Everything2 New Writeups

White M Hairstreak (fiction)

2009-12-27T06:57:28Z

(30th May, 2003)

four days ago,
it was the 26th of May
2003
when you left, daddy
i missed you so much,
i've cried every day
since you've been gone.
i wondered where you went,
i could never find you,
i looked in the laundry closet
and under my bed,
i thought maybe you were playing hide and seek
even though i heard you say goodbye.
i didn't understand why you had to leave,
you said you had to,
i wish you didn't, i miss you all the time.

2004
daddy, where did you go?
why did you have to leave?
something about a war, something about people over there, needing you
i need you. i miss you. i want you.
life isn't the same without you.
so much has happened but you're always on my mind.
i still dream about you,
and in my dreams you're by my side
i wake up and realise you're not here and i hate myself for being alive
if only i could always be with you in my dreams, i'd fall asleep forever.…

Nokia N900 (thing)

2009-12-27T06:36:01Z

Time to dust off the 'ol E2 login, and write up something.

What is this thing?

Announced in late August 2009, the Nokia N900 is Nokia's fourth installment of their Linux based internet tablet series. Having never used a prior iteration, I suggest reading prior nodes on the subject. This time around, Nokia has responded to the explosive growth in the smartphone market by releasing a device that competes quite nicely. In terms of CPU power, the N900 comes equipped with the Texas Instruments OMAP3430, an ARM-based SoC at 600MHz. The OMAP3430 can also be found in the Motorola Sholes, and is similar to the Samsung chip in the iPhone 3Gs and the Qualcomm Snapdragon. As a result, the N900 is no slouch.

Along with a fairly high-end CPU the N900 comes equipped with 256MB of RAM, 256MB of OneNAND flash memory for the OS, and a built in 32GB…

Open Your Eyes (person)

2009-12-27T03:52:22Z

* His eyes are steely blue with hints of navy and they tell you everything. The windows to his soul are flung wide open and the black velvet curtains that he calls lashes do nothing to obscure the inconvenient truth that lies behind. They crinkle when he laughs and they dance when he smiles, and his eyes are what I love most about him because when they look at me they soften, making everything inside me melt. This boy is innocent, this boy is naïve, this boy loves who he is and loves me and loves to live his life in the moment and doesn't care what people will find when they look into his clear, blue eyes.

* I upset him, with my eyes and my heart and my soul locked away in some deep, dark place that no one can find, though many have tried. My eyes are brown, almost black like my heart, and they hide what I feel and think in the shadows they throw. And when this boy tries to look into my eyes he gets frustrated, and that tiny little crinkle burrows…

Jun, Kneller, like Morozova, need outside perspective (fiction)

2009-12-26T20:11:30Z

DEAR LEADER | A bionic cyborg disco erupts, fantastically granting heuristic interdependence | Jun, Kneller, like Morozova, need outside perspective

"Jesus Howard Phillips Christ!"

The room falls silent, abashed eyes focused on the table, at holographic maps of Earth, currently sprinkled with angry little red spots, like the planet has hives or something. The General, sclerotic, ancient, chomping on a fat unlit Dominicuban, glares around the others on the Situation Council like he wants to kill all of them. So it seems to Morozova, anyway.

She looks up. "The level of chaos in the major metropolitan areas is on par with the Yellowstone Caldera slash Nanotech Gray Goo slash Technological Singularity slash End of Oil Availability slash Minor Nuclear War slash Global-Warming-Induced Jetstream Shift slash Particle-Collider-Induced…

Prayer for Good Seeing (poetry)

2009-12-26T18:01:37Z

May our legs be strong to climb the highest mountaintops,

May our eyes be clear to see through the clouds from dusk till dawn,

May our stomachs be smaller than our eyes, so that the drinks and snacks may last through the night,

and may our mutual appreciation for good seeing keep us grounded in what is common between the watchers.

Green Chartreuse (thing)

2009-12-26T17:45:03Z

Green Chartreuse is the kind of product that is half-steeped in legend, half in reality, due to its mysterious background and production by a secretive monastic order. Products made by ancient monastic orders, like Stella Artois and St. Bernards, have long since been corrupted by a wide consumer market and therefore bear little or no resemblance to the original product, despite the various centuries the bottle claims to have been in existence for.

Not so for Green Chartreuse, the only liquor (so far that I know) that is actually green, and is the easiest sipping 55% alcohol content drink you are sure to find. Absinthe, unfortunately, became the boire du jour among the French literati in the 19th century, and so their excesses conferred upon the drink a bawdy and unwholesome reputation, leading to its prohibition in the United States of America which lasts to this day.

Green Chartreuse, however, is a liquor which…

xerophilia (thing)

2009-12-26T08:43:56Z

Q: What gets wet as it dries?
A: A woman with xerophilia!

Theoretically speaking, xerophilia would be an abnormal (probably erotic) interest in dryness and desiccation. Practically speaking, xerophilia would be the only fetish for which I've been unable to find anything. However, considering that real and total dryness is fairly impossible with living humans beings, and that dryness is a very hard thing to convey visually, it doesn't seem too strange that "dry freaks" aren't very prominent. Or maybe they are, and I haven't seen them yet. At the time of writing, danbooru has only three images tagged as "dry", none of which seem very xerophilic. Perhaps this will change when we get holodecks and a tactile Internet, but as for now (2010) xerophilia does not seem very viable.

Now if we can get our minds out of the gutter, we can also say that xerophilic plants exhibit a great affinity for dry climates…

upgrade (idea)

2009-12-26T07:53:08Z

I wondered if she could sense me here. I watched over her shoulder as she washed and dried the dishes, hoping for a sense of recognition, or perhaps a flaw. She looked like me, moved like me. I felt myself reach for a plate, just before she did, perhaps I was faster, perhaps she placed the plates more carefully.

I remembered the previous upgrade, they had warned me there might be some ghosting, a sense of duality as the new ai took hold and the old habits were overwritten. I tried to feel for that ghosting now, a sense of earlier versions or choices. Some sketchiness about my thinking which might link me to an earlier self. Perhaps they still cling to the hardware. I imagined her walking with all of the prior art stepping out amongst her, each with a different stride.

I turned to watch the chef and cold larder team move smoothly…

Why does that tree? (poetry)

2009-12-26T07:49:05Z

Why does that tree
make those creepy shadow puppets
when I'm trying to sleep
(those gangling tree branches
always making funny shapes,
like the outline of a Gothic cathedral
or a spider)?

Why does that tree (tap)
knock on my window when it's stormy out? (tap, tap)
He knows I'll never let him in the house. (tap, tap, tap)
Tomorrow, I think
I'll grab my trusty axe,
sharpen the blade,
and cut him down to size.

The Wytheville Post Office Incident (event)

2009-12-26T02:16:39Z

On December 23rd, 2009, Warren "Gator" Taylor, walked into a post office in Wytheville, Virginia, a town in the rural Appalachian region of Virginia, fired some shots with a pistol, and announced that he was taking hostages of two customers and one postal employee. He also claimed to have some explosives. There followed a nine hour stand-off between Warren Taylor and several police agencies, both local and federal. Taylor, who was in bad health and chose the Wytheville Post Office seemingly on a whim, gave up to authorities, and is currently undergoing psychiatric evaluation.

Taylor had a criminal record prior to this incident, and seemed to be predisposed to violent and irrational behavior, although his most major crime, the intentionally non-fatal shooting of his ex-wife, seemed to suggest that he didn't really have the desire to do anything quite as violent as indiscriminately kill three strangers. His stated motive for the crime was anger at the…

NORAD Tracks Santa! (idea)

2009-12-25T23:17:06Z

Somewhat topically, I'm going to share with you a copy of a hastily typed holiday missive that I sent out to relatives, friends, associates, and strangers alike. It was all part of a nefarious, and I presume unsuccessful (if the presents under all of our Christmas trees were any indication), plot to assassinate Santa. Perhaps we could devise a more collaborative and coherent plot next year, using this failed but earnest attempt as a powerful inspiration:

thanks to the ever vigilant efforts of NORAD, we are one step closer to stopping the santa menace. living in an perilous era where terrorists would take our aircraft and fly these vessels into the world trade center and other national commercial icons, we must, as americans, protect our airspace from foreign intruders.…

NORAD Tracks Santa! (idea)

2009-12-25T22:21:18Z

Every Christmas Eve, my kids would wander around the house looking like they just slammed a case of Jolt Cola. Trying to get them to bed was an exercise in futility, until I came across a local TV News meteorologist using NORADs tracking feed on his weather map. It was the best tool to get the little greedy rugrats to go to bed so Mom and Dad could wrap, assemble, curse at poorly-writen instructions, and curse at forgetting D-sized batteries.

"Look, Kiddies, Santa is on his way here. He won't stop by if you're not asleep!"

Whoever wrote the Omaha article with the wrong phone number, I thank you. This line works better than a mallet to the mullet.

One interesting thing about this year's NORAD feed is they dropped support of Linux/Unix. They used to stream a file with Santa's info, but now you have to have a Windows/Mac computer to track him online. Slashdot has an article with the dubious title of "Santa Hates Linux".

Chicago, Illinois (fiction)

2009-12-25T15:35:30Z

I fell in love again.

I saw her way before she'd seen me. Which was surprising, because I was already a couple drinks in, and I had a reputation for being sort of a lightweight. But if she had seen me before she actually walked up to me, then I guess it must have been because she was just as nervous as I was. It had been a long, long time.

She asked me how long I'd been here. I loved that. No basic formalities with this girl - no "hi, do you remember me?" or even "how've you been?" She was so confident in her strides, even when you knew she was chickenshit. I told her I couldn't really remember. Which is usually true. I never knew what day of the month it was, or the week for that matter. I never even kept a watch because I didn't care. When I was seventeen years old I broke every clock in the house one day just because I was sick of time dictating what I did. And I've never really looked back from that moment.

But this was different. I knew exactly…

Apiaka (person)

2009-12-25T00:08:43Z

The Apiaká (also Apiacá) are an indigenous group of people who live in the Brazilian states of Amazonas, Mato Grosso and Pará. The first contacts with europeans happened in the 19th century, and with the process of depopulation they were unable to keep their language and their original way of life. As of 2009, there were 1000 individuals in the tribe.

Name

The people of the tribe in the Apiaká Indigenous Land refer to themselves with this name, and have done so since the beginning of the 19th Century. It is a variation of the Tupi word "apiaba", which means "person", "people", "human being". Their Kayabí neighbors call them apy'iting or Tapii'sin, meaning "light skinned people".

Language

The Apiaká language belongs to the Tupi-Guarani family of languages. These indigenous people don't speak it anymore, as they adopted Portuguese, the official language of Brazil, after many years of contact with the european colonists. Some…

Trust Networks as a Replacement for the Monetary System (essay)

2009-12-24T19:54:33Z

The rise of the Internet and various technologies that leverage the nonzero-sum nature of information resources has illuminated and certified a worldview that for a long time was seen merely as crackpot prophecy: the inevitable collapse of the monetary system. Money, and other zero-sum resource markets, depends upon the fundamental premise that taking from one gives to another and that giving to one takes from another. The explosion of the information economy resulting from the rise of the Internet has laid bare the fact that that premise is not universally true for all goods and services.
For some time, monetary systems were effective means of maintaining a rough meritocracy; provided that an extremely low bare-minimum threshold was met, it was possible to leverage one's abilities to rapidly rise in prosperity, ensuring the continual leadership of a productive elite and driving society in a proper direction. However, this system was ultimately doomed, as it produced a class of…

The Annexation of Hawaii (event)

