Below are the 11 most recent journal entries recorded in the sympathetic devil's LiveJournal:

Tuesday, October 19th, 2004
8:18 pm	poetry meme I am a little late to the poetry party. been a busy day. anyway, post a poem in your LJ after you've read this one... The Raven by Samuel Taylor Coleridge A Christmas tale, told by a school-boy to his little brothers and sisters Underneath an old oak tree There was of swine a huge company, That grunted as they crunched the mast: For that was ripe, and fell full fast. Then they trotted away, for the wind grew high: One acorn they left, and no more might you spy. Next came a Raven, that liked not such folly: He belonged, they did say, to the witch Melancholy! Blacker was he than blackest jet, Flew low in the rain, and his feathers not wet. He picked up the acorn and buried it straight By the side of a river both deep and great. Where then did the Raven go? He went high and low, Over hill, over dale, did the black Raven go. Many Autumns, many Springs Travelled he with wandering wings: Many Summers, Many Winters — I can't tell half his adventures. At length he came back, and with him a She, And the Acorn was grown to a tall oak tree. They built them a nest in the topmost bough, And young one they had, and were happy enow. But soon came a Woodman in leathern guise, His brow, like a pent-house, hung over his eyes. He'd an axe in his hand, not a word he spoke, But with many a hem! and a sturdy stroke, At length he brought down the poor Raven's own oak. His young ones were killed; for they could not depart, And their mother did die of a broken heart. The boughs from the trunk the Woodman did sever; And they floated it down on the course of the river. They sawed it in planks, and its bark did they strip, And with this tree and others they made a good ship. The ship, it was launched; but in sight of the land Such storm there did rise as no ship could withstand. It bulged on a rock, and the waves rush'd in fast: Round and round flew the raven, and cawed to the blast. He heard a last shriek of the perishing souls — See! see! o'er the topmast the mad water rolls! Right glad was the Raven, and off he went fleet, And Death riding home on a cloud he did meet, And he thank'd him again and again for this treat: They had taken his all, and REVENGE IT WAS SWEET! it doesn't have the sweeping epic-ness of "Rime of the Ancient Mariner" (which is too long to post, anyway) and it lacks the mind-blowing concinnity of "Kublai Khan" (which I have already quoted in this journal), but I like it quite a bit, all the same. what is extra SPECIALLY neat is that I first read that poem in the same book where I learned the meaning of "concinnity" -- that book being Neal Stephenson's Diamond Age. see, it is these weird little serendipitous collisions of knowledge that help me keep my childlike sense of wonder about the world. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, August 24th, 2004
1:14 am	fair warning all future posts in this journal are going to be friends-only, and I am going to slowly worm my way back through the archives and friends-lock them all. a few other people have started doing this, and in my current state of mind, I think this is the only logical action. can't be too cautious. yeah, feeling jumpy and paranoid. I'm not going to make some kind of offer for people to post here if they want to be Friended... because, if you have been reading this shit for any length of time and haven't announced yourself, well, that's not very Friendly at all. how come this "little gent" set of mood icons has no expressions for paranoid or overwhelmed? Current Music: the pings and knocks of bugfuckery (Comment on this)
Tuesday, April 27th, 2004
10:56 am	worthy of commemoration on this day in 1521, my people killed Magellan. a chieftain who didn't like the colonization plan took it upon himself to lay the explorer's brains out on rock. that chieftain was named Lapu-Lapu, and there is a drink named after him at a tiki bar half a mile from my mom's house in LA (coincidentally, the only non-Korean bar I know of in LA that disregards the smoking ban). so... I post in honor of Lapu-Lapu, and other Filipinos who wouldn't take shit. Current Mood: chipper Current Music: iio, At the End (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Wednesday, April 21st, 2004
1:06 pm	Neal Stephenson interview Salon has an interview with Neal Stephenson. however disappointed I may be with the new trilogy (so far), I figure I'll always be interested in his work because I find his ideas and the way he talks, the things he says, to be pretty compelling. especially when he talks about the craft of writing. a sample: One of things you like to do on the side is dabble in programming. Do you see similarities between writing code and writing fiction? I think there are common threads between writing and programming. That's a really easy statement for people to misunderstand and twist around so I'm a little leery of making it. All I'm saying is that the thing you're making -- the novel or the computer program -- has got a very complicated and finely wrought hierarchical structure to it. The structure has to work right or the whole thing fails. But the only way you can work on it is by hitting one character at a time. You're building this thing one character at a time while having to maintain the whole structure in your head. That description applies equally well to programming and novel writing even though they're very different activities. I agree that comparing the two could raise hackles in some quarters. People like