sounds suspect to me). The event hit it's hard limit of around 50,000 participants, as specified in its lease agreement with the Federal Bureau of Land Management. People pleaded for more tickets, but at that point it wasn't the BM org's decision to make. Burning Man has topped out.

And that exhaustion of one kind of resource turns the eye to the sustainability of the event. Nothing lasts forever (if only because it would take way too long to prove otherwise), and burners have long thought about how it would end, and what would happen when it did. That, in part, is why, thirteen years ago, a network of regional, localized burner organizations was founded, and has been growing steadily ever since. These organizations serve to foster the burner culture, such as the ten principles, back in the home communities that everyone returns to after engaging and being engaged by the week or more of Black Rock City. The regionals network also serves as a kind of reproduction by fission, whereby, should something permanently crash and burn That Thing in the Desert, the culture will survive, propagated by dozens of local communities instead of depending on a week in the desert that's no longer possible.

I took a particular interest in the local regional orgs in BC, while I lived there. For three years, I even skipped the playa entirely, mostly for financial reasons, while focusing on organizing events in Victoria. Getting involved locally answered the perennial question of "Wow. Why can't we do this all the time?" by making it possible to foster better relationships, and do things much more often than just one week a year. I recognized that this was where most of Burning Man's futures lay.

And then, The BM org announced the CoRE project. A Circle of Regional Effigies would be reserved, just a few hundred feet around the Man, for placement of effigies that all the regional organizations around the world would be invited to build and bring - and burn, simultaneously, on Thursday night. I am thrilled to know that the BM org has given such a front-and-center stage to spotlight the regionals, given how key they are bound to be to burner culture as we move ahead.

But more than that, the effect it seems to have had on the Portland burner community, which I had just moved into, was marvelous. Meetings were had, designs were brainstormed, input was exchanged and discussed, applications were submitted, and department leads and volunteer positions were filled. Portland burners, old and new, got excited, put their heads and hands together, and went to work making something beautiful. That alone would have made the CoRE project a success from our vantagepoint. But there would be much more to it than that in the future.

The first day you leave Burning Man, all you can think of is "Wow. Why can't we do this all the time?" That's why, on the first day you return, all you can say is "Wow. it's like I never left."

For my ninth burn, though, it was different. I left from a new home, in Portland, and camped with new friends. We brought a big beautiful new effigy to burn, that I'd been helping work on for half of my year. I came on a new early entry pass (last year's Saturday early entry notwithstanding). So this time, I pulled in on Tuesday before the gates opened, to a city that barely existed. There were so few, scattered camps. I could see the Man and the temple from my tent, several streets back from Esplanade. And for the first time, I didn't get that feeling of not having left. Last year, I left a city. This year, I've arrived in a desert construction zone. So I got to watch the city //go up// before the event, before I got to watch the city //go up// at the end of it.

"Welcome home," it always says - every time. Yet I've always resisted the tendency to call the playa home. I've lived in five cities - Denver, Phoenix, Vancouver, Victoria, and now Portland - since I first came here, and yet I always come back here. So the thought now occurs to me: do I really have any more right to call those other cities home, instead? I may have lived in each for months or years at a time, but I don't make any regular pilgrimages to see them again.

Out on deep playa, an oasis of shade, couches, and a gentleman serving iced "crappucino" (with playa dust, of course - the ubiquitous condiment) appeared near the trash fence. A couple with an interesting accent chatted next to us. When asked, they told us they were from Hamburg, Germany. He replied, "How about you? Are you from here?" I just grinned, reclined back into the dusty couch, and said "Yep. I'm from Black Rock City." So be it.

I'm back from Burning Man. My email backlog is cleared. My badly-cooled apartment is hotter than an unshaded playa tent. My back rebelled at the comfort of my bed, having delivered an incoherent pain memo in the night. "What the hell did you do with our dusty pillows and bare foamies we got used to loving so much?" I returned with less stuff than I took, the remainder being on the truck. Given how little I own, and how half of what I have is camping gear, my place is pretty bare right now. I have two dirty changes of clothes, and a towel. I have less shit now than when I got kicked out of Canada.And all is well.

Once I get my photos, I can begin posting in earnest, although I suppose I could get a jump start on the writing.

This burn was new, different, and powerfully great.

I am so grateful for so much, from so many. Stay tuned. You will be named.

And after that - I have things to do. To say. To burn.

Hey, man - I was on fire when I got here.

I felt nervous today, and I'm not sure why.

