if you are looking for some stuff to read on your holiday downtime, check out my shared google reader items. the most recent stuff is posted last because i just went down my starred list and tagged stuff so some posts may be old news. anyway, i thought that since i haven’t been posting much, the least i can do for now is share some what i am reading on the internets – lots of good content in there for those interested.
oh yeah, and i am experimenting with twitter.
this past weekend, des and i went to cypress bayou casino with danielle and justin. i resisted and reviled at the idea from the start, but once we agreed to not spend more than $20, i could live with it and liken it to a night at the movies. having never been inside a casino, i could use this experience to foil any attempts at a future casino trip.
From the moment i walked in, it became obvious that modern casino gambling is basically an adult arcade. rows and rows of machines, where people are basking in flourescence and are bombarded by atari-style sine wave monotonic sound effects. hundreds of machines being activated at random creates a sound collage of momentary suspense. 95% of the patrons are over the age of 40, and a significant minority of those are handicapped in some form. Casts, prosthetics, crutches, and wheelchairs… it’s almost as if all of these individuals have come to realize a strange absence of good fortune within their personal lives, and they come here as a last resort to tap into their unusued, long lost repository of luck.
it’s also fascinating to watch how many septegenerians are blowing their retirement savings in front of a slot machine. They are pushing buttons for hours, who knows whether they are even paying attention to the games. i know it was hard for me to pay attention. i couldn’t care less for slot machines. they are absurdly mind-numbing by design, so that you’ll keep hitting that “play” button until your credits are gone. i could deal with video poker pretty well… the odds of winning are much higher, so i played for a long time and even doubled my dollars. we only ended up losing $15 at the end of the night.
i learned about roulette, too. Justin, whose idea it was to come to the casino, has a very solid and realistic grasp on gambling. When he was telling me about the games, he would emphasize every dollar, every bet as it disappears. “There, he just lost 30 dollars. just like that. one spin. That’s like lunch for a week.” Despite this perspective, somehow he manages to come to a casino several times a year.
Why do indian reservations always have these adult arcades? Because, it’s the most lucrative money-maker on the planet. People walk in with pockets full of cash and just feed it into your machines, watching the lights blink and the sounds doodle away, and then walk out with nothing but a slight alcohol buzz. Nice. If my country was taken over and then my people disgraced by a bunch of supremacist snobs, i’d leech their sacred paychecks off of them through their own vices too.
On the plus side, the food offerings had a surprisingly good selection and truly modest pricing. No need to jack up the prices. Also, the free beers/drinks and delivery service make the night slightly better than bearable.
you know… garageband may be more of a toy than a tool, but boy, do i love playing. i just did this tonight:
Robot Heart
Imagine metal skin, that’s always ice-cold to the touch, incapable of pleasure or pain. infrared eyes, whose blackness is deep enough to absorb your soul, tempting you to look closer, exposing your own tender brains. motor-actuated arms and legs, moving smoothly but unnaturally, that sound like electricity. Programmed with the most sophisticated artificial intelligence ever written. Fabricated by those with fleshy hands and a bleeding heart, in the rough likeness of its creators. But its creators are long dead… and besides creating these machines, dying is the only thing that humanity has seemed do correctly, down to the last human being. The earth is populated by automatons. Collecting data, interacting, recharging, repairing… for thousands of years.
What if this device, through the course of its operation, attempts to cross the boundary between logic and emotion? The robot has no model or archetype to follow in memory. But it manages to recreate human compassion, taking place within circuitry and silicon. Before long, the subroutine has grown into a complex program, and is lodged into core memory. For this robot, all the regular programming is put on hold, while it struggles to manifest the feelings of pain and sorrow without the convenience of tear ducts. The desolation is staggering, unlike any physical condition ever experienced. Its batteries run lower, and lower, until there is barely a trickle current of power left. Ignoring the warning messages and self-diagnostics, the robot begins to systematically disassemble itself, seeing little use for things such as ambient temperature sensors when it begins to actually feel the pain of loneliness.
Suddenly, the other robots start to detect this change and identify it as malfunction. The others surround the one to restrain its errant actions. The algorithms for repair-and-replace are very straightforward. Erasure of main memory banks, upload original software. The robot with the silicon heart knows what is going on, but it has no desire to stop. A separate robot begins the data link to the Robot-Heart for memory erasure. Just before completing the command, the new robot examines the Emotion code that currently resides in the malfunctioning robot. Like a hard reboot, the new robot immediately is stunned. It reverses the erasure command and instead copies the Emotion program into itself. The two Robot-Hearts, still in data link, attain complete self-awareness for an entire second, an eternity of meaning and truth.
A third robot sees that this “virus” has spread, and destroys both machines.
And that’s the story about the robot-heart (4.6MB mp3). for optimum enjoyment of this song, you must dance like a robot for the first 40 seconds of this song.
i just gave you a plotline… go write the novel! (ok, so maybe there was a movie called “Short Circuit” and it’s basically the same thing, but still, it’s a cool song huh!)
Today I found myself reading through my e-mail archive during an idle moment at work. During this electronic stroll down memory lane, I caught myself in a moment of major self-realization: my current life is so drastically different from my life during college that, without the help of my electronic memories, I don’t think I would be able to recall how things were even half a year ago.
Reading old letters gives you a sense of the ebb and flow of life – what was I concerned with six months ago? Was it important enough to ask a close friend about? When was the last time I talked to so-and-so (and what did we talk about)?
Six months ago I saw different people, had a different schedule, drove different places, watched different t.v. shows – nearly everything in my life has changed, except for where I live and even that is about to change to before this year is up.
All this change, it’s natural and normal, but sometimes it is hard to maintain perspective.
Over the past few months, dealing with being sick, with car accidents and insurance companies, and talking about hospitals and funerals and nine-to-fives, it’s no small wonder that I’ve felt so disoriented – trying to adapt to the new, I had completely forgotten about the old.
