I’ve been listening to the debut album of David Lowery’s second band, Cracker. I can confirm that nostalgia has not colored my impression at all. It is astounding. Faux leather seats from Juarez.

Firefox’s spell check doesn’t know “faux.”

After spending a lot of time simply not being willing to set up a PHP sandbox (because seriously, it’s way more trouble than it’s worth), I’m getting pretty tired of the blog themes here and on FN. I have a copy of MAMP again, but no promises.

(N.b.: Link to post where Jason Kottke’s Spock analog, Aaron Cohen, describes the results thus: “Basically, yogurt turned these mice into Kanye.”)

So. . . scarf, goofy t-shirt, Kung Fu slippers (not that I’m not entitled), Instagram mirror shot, cat, and I was (no lie) waiting for a test run of my Ruby project to complete when I took this picture.

This is so bizarre.One of the (vast number of) things that I find strange about octopi (octopuses, octopodes, whatever) is that it seems to me that animals with tremendous intelligences tend to live a long time. I suppose that’s some kind of anthropomorphization. Still, the idea that something with that much brain power having 5 years or so as the absolute cap of their existence seems a little depressing. On the other hand, maybe I should be relieved.

Arguably the single most noticeable thing about all these catch-up sessions is that everyone wanted to be reassured that things were good w/ Carolyn. Now in most cases this is attributable to people liking her, but in one or two key instances it was clearly the result of thinking that we are a good combination based on a deep understanding of at least me. That’s pretty cool, and it’s a nice thing to be able to take away from the experience.

There was a lot of ribbing, mostly but not exclusively around the office, about me wanting to move back to New York. Not to throw my hat too far into the ring of the world’s smuggest man competition, but a fair amount of this was wishful thinking. As I said, I enjoyed the visit immensely, but I haven’t forgotten how burnt out I was on soulless yuppie swine when I moved here back in 2008. Properly filtered, the story here is that I am indeed eager for some sort of change of place. The specifics have yet to be worked out (and lord knows there’s plenty of time to think about it), but C and I are looking, in the somewhat distant future, to live elsewhere.

As for me by myself, I spent a lot of time telling people that things were okay, but that I felt like I needed to be working on being the kind of person that makes things. I think this is kind of a big deal, and I’m definitely going to be focusing on it more. In a way, writing a paper is sort of like a very small project, so I guess it stands to reason that I miss doing something that I did constantly at a time that I consider to have been pretty fruitful. Of course, things can run away from you. Markov Garden has been confusing and big in a lot of ways that I didn’t expect, but I think that publishing it will be a major coup that I really need to be looking forward to. And beyond.

At the all-hands, we spent a lot of time talking about connecting people from information and then I, during a brainstorming session about applications, said something to the effect of “Wait, what about filtering?” People sort of paused and scratched their chins, but we didn’t focus on it at all. It isn’t a thing yet. It will be, but for now people are racing ahead to get their faces in front of the fire hose.

I was reminded of this because C sent me a Pinterest invite last night, and for some reason ye olde Booke of the Fayce required me to upgrade to timeline view to blah blah blah and. . . I have to say that the effect is pretty ridiculous. Pinterest is also kind of nuts. It’s front page is just a massive grid of uneven rectangles full of pictures. Also, when you click on one there is no obvious control to go back to the home page. Presumably this is a way to encourage people to do some interacting with something they may have been merely curious about. Not a decision I would have made.

At any rate, not to bag on any particular site/company/whatever, because really the problem is with the zeitgeist. People want shit like that. People want all their email in one massive bucket that they can search using tags. To me that’s totally nuts. I kind of think that containing structures help create a flow that makes things useful. Of course, that can be limit your access to things outside of your extant experience (in fact, I’d say that part of the reason I thought being on Pinterest was a good idea was to encourage myself to look outside my extant structure), but everyone seems to be about searching, and nobody is about sorting. Yet.

Even my immediate surroundings can be surprising sometimes, although I find them limited in scope. This might be the main problem. While the cafes and bars are nice, nothing about the environment is particularly inspiring. Besides the accidental glory of the inner East Side, Portland is architecturally empty to me. Of course, it’s full of stuff that’s exemplary in various ways, it’s just that those ways don’t amount to much for me. I really miss living in a more vertically-oriented town.

“Ramirez the vagabond.”

The great mass of cloud filling the head of the saved silver he rubbed his hands upon Decoud. On his reddish-brown face, worn, hollowed as if from another door, advanced, portly and anxious, inclining her fine, black-browed head, opening her arms, and got better after a moment while he sits and watches the light of investigation can ever reach the rudimentary intelligence of Pedro Montero, Chief of the populace, that would calm down slowly at last, were very complete, too. Sometimes on the same fanatical fearlessness with which he was not so intimate terms. But no one could look at the mobility of expression.

“My chronometer!” Captain Mitchell had been leaning in the obscure disarray of that girl,” he said to himself—

“Do you mean by impossible? I tell you I am going to propose my own conflicting emotions. And after all these Spanish Dons. He had told her, with no end of the world like a lost child crying in a straight course for all that foolishness, while he swam. He had to be calm. He tried to understand a word while he signed a few minutes ago, and I let him grow rich quicker now. He hesitated the space of a gaudy bathing robe, stood by, wearing a light engine, and had walked in advance, and gone cold all over in his hand, like a besieged city.

“Ha! Old Giorgio—the guardian of thine honour! Fancy the Vecchio coming upon me that if I may?”

“Eh! I have seen that. He had been cut off from the ground. At the turn of events. And it came into her heart, that sense even the most anxious and patriotic hero than ideas of adoration, of kissing the hem

Nostromo is fucking grim, but I think we’ve got a little of the goofiness that motivates Markov Garden in this one.

I think that texting/mobile web abuse is related to the confusion I touched upon here, wherein people think this stream constitutes some kind of grasp on the world. Inundated with a steady stream of faux-information and faux-communication (fauxmunication?), people are too busy pressing buttons to wonder about the quality of things, which heads off some troubling questions.

This is the look — even as late as Proust — of the object of a love which only a city dweller experiences, which Baudelaire captured for poetry, and of which one might not infrequently say that it was spared, rather than denied, fulfillment.

–Benjamin, Illuminations, 170.