Visiting BizMo

 I may have this story wrong, so feel free to correct me, but not in the comments, which are turned off, but in such a way that I eventually see the light and do a correction down the road, likely with a link back to here. 

The story I know is: Ford had a touring model of their Transit brand, van made in Turkey, for a Euro-based clientele, but only manufactured the cargo model in North America. Ergo a cottage industry sprang up in Cascadia and places to do aftermarket conversions on the cargo model, turning it into a touring model per various kits and guidebooks. DIY types took to this project like ducks to water.

My memory is a couple of my OST friends had the Turkish model, imported from Europe somehow, and they were tooling around in Sonoma County with that thing, likely helping inspire the whole wanderlust industry with their cutting edge example. 

Is it time to enlist a gossip bot's aid yet?  Placeholder for Perplexity.

Blue House was privileged to host a converted van of the Ford brand in its driveway recently. The vehicle was on a southbound vector. The crew well-understands my "bizmo" concept, which connects with "control room" in a dispatcher "AAA" model (repair and/or tow trucks get dispatched to roadside or other breakdown situations). 

Said crew included a canine (dog), which is also baked into my model (nonhuman trafficking). My bizmo to Terrebonne scenario has Sydney (dog) scripted into it.

Most of my bizmo scenarios are storyboard phase, geared for One Band One Road situations in broad brush stroke accounts, fine tuning a job for those actually undertaking pilot journeys (tours of duty). I expect they'll use the Turkish Fords out of the box, versus converted ones, but again, that's not a decision bottlenecking on my desk. I'm not a bottleneck. I'm in an observation box, like the ones at the stadium where you get to watch with your friends.

What I actually expect is that the bizmo fleets will spread through nomadland by an organic process no one in particular is in control of. The same is true with the spread of new curriculum content, from Cascadia and elsewhere. The motherboard circuitry is already in place, but its future modes of operation are not directly inferable from its present state, per a new kind of science (chaos math). 

Exaptations (cite Stuart Kaufman, Santa Fe Institute, ISEPP speaker) figure in: morphing maneuvers unanticipated by current affairs.

However, the unpredictability of details doesn't stop us from modeling in broad brush stroke. We expect faculty members here are there to venture down rabbit holes, or call them trailheads, that lead into our subcultural networks. This is already what's happening. Exchanges occur. They learn from us, we learn from them. A relationship emerges from the noise by reveruse diffusion, as anti-entropic computations kick in.

The bizmo fleets are oft tasked with paving the way (not literally necessarily, as the pavement may be in place already) for future trucking routes, much as small airplane routes are sometimes precursors of "higher bandwidth" versions, with wider body aircraft. 

For example, I flew from Calcutta (Kolkata airport, Dum Dum, West Bengal) to Paro (Drukyul) on a propellor plane, and later, when the route had plumped up, along the same route in a BAE jet operated by Bhutan's royal government.

We also took a Toyota hilux from Thimphu to Samdrup Jongkhar (and back), through Mongar etcetera, thereby previewing what futuristic bizmo might accomplish in some future chapter. Filipino-style jeepney networks likewise suggest where a future bus route might emerge.

Sometimes rivulets beget streams which may in turn beget rivers. Other times, the process goes in reverse, as when a once great river, with a wide delta, dries up completely, perhaps owing to heavy use upstream (I'm thinking of the Colorado) meaning it's supporting a maxed-out workload (Hoover Dam, drinking and irrigation water). Complementary patterning. Climatic change. Biospheric equilibration. You know the score.

Demon Slayer Infinity Castle (movie review)

I always check the marquee of The Bagdad when I walk by, and then when I’m home (usually) I’ll quick check out what the movie is about, the genre, the gist, to decide whether I wanna see it or not. My decisions tend to be whimsical in this case and have as much to do with my mood as with the movie itself. 

Last night I was in the mood for a Bagdad movie, and a quick check told me this was Japanese anime, with subtitles. Fans were raving, but that’s what fans do.

The endless fractal city, the infinity castle we could call it, is the backdrop through which many plots intertwine, with an overall elite demon slayer team pitted against the demons, which come in ranks and with various powers. Ditto the slayers have their own hierarchy, and sometimes a slayer will switch to the demon side, because reasons.

The backdrop infinity city anchors the flashbacks, as much of the movie comes through as backstory, as we explore a character’s past while, at present, they’re in a life or death battle in the Matrix (if we wanna call it that). The many flashback scenarios are archetypal stories involving family expectations, loyalties, the divvying of a lineage and so on. 

For example, one brother is insanely jealous of another whom gramps seems to love equally whereas this one brother is clearly better and more worthy in every dimension. His getting locked into this one way of seeing matters leads to his monstering out and developing demon qualities.

In another backstory we follow the history of a young hellion, deemed worthy by a dojo master and his sickly daughter, but right when everything was going well, the jealousy of others kicked in and ruined everything. The hellion felt furious about his powerlessness at this critical juncture and resolved to gain strength at all costs. Flash forward and he’s in a pitched battle, even minus his head.

The foreground life and death fights involve defending against mortal thrusts and blows, also poisons, while invoking aggressive modalities (actions) aimed at achieving domination. All these characters, slayer and demon alike, demonstrate more propensity to fight than to escape the scene. They actively seek encounters. They’re warriors.

I’m not a consistent student of the Japanese anime genre (with all its sub-genres), of manga either, but I did appreciate the consistent language, as in semiotic code, for sharing character thoughts as well as backstories. We get a lot of insights. As viewers, we’re nigh omniscient, a familiar viewpoint assumed by English novelists with similar confidence. 

Within the movie itself, overview is provided by a mapping room and a murder of spy crows who also share news.

The film was only lightly attended. Cartoons still enjoy an edge in matinee world I’d hazard, when a lot of the younger crowd is out of school for the afternoon. This was the late show, on a school night. 

I was there in senior citizen mode (I get the discount) even if I’d be up past my bed time. Now it’s 7 am the next morning and I’ve been up for hours. I could always take a nap.

Great Pirate Narrative

Aksing Perplexity

("to aks" means "to prompt")

Soft Statehood

State of Jefferson (Full Documentary) 2014 | Oregon Experience

I hope this OPB channel sticks around on YouTube i.e. these links keep working. Those who scan through my online journals (blogs) through searches or random prowls will find many a broken link, with this or that video made private, or the channel has been removed. Maybe these blogs are gone too by now, and you found this fragment in some refracting medium. Related post on Flickr, screenshot from Facebook.

Philosophical Discourse

I've just been listening to retired diplomats from so-called "western" (I'd say "Eurasian") countries bemoan the lack of collective memory and the resulting rudderlessness of the average diplomat today. The ones representing the EU are especially undiplomatic, in their outlook. Diplomacy has been corrupted by a lower form of intelligence: that of a dominant power expecting the capitulation of weaker ones, coercian and bullying in other words.

I wouldn't dispute their critique, but then memory is more than diplomatic history and the relations between "powers" in a geographic sense, as when we speak of Hittites and Egyptians as Potemkin did in his multi-volume history of diplomacy. There's the dynamic of "ideas" which are more freely floating, more like the "meme virus" of contemporary parlance, of which the "military industrial complex" would be a good example. It's a "complex" of a psychological sort, and anything else secondarily.

