Tomorrow is my 1000 days.

Probably won't take the soapbox approach.

Thanks for everything, it's been more helpful than you know.

you kno what i mean ya lil hater

kleinbl00

This morning I joined my partner and their friend out on the front porch after I made some tea, both of them are current/former punks/anarchists/squatters and have been so throughout their entire adolescent to adult lives, and they were talking about former squats and houses they've lived in, and people they have come across when the friend says:

"Oh yeah, [mutual friend] sent me an article the other day about people discovering my first squat!"

I fucking know it's gotta be this link.

I pull up this article and show them the pictures and they just start laughing,

"yeah! that's it! They think some like, old man or something lived there and it was just [mutual friend] who would go crash there when he got tired of being around people"

In short, some weirdo teenage/early 20s punks lifted building supplies from a nearby construction site in 2007, made it as super stealthily as a few stoners could possibly be, testing out how far away you could hear conversational-volume voices, hammering in sync with some nearby clocktower that would help disguise the sound, giggling the whole time, and no one was the wiser for almost 10 years.

But yeah, lots of people passed through there and knew the place, definitely a bummer it had to go.

The key point is that there was no programming or learning involved to create the behaviors. The connectome of the worm was mapped and implemented as a software system and the behaviors emerge.

By far the most interesting and significant part.

I'm quitting my fucking job finally

In two months, granted.

I asked some of you for feedback (thank you lil edit: and veen!) about an invite to Beijing I got from a family member, and I'm taking him up on it, leaving in May. I'm taking advantage of the opportunity to also visit Hong Kong, Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand, and a place I've been interested in for a long time that has recently become quite a bit more open to visitors, Myanmar.

Two years of lame, meandering experiments, rejected publications, staring at a computer pretending to work, an 1:20 hour commute daily (one way), mismanagement at every step, and finally left with stock in a company that I get to watch slowly dwindle before I can even sell it. I've definitely learned a lot about what not to do. That mostly consists of "Don't ever try to go the FDA route unless you got hella money and a really, really solid plan."

But I sure as shit got paid well.

Now I get to ignore the foreboding future a little longer while I try and plan out this ridiculous solo trip.

Another quick tip I've learned: kindleunlimited sucks, but you can dl everything to your kindle, bounce that to your computer, scrape off the DRM, and voila, $200 worth of Lonely Planet guides for the price of a free month of kindleunlimited at amazon. Don't tell me I'm a thief, just tell me I'm a good one.

This ain't McCulloch's first rodeo. From wikipedia:

In 2000, in the so-called "Jack in the Box" case, two undercover officers, a police officer and a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) officer, shot and killed two unarmed black men in the parking lot of a Jack in the Box fast-food restaurant in Berkeley, Missouri. In 2001, the officers told a grand jury convened by McCulloch that the suspects tried to escape arrest and then drove toward them; the jury declined to indict. McCulloch told the public that every witness had testified to confirm this version, but St. Louis Post-Dispatch journalist Michael Sorkin reviewed the previously secret grand jury tapes, released to him by McCulloch, and found that McCulloch's statement was untrue: only three of 13 officers testified that the car was moving forward. A subsequent federal investigation found that the men were unarmed and that their car had not moved forward when the officers fired 21 shots; nevertheless, federal investigators decided that the shooting was justified because the officers feared for their safety. McCulloch also drew controversy when he said of the victims: "These guys were bums." The two men killed, Earl Murray and Ronald Beasley, had prior felony convictions on drug and assault charges.

Seems like cops in St Louis have a long track record of being afraid of something, I just can't put my finger on it.

The very first time I got an email saying kleinbl00 replied to your post, I knew I was gonna have a rough day.

Man, I was wondering if anyone else noticed, and maybe there was something I was missing.

Miss you man, please come back.

I would say that that is really a common theme throughout Kubrick's work, his characters are always a little distant, and most of the dialogue for the film seems to be going on inside their heads. Implication is the name of the game with Kubrick, I think.

However, when the veil is drawn back, like when Bowman is preparing to release himself from the pod to the bay, the nervousness on his face is tangible and paralyzing.

I think far too many films go overboard when expressing human emotion, and it makes me numb to any build-up after 2 hours of watching screaming faces and emotional writhing.

The lil snippets of Bowmans face when he is going through the "star gate" or whatever, and they are stills but crawling with pain and terror and awe, more emotion than has been present at any point in 2001, are really really really effective and hit me hard every time I watch this film. There's definitely some hint that this is what Kubrick thinks about humanity, in the cold, sober faces, and seeing them as reborn in face-peeling awe is really cathartic, and we never really get a glimpse of his, new, "evolved" humanity or what he thinks they would be.

Pabs, don't do it.

I've given this advice before, I'll give it again forever.

I've had 5 friends go into the military, only 1 of them came out okay. Not better, but okay. The rest in no particular order:

1) Extreme PTSD, still lives with his parents and acts like he's 17. He's 31 now.

2) Came home from the early Iraq days to be with his GF and his child after having an IED blow up 20 feet away from him, embedding shrapnel in his forehead and killing one of his buddies. Finally kicked heroin a few years ago.

3) Went in a kind young man, goofy as all get-out. Came back an unabashed racist and sexist asshole, constantly aggressive, and condemning me for being a "liberal pussy faggot"

4) On-again-off-again homeless, self-aware alcoholic with a penchant for the occasional meth binder

There is nothing waiting for you in the military, in a war zone or when you come home. There is no positive benefit that is worth it. You will be disciplined into being fodder. Your companionship and camaraderie with your fellow soldiers stems from your shared suffering.

Those in charge will make you into a sheep on the altar and have no problem slitting your throat.

No, no no, a thousand times no.

gaining strength, discipline, character

Those are just taglines. You are a lovely young man, you have plenty of character. Discipline? It's pretty self-explanatory, it's all about practice. Strength? For what? How to deal with a friend lying bloody next to you? How to avoid constant threat of sexual assault? How to be a fantastic team player?

What are you expecting to get out of military service?

If you must, at least figure out a way to stay far away from combat. That's the advice I gather from the one guy who made it out okay.