Poorly Written

2009-06-09T12:40:00.004-04:00

I, just for the record, am not a believer. I am modern erisian with zen leanings.

I believe in actualized reality. As long as a single person believes in something it is real, at least for that person. I do not believe that the beliefs of others no matter how many they are have an impact on those who do not believe, except where those believers manually impact others. Thier god is real, but impotent outside of his or her circle. Within the circle the god has extreme or minor power depending on the beliefs. That power may not be able to manifest itself in our reality, but the lives of those inside that circle are demonstrably impacted.

The greek gods were real, some still are. the god of abraham is real, and good thing he found abraham too, otherwise he would still be just the god of the mountain :D. The Flying Spaghetti Monster is gaining strength, not all of its belivers are faking. A religion does not have to be taken as truth to have impact. The impact which a religion provides is the existance of the diety.

In greek religion, Eris was, in addition to a real physical being who walked among the people, the incarnation of Existance, of Strife or Chaos. Aphrodite was the incarnation of Love. In christian religion the god has become over several of the BC centuries the incarnation of Love, Vengence, Jealousy, Wrath, Forgivness, Destruction, Life, Light, etc.

Most religions are the same, they just spread thier incarnations into different numbers of entities.

2009-06-09T12:34:00.004-04:00

Forgive me blogger for I have sinned. It has been 2 years and 3 months since my last post.

In lieu of a truely original post I will excerpt a recent message from a conversation I had regarding the germination of denominational religion.

In christianity they layperson is one who is not of the clergy, one who has not been trained by the recognized church. So what I think Joe is talking about is when a person wanders into the church, attends for a while, learns the basics, and then goes of and fills out the religion based on his own understanding of it. Like the snake handlers, they base thier entire religion on a phrase which says the belivers shall pick up serpants and not be bitten, drink deadly poison and not be harmed. The recognised church would explain what those lines mean. The lay person might take them litterally as a requirement to faith.

From outside christianity, it all seems quite ridiculous. What makes the clergy better able to interpret the bible than the leity? They were trained by the church. Who trained the church? Well, that would be the roman empire, which decided one day to adopt christianity and commenced the slaughter of all those who would not convert. BUT the only way I know that is because I read about it in the histories. Who wrote the histories? The ones who were socially accepted and in power. How can I possibly belive them? I am assured by people no more than a few decades older than myself that they are truth. The world is built on lies and truths, and the differences between the two are a matter of debate. The opposite of a trivial truth is plainly false, the opposite of a great truth is also true.

In the Principia Discordia it is written "A Discordian is prohibited of believing what he reads". I think its a very important thought, made even better as it itself is written :D

2007-03-11T03:48:00.000-04:00

Experiments in Musical Intelligence

While some of the music composed using this approach did prove fairly successful, most of its output was equally uninteresting and unsatisfying. Having an intermediary - myself - form abstract sets of rules for composition seemed artificial and unnecessarily premeditative. As well, having to code new sets of rules for each new style encountered proved daunting. I therefore revised the program to create new output from music stored in a database. My idea was that every work of music contains a set of instructions for creating different but highly related replications of itself. These instructions, interpreted correctly, can lead to interesting discoveries about musical structure as well as, hopefully, create new instances of stylistically-faithful music.

Read More
Hear some examples

2007-03-03T04:18:00.000-05:00

Most people know exactly where they stand on political issues. They don't need a test to tell them what they already know. But can a test tell you what you already know?

In 45 short questions, can this test reliably place you on a political map?

Take the OK Cupid Politcs Test and find out.

Personally I have taken this test a dozen times since initally finding it August of 2005, and it always rings true. My initial test on that first day were Social Liberal (93% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (11% permissive). Below is the test I took today, March 07. See if your results remain as accurate!

You are a
Social Liberal
(90% permissive)

and an...
Economic Liberal
(11% permissive)

You are best described as a:

Socialist

Link: The Politics Test on Ok Cupid
Also: The OkCupid Dating Persona Test

2007-02-28T16:40:00.000-05:00

Such fabricated humor might be considered superfluous, as real-life video examples abound of Millionaire contestants who were bounced off the show after missing their first (i.e., easiest) questions, including a college student who could not identify what type of unexpected surges a surge protector guards against (electric current) and an attorney who failed to select the common phrase closest in meaning to "I can't take it anymore" ("That's the last straw").

In this vein, a popular Millionaire clip is one from the French version of the program, featuring a contestant who could not determine whether the moon, the sun, Mars, or Venus is the object that orbits the Earth — answering "the Sun" even after polling the audience! In fact, a majority of the audience members also selected "the Sun" as the correct answer, although a common assumption is that many of them deliberately chose the wrong answer as a way of poking fun at the seemingly hapless contestant for being unable to answer the question on his own.

