FURTHERMORE
Seeking | |||
---|---|---|---|
Kevin | Woman | ||
Age | 20s to early 30s | ||
Status | Single, Monogamous | Ditto | |
Location | Canyon Lake, Texas | Earth | |
Traits | Independent thinker | Ditto | |
Height | 6'0" |
Right from the fount of these delights of ours A bitter something rises, which chokes us 'mid the flowers.Lucretius
I shall the effect of this good lesson keep, As watchman to my heart. But, good my brother, Do not, as some ungracious pastors do, Show me the steep and thorny way to heaven; Whiles, like a puff'd and reckless libertine, Himself the primrose path of dalliance treads, And recks not his own rede.Shakespeare, Hamlet
What from your fathers’ heritage is lent, Earn it anew, to really possess it!Goethe, Faust
Till that which suits a part infects the whole, And now is almost grown the habit of my soul.Samuel Coleridge, Dejection: An Ode
On human actions reason tho' you can, It may be reason, but it is not man.Pope, Epistle to Lord Cobham, 1734
In certain cases it would be uncouth, And most absurd to speak the naked truth; With all respect for your exalted notions, It’s often best to veil one’s true emotions. Wouldn’t the social fabric come undone If we were wholly frank with everyone?Molière, The Misanthrope
Cell2Jack: connect any corded phone to a cell phone over Bluetooth. Make and receive calls when in range.
SCENE: Car wash. A soapy car just exited the wash tunnel and stands dripping. Four workers are drying it with rags. Twenty feet away, two customers are looking at the car and talking to each other as another worker walks by.
CUSTOMER1: "I've never seen a drone at a car wash before!"
CUSTOMER2: "Yeah, that's neat."
WORKER: "Oh, that's just Donnie. He's working from home today."
There's something about travel where everything's new, every day's an adventure, and everything's exciting. Why can't that be true in our home cities, every day? There are plenty of things in each of our cities we've never seen, never tried, and never experienced. Even just walking through a grocery store and trying a new food is amazing.
One idea is that our homes are too comfortable. It's so easy to just melt into our couches, our phones, our laptops, our TVs, our beds, and our routines. Weeks float by in a blur. It's inconceivable to travel somewhere and do nothing new for a week, but we do it all the time at home. We might do stuff on the weekend. But 3 out of 7 days is lame. Sure, we're tired and busy but all it takes is 10 minutes to walk to a local store or park or say to a neighbor.
We should be achin' to get outta the house. When tired or bored or stressed, just go for a walk and look around. And then go home and sleep comfy.
Meta-cringe is when someone is cringing to something they shouldn't cringe to. For example, it's meta-cringe to cringe at well-done, wholesome country music, despite the dominant, cool culture cringing at it.
Meta-uncool is when someone is not cringing to something that they should cringe to. For example, it's meta-uncool to not cringe at poorly-done rap, despite the dominant, cool culture liking it.
But it's not always easy to tell. Question your involuntary reactions which have been molded by dominant, cool culture.
I think that something has to be both good and well-done. Cringey country music is good but not well done. Cool rap's aggression is well-done but its lyrics are bad.
Also, just because something is counter-cultural doesn't necessarily mean it's cool or non-cringe. A lot of counter-culture is trash, too.
What do good and well-done mean? Don't be afraid to find those answers yourself instead of just taking what the dominant, cool culture throws at you, or even most counter-cultures. More often than not, they're meta-cringey and meta-uncool.
And it's not meta-meta-cringe to analyze meta-cool because then philosophy would be meta-cringe, which it's not. At least, not cringey philosophy.
Voltaire's Candide is one of the most important books ever written. The ending is usually seen as a stoic or caustic response to irrational optimism.
What if it can be more than that? Besides the personal benefits, what if cultivating our metaphorical garden is the best way that cultural progress occurs? If so, then choosing what we mentally plant and how it's grown may have more profound importance.
I love that feeling in the shower when I'm freezing cold and hot water hits me. The joy flies through into an orgasmic eye twitch and deep sigh. I thought I'd see what OpenAI's DALL·E would create for the prompt:
cold person involuntarily feeling good when hot water hits them
This was the least weird one, and I didn't crop it or add that text!
FedEx just delivered a package that shipped nearly 1 and ½ years ago I always assumed that if delivery services find a package that they accidentally dropped behind some closet or something and it's more than a few months old, that then some worker would just take it home because of the embarrassment of delivering something after a few months, let alone years!
But no, FedEx were asked to get a package to me and nothing would stop them from delivering on their promise! Not rain, nor sleet, nor hail, and certainly not egregious incompetence! It's strangely endearing. Maybe this is some sort of 4D marketing chess?
Building brand loyalty through unconventional means
I forgot how fun Geocities was:
It's amazing that Neocities is free and you can edit your website in a browser editor (or through a folder on your computer).
It's fascinating how much of a mental straightjacket all the other cookie-cutter sites, apps, and social media put us in. Our creativity and our thoughts are transformed and squozen by the container we put ourselves in, like water.
This doesn't apply to just our internet personality, but we're straight-jacketed by political banter, social media posts, internet videos, memes, advertisements, propaganda, and just about anything entering our ears and eyes. How often do you select the topic of conversation? Even when you do, how often are you just parroting and sneezing on a mind virus from someone else, without even realizing?
Ostensibly, pictures and words have an ephemeral character. They don't physically touch us. In that is their power. Often, they penetrate deeper than a knife, into our subconscious, without us much realizing. Like a magic spell.
Our own, personally-curated and controlled website allows us to take back some of the power of pictures and words.
I ended up at Neocities because I was playing with Spacehey and I hit a straightjacket moment. Spacehey is quirky and nostalgic and it's great that you can edit and share CSS templates like Myspace; but, ultimately, it heavily restricts you. I don't even remember how I ended up finding Neocities but I'm so glad I did.
all 88x31 animals art backgrounds badges blinkies bumperstickers buttons containers cursors dividers doors emojis favicons fonts gifs images memes midis minis mp3s pictures poems stamps svgs tiles trees videos words
Directory listings generated with listings.sh
(only tested on Linux):
sh listings.sh
Use the ffmpeg command line program.
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vframes 1 output.png
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf scale=560:-1 output.mp4
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -crf 40 output.mp4
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -ss 00:00:05 -c copy output.mp4
ffmpeg -ss 00:54:07 -to 00:56:00 -i input.mp4 -c copy output.mp4
ffmpeg -to 00:00:15 -i input.mp4 -c copy output.mp4
ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -filter_complex "[0:v]setpts=0.5*PTS[v];[0:a]atempo=2.0[a]" -map "[v]" -map "[a]" output.mp4
Use the gifsicle command line program (or ezgif.com).
gifsicle --info input.gif
gifsicle --explode input.gif
gifsicle input1.gif input2.gif input3.gif > output.gif
gifsicle -b --unoptimize -O2 input_output.gif --resize _x100
gifsicle -b --unoptimize -O2 input_output.gif --flip-horizontal "#0-"
gifsicle -b --unoptimize -O2 inputoutput.gif --delete "#5"
gifsicle -b --unoptimize -O2 input_output.gif --crop-transparency "#0-"
gifsicle -b --unoptimize -O2 input_output.gif --rotate-180 "#0-"
gifsicle -b --unoptimize -O2 input_output.gif --crop-transparency "#0-"
gifsicle -b --unoptimize -O2 input_output.gif --rotate-180 "#0-"
gifsicle -b --unoptimize -O2 input_output.gif --crop 1,8+34x24 "#0-"