|
Channel111
|
read my profile
sign my guestbook
Name: Roy
Gender: Male
Interests: EV ER EE THINGGGG!
Expertise: Channeling, cleaning parking lots, herbal medicine, conversation, making peace
Occupation: Cleaning parking lots at night
Industry: Ohh, I am quite industrious or
Message: message me
Website: visit my website
Member Since:
4/12/2007
|
|
| Right now that's what I feel like, eyes bugging and just wishing that I had a lit stoge in my mouth. It's 18 hours since I said  I was quitting, and up until the last hour it's not been too bad. I feel extremely agitated.....in waves. I'll get all wired and anxious, then it'll ease back for a while. Kind of like the pressure ya feel when you have to take a shit and you can't, eventually it leaves you alone.
One thing which has driven me crazy over the years are the number of books and websites and people who tell me that there is no real nicotine addiction, that the bad things I feel (like right now) are anxiety / stress symptoms that my back brain produces in an effort to get me to light one up - in other words, nicotine withdrawal, if there is such a thing, is very mild. To which I say, bullshit.
I think that the older literature which indicated that tobacco is a very addictive thing is correct, there is enough evidence that nicotine withdrawal causes lot of fun histiminic reactions in the body - something the back brain "could do" (conceivably) but for which strong direct evidence is lacking. The argument that the back brain causes the symptoms one experiences while quitting are thus largely philosophical and have little evidential basis.
And I am not happy this morning.
| | |
| 
I suppose that I give enough evidence in the things that I post that would give me away as something of a n00b to the Internet. I got my first computer in April 2005, and so what? But I'm 61 fer chrissakes. I used to joke about how I'd successfully avoided having a PC for years, but now if I were capable of kicking myself, I would. At the same time, I got on line at a time when Windows XP had settled down unto being a reliable OS, there was a sharp rise in open-source software and MySpace had enjoyed its first year as a mega-social networking site. (Yes, I still have one) (Not four, like we used to) Generally my days of social networking are done except for here, YouTube and a new art site called iPernity.
However I came across something a few months ago whilst looking for some thing else, and what I'd found was totally new to me. I found a chan. I think it was 1024 chan, which is one of the bigger and more diverse chans. No-one has written a history of the chans, which is a shame. There is a Wiki which tells something of one of the oldest chans, 2Chan:
Futaba Channel was set up on August 30, 2001, as a refuge for 2channel users when 2channel was in danger of shutting down.[citation needed] The 4chan image sharing site is based on Futaba.[1] Futaba Channel consists of about 60 imageboards (three of which are oekaki boards) and about 40 message boards, with topics ranging from daily personal problems to junk food, sports, ramen, and pornography. There is also a place to upload general non-image files. Futaba is powered by a custom script based on GazouBBS. The Futaba script is open source and is used to run many Japanese imageboards. The boards are, like many Asian forums, anonymous, with an optional tripcode system also in place. Users are generally expected to lurk before posting, in order to understand the culture they are entering. Anonymity is considered a good thing; users who go out of their way to identify themselves are often ridiculed. Futaba has spawned a number of strange visual gags and characters; the OS-tans would be one such meme that has spread to western internet culture. Some of the characters that appear on Futaba Channel have entered the real world in the form of various real-life goods, such as figures, dolls or images printed on pillows. Such items are mainly produced by Japanese dōjin artists and groups. Internet users outside of Japan are not allowed to post on Futaba Channel, to try to save on both bandwidth and avoid foreign DDoS attacks. Other imageboards have been created outside of Japan based on the Futaba style of imageboard, most notably in the United States, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Russia. The largest English-speaking Futaba clone is 4chan. Non-Japanese Internet users sometimes refer to Futaba Channel as 2chan, due to the address of the site. It is frequently unclear whether this is intended to mean Futaba Channel or 2channel, and sometimes it even refers to both, as if they were a single website. To eliminate confusion, the names Futaba and 2Channel are sometimes used. (Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Futaba_Channel )
The above-named 4Chan is roughly six years old and is probably the best-known non-Japanese chan. A visit will quickly enlighten one as to the nature of "chan culture;" most of it is vile, juvenile, pornographic and at times, possibly the most vicious when it comes to flaming comments and responses to posts people make. A couple of years ago when Boxxy made her appearance on YouTube, her video was quickly taken up by 4Channers and made into a small cult; however, there are as many people who loathe Boxxy as love her, and there was a massive DDoS attack on the site. There is a second personality who appears on a lot of the Chans, a girl named Stephanie who is known for her magenta hair. And this deserves a separate paragraph.
