Month: January 2024

When You Have Bad Cookies.

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An unauthorized image of within an imaginary place where imaginary elves in uniform make imaginary cookies that are better than Chips Ahoy. It does not require that much imagination.

This post inspired by a whimsical Facebook update I did.

It crumbled as I bit it, as dry as a cow patty left in the sun too long, though I’d wager it might taste better based on scent.

There are no shortcuts to good cookies.

These were allegedly new cookies from a local store that has such a high turnover that they are frequently out of stock. They had some today, and I thought, “why not?”

Famous words of everyone who has learned something of worth, be it something bad or good.

Chips Ahoy cookies nowadays suck.

This is likely because the elves started chasing the bottom line for their shareholders, as well as being mortgaged property they couldn’t afford by selling cookies, and around 2008 this caught up with them so the cookies paid, the shareholders weren’t as displeased, and the chief consumer of their product didn’t give a shit what they put in their mouths as long as it tasted tangentially like chocolate and flour.

The girl scouts too, had their role in this, pedaling their wares with cute smiles and neat green outfits. They appropriated those things from elvish cookie culture, but no one wants to sue the girl scouts. What’s more, in the advertising the misogynistic system of cookie making in Elvish culture is apparent, so no one so much as blinked when this happened. In fact, it created a revolution of female elves, taking over the cookie making but unable to provide quality because they haven’t quite broken into management yet.

Maybe soon.

Well, that’s fiction, but their cookies suck things that are not sucked in polite company. It may even be questionable in impolite company.

What you can do, if you find these at home or have made the mistake of purchasing them and need some sort of solution, is make the best of them by adding peanut butter to the flat ends and making crumbly sandwiches.

Be warned, there is not enough peanut butter available to single consumers to avoid these being crumbly disasters, so it might be wise to eat over the kitchen sink.

In future, buy the cookie dough if you don’t trust yourself with a recipe.

The Danger of Pedestals.

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I was involved in quite a few discussions related to Steve Jobs somewhere on the Internet, and people were once again waxing poetic about him in another post.

He didn’t actually create the technology, but he drove people who did. He was also not known to be a nice person at times, though all of that is anecdotal. I didn’t know the guy. Some people say he was nice. Mostly, though, they talk about how he pushed things forward.

He did. To think he alone could have done it, though, seems a bit more of a deification than much else.

In a world absent of Steve Jobs, do people really think we’d still be using scientific calculators? No. Someone else would have used the stuff from Xerox PARC, very likely, or reinvented it. Someone else would likely have pushed technology usability forward. In fact, the world is filled with technology that Steve Jobs had nothing to do with.

Yet some people study Steve Jobs and think emulating him is a good thing. That, by itself, is not bad – certainly, he had an eye for integrating things and pushing people, and he was effective at the time he was in. Would he be able to do the same now? Maybe. Maybe not.

In the grand scheme of things, he was a person who did contribute to the PC Revolution, and he did push the mobile revolution forward. Apple still charges way too much for what they sell (my opinion), and they are one of the longest standing vendor lock-in companies out there all the way down to the charging cables.

I’m not going to smear him. We’re all human. The point is that when looking at what he accomplished, some people use some of his less pleasant behaviors as excuses for their own when he was Steve Jobs and they are… not. In a world swimming in personality traits, tests, and a surge of advice on dealing with narcissists for some reason, emulating other people should be about taking their best qualities.

So often I hear things like, “Well so and so did it!”. Very good. You’re not original, and you can’t improve on that which you place on too high of a pedestal.

Do something original. Be better. That’s what Steve Jobs did, as far as I can tell.

Bouncy Daydreams.

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I was thinking about my present writing project and somehow I ended up thinking about the universe doing something different this morning.

At this point, it seems like the results of the Big Bang are accelerating outward. This is mind-boggling to people because we are creatures of finite thoughts, so an idea of never-ending space where the entire universe is accelerating from a single focal point, the Big Bang, seems like a lot.