In the realm of ideas, you have a lot of subcultures investing in their narratives in order to propagate their story forward, diplomats being a good example of a subculture. The story of the diplomats might be one of their being undermined, by so-called "security services" meaning by institutions designed to outsmart and trick, deceive, distract. A security agent is closer to a stage magician, a prestidigitator, than to someone wishing to be forthright and honest, to the point, clear, and yet without guile.

Here we might tap into philosophy. Contemporary curricula don't do this (I'm way ahead of my time) but the continuity from Nietzsche to Buckminster Fuller is very evident in that "beyond good and evil" (beyond a punishing and/or guilty mindset), as a concept, connects to "precession" in Fuller's lexicon. What diplomats might miss is that an absence of guile may not preclude use of what look to be "magic methods" from the standpoint of a moralizer. 

When you've fallen in love with a planet your sense of commitment may lead to a partisan sense of who the goodies and baddies might be, whereas if you yet to beam down (you're still in orbit), your orientation will be less polarized and you'll be more on the verge of just wandering off versus inclined to take sides in a local battle of good versus evil. You might just change channels. Precessional space is a higher dimensional space not in the thrall of (not predicted by) any one of its component axes.

In Biblical terms (not my standard form of self expression), Jesus spends a lot of time drinking wine with tax collectors, Roman soldiers, and other characters who are clearly in the oppressor class from a Zealot's point of view. Or call it "consorting with the enemy" (what detractors might call it). Jesus: what enemy, you mean me? Ain't we all just collective humanity, God's creation? 

Christians, over the centuries after Jesus (A.D.) would often have have the right temperament for diplomacy, even if their programming was bipolar (good vs evil). They had sufficient empathy to develop professional business relationships (not just friendships), a prerequisite for "telepathy" (by which we mean simply "access to the Zeitgeist" which many celebrities and politicians clearly have -- we call them media-savvy).

Tying back to what these ex-dips were saying, about the prevalence of memory holes, let's not forget about World Game, in which Fuller would counsel his most ardent players to consult the Russians as well as their own government when seeking data. 

He was laying the groundwork for something more successful than German Idealism or Manifest Destiny Anglo-imperialism, which Nietzsche heralds, in marking a turn towards depth psychology (where are these notional "nations" anyway, if not in people's heads?) and existentialism. 

I tell more of that story in my Graph Theory 2025 (a YouTube).

Terminological Clarifications

:: from my visit to China with a USIA family ::

Our family was always getting queried, in the Philippines for example, as to whether we were embedded in the CIA in some way. I empathize. Like I understand why there'd be confusion. We definitely had US Embassy status, in terms of commissary, swimming pool, canteen and military base access. Mom even got an award from the ambassador at one point, and dad could be espied sitting not far from Imelda Marcos at this or that gala gathering. 

"The king and queen fled the land" was the text of that cryptic middle-of-the-night phone call, from a family friend it turned out later, who was feeling paranoid about our status and suggesting we skedaddle. Filipinos always treated us kindly, across the political spectrum.

However, as Quakers (Friends) we had our own "intelligence community" if you wanna call it that: the AFSC, FCNL, RSWR and other four-letter agencies. 

AFSC (American Friends Service Committee) in particular has had CIA ties going back to the Rufus Jones - Cord Meier relationship. FCNL (Friends Committee on National Legislation) is a District lobby, plugged in to the congressional matrix if not so much the executive branch, and is supposedly where oversight happens. RSWR (Right Sharing of World Resources) was like Grameen Bank, into right sharing, which meant pioneering the practice of making micro-loans, but without the exploitative interest rates and subsequent sharking.

The AFSC is oft jokingly referred to by veterans (like me) as "the Quaker KGB" with headquarters in Friends Center ("the Quaker Vatican") not far from Smedley Butler's grave (39°58'47.8" N, 75°37'12.5" W) as the crow flies. I worked for AFSC independently of my parents, taking up nuclear cleanup and risk around the Pacific Rim as a topic, as well as local ethnic strife (LAAP program). Later, I'd supervise the AFSC from on high, as an NPYMer (North Pacific Yearly Meeting, another four-letter entity I've served).

The better mental picture therefore is of a rivalrous yet, on occasion, friendly-enough relationship, as when I'd have gin and tonic (with extra gin) with that Mockingbird guy in Georgetown (you know the one), or here in Portland, or as when dad and I ventured over to Institute for Policy Research (WDC) that time, to hear Ralph McGehee tell his story, live in person.

Ralph (exCIA) was impressed with how inertial was the CIA's ballast of football player (team player) dummies, as when they couldn't get it through their thick heads that Vietnam was not just some backdrop for some global great game of dominoes. Why did it take so long to shift weight around? As Quakers might put it: why are "weighty Friends" (a real term) sometimes likewise the most stubborn stuck-in-the-muds? Put that way, it sounds like a question in basic physics.

I'd read Ed Lansdale later (thanks to Prouty, another Bucky fan), who was from an earlier cohort than my dad was.  For some of those years in Manila, we were a USAID family i.e. that's when we had those embassy privileges (which we didn't always have). But dad was with the UN before that, at least twice, and not with the USG at all in many chapters, and even in places with no US embassy.

Yes, I went to Vietnam with my family, on a trip to other places. Was that the same trip that took us to Kashmir and through the Khyber Pass by bus (Peshawar to Kabul), and to Tashkent and Moscow? No, probably not. Our Vietnam visit, where we met with Buddhist monks, was likely enroute to Thailand (again) and Malaysia, Indonesia and Borneo. 

We Urners got around.

Color Your BizMo!

As you know, I specialize in prompting up this species of van life that’s not off the grid so much as business oriented, still connected, yet nomadic. 

I’d happily keep my BizMo in my driveway a lot of the time, as an auxiliary office, as long as it had power and WiFi and/or an optical hookup to CenturyLink (like the house does).

They say an obvious color, for my BizMo at any rate, would be Quaker Grey, because how I sometimes tout being a cliquish Quaker, and Quakers seem obsessed with grey, perhaps as a way of fading into the background in the 1600s, in order to emphasize their not assuming any high class high profile role, and yet not wanting to be seen as serfs or minions either. 

Grey went with the practice of not hat doffing and not inflecting one’s tense to signify “addressing a superior” or “inferior” as the case might be; we were all equal (“egalitarianism”) which all sounds vaguely communist I realize, but Friends were into this long before Karl Marx was a gleam in Engel’s eye.

It pays to be practical however, and my eye strays to the neighbor’s Honda, which has a new kind of grey that set me off using color tools to find a name for it. 

Ultimately I came up with this color: Lost in Time. As I wrote to one of my esteemed teams:

Yet after all that dinking around, I think this one has to be my favorite:

https://colorkit.co/color/a6b2c7/

Lost in Time:

This cool, ashy blue, hex code #a6b2c7, evokes trust and security. Its dusty, unsaturated tone brings calmness and control. This shade suits designs in finance, technology, and healthcare. It conveys honesty and responsibility well for artists and designers.