Stephanie's story is set in Lazytown, a place where no-on exercises or takes care of their health. She eventually meets Sportacus, an adult who exercises regularly. Together they go about getting people to exercise and to take care of their health. The sets of Lazytown are more than a bit surreal, as a quick watch of many of the YouTube videos of Stephanie will attest (try this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=01UAkv-tr9k ) There is of course a website: http://www.lazytown.com/Default.aspx and it is a moneymaker for the company that featured the Lazytown program.
Stephanie's appearance on the chans is an example of the ingenuous perversity of the people who post on them. Bear in mind that she was nine when the Lazytown project began, but it didn't take long for channers to totally divert her images into things far less savory than most parents would ever allow their kids to watch. But this is the nature of the chan environment as a whole. It could easily be said that the chans as a whole bring out the very worst in people, or are appealing to the lowest common denominator of human beings. There are times when I would agree wholeheartedly with this view, but my feeling is, there is something going on that bears close watching when it comes to them. The Internet was originally a total free-for-all once things like NetScape and Google appeared, and it didn't take long before a goodly portion of the material you could find on line is pornography. The once-mighty Usenet, which once hosted millions of discussions on subjects all kinds, has become the world's largest repository of porn. AOL at last I heard will not link to anything connected with Usenet or any of its clones, MyUseNet or Xusenet. As governments worldwide attempt to impose censorship on pornography on the Internet, it is on the chans that they are faced with a losing battle, and all I can say is, Huzzah! Censorship of pornography today WILL lead to censorship of our rights to free speech tomorrow, it is the way of the largely-US lead movement to control people in any manner that they can. And that is something I will NOT tolerate.
| | |
| Several months ago our previous computer, Old Sparky # 9 went belly-up due to the lithium battery dying long before it should have. It took the hard drive and the CPU with it and in so doing, we lost roughly 35 GB of music which we'd been collecting over the previous three years. Much of this was gotten from CDs that I had bought; we copied them and I retagged them to keep that stupid Windows Media Player from cluttering up the computer with album art and other non-essentails. I mean really, who da fuck is gonna take the time to rate several thousand songs, as the WMP invites you to do? Maybe some nine-year-old kid, but not me.
Anyway, we had sent a goodly number of songs to people over the 16 months previous to Sparky's last demise, and we use Gmail; so yesterday I spent about three hours going through "sent mail" and downloading stuff that would be pretty hard to get again. I had long since sold the CDs which I'd bought from about 1999 to 2006, so that was no longer an option. Also, Sara had been working on a monstrous album of her own music, there were dozens of little songs which she'd created mostly using Audacity; except for a few samples which we'd sent to people, all 3 GB of that is gone as well.
At the end of the day we found that we'd retrieved about 100 songs with perhaps another 30 - 40 to go; of those retrieved there were about 10 that either Sara or I had made. So I spent a few hours making sure that they were all properly tagged, which we now do with an audio editor which we bought called AVS4You. It has most of the capabilities of Audacity. For some reason, we can't get Audacity to work on this PC, it won't hook up with the LAMEmp3 encoder, so for now, we're working with what we have.    
