What I Learned from Playing Bejeweled

Never lose track of the big picture.

Focus on what you're doing even when things get shaky.

There will always be someone better than you at this, but that doesn't mean much.

Pattern recognition is one of the most important guidelines in life. Having said that, speed is an incisive factor.

Sometimes just when you think you're about to fail, the game offers you an unexpected way out. You never completely know how the game is programmed.

The best way to execute a task is to get into the groove of it. That way it becomes easier.

When it becomes easy and automatic stay the course.

Sometimes, when in the groove of a task, do not over think your actions or it might impair the flow of things. It might be best to think about something else entirely, as a helpful distraction. This brain multitasking can be helpful in solving other problems at hand.
Also, negative thoughts will trump you and affect the game outcome.

You'll never know exactly what kids who play games addictively will turn into later in life. This kind of concentration and attention focusing could very well lead to development of constructive ideas and projects. But it also might not.

You can't sit for too many hours uninterrupted with this thing. It's really really really bad for you like that.

Today's Lists

THINGS THAT MAKE ME FEEL WORSE

1 - sitting at computer for hours without shifting position

2 - stand in awkward positions while skin picking

3 - turning on tv while eating

4 - turning on tv

5 - consuming extra sugar

6 - speaking to relatives

7 - conflicted relations conversation

8 - waking up without having moved around previous day: pain

9 - staying up late for something un-engaging

10- gossipping

11- whining

 THINGS THAT MAKE ME FEEL BETTER

1 - picking up guitar and playing

2 - playing music on guitar, keyboard, drums, computer

3 - drawing, painting, graphic art, web design

4 - eating vegetables (except for nightshades)

5 - eating fish once a week, other meats infrequently

6 - my espresso elixir, no more than once a day

7 - going on walks in woods, mountain, beach

8 - stretching

9 - dancing, dressing up

10- driving a well-running vehicle

11- paying bills (because it means I can)

12- knowledge of having a safe place to sleep/go at night

12- scalding baths

13- non-scalding baths

14- massage

15- sex

16- selling things, services

17- finishing projects

18- starting projects

19- saying I love you to loved ones

20- fasting

21- making things

22- making lists

Is Camille Paglia the new Al Gore?

In recent interviews, as well as past ones, Paglia lays claim to having invented every thing from the expression "pro-sex" to the entire feminist backlash syndrome - FBS. She used to love Madonna, but now is repulsed by M's older body doing seemingly the same things she used to do -- dance and wear sexy clothes -- because she is now revealing her "sagging flesh". I must be the only gerontophile who's been enjoying seeing the nicely fit bodies of older female actors and artists, and haven't really found Madge especially saggy in her new videos. Some recent photographers have delighted in promoting particularly bad pics of her because most audiences delight in validating the Decrapitating Diva meme -- one of the great gay themes of our time. Who doesn't love the legend of the suffering of waning power, especially as Madge's later cosmetic surgery efforts try to maintain that fleeting look of fertility.

The Big Projectowski: To Kick Old Habits.

The more time passes, the harder it becomes, of course. People get used to stuff - and then it's all over. For the rest of their lives. There's a zeitgeist, when your reality changes just because it's going there already automatically; you didn't do anything peculiar to steer it that way. And then there's deliberately willed future reality, which you create by actively giving a vision flesh. Intervening in your present and acting on your environment by changing the form of objects: writing a story, narrative, concept, communication, playing a new song or making new sounds, recording, putting paint or ink on a surface, assembling objects together, manipulating substances into different forms, constructing an engine, jotting budget projections for a business, film, show. And then there's pure expression without further goal of reality, something which happens in time only once and remains in the past without immediate consequences or results. Acts we do every day without conscious intent to change the direction of any possible future longer term outcome. This may be stuff we do for instant gratification. This may or may not be part of the zeitgeist, or just reactionary living. Instant unplanned reactions to surrounding stimuli without inhibition.

I now have a sudden rash on both my forearms. Brand new allergy to blogging?

