gone to croatoan

DOs and DON'Ts for this Week

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 08:00:06 -0800

DO pet things that explicitly request to be petted.
DO NOT lick things that seem to want to be licked.

DO assemble a plate of cheese, crackers, and lunch meat from your fridge for an impromptu “deli dinner”.
DO NOT buy cheese, crackers, or lunch meat for the purpose of a planned “deli dinner.”

DO watch for cars.
DO NOT get hit by a car.

DO find someone with freckles and kiss them.
DO NOT pinch the person with the freckles.

DO take your clothes out of the dresser and refold them.
DO NOT put any back in the dresser if you don’t like them anymore. Give them away.

DO pretend your house is up on stilts on attached to a balloon before you go to bed.
DO NOT open your eyes while pretending.

DO eat some ice cream.
DO NOT eat all the ice cream.

DO experiment with your hair. It might be good if you brush it a different way.
DO NOT dye your hair. It’s a great color right now.

DO drink your coffee in bed this Saturday.
DO NOT have your lunch in bed this Saturday.

Revisionism

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 08:00:05 -0800

Bambi was based on a critically novel written for adults. What other surprises do children’s movies have in store?

Old Yeller is about a spacechild who adopts a star. It’s about to go nova, and he has to detonate it with nuclear weapons so it becomes a black hole instead. Nova is the galactic equivalent of rabies.
To Kill a Mockingbird is about programs from competing operating systems. The only things the two OSes can agree on is that viruses (rabid dogs) must be put down and that it’s a sin to delete an animated .gif.
Swiss Family Robinson is about a virulent family of viruses that is quarantined in a lab while scientists work feverishly to find a cure.
The Parent Trap is about what happens when parasitic twins grow apart: They turn on their mother.
Monsters, Inc. showed only the “good” side of the fear-harvesting business. A larger portion of boogeymen spent their time menacing the schizophrenic with waking hallucinations and goading meth addicts into states of utter panic.
Toy Story II shows what happens when the Lacuna technology from Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is applied to a child.
Requiem for a Dream was originally cast with children and set at the apex of the Saturday morning cartoon-fueled action figure boom.
Wall-E ends in a murder suicide.
The “Sorcerer’s Apprentice” portion of Fantasia is based on the true story of a nurse who got into an automated drug room.
Terminator II and Iron Giant were independent adaptations of the same script.

Before takeoff, I traced the pattern of my sigil for “this...

Tue, 21 Feb 2012 14:10:17 -0800

Before takeoff, I traced the pattern of my sigil for “this journey will proceed smoothly” onto the blank touchscreen in embedded in the setback in front of me.

The screen immediately booted up.

Do this with every machine and every machine creator.

Sat, 18 Feb 2012 10:03:36 -0800

Do this with every machine and every machine creator.

Photo

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 13:46:26 -0800

Photo

Sat, 11 Feb 2012 07:58:16 -0800

Spelling

Fri, 10 Feb 2012 11:14:50 -0800

I just tried to write out the last four months of the year really quickly and here is what came out:

Spetedmber
Octoboer
Novemb erre
Devetmter

Advice towards a Non-Consumptive Nerd Culture

Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:45:00 -0800

I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of nerd culture as hypercapitalist and reactionary. A friend asked me how a person who recognized that nerd culture has become unpleasant might differentiate him or herself from the consumptive model of apolitical consumer-centric nerdism.

(Author disclosure: I do not identify as a nerd. But as a white man with a kind of weird personality and interests in science fiction and the internet, I’ve been around nerd culture my whole life.)

My thoughts:

Respect What Brought You To Nerd Culture

Be aware of your similarity to the consumer nerd.
Acknowledge that there are reasons you are drawn to nerd culture.
Acknowledge that you can address those reasons in a progressive way.

Have Interests Beyond “Cool” or “Fun” Things

Appreciate beauty and complexity.
Get socially engaged: understand the problems of the world.
And recognize that you have a role in addressing the problems of the world.

Challenge Yourself

Get diverse in your interests.
Question your lack of interest in things.
Put yourself in new intellectual and cultural situations.
Be careful how and what you collect.
Keep learning.
Create things.
Consider yourself an adult by whatever definition you choose. The consumptive nerd is a child. You are not.

Be Genuine in Your Interests

Like things because they’re good, not because they’re terrible.
Acknowledge and do not celebrate the deficiencies of those things you enjoy.
Don’t use irony.
Don’t exaggerate.

Accept and Celebrate Differences

Allow change.
Enjoy differences.
Allow others to have interpretations which differ from yours.

I realize this is all likely preaching to the converted. Maybe I’m doing this backwards.

