loose ends

Not interested in beauty.
Nor am i interested in truth.
I am interested in the interesting.

“Just as inviting people over forces you to clean up your apartment, writing something that other people will read forces you to think well.”

– paul graham

slowly realizing i’ve reached the tipping point where learning how to actually code myself is easier than harassing my coder friends to help out with my arbitrary projects.

.Everybody leaves.
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.If they get the chance.
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.And this is my chance.

“Industrial man—a sentient reciprocating engine having a fluctuating output, coupled to an iron wheel revolving with uniform velocity. And then we wonder why this should be the golden age of revolution and mental derangement.”

—Aldous Huxley, Time Must Have a Stop, 1944

the trick, i noticed, is pushing me. challenge me and i’ll challenge you back. push me harder and i’ll push back harder. keep me interested and i’ll make it worth your time.

(march 29, i think)

i only fall for those with superhero names

on a long enough timescale, everything is exponential

some times i feel there is no middle ground. either you read it all, or you read none of it.

friendships are very quantifiable. skip the bs of how all relationships live in immeasurable silos beyond our grasp and comprehension. the value of all friendships can be ranked simply by counting how often you meet* over any given period of time. once every week? once every year? count & rank. those at the top are your best friends. those at the bottoms are not.

considering the time spent with any particular friend sums up: how much you have in common; how interested you are in being together; what kind of other commitments you are ready to give up in order to see each other. etc.

don’t meet? not a good friend.
simply.

*you get to define meeting.

friend /frɛnd/
–noun

1. a person you would lend (and who would lend you) a month’s wage without asking questions.

Claiming you’re waiting for somebody when sitting alone is a shoddy cover-up. People don’t like admitting that they are alone. (not that I do)

Writing about nothing in particular is hard. It requires you to get into a specific mindset. Frame the world around you in a way that squeezes into words easily. Shape your fragments of ideas into bits that can be conveyed to somebody else. Pick the right words in the right order. Choose the proper expressions. Don’t want to get the wrong message across. Don’t want to be misunderstood. No. Understanding is important. Deciphering and shuffling thoughts takes skill. Writing should, theoretically, be harder than reading. If it isn’t, you’re writing it wrong. Writing demands the proper wires in your head to collaborate. Merge the ideas, cut them into thoughts, spell them in letters and hope they reassemble on the other side. If either of those wires are off nothing works. You feel dreadfully uninsipred for months. Only images come out of your mouth. Metaphors don’t assemble. Everything starts sounding like everything else. But be careful to stop before your thumbs start hurting too.

Hoarding data; watching stuff compulsively; downloading dozens of films at the time. It’s not about having it all. Perhaps about having seen it all. It’s not a new economic model where all data being free means you should literally get hold of all of it at once. Nor about having read more articles than you. That’s just silly. Information is abundant and infinitely accessible. Bandwitdh and storage near free. Attention-span doesn’t seem to be going anywhere but down. The more you want to see, the less inclined you feel to actually sit down and hit play. Rambling.

How long can you disconnect? No tv, phone, web, magazine or friend at hand? Just you. And blank walls. Or nature if you’d rather. No inspirational input. No soothing rss. No distracting glossies. No writing down your thoughts. No taking pictures. No chatting with her. You & you & you. It sound like a charming proposal — romanticized offlineness juxtaposed with hectic city living. Every blackberry in the world serves erases that fear. Of being unproductive. Of being empty. Of being bored. Every magazine you haul around too. And you quickdial. And your feeds, checked twice daily or every other minute. Fear of being bored. Facebook notifications and commenting on blogs; wishlisting books and noting tomorrow’s groceries and making those reservations. Can’t be lonely. Can’t stop producing. Can’t be bored. Not for a second.

(written on a phone, waiting)

i am impressed you’re actually reading this. you were supposed to be too busy for it. too much to do today, tomorrow and next week. only opening was supposed to be two months from now. but you found the time. lost the time. spent the time. indulged in a free minute. you might be regretting it by now. back to the frenzy and the lost seconds and the rushed remains of your day. staying around here won’t help you. won’t free up any more time. so stop.

too much watching, not enough reading
too much planning, not enough doing
too much doing, not enough thinking

these are guaranteed to make a splash.

you could argue that the problem of bloggers, in general, is the lack of original content. too many people rehashing existing stuff. news crossposted halfway around the web. many href’s, little insight.

i am now further adding to the noise:
theconsuming.com

stuff seen, read, watched: in a glossy quilt-y fashion. real pretty and changing all over.