Day

Today was like I was describing to my friend Lars, similar to the time I took half a Zoloft for test anxiety: within one day I became enclosed in a bottle - with fluid in it, unable to hear, see nor feel clearly my surrounding world. I wondered who would want to feel that way, no matter how much anxiety they might want to conquer.

But more than that, it was like someone else's detached dream. Although it was generally pleasant lunching with my friend and strolling on a rare and unseasonably warm SF day, it was still someone else's day.

Then the magik happened: as we got in the normally extended ordering line at UNNAMED EXPENSIVE HIPSTER MICROBREW COFFEE - and not even the longest I've seen there - we were discussing what to get, and we finally settled on a mocha which we knew was so overpriced we would split it and consume it on site. The instant our decision was made the place fell silent for a mere fraction of a second - and the next loud words out of the barista boy's mouth were: WOULD ANYBODY LIKE A FREE MOCHA FOR HERE? lifting a cup into the air. The even weirder part - we were the only ones to raise our hand in a line of twelve people. I stepped out of the quiet line to the front to take it from him before he changed his mind, and drifted directly to a table where Lars and I sat in amazement for a second before having a taste to make sure this really happened.

It was definitely the real deal, the coveted Mocha from U.E.H.M.C. It wasn't flawed in production, tainted or defective in any way at all. Correct temperature, cocoa sweetness and froth consistency, not to mention the usually intricate foam decor.

The young people who frequent this place always stand in line very patiently. They turn to have conversations with their friends or other folks behind them with the knowledgable resignation that their sacrifice is a necessity which will ultimately yield the exquisite and exclusively appropriate cup of java.

We shared and terminated it with glee, and conversed over it for longer than I'd done in a while, taking up the tabled seating for an extended period of time.

1-800-HATEYOU

A phone line - texting number? - where you can call and spew all your nastiest hatred for someone/something which has been percolating inside your deepest recesses for the longest time.

Have no guilt! Just lay it on me, baby, for a mere $6.66 per call. This would relieve the most pent-up do-gooder liberals who have no such other un-PC outlet, unlike neo-cons who apparently know how to express themselves much more freely in this manner on a judgemental daily basis.

Do this before we adopt euro-like anti-hate-speech laws, as it looks like we are long overdue.

Undecided if some of the proceeds should go to some worthy cause somewhere else, considering my current placement as a good recipient.

Night Cuts

I keep waking up with cuts and scratches on my face - when I've slept alone.

Wondering what the story was...

Public Servants Don't Have a Safeword

People who vote for Prop B: Consider most SF public servants can't even afford to live in SF on their city pay, and frequently do jobs which are dangerous or really unpleasant for the sole public good, thankless and generally unrewarded, all to sew back the seams of a flawed and increasingly stressed out system. Lower level employees have already taken pay cuts, services have been getting slashed yearly and budgets cut drastically.

Private sector entities who get rich basically feeding off the general population don't have to deal with their own by-products: exploitation and despair, and use their money to distance themselves from where that happens. Public servants are the ones who pick up after this consumptive process, mainly to keep things running in some fashion.

Life and Decrapitation

Repetitive stress injury from working day after day. Thought I would be an observer through this, but got caught up in the routine druggedness of people with jobs, like The Man Who Fell to Earth.

This was never going to be the healthy choice, guess I felt privileged by thinking I would never fall for this establishmentarianistic trap. Never would I work full-time for anyone but MYSELF again, and any future money I'd make would go directly to my craft and skill, whether it was my latest short video, new guitar or launching/developing the ultimate psychosex site.

Where did all the good will go? or the ENERGY whatwithall?

The body: we all know it eventually breaks down. Living like it never will is in some kind of positive attitude self-help book all over the world, soon to be in every language, originating straight from our holier-than-thou californian coasts. So why would anyone want to waste even one precious moment doing with their body -- their only true possession (if not factually physically enslaved by some other entity) doing something they don't really want to do?

A-ha, there's the rub: Whether tis nobler for the heart to suffer the slings and arrows...
No, wait.

Tuesday. Seven pee-em.

