The Order Beneath the Chaos Beneath the Order

Thu, 07 Aug 2008 06:35:37 GMT

Entropy is the tendency of things to become less interesting over time. As such, it is my arch-nemesis.

The planet Earth appears to be a counter example to the law of entropy. We rapidly grow more fascinating every day now as we produce and share new culture. But our secret weapon is our Sun. Transmittable energy is one necessary weapon in the war against entropy. Energy is finite, and entropy is not.

My task, then, is not to stop entropy. That would be a naive and futile goal. Rather, my task is to create as much peculiarity as possible with the energy I've got.

(I'm taking some poetic license here. I believe what I said, but I'm not using strict definitions of entropy and energy. If you'd like, there's a much more accurate description of evolution and energy vs. entropy here. And to balance out all creationist hatin' in that article, this one is pretty good too. I may be a militant atheist, as are many of you, my friends, but I'm not a hater.)

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 00:29:21 GMT

A while ago somebody hired me and then put me under a non-disclosure agreement. The latter has been lifted. :) I'm one of the coders behind PlayCrafter, a new website where you can build quick 2D Flash games, and then post them wherever you want:

www.PlayCrafter.com

Send any complaints, bug reports, and fits of profound spontaneous inspiration my way.

An example game created with PlayCrafter, by me, is under the cut:

Wed, 02 Jul 2008 04:41:31 GMT

I haven't seen Wall-E yet. I want to, actually, despite the content of this post. I'm happy to see that a movie can be made with very little dialogue and still become mainstream. But after reading an interview about it, I had to get something off my chest.

Wall-E's design was inspired by a pair of binoculars. The director was holding this pair of binoculars, and he was like, "Whoah, dude, I can make expressions out of these by bending them! Awesome!"* And so Wall-E's head became a pair of expressive binoculars.

My immediate reaction was, "Wait, so the design for a head for a ROBOT -- a TRASH COMPACTOR robot -- was chosen based on its potential to express HUMAN emotions?" This sort of thing happens all the time in movies, of course. Pixar's target audience is, in fact, human beings, who are really good at empathizing with other humans and human-like things... and really bad at empathizing with non-human-like things. I just find it frustrating that, while Wall-E goes so far, it stops short of actually making a movie about robots. It's no more about robots than Adaptation is about flowers.

Sometimes, I am similarly annoyed by how LOLCats projects human-like personalities onto cats, and how people generally perceive their pets and even their own offspring as "cute". I believe that to perceive an organism as "cute" is to misinterpret what's going on in its mind. I'd prefer to characterize the curiosity of a newcomer to the world as "beautiful", but even that isn't really the right word, too idolistic**. It is what it is, and as soon as you put a label on it you mess it up.

I want to see some truly alien media. I mean, it's there, it exists. I was raised on Metroid. That's some really alien stuff right there, espcially if you didn't bother to read the manual, and I loved it, up to and including Metroid Prime 1 (not Fusion). But the newest Metroid games are littered with reminders of humanity and it's not the same. It's hard to find other sources of media that do not fall back on human-like characters to carry the story.

*paraphrased
**not a word

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 08:39:40 GMT

In my humble opinion.

Sat, 03 May 2008 06:29:04 GMT

Ready for more crazy philosophy?

Consciousness is the derivative of the brain.

As I type this, my brain is constantly throwing signals around, constructing sequences of ideas and then translating it all into English. The internal state of my brain is animated. I am changing my mind.

If you were to take a snapshot of my brain, it would not be a snapshot of consciousness, even if you were able to represent whatever mental image I had in my brain when the snapshot was taken. Maybe I was picturing a red balloon. Maybe there were a bunch of items hanging out in my short term memory that also get represented in this snapshot. But no matter how accurate and detailed that snapshot of my brain is, it is still not a snapshot of consciousness, because it is static. The moment my brain stops changing is the moment I lose consciousness.

If you were to freeze me, or put me in so-called "suspended animation", and then reanimate me an hour later, I would lose and regain consciousness. This makes intuitive sense, but I feel that this is a clear, clean example of precisely what consciousness is: an animated brain. Or, more generally: an animated, self-modifying system.

