School Chatter

Some of my School of Tomorrow topics are like tent stakes for me, in helping me define the tent inside from outside, but then I haven’t had much time within the tent yet. The Mark Fisher stuff, for example, is dense with cultural allusions that go right by me, because I haven’t yet had time for much immersion in that particular floatation tank. 

So I’m quick to defer to experts who come bustling in saying I don’t seem to know the first thing about X. That could be right. Lecture away, oh expert mam or sir or… help me fill in what I’m missing. You have the floor.

As a result of a Syn-U faculty convergence (harmonic enough) earlier this summer, there’s a new Syn-U preview of an interviews anthology in which I’m presented as an icebreaker interviewee. I knew the cameras were rolling and did my best to ignore them, sticking to a conversational persona wandering around the neighborhood and sharing my views. 

I’ve got a Crusty the Clown look going that gets me thinking of my funny line: that, like Christian Bale sometimes does, I had to put on a lot of weight to play this role.

In making that joke a few times (I plan on continuing with the intermittent fasting BTW), about gaining weight for the role, I found myself in Movie Madness renting a couple Christian Bale movies, why not: Laurel Canyon and The Machinist. 

I also bought another XL Movie Madness T-shirt to add to my collection. I’m wearing it today, right now (and both movies are still in my possession at the time of this posting).

The plan with me playing a Dymaxion clown is to show it at RISD later this month as a kind of project portal. We’re recruiting, as usual, with Cascadian Synergetics, continuing to drum up the many opportunities for collaboration, including but not limited to being interviewed. 

This wasn’t the first time in my case (like Mike Acerra had me on his channel), plus I’m a known quantity appearing solo on my own low key not-monetized channel.

In other autobiographical news, I got that second pair of eyeglasses half off, even more it worked out thanks to specifics, this pair tinted. I’ve been testing them out, and also celebrated this return to high living standards with a visit to a sushi train in the Hollywood neighborhood. I’d been imagining going there for weeks, and this week I finally found the time.

Urban Vistas (Fall Term)

In saying "urban" I'm not pitting it against "rural" as in "yes, the two go together but not every relationship has to be one of opposition; antonyms share the workload, of characterizing a spectrum". And then we have suburban, and, no doubt, semi-rural.

What I am saying, in contrast, is that I appreciate urban studies as a discipline and/or area of concentration as we'd say at Princeton (mine being philosophy at that time), and of late I've been binging on video documentaries about Portland (mixed with walk-throughs around China and clips from Burning Man). 

This focus syncs with my bold talk about Place-based Education being a great way to go, in terms of mnemonics and keeping stories anchored in personal experience. Autobio and first person perspective are implied, meaning not out of bounds, but rather encouraged. We're free to be Bayesians.

Urban renewal: I've already blogged about Robert Moses, picking up much of my info through Defunctland, a favorite YouTube channel, and its focus on old theme parks, expos, world’s fairs. Some fairs were officially recognized as expos by the expo recognizers (Seattle, Montreal...), whereas others were not (New York, Portland...). 

Portland? I'm talking about the Lewis & Clark Centennial of 1905, staged in North Portland, and mostly gone without a trace but for the NCR pavilion, now a McMenamins in St. Johns. So Portland hires Robert Moses to do another one of his famous freeway clearings, this time right through SE PDX. But the citizens fought back, and won. I-80N never happened.

Speaking of "gone without a trace", probably the most eye-opening documentary of them all, speaking subjectively, given my prescription, was the one on Vanport, its rapid rise as a microcosm of the United States then emerging: shipyard workers from everywhere, congregating all at once and working out a lifestyle, with support from Kaiser, that really rocked, according to kid testimony especially. It verged on being a true company town of the kind envisioned by John Cadbury (see Quakernomics).

But Vanport was never designed to be permanent, one reason it was allowed (Kaiser and the Feds largely paid for it), and was being gradually dismantled after the war, but also made into a large community college, serving vets (GIs on the GI Bill) especially. 

The utopian town (too loud, working class, kinda grungy, but always hopping) was pressing on towards the present, until the freak flood of 1948, which was devastating all over, to downtown Portland as well, although the Rose Festival came off as scheduled (Vanport even had a float in the Rose Parade, whereas Vanport itself had washed away in the meantime).

Vanport housing was segregated, and when it flooded, many of its African heritage families, now refugees, strangers in a strange land, moved to the Albina area, which in a later chapter was to face a lot of forced redevelopment, ala the Robert Moses chapter. I-5 and the Rose Quarter (Memorial Coliseum -- no Paul Allen Moda Center back than) had eminent domain. 