Driving back home from work I saw people with very gray, sickly faces. Not just the first guy, who was crossing in front of SF General Hospital, but later another lady, several blocks past the hospital. She had baggy clothes, but not necessarily disheveled, and a nice haircut. Everything else about her was quite normal, except her face -- a grayish-green shade.

Now, I doubt they both had the same terminal illness at the same time. But now that I think about it, they also had the same malaise in expression, a very unhappy one, on the fringe of desperation.

At the moment of seeing the first person I also began realizing everyone was driving crazy, they had been doing that since I left work. This was Tuesday evening. Had everybody gone to happy hour and were now totally drunk going home? Had something suddenly happened in local/international news that I wasn't aware of yet? Was this a regular behavioral pattern of normal people on every Tuesday after work?

I'm either becoming less wise about humanity, or creating my own mystery thriller in my head out of pure boredom.

Camille Paglia - No Sex Please, We're Middle Class

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/27/opinion/27Paglia.html?src=me&ref=general

Amusing article. Smacks a bit of old fuddy-duddy bemusing the infamous "lack of eroticism" of modern media, and nostalgia the so-much-better bygone days when things were more prohibited.

"There’s no mystery left. "

Heard that before?



"...without an ounce of genuine eroticism. "

This quip about L. Gaga is not an insult at all. Her art transgresses the erotic norm, and you'd think Paglia would see that with in-your-face s&m dirty video imagery. I concur, that is not genuine eroticism, it's late century expressionism, like M. Manson and Nine Inch Nails.
It is so not what she's about.


Paglia even sounds chauvinistic, when as a spectator she wants women to be more erotic. I do agree that modern life de-sexualizes people for business purposes -- modern family can survive only in function of business (that's why they'll HAVE to let gays marry. It's practical business sense, although I don't believe marriage the way it's still set up like the middle ages makes any business sense either: obsolescent.) But if making a living in the real world means having to curtail a bit of your eroticism on the job site (!) then maybe you can lead a fulfilling career in some other field and then do or pay for your sexuality somewhere else intimately fulfilling, like guys do, and that might just be okay. Because you can.

In this following quote she's pretty much defining successful and ambitious women as reproductive ones. I have serious issues with that statement. There will be more and more women foregoing reproduction, you watch. Truth is, it's just not an essential/defining part of womanhood anymore. Sorry, just the way it is.

"Men must neuter themselves, while ambitious women postpone procreation".

But as women try to gain more life power -- as in jobs, cultural careers and options for life choices -- they can define their own kind of sexuality and eroticism. Hate pseudo-quoting Kissinger, but power is one of the best aphrodisiacs in my book, too.

A New Bio-directive

There's more than one reason older women are more attractive these days: not only because they've been taking better care of themselves, having less children, and generally living their lives in more fulfilling ways, but also because the biological focus has shifted more towards present group maintenance rather than future sustenance of the species as a whole.

As we near the visible end of the human adventure on earth, the identified "instincts" to propagate give way for more reasonable and practical instincts: how to live well the rest of the time we all have left.

The saying that males -- young and old -- are always on the lookout for the young, fertile females as an irrefutable, irresistible urge to carry their seed into the far future, may be shortfalling to a new reality of a species in precarious conditions of survival into that far away future. Chances are getting slimmer daily that even two generations from now they will be able to enjoy simple pleasures such as non-toxic shellfish, or un-synthesized meat or natural plant and fruit products. Bladerunner comes to mind, with a now more plausible scenario of most animals being extinct, and a huge market for animatronics and synthesized hyperrealistic creatures, used in everything from pet needs to natural photoshoots for visual illusion.

In biology, animal species tend to propagate in different patterns mostly according to their environment. In a high risk, dangerous habitat species reproduce in quick, large quantities, flooding the environs with as many offspring as fast as possible in the short time of parental life they may have left.

Seeing how we -- and I'm primarily talking about middle class western societies -- have created a more comfortable environment for ourselves, with most people working with an option for windfall for future needs -- savings plans, 401Ks, the need to reproduce no longer serves our environment. Although we are still in need for a young workforce to maintain the older crowd (which is getting older by the minute as baby boomers age) it is no longer true that having more kids is more profitable or even convenient. Women in these countries are in fact discovering that having any kids is not only quite unprofitable, but downright inconvenient to the simple goal of having a happy life.