Caveat: The popular definition of "consciousness" excludes sleep and dreams, but mine does not exclude dreams. I feel that dreams are more of an interruption to awareness than to consciousness.

Most computer programs do not change their mind. A human programmer writes a program once, and then the program remains static, aside from shuffling some data around using a predetermined algorithm. This is why conventional computer programs are not conscious.

Current Music: Kevin MacLeod - Skye Cuillin

Thu, 17 Apr 2008 22:20:58 GMT

I posted Planet of the Forklift Kid on two well known Flash game websites. After five days, it has been played over 340,000 times, and is hosted on roughly 100 different websites (stolen) (including non-English-language websites), and its popularity is still rising, and strangers are sending me emails either to tell me they like it or to ask if they can send me money (and put their logo on it).

Note to self: the Internet (the one that isn't a dumptruck) is really big and fast. o_O

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 05:49:12 GMT

I made another Flash game! ^_^

Planet of the Forklift Kid! It's physics-y.

The title for this one was randomly generated by the Video Game Name Generator, and the rest flowed from that. Though it wasn't the first name that it generated for me; I went through a bunch of names before I settled on that one. A runner up was "Custom Sex Disaster", but I decided such a game would be too epic. I just don't command the resources to build that game at this time in my life, so I leave it to your imagination. ^_~

Fri, 01 Jun 2007 09:53:54 GMT

I made a fanart! ^_^ Click the thumbnail.

Sat, 19 May 2007 08:07:20 GMT

I couldn't not mention this: There is a band, called The Protomen, that released an album called The Protomen, that is a rock opera about Mega Man.

And it's really amazingly good. So good that I had to make my first LJ post in over a month about it.

That is all. I'm still alive. I'm still not using LJ. I will be back, but not now.

Sun, 15 Apr 2007 20:55:56 GMT

Just a quick note to pimp my latest artwork: Love Nazi Boxing! It is a gift, though if anyone wants to pay me to make this sort of thing, that would be awesome. ^_~

Tue, 03 Apr 2007 01:06:23 GMT

I made Zaphod Beeblebrox fanart! :D

I want to have a second childhood. No, I don't mean like what adults do at their midlife crisis. I am perfectly capable of acting like a kid right now if I want to. What I mean is that I want to be reborn, in a city this time, to a low income family, and I want to have several younger siblings and I want to get in fights with them and my friends at school and I want to be teased and backstabbed and I want to get drunk and make out with strangers in the back of a car and I want to be rejected from my college of choice and I want to go to a state college and meet all the punks and frat boys and the drama people. I want to make all the mistakes that I never made and no longer have the opportunities to make. And then I want this second childhood to merge with my first one, with me, right now. And together, in one head, we will be perfect, and we will rule this world, because we will have twice as much experience as anyone else, with the wisdom of the first me and the passion of the second me.

Perhaps the other me is already out there, waiting for me to find it and merge with it. Maybe these things are called significant others. Maybe not.

Sat, 27 Jan 2007 20:59:32 GMT

They're hiring concept artists and background artists for the production of an animated Castlevania movie right now. WANT.

Now would be a good time for me to have a better portfolio. >_<

Current Music: Russel Cox - Prelude to Darkness

Mon, 22 Jan 2007 01:25:45 GMT

So, I was cruising around in my motor vehicle today, when I saw a billboard with a little black girl holding a stethoscope up to a teddy bear's chest. Awww. And then I read the caption, "Born to be a nurse." (with a phone number, presumably for some nursing school or hospital or whatever, I stopped reading at that point)

People are scary. :(

Mon, 15 Jan 2007 19:10:32 GMT

This short from Nickelodeon is currently my favorite thing in the world for some reason. I think it's the "rhombus". O_o

EDIT: Moved link to youtube because google video is mean.

Sun, 07 Jan 2007 00:22:34 GMT

I finally got a good digital camera for Christmas. (thank you! ^_^) Here is what I've been taking pictures of:

Juice on a plate.

Rust constellations.

Tree stump. Bonus: My shoelace in the lower left.

