I Am my Own Enigma

We're going to need a bigger boat

robotboy8@aol.com — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 03:48:14 GMT

Just finished reading The Raw Shark Texts.

It is the most Platonic thing I've ever read. Everyone reading this, go and get a copy, right now, and read it, right now. And thanks to Tucker for introducing me to it.

It's a book about an amnesiac running from a conceptual shark. I wish I could say more but I can't, I don't want to ruin anything... just, damn. it is good.

robotboy8@aol.com — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 04:05:42 GMT

Touching...

...hell of a story.

update.

robotboy8@aol.com — Mon, 22 Jun 2009 03:59:31 GMT

Camping at Sky Meadows last night with Kristin. It was a lot of fun, hard to start a fire with such wet wood but we managed. Need to camp more this summer.

Night before, Annapolis. RPG and ice cream with the apartment crowd and such-like.

The night before that, and the night before that, I was in New York, which was pretty awesome. Also very good to see Tucker, Becca, Zack - all those people that I miss because they're in New York.

I also have a new umbrella and shoes, due to my lack of preparation for the horrible rain that New York greeted me with.

Work starts on Tuesday. I think I can manage to summon up a decent attitude for it.

This modern world

robotboy8@aol.com — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 20:50:56 GMT

I'm updating my LJ...

...from a bus.

Cool.

robotboy8@aol.com — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 23:22:41 GMT

Meg graduated yesterday.

I bought a Danelectro Chili Dog pedal today. It generates two extra signals in addition to its input, one an octave below signal and one two octaves below. This plus the old Realistic reverb unit feedbacking is HELLA NOISE also bass amp, mics, and recorder...

DC tonight, New York tomorrow.

Current playlist: Mountain Goats, Death From Above 1979, Captain Chaos, Captain Beefheart, Butthole Surfers.

But my love is like a dark cloud full of rain/That's always right there up above you

robotboy8@aol.com — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 23:58:43 GMT

The Mountain Goats.

I suspect that I would have been much happier for much of the time from maybe eighth grade til a year or less ago had I not been caught in a race to the bottom, searching for the most painful emotional content life could inflict upon me - and if life wouldn't inflict pain, then by God I would. So I painted myself the old romantic hero and I just about forgot how to find beauty in anything that wasn't painful, incisive, or at least covered in gobs of a certain sort of irony.

Sure, it's a thing many people that age do. From what I've seen, it's a thing that many people do, and especially people like myself who've never particularly been tested in that regard, creating unhappiness to fill an experiential void. I've been a lot happier since I began to see the extent to which, in my case at least, it is self-created. (That, and since I began to see how fundamental endorphins are to my psychological well-being).

In light of these realizations it would be easy to view such impulses with condescension, as something childish or not fully formed, at the very least something which I have moved beyond. But God, The Mountain Goats. Music that lets me indulge fully, grab hold of and understand things I've never lived, and come out of them cathartically refreshed rather than just vaguely more depressed than I was before. Landscapes out of a stained window, beer can in the cup holder, the alternate introspective beauty and frantic desperation.

The masochist within is inexorably drawn to these songs, but the veneer of almost-wishing-it-were-me is gone.

God, these are some beautiful songs. Beautiful and terrible and alive.

robotboy8@aol.com — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 15:32:16 GMT

I think I'm the only person in this family who has turned a television off in the past week.

Seriously.

In other news, I'm a huge fan of summer thunderstorms.

flipping through late-night television I realize

robotboy8@aol.com — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 03:58:59 GMT

that Pat Robertson has a hella mobile face

Projects

robotboy8@aol.com — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 01:56:39 GMT

- Repaired an accordion today. It is old - likely from the 30's, quite possibly earlier. There is still some restoration to do (it's okay mechanically, but the leather bits need replacing after 80+ years of wear/storage) and it's not really in tune (and I'm not sure I'll be able to manage tuning it, but if I build a strobe tuner then it should work.)

- Strobe tuner? I need a synchronous AC motor, then I need to cut some custom gears or wheels and possibly pick up belts, but I think this is doable.

- Clockwork drum machine. Need a spring and to build an escapement and... maybe do a music-box to start with, then work up from there? Doable, but needs more research.

- Allelectronics.com has a bunch of motors, controllers, and throttles from a now-defunct electric scooter company. I'm going to convert a bicycle into an electric motorcycle, bitches.

In other news, I think that American Pie features red leather chairs that are the same ones that are now in the Chasement. Also, my car smells hella moldy, and I really miss school-people, and I have a job that I don't want but I know I can't really complain because unlike everyone else I have a job for the summer.

Also I'm back in Fairfax now

robotboy8@aol.com — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 18:54:40 GMT

I really want to buy a parakeet and train it to speak using a recording of the Canterbury Tales. Not the translated one that we found while dorm cleaning, a recording in Middle English.

Then I'll train another one on Shakespeare.

And a third on Milton.

After each has spent a few months in solitude learning English from their respective masters, I'll introduce them to each other.

robotboy8@aol.com — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 04:00:33 GMT

Back in Fairfax.

I don't want this summer.

robotboy8@aol.com — Wed, 27 May 2009 20:15:05 GMT

Sorry for the lack of comments, but there has been moving, and then dorm cleaning, and an internet outage, and...

Ah hell suffice it to say, regarding recent days, that I've biked a lot recently, and also that I wish this past week and a half were sustainable for the duration of the summer.

robotboy8@aol.com — Wed, 06 May 2009 15:09:59 GMT

Woke up at five and Will and Rachel and Kristin and I drove to a Waffle House up north of Baltimore.

That was awesome.

robotboy8@aol.com — Fri, 01 May 2009 14:29:37 GMT

So last night after the best seminar of my life I spent a couple of hours writing Alceste and Celimene into Don Juan.

If Mr. Petrich likes the idea, this will be the most fun paper of my life.

Also, started playing with potential ideas for a long and well-mixed DJ set for Saturday night's dance party.

may day backwards is not yam dam... but i wish it was

robotboy8@aol.com — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 15:34:21 GMT

Last night I had a dream.

I was at the beach with Kristin and Hunter. It was an odd beach, sort of a string of small connected islands. Very clear water, most islands only an acre or two in size. There were docks midway through several of them, weird inlets. The water was blue and green and clear and beautiful in the day. An old man with an impressive beard was complaining about his tiny submarine's motor not being quite functional; I couldn't understand how he could even fit in the sub, which was smaller than he was.

We were staying in the living room of an old man (who looked like the old man who runs the Public Sales Office on Main Street) who had a very delicate and ancient cactus city in his garage (which was behind his living room). I went in to look at it and he saw me and got very angry; I tried to excuse myself - "I wasn't touching anything, I just wanted another look at it" - but he was definitely still angry. I ended up on a computer in his garage, annoyed and embarassed, when some guy was next to me, also on a computer, my mind in its dream conflating this guy's garage and a PC cafe as potential settings.

We got to talking about something that really intrigued me, not sure what, and he said he had some friends that I really should meet, so I walked off with him, across a bridge to another island and back into a forest of trees not indigenous to so tropical a clime.

Back behind it there was a mansion in disrepair. At least five stories tall above ground, and - as he showed me around - at least three stories below ground. It was massive. It was beautiful. It was a horrible mixture of architectural styles from the last two hundred years. I wanted to live there.

Turns out there were a lot of them living in that house: I met four at first, then another group of three or so (running naked out of a basement shower, which had started to flood), and a few more wandering around.

There was some embarrassing social thing going on where one of the residents of the house somehow expected to sleep with me within the next hour, while I had no plans to do any such thing, so I really had to leave - but the house was so beautiful that I really didn't want to. Eventually though I did end up leaving, just as the dawn was breaking, and the bridge was much narrower and there was a cop looking at me suspiciously as I crossed it.

