TrimTabbers Meet

Today our "est person" is Peter Meisen, GENI's founder. He was a co-organizer of the San Diego Bucky Fuller Centennial, which I also attended, with my wife Dawn Wicca and newly born Tara. Here's a link to my write-up on Grunch dot net.

We got to stay in a luxurious hotel.  Anecdote: I failed to bring Dawn some Thai food, getting lost in conversation with Jim Morrissett. Another time though, we had delicious Thai food, in Thailand, in route to Bhutan.

Peter is reminding us about renewable energy.  Remember demand side management?  Amory Lovins?

Those projecting the future sometimes simply multiply the current consumption per capita by a growth factor, whereas the "more with less" aesthetic suggests a smaller per capita carbon footprint, without sacrificing lifestyle.  

More care free traveling, good health care, work-study programs galore, is not beyond our daily energy budget.  Think "global university" (= Spaceship Earth).

Movie Talk

You've probably noticed the steep drop off in movie reviews, in my blogs, over the years.  That's not because I no longer see movies, or stopped writing.  I'm just switching it up some.  "Maybe I'll do the movie stuff on Facebook" might be the thought.

Search on "(movie review)" in all three of these, to see what's here up to now.  My writing style is impressionistic because I'm not in a commercial business mode when I journal.  I'm more in a reverie, mixing movie content with personal circumstances, in a stream of consciousness.  However, that's not an unusual genre really.  It's what one might expect from some blogger.

That period when we had total access to the Laughing Horse Books collection is especially prized. I saw so many obscure documentaries. LHB was what passed for a radical left (meaning interesting) bookstore here in Portland, helping put us on the map.  This store had more than one location over the years, including right nearby my place here on SE Division.

My house guest was using LHB has a hub, hoping to break into the music circuit, and succeeding in the context of Belmont Street.  I was in roadie mode (using her car), gaining experience with the nightclub scene (she was already a veteran, from Savannah).  In this chapter, the store was just north of East Burnside.  She'd do these sleeping bag fundraisers where the price of admission was an old sleeping bag donation, which pile she'd then donate to a houseless supply center (camping inventory).

Because my housemate (basement digs) was part of the LHB anarcho-organizational management structure, we were able to borrow from the VHS library pretty much at will.  We'd return them.  This wasn't about taking over curation, more simply benefiting from having access to a stellar collection.  You'd do the same, right?  VHS was a golden age of affordable and unrestricted recording technology.

A topic to delve into:  the Spanish "civil war" which, as usual, was interfered in by all the other powers seeking to find something advantageous in the altercation.  Check out Ernest Hemingway's role. Germany was eager to try things like carpet bombings, to the envy of many bomb-happy Americans.  

Which side the Yanks would intervene on was not always that clear.  Ford Sr. was leaning strongly towards the Reich idea.  As shown in that Amazon Prime show (The Man in the High Castle), the USA had some amenable (as in capitulating) elements.  Ford later changed his mind, good capitalist that he was (i.e. able to mess with his own head, adept at self reprogramming).

They say Netflix is about to end its mail order DVD service (a way I've been a past customer).  But wasn't that collection much bigger than what's available through streaming?  What level of dumbing down are we talking about here?  I'll be scanning the internet for some clues, and not bothering Chat GPT 3 or 4 about it, as they're not really up to date on any of the latest gossip.

Anyway, here's something I posted to Facebook recently, along with the above picture, and followed with some animated GIFs.

I've seen a lot of YouTubers dumping on Disney for supposedly vacuous remakes with no point other than "race swapping". My response, having just seen the new Little Mermaid preview (before Super Mario Bros):

* remaking perennial fairytales is not an issue. Every generation gets a chance to remake the oldies and pass them on. If we live long enough, we'll see remake after remake of childrens favorites. We might get cynical and grumpy about it, but Disney knows better. Keep on keepin' on.

* having seen only the preview, this remake looks just fine. The little mermaid is great. I don't see any reason mermaids should be nordic characters as nordic seas are too cold and you have all these nasty humans doing their war game crap. Much better the warmer climes, where people aren't uber-pale. In the mythology I grew up with, merpeople were going back to the sea, as mammals, having decided landlubber lifestyles (and their practitioners) suck to high heaven, except maybe in Polynesia.

Pascal's Triangle and GST (School of Tomorrow)

Thinking Out Loud

I'm waiting for the term "fun house mirror" to make more inroads into AI-speak.  Those who angst about phony intelligence (PI) chat machines aren't using the "mirror" image much, yet that's one way to see all this monkey screeching.  Upon seeing our own groupthink mirrored, in a phony way, we go ape.  

OMG, we won't be called upon to think in the near future!  Yet if groupthink is your thing, how much thinking are you doing anyway?  If your idea of thinking is to retweet and repost what grips you in the moment, then consider the notion you've yet to think much at all.