So I started wondering, “What if the initial Big Bang was just one force out there, and as things go further from the center of the Big Bang, other forces pull back toward that center?” The idea is sort of like a car in that if you hit the gas, it accelerates, and if you hit the brakes, it decelerates. There’s a lot of stuff we don’t know, and I was just having fun with an idea for the book.

The whole idea of the universe reverting every few billion years to create a new Big Bang is interesting.

As it happens, the idea of the Big Bounce is not new, and I will not be accepting a Nobel Prize for Physics this year. There’s no need to get a confirmation from Neil de Grasse Tyson, it’s a known theory.

It’s all just as well. I never planned for a Nobel Prize. I have nowhere to put it, so not getting one would just create a new problem for me. But it is fun to think that just by having some coffee and tuning the world out I could come up with an idea way outside of my experience based on only what I have read and gestated on for half a century.

There is still space to dream in the world. You just find yourself in someone else’s campsite fairly often.

Leave snacks out!

The NPC Meme Taught Me Alphabet History.

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DALL-E apparently sucks at rendering the alphabet, but not that many people may notice. This has potential as a NPC Litmus test.

I caught a reel on Facebook this morning that one guy explaining the NPC Meme to another – as it happens, kind of poorly.

He said that some people respond to cliche things in cliche ways, which is kind of on the right track. The NPC meme is really about people that don’t think for themselves and simply regurgitate someone else incessantly.

I generally call them idiots, but sooner or later a group of idiots are going to say that it’s a pejorative way of saying ‘NPC’ and I’ll get canceled. That would be funny.

Still, I figured this ‘say cliche things in cliche ways’ might be a good way of describing it and put it to the test. An example of this is…

The Alphabet.

In every language I have been around, which isn’t that many, there’s a way of saying the alphabet. In English, we all seem to have that silly song about having sung our ABCs and wanting someone to sing with us. It is cliche, it is done in a cliche way – but it also happens to be right.

We forget that when humanity gets things right, we tend to be pretty standard about how we’re right. This is likely because we don’t often get things right and just right enough to find out it’s wrong later. Yet when things are right, we don’t mind the rote memorization because at least they have a view of reality where we agree with them. This was fun to think about because sometimes when people use the ‘NPC Meme’, it may be that the other person is right like many others.

If I say 1+1 = 2, and everyone else says it, it may just be because we’re right.

So I wondered why in the first place we have that silly little song. It’s certainly easy to listen to a child and correct, and we’ve sorted things in alphabetical order for some time – but do we say the alphabet the way we do to help us later with alphabetical order stuff, or did it come later?

Deep Diving The Order.

This got me researching, which got me to the Wikipedia page on the Alphabetic Order. When Wikipedia has a page on something I feel late; I had no idea that this was a point of interest. It is.

The first recorded use of an alphabetical order seems to be in the 1st millennium BCE by Northwest Semitic scribes using the abjad system. I went and read on the abjad system and, while interesting, it didn’t have anything to do with alphabetical order.

Backtracking, I ended up at ‘From A to Z — the surprising history of alphabetical order’ from June 2020.

It’s interesting, and quite a rabbit hole to jump off from. We humans didn’t use alphabetical order to organize things originally, and even well into the use of the alphabet. We’re so used to it that we don’t think about it, but much of how information was organized before alphabetical order had to do with social hierarchies, values, etc.

It was way too interesting, and I do want to get back to it, but I wanted to get back to the NPC Meme thing.

Not Just Repeating Cliche Things in Cliche Ways.

Somewhere along the way in delving into things alphabetical, I realized I had proven the point. The alphabet is cliche, and it is repeated in a cliche way. Everyone who answers about the alphabet and providing a standard response is not a good explanation for NPCs per the meme.

The NPC Meme is a fun idea to play with. It has come to mind off and on when people respond in discussion in certain ways, but that commonality is about mindshare. Sure, some people just regurgitate what they heard, and in communication that evolves eventually into less and less ways.

Also, people who are idiots say the same things and respond to things the same way.