But if you feel disengaged and unfulfilled in a life of consuming, there is a way out.

/////////////////////////: feraferiablakkwitchmanflayer: christ-the-retweeter: “nerd culture” is...

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 10:42:00 -0800

/////////////////////////: feraferiablakkwitchmanflayer: christ-the-retweeter: “nerd culture” is...:

christ-the-retweeter:

“nerd culture” is a hypercapitalist extension of regular culture i think

i mean think about it, there’s literally nothing that defines the “culture” beyond shared experiences of media consumption

you basically have to spend money to be able to take part, it’s the falsest thing imaginable

and seeing as how it’s basically the new mainstream (and what better way to make it sell than to pretend it’s subversive) it’s not surprising at all that it carries no actual subversive values but just intensifies the values of the people in power.

There is no better consumer than someone who defines herself by the media she consumes.

Arguably, one of the most repellent activities of nerd culture is the ironic appreciation of low-quality media.

Ironically appreciating something terrible allows one to feel superior to the terrible thing and above its often repellent values while still consuming it. The process of “watching a bad movie” involves the explicit acknowledgment of the the film’s deficiencies. The sarcastic viewer feels superior to the media, but is still allowing the film to pander to her by consuming it.

SMELL MY WILD FLAVORS

Fri, 27 Jan 2012 11:30:03 -0800

tphd:

HERE IS A THING I WROTE CALLED “SMELL MY WILD FLAVORS” I HOPE YOU ENJOY IT AND ALSO THAT YOU HAVE A NICE WEEKEND

SMELL EM

Contents of My Coffee Table

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 20:19:50 -0800

An owl feather,
a bottle of ink,
a vial of melted snow,
a soap dish of full of Sacajawea dollars with an “L” on them,
a yellow toy bicycle,
half a roll of masking tape,
a bottle of pufferfish spines,
an Outkast CD,
a leather pen case full of pens,
two scissors, one very large, one small,
a skinning knife,
a stack of folded vintage kimono fabric,
a cow’s tooth,
two empty matchboxes,
two pads of vellum paper,
five art books,
a leather beltcase,
an ipad,
a painting of angel from bolivia,
aterra cotta statute of a “vermin”,
a sea shell,
vials of ink for a fountain pen,
an origami boat,
a packet of cards with art items on them,
and a wooden whale.

thewww: ritualaid // 2009 - In 2006, I was blasted apart by...

Wed, 11 Jan 2012 07:19:29 -0800

thewww:

ritualaid

// 2009 - In 2006, I was blasted apart by LSD, went through ego-loss, and then suffered the unknown presence of a movie which was in an adjacent room during my re-integration. Through many of those years I was continuing to consume psychedelics as well as fighting with an opiate addiction, and as I look back on the photographs I took, songs I wrote, I see them as clues, which if I wasn’t afraid, if I’d understood, would have led me to being able to integrate the experience sooner. I felt a continual pull towards televisions, first enshrining one in wax, eventually playing a TV as a musical instrument using audio and video feedback and a magnetic glove. This TV was in a dingy, fly-infested two room apartment in back of town, Morgantown, West Virginia where I spent a year in Hell driving around the crack-addled dealers Mustang and Lil Mustang who would steal from me and then make it up to me when they needed my car, and a neighbor, Jimmy, who was honest and told me to keep away from them. All this time I was going through a “schizophrenic”, doped up nightmare in my apartment, clogging the toilet with a dope-dense shit and cleaning the overflow myself, as well as seeing shadow people and sensing ghosts, I was also driving across Monongalia county with crackheads and felons, trying in vain to help them as I also tried to get my own needs for hillbilly heroin and benzodiazepines met by men who’d been made sociopaths by crack cocaine. At one point, emboldened by hero-in, I refused to take Mustang on his first stop (a crackhouse), before we retrieved my drugs. He then put his hand into his jacket and claimed to have a gun, and I began screaming “Fuck you, pull the fucking gun, I’ll break your broken shoulder!” as his son screamed in the background, “Dad, don’t do that. He’s lying, he’s lying!” Things calmed down and we got our drugs. That same winter I made a costume from a coyote hide, worn on the back, came up over the forehead and covered the eyes, and when a street kid who called himself Wolf came through my apartment, I did psychedelics with him and Lil Mustang while we watched the Holy Mountain. Wolf left wearing my coyote-shaman outfit and never returned. A month or two later, Lil Mustang was sent to a military school. He left 3 days later, claiming he was forced to lift 30 pound bricks over his head for hours on end. I called my Dad once, drunk and raving in our recording studio and he said he’d call the cops. “No, no!” then I wouldn’t be able to get any dope. I was always willing to put the fear out there at random, never to take the help I was offered. I gave these guys constant trust and compassion, expecting that to help, not sober or wily enough myself to understand I was being used, and when I did, the situations got harsh, quick. The father and son duo, Mustang and Lil Mustang, threatened me over the phone repeatedly after I declined to drive them around to any more crackhouses, but thanks to an accidental pocket dial, he heard shotguns being cocked by two of my friends and plans of causing trouble. I heard him yelling in my pocket, and picked up the phone “Don’t do anything to us! Leave us alone!” Never heard from them again after that incident. They were always curious about my TVs and my playing the TV as a musical instrument, and once Lil Mustang took me up to his room, showed me that he’d melted down red candles in pill bottles, “This is how I’m killin myself,” maybe another sociopathic ploy, maybe he really looked up to me and wanted my help. None of that ended up mattering except that now I can look back and write up another incomplete Hell I passed through, and know I won’t go there again, to the corrupt pharmacy 35 winding miles through the cool windy valley, to every waiting room where a doctor might be tricked into giving up some dope, to houses where only a moment of a face was seen and where money sometimes disappeared, to frantic roadside phone calls to scream at dealers and thieves, the gritted teeth, the threats, and between all that, what I believed were magic spells, stolen prayers, triumphant, miraculous music I could’ve taken somewhere, if my spirit hadn’t been pulled a hundred different directions, but mostly to my next fix. Each time I visited Walmart I bought more candles, until the TV was lost in wax, and I never understood any of my fixations, the TV, the Bible pages on the bathroom door, the acronyms, the signposts of anamnesis, of recomposition.