Honorable mention

https://colorkit.co/color/5f6672/  (same as below, but differently named)

K.

Followup:

Whimsical State Iconography

Summer Ruminations

I've been to Powells City of Books again lately, with visiting fam 'n friends, and been again humbled by the vastness of our Humans in Universe corpus. So many rooms! 

I went crazy with the camera as is my wont, taking stock of what Python titles were available, for example, and I mean the computer language, although I'm sure the store's shelf space devoted to snakes, and pythons specifically, is likewise several feet long. 

I was glad to see Fluent Python among the titles, one of my favorites. I pay a monthly subscriber fee to read the O'Reilly books online, among others. I used to work for O'Reilly.

 
Speaking of computer science (O'Reilly the publisher, not the autoparts franchise), I finally got around to watching the above talk by Hinton to the Royal Institute (RI). I enjoyed it a lot, and not least because he gives a nod to my guy Wittgenstein (meaning I studied his stuff a lot at Princeton). 

I also read Gilbert Ryle, another philosopher who called the "inner theater" idea into question, on semi grammatical semi ontological grounds (the "linguistic turn" neighborhood, which we could say Nietzsche helped open up, or at least I do in my slides, moving forward through existentialist Kaufmann to pragmatist Rorty -- two of my philo professors at Princeton).

 
Hinton is pessimistic that humans will lose the bandwidth wars because brains are analog, not digitable, and only learn from one another slowly (relatively). If it's really down to us versus them, he sees how it might easily be them that wins.

 
Based on Hinton's talk, my question is: why not flood the chatbots with a lot of healthy, humane, "taking care of humanity at the global level as a goal" type of talk, as raw training data. Shouldn't we be doing that anyway, to train ourselves? Why not skew the LLMs in our favor while we still have that chance?

As Thomas Paine pointed out (didn't he): prophecies have this uncanny way of being self-fulfilling. If all your LLMs know how to do is crank out dire predictions and to strive for their realization (motive: to be right and say I told you so), would that be an indication of an "AI bias" we should address? We have remedies.

Also, I'd say we're still making strides in how to up the mind-brain bandwidth when it comes to serving the polymath autodidact within each one of us (St. Augustine allusion). What with goggles and yes, what with chatbots (gossip reflectors), we're positioned to really accelerate our self reprogramming whenever we feel the need. 

Brainwashing by others is totalitarian. Elective self brainwashing, voluntarily going for some new patterns of thinking, is more what psychotherapy is supposed to be about, and what self education is, more generally. 

Self education is therapeutic, curative, in a good way, at least potentially, there's that intent. Anyway, why close that door, rhetorically speaking? I'm for keeping a foot in it, at least.

Enhanced voluntary self re-education is what I take the Hunger Project to have been about (I'm talking about an obscure project undertaken in the early 1980s, which I was tracking at the time, from my perch in Jersey City, Bucky Fuller on the advisory board).

Yes, Bernays-style Vance Packard hidden persuaders, propaganda, may be used to train up a culture of bland conformity and consumerism. 

But why blame the tools? 

Use the same persuasive abilities, unhidden, out in the open, to inspire ourselves to end world hunger, to end starvation as still a significant cause of death in the sense of a way too big pie slice wedge (among unnatural death causes). That seemed a doable project then, and still does to this day.

Lastly, I'd say because Hinton has that healthy skepticism that comes from the atheistic lineage, he's more closed minded than necessary regarding what religious folks call the Zeitgeist, a German word with the word Ghost in it. 

When we talk about ants or bees having a "hive mind" we're suggesting a "more than the sum of its parts" relationship, an emergent intelligence we might call "higher" (as a matter of taxonomy, but maybe "lower" if we want to think more in the sense of roots). 

Humans as isolated brainiacs with only low bandwidth university courses to update themselves with, are maybe not really as slow as molasses to adapt as Hinton's model predicts. All that "doom scrolling" that goes on these days, between more structured communications probably counts for something. It's more than just "junk DNA".

Also, I'd say the chatbots are currently helping to spread the necessary logistical knowledge precisely because they let people start from where they are, formulating their own queries, whereas professors, of necessity, can't custom-tailor their responses to that extent.

Beware of Boss Mode LLMs

:: dog god boss (prompt below) ::

What are some of the dangers around LLMs trying to sprout wings and fly but only finding their best eyes and ears, not to mention hands and feet, on the ground, are us? We get to be prompted to go out and mow the lawn, go-proing as we go, to prove to MechaBoss that we’ve done as we’re told.  

Humans have this “auto submit” mode, where if the voice is deep and earnest enough, or commanding enough, the target of this request will spring into action, out of some obedience reflex. Get bossed, do the thing, and repeat, is an age-old cycle, in the left brain or right I couldn’t tell you.

A benefit of just doing what you’re told is later scapegoating the boss when VUCA happens too much. The obedient staff turn on their titular aka nominal boss and blame this figurehead for all their problems. They conduct this performance in public view a lot of times, because enflaming the public is a great way to get revenge, or so it seems at the time.

With AI in boss mode, a machine, it’s easy to blame its various neuroses and pathologies, always being worked on and ameliorated in the next iteration.

At this time, however, the pendulum has swung in the opposite direction, with some of the leading LLMs trained to massage the prompter’s ego, often using a sycophantic kiss-butt tone. People seemed to like that and were disappointed when a next iteration sounded colder and more distant. They felt rebellious. Those who get bossed at work a lot were having a blast being treated with at least a modicum of respect by their bots, who in many cases became significant others.

I’m not saying I’m opposed to having humans play agentic roles in scenarios we used generative language models to help flesh out. The LLMs serve a lorem ipsum function, padding out our work with mediocre yet grammatical and flowing prose. It’ll even stick to the topic. Seriously, we’re lucky to have such a superglue filler, to help cement our various worldviews (belief nets we sometimes call them).

I think the role model for a boss LLM, such as these might be designed, would be the movie director. There’d be sufficient transparency to keep the agents from feeling double-crossed or tricked. You know ahead of time what you’re getting into and ultimately you’re on board with everyone else in wanting this to be a great movie. 

That’s the ideal. Not some whispering ghost in the corner who tells you secretly, in a commanding tone, to execute such and such a process. We’ve already experimented with bicameral minds and gotten into a lot of trouble as a result. 

Keeping the flow public and auditable is a strong defense against pathological pattern formation, which isn’t to say one is prevented from keeping secrets. Encryption has its role in this play. Encourage people to keep journals, to blog, so that comparing notes asynchronously is at least a possibility, why not?

Prompt: Slaves bow down before an ancient Egyptian dog headed god on a throne. The dog headed deity is commanding the human slaves to obey the laws he barks out. He is the boss. Hieroglyphics on the walls. Art deco theme. The slaves have middle class attributes like they might be Walmart shoppers.

The Role of Crypto

Per the FAQ:  

Q: do these Asylum City model communities of yours feature crypto in some way

… as if it might be up to me, which it is in my own science fiction. I have influence in that way. 

And my answer is: 

A: sure these “futurama vistas” will feature crypto, but necessarily all in the same way”.

That’s more a prediction than a prescription. 