Portlanders tend to know this Rose Quarter story and nowadays celebrate what's left of the mowed down (as in bulldozed) area, from SE Mississippi north along MLK to Alberta and such places. Take it all the way to Lombard if you wanna, or to Columbia Boulevard.

But fewer, I'd wager, remember the urban renewal projects that took place closer to downtown, which explains the Keller Auditorium and environs. They took out an old European Jewish neighborhood with lots of single old men (many white ones) in hot-plate-equipped apartments, also Afro-Chinese and Native American, i.e. another microcosm, against which many of the mostly-whites in City Hall (in many cases Klan-friendly) had an immune response and wanted to erase not only physically, but from public memory.

Portland (aka Rust City) has always been a "frontier town" in many ways, with a positive spin on "pioneering" even in an age which acknowledges the imperialist nature of the immigrants' project. Quakers experienced the drive to conquer and enslave first hand in the New World, as the institutions of slavery and militarily enforced expansion filled the ambient culture around them. The Neo-Romans never left us. They established us, coming from an already-established British Empire (United Kingdom).

Generative AI

Buckminster + Herman Munster = thebuckmunster 

We've seen several experiments already around generating text, voice, imagery from the Bucky Fuller corpus. 

thebuckmunster is a convenience meme for handling machine-generated Buckyisms that it'd be inappropriate to attribute to the man himself.

This isn’t necessarily a best rendering. Roll the dice yourself why not?

Show & Tell: The BASKET Modules

:: BASKET weaving for high schoolers ::

Pythonica: A New Slide Deck

Recalling Chicago

a wanderer "hobo" September 2013

My loosely knit study group is looking at Chicago more. I should probe Mercado Group for leads; those are my retired librarians, good on fiction especially, but also non-fiction of various genres. With Chicago, the focus is two institutions, roughly contemporaneous: Hull House established by Jane Addams and friends, and Hobo College. 

A theme in both cases is spreading the fruits of education beyond the cloistered high tuition walls of a formal university, often by means of curriculum variants, meaning the content is not cloned from elsewhere, but home-brewed locally, from multiple sources.

Cascadian Synergetics aims to trod a similar path, this time encompassing the world of seniors, people looking back on choices made, vistas mastered, starring roles, in whatever walks of life. That’s a pool of experience going forward, often accompanied by a reawakened sense of curiosity, especially about roads not taken. Why not take them now, at least in gist?

Jane Addams is a founder of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), of which my mother was a member, as I am today, as was Linus Pauling’s wife Ava Helen, not that our family knew theirs. 

Urners overlapped the Paulings in a different way: the nonprofit think tank for which my wife and I performed technical services, authorized our engineering and public policy meetups in Linus Pauling’s boyhood home, just blocks from my Asylum District house.

Hobo College comes to me a lot through the writings of one Trevor Blake, someone I’ve always looked up to as conversant with a lot of esoterica. He used to be just blocks from me too, when he was busy curating a Bucky Fuller archive, later sent on to OSU. He introduced me to the Subgenius Church, itself a portal into many subcultures (ethnicities, namespaces, tribes), and well-armed against the kinds of pulpit subterfuge many flocks have to put up with. 

Vanity vanity all is vanity — Ecclesiastes (1:2). There’s no business like show business. We play Show & Tell. We play Hide & Seek. We play branded versions of same.

Chicago is also (a) a hub for the commercial advertising community, as much as New York and (b) an asylum city for refugees descending from old countries that are no longer, such as Prussia, Bohemia, Yugoslavia … the whole Austria-Hungarian empire. 

Let’s prompt Perplexity to talk about North American refugees from the old Ottoman Empire.

Adaptive Behaviors

:: a visit to Powell's City of Books (slides) ::

I remember one lazy August when my fridge was on the blink. I hadn’t sufficiently thawed it when the repair man came, with the consequence of waiting more weeks, I forget how many, too many. The thermostat needed replacing, a simple part, no problems since then, from some years before the SARS waves. My sister was visiting. The weather was hot, like it is today, over 100 F.

Well this year, in 2025, the fridge is not a problem, nor the stove (I even replaced a burner coil on a burner I’d not been using for literally years), nor the car (the new AAA-installed battery is working great), but my eyeglasses. 

They (plural needed for some reason) snapped near the nose, and the only backup I could find (still the case) is some old now off-prescription sunglasses at the bottom of some drawer, probably the same ones depicted in my profile picture to the right, from an earlier Life of Kirby chapter. 

I’m still able to safely drive, at least in daylight. I’m sure I see more sharply than a Waymo or Tesla, even without any glasses at all.