Both Italy and Japan have continued to hold world records in negative population growth in the last ten years. Despite minor differences between these two countries, within the same socio-economic status child-bearing women have largely stopped having kids. Women's lives have simply been made more difficult by having children, apparently at all socioeconomic levels, so women have finally stopped and taken note. Females are not moving out of their parents' house, not getting married or just choosing to not spawn even when partnered. It's simply too much trouble -- and not enough reward. There is the highest level of single female headed households in the world now than ever before, and a higher number of physically self-sufficient women than ever before.

In this present-tense scenario, people look to sex more for bonding and entertainment purposes, and for raising the quality of life. The whole esthetic of bio-fertility of younger women being more attactive no longer makes sense, and it's resulting in males opting for older women rather than young ones as a more attractive choice. I don't believe that these are conscious choices, but most talk about children as a major motivator for relationships no longer holds true nowadays, for the vast majority.

Social Networking

Yesterday people at my job were wishing me happy birthday all day. It wasn't my birthday. Then I realized... it was my facebook birthday.

These colleagues were people I had not friended on facebook, either, except for one. And after that first person said it to me -- and I thought he'd know me better to remember my real birthday, since he had been invited to the party some two years before -- I just stopped telling the rest that it wasn't my real birthday after all. I just gave up, and took all the new birthday wishes in stride, kind of rejoicing to have a brand new birthday, the second one this year.

I don't feel comfortable exposing true personal identity data on any of these sites, and I've been on them since friendster pre-history. It always shocks me how much intimate information people post on this thing, and not surprised when it bites them in the ass.

It made me realize exactly just how powerful facebook has become. It just creates whole new realities for people, pushing their real-life events to a questionable back file in their brain.

Upon signing in to fb of course I had a slew of birthday wall posts, and they also included several other people who had been at my IRL birthday party previously.

I thanked them all profusely.

A Peek into Charleton Heston's Basement

No wonder he was the head of the NRA. Or was it that he had this fetish because he was the head of the NRA...? Chicken or egg thing, I guess.

Click on each pic to enlarge.

BEST BLACK-DEATH-GORE METAL BAND NAMES

1000 Funerals, Abattoir, Abhorred Existence, Abominator, Abortarium, Absolute Hatred, Accept Death, Acheron, Acid Bath, Amoebic Dysentery, Apiary, Asphyx, Atheist, Atrocious Abnormality, Atrocious Abnormality, Atrocity, Atrosis, Autopsy, Behemoth, Belphegor, Benediction, Blasphemic Cruelty, Bolt Thrower, Brejn Dedd, Brutal Devastation, Bukkake Tsunami, Cadaver, Cancer, Cannibal Corpse, Carcass, Cardiac Arrest, Carnage, Carnage Asada, Cattle Decapitation, Cemetery Rapist, Cephalic Carnage, Cephalotripsy, Convulsus, Corpse Cum, Corpse Dismemberment, Cuntworm, Darkthrone, Death, Decapitated, Decrypt, Deicide, Desultory, Deterioration, Dethroned, Devourment, Digested Flesh, Disgorge, Disincarnate, Dismember, Divine Pustulence, Dying Fetus, Edge of Sanity, Electro Toilet Syndrom, Entombed, Excruciation, Execration, Fecal Corpse, Foetopsy, Genocaust, Gorefest, Gorguts, Grave, Grotesque, Gut, Guttural Secrete, Guttural Secrete, Hail of Bullets, Hate Eternal, Horde Casket, I Shit on Your Face, Immolation, Impetigo, Incision, Incubus, Infestdead, Inhuman Dissillency, Jungle Rot, Kataklysm, Katatonia, Katatonia, Krisiun, Kuntle, Lapidate, Lividity, Loudblast, Maceration, Malevolent Creation, Massacra, Massacre, Masticate, Merciless, Monstrosity, Morbid Angel, Morgoth, Mortal Decay, Nailed Shut, Napalm Death, Necrophagist, Nekros, Nihilist, Nile, Nocturnus, Obeisance, Obituary, Opeth, Orchiotomy, Pestilence, Pollution, Possessed, Pungent Stench, Purulent Jacuzzi, Putrid Pile, Ribspreader, Rottenness, Sadus, Sarcophagus, Sceptrum Mortiferum, Screaming Afterbirth, Septic Devourment, Sepultura, Severed Savior, Skinned, Slaughter, Slayer, Spermswamp, Splatterwhore, Stab Wounds, Suffocation, Syphilic Gitrot, Therion, Torture Division, Unanimated, Unearthed Corpse, Unleashed, Vader, Viral Load, Vital Remains, Vital Remains, Wounded Knee

