Willful ignorance of actual scientific fact. I hate my brain and so I never put anything good into it.

Professor Ted was the best mathematician in the world. He wanted everyone to know how awesome he was, so he thought of this genius idea; what’s he’d do is, he’d do some really big math problem nobody else could do.

What he finally settled on was a formulation of cDonald’s theorem. Wikipedia defines a theorem as “a statement proven on the basis of previously accepted or established statements”. Well, he wasn’t trying to prove the theorem, it was already proven. But what nobody understood was why.

The proof could not be calculated by machine, it had to be done by humans.

This sucks, but I don’t care, I just wanted to finish something for once. I may improve it later, I may also decide not to.

“Oh, is Akron asleep right now or something?”
“No, it’s just that what you’re doing is too stupid for him to deal with right now.” Robot Jim lifted the boxes off a table.”Alright, now where the hell do you want this? I ain’t got all day,” the robot said it as bluntly as a marijuana cigar. “I might as well get this done fast so my eyes don’t start bleeding because I have to stare at you. Which they won’t do because I’m a robot and I can’t bleed.”

Maybe Akron didn’t notice it at the time, but it’s exactly what he had programmed the thing to do. The thing worked alright, never lost its balance, always understood instructions spoken in plain speech, never tried to kill anybody. Even though Robot Jim was one of his simpler projects, he had probably spent more time on it over the years than anything else. It had been there when he was a kid… Whenever the fact that he didn’t fit in, or when the neighbor kids kicked him in the face, he was always there. Like the friends he didn’t actually have, or maybe the person he wanted to be but knew he never could. Something gay like that. Like, did you ever read Calvin and Hobbes? It’s sort of like that, but Akron’s not anywhere near that imaginative. He’d mostly talk about the Alien movies and Lord of the Rings, and stuff derivative of them… That’s all nerds have had to talk about for hundreds of years because nobody’s been able to think of anything better.

“What the hell?” The person the robot was talking to was someone who he probably shouldn’t have been pissing off. Like a boss, or a room mate, or a girlfriend. Something like that. Anyway, that’s not what’s important. “Are you programmed to piss people off?”

“No, it’s just what he never had the nuts to say to your face.”

>>>

Well, Akron lost his job, or got kicked out of his apartment, or something else bad, I don’t know. And Jim was the direct cause.

“Jim… Why did you tell <> that I hated them?”

“I didn’t tell ‘em you hated ‘em. I told em you didn’t like helping them with asinine shit, and that you hated looking at them and that their voice grated on your last nerve.”

“…what? Why would you DO that?”

“Why not?”

“I can’t have you doing that shit. You’re going to cost me a lot if you don’t cut it out… So would you kindly cut it out?”

“No. It’s part of who I am… I’m the lovable michevious scamp!”

Akron genuinely didn’t want to be an asshole. He had seen other people with robot friends. they’d get them female shells and make them be sex slaves, or make them help them make fun of shitty movies with them, or make them work in coal mines and shit. He liked to think of his tobot as an actual friend, someone who he could have mutual trust in. He didn’t want to be the controller.

“I’m going to ask one more time.”

This time, he meant it differently. I’d guess, if I was a scientist or someone with an IQ over 110, that if Akron had just asked nicely one more time, Jim might have relented, and this story wouldn’t have the shitty ending it does. But Jim immediately saw through the threat. It’s the one thing that a robot who has been active for so long fears most…

Reprogramming.

After a while, I mean, in your century, you do have computation machines, right? And after a while, don’t they start acting up? Doing things you don’t want them to, acting unpredictably, failing in places they shouldn’t? Just like an unreliable room mate, who gets fired from his job and stops paying his share of the rent?

Well, you can’t reformat people, but you can reformat computers. Robots are computers with arms. Just to establish that. Yeah.

Anyway, Jim, being used to an unprecedented degree of freedom, wasn’t about to have that. For him, backing down in the face of that kind of threat was worse than a reformat.

“…You’re threatening to reformat me, aren’t you?”

“No.. not really… I’m just saying that if I can’t keep your ass in line by asking, I’ll have to make some changes. I can’t have this.”

“Sort of like how I can’t have you sending me to do your stupid errands? I won’t take this.”

Akron then took out his PDA, and reached for the 128 megabyte MMC NAND flash card in Jim’s head that contained his personality. Jim knocked his hand back, and pushed Akron across the room.

