Wage servants sit glued to the glowing
Of the monitors, manipulating
Electrons of Industry.

Inside, spleen gives way to toxins
Untouched by liver, imbibed
After terms of indenture.

In deeper, indivisible selves wither,
Except for the few that forge fearsomeness there.

I fritter away a lot of time. This bothers. I have a stack or two of notecards I ostensibly use to keep track of what I should be doing in my sparer time. It’s been a week since I used them. I instead allow urgent or interesting tasks to fill my time. I don’t exert my will over this time like I ought.

I don’t wonder that GTD is so popular online. It really is the ultimate self-help cottage industry. Promises of satisfaction for engaging in bite-sized tasks with Pavlovian-addicting rewards (productivity!) and a requirement for some physical products (book, labler, etc.) add up to a healthy economic niche.

I spent 45 minutes watching foxtrot and tango videos on youtube yesterday. This wasn’t nearly as mch fun as the ballroom dance classes I recently completed.

I have, in my stack of notecards, a couple tasks that cannot be broken down into any further smaller, more manageable chunks. They start with words like “Research” and “Draft”. I usually just work on the ones starting with “call”, “reply”, and “check” instead.

If I had an accurate brand, my logo would be of a slowly-leaking tire, doing most things right, but heading for reinflation or replacement.

I fear the most worthwhile thing I’ve been doing in my spare time is rereading Jane Eyre.

In the realm of Whimsy everything’s verdant:
Centaurs at leisure braid each other’s hair.
Ogres belch as they work on their cross-stitch.
Weeping willow branches sparkle like wind-chimes.
Knights take care not to trample on butterflies,
Lest the King be unable to brew his tea.
Unsurprisingly, mimes have nothing to say.

Velveteen unicorns eat day-glo batteries,
Drink carbonated rainbows.
On Thursdays the King distributes gold stars
To everyone who has achieved.

A while back I switched from delicious to bibsonomy to handle all my social bookmarking needs. I was all taken in by the RDF backing. I decided recently to switch back, since it didn’t have the user base and general ecosystem, it’s geared toward more academic pursuits, and RDF isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Here’s a tarball of the scripts I used to move the bookmarks back into delicious:

Download: bib2del

Caveats:

1. bibsonomy handles unicode characters, delicious doesn’t. I opted to delete/edit the few bibsonomy bookmarks that were giving me those errors, but it will error out when you pass delicious a title with a smart apostrophe, smart quotes, em-dash, or other non-ascii character.
2. It is a dumb script. It will take all your bibsonomy bookmarks and add them one by one, with a 1.1 second delay in between to keep delicious happy. If, for some reason, you pass delicious a unicode character and it errors out, it will attempt to readd all the bookmarks you successfully added the last go round.
3. You will need to ask bibsonomy nicely for a developer’s api key. delicious only needs username and password.

I could have written something that stored the bibsonomy bookmarks locally, cleaned up the unicode, and then pushed everything to delicious, but this does 99% of what I wanted it to do.

I’d like to give a shout-out to two fabulous webservices that allow RESTful api access to the information they store on my behalf, and to those brave souls who wrote python bindings to those apis.

P.S. Not only does delicious choke on unicode, but it stores tags as space- delimited strings. Strings! Boggles the mind, it does.

Vile split of self from same,
Extinguishing of vital flame;
Halfway there is merely maim.

In factories and bathroom stalls,
Farmer’s fields and city halls,
This interloper all men calls.

I went and saw the Dark Knight again. This time I went with my parents. My mom is a pretty devout woman with a decent artistic sensibility. Afterward she was still trying to process the experience, and it was good to get her take on things.

One thing she said that struck me: “Everyone says it’s lots darker than Batman Begins. I hate that. It’s not dark, it’s sadistic.”

In one sense, she’s right. It is sadistic. But the sense in which she’s right is incomplete. The Joker is sadistic, not the film. He is a twisted sadist whose mere presence should have given the film an R rating. But the film doesn’t glorify that evil, it exposes it. It presents a glimmer of hope and a dash of martyrdom in the face of such evil.

And what evil it is. The Joker embodies depravity detached from sanity and given free reign to deconstruct everything and everyone around him. And by deconstruct, I mean either blow up or bring to despair.

My mom had another point: “Won’t portraying that evil push some people over the edge?” Perhaps, but it is their choice to follow the siren song of evil. The film is structured in such a way to make it clear that there are many and profound negative consequences for allowing yourself to embrace that evil. Two-face dies, spiritually in his rampage and then actually. Batman, by way of contrast, has long ago learned to live with his grief and not succumb to the temptations of despair. The contrast clearly highlights that the evil is not to be trusted or embraced. Good clearly triumphs, to the extent that it can given the horrific, 9-11 scale circumstances.