The acid test is asking them to explain it in their own words.

When their eyes glaze over, you have a NPC.

Just make sure you’re not one.

When A Comedian Is a Trusted Source.

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Getting an AI to generate Jon Stewart as a superhero was tricky. Fortunately, you can tell it’s AI by the hands that… well… let’s go with ‘moving really fast’ or something.

The return of Jon Stewart to The Daily Show made me smile today. It will be good to have him around through elections.

I started watching The Daily Show in the early 2000s and really appreciated the satire of things going on in the world. When outside of the United States, I found ways to watch it because it not only informed, it entertained. This was a team effort but the delivery by Jon Stewart never disappointed.

He openly criticized the media, as someone needed to, and the platform of being after cartoons and/or puppets really made the point. He was like a news anchor with the spirit of George Carlin.

In these times, we need people like him, we need teams like that. Often, for me, it was a way of realizing that I wasn’t crazy because when I spotted idiocy being reported, I began to question myself. Is it just me? No, it wasn’t, no, it isn’t, and no, I wasn’t alone in silence wondering whether I should write about it, or even if I could in an engaging way. Watching it be done right and comprehensively while being pretty politically agnostic allowed the issues to come out of the mayhem of the media spin doctors.

When Trevor Noah took over, it didn’t feel the same. He’s a funny guy, and he’s closer to my shade of skin tone, but it just didn’t feel the same. I lost interest. Maybe I’m not ‘woke’ enough despite being sentient for longer than most ‘woke’ people.

Having caught up on his “The Trouble With Jon Stewart”, it’s apparent that he’s kept up his skills and further refined them. I loved how the episodes started with the team spitballing the show beforehand. I imagine working on ideas with him would be fun. Much of what he has done before keeps coming back, too, like George Carlin’s quotes and videos.

The world doesn’t make sense. It’s completely appropriate that he’s a trusted source because he earned it.

All Sorts of New Problems.

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Taken by Mark Lyndersay some time ago.

People are strange. It’s hardly a sentence worth writing but it’s a sentence more people need to read because they are people. Therefore, they are strange.

I am strange, too. I accept that. I try not to inflict it on anyone I don’t like, with the exception of writing. With writing, people who don’t like your strange can just not read it. Or they can get on social networks and fight about it, making billionaires richer.

I was in the garage when I encountered a friend and his Mom. The last time they’d seen me was on Christmas Day, where they’d invited me over and I enjoyed their food, view, and most importantly their company.

I’d shaven since. I sort of look like that guy over at the top of this post.

His mother looks me over, my friend and I exchange the normal things friends do. We paused. His mother jumps in.

“What happened to your beard?”, she asks.

“I fell on a razor. It took the beard, and all sorts of other hair.”, I respond.

This was an attempt to be funny. My friend got it. His mother did not.

“You should take care of yourself!”, she exclaimed, then after a pause said, “…. and find yourself a girl!”

Oh boy.

“If I did that I might get one, and that would cause me all sorts of new problems.”

Fortunately, the conversation ended there with my friend pulling his mother into his car.

There are people who think being single is terrible. They want the best for me because I seem to be considered a pretty nice guy.

I’m going to let you in on a secret, since my past is not well documented on the Internet. I’m content being alone. I get to wake up whenever I want in the early hours and tap away at a keyboard. I get to read books undisturbed. I’m capable of doing my own laundry, cooking my own meals, cleaning my place, etc. I get to do things when I want, and while that is a tyranny unto itself, it’s my tyranny.

I prefer my self-inflicted tyranny over all the nonsense that comes with relationships. For a woman to gain romantic interest from me, she would have to provide value well beyond what I can already do and have done for decades. I’ve lived a lot in my life, more so than many my age, enough so that people frequently ask me if there’s something I haven’t done.

And yet, people constantly remind me to take care of myself. Since there are no parts hanging off of me that aren’t supposed to be hanging off of me, this may be about age. The woman who cuts my hair and her boss are always trying to get me to dye my hair.