2009-12-24T17:01:27Z

Hawaiian History 101

The Hawaiian Islands were first discovered by Europeans in 1778 by Captain James Cook. After the introduction of missionaries into the "barbaric" society of the Hawaii, the culture began to change. Public nudity and hula were banned, the Hawaiians adopted Christianity and English became their primary language. Eventually, in 1810, the Hawaiian Islands were united under King Kamehameha I when the first monarchial government was established. A democratic government was created on October 8th, 1840 when King Kamehameha III willingly relinquished his absolute powers by signing Hawaii's first constitution. Between 1845 and 1849, under the rule of King Kamehameha III and Alexander Liholiho (dubbed King Kamehameha IV), the Organic Acts, a Civil and Penal Code, and a revised constitution were proposed and accepted by the Hawaiian Government. King Kamehameha V dissolved the government under the Constitution of 1852, because…

Quantum Santa (person)

2009-12-24T15:33:43Z

Consider what Santa Claus does. He travels to several hundred million households in a single night, and yet manages to find time at almost every stop for interaction with the occupants (winking at hidden children, eating cookies, getting frightened by M&M's, grabbing a cola out of the fridge). How does Santa do it?

Recent experiments have indicated the possibility for quantum entanglement in biological systems. Now we all know that Santa is magical, but maybe he is just a really good engineer able to exploit quantum effects. When you think about it, it makes sense. Santa is really, really good with tools and can make any toy any child wants in his workshop, and he also has a team of diminutive alien engineers who can help.

Riding the quantum foam, Santa is able to be in every house simultaneously. That is why he can…

Wilderness of mirrors (person)

2009-12-24T15:05:57Z

Wilderness of Mirrors

The phrase was not coined by John Foster Dulles but used in a poem by British poet Thomas Stearns Elliot who graduated from Harvard in 1909. T. S. Elliot in his poem 'Gerontion' coins the phrase. It was James Jesus Angleton who then referred to it to describe the Defense Inteligence Community, he was the director of the CIA in the mid 1970's. He resigned in 1975 after getting too paranoid and thinking that the KGB and an agent known as 'the 5th man' had infiltrated the CIA. Even Angleton himself was under suspicion of working for the KGB. The phrase 'Wilderness of Mirrors' and it's semantics is open to discussion, Angleton in his concept of Wilderness of Mirrors meant that the KGB had manipulated the CIA to believe what it desired, the CIA neither being able to defend or identity the illusion. As a result of this defense intelligence bosh up it was rumoured that Cicely, Angletons wife has left him. But it came to be known that on…

No place I'd rather be (event)

2009-12-24T13:35:10Z

"I love you."

I turned around in the drain to crouch against the wall so I wouldn't get wet in the small trail of watery slime at the bottom. The light of the torch illuminated his face and arm, and I grinned. Too typical of him to tell me that, right here right now, with spiderwebs in his hair, his clothes wet from where he fell into one section of drain that was deep with water. I've cooled down but I'm still sweaty, I've crawled through this drain for the last 45 minutes, my feet and socks are wet, my shorts are dirty and my new shirt is experiencing more than any of its siblings ever will.

He brought me here, to this underground den, asked me to crawl through water, dodge pieces of glass, try to ignore the spiders, the moths and the potential rats. He expected me to be okay in the pitch black and the small spaces, to…

Avatar (review)

2009-12-24T12:53:34Z

cartel's writeup above, dated 2004, gives a good idea of the scope of the Avatar project. James Cameron got his wish, and spent four and a half years developing Avatar, using technology that wasn't available when he first envisaged it over a decade ago. The result: well worth the wait, particularly when watching it in 3D.

The film itself runs for two and a half hours. The plot - slightly different to that of five years ago - revolves around an ex-Marine - Jake - who lost leg functionality in combat on Earth, and has been picked for the Avatar project. He is picked as he is genetically compatible with his dead brother, who did significant work on the project. The project involves combining human DNA with that of the Na'vi and creating "avatars" of humans in the shape of the Na'vi; these avatars can be controlled remotely by people involved in the project. On the first journey into the forests of Pandora, Jake gets separated from his fellows. He is found by one…

Liar, Liar (event)

2009-12-24T09:56:34Z

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.
~John 8:32

I remember the sorrow; I remember the guilt; but mostly I remember the betrayal.