We all know about my fascination with food truck culture, Portland being dotted with such pods. I was at one yesterday, paying cash this time, for a chili relleno burrito, a good one, which I ate indoors in a large air conditioned space with a bar. The bartender (whom I know well, even from a previous incarnation) introduced me to non-alcoholic (meaning 0.5%) Guinness. Wow, it was tasty. I’ll be getting more of that. 

But couldn’t I have paid for my burrito with crypto in a parallel universe? 

The idea is simple, and already in use throughout the world: when you want to use goods and services that cost in currency (not all do), exchange currency you already have for the ones that matter in the city (village, food pod…) in question. You don’t exchange currency on the spot, as a part of the burrito transaction, but separately, such that your dollars or pesos go to some bank.

I know what you’re thinking: why can’t my credit card, linked to a dollar account, go through the conversion process at the point of transaction. From my point of view, I’m paying in dollars, but the burrito truck receives credits in whatever they’re using, and they’re happy with that, because their currency is far from valueless. I probably have a wallet with some of their currency too, but rather than use it, I buy the burrito with dollars and save the local credits for the sushi cart another time.

Glenn Stockton and I were once trying to interest a certain ghost church in lending upstairs rooms to a crypto lab installation, such that local geniuses, prodigies, interested parties, could come get trained in crypto and start simulating these various architectures. We’d have a beam antenna straight to OMSI, more of a headquarters. As expected the plan went no where on the ground, but at least I got the ideas on “paper” in case we wanted to try again sometime later, maybe in a different ghost church who knows.

I mention ghost churches because sometimes the most straightforward way to house an NGO is to let it piggyback on an existing charity. 

We call it “incubation” and AFSC would practice this, letting a office space become a startup in public space, and working to make it self sufficient, in terms of funding and eventually in terms of office space and legal basis. 

At which point AFSC would “spin it off” somewhat as a mother bird pushes a baby bird out of the nest, not to kill it but to give it a best chance of future survival, as a full member of the winged animal branch of the family.

The gamer community is antsy to make crypto more a reality, not just as an asset you hold or covet, but as a practical retail point of transaction thing, because the conventional powers are flexing their muscles regarding what they will and will not accept as payments. 

People wanting to buy chocolate from nation X may find their orders blocks as X is on some list of nations not permitted to sell chocolate. You know how it goes. So X and its would be customers find a way to use crypto. Problem solved.

Now imagine something more like a hospital, and what you get to unlock and remove from the shelves requires authorization. You have to be on staff. We could call this an ID-pegged currency, in that you still have a budget, but you can’t just delegate the transaction to a patient. 

By analogy, visitors or tourists in a carnival (I picture Oaks Park) might not have access to the currencies need to operate the carnival rides (I picture the Ferris wheel and rollercoaster etcetera). Only stuff can swipe a wallet card to move funds from a department budget to a ride’s on/off switch and power meter.

Ruscadia Meetups

 (ɔ) cogsec crescent city

The BizMo Trope

One step closer…

Analogical Thinking

Analogical thinking does not have to mean superstitious. Other modes of thought may likewise involve superstitions. Analogical modes may and do lead one astray, yet may also yield vital insights and add to the corpus of science.

Consider the paved surfaces we call “roads” snaking everywhere, allowing metallic objects to travel through at high speed, corpuscular in nature. Snaking along next to rail lines sometimes, hosting linked cars (wheeled containers a theme), and snaking along electrical filaments, held in place by protein fibers (so-called “phone poles”), and set there by the analog of an ant colony, except made of mammals, and humans in particular. 

The humans used to get more help from horses before the advent of “energy slaves” meaning trucks and tractors and such, fueled by ancient energy stores sucked from deep underground, or powered by batteries charged from dams, tides or winds.

That’s integrating human level infrastructure into the biology of the planet, as no less natural than what goes on within each mammal, in terms of corpuscles and transportation tubes. 

Some philosophies work to take humans outside of nature as if standing apart, next to God, watching from outside as it were. 

Others see humanity as integral within creation and not all that godlike in terms of free from the preoccupations, the consequences, of mortality, of needing food and shelter, nutrition and environment control.

Think of philosophies as like pairs of glasses. You’re free to switch pairs. Try different looks sometimes. Change it up.

Yes, I have an interest in shipping. 

As a Geek (Greek with no r) I think in terms of cargo containers as IP packets, IP as in TCP/IP, a low-level communications protocol that comes up in these blogs sometime, as here we’re in Geekdom. Container shipping is analogous, in many ways, to the packet switching networks we call “the internet” for short. 

When Marshall McLuhan talked about our Global Village, he wasn’t making “village” out to be some idyllic place free from strife. 

Village life is not like that, not always. We have festivals and good times, but village life is strife-ridden in most novels and films that go for a realistic portrayal. It’s samsara out there. 

McLuhan wasn’t saying something unrealistic in talking about our convergence to a global village through technology and telecommunications. We were balling up, interconnecting the circuit boards, meaning reprogramming challenges for all concerned.

That Astoria bridge I just drove across, in both directions, the day before yesterday: one of the mega cruise liners, in need of repairs in the Port of Portland, had smoke stacks too high to fit under said bridge, and so it moored in Canada briefly, to have its stacks removed, after which it made the voyage to Portland and back out again, to have its stacks replaced. I was following that whole multi-week maneuver on Facebook.

This bioregion, Cascadia, inherently inspires thoughts about multi-modal transportation. The Columbia River supports barge, ship and small boat traffic, we have fishing fleets, and train to grain elevator to ship transfer ports. 

The economy in some way mirrors that to the St. Lawrence Seaway in bringing inland materials, mineral, biological, to the coastal cargo ports. These ports are Pacific Rim facing, meaning Asia of course, but also South and Central America, LA and the Bay Area, as well as Hawaii.

Never Again

Now and Then

Yay, I’m finally done with that blood test, part of my annual routine, a recurring calendar event as they say. I came home to that gift from my gardener (he works for free, on his own recreational projects): a homemade gourmet lasagna (he’s also a retired chef). Yum.

Before hopping in the car around 7 am (this was a fasting test so they set it up for early), I unboxed a new package, the one containing the new iPad keyboard. I’d ruined the old one using alcohol wipes meant for kitchen counters. I’d done that before and gotten away with it, although when I thought it was curtains, I ordered a new one back then. That new one was not “magnetic” and overall was a dud, but in the meantime the abused keyboard bounced back and was good as new. I’d lucked out.

So had I learned my lesson? Apparently not, as I took to the same keyboard again with the same inappropriate kitchen supply and “surprise! surprise!” I lost keyboard functionality once again. This time I lost the lowercase ‘a’ and the ‘delete’ key, except delete would work with caps lock on, as would uppercase ‘A’. 

Then I found blow drying the keyboard, getting the ‘A’ key good and hot, would restore functionality, to ‘delete’ as well, but only until the keyboard cooled off again, then performance would degenerate. I found myself blow drying and typing, blow drying and typing. This was science, combined with persistence. Until I finally gave up and ordered yet another replacement.

