RKNet Blog... Thing

Did it ever occur to you that I might work from home?


I’m cancelling the minute I find a viable alternative. In the meantime? I’ll be checking this out.

Via Maybe Logic.com:

Maybe Logic “is” a hilarious and mind-bending journey into the multi-dimensional life of Robert Anton Wilson, author of the Illuminatus! Trilogy. Featuring video spanning 25 years and the best of 100 hours of footage thoroughly tweaked, transmuted and regenerated, Maybe Logic follows the ever-open eye of Pope Bob as he penetrates human illusions exposing the mathematical probabilities and spooky synchronicities of the 8 dimensions of his Universe.

The feature-length documentary features Tom Robbins, RU Sirius, Ivan Stang, Paul Krassner, Valerie Corral and Douglas Rushkoff.

The soundtrack includes music from Boards of Canada, Animals On Wheels, Tarentel, Funki Porcini, The Supplicants, Pullman, Matt Elliott, The Cinematic Orchestra, Ognen Spiroski and Amon Tobin.

This documentary on the lives and times of Robert Anton Wilson was made by Deepleaf Productions. It won Best Documentary Audience Award at the 2004 San Francisco Independent Film Festival. It’s a region-free DVD, and the run time is over 3 hours. There are tons of extras, too. I fully recommend checking out the trailer when you get an opportunity. The only thing that’s mildly discouraging is that it’s a little difficult to hear RAW speak, but that could be an audio quality issue on the trailer. Regardless, when I get my hands on the DVD I’ll go out of my way to watch it with subtitles.

Deepleaf has also put out an audio book of The Illuminatus! Trilogy. Exceprts of that audio book are available as a podcast at Deepleaf Audio. The snippet of podcast I listened to is brilliantly narrated. I was not at all impressed with the narrator for The Earth Will Shake, however. Perhaps it’s just a matter of taste, but the narrator featured in that snippet (Scot Crisp) had awful rhythm and struck me as completely smarmy and dull. I tend to prefer a physical book anyway. More on all of that after I’ve had an opportunity to read the book.
(Ahem. Added an Amazon Wishlist tracker to the Misc Information page. Just, you know, so everyone’s aware.)

It is official. Google wants to both sire, and devour, your babies like a modern day Saturn or perhaps more like Rumplestiltzkin, spinning your flax into gold… for a price.

On the one hand, the idea of Google tracking your search history and displaying to you is useful, and “transparent” on their part.

On the other, Google is tracking your search history. Seriously. Your own personal search history. With that kind of information it’s only a matter of time before someone’s government decides to make use of this information to send someone away for a very long time.

So today has been re-affirmed as “Loyalty Day” by our current Commander in Chief. Well… okay, fine, whatever. It’s not as though we don’t already have a number of patriotic-themed holidays that we thoroughly ignore despite these types of reminders. What’s one more?

The whole thing smacks of Orwellian doublespeak, to be sure, but any propganda is bound to display the characteristics of its nature, afterall.

That aside, I think it is a good idea to keep in mind the history on which this country was founded and maintained; that habit, in addition to tracking the most recent ways the nation is being run, should provide us with more ways to keep the BS down to a bare minimum. Granted, “A bare minimum” will undoubtedly still be a very large amount, but that is the issue with democracy in the first place: it requires many people to get together in the attempt to reach an agreement on which policies will work out the best for the most people at once. But I digress.
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This is my Amazon stuff:

And this is all my Last.FM stuff.

I’ve heard of at least a few people who are finding themselves more and more depressed lately. There are times where I’m tempted to lump myself in with that group as well, although for the most part I’m doing my damnedest to keep a relatively positive disposition despite mounting fears about my irresponsibility catching up to me.

As it turns out, I and my compatriots are far from the only ones who feel this way. Via The Sherman Foundation, I found an article at Ananova entitled Blue Monday. It addresses the phenomena of winter blues, particularly that post-Christmas slump a lot of people seem to fall into.

Just a short blurb of an article, but it cites a few villans of positivity that tend to crop up right around now:

• bad weather - That one is a big 10-4. Winter finally showed up around here, and I have to say the cold snap and the nearly snapping my neck walking to work on ice doesn’t do much for MY mood.
• mounting debt - You bet your arse this one’s creeping up with increasing urgency for yours truly here. My holidays were at least somewhat expensive, and without a “nest egg” to speak of, making rent is stressful as hell.
• failed resolutions - I didn’t have any specific “New Year’s Resolutions” but I was definitely poised for reform of my habits until all the ice hit. It seems sort of obscene to drive to the gym, drive home, then walk to work… when the gym is in the same building as my office. If they hadn’t taken away my parking space, it wouldn’t be an issue. I was feeling a little more positive about the whole thing before the prospect of walking to work became a dangerous one.

So yeah, I can see what they’re getting at with that.

The solution proposed in the article is “volunteer”. Well, that’s nice and all, but that won’t shore up the hole in my bank account, now will it? I’m all for doing for others, but dammit, you have to do for yourself first. If you can’t help yourself, what business do you have helping others?

Still, I have to look at all this from a positive persective. Being broke is encouraging me to start cooking again. It’s going to get me to follow through on setting some things straight. It’s going to motivate the hell out of me. Hopefully I can take all this negative propulsion and adjust it, setting a trajectory that will slingshot me back to home using the moon’s gravitational pull. Or something.

http://www.petakillsanimals.com/

I stumbled across this link earlier. Now, I’ve seen a few PETA-based propaganda booths in my day. Much like the “Truth” campaign, they’re big fans of large, symbolic, sometimes angry displays of protest against things they believe are wrong. While they might be passionate about what they do, and may be - in most cases - correct in their statements, I personally don’t react well to the types of conversion methods used.