I’ve got new glasses on order, after pricing at both LensCrafters and Stanton’s. I had a blast driving around, like alongside that train with the two tier containers configuration. That sure was a long load, as I discovered when it came time for my route to cross its. Guess who had the right of way.

I’m still able to use computers. But I decided to skip the Python User Group organized by New Relic, which was on my calendar. I didn’t want to be wearing shades, or squinting, or be dealing with eyesight issues in any way. Maybe next time. And no, neither eyeglasses outlet was prepared to process my exotic prescription on a “while you wait” basis. The good news is my old frames (the ones that snapped) were approved as reparable and perhaps that shop, the one doing the repairs, will have them ready even before the new ones appear.

Some of the YouTubes I’ve been attending to work pretty well as audio only anyway. I enjoyed Caleb Maupin’s well-researched storytelling regarding some intellectual undercurrents I’m eager to learn more about. I also picked up a lot from these Active Inference related interviews coming from Verses, an AI company.

In my inbox, I’m being tutored about the geographical meaning of Bohemian, which has everything to do with a part of Europe, which we could circle even today. Prague and Vilnius might both be in it. People in Chicago remember a lot about this old country. Others think about Yugoslavia and what happened there.

This geographical meaning is in contrast to the literary meaning, which has more to do with a free thinking anti-conformist lifestyle originating among disaffected American writers, many of whom had moved to Paris. Bohemian in this sense gave rise to Beat, which gave rise to Hippies, although it also forked into Bohemian Grove type Bohemians, who maybe wanted the free thinking part, but without the inconvenience of material poverty and/or austerity and/or disciplined lifestyle.

Given my somewhat casual (open minded) attitude to geographical naming, I’d be fine with talking about Bohemia like another Cascadia or Jefferson State. Something not on the radar of the legal beagles? Something more science fiction and even Tolkienesque. 

We could think in terms of Bohemia, Prussia, Mesopotamia, and the Holy Roman Empire, all on a World Game map, engaged in trade. A board game. Mix and match across historical periods, why not? Cosplay as queen of Phoenicia. One could learn a lot of world history this way, if the structuring weren’t too haphazard.

Weapons (movie review)

December, 2010

My route to The Bagdad, for the camera, was by way of a bank, as I had this new bank card, a reissue of an old one, that I hadn't activated. It ended up in the bottom of some box during a scene change. I found it and wanted to see if it was still activatable. It was. Checked balance. So then walking home I realize my timing was perfect if I wanted to see Weapons. I'd made up in my head what I thought it was about, but I was way way off. Someone on YouTube said it was good, so I decided to check it out, really having no idea what I was getting into. I thought it might be a cartoon. Something silly.

What I wanna take credit for up front, as having figured out all on my own without seeing this in any review first, is I got the allusion or tribute or building upon or whatever vs-a-vs Gus Van Sant's Elephant. And by that I mean something specific: we follow multiple characters in series but go over a territory wherein everything was happening in parallel, and when we get to key junctures, we see exactly the same scene but now from the angle of this other character.

For example, we see a drugstore cowboy type, into petty theft to support his habit, trying to pry his way into some apartment. We don't get his backstory at all the first time, and the first time we see him trying to break in, from an alleyway, it's from the point of view of the cop, the teacher's lover, and in the doghouse with his wife. We've already followed the teacher in detail at this point. Later we'll follow the drugstore cowboy. This time we'll see the cop looking back at us, from the end of the alley. We follow the petty thief as he runs away, and there's the cop car, which previously we'd been looking out of. Very clever. Same as in Elephant but even more spectacular.

The only other thing I'll say about this film is it's very competent and knows the genre, which is horror. The setting is mundane middle class America, our suburban USA, with prosaic nuclear families and their variously styled big box houses. That's a great setting for horror. The contrast between the safety and security these power nesters seek, and the deep psychic disruption of the Salem witch aspect of American village life, takes us over the cuckoo's nest more than a few times.

Affluenza

A lot more could have been done with the term "affluenza", coined by the Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith. Unfortunately the word become caught up in moral judgments, rather than treasured for its medical aspects. 

Even thought Freud may have waned in influence since the height of the psychoanalytic movement, the idea of "neurosis" hasn't gone away. People didn't stop being neurotic all of a sudden. Many of us suffer from affluenza.

What are the symptoms? One is hoarding and accumulating, room after room full of unnecessary and unused objects. If this were a rat, the nest would be stuffed with gee-gaws and what-have-yous. 

This is a side effect of shopping for pleasure, finding outlet and reward, not so much in studying or self improvement, but in stocking up on various provisions, in order to fill ones basement and/or garage.

Given we're talking "group illness", the treatments tend to be societal. We see the counter push in my neighborhood: lots of 2nd hand stores, mainly for recycling clothing, but also for recycling things. The Village Merchant does a brisk business. 

But is this really addressing root causes?  

And isn't there a place for curating and collecting?  

Isn't it natural to acquire and pass on, or pass around?  

We also see a lot of free piles. Items just put out on the sidewalk for the taking, often with the sign "free" in case there's any doubt.

In one of my scenarios, as a Village of Tomorrow guy, I was proposing folks could offload worldly goods to such places, where inventory would be shared with new arrivals wanting to furnish a unit to their own sense of taste. 

Although the unit would be futuristic and factory made, the inventory would feel more vintage, and it's a combination of the new and old that makes for an interesting, and livable, aesthetic. 

I called it Hand Me Down City on reddit, in one of the SolarPunk groups. My suggestion was widely ridiculed as I recall and eventually removed.

DEQ 2025

What I did today is get the 1997 Nissan, the muscle car jalopy, with a gash on the side, a battle scar shall we say, through DEQ, an every other year ritual. I'm good until September 15, 2027. So yes, I went through earlier than I really needed to, having got the paperwork in the mail.

What got the wheels turning, was the Wednesday before, when I met Dr. D. at Lloyd for the burger week flagship at Stoopid Burger (3rd floor Food Court, overlooking the ice skating rink), I was thinking: "before the movie starts at 1 PM (Naked Gun, across the street), I could probably make it to DEQ and back. I mean heck, I'm like half way there already."

As luck would have it, I stayed at Lloyd until the movie, hanging out with Dave, milling about in Barnes & Noble, snapping a few pix, and thereby encountering a glossy Python magazine, more a large size book in some ways. 

You see it depicted up top, from earlier today, Friday, August 15, Alaska Day (today's Kremlin - White House summit).

So this morning I'm thinking: "I could get the DEQ thing out of the way today, while I'm still thinking about it why not?" 

Then, about a mile up the road I thought: "and while I'm at it, provided I pass, I can celebrate with another Kooky burger. It's still burger week, and that was a mighty good burger for $10." If I failed? I'd console myself with sushi, which'd be healthier.

Then, having passed the emissions test at DEQ, I was thinking "and I could go back and get that Python magazine at Barnes & Noble, it'd make a good gift, and maybe I'll even learn a thing or two." As a teacher, it pays to pay attention to the state of the art (the art of andragogy that is).

When I got home, it was time to walk Sydney, which proved fortuitous as I wanted to tune in my programs but CenturyLink was having issues, so I was needing to use Verizon anyway, through my hand-me-down iPhone (works great!). 

So why not walk around the block, which we did. Pick up on my channels. Sydney is allowed to saunter off leash given she's a highly trained emotional support animal (she still has the vest, which even still fits), enjoying retirement.

A lot of my peeps seemed pleased with the day's events, and even more pleased by the time I awoke from my afternoon nap. There're still a lotta haters out there, but there's not much we need to do about that when the circuits are equilibrious and robust. 

I'd say the chatbots are helping, by making the research a lot easier. People have a lot to catch up on in some cases. We all do, regarding this or that vital topic. Get a robot detective to comb through big data and pop out with a succinct report. The detective may have been drinking (hallucinations) so be sure to omni-triangulate (crosscheck from many sources, including by drawing from your own experience).

By evening, I was tripping down memory lane, with Python and food both topics again. Something about polish comfort food, posted by my old friend Seth Tuska, went by on Facebook, and that got me asking Perplexity (a gossip bot) about Chicago and pierogi. 

I was remembering Djangocon 2013. Patrick and I took off, prowling the streets of downtown Chicago for pierogi. Patrick's wife is from the Chicago area. Maybe she's the one who reminded us to track down this ethnically Polish food menu item.

We go through DEQ to prove the car's emissions and other records are in good order, and re-registration through the DMV is therefore warranted. Drivers queue up in their vehicles across several lanes for parallel processing. Their objective: sticky "tags" that go on the license plate showing the car is "street legal". Police sometimes use outdated tags as an excuse to pull a driver over and run random checks.

This Nissan has never given me problems passing the emissions test, and not this time either, so I was able to pay the registration fee (a hefty $280 plus) to keep my car legally on the road for another two years. Insurance is a separate monthly tab.

Other work today (not for Oregon State) involved recruiting alpha testers for the lastest QuadCraft experiments. We've tapped into gamer culture to help make Cascadian Synergetics relevant to the animation world more generally. I'm excited to learn about the newest Blender.