I had a dream last night, and I had to write it down. It’s sort of complicated. What was weird was it’s dream-within-a-dream recursion, a fake-world created entirely by those inhabiting it, who journey there from the real world, which itself may not be real. Or is it? Teasing logic like that permeated the whole thing, and I only barely understood it myself.
There was dinosaur wrestling. And pet tigers. I should speak about that. I dream things like that a lot. Rarely does it make sense, but it made a lot of sense last night. I wrote four pages this morning, and in the process I figured out how to write the story—I think. I’ve never written a choose-your-own-adventure story of any length, and I think I wrote the last one when I was four. I wouldn’t know where to start. I suppose I could start at the beginning.
It’s harder than it sounds.
I had a lovely birthday. Thanks, guys. You called me on a cold pier as the sun was setting. You called me as I was trying to navigate a radioactive abandoned Navy base. You wished me health, prosperity and success in your studies (even though I don’t have any studies… but thanks anyways). Some made me cake, and damned good cake at that, cake that wasn’t even choco-nutty-poke. Some of you even let me call into work sick with a “head cold,” whatever that is. Twenty-four. I don’t feel the need to look up the number on Wikipedia this year. Just wanted to say:
Thanks.
How many tabs do you have open? No, go check now.
How many of those are things that you’re going to read? Blogs, Wikipedia articles, things linked from friends, searches for places or people or events you heard about somewhere, information of every thinkable sort. There’s a lot of it to be had. When tabbed web browsing was first introduced in the MultiZilla extension for Mozilla browsers in April of 2001, the 21st-century web browser—both the program and the person using it—came of age. A web program that can only view a single website in a single window at a time is ideal for modem connections, who can’t handle much else. Well, tabbed browsing evolved for everyone with something better. Even Microsoft eventually figured that one out (right now we’re all glaring at you, IE7 users). I blame the epidemic of neglected tabs and… well, neglected tasks in this country on these developments. There’s now too much information out there for us to handle with ease. In the interests of full disclosure, I am very familiar with this tab/information overload. I suppose that’s why LifeHacker evolved.
Recently I stopped doing some of these things. Well, I stopped doing them for isolated 30-60 minute periods during my day. There’s a thing I discovered called I-Doser that I started experimenting with, and it’s a stimulating break from much of the stimulation. It’s based on binaural beats that are designed to affect the mind, so that you’re on drugs. Pretty much. You know, drugs? I’ve had some experience in the past working with binaural beats, starting with CoolEdit in 1998 and then Brainwave Generator in 2003. For those who don’t care about those last two factoids, they weren’t for you… they were to prove my cred to those in the know. To those not in the know, allow me to explain why this whole thing isn’t as stupid as it sounds.
It’s based on our lovely hominid brain structure. Two sides of the brain, each synced with the other; two sides receiving signals from the different sides of the body. They sync up with each other at regular intervals, depending on what state you’re in and how active your brain is. Solving math problems is Beta, pretty high at maybe 30-40 cycles/second. Normal operation might be between 15&20 Hertz. A light siesta would be Alpha about 11-8 Hz, and then—my favorite—Theta, where dreams and daydreams happen, ideally about 6-3.5 Hz, where the world slows down and external awareness nearly drops away. Then of course there’s Gamma, where external awareness does drop away and people like me tend to snore. It happens. The odd thing is that at any given time we have an eternally variable state, where all four co-exist. The brain’s internal communication is itself communicating on different levels. Weird that such a thing needs to be, no?
But back to the drugs, anyways. The idea behind brainwaves is simple and that is that if you can stimulate only one side of the brain (by stimulating one side of the body—like one ear, one eye) and signal the left and right at a specific pulse, eventually the brain can sync up and replicate the pulse. 6Hz dreamstate? Voilà, an enchanting 6Hz pattern. I-Doser takes this notion up a conceptual notch and presumes “well, if you could read a brain and see what kind of state it’s in, and then replicate that, couldn’t you essentially copy that state/mood/outlook/disposition from one brain to another? Well, let’s try it! And then sort-of maybe market it to teenagers as a substitute for recreational drugs.”
That last little bit is my own personal “disposition” on account of what I think of some of the descriptions on their webstore. Sure, I tried Peyote. I liked it. I maybe got some pleasant visuals and felt a bit out of it for the next hour, but possibly nothing that couldn’t be accomplished by a dose of lying quietly awake but with eyes closed, thinking intently of what kind of experience I was having. Who’s to say? Ultimately, that’s the reason this sort of thing is legal (and is going to stay legal, for the foreseeable future), is that the brain has a choice. You aren’t hypnotized, although it’s a little like it… one cannot make a hypnotized person do anything they have a moral objection to, nor to put themselves in bodily harm. Once something, like, say, Cocaine is inside you, your body pretty much has to deal with it till it’s processed. If I wanted to, I could take off the headphones any time. Or the browser too. Really.
Sometimes I just don’t want to.
photo credit to Inju, casamanita and Drunken Monkey on Flickr
A long while back, way in April 2004, I made a school project to impress a girl. +20 Dork points.
Good news and bad news about the outcome: it totally worked, she and everyone present thought it was a masterpiece. Even better, afterwards she wanted to get the software I used. From me. Bow-chicka-wow. Bad news: when I met her in the library, I acted the total dork-azoid. Had it not been for the timely appearance of my good friend Emily, I am certain I would have tumbled headfirst-chairlast into a piece of abstract art. Bad abstract art. Thankfully, Emily also gave us the topic of couples with matching hair (she and her dood both sported Pepé le Pew styles at the time—neither knew of the other’s current look until they first met—aww). The nervous klutz-ass factor, despite the presence of awesome friends, and combined with the fact the software later might’ve got that girl a virus (oops)… all of them accounted for why I didn’t do so well that season.
But that’s alright. I later learned on some pseudo-date with her roommate that she was a massive sto-o-oner rivaling Tommy Chong. Some things aren’t meant to be. Now that is hearsay and if you’re reading this, business major Maria T., you do have a chance to defend yourself. What totally reasonable explanation can you think of that we shouldn’t have worked out, other than the fact I acted like a doofus (the bad kind)? Cause that doesn’t count.
At least I got a movie out of it. It is what those involved in online, remix and collage culture might call a “mashup,” and what my parents might call “pretty neat.” Normal people might call it “putting the sound from one thing with the video from something else.” Your pick. Samples include:
That’s all I have to say on that. I didn’t get the girl, but I did get the A+. Go figure.
I just created a new category, “Smartglot,” for all the thought-piece writings that I tend to be proud about and that tend to be forgotten. Also, it gives me more of an excuse to write throwaway posts about junk that’s happening at the moment. Just saying. There’s also the semantic and also highly unimportant addition of the Stuff-n-Glot category, which is broken down into audio and video/pictures. I was also try to install a word-meter that will show the amount of words written since a certain date (no reason here given for such an addition) but that has yet to be worked out. Thanks, ProgressFly—how many fields do you want in your table, anyways? Why must I ask casual readers in SQL jargon? Wouldn’t it be better simply to ask on a proper forum?
As they say, Content is King. Maybe tomorrow I’ll actually have some of that. But really, who says that but douchebags? I’m not gonna say that. Come back tomorrow.