KODA

Yesterday, I discovered that the graffiti I found about a month ago has been painted over. Frankly I’m not surprised, but it’s hard to understand how people can take such unique art and slap a dull brown paint over it. It wasn’t even out in the open — you had to look to find it. How much culture and honest self-expression is lost to this “cleaning?”
That image was one of the most personal and raw statements I’ve seen for quite some time, and it is really too bad it had to be painted over. How fascinating that it’s expression should be further emphasized by it’s very destruction.

Today marks the day upon which my beloved childhood pet Mazel passed away. Tonight is the night a year ago that I stayed with her as she died. Tonight is a night of ghosts, of memories, of reaching back to a time that feels so close and yet so far away. I remember sitting with her, that sleepless night, resting on the floor to try to be nearer to her. I remember stroking her body outsite my room, trying to calm her breathing. It’s ironic but fitting that because of company tonight I shall be sleeping in the living room, the room in which she died.

Tonight I’m just feeling melancholic and reflective. I couldn’t stay sad long after I realized I wasn’t mourning for her as much as I was for me. Often when I think of her I feel a boost of love, of motivation. Reconciling her death pushed me to reach out, to imagine higher goals in my life, to try to reach out and connect with people. While I didn’t have the heart to photograph her on her decline, after her death, I felt drawn to photography: to be able to document and capture a bit of the things that I loved. This medium and it’s meaning has grown in different directions on me over the past year, but the process of dealing with her loss was what inspired me to get started.

	Firefox	75.6 %
	Safari	9.7 %
	MS Internet Explorer	5.8 %

Sorry to those 5.8% (!) who are using IE, things will be looking pretty ugly here from here on out since your browser does not know how to display standards-compliant web pages properly…

For the other 94.2% of you out there, I think your taste in web browsers is damn cool.

http://browsershots.org/website/1152960/

Today, this day… after years of ISDN, I finally have DSL. Oh man. What a difference a little bandwidth makes.

Later: This is incredible… hahaha, I’m apt-get dist-upgrading and listening to internet radio at the same time.

Just taking a break from schoolwork to test out the Wordpress “Updated Today” Plugin…

Just to let you know, it’s likely to get quiet here for a little while. I’m forecasting a significant drop in the awesomeness coefficient for the next one and a half weeks or so while I wrap up the end of this academic quarter. I’ve got books to read, papers to write!

I am so glad that summer is approaching.

I just fell through a Trapdoor, and I must say I won’t be coming back for a long time. A “Sketchbook for a group of programmers, graphic designers, psychologists, writers” — quite simply, this one of the most astounding groups of projects I have seen in a long time. There’s kiwi, “the wiki for sketching,” an editable (unfortunately shockwave driven) world of imagery in the style of MS-Paint… NodeBox, a fascinating bit of image generation on OSX using Python…

But by far most intriguing to me is Replica, a scarcely explained collection of full articles pertaining to art, design, computers, machine learning, consciousness, philosophy — the good stuff. And boy, is it good. I am amazed by “On artificial creativity”, where computer-generated art, words, artificial intelligence, and the internet meet. This is very interesting stuff, both artistically and conceptually. To me this seems to be the closest thing I’ve seen to a synthesis of modern philosophy, technology, art, and psychology. I am so impressed and inspired.

Oh, why are there such incredible people here on the internet?

Have you ever watched a movie or an animation with the sound off, and felt like you could hear the movement? Kind of like your mind is assembling sounds for the motion? Have you ever been staring at some cheezy animated gifs and thought you could hear the visual rhythm?

Have you ever stared at someone’s mouth in the distance and tried to read their lips? When doing so, did it feel like you could hear bits of what they were saying?

Perhaps our senses truly are not as separate as they would at first seem.

A few minutes ago I was sitting down, munching some granola and flipping through some camera ads laying on the table. I was mulling over some dissapointment from the events that had transpired over the past hour. But then, I had a realization. A realization of how seemingly separate events happened to bring me to experiences I couldn’t have possibly planned for. I have to chuckle at how these events and my intentions have shaped my experience today!

Today I was to meet some friends to hang out and have fun; we’d been doing this for a few weeks and I was really looking forward to it. I was very much anticipating seeing one friend, whom I had missed after her performance the night before. She is the one who originally invited me to these afternoons. I had packed a CD in my pocket I thought she might like hearing. The quickest route to the place where we’ve met is a walk up a few hills, and so I set out walking, making my way to meet my friends.

Enter the story game.

The latter part of this weekend and memorial day were spent debugging the PHP/Ajax story game I wrote about earlier. Why all this debugging you may ask? Well, as insta had put it, I dove in way too fast. I decided that I should move everything over to MySQL and custom database session management. This promptly led me to the brink of insanity and nearly giving up the project entirely. Well, while I have gone insane, I didn’t give up, and sure enough – last night I actually got it working.

Yay! This switch to a database backend has given me the control I needed to implement some new ideas from the past week. After some more MySQL tinkering, and throwing in some JSON magic to pack several variables into one refresh request, things are actually starting to look pretty cool.