encoded notions

So here I am, sitting in my apartment on a Friday morning in Austin. I look down at ForecastFox and I see:

If I were deaf I’d believe it, but you see I have this thing called ‘the ability to hear’. The real world sits just beyond my curtains and blinds. Rain has been falling all morning—enough to make nontrivial falling-rain noises. One wee little peek through the curtains reveals a veritable wonderland for Gene Kelly freaks. So, who do I believe: the Internet, or reality?

When I walk from the bus-stop to work (1.7mi) I generally take along a Nalgene bottle 1/4 full of water. It isn’t until I get to the 75% mark that I usually pull the bottle out of my messenger bag to consume.

Today, as I neared the apex of the final hill before the easy descent to work I scrounged around for the bottle, removed it from the bag, unscrewed the cap, and just as I was to angle it back into my mouth I had to stop.

There were soap suds in my water bottle. Damn if this doesn’t teach me to wash once, rinse twice. I had to pour it out along the ground as I walked the rest of the way to work. There was no way that I desperate enough to drink soapy water. Yuck.

I’ll just quote Tim Bray said:

Please, stop reading this and go read Kathy Sierra’s Death threats against bloggers are NOT “protected speech” (why I cancelled my ETech presentations). Something is badly out of control and needs to be fixed, urgently. There’s got to be more story to be told. Anyone who is remotely connected with the people doing this needs to dig that story up and tell the community. You can’t cure a disease without a diagnosis.

Right after I watch an episode of Lost, or even rewatch older episodes in the context of newer episodes, I get really wired. I start trying to reexamine hunks of prior episodes in the light of new plot twists and gasp solid information delivered to the viewing audience.

Usually I end up bashing out several paragraphs worth of theory directly into a Gaim chat with my fellow Lostie friend Petra. I’ve decided to start mining my Gaim chatlogs and extract out the Lost bits and dump them into a very spoiler-laden blog over on my Wordpress.com account that I originally made just to get access to a Wordpress API-key to use Akismet.

Just one more time I’m gonna warn you: THAT BLOG WILL SPOIL ANYTHING THERE IS TO KNOW ABOUT LOST.

31 Mar: edited the URL for the link

The Show with Ze Frank is complete. It has run for a full year, just as Ze declared at the beginning.

I am sad. I will miss the songs, the commentary, “are the new viewers gone yet?”, and the frequent discussion on topics of a philosophical nature. If I had to pick one thing to take away from Ze’s show, it is the notion of brain crack.

I spend a great deal of time reading books, documentation, tutorials, articles, and websites trying to reach some state of information-enlightenment. I have several random ideas for websites, essays, and fiction books, but I put them off because I feel that I don’t know enough to implement them properly. To solve this, I go back and read more, which then repeats the cycle and I don’t really get anywhere.

This is exactly what brain crack is. You feel like there is this teeming sea of originality and creativity behind your eyes, squirreled-away in the folds of your wiggly grey-matter; if only you knew the proper incantation you could entice pure-gold to slither out of your head and into the world. We, as human beings, only exist for a brief amount of time; if you allow yourself to grow addicted to brain crack, you’ll end up with a lot of dreams that slowly wither away. A quick peek at Ze’s site will show you what you get if you try out everything without pre-convincing yourself that your idea will suck if you implement it right now. Cruising through the ORG’s galleries will show you what happens when thousands of other people also give up on their addiction to brain crack.

Over the last year, I’ve tried to give up on the brain crack in my life. To my dismay, as I purged the detritus from my idea pool, more and more stockpiled ideas floated to the surface. This vast sea of unimplemented ideas had been sitting in the corner whispering to me “you are awesome” leading to a skewed sense of purpose: “I’ll be so awesome after I get a chance to implement all of these great ideas!” What I really want is to be awesome now, and that starts by doing awesome things.

Now that The Show is over, and Ze isn’t thinking for me anymore, I guess I’ll have to start.

Number one on the list, start being awesome.