If you liked that video I posted some time ago with the juggler, you'll love this.
Maybe it's called "contact juggling". Not sure.... but it looks awesome, and I wish I could do it.
The site has some NSFW stuff ads on it, though the video itself it clean.
So, I just noticed that the vast majority of the posts I've tried to make in the past two months have NOT been actually posted. ...This is my own fault, so I apologize for slamming everyone with a bunch of stuff. Ooops. I will fix it, so that this doesn't happen again.
Sorry.
I'm sure you're familiar with mind maps. They were all the craze about five years ago. ...They seem to have fallen out of style since then, which is fine, 'cause I don't think they're optimal. But the idea is a good one... representing things in a natural, parent-child way, with the ability to do some neat things. I liked 'em. On paper, as it were. But when it came right down to it, I didn't use the damn things. Too awkward to set up. Heck, I don't even do it with a blank piece of paper--also too awkward, since you're never sure where you're going to want more space. It just doesn't work, in practice.
But I do think of my life in a mind-mappy kind of way. As I see it, I've spent the last 30-some-odd years trying to find a few things to focus on. ...I'm not a "single focus" kind of guy: I have too strong an appreciation of everything life has to offer. But in the context of a diverse framework, I think I can "hone" my life down into several areas. And, in fact, I have done just that over the past decade or so. I've managed to avoid getting sucked into side projects as much as I did in the previous decade. I've learned what makes me tick, I think.
The way I see it, there are eight focuses in my life:
I'm considering setting up an email filter that automatically archives any messages with multiple recipients that contain the string "congrat".*
[sigh]
* The idea being, it would stop all the top-quoted, single-line emails that say "Congrats, Tom!", or "Congratulations, Betty!"
I've noticed to, conflicting trends over the past two decades.
The first is a direct result of mass-communication becoming more wide-spread: we are exposed to the best of the best, and next year, it'll be better. Most recent incarnations of this include American Idol. Any of the people in this season are better than any singer you'll ever personally know, and yet we all feel entitled to say that they suck. We compare everything to the elite model.
Models: there's another example. Actresses (men are, for the most part, exempt, but we'll go into that another day) are all gorgeous. Better-looking than anyone you'll ever know.
Politicians. We won't even consider them unless they appear to be super-humanly squeaky-clean. If you pick your nose in public just once, you'll never win another election.
The inverse also applies, here: talk-shows are happy to expose the worst of the worst of humanity. I won't give examples, but you know what I mean.
At the same time, there is a second trend. And it moves in the opposite direction: we bloggers air our dirty laundry. We take pictures of themselves in the most unflattering states and post them online. We talk about our debt. We share our personal dramas no Live Journal. This is abject reality. It's ugly.
What strikes me as interesting is that it is unlikely that the two can ever meet. Angelina Jolie can't post pictures of herself at 6:00 in the morning. Obama can't blog about how much his coworkers pissed him off. PZ can never run for office. The kids who sing on You Tube will never appear on American Idol.
I don't know what it means. I'm just watching it happen.
I've been frustrated lately. Mostly, regarding the propensity of angry flame-warring that usurps the internet.
Today, I read this comment:
