He a dude that likes to play with reflective spheres on checkered planes. Cool guy :)

It’s trippy, I love it

Hmm, it could be good. Thanks for the recommendation 👍🏻

This post is a good place to remind everyone who likes zombie flicks to watch Fido (2006).

Yikes :S They didn’t do that to me, but they did ‘correct’ my left-handedness in preschool. I’m now only slightly ambidextrous, but I did discover I can write with my left hand… backwards. It’s sloppy, but every stroke is a mirror image of what I write with my right hand…

Space rock via internet radio! Interesting and pleasant stuff if you like psychedelic music.

There’s always 5D Optical Data Storage, which might store data in glass for a long, long time. (It’s not really 5D; it’s composed of discrete nanostructures which have five attributes.) You would only have to write to a new disc every N billions of years.

9/11. My first thought when watching TV that day was ‘Bush did this’. Now maybe he did or maybe he didn’t, but it’s clear as day the US was just itching pass the Patriot Act and go to war. Every year since then has shown me this country’s government couldn’t give a shit about poor and downtrodden people in other countries. In fact, the US is doing the trodding, and the poor of this country are also in its sights.

At least we still have social programs here, which is good thing, but it feels like something left over from when more people cared.

I really, really wish the US would get the f out of the Middle East, stop arming Israel and begin making reparations. Unfortunately, those of us wanting peace tend to be meek (up to a point), which isn’t a bad thing. Meek people can be strong enough to build a more stabile society, but a lot of unfortunate things are going to have to take place first.

Wtf, something like that really happened: https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/tamir-rice-shooting-family-sued-over-unpaid-ambulance-bill-of-son-shot-dead-by-cleveland-police-a6866896.html

Lol, thanks saying what I was thinking. Generative AI seems good at disinfo and not much else.

Here’s a story for you: Poisoned trees gave a wealthy couple in Maine a killer ocean view. Residents wonder, at what cost?

TL;DR: it’s not worth it.

Ah, I need to get ahold of The Expanse.The TV shows were good, but they seemed to end right when something interesting was going to happen…

Hard science fiction: Red Mars, Green Mars, Blue Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. What would terraforming Mars be like?

Video games: the three Castlevania games for Gameboy Advance, and the three for Nindendo DS. Not trilogies per se, but they came in threes :)

Neighborhood cats have been coming inside and eating our cats’ food. There’s easy access to the house via the cat door. I don’t mind, the food they eat is cheap enough, but these are male cats and have been spraying here and there, maybe even inside the house… one at least is definitely spraying in a shed that won’t close properly.

I’m thinking of befriending them and taking them into the vet for a little ‘operation.’ There’s a local plan that neuters feral cats for free. I think it would help the entire neighborhood. Fewer fights and whatnot. Just need to make sure they don’t actually belong to someone first.

Oh, and a cat pissed in my backpack `:| Hopefully I got the scent out. But now I’m paranoid about everything I own, and unwilling to leave the house for too long…

Don’t drink alcohol with a mood disorder, It might seem ok for a while, but it’s totally not.

A funny thing I found out about dwelling on negative emotions like fear and guilt is that it never helped me become a better person. Quite the opposite. Only by facing my issues head-on and forgiving myself if/when I screw up do I actually make progress. (Some religions would have us look ‘outside’ ourselves for forgiveness, but that always places our spiritual wellbeing on some unknowable other.)

I’ve got one, if dreams count.

Twenty years ago I had a series of dreams in which I was told about the design and usage of Mind Control Technology. The tech worked like this: two microwave/radio signals were sent out, one directly to a receiver, and another passing through a brain and then to a receiver. By subtracting the unaltered signal from the one altered by a brain, a sort of ‘map’ could be derived. That map was then analyzed to find key areas of interest. Then, using patterns saved from that, a new microwave signal containing said patterns was sent out to the subject, the result being total control over their mind and actions.

I was first showed how it worked on a cat. They would make the cat playful, sedate, or mean and angry.

In another dream, I was just doing my own thing in a city. I passed by these strange, clear globes on street corners. There were also suspicious white vans driving around. Suddenly, the globes and vans emitted signals, and everyone just lost their minds, killing each other with whatever they had on hand! After a while of this, the survivors woke up, covered in blood and not knowing what had just taken place. I was somehow immune, possibly because I knew the mind control tech existed.

Other dreams were along the same lines: signals going out, people going crazy and waking back up later, and me unaffected by it.

Come to find out later that there’s a bit of truth to the initial dream. A man named José Delgado ran mind control experiments with animals (including cats!) using direct brain stimulation. And then there’s this patent, which was a shocker when I found it: Apparatus and method for remotely monitoring and altering brain waves

Do I believe all this is true and happening right now? Let’s just say I think it might be possible. To this day, whenever I hear abour a guy losing his mind and going on a killing spree, I wonder…

I have lots to say, but I won’t.

The best bet is do plenty of research and read trip reports. And don’t stop reading until you’ve heard about poor metabolizers and Olney’s Lesions (which might not be an issue, but evidently is for other dissos.) And then read some more :) Then you can make a somewhat informed decision about it…

I didn’t know it was called Lenia, but I have seen implementations of it here and there. It’s pretty cool that people have gotten it working, and I wonder what other totalistic cellular automata besides the Game of Life would look like when evaluated in a continuous manner.

The problem with making truly continuous CA is that we are using digital computers to do it, so we can only ever get an approximation of what a CCA would look like. I’ve seen just how big a difference 8 bit vs 16 bit values make, and I imagine that even though higher and higher bit depths would converge upon a truer model, issues will still persist. Plus, we are still stuck with using grids…

Not exactly about codebases, but I believe the universe operates like a cellular automaton (CA) at its most fundamental level. (Idea originally from Stephen Wolfram.)

A CA, if you don’t know, is a simulation in which a cell in a grid evaluates nearby cells and returns a value based on what it finds and the rules given to it. What happens next is called ‘emergent behavior’, and in some ways mimics physics and even primitive life. In fact, many physics models use CA already.

What this means to me is that there is ultimately only one type of energy/matter, and that everything we can detect (quarks, photons, atoms, etc.) is made from the same ‘stuff’, and that nothing is truly random… it’s just that we lack the tools and models to predict what happens below the smallest observable scale.