Matthew Harris

More art:

Tue, 13 May 2008 21:56:21 GMT

Geometry AND botany, FTW:

I have trouble sleeping, Part whatever

Sun, 11 May 2008 11:16:05 GMT

Friday I took my long, grand walk up to Crown Point (although actually, it is more down to Crown Point, since Crown Point is actually quite a descent from the real high point, the Portland Woman's Forum).
And then, after getting home, and having walked 18 miles, I was pretty tired.
Of course, I didn't manage to sleep through the night. I woke up after about five hours, stayed awake most of the day, took a nap around 6:30 PM, woke up around 10, and now here it is, 4 AM, and I have not been truly awake or truly asleep all day.
AND!
I wish I could give a better update than my FAILURE at sleeping.
Especially about my trip to the east side of Multnomah County. (although actually, I think that Crown Point actually might be just about at the midpoint of Multnomah County, area wise), where I learned many things. First, there are these little plants growing on the masonry with springy, thick, waxy, spirally heart-shaped leaves, and I wonder what they are.
Also, the fact that (as we all know) everything "around us" is "actually" just a neurological phenomenon, is something we don't think about often, or perhaps think about for a moment or two as a curiosity, but sometimes it strikes us as a very real thing. And for me, that particular moment came looking at chain link fences in the very-rapidly fading light outside of Springvale.

Remember what I said about E2?

Fri, 09 May 2008 06:19:23 GMT

A while ago, I pointed out that E2 really did seem to improve the thinking and articulation skills of people who spent some time there.
At the very least, you couldn't pass off big gaps in reasoning with a straight face.
Like, seriously, would anyone get away with saying any of this?:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080509/ap_on_he_me/teens_drugs;_ylt=AocfAa6qsQzGtmyLdnw_KtWs0NUE

I mean, shit, anyone Level 2 and over wouldn't even need a word of explanation as to why they were getting down voted.

And I guess I just have to accept this:

Wed, 07 May 2008 09:04:03 GMT

When I wake up in the morning, I have to spend quite a few minutes, or hours, wondering how much time I have to waste in "this one".

The entire point of Free Geek

Wed, 07 May 2008 08:48:54 GMT

The entire point of Free Geek for me, in brief, is it represents a brief vision of a unified culture.
What I have noticed happening too often, is that people with even the most creative ideas, even the most beautiful artistic spiritual perspectives on life, live divorced from them. They go and grind away, and then all of the things that really matter in life to them are added as an after thought, functioning as nothing more than parsley.

But Free Geek, really to the amount that it is possible, combines the physical with the social with the intellectual with the spiritual seamlessly. "There is no separation between the mind and the environment"

As my soul gets sucked into a depression I can't explain...

Fri, 02 May 2008 07:43:45 GMT

The world of abstract imagery gains in some small measure:

What I am doing up in the 3 AM hour:

Thu, 01 May 2008 10:57:55 GMT

Cut for some high-pixel images:

Who can guess what I was listening to on repeat when I made these?

Book quiz!

Thu, 01 May 2008 07:51:42 GMT

I don't like memes, but I do like bragging about what books I have ~~written~~ read. Taken from crewgirl

Books I have ~~written~~ read are bolded, books I have started and didn't finish are underlined.
Also, I have added in the approximate ages I read them.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina -16
Crime and Punishment -13
Catch-22 -17
One Hundred Years of Solitude -23?
Wuthering Heights-17
The Silmarillion-13, and then about every two years since then
Life of Pi : a Novel -28
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote-16, 17
Moby Dick
Ulysses-15
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey-14
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
A Tale of Two Cities-15
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad-13
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner-28
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations-16?
American Gods-23, 24?
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius-27
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man-14
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World-11? 12?
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum-17?
Middlemarch
Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King-17
The Grapes of Wrath-17
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984-12? 13?
Angels & Demons
The Divine Comedy-13 or 14
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest-15
To the Lighthouse-16
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist-15? 16?
Gulliver’s Travels-16, 24
Les Misérables-17, 21
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
Dune-12, and several times since then
The Prince
The Sound and the Fury-16-20?
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things I read Small Gods though.
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon -23?
Neverwhere -25?
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners-14
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five -15
The Scarlet Letter -17
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye -15
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down -11
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit -7, and then once every few years since then
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

No Omega

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 21:41:09 GMT

So, the other day, kind of as a joke, I wrote about having my own Human Instrumentality Project (only with blackjack and hookers).
In life, I think that for most people, along with doing well, there has to be something to look forward to. And often, that thing has to be somehow transcendent. The feeling of literally (or figuratively) climbing a mountain. And right now, although everything else in my life is going well, I don't really know what on the horizon equals that moment of exhiliaration.
This is part of the reason why I stopped taking DXM, because it was just too much of a cheap trick on myself to have that type of amazing feeling for four dollars, when I could get high and feel that anything I pick up is the secret to the universe. Maybe it is dopamine depletion, or maybe it is a realization that I am missing something.
Anyway, last night I was reading wikipedia, actually reading about various NBA players, when I saw a link in the Bill Walton article to "Omega Point", a concept that is used by Deadheads to refer to the feeling of merging with the music, but originally comes from Teilhard de Chardin, French philosopher, to describe the point of total awareness that humanity is eventually heading towards. The concept of course, is kind of what the Human Instrumentality Project is aiming towards. And of course, also what some people would call the singularity.
Not totally by coincidence, Rakim has a song called "No Omega", which begins with the lines:

I'm the Alpha, with no Omega
Beginning without the end

which is actually in many ways just a normal Battle Song (with references to He-Man and everything!) but being that this is The R, it also has some spiritual meaning. Perhaps Rakim is meaning to tell us that spiritually, it is more important, more realistic, and more meaningful, to be originating things, constantly, than to look forward to a moment where everything will be understood.
So, maybe I should think about that, "No Omega".