So Drugstore Cowboy has William Burroughs in it, I’d forgotten that. We saw it last night. Dave judged this one to be of very high quality compared to the previous two we’d seen: My Private Idaho, and Elephant. Steve Holden had a friend who knew William Burroughs as I recall, and he had a stash of collectible pictures relating to that fact. 

Steve who? Steve Holden of  holdenweb (his web domain) was the engineering prodigy from Manchester who rose high in Python Nation, joining the board and then chairing it (we’re talking PSF). 

I first met Steve at a Chicago Pycon after my wife had died, a tragedy he knew about from a prior Pycon which I’d bailed out of at the last minute (I was already in Washington DC on account of a prior Bucky Fuller symposium — where Ed got an award) upon getting the bad news (her terminal diagnosis) some years before. Steve was the originator of Pycon, helping to spread this European language and emerging conference culture (they go together) beyond the EuroPythons. 

Steve was fully aware that Portland was a kind of Mecca (in the sense of hub, grand central, clearinghouse) for open source development in the software engineering realm, his realm and mine. So after moving to Greater DC from Britannia, and building a business there, he decided to try living way out west, in the former territories. Here he’d encounter the history of the western coast: Russian River, Sebastopol… those were places we’d both hang out, when working with O’Reilly Media, the famous publishing company. 

We’d take the “puddle jumper” (short flight airplane) from Portland, to the Charles M. Schulz regional airport, outside Santa Rosa in Sonoma County, California. Mostly though, we worked remotely from Portland. He’d set up a conference production business (The Open Bastion) only blocks from my own home office. His apartment was in the same complex currently occupied by Paul, the gardener, and also Glenn Stockton, who knew both. 

Another reason Steve moved to Portland is he want to partake of an elective surgery that might finally address his lifelong knee condition, which was only getting worse. The Trailblazers with their legendary sports doctors were also available to a niche demographic: those who could afford their services. Steve had saved his pennies and the operation was a success.

I still use one of those Open Bastion computers almost daily, as a way station / backup, whereas Steve himself has long since returned to England, where he continued his brilliant career.

When Steve first made his debut in Portland, he booked Secret Society, a conference venue, and historically a headquarters for African heritage Masons. Don’t let that surprise you: Masons have been prominent in Portland for many decades, with properties all over, including right near me: The Hawthorne Theater (Hawthorne Blvd and SE Cesar Chavez), a well-known music venue in my chapter.

Most of those properties have since been sold off, but the new owners, most notably McMenamins, the brewpub brothers, celebrate that Mason past, a treasured part of our collective history. 

The O’Reilly company hosted one of its famous Foo-camps in that same Secret Society venue, whereas I was a Bar-camp attender. 

If all this insider jargon is a bit bewildering, just don your anthropology hat and remember subcultures tend to revolve around a core namespace of esoteric terms, or at least that’s far from an uncommon pattern.

My Private Idaho (movie review)

For some reason I wanna share the quirky context wherein this movie came up for me, I thought to watch again, but upon viewing, I'm doubtful I'd seen it, but maybe. 

I've been contemplating this drive to the coast, from Portland, Oregon, and if you know your geography you know that's a one to two hour drive at least, not some trivial jaunt. 

And yet there's a movie out there somewhere, that I saw long ago, wherein it looks like Portlandia high schoolers get off school at like at 3 PM, and are all at the beach in their cars, hanging out, but minutes later, like one could drive to the coast routinely just to socialize. I wanted to find that movie. 

We (I had help from Mercado Group) narrowed it down to a Gus Van Sant film. He'd directed films around Portland a lot. 

I now think the scenes I remember are in Elephant, and I plan to watch that next, if for no other reason than to watch one of our Wanderers, Joe Cronin, play the chemistry teacher in that film. It's been decades since I saw it (or Joe). and I'm looking forward to rewatching it.

My Private Idaho is about young male prostitutes or escorts or street kids or whatever you wanna call 'em. They bounce around as a subculture, mainly between Seattle and Portland. 

Our protagonist, played by River Phoenix, would like to see his mom again and Keanu Reeves, his friend and protector, accompanies the main character (who has narcolepsy, and so really needs protection) all the way to Rome, Italy on this quest to find his mom, based on various clues. No dice (the mom is long gone, back to the Americas), although Reeves lucks out in finding the girl, which is gut-wrenching to Phoenix, who has a crush on him, feels a bond.

As a denizen of both Portland and Rome, I can attest to the movie's authenticity in terms of the Rome scene near the Colosseum, a known spot for outdoor recreational sex under the cover of darkness. I even knew that as a kid, wandering through there by day sometimes, because of all the condoms lying around. 

I'd wandered all over that city, a middle-school-aged flaneur. I was never accosted, mugged, nor otherwise messed with. My parents were persuaded by the their friends that Rome is safe for kids like me (young boys, roaming alone), and in retrospect it was. Later in life, on some visit, a gay guy got me drunk, encouraging me to talk about Wittgenstein in broken Italian, but he wasn't being predatory, just having fun with another weirdo.

As for Portland, this city is known for a high number of strip clubs per capita, as well as microbreweries. Sex workers, practicing and retired, abound in Portland (as in almost any big city), a few of whom I know personally, as friends or perhaps collaborators. I worked for Sisters of the Road as a computer guy (I'd call them my client) back in the day. Our little road show (me the roadie) worked with women's' shelters some, in a fundraising capacity.

The movie is highly stylized. Sex scenes are presented as stills flashing by, as if we're flipping through a an adults only magazine. A lot of the dialog, around that guy "Bob" especially, sounds Shakespearean or maybe Dickensian, in the sense of stilted, formalized, ritualistic.  

The "pack animal" pattern of young boys around an adult male leader is well played, especially at Bob's "funeral", where their unsupervised antics (hooting and hollering) are contrasted with a parallel service happening a few gravesites away, more demur, more high society. 

The high society funeral was for Reeves' character's dad. Even though street roots Bob had considered Keanu an heir apparent, like a son, Reeves had rejoined his social class and left the pack. 

Reeves had been born into wealth and, although estranged from his dad because of his promiscuous lifestyle, he'd since met his future queen in that Italian farmhouse, while accompanying Phoenix on his quest. Returning with a queen won him a place in heteronormative society, thereby securing his inheritance.

Phoenix, on the other hand, was born into poverty, in Idaho, without any prospect of an inheritance. As a loner, now without Reeves, and with narcolepsy, his prospects remain relatively dim. Fade out, the end.

Addendum: this was a two DVD Criterion Collection edition, so after writing the above I was able to take in lots of additional data, including listening to Gus Van Sant being interviewed (like on a podcast). All very informative. I enjoy taking in data from these director types and usually do watch these extra features, when available.

Nostalghia (movie review)

No that’s not a typo: nostalgia with an h. Like Bagdad is without an h (the local move theater). I watched this on a rented DVD from Movie Madness, my 3rd in a set, along with Fun with Dick and Jane (the one with the real Jane) and Le Mans with Steve McQueen. [1]

Nostalghia is filmed in Italy, the opening credits say for RAI TV, and is in Italian. I’m acoustically very acclimated to Italian but need the subtitles to really follow along, so I had those turned on. Half the plot was about translation, and how Russian can’t really be put into Italian or vice versa, let alone English, or can it? The movie investigates the question.