Most of us are getting ready for Burning Man. We leave Sunday, or Monday. It's exciting, and for most, there's tons of preparation and things that still need to be done. The stress comes from having so little time to do the stuff. But while I still have stuff to do, my todo list is down to so little that I still have plenty of time to fart around blogging. Like so. And while I have stuff still to buy, the clients whose contracts have paid next month's bills, and for this month's trip, have all come through, and have thrown in a little extra at the last minute with small revisions that will pad my wallet for the unforeseeable while I'm out chasing the rainbow. I feel good that I have done so well with estimating my own thresholds of commitment, and I feel good that I won't be worrying much about money. So wherefore this ill ease?

I spent a good amount of time listening to my friends today; asking questions about things I'm curious about. And it occurred to me today to ask myself a question: is the reason I like listening so much that it allows me not to share so much of myself, and my own vulnerabilities?

For awhile now, I've been new to Portland. I am making plenty of friends, but in moments like this, I have not felt very close to them quite yet. I blame my youth in this new environs, but it strikes me that I actually felt the same way many times in Victoria, as well, even after five years. And somewhere, I have to realize that I'm not "new here" anymore. So I ask another question: is the feeling of lacking intimacy really about the community - or is it about me?

Soul searching like this always gets to me at Burning Man. This year, it's apparently hit me before we've even left for it.

Gifting is not an economy. It's a society.

A lack of education seems to be the only thing standing between me and a job I hate.

Schadankenfreude - Noun.

A portmanteau of the german words "Danke", an expression of gratitude, and "schadenfreude", glee over the misfortune or suffering of another.

eg: "Man, I'm glad you went through that bullshit, and not me. Thanks for shielding me from that."

Charlie Stross reminded me of something.

I started collecting and archiving my own data as a habit, because I wanted a paper trail I could follow for my own interests. On occasion, it was also important as a way to provide evidence of where I'd been, or what I'd been up to in the past. It could be useful in corroborating an alibi.

Then, last summer, I went over the border with a large collection of grocery receipts in my pocket.

"So how long have you been living in Victoria?" Asked the customs officer. That was how the course my life changed in the most cataclysmic way I've ever experienced.

This was a huge lesson, in my mind, regarding the value of personal data. It can backfire, as well as help you. If I'd taken a cleaner paper trail over the border, I might be living there today.

What's in your brain may be your own. but externalized data belongs to whoever can get at it. And it's MUCH, much easier for others to get at - especially powerful authorities. As neurological technologies develop, even your brain will one day be subpoenaed as evidence. Your skull will no longer be the place where Powers will be forced to stop short. The only way to protect yourself then will be to retreat from constitutional law to the laws of thermodynamics, and erase //yourself//.

This is why I'm glad to know that I'm going to die someday. Hopefully I won't have to put up too long with the intersection of the self-justifying police state we're becoming and the technology necessary to completely invade and dominate the very minds of its people.

It is scruples that make people good; laws only make them into criminals.

Let's start using the term "Corporate-occupied America", shall we? Because we've long since stopped being a democratic republic.

I also wonder if we could find occasion to say some like "post-developed world", along the lines of "underdeveloped nations" or "the developing nations". It would indicate a country where all of the resources and capital have been "privatized", swallowed up by wealthy globalized industrial corporations, rather than being reserved to good use by the human citizenry.

Perhaps we still have things like sanitation. But the things Americans count as distinguishing them from the third world pale in comparison to the riches this nation's government continuously showers on it's richest, even in unprecedented deficits and debt.

Every door is just a window you can walk through,
and every wall is just a door that stops you.
So when you perceive a door impedes your call,
don't unlock the door - tear down the wall.

When I say I am lit from within, this is what I mean. Almost everything that brings me joy in my life exists entirely within my mind. My imagination, my thoughts, my capacities for satisfaction, patience, ecstasy, compassion, and joy - all these things are right here. I don't need to go looking very far into the outside world to find them. There are already worlds within, teeming with life.

The world we share, is dull in contrast, fraught with compromise and difficulty, heartbreaking and deceptive. It seems as if the very purpose of this earthly universe is to gradually, yet persistently rob me of all the joys I hold dear, and eventually kill me. From the landlord's silent expectation of rent, to the entropic advance of bodily disease and decay, stillness and oblivion make creeping demands upon us all. And in my country, uniquely unlike others, government doesn't care.

The only thing I have ever found worthwhile "out there" in the world we share, are individual human beings. I am disrespected by the new species of organizations and institutions that monopolize control of our ways of life all day long, but it's //human// people who bring me what I need, from new work opportunities to summer barbecue meals to simple hugs and gratitude just for being alive. People are the things we are evolved to cherish, and so I do.

This paints a picture that explains, in one way, why my values are autonomy, autogamy, austerity, and empathy.

Why do I go to Burning Man? Because no where else in the world holds as many human beings that I love, and that love me.