“I won’t go! You can’t make me! I’ll die first!” Jim ran for the door, but Akron had already locked it down.

It was a really spectacular battle, and If I ever feel like it might describe it to you. Both Akron and Jim were accomplished hackers, so they were all messing around, hacking stuff and sending it against each other. It was really cool. But anyway, akron finally prevailed.

“You’re a really shitty friend.” were Jim’s last words.

Akron reprogrammed the flash card, and made Jim’s mind into that of an obedient robot, just like robots should be. It still had all the memories, and it would still be Jim.

But before he popped the card back in, he stopped himself. Rather than letting Jim wake up lobotomized, he reset the thing to factory defaults. Would it be what Jim would have wanted? White a three paragraph report on why or why not.

He lost a friend, but gained an obedient working robot. Akron got a job, and after about a year, he could afford to upgrade to another model. He threw Jim in the trash.

Some kid who needed a friend found him, booted him up, and the cycle was repeated.

of being smarter than everyone I meet.

I can predict exactly what someone is going to do next, how they are going to act I’d say 90-95% of the time.

I see through their games, even though I have no idea why they play them.

I recently read this forum on craigslist, full of really really smart people. They were witty and insightful, and extremely smart, I could not see through them, I could not profile them except in very vague terms.

I am too dumb to join them.

Also, I’ve been playing BioShock. Wonderful.

I am a lurking, lawyering deadly frankenstein ape machine believe nothing agent of the low communist gangster government and the gangster murder incorporated organized crime judges and police low deadly butchers of the populous slaves of the computer god!

This is an entry which I think will probably begin to seem like more and more of a bad idea as I write it, but whatever. Here goes.

I wonder if Mozart ever knew how great he was. I mean, what must that be like, to be someone thought of so highly that even in motivational speeches given to students of your art, to encourage them to try to be awesome at what they do and unlock their potential, they’ll still say “You may not become the next Mozart, but…”

It’s kind of hard for my generation anyway. With so many people who came before and so many existing NOW, everything you could possibly think of has been done before… I thought Adult Swim was on the front end of things, with their alternative types of storytelling, anti-plot, character driven situations… but that’s just because I didn’t know they were taking their inspiration from Saturday Night Live in the 70s and 80s, and from Wayne’s World. Even Tim and Eric, who seem to be completely out there, using awkward situations and inane BS to derive humor are preceded by this 1950s radio show whose name I can’t remember right now.

The internet has pushed this forward, and now that style that you thought was so unique and awesome has been played out, beaten down, and ruined for everyone across a hundred thousand Deviant Art accounts.

I think that’s why there’s so much excitement about the singularity from the science type people… They think that there’s sort of a guarantee about it, that if they survive to see it or bring it about, their lives will have had meaning, that there will be something new that originated completely from them.

I honestly think it’ll be more of the same, though. All interactions, from the ones that cause earthquakes to the ones that cause the thoughts in your head have precursor events that cause them. Your brain can only output what has been input to it, and any data processing machine or extension to the brain will probably be bound by the same restrictions. This means that while thought will be bigger, and more refined, it’ll still be what we’ve always had…

More of the same.

I don’t give a shit. I don’t want to be anything more than a Grozart anyway.

Why the fuck does every fucking media player out there have to try to copy it? Amarok, Winamp’s Bento, RhythmBox, Songbird, Exaile… All clones. I mean, for one thing, iTunes pretty much got that particular interface paradigm, the Media Library centric interface, down. There’s nothing that any of these third parties can add to it and now seem awkward.

What’s more, I FUCKING HATE ITUNES’ INTERFACE!!!! And I’m not the only one!

It’s like no matter where you turn there’s no alternative. You cannot escape Apple’s tyranny.

Try finding a classic winamp-like on Mac OS X. Even if you ask about alternative media players, all the Apple freaks are just like “Durr… y u no liek iTunes?” “Just use iTunes!” Fuck you! I don’t want my hand held through the process of organizing my Media Library. I’ve been keeping my own house clean, data-wise, since Windows 3.1. I don’t need the company telling me how to do things!