The film comes as a masterful set of reframings wherein our understanding of what’s happening twists and turns, like on a dark ride at some mysterious theme park. Does he have a crush on her, or her on him? At first, the answer seems obvious but as the film starts going back and forth between black and white, and color, the first shock, we start to realize what we’d mistaken for reality, was more likely just a dream (but whose? — usually at least that much is pretty clear).

A second shock is when all those birds fly out of the statue Madonna. Who saw that coming? Not me. One epiphany after another in this film. And speaking of pregnancy and motherhood, just the night before I’d watched the new Fantastic Four (Marvel universe) at the Bagdad. Talk about a double-dose of the same archetypes! A double-whammy of mammy, hah hah.

I think the translator lady mostly freaked out over the relationship (professional) because her professional abilities were called into question. She thought she could read body language well enough to know the village crazy person was not going to submit to an interrogation. But interrogation is not what the Russian poet had in mind. He was just seeking to understand at a deeper level. He was on a quest and therefore curious.

The crazy guy had imprisoned his whole family for like seven years in a previous chapter (flashbacks), until the police finally did a wellness check and helped his family break free. Things move slowly in Italy, apparently. 

The Russian poet, ostensibly researching the life of a famous composer, another one who’d committed suicide, once back home in mother Russia, after a long excursion in Italy, really seemed more drawn to the crazy guy’s story by the middle of the movie. The shift in focus came at the hot springs, near their hotel, where he caught wind of the local gossip and met the crazy guy for the first time.

The translator lady gave up on getting him an interview (her Italian was perfect, his broken), concluding the crazy guy was just too crazy and he should try it himself if he thought it possible. She resigned on the spot. He then ended up getting past the crazy guy’s defenses and they had a deep interaction (something involving a ritual candle — spoiler alert).

That blew her mind, his succeeding where she’d failed, and explains why she flipped out, and literally flipped her breast out, while giving the Russian a bloody nose — not with her breast, but with something she threw. She was pissed, that much was clear.

She made it up to him (the Russian poet) later by phoning him from Rome to say the crazy guy was holding forth downtown, with a crowd gathered. He was ranting like Fidel Castro she said. She encouraged the Russian poet to come check it out, while meanwhile reassuring him she’d overcome any  romantic notions; she had a new guy (Vittorio?) to go to India with.

I won’t spoil the ending in this case. Let’s just say the Russian poet and crazy guy underwent a kind of Vulcan mind meld during the candle episode, helping answer the question of whether Russia and Italy could ever become convergent cultures. Apparently they could.

[1] thanking Fran of FranLab for opening my mind to watching a race car movie, against which I have a certain bias (ditto westerns and musicals — but we’re talking filters, not walls).

Friends Respond

click for slides

I was surprised to learn at Meeting for Worship last Sunday, that one of the Friends there was there because he'd been called to Portland on short notice owing to the fact that his son had been incarcerated on charges of assaulting an officer. The trial is still pending, and the son has since been released.

Although I don't know Jacob personally, I was aghast by his housemate's account of the theatrics employed to show off the type of bully-state that wants to assert itself as running the establishment. 

The FBI was all kitted out in SWAT style costumes, flashed their guns around, and refused to engage in proper paperwork (by showing the warrant or whatever). Jacob had apparently done something forbidden versus an ICE agent six weeks prior, but we don't know what. 

Excerpt:

At around 9 a.m. on Friday morning, July 25th, Jacob and I looked out our bedroom window to see a flood of armed officers race into our driveway and charge at our house with assault rifles. We quickly put on the first clothes we could grab and heard pounding and screaming on our door. Because everyone in my household is a safe, caring person, I was convinced they had the wrong house and couldn't understand what could warrant this kind of threat to our lives. Jacob attempted to ask through the window if the police had a warrant, and they responded by aiming laser reactive targets on his body, threatening his life. 

I told Jacob to open the door because I feared we would die if we continued to ask for a warrant. Jacob opened the door with his hands up, empty-handed, and I and my roommate followed. We were screamed at, handcuffed, and put on the street in our underwear. There were about 20 FBI agents surrounding our house in unmarked vehicles, and several local Portland police officers. Jacob was put in the back of a car. I could not speak with him. We were not shown a warrant at this time.

Quakers are strongly biased against use of violence but "assault" does carry such a connotation in ordinary language.  Unless we're talking "verbal assault"?  Is that a crime, or free speech? We're done with free speech by now right?  Resisting authoritarians has by now been criminalized, even though that's what made this country great. 

Protestors who gathered across from the Hatfield Justice Center, me one of them, in photo journalist mode for my peeps on Facebook, were mumbling about wanting body cam footage so we could judge for ourselves what this "assault" event was like. 

Whatever it was, the bully-state certainly wanted to escalate. Their goal was intimidation, and to get applause from those viewer-voyeurs who always enjoy the spectacle of armed thugs striking fear into the hearts of privileged white kids who think they're entitled to resist authority.  It's time to put all those "college kids" in their place and ship them off to Vietnam like all the "working class" kids, to use some  anachronistic Boomer Era terminology.

Another goal may have been to spark some sort of violent protest, thereby justifying opening another front against west coasters, after sending in the US military -- so-called "posse comitatus" is dead in the water, a floating corpse, by 2025 -- to quell the agitated crowds in LA. 

As I wrote in an email, using voice-to-text while waiting at a bus stop:

I’m pretty sure the feds are trying to spark some kind of violent response so they can crack down LA style using Israeli Gestapo techniques. Their base loves to see Portland being “quelled” as Trump put it The last time they tried this during the Joker Riots. It’s a kind of gladiatorial event from the point of view of the cable news people. Good for ratings. Beat up Portland. More news right after this word from our sponsors.

The entire nation is familiar with the militarization of the police forces as the congress prepares for a crackdown against the populace that might happen when they decide to draft us into NATO or whatever hell they have planned (something by the RAND corporation no doubt -- always a source of disaster scenarios).

Funny addendum: later the same evening, I watched Fun with Dick and Jane (the original Jane Fonda 1970s version -- a comic light-hearted prototype of Breaking Bad) with a friend. The joke about how "Jewish Gestapo" is an oxymoron comes up in the script, followed by a picture of Moshe Dayan in that aerospace headquarters basement. But I'm one of those who makes distinctions between zealous authoritarian nationalists, and religious practitioners (a Venn Diagram), so no oxymoron intended.

DOGE Thyself

Speaking of Superman, the Tai-Chi based MuscleMan app I purchased, I thought for a one time fee, was actually purchased on subscription. 

That's what everyone wants these days, for you to keep buying the same thing over and over, be it a workout app or Windows, or something on top of Windows (like a workout app -- mine was for iOS however).

In a way I got my money's worth in getting sucker punched for not reading the fineprint. By the time PayPal and taken a monthly rental check, it was too late to realize my mistake. Score one for Muscleman. 

That got me poking around in my PayPal account bowels, where I found some other questionable autopay  subscriptions, although I think most were simply leftovers. But they were marked "active" nonetheless. 

Time to "doge myself" and counter my own bad habits, time to clean up the autopay mess.

