2003

From crispyneurons

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[edit] 29 December 2003

A final thought for our mad, beautiful world, in the midst of once-religious celebrations at the end of this turbulent year:

When I became convinced that the universe is natural - that all the ghosts and gods are myths, there entered into my brain, into my soul, into every drop of my blood, the sense, the feeling, the joy of freedom. The walls of my prison crumbled and fell, the dungeon was flooded with light and all the bolts and bars and manacles became dust. I was no longer a servant, a serf or a slave. There was for me no master in all the world - not even in infinite space.

I was free - free to think, to express my thoughts - free to live to my own ideal - free to live for myself and those I loved - free to use all my faculties, all my senses, free to spread imagination's wings - free to investigate, to guess and dream and hope - free to judge and determine for myself - free to reject all ignorant and cruel creeds, all the "inspired" books that savages have produced, and all the barbarous legends of the past - free from popes and priests - free from all the "called" and "set apart" - free from sanctified mistakes and "holy" lies - free from the fear of eternal pain - free from the winged monsters of the night - free from devils, ghosts and gods. For the first time I was free. There were no prohibited places in all the realms of thought - no air, no space, where fancy could not spread her painted wings - no chains for my limbs - no lashes for my back - no fires for my flesh - no master's frown or threat - no following another's steps - no need to bow, or cringe, or crawl, or utter lying words. I was free. I stood erect and fearlessly, joyously faced all worlds.

And then my heart was filled with gratitude, with thankfulness, and went out in love to all the heroes, the thinkers, who gave their lives for the liberty of hand and brain - for the freedom of labor and thought - to those who fell on the fierce fields of war, to those who died in dungeons bound with chains - to those who proudly mounted scaffold's stairs - to those by fire consumed - to all the wise, the good, the brave of every land, whose thoughts and deed have given freedom to the sons of men. And then I vowed to grasp the torch that they have held and hold it high that light may conquer darkness still.

Robert Green Ingersoll (1833-1899)

As our self-enslaved species struggles to free itself, I think about both the ominous slippage and the real achievements. Another year is past, the journey continues. We all could use a Better New Year.

[edit] 14 December 2003

Begin fragment...

Aerial approach: a gleaming city on the water. The water is rich and blue. Indistinct land isn't far away. Giant industrial floating platforms, flat rectilinear grids of carbonized metal and rebar, are vast thundering stages covered with a thin white material similar to paper or Tyvek. They are floodlit in broad daylight, and are obscured by overpasses that can't be seen. Perhaps in reaction to the emptiness, startled seagulls fly away. Clusters of glassy skyscrapers are embedded in geometric granite-edged islands.

These are my ancestral waters. But myself aside, not one person to be seen anywhere. A vast, lonely place.

Traversing the waves lapping against the granite I know so well, I see curious things. A grizzly bear: sinuous, enormous. Somehow it seems to have found an inexplicable whitewater interstitial, and lunges at it. Ostriches plunge knoblike heads into water. What is this pandemonium? A zoo jailbreak? Apparently not. Here, exotic animals get one day of liberty, only to return to their captivity. This is apparently logical. And what strange things they do with their free time. Bears hunting urban salmon runs? Ostriches trying to drown themselves?

More large animals. Or monsters? A creature seems to be another ostrich in the water, this one gray. On its back: a mindless face embedded in feathers or perhaps fur, smiling meaninglessly. A useless human arm facing backwards, sprouting arbitrarily. I search for meaning, for reason... how can this be? Human DNA spreading to other animals virally? It seems more accidental than malevolent. But the implications are disturbing. Is my species, my essential biology, now some kind of disease vector, infecting other beings with my biological components? What a terrible fate for the hapless host. Evolved elegance becomes monstrous.

Now a city square, or a university quad. I walk on large stone rectangles, gray and rosy pink. Are those trees in planters so far away? Can't tell. I am distracted by lanky, furry golems. As tall as I am, but ridiculously slender, covered with charcoal fur, faces obscure at best. Badly programmed robots, they dance silently in clumsy reticulations like crudely engineered avatars in some ancient video game. They appear so autonomic, so atavistically algorithmic... I sense no immediate threat, no more than I would from buggy software. I approach to watch them, to try to understand what they are. But their strange jittery perambulations take them closer to me, closer, closer...

I feel an aimless hostility in their alien dance. They want to trap me! They surround me, pressing too close. I need to know what they are before I can trust their actions. I panic, I thrash uselessly against their fur-on-metal limbs. An oddly calm part of me notes the golem-fur is authentic, sprouting from living skin, yet I feel the steel structure beneath. Trapped, and no one to help...

End fragment. Abruptly I woke up, well before dawn. Fear of the bizarre pulsed in my mind for the first time since I was a small boy.

[edit] 29 October 2003

Check out crispy's new facelift. The layout has been lovingly wrought from the living rock, sculpted into the finest and strictest XHTML and CSS. Amazingly, even IE6 renders it correctly. All the weird problems with div placement, the lack of margin at the footer, and other nuisances and glitches are gone. Mozilla and Safari, of course, had almost no problem rendering crispy in the first place.

[edit] 3 October 2003

All of the Burning Man 2003 photos, about 350 all told, are up now. (Fuck is it good to be done with that project!) I've also posted the photos from the UK trip Sarah and I took in mid-september to attend my friend Marta's wedding. Heather performed at this year's Street Scene; it took considerable preparation.

[edit] 8 September 2003

Get your fix: the first round of this year's Burning Man pictures are now available!

[edit] 9 April 2003

I've written a white paper about the Java programming language called Death to Final.

[edit] 23 February 2003

You are a cactus in the beautiful desert of pain you created. Every so often a rainmaker shows up, and causes rain to fall and quenches your thirst. The rainmakers please you, and sometimes you thank them, yet you blame them when the rain stops. The desert dries, but the cactus remains, invigorated for expanded pain. The rainmaker tires and moves on, recognizing the futility of the rain.

Sometimes you had more than one rainmaker, but the most ancient one has left your desert, and now only I remain. But I am not truly of that trade; I am a shaman on a journey who happens to know how to make the rain fall. At first I did just that, because I heard your pleas. Later, when I saw your true challenge, I sought to teach you how to make your own rain for your beautiful desert. Now I see you want to be a prickly cactus, and if you make your own rain, you will rot.

I will no longer make the rain fall. I am wise enough to see the futility, but I am a young shaman and cannot yet see the nature of the necessary transforming solution. But a strange new wind is blowing through the desert, and with it comes the promise of change. My eyes look toward the horizon and I hope for the best.

[edit] 17 January 2003

I've written a white paper about something I've invented called the Semantic Object Language.

[edit] 13 January 2003

In the interests of the vast majority of visitors using browsers with subpar CSS support, I have recrafted the layout. This should work in any Gecko-based browser (Mozilla, Netscape, Phoenix, Camino, etc.), IE (Windows and Mac), Safari, Konqueror, and probably Opera as well. Sorry if you hit the site while I was updating it, it's all done now.

Continue back to 2002...