The weather is about 100 times better this year, and some interesting
bikes have come out!
Monthly Archives: September 2008
Trinity of Knowledge
Okay, so this was a two paragraph post, but fuck that.
?? Amazon? maybe.. Dictionary.com? possibly.. MSN, Yahoo? probably not. More likely the BBC, or CNN. I think I might even vote for Wil.
When you want to know something, or HAVE to know something, where do you go? I guess I google, and go from there.
Resolution
First, I should probably start with a few disclaimers… This is NOT directed at any one person, or even anyone I know in particular. I will most likely use terms such as him/his/he. This is not a gender-bias, just an easy out, and much easier to write than playing the pronoun game (they, them, etc. etc.)….
I digress…
Entitlement. I would daresay that a majority of the populace feels at least some sense of entitlement. People feel they are owed things. Especially in the US. This will not be discussed at any length; for the purposes of this discussion, I don’t really give a shit. The thing that has piqued my interest of late is one particular thing to which people feel entitled. Resolution. Not a New Year’s Resolution. Not a UN Resolution. The “self improvement” money train version of “resolution.”
The self-help ass clowns of the world have many terms for resolution. Closure is a favorite. I’m not quite sure how it got there, or why it’s been up for so long, but our favorite of the Internet Trinity of Knowledge defines closure as:
- An individual’s desire for a quick answer as opposed to enduring ambiguity.
and follows it up with:
- A person with a high need for closure prefers order and predictability and is decisive and close minded.
(I’ll get back to the ToK stuff later, but for now let’s just say that Wikipedia & Google are in there)
So, in short, everything is supposed to have tidy little endings. Like the last five minutes of a sitcom, where everything is re-set the show for next week. Unfortunately, real life suffers from something most sitcoms (and many movies) don’t have to deal with. Continuity. We are tortured by the fact that we actually remember shit from yesterday. Sucks, huh?
So how is one ever supposed to “move-on” from a disastrous past? Well, as my Mom says, you just pick yourself up by the bootstraps, and get on with it. “Walk it off” is another favorite. The terrible truth is that we never really “get over” the traumatic events in our lives. They haunt us for the rest of our lives. Things that are truly significant are never really “closed.”
Descartes
Common sense is the most widely shared commodity in the world, for
every man is convinced that he is well supplied with it.
René Descartes (1596 – 1650)
Sent from my iPhone
Optimism vs. Reality
All my life, I’ve heard people question whether the “glass” is half full or half empty. An age old question, meant to query whether someone is an optimist (the glass is half full) or a pessimist (the glass is half empty). I would like to answer the question from a more scientific point of view.
Best Thread from the PAX forum
PAX ’08
First off, a thanks to Y, for introducing me to the world of Penny-Arcade. Thanks. Wow, what an event. About a million people (many of whom in desperate need of deodorant!) crammed into the convention center. Games as far as the eye could see. And one hell of a mix of interesting people.