Dying hair is hardly taking care of myself. It’s just covering up the silver hairs as if they were blemishes instead of trophies.

When I indulge people who tell me to take care of myself, they talk about things like alkaline water (your body handles your pH, not the water you drink), health supplements that they’re selling or their friend is selling, etc.

They also seem intent on thinking that I would want to live longer. In fact, entire industries are built up on living just a bit longer. I’m not sure what there is to sell in that regard. We are supposed to die. If you live longer, you have to take care of yourself longer and those industries just sell you stuff longer so that they can impress their shareholders with their profits. I’m of value to them alive.

This is not to say I’m suicidal. I’m not. It’s just that no one has made a plausible argument as to why people need to live longer. Time magazine actually has a story questioning why people want to live longer, referring to the essay, “Why I hope to die at 75“.

75 is roughly half of my life away from me. 75, for me, would be 2044 for me. Yikes. And for that time I’ll need shelter, food, clothing, etc. Prices aren’t going down.

And you want me to have someone in my life to stress me out? Yikes. To what end?

I don’t get it. We live, we love, we die. I’m not so egotistical to think the world will not go on without me – it will. This is a pretty old planet by human standards, and there are plenty of people to carry on. When I was young I was to live forever, and despite my best efforts not to, I seem to have surpassed that forever.

There is dignity in a life well lived, and death is simply the necessary way to make space for newcomers.

Living longer, to me, just creates all sorts of new problems. The world hasn’t been that improved in my lifetime, in fact, in my perspective, it’s pretty much gone downhill.

Romance. Live longer. Blah blah blah.

Now, tell me that there will be value in those years for me, and hey, maybe I’ll worry about it.

Live your lives as you please. You might die tomorrow of the regular stupidity of humans. Palestinians and Ukrainians have been demonstrating mortality by the thousands and no one is trying to sell them health supplements.

I don’t want someone standing over me doing an eulogy and saying, “Up until he died, he was healthy and nagged.”

No. Thank. You.

I want that person to say, “He was useful, helpful, and strange. Now he isn’t. Let’s move on.”

Death, you see, is normal.

Dealing with AI Generated Book Summaries.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment
           That’s not Jeff Bezos

When I wrote ‘Summarize This‘, I think expressing frustration at AI and copyright as well as AI being used to undermine the work of people would be more tangible on the Internet.

It wasn’t.

It shouldn’t be surprising, really. There aren’t as many authors out there who are concerned about it – it would seem that it’s only a non-fictional book issue. I don’t know if anyone really wants to get a book summary of Lord of the Rings, as an example.

Yet I thought about it and some days ago thought, “The best way to beat that is to come out with your own book summary. An ‘AUTHORized’ version.”

Amazon’s not going to stop anything once they’re making money. Bezos has to… well, I’m not sure what he has to do, but we can be certain he’ll need money to do that. What you can do is summarize the book yourself, toss in some tidbits that hint at the actual book and needing to read it for some stuff, and then if you’re feeling particularly grouchy, you can undercut the AI book summary prices.

In fact, it might be a healthy way to introduce a book to people.

In fact, why aren’t people doing it already?

To Flow.

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A good friend of mine1 recently bought a sailing ship after years of sailing on other people’s ships. This is a guy whose name has become synonymous for ‘he who fixes’, and while I’d love to use his name to continue propagating that, I’ll just call him ‘Fixer’.

Fixer loves motorcycles, sailing, and good company. That he did purchase the sailing ship didn’t surprise me, it was a matter of time because Fixer had been going out to sea and paying to do so.

Why would someone do that? To get experience. Why would they want that experience? To buy a ship of one’s own. It all makes sense – so why did he buy the ship?

He wanted it. But why did he want it? Fixer would have to answer that himself, yet I think at least part of it is the challenge. When you’re on a ship, you have what you have and you make do. You have to be prepared, you have to know what to do when things go sideways, and as a reward you get to have the wind through your hair, the smell of sea air2 , and the physicality of it at times.

