never eat sleep

listening to "Sweet Jane" with the lights on at 5 am. haven't slept all night and a strange...ultrasobriety (??) i guess you could call it that...is now coming over me.

Getting my LCD tan, as Dave said. He's working on his album finally, and to great avail; apparently he and Matt McKie, another face from High School, are recording some awesome work. I trust his assurances that it will deviate far from the cliche, mellow instrumentals we've come to expect from...post-rock (i use the term with hesitation) music (again, hesitation). He's said some interesting things about style; makes me wish it were already released =P.

http://photos1.blogger.com/x/blogger/4500/2100/1600/52455/nervousstates3.jpg might as well point you to the art i'm looking at now. It has that feeling of flatness and chaotic superposition typical of generative art, but with quite a bit more depth. Created by a neural network, too, which rather surprises me. Resolution must've been damn good, because they usually aren't so sharp (I don't think). I wonder how much manual editing and postprocessing was used...hmm. In any event, I'm convinced of two things; first, that my secret admiration of...is it lou reed or john cale? is about 60% justified. And second, looking back at Jon McCabe's neural nets piece, my desire for symmetry and unification seems to be an OCD thing more than anything. You can see it in my physics, and other places...everything has to be in order, and I'm very reserved about generating new concepts that don't fit in with the entire spectrum of things. Surprisingly then this is nowhere to be found in my poetry or art...though art isn't a particularly good gauge of my abilities, since i'm not particularly talented with it. It's just one of those situations where the product adapts to good taste.

Poetry though...odd exception. Maybe it's why that seems almost a remedy for the OCD...maybe it's also related to the similar characteristic of my musical tastes. In any event, you look at my free verse and you'll see...well free verse pretty much says it.

But don't get me wrong, I mean, there /are/ still rules: the number 1 being, "don't suck." I select such vague, commonplace diction because it could mean so many things you wouldn't thing: don't try to act like a work of prose, drawing your audience's attention into the progression of ideas. the reader should decide how much he wants to listen...which is why poetry is so effective and why it doesn't sell. Don't suck/siphon your emotions and discard them onto the page. Don't do a lackluster job of editing. Don't be inefficient; rearrange and reduce, don't rewrite or repeat. Don't try to suck out a specific reaction; you don't know how your reader feels about everything you're saying, respect that. And don't go anywhere near an MFA program in writing, because those /suck/ in every sense of the word...

...enough puns. Let's talk about JEEEESUS. Specifically, why I left the Church today (again). I distrust the principle of succession and interpretation. Plenty of scholars have contributed to other fields without needing any kind of mandate from God; why should faith, which is and out to be rational in its approach, be any different? And what's the point of clarifying doctrine for people who need more than doctrine? They need love! They need knowledge and strong intuition of the positive and knowable virtue from which good doctrine always emerges. Who is responsible for giving them that? Isn't that /everyone/'s heavenly vocation? And sure, sacraments can claim a powerful basis in existing tradition. But ours is not a common-law religion; besides, since when was tradition intended to actually replicate real processes like forgiveness and communion with the holy spirit, whose occurrence is immutable and all-powerful, in the form of memorized ritual? That's not how tradition works; that's how overprotective paranoia works. We have to eat the bread, because the bread keeps us safe. God's hiding in the bread.

Anyway, yeah I suppose I'll have to sleep eventually, and now's no worse time than any other. In the future, that is. I'll be damned if grooveshark hasn't played the same two songs all last hour though.

Peace and Love,

Kevin

BLACK MESA FEVER

So the big bombshell of last Christmas-ish (I know, old news, but it's becoming more relevant as we speak): "Raminator", "RabidMonkey", and the others are hard at work finishing Black Mesa for a 2009 release date; which, for those of you who don't know, is a mod recreating half-life 1 on the orange box engine, and it is PURE AWESOME.

Well, 2009's almost up, and already the Ichysaurs desire flesh (those things creep me out literally to no end); meanwhile, some forumgoers introduced me to the machinima creator Ross Scott, whose animations, namely "Freeman's Mind" and (especially) "Civil Protection", are top-notch. Watch them; that's an order, Dave!

In other news, in keeping with my new vision for CEREBRA, I'm developing some MMOG engine code to be used alongside OGRE 3D---hopefully launching well before summer 2010. Things are moving along. Wish me well!

Song of the day: Speed Increased to Scaffold ----SOLEFALD