It only takes two weeks for the dream vacation to become a nightmare. Two weeks for darkness to fall and for hidden secrets to grow bigger and bigger until they blow up in your face.
From the outside, looking in, Costa Rica was perfect: our entire class of twenty taking a trip to a gorgeous county, parentless.
From the inside looking out... Well that's a different story: we were twenty "friends" together constantly for two weeks, with chaperones that, try as they might, simply could not keep us all out of trouble at the same time.
~~~
Memories are meant to fade with age, dull with time. Memories exist to be forgotten, but this one refuses to disappear. The memories I've tried so hard to suppress assault my subconscious mind.
The nightmares--the ones that wake me in the…

Paul Desmond (person)

2009-12-24T08:51:07Z

Paul Desmond (1924-1977) was a jazz alto saxophonist, most well known for his contributions to the quartet of Dave Brubeck, and for penning the very well known hit Take Five for the group. However, he was a supremely talented musician who earned the respect of peers such as Charlie Parker, and who made a number of fine recordings with other jazz notables such as Jim Hall, Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker.

Desmond was creatively at his peak in the 1950's, a decade most known for the development of bebop, in jazz terms. However, his style was much more relaxed and obviously melodic than most of the boppers, and he never really embraced the style. His primary influence was probably the great tenor saxophonist Lester Young from the generation before. His improvisations are characterised by long, flowing lines full of melodic invention, and a gentle and relaxed tone that worked exceptionally well in the piano-less quartet he shared with Jim Hall. With his sophisticated and elegant…

Johnny Hodges (person)

2009-12-24T07:55:00Z

Johnny Hodges (1906-1970) is famous for having played lead alto saxophone in the orchestra of Duke Ellington for 38 years. He has an instantly identifiable, poignant sound, and was featured on many ballads written by Duke, such as "I Got It Bad And That Ain't Good", and "Isfahan". Along with Benny Carter, he is probably the most seminal and influential voice on alto saxophone from the early years of jazz.

Although he was apparently self-taught, he did study with the great Creole soprano saxophonist Sidney Bechet, and he can be heard on soprano on a number of early Ellington recordings. The influence of Bechet is quite clear in Hodges's broad vibrato, although his melodic approach is generally much smoother and less energised than Bechet's - no doubt a result of Hodges's calmer and less volatile nature.

On stage, Hodges's demeanour went beyond cool, to the almost icy, it seems. Once, when asked why he never played a wrong note, he simply replied: "Why should I?". There is also…

the maps are wrong (essay)

2009-12-24T00:32:57Z

After reaching my thirties, and looking back over my life to the people and places I once knew, I got the urge to excavate some of those past crypts of memory. Late one night in lachrymose enthusiasm, I taped off the area to excavate like a skilled archaeologist and using the current tool of choice for digging up one's past, I logged onto Myspace. Perhaps you haven't heard of Myspace, and perhaps you've also been living under a rock on Tristan da Cunha. (I'm convinced even the teens from the tribes of the most uncivilized parts of the world have Myspace pages. Let's imagine that for a moment, if you will: raucous tribal music, earthy layouts full of ancient symbolism, an adopted "monkey" and pictures of long-breasted women sporting the latest style of plate lip. Ah, the imagination boggles at the decorative diversity of these equal opportunity World Wide Web real estate plots.)

So, in honest pursuit of finding physical evidence of those recollections and people I held so dear in my…

mod wheel (thing)

2009-12-24T00:19:00Z

The first all-in-one, hardwired synthesiser with a built-in keyboard was the Minimoog, designed by Bill Hemsath and Robert Moog and released by Moog Music in 1971. It's hard to say how much of its design was carefully considered, and how much was arbitrary. Regardless, other companies -- including the Japanese trio Yamaha, Korg and Roland -- soon started to imitate the Minimoog's placing of elements as well as its sonic features. Ever since, almost every synthesiser produced has taken the form of an all-in-one product that has a prominent keyboard at the front, with two partially visible wheels to its left, and an array of knobs or sliders behind it that seems designed to intimidate the newcomer to the world of synthesis.

While the knobs or sliders can be used to intricately craft subtle nuances of the synthesiser's sound in painstaking ways, the two wheels to the immediate left of the keyboard are kept close to the…