I’ve always found large expanses of water to be therapeutic. On a crowded planet, the oceans are our last refuges.

The Coffee Thoughts.

I thought of this while having breakfast and coffee at one of my new haunts. I was sitting, as I normally do, by myself at the bar, and this morning the barista had my order in my spot before I got to the door – she’d seen me in the parking lot and had not planned for me to talk to a guy in the parking lot a while, and her countenance showed a bit of disappointment that I was tardy. It was still hot, it was still good, and somehow I felt I had robbed her of something she had worked hard for.

I ate and drank as I tried puzzling this out, as well as how well she did and did not seem to be handling it. I’m always suspicious of a woman who says, “It’s fine”, and she had said that. This delves into deeper and deeper questions which are well beyond the scope of this. I was deep in thought, as I like to be since to have a brain and to not use it seems like a waste of a brain.

Out of the blue, this guy pulls up and sits on a stool next to me, despite there being other stools further away, and he’s jabbering on the phone. This is like the guy who comes into the men’s room and despite having other options, picks the urinal right next to yours.

This guy was effectively urinating on my shoes.

Here I was, just minding my own business, when an annoying human wanders next to me, sits down, and has complete conversations with someone who isn’t even there. A few hundred years ago they would have dragged him to a sanitarium.

I hate mobile phones and the manners they have produced. I’m sure that at least his mother thought he was a nice person, but to me he was simply an irritant, a fly buzzing in a way that I understood and saying nothing I wanted to hear. This, to me, is a large swathe of society, and I pulled up Facebook and started looking over the ship in the pictures Fixer had posted.

That’s when I decided to write this.

Getting Lost.

There’s a wonderful thing about getting lost in something – sometimes you do need to wander to see where you are. More importantly, fully engaging your brain in an enterprise that is both mentally and physically tiring allows an escape from the burdens of everything else you have to deal with in life.

Fixer likes motorcycles and sailboats, a good merging of physical and mental engagement with the universe, where the two become one and the one is most definitely human.

If you haven’t experienced it in life, you have not yet lived, that feeling of state of flow.

These days, it seems like people are wandering around with cowbells, tambourines and harmonicas to disrupt flow, intruding into our lives like sexually transmitted diseases – yet there was no consent. Maybe this is a product of getting older, a temperament refined over half a century of interruptions and annoyances with sparse periods of ‘time at sea’.

I know plenty of people with boats. Some like going really fast. Some like line fishing, which done right is a meditation. Fixer, though, does it for different reasons.

Fixer grows. He does things to grow, and the boat is no different, and all the while I imagine it’s a therapy unto itself.

We all need more of that, and less people peeing on our feet.

Where do you find your flow? When is the last time you did it? Isn’t it time you did it again?

Of course it is.

  1. There was a time when ‘good friend’ would have been considered more redundant than it is now. Social networks have diluted what a friend is, I think, but how does one measure that? ↩︎
  2. It’s dimethyl sulfide, released by microbes, which gives the smell. Ozone has nothing to do with it, that’s a myth from the Victorian era. ↩︎

The Week Wander.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

I gave myself a few days off from writing. It started first with, “I don’t feel like writing today”, largely because of the summary issue which interferes with some of my plans and needs to be addressed1.

It’s easy to lose inertia. All you have to do is stop moving, which is easy enough because life’s frictional forces will happily put you to rest.

Then I got involved in some ‘debates’ regarding different things in a group, and saw pretty clearly how there are two main sides and they are so busy ‘debating’ that they seem to have forgotten, or never realized, that the frame of a debate or discussion is easily expanded.

People only seem to know how to make frames smaller. Maybe those are their strong muscles constricting discussion into increasingly small areas, and yet what we have found in the world is that the seemingly minuscule almost always has a broader context. 

The frames are generally handed to us by others. Republicans versus Democrats, coffee versus tea, cats versus dogs, The Beatles versus Elvis, and so on. You’re expected to have a side, and if you don’t, you’re graded on scales of either.