...Australia? Nah. EDIT: gustavolacerda pointed out to me that it looks much more like China. Yep.

A stone step by my front door in MA.

A cheerfully dressed tree.

Our refrigerator.

YOU WILL EAT MY FRIES.

A small sample of the clay figures I made in my childhood. Gotta name them all! Come on, you can do it if you really try! Bonus: A little bit of my sombrero on the right.

Some more of those figures.

If I had a myspace, this would probably be my picture. I.E. it's the most flattering picture of me that I know of.

Sun, 24 Dec 2006 04:40:04 GMT

Mouse, regarding The Matrix:

You have to wonder now, how did the machines really know what Tasty Wheat tasted like, huh? Maybe they got it wrong. Maybe what I think Tasty Wheat tasted like actually tasted like, uh... oatmeal, or tuna fish. That makes you wonder about a lot of things. You take chicken for example, maybe they couldn't figure out what to make chicken taste like, which is why chicken tastes like everything.

The consistency of Macaroni and Cheese changed a few weeks ago. I eat two different brands of Mac & Cheese, Kraft and Valu Time, though lately I've been mostly just eating Valu Time. I had a bunch of boxes of it in my cupboard, all purchased at the same time. One day I made myself a batch, the same way I always do, and it was different. It was much thicker and stickier than it was the day before. I made myself some more the next day, and it was thick and sticky again. I finished the rest of the Mac & Cheese in my cupboard and bought some new Valu Time boxes, and they were all sticky too. I assumed that something was wrong with the Valu Time brand, though I had no idea what.

Today I made myself some Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. It was much thicker and stickier than I remember Kraft being.

...I don't mind the change, I guess, but it makes me feel like I just switched into or out of a reality where they got the consistency of Macaroni and Cheese wrong.

I made some Sandman fanart. :)

Current Music: Sminky - Puppies in the space & Everything's Good!

Thu, 30 Nov 2006 17:40:42 GMT

I type the word "penis" so rarely that sometimes I forget how to and it comes out "penus". I kinda like my version better. But anyway, nobody ever uses that word for some reason that I can't fathom. They'll always use "cock", "dick", "wang", "member", "thing", "corndog", "man-missile", "flesh flute", "joystick", "bilbo baggins", "excalibur"... I guess they're less scary? Funnier? But really, "penis" is a perfectly good word on its own.

"Hey, dude."
"Yeah?"
"I like your penis."
"Hey, thanks man. Likewise."

There, that wasn't so bad, was it? That's an acceptable use of the word between any two gay or straight men (but not between a gay man and a straight man, that would be awkward).

I am considering writing some open source code for a drawing program.

Humans

Tue, 26 Sep 2006 21:01:20 GMT

This morning I met two interesting people.

The first was a black guy with a wide-brimmed hat in an expensive car. It would be unfair to describe him as a pimp, as he wore no purple nor tiger stripes nor bling, and I can't remember whether his car was a Cadillac, but that was nevertheless the impression I got.
He greeted me with, "Hey, um, do I know you? You look familiar."
"No."
"Are you sure? Eric, wasn't it? What's your name?"
"John."
"Oh, hmm. Where are you going?"
"Home"
"Want a ride?"
"No thanks."
"Are you gay or straight?"
"Ha!" I laugh. For some reason, I think it's really hilarious when people do exactly what one expects, and this guy definitely seemed to have sex on the mind. "Straight." I figured accuracy is less important than making sure this guy doesn't get any fancy ideas.
"Oh, man, I'm sorry, I shouldn't have asked that."
Then I walked away.

On the whole, I think the experience brightened my day. It's nice to know that I'm attractive enough for people to hit on me, even if they are creepy gay pimps.

The second person was an old white guy walking down the sidewalk, alone, saying out loud, "I'm not going to shut the fuck up, don't you ever tell me to shut the fuck up again," over and over. This kinda broke my brain for a moment.

