mi troci lonu samciska bau lo jbobau
ni’o mi puza tervencpe lo dja’aza xagrnklarineto bo multu’u fo lo kibro .i ca lo cabdei ki mi klama be fu lonu cadzu be’o cpacu lo multu’u lo mrilu tcana .i mi ca mutce glare seja’e lo crisa be fi la .xuston. .i mi xrukla lo mi zdani gi’e zutse vi lo bifpra
This poster is awesome, and greeted me on my dashboard when i was about to make a post. I *love* optical illusions, so I just had to reblog.
It’s been a while since I’ve posted. A lot actually has happened. But in the interest of having my tags be useful and making it easier to find different kinds of information, I think I’m going to make them as separate posts. And use my queue so that it’s not *really* showing up all at once, and maybe the time between now and next time I think of stuff to write won’t seem like so long since the stuff I say will still be coming for a couple more days or so.
As far as my current activities, I’ve been reading a lot about linux and making preparations for a build of LFS. I’ve also been practicing up on my lojban a little and played with the idea of practicing translating stuff, probably either wikipedia pages or various linux related things. Though I must admit, some of the lfs hints, and even some man pages of packages I have, aren’t quite as grammatically elegant as I would have guessed would come from a native speaker of English. Most of the man pages I notice things in, it’s little typos and stuff, like transposition of letters, or skipping one, or something simple like that. Some of the LFS hints pages just have that feeling where the person who wrote it was trying very hard to make themselves understandable. Which is fine. There are people all over the world working on stuff like this, and I find it admirable that they try to make it understandable to English speakers. I think the next step in the process though, might be a little bit of clean-up editing my someone who speaks it a little better, so that the next person doesn’t have to think quite as hard to figure out what’s being said and can use more of the thinking on trying to learn what the article is trying to teach. For this reason, I think I might spend some time volunteering to clean up some typos in man pages and smooth out the writing in some other documentation and articles. It seems a thing which is likely useful, and probably just everyone’s been so busy doing other things that it hasn’t been done yet. It happens, and maybe it’s something I can help with. It also sounds like a fun thing to try to translate stuff into lojban. That would take a lot more time, since I’m still pretty much a beginner, but it could be very good practice.
I’ve also applied for a job! Hopefully that will go well. I haven’t heard back from them yet, but I worked there before, which should help. I hope.
A: Relax. It’s probably the most frequent word said to me by my second grade teacher. It was a hard thing to do, and I had no idea why at the time, but I knew he cared. That he wanted me to do well. I have heard similar advice from many others over the years, but the many times I heard it that school year stand out especially well, even this long after. There are many other interesting things I learned that year, where even in high school, I’d hear something about the topic and remember fondly, “I remember when I learned about that in second grade!” But yeah, “Relax!” is probably one of the most important lessons of my life. It’s still a thing to work on, but I have come very far. Even though more recent changes are probably bigger, I still consider the role my second grade teacher had to be extremely important.
RoboQuest
A: Bridge to Terabithia. I really liked every bit of it, except this one part near the end. But then the thing that happens after that, at the very very end, is really sweet. But I still think it could have happened without that other thing happening.
Sorry for the lack of details, but I don’t want to spoil it for anyone.
With luck we will both be able to help and learn from each other. I look forward to it!
So far, every time I think, “aha! I think I’m finally getting into the swing of this making sure I keep my blog up to date thing!” I’m within a day or two of leaving it alone for much longer than I wanted to.
But I really am here! Really! I’ve got another idea to help keep me on track, let’s see if it works or not…
I’m really glad classes and finals are over. In half a week, I graduate. I’m looking very much forward to it. The first few days after the end of finals, I was taking a huge break. I didn’t even go to my computer much at all for a few days. Now, while I still don’t want to get into some of the stuff I’ve got to get going on soon, I’m feeling more like doing more productive, or at least creative, things. One of which is getting caught up on my blog.
Also this summer, I hope to make more progress reading through the first of the Bourbaki books. I want to brush up on my Lojban. I am thinking about taking up Na’vi as well, but I’m not sure. I want to work more on my mysticism-type things, my See-ing into how Existence itself is put together. And flesh out my internet presence/home a little more.
I am undergoing a healing process. I suspect we all are. When I was little, I didn’t understand the problems I had. I think at that time, very few people knew what to look for. Through adolescence, I started realizing that some of these things might actually be problems. I also realized my identity was a bit different that I had thought. In college, I learned more about myself, both about who I am, and also about the problems I have that make it harder to be who I am. I began medication a few years ago. Always a fan of spending time thinking about how I think, I continued to learn more about who I am, and still do today. My medication was recently adjusted and I feel even better. And the more I learn, the more I realize that my search for knowledge of myself is exactly the same as my search for understanding of the universe as a whole.
There are still things to do. But now I am more able to do them. I’m putting much more effort now into trying to quit picking my skin. Part of this is that I am trying to be more careful to wash my face and to shower regularly, and to use acne-treating lotion to help the current wounds heal.