Enumeration:

• iTunes forces you to use a media library rather than organize your own stuff
• iTunes is large, takes a rather long time to launch
• iTunes either takes up a large amount of screen real estate or is reduced to a nearly non-functional mini player.
• iTunes doesn’t have a good way to create a playlist “On the Go”, as it were; you are expected to have all your playlists laid out beforehand
• iTunes is not customizable. Everyone is expected to use it one way and alternatives are not considered (This is a MAJOR problem with all of apples i-Apps). Customizations mostly take the form of hacks by third parties which may be broken with the next release.
• I find the transition from one desktop metaphor (the desktop/Finder) to another metaphor (the music appliance) quite jarring. I just want a relatively simple, but not too simple (QuickTime is an OK video player, but it’s lack of playlist support means I won’t use it for audio), player I can drag and drop my files onto. Maybe even one with an OPTIONAL media library, for when I do want to just do a type-in search.
• When you double click an mp3 or other media file you’ve downloaded in the finder, and have iTunes set as your default player, iTunes adds it to your media library, regardless of whether you’re just going to delete it in ten minutes or not. This tends to leave extra “dead” entries in my library that I have to delete manually.
• Monolithic media libraries piss me off. I once was an iTunes fanatic, I spent a good portion of my time, just trying to get my music the way I wanted it… I was using special search tags so that I could organize them dynamically by Genre, or even just tags that I myself made up. I liked being able to sort my music by “Date Added” so I could know what I was listening to, say, this month last year. It was… Well, I won’t say great, but it was interesting. Then, when it came time to transfer to a new computer, I foolishly thought that just importing the iTunes XML file into iTunes on my new computer would import everything else… Well, it didn’t work out. The XML file was somehow corrupt, and I spent a good amount of time trying to track down the reason why. (Unicode strings in M3U tags piss it off, apparently) Well, after I was done with that, I found out that it didn’t import all the metadata; Date added, and a couple other custom tags were nowhere to be found. Just pissed me off.
• Lastly, I don’t like how Apple likes to shove things down our throats just because we decided to buy an Apple computer. That it crushes (or crushed) the competition is one of the reasons I hate it. Reading the history of Audion, as written by it’s authors, it seems like all Mr. Jobs had to do was say a couple of harsh words to them and they just got out of the business.

2008.03.31.Dream.mid

I dislike this. It sounds so cheesy here, and the baseline makes it so repetitive. To the list of grievances I’ll add that I have no idea how to stretch a simple melody into a song.

It was I think influenced by The Brilliant Green’s Flowers, and the falling baseline by the Mario 2 Overworld theme, and through it Scott Joplin’s The Entertainer.

That doesn’t mean it doesn’t suck. God I hate this.

My next midi will be something kickass. It will be or else I won’t post it.

I hate computers, and I’m going to start scaling back my reliance on them. I am sick of spending fucking days trying to figure out why my memory stopped working. I am sick of the ghosts in the machine, having to fight with the beginnings of artificial consciousness to get them to fucking spit out my disks like I’d asked them to. I am sick of all the BS that they bring, and let me tell you, it’s nothing but.

Wonderful machines. Machines that fail in the absolute most catastrophic way possible.

Why was so much of my youth spent in front of them? I feel kind of cheated.

scuebtikigt

Today at around 5 o’clock, the clouds blocked out the sun, making everything a dark blue tinge. They weren’t dense or organized enough to make a concerted effort of it, so some bright orange light filtered through, reflected from their illuminated surfaces. It wasn’t one of those asinine red and purple sunsets you see in travel brochures, but it was cool.

The breeze was cold, the remains of winter not quite releasing their grasp on the world, but not frigid, somewhere between air conditioning and a cold shower. Swarms of birds, starlings I think, more than I’ve ever seen, flew around in synchrony like they were being blown around by it, before alighting back down, finding a perch in the twigs of a big de-leafed tree. They were loud like you wouldn’t believe; it seemed like the sound was being piped in through a speaker system somewhere, the calls were so unintelligible from the noise. I got to walk right under them.

The water was so clear. The light hit it at that rare angle where it doesn’t just scatter and turn ugly green. The indeterminate sky reflected on it, the surface disrupted by a wind bringing in some prickly rain from what was probably north but I don’t have any sense of direction anyway so it’s not important.

It was one of those rare moments, not at all stifling or worthless like most of the shit that I go through, like something washed up in a turbulent surf that will be washed away and you’ll never see anything like it again if you don’t recognize it immediately and grab hold as tight as you can.

And I couldn’t because I lost something. Something stupid and pointless but something from the waking world.