Today

Tue, 19 Sep 2006 07:16:39 GMT

Sunday totally did not go as planned, but accidents are often more fun than plans, and Sunday was no exception. But I apologize if you said you wanted to hang out and I didn't contact you. There may be more hanging out today (Tuesday), particularly to watch Nausicaä, which looks like it'll be a lot like all the other Miyazaki movies I've seen. I say we meet at the entrance of Wean Hall around 8:00 PM to see the movie. And if you can find me earlier than that, you can help me look for the things on my birthday wishlist:

1. a cosmic banana peel
2. anti-gravity toothpaste
~~3. Pittsburgh~~
4. a meme
5. nature's smiley face
~~6. makeshift birthday cake~~
7. pants
8. 2^8
~~9. milk & butter for Mac & Cheese~~
10. singularity
~~11. movie showtimes or a DVD~~
12. His noodly appendage
13. the Pokémon... all of them
14. a themesong
15. mass confusion!
16. a jamaican accent
17. a freudian penis
18. the win
19. a backrub
20. an entropy reverser
21. a katamari

shipping

Sat, 16 Sep 2006 23:58:16 GMT

I AM GOING TO RANT AND YOU CAN'T STOP ME BECAUSE THIS IS MY JOURNAL SO THERE. This post isn't interesting unless you like reading about stupid, stupid problems.

I ordered Verizon DSL last week. They were supposed to send me a self-install kit. It was supposed to arrive earlier. It didn't. They did, however, send me a UPS tracking number. So I go use that at the UPS website to find out what happened to my package, and see this error:

THE APARTMENT NUMBER IS MISSING OR IS INCORRECT. UPS IS ATTEMPTING TO OBTAIN THIS INFORMATION. A POSTCARD HAS BEEN SENT TO THE RECIPIENT REQUESTING THAT THEY CONTACT UPS.

Question: How do you send a postcard to the recipient if you aren't sure what their address is? Of course, I haven't seen any such postcard.

Problem: I don't have an apartment number. I live in a duplex; it's a house with two floors, and I live on the second floor. "2nd Floor" is the only specification I have. And even that is basically useless, since the two floors share a front porch, which is where the UPS would deliver it. But I know that I specified "2nd Floor" to Verizon when I ordered my service. So it's not my fault. Apparently UPS doesn't consider "2nd floor" to be good enough though. I have to make them reconsider somehow.

First, I try the UPS website. I found a phone number that takes me to a machine that is totally useless. Okay, scrap that idea. They have a form that I can fill out to email them, so I try that. Except... I need to know the address of the sender, and I see nothing from Verizon or UPS indicating exactly where Verizon decided to ship my order from. This means I can't fill out the form to report a problem. And all of the other contact methods I saw for UPS involved responding to a note left behind by the delivery guy, and there never was a delivery guy so I can't do that.

Another Problem: Since I did not respond to that mythical postcard in a timely fashion, UPS decided to return the package to the shipper. According to the UPS FAQ, this means it's too late to try to change the shipping address anyhow.

So I want to check out Verizon. They also have a service to let me check on the progress of my order. Except... they use my home phone number as a login to check my order, and I don't even have a home phone number. Verizon will give me service regardless of whether I have a land line, but they won't let me check on my order if I don't. So I can't use that.

Next, I tried emailing Verizon. But the only was to do that is by filling out a little form with seventy character limit on the problem description. For referencee, this is 70 characters:
XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
That's how much room I have to explain the problem to Verizon. I assumed that this was because some human being was actually reading these, and the reports needed to be small and concise so that the human being could read and handle them quickly. I explained the problem as well as I could.

And I got an automated response from that. And it was, of course, useless. So I look for a phone number for Verizon. There was a "Contact" link somewhere on the Verizon page I was looking at, but it did not lead to any phone numbers. Eventually, I realized that the "Contact" link from the main Verizon page lead to someplace different, which *did* have phone numbers. So I called it. It brought me to another machine. This machine refused to tell me anything unless I gave them the phone number that the order is for. This is the same problem from two paragraphs ago. But I wanted to talk to someone, so I just used my cell phone number to get by that obstacle, and then they let me talk to a human. Finally! Except, oh wait, today is a weekend and they don't have representatives on weekends.