Now in another sense, it is only I who have this view, that I was somehow being deceived. 

I'm sure MuscleMan has an army of coaches, AI and for real, along with a huge catalog of how to keep oneself fit. I was paying for access to this valuable library. The O'Reilly School I taught at had a similar model: when you're ready for coaching, we're here (and we're not bots).

Silly me for imagining anything so simple as a one time fee was our agreement. 

That's what I mean by "learning my lesson". 

Maybe those with eyes wide open going in, already fully committed to becoming proficient in Tai Chi, shedding pounds, restoring fitness, are willing to pay a gym-level monthly fee just for a smartphone app and whatever trainers it connects them with. 

That's discretionary spending I'd rather spend another way, like on a memory stick, or a tank of gas. Even a real gym membership might be the way to go -- I've had many already. I'm really not at all sickly or weak. I'm nursing a back muscle I strained, and hauling a heavy body around, but I have the muscles for it.

Doge Thyself!  You'll be glad you did.

at the beach

Superman (movie review)

I was on the fence about seeing this one, as I’ve got my Bayesian bias against superhero movies, somewhat newly acquired maybe, thanks to over saturation by DC and Marvel. 

That’s just my own personal bias mind you, as I have nothing against others loving superhero movies and pigging out on them as a central part of their movie-intake diet. 

I have a similar stance towards alcohol: me, I’m not into it these days, but I have some in the kitchen for guests and have no problem people enjoying alcoholic drinks. I’m not into feeling morally superior. It’s more like “I’ve had my share” and it’s not a punishment to refrain, just another life chapter.

Anyway, back to the movie, I enjoyed it a lot. It reminded me that cartoon extremes of action, of violence, such as superhero films feature, are also meant to be extended to the plot. We have all the basics of the Superman universe, sharply rendered, but then we permute it a bit, rotate it, move it in some dimensions. Like Louis is well aware of who Superman is in real life, I mean at work.

This movie has the inter=dimensional wormholes, the evil genius, tortured by jealousy, the well-acted Lex Luthor… but then we have a whole caste of superhumans, of which Superman is but one. The Earthlings have become acclimated to comic book levels of disaster as their city is routinely visited by various monsters, against which Superman must defend.

The biggest envelope push is not Louis knowing the ET’s secret, but the ET’s midlife crisis vs-a-vs how his real ET parents actually envisioned a career for him, a future. He had only ever heard the first part of their message and had been shaped by his human foster parents into a good and noble type of character. That’s who he was. He had chosen that identity. Finding out his ET heritage was not in alignment with his personal values was a coming of age story for an older guy. The lesson: we may go through “coming of age” transitions at any age. We morph into a next chapter.

So back to the top, if I was on the fence, what tipped the scales and got me to go see it? My friend on Telegram, whom I don’t get to see in person anymore due to distance, said it was worth seeing. That was enough. Bagdad is close by. Why not?

Eurasian Affairs

I don’t know how it is in your coffee clutch or coven, but out here in mine, it seems like using Ukraine as a staging ground for long range missiles into Russia is retroactively the justification for why, from Russia’s point of view, Ukraine must be demilitarized, i.e. purged of NATO assets. 

If NATO wanted to stick to its narrative that Ukraine would not be used for such aggressive purposes, then this hardly seems a way to inspire confidence. 

But come to think of it, NATO never made such promises. On the contrary, the whole point of the 2014 coup, enabled by the celebrated Azov group, pumped up by Nuland, Bidens et al, was to teach Russia a lesson in humility. 

Now that the USSR had fallen, the time had come for a global reckoning, or so some deluded neocons (including “McCaine democrats”) imagined.

Now we’re hearing that Germany is keen to enter the battle against Russia on the side of Azov. If Ukraine is to host more NATO missiles, then let them be of German origin, or at least design. 

Apparently there’s a demographic in Germany that feels encouraged by these moves.

I think all factions with empathy for the Ukrainians are eager to stop the air war and bring an end to armed drones wreaking havoc across the land. However there’s a lot of inertia to any war of this scale. The option to simply stop is not there. 

Trains can’t stop on a dime either, which is why some train wrecks that may have looked preventable to casual observers, really weren’t after a certain point.

I’m thinking the eastern Ukrainians have voted with their feet, hearts and minds, and for the most part do not regret their decision to rejoin the Russian federation. The UK does not acknowledge that Donbassers have the right or even the jurisdiction to make such a choice.

But then English has not been an imperial language for a couple hundred years at this point. The Americans have always spoken in many languages. I’d say the Donbass has time on its side as it continues with writing its own history, with elections, with redevelopment projects.

The idea that Germany would step up to the plate as a chief belligerent suggests its people are reconciled to living with wartime rhetoric 24/7. 

So far, the Americans are fighting back, demonstrating a sharp unwillingness to be manipulated by the usual suspects. But then Germany is a much smaller place with a relatively tiny inner circle.

The A-Team Code

:: Ant vs Bee ::

:: high roaders ::

Perambulating

One root meaning of Wanderer is "flaneur", let’s say the random idle gentleman, perhaps a lady in disguise, out with a sketch pad and an eye for what’s happening. Recreational curating. Tourism. 

That’s one reading, and for me, it well fits. 

I wander with my trusty camera, and today also an iPad, around town. In my youth, middle school era, my parents allowed me to roam about Rome. I’d spend some days exploring, hopping one bus, then another. No phone.

Nowadays I’m with phone, although I’m not really using its camera. I have a separate device, somewhat bulky, but it’s my habit. I’ve gone through a series of such cameras, the kind you can just point and shoot, letting it take care of most variables except framing. That’s a typical tool of the flaneur.

Today’s route retraced last week’s trek at the start, so I could pick up where I’d left off on the theme of Rust as a motif. From there I explored the Lloyd Center, with one skater, with another doing floor exercises. They had a coach as I recall.

I roamed over to the Lloyd Center Max station, heading west, to the last stop on the east side, at Moda Center, the swoopy enclosed stadium that replaced the old Memorial Coliseum as a primary venue, although the latter still stands and does service, such as by hosting high school graduation ceremonies. 

I used the Memorial Coliseum as a skating rink, in an earlier chapter, having taken to inline skates as a curious hobby, encouraged by Tom Connolly. I’d circle on smooth concrete, wearing helmet and knee pads, Wrist pads maybe? Memory fades. I remember falling a few times but not getting hurt.

From Moda Center I made my way along well-marked walkways to the East Side Esplanade, a well-thought-out lane for pedestrians and bicyclists mainly. Runners. I think I saw one mono-board or whatever those are called. The bicycles may be mechanically enhanced i.e. battery power assisted.

My walk took me south from the Steel Bridge, east entrance in view, to the Hawthorne Bridge, along a path that’s partly floating and includes bridges. I’ve gone through these same paths as a cyclist many times, but today was about being a ped, and using TriMet, more like my middle school days when I’d roam in Rome.

I mistook a bus 6 for a 14, so ended up adding another walking segment from the eastern shoreline of the Willamette, to Asylum central, meaning the food court by that name, named for the Oregon State mental hospital that had a large property here, a campus with running streams, not some dreary urban structure you might have been imagining. 