Next week: care to add to this list?

Bukkake Tsunami... that one gets some prize.

Please send me all the best names you can find to add to the collection. Fanks!

Impaled Nazarene - tx to Crazy Frank

Names of Pain

Ever wonder where those ex nerdy geek boys fished the names for their big new companies once they hit the big time?

It's all in the name.

Sounds to me like they had plenty of teenage sexual problems, and their revenge was not forgetting where they came from. Finally getting paid, after never getting laid as young men, they've been able to describe their private parts and their condition to common household and now senseless words -- MICROSOFT and EUNIX.

Mmmh.

This Week's Most Alarming Headlines

Nuclear booby-trap devastates Sri Lanka: ‘Gotcha!’ says rebel leader’s suicide note


Mirrored buildings killing more elderly drivers


Dear Abby: Is 84 too late to give up drugs?


N. Korea goes ballistic after Fox anchor mocks small missiles


Space Station’s Tang supplies critically low; NASA fears mutiny, scurvy


New ‘Frenemy’ app spins web of malicious gossip


‘Hipster Grifter’ deployed to Iraq


Urine the money! Out of water, Vegas casinos offer perks for recycling


Web 2.0 moguls spark leather pants craze in Silicon Valley


Renegade nun re-frocks herself at Forever 21


Parents sue after brain-dead teen denied Harvard admission


Doomsday cult books cruise to Mount Ararat


Peace activists plan to cross DMZ


Wienermobile in freak collision with carnival workers


Farmers Council vows to squash dissenters


Lindsay Lohan buys house next door to Jonas Brothers


WWII buffs re-enact Bataan Death March at Florida outlet mall


Haitian president says crisis may require greater sacrifices


Strange new microbe feeds on silicone


Viking biker gang seizes control of Iceland’s capital: Elves vow, ‘This isn’t over’


‘Pregnant man’ struggles with chores, derailed career a year after giving birth


Courtesy of C. Ward

Fatal Fall into Vat of Chocolate

Fatal fall into vat of chocolate

A man has died after falling into a vat of melted chocolate in a New Jersey processing plant.

The accident happened on Wednesday as 29-year-old Vincent Smith, a temporary worker at the Cocoa Services plant, was loading chocolate into a vat where it is melted and mixed before being shipped elsewhere to be made into sweets.

A co-worker tried to shut off the machine and two others tried to pull Mr Smith out of the 8ft-deep vat. He was hit and fatally injured by the agitator that mixes the chocolate.

MJ Dead? Feels Awkward...

He Wasn't Supposed to Die!

A London Daily Telegraph article gives a list of 100 facts about Michael Jackson. One fun fact: The fictional character he was trying to imitate with his continuous body modifications was Peter Pan.

Thinking about the way he's looked over the years, I think he had succeeded in doing that, and also in fulfilling to the most humanly possible degree his Peter Pan Syndrome. Becoming a wealthy artist made him capable of following his own fantasy, while simultaneously creating a mythology about himself all over the world — over which, by the way, he had much less control.

And myths never die.

The guy was in pretty good shape physically, despite general fallout from multiple bad cosmetic surgeries and pharmaceuticals to sustain such errors. Beyond the strange anime expression achievement, he looked nowhere near any other "normal" human 50-year-old male that I can think of. His nose eventually resembled the two-dimensional, upturned Disney character feature, and his eyes, facial shape and hair the stereotypical Japanese anime super-heroes: elegantly elongated, effeminate and seductive androgynous creatures, who always break everybody's heart and save everyone's day, even as underdogs. (They also typically have extreme round eyes and very white skin - both very un-Asian traits.)