*closes eyes* ... *sighs*

Anubis

Sat, 16 Sep 2006 10:22:03 GMT

It had been way too long since I had drawn something that I was proud of, so I bought a new sketchbook and some artist pencils (as opposed to the stub that had been in my pocket for ages) and made this. This is Anubis and his brand-spanking-new daughter, who currently lacks a name (I'm resisting the temptation to call her Sibuna). I hope to clean it up (it looked better before I scanned it) and color it in soon. Critiques are welcome. ;)

I don't normally time myself, but this time I had been listening to PhabeFX - Feuer on repeat the entire time, and my MP3 player had kept track of how many times I had heard it, so I was able to calculate that this picture took me about 3 hours to draw. Curiously, Feuer is a song that loops seemlessly, like a video game song. It's also awesome. Go download it; it's free, as is the rest of the music on Archive.org.

What is the caption for this picture?

I plan to watch Little Miss Sunshine on Sunday. There may or may not be cake involved. There may or may not be partying involved. You are invited. There will not be any getting wasted, despite this being my 21st birthday. ^_^ If you want to help me make cake, show up at the UC today (Saturday) around 3:45 PM, especially if you have ideas on how to make the cake. Or just call me sometime today or tomorrow. I'll tell you my phone number in a friends-only post below this one.

Salutations!

Wed, 13 Sep 2006 20:33:05 GMT

I've got a story about last weekend, but I'll relate it later.

Hey Pittsburghers. My birthday is next Tuesday, but people'll probably be busy then, so I'm thinking of getting together this weekend. But I haven't decided what I want to do yet. Any ideas?

You're invited. Let me know if you're interested.

EDIT: Man, I have such a crazy combination of friends. This could be interesting.

Asplode

Sun, 03 Sep 2006 23:20:24 GMT

I went dancing both Friday and Saturday night. First at the very gay Pegasus bar, wherein I danced topless, and then at the very goth ThouShaltNot concert, wherein I was disappointed that they did not play their song If I Only Were A Goth, but only mildly so, as their rendition of Without Faith was orgasmic when the crowd sang along at the end. The ThouShaltNot concert involved a roadtrip, ~5 hours both ways. I drove some KGB/CSlounge friends (all of whom are on my friends list and potentially reading this:) and my driving didn't suck, except when people told me to make turns at the last moment. The dancing and the not sucking at driving are semi-new developments.

My social skills have improved greatly since last year, though there is still much to be desired. I'm amused at the improvement nevertheless, as I certainly didn't do anything very social over the summer. But my outlook changed.

I think there are important things I should do today.

Wed, 30 Aug 2006 15:40:42 GMT

Someone just started an IM conversation with "hi. asl?"

I didn't know people still do that. In fact, I can't remember anyone ever asking me that before. But this person was serious. He/she found my journal through an interest in robots (?) and was wondering if I was interested in helping to write a fanfiction of a movie.

I'm giving the Internet the benefit of the doubt and keeping my screenname public on my LJ profile for a little while longer. I haven't had trouble before.

Pwned

Tue, 29 Aug 2006 01:08:03 GMT

Today I've been carrying around a slinky. I was making sure to warn people that it tastes terrible. Most of the responses were a raised eyebrow, combined with a, "Um, okaaaay..." However, twinofmunin's response was, "Hey, whoa, it really does!" as she had already put her mouth on it by the time I was able to warn her. She wins.

I like pictures. I especially like provocative or bizarre pictures. Anything that gets a smile or a chuckle or a gasp or a curl-into-fetal-position-and-groan from me is good. So I friended randompictures, dashing, everyday_people, pantsketch, sensuality_art, and space_ghetto. Except now my friends page is mostly filled with pictures posted by people I don't know, and quite often the pictures are inappropriate for the public computer labs that I use most of the time. It used to be that whenever I got to an inappropriate picture, I could just scroll down quickly to the next normal post before anyone else could notice. But now my friends page is almost saturated with potentially inappropriate pictures. So either you guys need to post more often to dilute the pictures, or I need to unfriend something. :P

Tomorrow I will sign papers and checks and I will own 1/6th of a house. I will move in on Friday. I will probably go to a ThouShaltNot & Absurd Minds concert on Saturday.

I just found out that "winsome" is a word.