I’m considering catching a third screening, partly to let it sink in one more time, and partly to see it in IMAX. And in choosing whether to, I do need to take some of my mother’s concerns into account. Art does affect us, powerfully, deeply, and there is a legitimate risk of responding improperly to art. And such art should play only a minimal role in our lives. One of my criticisms of the character of Father Ruiz-Sanchez in A Case of Conscience is that he didn’t read scripture or the divine office nearly as much as he read Finnegan’s Wake. Art was taking up an unhealthy chunk of his life, likely because he gave himself over to some aspects of the work that he responded wrongly to. But the work as a whole needs to be considered, not just the villain. And you can’t allow a work of art to push you over the edge.

Bits byte the address space
All round the spinning plate,
In the Mathematic place;

Objects soon instantiate;
Network packets rush to take;
Threads start to bifurcate;

Dot/configure and and make;
Computation filled with grace.
Unto us, Von Neumann spake.

There is something about data that recommends itself. The more data you have the more you ostensibly know about the subject; the more you know the better basis you have for your decisions; the better foundation for your decisions the higher the odds your decisions are the right ones. Everyone likes to make the right decisions. Few things are as truly satisfying.

That said, most data are crap. If they’re not inaccurate then they draw your focus to teh wrong thing. Instead of basing your decisions on what it is you’re actually doing, you’re basing them on a reading of the effects they had the last time you did them.

The above is exemplified in web statistics. Say, for example, that you start blogging. You’re shouting into the void on a regular basis, and then BAM! someone links to one of your pieces, and you watch your stats shoot up. The tempting thing to do is write a similar piece on the same topic. AND YOU WOULD BE WRONG.

What worked the first time? Writing something you wanted to write for the sake of writing it. The second time, your ulterior, utilitarian motives will work against you.

I was spurred to write this by this tweet, with which I completely agree. On the one hand, blogging is a conversation. On the other, it is shouting into the void. There are no guarantees that anyone will click your way, or read what you’ve written once they get there. And if that’s your focus, well, maybe you’ll get the links, but you’ll have sold out. I’m not condemning selling out, it has its time and place, but there is a reason people sneer when they say “he sold out”.

I’m putting my money where my mouth is: goodbye Google Analytics. Goodbye data. If you need me, email works best.

I could really go for a smoke. I’m a non-smoker. The most I ever smoked was three times in one kinda stressful week in college. And I try to buy the good stuff when I do. No Camels for me.

If I ever want a smoke, it’s because I’ve an itch that needs scratching, and a cigarette seems like the shortest path to itch relief. It never is though. There’s a deeper underlying reason why I have dry skin. The itching won’t abate until I eat my vitamins, or eat animal fats, or stop eating melons, or get new genes. The rest is vapid style.

There’s so much style to smoking. Nowadays it happens outside. Always with the lighting it, holding it in your fingers, sucking on it, occasionally looking at it. It’s the perfect excuse to take a break, because who would deny an itching man his scratch? And it can’t be done indoors. So it becomes a paradigm shift. An opportunity for a moment. With friends, huddled against the cold and the itch. Or alone with the itch.

There’s that kind of moment, and then there’s mortal peril. That innocent girl, tied against the tracks, kicking her petticoat. The mustachioed man behind the bushes, twirling his handlebar with growing glee as his dastardly design is about to bear fruit. And our clean, upright protagonist, whose white teeth shine brightly in his favor as he strains against inconceivable odds to ride his worthy steed to the rails in time to throw the switch, sending the train on a different path, the one without a buxom beauty. The thrall of potential defeat in the moments before improbable success.

Catharsis. You can relax now.

In those moments, either smoking or rescuing a blossom of virginity from the jaws of death, in these moments are birthed a potential writer.

There is no such thing as a Greek muse, but there is such a thing as a moment. Live through enough successive ones with a tolerably observant eye, and one will feel, think, experience. And that will either need to be processed or dismissed.

Writing about it can scratch that itch. But the root cause will be here until judgment day.

Allen Ginsberg sang the slow poetry of the technological age before its time. He took the time to wallow in the horrors of the banal that flit by us as fast as we can click thru. With Whitman as his muse, he turned our eyes from nature to our fractured nature, and held our gaze.

I don’t even especially like Ginsberg’s poetry. Give me Hopkins any day. But the torrent of measured fitfulness poured out as a fruitless libation, sterile poetry stank with death, demise, burrowing in little rat holes for faint hope; well there’s more there there than the internet, right? A goodly bit of the tubes piping bare flesh into bare hands and barren hearts, the rest amalgams of news, quizzes, pokes, wanton squealing over shiny things, and poor people mortgaging themselves on the next turn-key SEO keyword whitepaper build an audience dropship four hour solution (run on index cards, of all things). Well of course Ginsberg’s deadbeat doped out strung hipster buds and their very real suffering has more life than that. Life takes time. Poetry takes time. The tubes steal attention, the grist of living. Time bandits. Attention pirates. Design masquerading as art. The shocking parading as feeling. This pause pretending to be an ending.