to believe that one activity is entirely aesthetic and emotional and the other is entirely rational. That's a misconception. I justify say that by referring to the work of Antonio Damasio, who's a friend of mine. He's written a few books about the brain, and the one that's most relevant to this discussion is "Descartes' Error." The error he's complaining about is the idea that reason and emotion are different things. He tells a story about a patient who suffered a very specific localized kind of brain damage that was blocking a certain kind of interaction between how he thought and how he felt. In certain situations, this guy was better than other people at certain things. When driving on ice he didn't panic and he knew all the rules, how to turn the steering wheel and keep his car under control, and he was able to drive when other people were skidding off the road. But if you asked him to schedule an appointment and gave him two dates to choose between, this guy could sit there for an hour, dithering over this simple choice. Every possible contingency or scenario that could play out would flash up in his head, and he didn't know how to choose between them. Damasio is arguing that one of the innate faculties of our brain is that we can envision a wide range of possible scenarios and then sort through them very quickly not by logic but through a kind of process of the emotions. Emotions associated with a particular scenario cause us to prune off whole sets of options. He claims that chess masters work that way. Part of the time it's this very logical, rational thing, but part of the time it's "This gives me the willies. I'm not going there." Damasio quotes in this book scientists like Einstein who quite explicitly say that their process of shifting through ideas and deciding where to go with their research has a very strong emotional component to it. I don't buy the idea of a split between a rational and an emotional mind. I suspect that idea is a lot more common among nonscientists. I think there's a whole complex of factors behind scientists being pegged as emotionally remote or out of touch with their feelings. other noteworthy informational bits from the interview: - he wrote the Baroque Cycle entirely by hand, with a fountain pen. ye gods. - he revealed some autobiographical details which justify my suspicion that he had quite a bit in common with Randy Waterhouse from "Cryptonomicon" and with Lord Finkle-McGraw from "The Diamond Age". - "The Big U" was actually the third novel he wrote. the first was "sort of fantasy" and the second, apparently, was a consciously un-Tolkien epic fantasy. wow. I would love to get my hands on the second one... Current Mood: relaxed Current Music: Massive Attack v. Mad Professor (7 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, March 29th, 2004
7:54 am	songs still being sung happy 45th birthday, Perry Farrell... thanks for the great tunes... now make more prz. erotic Jesus lays with his Marys loves his Marys bits of puzzle fitting each other all now with wings! "oh my Marys! never wonder... night is shelter from nudity's shiver..." all now with wings... -- Three Days Current Mood: awake (Comment on this)
Tuesday, March 9th, 2004
4:39 pm	culture update it is our considered opinion that it is safe to start making "all your base are belong to us" jokes again, as it can now be considered retro. that is all. Current Music: Jane's, Kettle Whistle (5 Comments |Comment on this)
Wednesday, July 9th, 2003
3:13 pm	omg this is awesome http://www.ntv.co.jp/channel/asx/hkzkt10.asx Matrix ping pong! hilariously done. you MUST watch this. Current Mood: impressed (Comment on this)
Friday, May 9th, 2003
9:58 am	I just couldn't resist these quizzes either... You are the Low-Fidelity All-Star. You were born with your cool, and it's totally natural. You run the gamut from Hipster Supreme (only they can ingest as much coffee as you) to the geeky hipster (Mario Kart, anyone?). What Kind of Hipster Are You? brought to you by Quizilla You're Mr. Orange! Which Reservoir Dog Are You? brought to you by Quizilla Current Mood: anxious (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 3rd, 2003
11:38 am	a small, belated tribute "I don't think there's any point in being Irish if you don't know the world is going to break your heart eventually." -- the late Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, after the assassination of JFK Current Music: Perry Farrell, Song Yet to Be Sung (Comment on this)
Thursday, March 6th, 2003
12:46 pm	work quote of the day "no, our AIs are smarter than you. at least they can be taught to love!" "that's right, sucka, I've only got a hate table!" -- engineer and designer wub everybody should get to spend a little time working with sarcastic geeks. Current Mood: amused (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, August 2nd, 2002
3:08 pm	if you need to work out some aggression... comic mischief go to that site, download the program. it's a simulator that allows you to push a little polygon man off the top of a set of stairs over and over. you get to pick where on his body you want to push, at what angle, and how hard. then watch him fall down the stairs, each body part turning red as it impacts, and then it calculates how much damage you did to each part, and your total. you can even change the camera angle. I recommend the top-of-the-stairs view. I've been playing for about an hour now. endlessly addictive. just imagine it's someone you hate... Current Mood: geeky Current Music: my motivational hip-hop medley (1 Comment |Comment on this)