PETA Kills Animals seemed sort of suspicious to me based on that. Any form of extreme activism is bound to engender some kind of extreme activism from the opposite camp, but I wasn’t one hundred percent sure who would want to be seen as being opposed to the ethical treatment of animals. So I did a little bit of Google news searching on one particular claim made over at PETA Kills Animals. PETA Animal-Cruelty Trial Date Finally Set I gotta say looking up anything with “peta” in the Google News section only turned up other organizations that PETA has attacked, rather than the law coming down on anyone who works for PETA.

A regular Google search did pull up a matching local news story, however. http://content.hamptonroads.com/story.cfm?story=93730&ran=57036

So that story is at least legit. Still, one has to wonder what is the agenda there? The About page at petakillsanimals.com marks them as being associated with the Center for Consumer Freedom. A quick search for these guys brings the following items up:
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Center_for_Consumer_Freedom
These guys say that the CCF is a sit and spin for all the things that organizations like PETA fight against. I’d be willing to believe that.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Center_for_Consumer_Freedom
Then there’s the wiki entry, which confirms sourcewatch’s assertion that this organization is paid to support the interests of a few very large industries which aren’t renown for their regard for health or moral practices.

I’ll also say that the couple reviews at Alexa aren’t very encouraging either. One response is a vauge “lol itz teh interestingz cause animul pplz gots teh sekrits!” and the other is a direct slam.

I’m all for public reminders that no organization is without it’s flaws, it helps prevent types prone to holier-than-thou behavior from appearing infallible. I’m all for the promotion of personal responsibility. I’m not real keen on someone trying to douse me in false activism, or in this case I guess you could say anti-activism. All in all? This was a pretty disappointing, but unsurprising, discovery.

What are your thoughts on activism? How far does a person or a group have to go before they are considered “extreme”? Are there any groups that personally get your goat that deserve exposing?

Challenge: iPods are pretty famous for taking the liberty of wiping themselves out when you plug them into a computer other than the one you set it up on in the first place. It’s got a bad case of “are you my mommy?” that makes it hostile to other PCs but you really want to be able to manage the music on more than one PC using your iPod. What to do? Read the rest of this entry »

Last night I dreamt I was touched by lightning, and harassed by boys that are in love with me.

The lightning dream was really cool. I was in some living room with huge windows. The sky was nearly black with clouds, but not raining. Then these MASSIVE (think 3-4x as wide as normal lightning you’ve seen) bolts of lightning start slamming down from the sky, over and over again, in a sort of pattern, moving closer. Others in the room were nervous, but I was fascinated. So I leaned over to watch stuff that was off to the right, and was just in time to see lightning hit the house next to the one I was in. (They were stacked nearly on top of each other, inner city style.) Rather than obliterate the house, all that electric power instead dispersed outward along the homes and rushed into where I and the other people were. I noted that both myself and the girl across from me (whoever it was) glowed/crackled briefly with electricity. It made me tingle and it felt strange, but it wasn’t like getting electrocuted; That hurts, I know, I’ve done it. Edit for Mogrothir’s sake: I have not, in fact, been electrocuted. I have however gotten some nasty electric shocks before. XD and those do definitely hurt.

Don’t remember much about the boys dream, other than I was running around a campus of sorts (lots of buildings intercut with park-like areas) and some guy who barely spoke english kept after me with something akin to “why you no love me?” That was just weird. XD

Okay. Gotta make today an early day! Hopefully I get to go out frame shopping with Ian’s mum later, for the sexy-ass art prints I have in my possession. Mmm… art. But this means I gotta hustle to work. I actualy woke up at a reasonable hour and didn’t immediately wanna pass back out forever and ever! YAY! *zooms* ciao lovelies!

This time he is taking aim at the global warming issue, as it has been stirred up lately by both An Inconvenient Truth and the subsequent answering television ads claiming that CO2 is a way of life.

This isn’t as decisive and cutting as I am accustomed to reading from Mr. Long, but as he himself admits, it is a very complicated and difficult for Joe Average to approach in an impartial and a well-informed manner.

Still, if you ask me, it ties back into personal responsibility. His assessment was very neutral, very info-gathering oriented rather than firing off his usual heavy slug of strong opinion. This was more of a buckshot approach, scattering some lead over this very broad and dangerous topic to make sure to hit at least a few key points.

One approach that he only hinted at, and I would have loved to see him persue, would definitely have been for him to raise the flag of Personal Responsibility. Little steps will help immensely in this situation, and people who are passionate about the environment (or claim to be so) need to take more action if they really do have ideas. To some degree, the early 90’s thought process of “it takes everybody to save mother earth!” is correct. However, realisitically, not everyone can devote the kind of time necessary to finding cures for our greatest sources of pollution. In this case, it really is up to the vocal, independant movements to muster up the courage to get out there and support the fine minds that will bring us alternatives to our current mode of life.

Which is really what it takes. Science got us into this particular postion. The industrial revolution’s brand of science, anyhow. Interchangable parts lead to disposable parts, the study of electricity leading to power plants of varying degress of smoke-belching, the development of vehicular advancements, the invention of plastic, the machinery that allows us to automate and speed up production of goods, and the list really does go on and on.

Realistically there are a lot of things that could stand to be shifted around. I myself don’t have a whole lot of ideas, but I know when something is a flat-out wasteful idea! In that light I myself do some little things which will in some way help. I won’t be toppling any major issues or winning a Nobel prize for my efforts, but it’s surely better than nothing.

Soon, I think it’d be a good idea for a lot of us to do a little inventory and see how many wasteful and how many useful things we do every day. The idea there is to knock a few items off that wasteful list, and add a few to the useful list. How about Monday? As of Monday morning, start making a few mental notes on your habits and - if you can - jot them down or type them out and see how you’re doing.

I will if you will. Who is with me?