Having every intention of going back to the mansion in daylight (and armed with a girlfriend against unwelcome advances) I found a map of the string of islands that included the one with the mansion and discovered that there were also two camps of militias on that island, each one of which had only a single gun, but each gun was a good fifty feet long and as wide as a big trash can. I then found some statistics of the mansion on a chalkboard and was describing to Hunter and Kristin how awesome it was (Seven different types of copper used in its construction! Slate from nine different continents!) when I was woken up by an alarm.

Damn.

In other news, I'm looking forward to putting together a long (30+ minute) beatmatched set for the Chasement dance party on Saturday, and have been exchanging emails with a guy from Craigslist about the possibility of starting a band over the summer.

Also, considering writing a language paper consisting of Alceste (from The MisanthropeDon Juan where Don Juan is flattering M. Dimanche so as not to pay his tailoring bills. (Alceste is the titular misanthrope primarily because of his hatred of flattery). I figure that I could get at least a fifteen-page script out of it, which would be one of the most fun papers ever.

I won free trash day

robotboy8@aol.com — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 04:12:01 GMT

by which I mean bulk trash night.

Got an air conditioner which works (a little rattly, but a hell of a lot better than nothing), a small color television (with a 12v DC input, hence I could install it in my car), and a sewing machine (which needs a bobbin and a bobbin cover plate, but is fully functional from a mechanical standpoint).

I am happy with myself for this.

Also, I'll probably catch the rest of the way up on Questionable Content tonight. +Going mushroom hunting tomorrow, still need to pack (not to mention bike 8.5 miles to get photo paper...) and damn I'm looking forward to this.

Sometimes machines understand

robotboy8@aol.com — Sat, 18 Apr 2009 19:02:34 GMT

I'm made very happy by the fact that Pandora (www.pandora.com) just recommended Stay, by Jackson Browne, on a station I'd loaded up with electronica, folk-punk, and blues.

My bass is coming along very well, and I started converting the piece-of-shit that was being thrown away on second Pinkney into The Saddest Guitar. Snapped a string, so I need to pick up a replacement - normally a broken string would only add to the sadness but in this case I need properly paired courses. The idea is that you have 3 courses of strings, but rather than tuned to unisons or octaves they'll be a minor 7th apart (maybe a major third? Perfect fifth for AUTOMATIC METAL). I've recut the bridge and nut so that the 6 strings are no longer evenly spaced, just need to finish tuning specifics.

And also, as if I didn't have enough projects already, I have a bicycle whose gears need to be repaired. This is going to be awesome.

robotboy8@aol.com — Fri, 17 Apr 2009 13:25:20 GMT

God damn endorphins are a good thing.

Thought

robotboy8@aol.com — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 15:09:18 GMT

So I think I might have the theory behind a pretty awesome artificial intelligence. I don't have the programming skills to pull it off, but I might be able to come up with a database standard and start putting information into it if I can find someone that for whatever reason felt like coding the processing modules.

At the very least, thinking along these lines provides fascinating insights into the way that the mind works.

More info as the theory comes along

Damn

robotboy8@aol.com — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 18:02:05 GMT

just realized that I cut the neck for my bass to be just right for 40" scale length, but it should be 36" (it's a guitar not an upright). Urgh. Got some re-cutting to do...

robotboy8@aol.com — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 21:49:10 GMT

Wrenched the hell out of my shoulder yesterday, amtyping this one-handed, right arm in a sling. Not broken or dislocated. On painkillers.

robotboy8@aol.com — Wed, 08 Apr 2009 13:18:19 GMT

Yeah, I've totally done this.

...done.

robotboy8@aol.com — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 19:14:40 GMT

Bandwagon ho!

robotboy8@aol.com — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 06:55:08 GMT

Essay done but not finished. The next fifteen hours are for editing.

Good

robotboy8@aol.com — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 18:23:28 GMT

Added a 1/4" output to the talking alphabet thingie. And another thousand words to my essay.

More for the rest of today, then the goth party!