I like big frames. When I don’t understand things, or when I don’t have an answer or more importantly better questions, I wander. Or wonder. The two words are wonderfully interchangeable, with one exception being this sentence.

Why do we instinctively draw smaller frames when trying to understand something, or discuss something? Is it our eyes, allowing us to attenuate light so the grey matter encased in our skills can focus? Why can’t we focus more broadly?

These, I think, are better questions, and something I’m having fun exploring.

Sometimes, you need to wander the shifting landscape around you to discover where you are.

When’s the last time you orbited your position?

  1. I have developed a few strategies on this, which are on the back burner now and which I’ll share maybe this week. They are benign in nature, and publishing it might help stem the tide. ↩︎

Somewhere To Belong.

~ taran.a.rampersad@gmail.com ~ 1 Comment

I was going through some memories on Facebook this morning and came across something I’d written 2 years ago:

“Sometimes, when looking back, you’ll see that nothing ‘went wrong’ but [as much as] sometimes it just wasn’t right to begin with.

As you grow older, ‘sometimes’ increases significantly.”

I don’t remember exactly what I was thinking about when I wrote that. It could have been anything in my past, a past of places, times, and different versions of me.

At the time, too, I was listening to Linkin Park’s “Somewhere to Belong”.

“Somewhere To Belong”, Linkin Park, with lyrics.

It doesn’t always occur to us, we who search for a place to belong, that maybe we aren’t meant to belong, that we are supposed to be in motion, and the yearning to belong gives us itchy feet.

This could explain how humans all wandered off from South Africa – if people felt like they belonged, they would not have left. Maybe there wasn’t enough food. Maybe there weren’t enough women. Maybe someone’s intelligence or lack thereof didn’t allow them to fit in. Maybe they were just jerks.

When I did a google search on “feelings of not belonging”, you find things on mental health – actually, some pretty good stuff that could be possible for an individual. I liked this response to ‘a feeling of not belonging’ here, and there are enough legitimate answers that if you really feel like you don’t belong, you should talk to a psychologist. I did, though not about that particular thing – but I addressed it and it’s not that I am off my rocker.

Sometimes you just don’t belong where you are, literally or figuratively.

We come from thousands of years of change, perhaps even billions of years depending on your perspective, but we only see a lifetime’s worth, a very small fraction of who we are. We are inherently wanderers, this stacking of people on top of each other is pretty new to humanity. Most religious texts have people wandering around somewhere, maybe even all of them.

Some people do not want to wander, they want to stay where they are. I used to think they were the crazy ones. In some ways, I still do, those who are happy with routine and the same ideas and thoughts comforting them like a blanket, but we are told these days that that is normal.

Part of me wants to say that society has normalized this, and maybe that’s true to an indeterminate degree, but if that were true then every city would be filled with crazy people. Some think that’s the case, but I elect to believe that statistically, cities show the significance of wanting to stay in one place in an undeniable way.

Both can be completely normal.

I’ve always had itchy feet myself, always wanting to explore a place or an idea, and part of that could be associated with my childhood, but really, it’s just who I am. I don’t want to see the same things, hear the same things, smell the same things over and over and over. I don’t fit in with people who do not have that feeling, and I shouldn’t – they are happy as they are. They are not curious. They are not explorers. They are settlers, and that’s an important aspect of being human.

Wanderers, though, seem also to be natural. While feelings of alienation or not belonging can be symptoms of legitimate mental health concerns, sometimes it’s natural. I love the feel of motion, I love the wind through my hair. I love learning new things.

For me, it’s when I can’t experience something new that I feel trapped. That paralysis and being imprisoned can also feel like much the same thing, but they are not the same. The former is done to one’s self, the other by others. The hint here is that there’s only one person you can control. Yourself.

The trouble is how we frame ourselves and are framed by others in these disagreements we call life.

Looking for somewhere to belong can just be an excuse to do something different. Go somewhere different. Experience something different.

And yeah, it is worth checking with a mental health practitioner. Probably the easiest medical people to deal with.