yerfatma’s blog

Donald Trump showed up outside Celtics practice to present Kevin Garnett with a birthday gift, a copy of Trump's newest book, entitled October Leaders. John Madden received only apologies from Trump who didn't know Madden would be there to chauffeur the guests via bus to KG's party. "Professor" Brendan Morrow got a paddle for discipling students. "Bucket" Billy Crystal, coach of an unspecified team, received a plaque and, most poignant of all, Pete Rose Jr. got a single, perfect red rose to commemorate fighting Mike Tyson to a draw one day earlier.

I'm thinking about registering with Megan's Law, just to keep kids out of our yard.

Given I'm not doing anything else with this address in cyberspace, I figured I'd use it as a way to guilt myself into writing about what I am recently obsessed with: information. It started with an issue of Warren Ellis' Planetary that broached the idea beneath the atoms and quarks was information, the actual building block of everything.

Then I moved from being a developer to being a developer and a team leader; this meant a portion of my time went from doing what I considered "work" to shifting information from one party to another, typically a project manager to a developer. It felt as though I'd become an old-school telephone operator, patching Klondike-5342 into the proper line. My initial reaction was revulsion because I had seen a number of other people using a similar process to hide from doing actual work.

Six months later, I couldn't tell you the difference between passing relevant information onto parties that need it and "work". We need packet sniffers watching the routing of information between people, intelligent agents (whether human or machine-based) that can watch the overwhelming streams of data we now generate and pick out the single notes that matter.

An aside: in the interests of simplicity, I am going to avoid questions of privacy and civil liberties as much as possible. I am a fierce believer in both, but I think the questions muddy the water. Furthermore, this kind of information sniffing is already going and will continue to evolve regardless of this discussion; better to get to the answers and then propose solutions.

I think information may be underneath everything. Even if it's not, this feels like a useful framework to investigate the world with. I've lost interest in video games in the past year as I started to see them as work. It's become hard to think about sitting down and executing a repetitive task as a vehicle for fun. I don't think this means video games are over or that I will never enjoy a game again, but it's changed how I look for games and I'm stuck to tell you what criteria I should use. The only game I've loved recently has been Wario Ware, and the whole concept of that is short, repetitive tasks. But there's no point to the tasks, and I think that's the difference.

The Information drives a lot of what we do. We live in a world that is a random system (if not random, the system and its various subsystems consist of enough inputs to make the system effectively random) and yet we are wired to try to impose order on the system. To try to see patterns, to try to fence things into grids (property maps, long/lats, GPS) in a system inherently opposed to this. I think much of the things we find entertaining are artificially ordered. Most works of fiction are satisfying in their sensibility: the protagonist has a problem with a clear cause, they take an approach to the problem and solve it or fail in an understandable way. Along the way (at least with a 3rd-person omniscient narrator), we assume we know everything that's happened to the protagonist even though few works of fiction are in real-time.

Put more succinctly: why the hell do I do the NYT crossword puzzle a couple of times a week? Ostensibly it sharpens my mental faculties, but I can't say that would keep me showing up for the kind of abuse Will Shortz provides.

There might have been a point to this post at one point, but I clearly lost it. The meta-point survived though, as I just need to get started. Hopefully with practice will come organization, thesis and, however unlikely, insight. I am not, fictional reader, here for you, I'm here for the Furies buzzing in my head.

In my continuing pursuit of ADHD satisfaction.

Things I've already observed in the build-up:

• I hate Brian Kenny more than I realized. He's somewhere between Really Stubbing Your Toe and Hitler
• Seriously NESN, what demo does Jack Welch appeal to? Why don't you just have Tom Werner suck him off in private? The only excitement is the 1% chance Eck calls him out as a rich old fart with nothing to offer, tears open his shirt to reveal a union-related tattoo and beats the pharmaceutically-enhanced goo out of Welch
• ESPN, thanks for pushing the start time back. That 10 minutes makes all the difference for the 12 Devil Ray fans who think all games start at 7:15
  

I'm thinking of creating a docu-comedy set in 1980s South Africa called The Fabulous Botha Boys. Show of hands, everyone who's interested.

Le Samouraï? Le Samournay.

WTF do you care? 6th Street costs like four dollars on iTunes. I have no idea how I found him, but it works for me. If you need a Pitchforkian review, he straddles the intersection of Creedence, Mellencamp and Shitkicker. And I'm straddling my 5th and 6th beer. So YMMV. But I know.

Bumper stickers seen this week:

"FUCK RAP [middle finger]"
"If you're gonna be riding my ass, you better pull my hair"

The latter on a 1986 (or so) Jeep Cherokee recently purchased for muddin'. I know this because:

it featured a set of tires listing at 3x the Kelly Blue Book value of a brown Jeep Cherokee
the temp plate indicated it would soon feature the word "DRTIER" on the backside of that beauty

Admit it, you wish you lived in New Hampshire, Athens of the North.

What I want: you know those Ichthus on the back of cars? And the ones that grew feet and say "Evolution"? And the ones eating the ones that say "Evolution" or "Darwin"? Yeah, so I want one of those where it just keeps recursing for as many times as will fit sensibly (and stylishly) on the back of my car so everyone who cares enough to work out the 39 reverses of the thing will crash into the back of my car and I can sue a bunch of people for whiplash and then take a vacation.

Don't try to rip me off and just give me the vacation either. That's shitty. Two items of note here:

Firstly, if you tell me you don't believe in evolution, I silently cross you off my "Has a brain stem" list, but rather than be a zealot on the other side, I will defend to the death my right not to care one way or the other. Whether I am descended from monkey-humping mud peoples or the Incestuous Adam and Eve of Eden, my mortgage company doesn't seem to care. (And BTW, Countrywide, fuck you).

Second, while I am fascinated with recursion, I am sensible enough not to have pointed out to our neighbor on the corner an even number of "Never" winds up negating what you're saying, so her bumper sticker encouraging me to "Never Never Never Never Shake a Baby" technically suggests I will have missed out on an experience were I to go to the grave without giving a little kid The James Bond Fancy Martini Treatment.