That PI (phony intelligence) is able to reflect our thinking back at us, and synthesize believable-sounding chatter on the fly, grammatically correct, structured, is what brings out the inferiority complex lurking since our great dumbing down, however that happened, usually through schooling and mindless television.  Poet Gene Fowler called it "de-geniusing" hence his "re-geniusing" project.  He was a graduate of San Quentin at the far end of the school-to-prison pipeline.

I treasure Quakerism as a thinking persons religion less because it encourages the recitation of theological dogmas in Meeting (it doesn't) and more because it encourages journaling, in this day and age blogging.  Making your thinking world readable, in principle, helps provide traction by raising the stakes.  

Quakers who don't blog are maybe not that interested in the thinking side of things.  They don't want to rock the boat or endanger future job prospects.  That's why a lot of people quit thinking, out of fearfulness.  I found out when working with Friends that a great many are reluctant to make their religious affiliation public.

Spring Sprint

I'm using the word "sprint" in the title, in a geekish sense, meaning: "a concentrated spurt of effort regarding a task or challenge at hand". Running fast (sprinting) is the operative metaphor.  However in geekdom a sprint might involve sitting with one's laptop and typing furiously.  

I'm repurposing it to refer to something athletic that is yet not running: my Saturday bike ride, the first of this spring.  I plumped up my tires and took off.

I headed out intending to circle around in Laurelhurst Park a few times, a "gear check" I told myself, remembering how the chain had slipped off that time.  

However a pedestrian whom I mistook for Barbara Stross was approaching the corner of SE 38th and Harrison, and my mistaking her identity threw me off course.  I continued west on Harrison.

I could have easily corrected my trajectory by turning right, but I realized I'd been of two minds from the start:  the cherry blossoms were calling (if indeed they had weathered the rains) and I wanted seeing them in person to be the goal of my sprint.  

I'd heard through the grapevine that they were being splendid this year, along the waterfront, near the Steel Bridge, at the Japan America Friendship Park, where we celebrate an end to nuke warfare every year.

So I cycled pell-mell down the hill towards OMSI, by way of Ladd's Addition and all that new infrastructure around SE 12th, put in with the Max Orange Line and the newly built Tilikum Crossing. 

I circled up the 270 degree ramp onto the deck of the Hawthorne Bridge, then headed north along the waterfront towards the blossoms.  

Saturday Market was in full swing.  

The blossoms were in full bloom.

Coming back, passing OMSI again, I bicycled parallel to a long freight train heading southeast, and  temporarily blocking streets, as trains in Portland are wont to do.  

Then it stopped, seemingly indefinitely (I didn't wait around).

Fortunately, I remembered the pedestrian and bicycle bridge over the tracks, the Bob Stacey Crossing, with working elevators.  I could take more train pix from that vantage.  Another train was queued up to go the other way.

The rust patina is intentional, and thematic all along the waterfront (e.g. those trademark esplanade pylons), right up to the Oregon Convention Center, with its deliberately rusty sculptures.

Planet of Ghosts

I have to admit I find it uncanny, in the sense of eerie, to the point of creepy, that we're having dark ages tank wars in the eastern hemisphere ("the east") these days.  I'll even call it "the Orient" because it sounds so quaint, even though I'm using it differently, to include Europe in Eurasia.  I live in "the Occident" (accident?).  OK, maybe not.  Just a thought (trial balloon?). Too much of a mouthful.  East and West.

To me, it's like:  lots of psychological processing never completed during the WWs (world wars) so now we're up from the grave, back on our feet, doing the same ideological battles.  It's like Season Four already.  The names may have changed.  It's still that steady stream of corpses, back to the graveyard, to fight again another day.

In one corner, the NeoRomans (NATO star), proud descendants of an imperial mindset, filtered through the UK, and now bubbling over with pomp and circumstance in their capital city, one Washington, DC.  In the other corner (letter Z), their arch foe:  the Mongols.  Genghis Khan's vast armies, slanty-eyed behind a Slavic Caucasian visage, must be stopped with "high mars" (some kind of rocket system?).

My conceit (literary trope) from my YouTube channel is I'm like "coming from the future".  All this happened long ago, on a planet far far away, and I'm visiting.  I turn on the news and remember how people walked and talked way back then.  So many dead languages.  So cryptic, or so sepulchral as E.J. Applewhite (spook) used to put it (mocking himself in some ways).

I guess the segue to AI is Language, in the sense of "dead already".  Caught in the web are the sentients, the empaths, the beings. I feel compassion for them (for us) somewhat the deaf-mutes (blind too) of Machine World.  The channels of communication are taken up with ghostly chatter, as usual, as humanity (the program, a tale told by an idiot) stumbles forward, the eternal retard. 

Wisdom is from the sentient side (I'm not talking about compulsive outrage, or fits of righteous fury, temper tantrums, puppet shows), and still helps shape the debate (using leverage), always hoping to channel all this vibrant energy towards more compassionate, less horrific, world game playing.  Something fresher and more innovative than digging out the decaying weapons and staging fight club with them.