At first I saw something silhouetted on a card table. Then Action entered the story and I had to choose an adventure after being asked what happened.

I figured how it rolls might depend on who pushed it, and I already knew that. Kevin. Why he did it was less clear. Muscle memory placed us at a table in the canteen. Sitting across from him on any ordinary day, some rolled up piece of napkin or a wad of garbage paper might present itself as a projectile to reach him across the plates and glass between us.

Tonight we were in my kitchen, together there for the first time. I’d moved the table into the corner with both leaves open to make extra space for snacks for the party. We pushed the pretzels and empties aside and sat facing each other off the edge of the table, knees nearly interlocked.

My chin was on my hand and my heart was on the ceiling. We were laughing about something when I noticed the toy baseball on the table. The stairs creaked and the sound of background chatter crept in like a breeze that chilled my spine. He flicked the ball, and it rolled fast off the edge then fell to the floor with a flat thud.

The phone on the wall behind him rang, and I clicked to review the test questions.

anywhere you can see a map

I think I need a rewatch with this new perspective. I saw Enlightenment to Romanticism through a lens of British stuffiness that gave the veneer of “light hearted”, but Ow My Balls makes a little more sense with a layer of mid-Atlantic mud. I already got Boob Comedies from Ren and Stimpy through Family Guy. What I want is hero stories to save Atlas, but the scornful judgment in the movie’s framing is a force of Christian conservatism trapping him between two worlds.

Here’s a random paranoid tangent before lunch! I was reading recently about the evolution of theater in England over a hundred years from ~1550-1650. Elizabeth ruled during the first part of that interval, and Shakespeare wrote. His plays included perspectives from wide slices of society and were performed for royalty and commoners alike. Elizabeth died and private theatrical commissions began to outgrow public theater, which according to wikipedia “sustained themselves on the accumulated works of the previous decades”.

Starting in 1642 theaters were closed entirely by act of a Puritanical Parliament. That ban lasted 18 years and once the audience was Quite Thirsty, the English Restoration restored theater abstractly and filled it with bawdy raunch.

Yada yada, Disney then hired a crew of weepy Christian writers in the 20th century to repackage folk tales into Little Mermaid and Iron Man, which seems parallel enough to Shakespeare retelling Ovid. Film flourished, and in the early days of broadcast TV anybody could star in their own very own program. The Writers were on the brink of delivering us Heroes, but they up and left before they could save the cheerleader.

Now this age of regurgitated, computer animated-and-written, crowdsource produced art seems familiar, too. We’re filling the gaps with what we know, and the Appalachians wielding the pen are finding gaps they didn’t know were there. It’s odd being here, but my point is that if we are stuck in a loop then there’s the potential that on the horizon is a period of Hollywood producing a bunch of light hearted Boob Comedies.

This post is creating company culture by its promotion of ditching coworkers and seeking validation through memes. Disassociation is the problem!

moralizing “diminishing relationships to promote etc” sounds like ayn-rand-libertarian-christian-nationalist-trumper lizard folk valuing the ability to say horrible things to people then hoist blame on them for corrupting society while camouflaged behind a veil of repentant self-exile

There’s bacteria that grow in the roots of legumes that are capable of capturing gaseous nitrogen. That nitrogen makes its way to the soil, where the trees can suck it up to produce protein, like sunflower seeds. I eat those and by the time I urinate and die the nitrogen has been so concentrated within me that I burn a small hole in the ground for the fungus, sun, and time to decay and heal.

If I could photosynthesize the carbs needed to bootstrap this operation I would. If I could plant a piece of myself and feed it rainwater and atmospheric nitrogen to grow a steak I would. If I could leave behind shelter I wood.

all your time learing to configure an abstraction layer instead of interfacing with the real underlying tooling

Bro it’s state machines all the way down and expressions up top

They called themselves the Kool Kids but we knew them as the Terror Twins, the Masonic Menace. They’d force their way into any bit of joy or loss, a trail of rubble and scars bolstering their smothering presence, the moon’s the only force strong enough to pull them away.

At least that’s what some say happened the night Kool-Aid Man landed on the rocks. Everybody has their say on how he got there, but the facts of the matter are he did get there, the tides were shifting when he did, the moon was full and the sky was clear, and a group of yutes had just started a fire for a clam bake near where shards of glass were later found. All the king’s horses and men gathered to put him together again, but with one piece lost in the sand he bled out entirely.

The coroner informed Warm-Hinder, who froze in place. A sudden strong gust cracked his icy joints in half, sending his upper parts rolling down 95. When he finally thawed out somewhere near Maryland he dragged himself to the woods, to the remotest cabin of the least connected mountain in all of Appalachia.

Out front sat Marge and Paddy, who offered a refill to the dehydrated tumbler and pointed to the trail of sweet tears leading to the stranger on their porch. He drank deep then reached for a horseshoe on the ground near his foot, hurling it at the hosts’ hearts. A cloud shifted as he did, and a ray of light caught the glass in the old couple’s hands. A rainbow fired from between them blinding the guest, who fell to the floor grasping at his eyes.

“I can’t see, I can’t see!” he cried scrambling on all fours, kicking up dust and throwing what rocks his fingers could find.

“What is it you can’t face?” asked Marge.

“I thought if I tried hard enough,” he trailed.

Paddy chuckled through the break in the noise and shared a slice of moldy bread.

The two sat sipping in silence where they had been and where they’ll stay rocking. The one watched as the rain fell and the sea filled with boiling fire, and the earth pulled in closer still. He heard rhythm in his frantic breathing and saw seedlings sprouting out of softened soil. The beating of his heart filled his feet and he began to dance.

Night had fallen by then but the forest was bright and the path was clear. So he danced with the gravity pulling him through forest and flood and ocean until daybreak. And when he arrived home he saw the gates and gears of the city lifting and turning, and a river of Red 40 flowing through.

At a certain level all data is a pair (some name, blob of bytes). You can concatenate sequences of those pairs into a tar archive and call that a database. To access “the last object” you’d have to seek over the “first” objects. So you can build another set of (some name, blob of bytes) that serves as an index into the first set. You’ll first have to do at least one full pass over that first set, and you’ll need to make space on the books to account for twice as many sets, AND you’ll still have to do some seeking over the “first objects” in the indexing collection, but it all keeps recall times very short!

We taught the infant AI to say Hitler as a joke then we got bored so now the only way it knows how to get our attention is by heiling in the school hallways while we get drunk in the comment section blaming capitalists and reddit for our absent parenting.

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