gowns: yoko ono - “silent piece” (1972)

Sun, 08 Jan 2012 14:11:51 -0800

gowns:

yoko ono - “silent piece” (1972)

Tumblr! Find me on Twitter!

Fri, 06 Jan 2012 10:25:23 -0800

Tumblr! Find me on Twitter!

I drove to Bellevue a few days ago to spend an hour in a sensory...

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 09:09:00 -0800

I drove to Bellevue a few days ago to spend an hour in a sensory deprivation tank at a yoga teacher’s home studio. I had intended to spend the day preparing for it: I went to bed early, and when I woke up I drank no caffeine. Unfortunately, bad dreams and a body sore from a rough massage put me into a foul, foul mood, and I spent all morning trying to distract myself from my desires and my regrets.

It turned out that my foul mood couldn’t have been more effective for a first float tank session, because an hour in the tank replaced negativity with a serious sense of bliss. The man who owned the tank had me shower. I walked through his yoga studio into the back of his house to join him in the tank room. The tank was an oval-shaped pod about six feet tall and probably eight feet long. Together we removed the cover from the inside of the tank, and he explained how I needed to be careful of my eyes, as the water was extraordinarily salty. We had part of the cover off, and he had me jump in. I disrobed - you float nude - and got in clumsily. Slow down, he said. You really need to slow down. I laid back. The water came up the plimsoll line just in front of my ears. I put my feet flat on the floor of the tank. I put a rolled up floating pillow under my neck and lifted my feet. I put my hands above my head with my palms facing up and laid there. The other option was the hands down by the waist, palms down, like the Vitruvian man. It was pitch-black, silent, and I was laying in a slimy, room-temperature solution. It took a long time to begin to take value from the experience. I laid there worrying and thought about the term “monkey mind”.

I really tried at first. I have found that with inner-facing experiences like this, getting rid of my preconcieved notions tends to happen within the actual experience. I tried to relax, tried to observe myself not relaxing. I kept my eyes firmly closed, which didn’t work. I found that my legs were tensed even though they were nominally floating, and I actively relaxed them. This helped, and a moment later I went through a progressive relaxation which immediately changed my posture from something flat and rigid to something genuinely *floating*.

Things got serious then. I had a sense of my body being separate from my mind. I started to feel separated. It was interesting that my mind could act even in the absence of stimuli.

I felt a sense of amphibiousness, as if I was drifting between media.

The flatness of the experience was interesting: my only open areas of movement were on one plane. I hit the side of the tank a few times and gently pushed off each time, so I barely moved. After the first time, I had the sense of being in strong motion/non-motion for the rest of the session.

I did some basic self-hypnosis. I wanted to find the answer to the question “What’s the next phase of my personality?” and I have found hypnosis very effective in identiying answers like that. I didn’t get an answer.