There are also the wounds inside me which are healing. Much progress is being made on that front as well. With the help of my medication, my self-perception is less clouded, and I can see how beautiful I really am—and also how beautiful everyone else is. Not just how they look, but how precious they are as sentient beings. I can feel my love for every single individual, even strangers I have never met. And because of my experiences, I think I am better able to love than I would have been had everything always been easy. In the process of recovering from the damage done by my chemical imbalances, I learned that “the best you can do” isn’t always “the best it seems obvious you should be able to do”. Sometimes there are very basic things you really have to do, and that for most people seem extremely easy and obvious, but you just can’t do them anyway. And you might not know why at the time. If you are particularly unlucky, you may never know why.
And in seeing how true this is for myself, I learned to be even more patient with others. That prof who seems really scary? Maybe he just has trouble interacting with people. Maybe he just doesn’t take for granted some of the conversational conventions others around do. The jack*ss driver that cut you off and is driving extremely aggressively? Maybe they are on their way to see a loved one at the hospital, or are taking someone there. Or maybe they have rage issues. But even that doesn’t mean they’re not doing the best they can. That one cousin that doesn’t seem to be making much of himself, and is always getting himself into trouble? Maybe there is more to his story than you realize, too. Maybe he had needs that were unmet at a critical time, causing damage to some of his other psychological abilities. Maybe he too is doing the best he can. With help, perhaps he could go much further.
And now that I am much better able to deal with life in general than I ever have been before, it is time to try again some things I didn’t do well enough the first time. I missed the application deadlines to get into grad school this fall, but I think that will work out very well actually. It will give me time to study for my math GRE, to help grad schools to not throw out my applications before seeing what my story is. It will give me time to take a couple of math classes I need to retake, partly since I didn’t do very well in them the first time, and also to show that, while I did have problems with some of the more obvious parts of the application, that I have found the problems, dealt with them, and can prove that they are now under control.
It will also give me more time to grow and heal and become even more me than I already am. To flesh out my internet home to fit me better. To find more friends to share my me with, and to learn and appreciate their mes. To express myself more fully. To study, for fun, those things central to my identity and to the current stage of my search. To brush up on my Lojban, to consider picking up Na’vi, to read the Bourbaki books. To quit, or at least significantly reduce, my skin picking. To reflect upon the Nature of Existence, and my place within it. And to develop my creative and artistic endeavors.
I want to start a band. This band will be a way of expressing very important parts of myself that need to be expressed to be properly honored. I will call my band Five Ton Flax. A quick Google search shows mostly Discordian references and blogs, and economic reports regarding the price of flax and flax seed. So I think I’m okay there. And the Discordian reference is on purpose. Discordianism is an important part of my identity, even if there are those I haven’t gotten around to explaining in what way to yet. The way it will work is similar to how Nine Inch Nails works, where there is basically just this one guy recording the tracks and putting them together himself, but if he gets hired for performances, he rounds up a tour band. I want to try putting things together that way. I intend to use primarily clarinets in the music. The clarinet family of woodwind instruments includes most ranges. Even for bass lines, I intend to use a low-ranged clarinet, once I get my hands on one. The trickiest part would be drumset, since I don’t play any percussion, but I am told that good beats can be found and used from programs like Garage Band, which I’m likely to want anyway to do the track mixing. Because of the inspiration from Nine Inch Nails for the process I want to try, in addition to having a name that has the same rhythm to it, I want my band’s logo-symbol thing to look a little like it too. It will be a large, sans-serif capital T in the middle, with an F on each side, the left one backward, so that the cornery bit of each F fits inside the cornery bits of the T.
My reasoning for choosing the clarinet, aside for the convenience factor of I already have one, is to honor my aunt who was my godmother. She was always very special to me, but we had much more in common even than I realized at the time. She played clarinet in school band. She didn’t stick with music as long as I did, as far as I know, but with all the things I have in common with her, I think this counts. Since I have so much in common with her, I consider honoring her to be a very important part of honoring myself and who I am. We also share an appreciation for the works of Edgar Allan Poe, and for this reason, I expect that one of my first songs will be Graveyard Picnic, by Voltaire.
As for what I’ll do with this music, my current plan is modeled after one I have seen seem to work for several webcomics I read. I will have my music freely available, but have probably a donation button, perhaps through PayPal, so that people who like my music enough that they want to can donate something so I can spend more time on it. Or, if they don’t, it’ll stay a project restricted to my spare time. For some of the more major expenses, I might use something like Kickstarter, for example for things like a new mouthpiece, a professional cleaning for my instrument, paid versions of useful software, and, eventually, more instruments. Things which cost money, but would be for the purpose of making my music better. I want to eventually write my own music, but in the meantime, I will play mostly cover versions of songs which for one reason or another are very important to me.
All told, here are the things I can think of which are currently on my to-do list:
Quit picking at skin
Look for work
Get a GRE math book
Five Ton Flax:
Make blog for Five Ton Flax
Get Finale (free version)
Look for Garage Band equivalent for Windows (free version)
Get clarinet reeds, cork grease
Get clarinet jazz mouthpiece
Get clarinet cleaned
Read Bourbaki books
Study Lojban
Learn Na’vi