| | |
|         Ah, the joys of living in New Jersey! Perhaps it is my lack of having spent extensive time in other parts of America, but based upon where I have been and what I've seen, New Jersey has THE most psychotic drivers in the nation. I see this in the hours between six and eight ayem as people scramble to get to work or to get the little bastards to school. Virtually everyone behind a steering wheel has left sanity and caution at home; virtually every one of these beknighted fools will drive fifty to sixty miles an hour in twenty-five-mile-an hour zones in an effort to beat a traffic light or to merely get ahead of whoever is in front of them. Very few people use turn signals; quite a number of these so-called drivers will run stop signs, red lights and have no qualms about going the wrong way on one way streets. Should you be foolhardy enough to get onto an Interstate highway, people will be driving between eighty and one hundred miles an hour. Where are the state troopers? Hiding, if they have any common sense! To be fair to the brothers in blue, though, they do spend considerable time pulling over the very worst of the speeders and careless drivers who cross their path. And this is when they aren't disentangling cars and bodies from multi-vehicle disasters. One night about five months ago I saw seven separate accidents along Interstate 80 westbound; each involved quite a few cars and in two instances, buses and trucks. As I had to return more or less the way that I'd come, I took a different road, thinking that I would avoid the congestion the afore-mentioned seven pile-ups had caused. Ah, silly old hippie! On this highway there had been three MORE accidents and traffic was being diverted to side streets. We were moving slowly enough that I was able to talk with one police officer for a few moments; he described the situation as "another god damned bloodbath." He was visibly upset and I had to move on.
A lot of people piss and moan about "the cops," but it's convenient to forget that if old Missus Johnson hasn't been seen for ten days and there's a stench coming out from under her door, it's always a policeman who has to go in to see just how badly she's decomposed. It's also the police who have to scrape up the remnants of people who drank and wound up smeared all over a bridge abutment; the police who have to break into the midst of a "domestic violence" occurence, meaning, when a husband has gotten drunk and beaten his wife or raped his children. To me, the police are like the barrel of apples analogy: one or two SOBs will make the whole profession look bad, which is a shame. During the late 1960s the police generally made my life miserable because I had long hair and dressed funny, so for a long time I held a blanket grudge against them. But this sweeping job that I have threw me out there for the whole night, on into the morning hours, and it was often that the only people I'd see and talk to were those officers who'd stopped to pick up a roll and coffee and maybe the morning paper. I learned that most of them are really decent people, bordering on selfless (as opposed to selfish); good humored, patient. Why do people join the police force? There are a few who have the misguided notion that they are gonna outdo Dick Tracy in catching crooks, but the majority of the women and men I've spoken to over the last twenty years became cops to give back to community in which they live.
| | |
| It's good to be posting about nothing in particular again, although I did have a couple of dreams a couple of days ago. Both involved women I've loved in the past, one I can't name and the other is my last mortal girlfriend. The one I'm not going to name, well, I've said any number of times that when I was younger I was a total bastard to people at times and I was terribly awfully so to this lady. It was something I'd done, something that hurt her and ultimately hurt me for my unwillingness to admit it. What is worse is that we still see each other once in a blue and the emotional bond is still there. Soooo, in this dream she and I were in a room with "some guy" whose face is lost to the general vagueness of dreaming. I can't even recall the context, what was going on, but she was standing by me and was crying; the guy had become pushy (apparently) about something about our long relationship, and she was holding back. Quietly I said, "Tell him. Tell him everything." She looked at me and repeated, "Everything?" I nodded. And again, there is the vagueness of dreaming here, but she told him "everything," everything about the wrong I'd done her, and in those weird moments of dream-life it was as if the telling had freed us up from a terrible thing in the past. She hugged me. The second dream involved a kind of running process in my dreams as a whole, where I am trying to get "home." This has been an ongoing theme for many years now, I recall having had them when I was in my late teens. Again, there is vagueness; all that I really recall is the end of the dream, where I was on a grassy hill; there was a red door that led into an underground chamber within the hill and I went inside. The interior was a mad amalgam of a number of places where I'd lived, but the overall atmosphere was very much like Das Kobaldhaven, the underground warehouse that I lived in for a number of years - only it had windows! And waiting for me with a smile was the Other, my late last girlfriend, and we embraced in a sweet hug - thus ending a brief if marvelous dream. 
| | |
|