2007-01-25T01:06:00.001-05:00

Trippy Trick - video powered by Metacafe

Panda Sneezes

2007-01-16T23:08:00.001-05:00


Sneezing panda, priceless!

Redneck Rocket Launcher

2007-01-16T21:52:00.001-05:00


While drinking beer, and smoking cigarettes; this guy builds a rocket launcher, then loads it with eight thousand five hundred bottle rockets. Then he fires them all at one time. This is a killer video. Check out the firestorm!

2007-01-07T21:13:00.000-05:00

Review of Apocalypto

I just finished watching Apocalypto and have had a chance to put it through the movie rating algorithm I use. On that scale this movie is roughly eight hundred times better than Children of Men. I highly recommend it. It does not matter if you despise Mel Gibson, this is a great movie.

The cinematography is excellent, I never once felt i was watching through the cameraman's eyes. It draws you into the story; I actually found myself on the edge of my seat, jaw hanging loose at one point. It's been a long time since a movie did that for me. The soundtrack is minimalistic in all the right ways.

I have heard that it is too gory, but I did not find this to be the case. There is blood and bodies, but it is all very well done and not over the top at all. This is the Aztecs were talking about. They are told as having killed 84,400 men in a reconsecration of the pyramid of Tenochtitlan, but in this movie they don't show more than 2 dozen sacrifices, and only a couple of those on screen, and only see piles of indistinct headless corpses a few times, in all the right places. This is nothing compared to Saving Private Ryan or even Shaun of the Dead.

This is certainly one of the 10 best movies of the past decade. If you never see this movie and are laughed at in The Afterlife™ you will only have yourself to blame.

IMDB rating is well earned.
User Rating: 7.6/10 (7,859 votes)

2007-01-03T21:43:00.000-05:00

Mischief Managed!

Now that he is on his way out, President Bush sees fit to provide recommendations to congress to bring the deficit down to zilch.

WASHINGTON (AP) - President George W. Bush said Wednesday he will submit a five-year budget proposal that would balance the U.S. government budget by 2012 and urged Congress to cut back sharply on costly pet projects hidden in spending bills in the "dead of the night."

continued...

2006-12-31T02:09:00.000-05:00

Okay. This is the last time I will confuse Rufus Sewell with the actor that played Commodus in Gladiator. Every movie with this guy in it, I am certain it is the guy from gladiator. I find out when the credits roll it is not.

In an attempt to stop this confusion I went to IMDB and here is a list of the movies they have been in which I have seen and thought "Oh, that's the guy from Gladiator!"

Rufus Sewell is not Commodus from Gladiator, but is in fact:
Crown Prince Leopold in The Illusionist
Petruchio in The Taming of the Shrew
Agamemnon in Helen of Troy
Count Adhemar of Anjou in A Knights Tale
Eric Stark in Bless the Child
Fortinbras in Hamlet
Harry Percy in Henry VI
and of course my favorite movie, John Murdoch in Dark City

Joaquin Phoenix is:
Commodus in Gladiator

In all fairness I should have been thinking it was Rufus in Gladiator instead. Maybe by writing this I will reinforce in my mind that if it is a good movie and that guy from gladiator is in it, it isn't him.

Thanks for your time.

By the way, I have The Illusionist now if anyone wants to watch it. Truly a fantastic film.

2006-11-09T16:02:00.000-05:00

those damn democrats

they are in power for less than three days and already have us hopelessly mired in iraq. cant they do anything right?

2006-11-06T18:54:00.000-05:00

My response to the news of Saddam Husseins sentence of hanging is best summed up by a very famous George Lucas movie: "You can't win, Darth. If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine."

By executing this man, rather than leaving him in a jail for the rest of his life, they are creating a martyr. A martyr who could be avenged. A martyr who could be used as an excuse for more violence.

Saddam was found guilty in a corrupt court by a hand picked judge for the crime of sentencing people to death in a corrupt court with a hand picked judge. WTF is up with that?

2006-10-07T01:58:00.000-04:00

First Chroma Key test in Sony Vegas. Includes free footage from Detonation Films.
The sound was in sync in the file I uploaded, but after youtubing it has shifted to the right a couple frames.

2006-09-14T19:17:00.000-04:00

Google Video RSS feed - popular 30 Subscribe

2006-08-30T17:19:00.000-04:00

Mind the gap

This is just me being bored with dominos. Shot with Samsung D820 cameraphone, edited in Sony Vegas, sync'd with Aphex Twin.