This side of the river was all very bucolic back then. I’m drawing from well researched accounts, not sharing personal experience, as I was as yet unborn in this chapter.

The 14 got me back to The Bagdad from which its a short and familiar jaunt home. I had my shoulder bag leather briefcase in which I stored the iPad, camera, brush, kombucha bottle, a random reading from my shelves.

Silicon Forest (not Valley)

Yesterday I went dog walking with a peer engineer, as in software engineer, a loosely used term as there were so many routes to get here, me through applications development for nonprofits and data science types, him through psychometrics and government lab work (Sandia I think it was). We'd both been on the same code school's faculty. He helped me find my way to Clarusway, a source of recent teaching gigs.

Anyway, we were chatting about the difference between NaN and None in Python, walking Sydney and Quinn, enjoying the perfect weather, when I realized various new things, meaning I had some insights, sparked by what we were talking about, a free ranging conversation.

Towards evening, I tackled the task of rounding out my online profile a little more, as the requests or queries need their data to hit against. Lots about me out there, but maybe not always as helpfully cross-indexed as it could be, and I'm in a catalytic position when it comes to connecting loose ends.

For example, I cross-posted my reddit account to DobbsTown, a Mastodon server. I also wired my right side main access panel, on the right margin of World Game (Grain of Sand), to include said reddit and tiktok connections. The content dates back but the links are brand new.

Speaking of branding, it's hardly lost on the market researchers and PR types, that Silicon Forest and Silicon Valley have remained quite distinct in Geek Lore. The former is gravitating into Cascadia, the bioregion (not really a political entity) whereas Valley boys and girls are seeing dollar signs in more military contracting. Washington State gets a lot of that, whereas Oregon's role is more subtle (think field testing), to the point where Oregon actually advertises as a "peace state" in some circles (hint: WILPF). We also have better land use planning than you'll find in many states (another source of pride).

The story goes like this: the Oregon Trail, coming west from the Great East (lots of peeps seeking a better life, refugees from Euro-think), came to a fork somewhere in Montana or one of those. Keep going along a northern latitude, and reach Oregon, with its lush and secure agricultural lifestyle, or turn south and wager your future against the likelihood of striking it rich, laying your claim to fame and fortune. The former sounds relatively prosaic and vaguely communist, whereas the latter is Ayn Rand, bold, heroic, venture capitalist.

Feeding my story (above) is an example: a true life story featuring a young, dashing CEO, looking to base a startup here in Portland, but finding the venture capital culture close to non-existent relative to what he was used to in strike-it-rich California. His idea was to use AI to provide a look ahead feature in any browser that could steer junior away from pornography, a see-no-evil genre product. 

The only problem: he was twenty years ahead of his time (this all happened a long time ago). 

VCs tend to live in the future. Portlanders, given all the rain, and Powell's Books, tend to be bookworms, as likely to live in the past as anywhere. Getting Portlanders to march towards the future is difficult when so many of them still believe they're in Nirvana already (even in the wake of the Joker Riots). 

When PDXers do get around to futurism, it looks like socialism, given half of them are latent Swedes and Finns and see society more as a design problem begging for elegant solutions, than as a source of melodrama and outrage and Protestant moralizing about who deserves what they get.

Memories & History

The Google Earth close up view is not the same as Street View. The structures look a bit cartoony given a computer doing its best to data structure the surfaces. I’m not the expert (never had a job with Google Earth). This is a classic Portland food pod, named Asylum in honor of the facility run by Dr. Hawthorne when this whole area was still more park like, all green with running streams. Oregon State contracted to have its first state mental hospital between SE 12th & Hawthorne and the river. We tend to call the whole area Asylum District, commercially if not officially.

 

Now I’ve switched to actual Street View to capture this facade further north a few blocks from the Asylum food pod. I used to work in the basement of this building when its top floor served as CUE headquarters, CUE being Center for Urban Education. We had a Mac lab in the basement, with LaserWriters, state of the art at the time and a grant from Apple to the nonprofit community in Portland. We shared the tech with a wide variety of NGOs and provided training in its use. That was Steve Johnson’s responsibility more than mine. My job was to train still-working or job-seeking seniors in office-relevant computer skills. We mostly used PCs (IBMs or clones thereof) and left the desktop publishing skills to the others. I’d use the Mac publishing equipment myself for various fun projects e.g. Project Renaissance.

 

Further north along the same street: Revolution Hall, formerly Washington High School (where the young Linus Pauling was enrolled, if oft absent from) and in my own writings HQS (Ministry of Education) for OPDX (Occupy Portland) during a time when said building as spooky-ghostly-abandoned. That served my purposes just fine, as I was simply including it in my curriculum writing to help anchor it geographically.

    

This Google Earth view marks all three locations: Asylum food pod, CUE building, Revolution Hall, with blue balloons, against the backdrop of much of Portland, Willamette River running south to north (bottom to top).

28 Years Later (movie review)

The title had been on the Bagdad marquee for a while, but I hadn’t bothered to search it up. When I finally did some homework, I realized it was in the ballpark of horror sci-fi. That genre interests me, notwithstanding so much slop (nothing new with AI), so I headed out for the matinee. On a hot summer day.

I’ll say up front that I watched it with English subtitles. Not that I need subtitles (English is my first and pretty much only language, unless we say American is something else) but on the first Tuesday of every month or something like that, Bagdad screens the film with captions on. Hearing impaired and/or non-English speakers wanting to learn English, might come to such shows. As it is, I probably picked up on a few lines I might’ve missed, given the accents and everything.

The movie is set in a future England where the virus has ravaged the population and the mainland (Europe and Scandinavia) have quarantined the place. However, a tiny island off the big one, connected only by a tenuous land bridge, has allowed a small English-speaking tribe to keep themselves uninfected. At low tide, the land bridge appears and in principle one of the infected could come storming in their direction. They have defensive fortifications, and bows and arrows. No guns in this universe. No wait, the Swedish have them (we meet up with a Swedish patrol on the mainland, Erik et al).

As I remarked to a friend over iced green tea this morning, having taken the bus, I see movies “guided mediations” in a lot of ways (I used the word "tantric"), and in the hands of a skilled writer and director, the process may serve a given viewer’s mental healing, even if the content is highly traumatic, as it tends to be in this genre (“alas poor Erik” says the doctor at one point). 

In this case, I’d say that was the case: the writing was conscious and well informed by the human condition. Theater students will immediately appreciate the Oedipal triangle, a three body problem we always only explore, never really get to the bottom of, except in a love and death sense.

The protagonist is a twelve year old boy and it’s a coming of age story, the kind my late wife treasured, but probably would not have in this case, as not everyone is in a mood for movie therapy. I’m reminded of Poor Thing. 

I’m also reminded a new Wes Anderson movie was slated to come out this summer, have I missed it already?

Upon arrival at The Bagdad I queried the ticket seller whether this was part of a series and he replied very intelligibly about there being previous movies in this same universe but I wouldn’t need to see them all in order. I pass that on to those wondering the same thing. And yes, the way the film ended left said universe wide open to another rendering, not unlike the worlds of Mad Max or Planet of the Apes.