My plans:

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 22:11:30 GMT

I am going to start my own Human Instrumentality Project, with hookers and blackjack!

Deltron 3030:

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 19:33:24 GMT

How does it stand up in 2008?

I actually have a formula for these

Sun, 27 Apr 2008 07:52:59 GMT

Proverbs:

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 21:32:20 GMT

You know the proverb that "as soon as one door closes, another opens"
I have a similar idea:
"As soon as your ass gets too big for one pair of pants, there is another it will fit"

How many shots can get fired at a targer and just barely miss? Do you really want to live like this?

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 21:00:27 GMT

Some of the readers here might be familiar with the concept of "Hurry up and kill me so I can go to Taco Bell", a phrase used years ago by a punk rock kid playing Risk to signal that he was tired of the unending game, and just wanted to get to the inevitable conclusion so he could go indulge in some good, punk rock Taco Bell.

So I often use the phrase when I want a situation that is going to end in eventual disaster to just hurry on to its completion.
I've often taken it for granted that pain and suffering are some of the best ways for people to learn. Even I learn that way! But it seems that after six or seven years of unending war, people don't seem to be learning. Of course, maybe that is just because the "blood and death" aren't enough (4000 dead soldiers in five years? That wasn't even a busy week in World War I or the Civil War!) , and after all, we still "got gas, and we got water".

But I also suspect that perhaps rather than just avoiding bad things, people might want to change because they have something attractive to them, rather than just changing to avoid getting punished over and over. So, perhaps, when someone articulates an attractive way for society to be built around something other than violence and domination, it will happen in...two weeks.

Wo tingshou

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 20:40:24 GMT

Wo tingshou Dumbledore kan Muggle de bao, danshi esmesquall xie Muggle de bao. Danshi ta mei you Yuxianwen de banfa!

Street hassle---

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 06:36:52 GMT

Street hassle---does that show humanity?

Election Prediction:

Tue, 22 Apr 2008 01:17:18 GMT

My latest election prediction
(the last one wasn't too successful)
Hillary Clinton will win the Pennsylvania primary, but not by enough to give her reason to stay in the campaign, but not by enough to make it clear that it is time to leave.

The only reason she will leave now is over money, since as I understand it, she is quite a bit behind in fundraising, and it would seem silly to go further in debt to contest a number of primaries that really can't change the fate of her campaign, even if she does manage to do better than predicted.

On the other hand, since she has been talking about staying in, she might not be able to back out just because she hasn't won by as much margin as she would have liked.

A slightly less serious revelation about our culture:

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 07:40:20 GMT

Did you know?
Moogles are just ewoks.
With wings!

Things hidden about the 60s:

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 07:38:28 GMT

The Beach Boys probably changed and grew more than even The Beatles did.

Its late

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 08:22:02 GMT

But doesn't a totally empty e-Mail inbox feel nice?

One last macro for the day

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 22:48:00 GMT

Unless I decide to make more:

Tall, but not wide, so lets not even cut it

And just because I have to show that despite the migraine, I am not bitter all the time:

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 20:24:49 GMT

Here is a picture of a turtle with an identity crisis!
Its kinda big, so it is cut.

Bitter Americans and the Matriarchy

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 20:20:47 GMT

I feel bad that Barack Obama backed down on his comments about small-town Americans being bitter, and no longer trusting the government. I guess people won't accept anything as obvious as the truth. Its pretty obvious to anyone who has studied American culture that distrust is the default mode, and has been since sometime in the Silver Age. So it is too bad he backed down on this, because it should be addressed.

Which is why I want to say that I have never really backed down on my theory that the matriarchy is an anti-humanistic force in our society. I just don't feel the need to carry on about it because it is so obvious.
What I mean by "matriarchy" is a system that tells men that they have no intrinsic worth, and can only earn worth by accomplishing things, often forceful or violent manipulations of the outside world. And as feminist theories sometimes talk about the internalization of patriarchal values, men in our society internalize matriarchal values-that they don't deserve attention or affection until they are doing something-to the point where everyone takes it for granted that this is a self-directed, "natural" type of thing. So society, including women, mock men for needing a bigger truck, bigger muscles and more money, as if that is a natural male drive and not something that men pick up because they think that is the only way that a woman will like them.
And of course sometimes this makes men do violent things and hurt each other and start wars and bravely soldier off to war, but hey, when you own a big chunk of the bloody third world, the babies just come with the scenery.

Off again!

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 17:45:26 GMT

Going to Rhododendron,
BBL

E2: Still wonderful

Wed, 09 Apr 2008 05:11:58 GMT

Lately, it seems that more and more when I click on articles on google news, that whatever newspaper or magazine is being linked to has a discussion board attached to the article.
And that is when I realize that my years on e2 did me well, and did well for everyone on there. Because I really can't believe that anyone who has been on the internet for more than a year would really be so weak as to type the type of comments you usually see attached to these. Spelling and grammar are obvious deficiencies, but just that people can trot out the same stereotypes over and over without thinking that their opinions will be (for better or for worse) immediately discounted. And these are the people who are actually hip enough to be reading online news, and commenting on it. I shudder to think what the people who are just watching television news would be thinking.
On e2, it wasn't so much that things were much more civil (because I have been the occasional victim and very occasional perpetrator of these things), but just that people would try to put some type of sophistication or novelty in their comments. Occasionally, even facts.
And, also, while reading my college level textbook today, I realized that not only in comparison to other parts of the internet was e2 wonderful. E2 was also wonderful in comparison to way too much of the academic world, which really needs to understand the concept of "All your radical ideas about X have already occured to others".