2006-08-22T12:04:00.000-04:00

These things never cease to amaze me. This is me in a nutshell, and its all accurate. I clipped from the original version intended for blog posting because that one took up 8 times the space with extra blank lines and whitespace.

The Oracle 0% Extroversion, 66% Intuition, 0% Emotiveness, 54% Perceptiveness

Heuristic, detached, and analytical to a fualt, you are most like The Oracle. You are able to tackle any subject with a fine toothed comb, and you possess an ability to pinpoint nuances and shades of meaning that other people do not have and cannot understand. Accomplishment and realization of ideas are, for you, secondary to the rigorous exploration of ideas and questions -- you are, first and foremost, a theorist. You hate authority, convention, tradition, and under no circumstances do you accept a leadership role (although, you will gladly advise leadership when they're going astray, whether they want you to or not). Abstraction and generalities are your interests, details and particulars are usually inconsequential and uninteresting. You excel at language, mathematics and philosophy.
You are typically easy-going and non-confrontational until someone violates one of the very few principles that you deem sacred, at which point you can fly into a rage. Although you possess a much greater understanding of process and systems than the people around you, you are always conscious of the possibility that you've missed something or made a mistake. You don't tend to become attached to particular theories, and will immediately discard mistaken notions once they're revealed to be incorrect (but you don't tolerate iconoclasts who try to discredit validated theories through the use of fallacies and bad data). Despite being outwardly humble, you probably think of yourself as being smarter than most other people. That's because you are. In fact, in your dealings with people your understanding of their motives is so expansive that you know what they're going to say before they say it, and in world affairs, you usually know what is going to take place before it actually does. This ability would make you unbeatable in debates if only you were a little less pensive about your own conclusions, and a little more outgoing.

You scored higher than 99% on Extroversion
You scored higher than 99% on Intuition
You scored higher than 99% on Emotiveness
You scored higher than 99% on Perceptiveness

Waking Dead

2006-05-25T12:31:00.000-04:00

Interesting social experiment where the player is a random person who happens to approach a video game in a pub. The operators of the game control everything, and attempt to hypnotize the player with flashes of light. Once hypnotized they move him to another building which looks exactly like the one in the video game (where they were killing zombies). They give the player an airgun and then all hide in the control room. The alarm sounds to wake the player, and then the fun begins.

Warning this game may cause traumatic stress.

See the video at www.kontraband..

Mascot of the year for 2005 - San Antonio Spurs Coyote

2006-05-25T12:28:00.000-04:00

local6.com - News - Teacher Apologizes For Asking Students To Write About Who They Would Kill

2006-05-15T17:45:00.000-04:00

here is a teacher who needs to go to a conference or something, get some new ideas.

Maxwell said the request to describe how students would carry out a murder was merely a writing exercise. Maxwell teaches a beginning drafting class and it was not clear why he asked the class to write fiction.

FDA OKs New Quit-Smoking Drug

2006-05-11T18:45:00.000-04:00

"In clinical trials, the most common adverse effects of Chantix were nausea, headache, vomiting, flatulence (gas), insomniainsomnia, abnormal dreams, and dysgeusia (change in taste perception), according to the FDA."

That's exactly what I want when I consider quitting smoking. At least they are still working on this stuff, but for some reason the side effects never change. I hope someday they find a safe and much more effective solution. On the post from the FDA, they say this new drug is signifigantly more effective than already existing drugs in people quitting sucessfully after 12 weeks, but then goes on to say that there is no signifigant gains over competitors when it comes to people who are still successfully not smoking after 50 weeks. Appearantly therefore, this is not any better than anything else currently. Maybe someday this will get better.

Tab Mix Plus :: Mozilla Addons :: Add Features to Mozilla Software

2006-04-27T19:41:00.000-04:00

Very serious woo yay on this extension.

Finally i can get the tabs to operate the way i'm used to, to way they did in galeon (my all time favorite browser, even though it seems to have lost quite a bit of steam).

Doubleclicking on a tab closes the tab. the way it should.

ABC News: Nintendo's 'Revolution' Gets a Name: 'Wii'

2006-04-27T17:14:00.000-04:00

I have seen the name of the new nintendo console, and I am left asking myself 'why'?

HALF-LIFE..Mods

2006-04-26T11:37:00.000-04:00

This site has it all. HalfLife mods galore. But it has a major problem. It relies soley on File-Planet. There are no alternate mirrors.

Ya know what I hate about sites that force File-Planet Downloads? I never get anything from them because File-Planet is a crap site. I know it's a great site for file distribution, but why do they force me to put in fake information prior to downloading anything. Thier insane if they think I'm gunna tell them my REAL name.