His body stayed lithe and adolescent, regardless of substances employed to keep in that condition. In the same way, models who are under high pressure to maintain within the body type employ any available scientific and empirical methods to continue resembling the highly abstract and idealized form of that particular esthetic. It also doesn't have much of a basis in real life — hence its popularity: Nobody really looks like that, and to be born with some of those culturally idealized traits, or to be able to modify one's self into them creates the high-prized specialness of the Holy Freak.

In his world he achieved a level of perfection: matching the flawed human to the ideal. In the art milieu, several artists have worked with this concept, most notably Orlan: using cosmetic surgery on herself — and creating performance out of the actual surgeries — as a means to resemble her own esthetic ideals. This differs from Hollywood actors, or general public even, who undergo cosmetic procedures to visually fit the esthetics of the market, or of the current powerbase.
In this respect Jackson was the ultimate performance artist, making his body integral part of his world spectacle, and setting no limits on his private life in order to achieve this personal artistic vision most completely.

He actually was able to remain the eternal teenager, psychically as well as physically. That would be a guess confirmed somewhat by the level of friendships — or even relationships —with young boys he was able to maintain for a long time under wraps.There are two distinct popular schools of thought on this, after his latest scandal-riddled news revelations: one that he is Jackson, the reincarnation of the Archangel Michael (there really was a cult who believed that to be true) — the one who does good for all the children by spreading his message in world-wide unification through catchy music and dance, as he also once claimed; and the other that he is an evil clone of Jackson who took over and monstrously transformed him into an unintelligible, freakish child-molesting tycoon, who in his older years could no longer control himself privately nor publicly. In fact, the more he sought to embrace world causes relevant to children in order to more plainly demonstrate his heartfelt innocence, the more it registered as a strident media ploy to cover up plausibly unlawful activities. His wealth did not help him there. His predicament of dabbling in possibly the last taboo topic of our iconoclastic times —as well as one of the most understudied — did not beg positive media attention with a ten-foot-pole. When he was mentioned, it had to be with an automatic built-in attachment of condemning clause.

So, were these little boys — whose claims against Jackson made him the permanent defiler and scarrer of their innocence — truly the future victims of life-long PTSD and therefore unable to live a functional life because of their intoxicated sleepovers with some rich famous freak,or were they just lucky to have shared some kind of intimacy with one of the greatest pop music geniuses of our time in the weird way he knew how to be intimate?

Depends on which planet you're on.

This Week's Most Alarming Headlines

Polar bear escapes Kansas zoo, dies of boredom



Hello Hentai toys a hit with Japanese teens: Is fad headed here?



Herpes superbug colonies thrive in motel pillows



Kiss and kill: Tubercular temptress terrorizes Toronto



Hurricanes fling millions of deadly pythons across Disney World



Morales rallies Bolivia in face of economic crisis: ‘We have what it takes to get through this’



Settlers rush to claim new Pacific trash islands



Investigators can’t make heads or tails of latest cattle mutilations



SF Crystal Queens take speed-talking trophy; Bakersfield Hash Slingers a close second



Susan Boyle in lesbian love triangle with Ibiza strippers



Five billion swine flu survivors look for someone to sue



Bravo’s ‘Suture Self’ offers beauty on a budget



In peace gesture, Muslim terrorists offer not to behead children



Fidel Castro elopes with Cher, will help market rejuvenation serum



Air France victims may have been eaten by underwater Nazis: Experts



Wendy’s says food almost 100% free of roach particles



Pentecostal messiah says anyone can get into heaven, but it’ll cost ya



Study finds almost all U.S. adults believe others to be deluded – and they’re right



‘Reality’ was coerced, say TV stars: Lawsuit claims producers threatened to expose true events



Doomsday bomb goes off too soon, destroys Philippines: ‘Sorry, it won’t happen again,’ cult leader promises



Courtesy of C. Ward