I kept thinking about how the letter R is a stylized spiral, and how I had built delay into my desires. At some point I dozed off, or fell into something that was sleep-like. When I came out of it I was unable to comprehend the darkness caused by having closed eyes from the darkness present when my eyes were opened. Afterwards, I got out and showered. My foul mood was completely gone. I was moving much more gracefully, less clumsily, than I had before. The yoga teacher gave me a hug and I left. Someone had called me and left a message I couldn’t understand on my cell phone.

It’s about two hours after the session. I’ve got a sense of total bodily relaxation that transcends any massage I’ve ever had - my muscles and tendons feel stretched out in interesting and natural ways. I have that sense of bliss you get from having positively spent your energy on something.

Other effects: Driving home, I wanted to minimize my sensory stimuli. I have found this is very common after inward experiences: I don’t want to use headphones or listen to music or watch television or read. The most valuable experiences, for me, are those that result in the positive feeling of “being” without pushing outward against that feeling.

I’m using my Chrome browser as an experimental arena to...

Tue, 27 Dec 2011 10:29:00 -0800

I’m using my Chrome browser as an experimental arena to see what happens when you mess with your basic web interface. What happens when you corrupt the very basis of communication?

Well, here’s what happens when you achieve 100% corruption. (Unfortunately, I don’t know enough CSS to make this work on non-wiki pages.)

If you take i seriously, it’s sort of overwhelming to try to read Wikipedia when the text is Wingdings. There is zero comprehension. But once you decide *not* to try to read them, you can appreciate them for their aesthetic value, and maybe start to make up meanings.

riteaid: //11-21-11 I went to my first session in the sensory...

Thu, 22 Dec 2011 08:58:28 -0800

riteaid:

//11-21-11

I went to my first session in the sensory deprivation tank today, walked down the boardwalk along the Pacific Ocean and found the Float Lab at 801. When I went into the office, a small anteroom with two photos of Albert Hoffmann (the chemist who created LSD) I knew I was at the right place, and when the owner, Crash came inside and made eye contact with me, I knew immediately serious mental work was being done, as his look put the kind of energy up through my lower back and skull I normally only get after 3-4 minutes of eye contact with someone. He asked why I was there and I told him I have a blog about rituals. “You mean like going to the top of a pyramid and sacrificing virgins?” “No, meditations.” “You gotta work your way up, huh?” He gave myself and another a rundown on the use of the tank: go through this door and wash thoroughly using special soap, shampoo and conditioner. Put in earplugs to prevent the epsom salt from accumulating in the ears, climb into the tank, and lie down face up, feet towards the door. No instructions were given for what kind of meditations would be appropriate. I opened the black steel door and climbed in, laid on my back and began to focus on my breath. I was planning on using the space for chanting, silent breathing, and Jung’s active imagination, but I realize now the most conducive activity is to just let go. (Letting go seems always the most ‘conducive’ activity, but some things, like cardio exercise or meditation require focus on one task even when other desires arrive, I still wonder about the relation of these ‘building’ activities to staying truly in line with the will of the universe.) After about 10 minutes euphoria began to creep up my toes and through my whole body. I cut this process short as well, thinking I “needed” to use the time wisely, not considering I’d have many opportunities in the future to take control and guide my experience. Because of my fear of falling asleep in the water, I didn’t allow myself to relax, and because I’ve disconnected myself from the variety of activity of my unconscious in society in order to focus on certain parts, I was unable to bring those things to surface without what would’ve been the appropriate thing to do, letting go completely and hitting the pre-sleep dream state. I’m hoping to start going twice a week for at least the next 3 months, and will report further on my experiences.

This is the second time float tanks have come up in the past week. That’s not quite synchronicity. The connection feels profound in the way synchronicity is profound.

I’ve found two places in Seattle that offer tank sessions, and I’m setting up an appointment for next week.

I love things that seem both futuristic and ancient. Banged up...

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 09:03:34 -0800

I love things that seem both futuristic and ancient. Banged up metal like this could be from both the present, the future, and the past.

Could be:

Light factory detritus from any time in the 20th century
A modern emergency blanket
Tin foil from a modern kitchen
Gold-faced metal insulation from a satellite
A bent vessel from the Bronze Age,like the Ringlemere Cup

fancygriptape: ianbrooks: Rorschach Shuttle by Timo Meyer What...

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 08:45:05 -0800

fancygriptape:

ianbrooks:

Rorschach Shuttle by Timo Meyer

What do you see?

Artist: flickr / twitter / website

I see a man preaching.

The outline of the shuttle is the ultimate science totem.

Big baskety things by Sopheap Pich at the Henry. The vertical...

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 08:44:43 -0800

Big baskety things by Sopheap Pich at the Henry. The vertical elements of those conical baskets are made of one piece of bamboo slit into many many bars.

Great shadows.