Category — aesthetica

I looooooove summertime, and it's finally here!  Today I wandered past my mirror, au naturel, and realized how very I-love-summer-y I looked, so I snapped a photo.  

After snapping it, I realized that it wasn't just stomach-muscles (well, some) and ridiculously comfy clothes, but that in fact the backdrop is entirely made of martial-arts weaponry and tools.  Accidental though that is, it officially made this tribute to summer too good to not post.  ;)

I also grabbed this pic for similar reasons to the last one, when I was making a dietary change and wanted a baseline to track any changes — though in this case, it's a bit different.  Multiple symptoms that can't be easily explained have plagued me lately, and my experiments with reducing certain foods has made me pretty certain that the cause of at least some of them (and more likely all of them, only some stop and start more quickly after exposure) is an allergy to wheat-gluten.  Furthermore, as seems to be the case with such things, the more I waffled (pretty good dual use of that term, I think!) and allowed myself a scone here, a sandwich there, the worse the symptoms got.  The other day I realized that I'm just going to have to admit that "bread and sugar isn't good for you" is more than a generality in my case, and go really Gluten Free For Serious, as the health consequences to doing otherwise are simply too dire to mess with.

By the way, one thing that really motivated me was the worsening of the symptoms and the knowledge that the sensitivity can ramp up and get nastier the more it's poked — and beer.  I love beer, especially since I've discovered craft beer, and beer is not entirely gluten-free.  It does have barely trace amounts of it compared to bread-related things (about 15ppm compared to 200,000, if my reading is generally accurate) — so you see where I'm going.  If I quit the bread and stuff now, hopefully my sensitivity doesn't get so serious that I can't drink beer.

Ah, motivation, you wear some funny clothes sometimes.  Then again, given the picture above, I suppose I can't talk.  ;)

Anyway, I've cleaned out my fridge and re-done the shopping, and stuffed everything with fresh produce, because the fillingness of raw veggies and the sweetness of fruit seems to be the only good substitute for the psychological lack of my favorite foods.  …And I'm sure that sounds healthy and everything, but it's risky too:  I do a lot of pretty calorie-intensive things, and I don't have a big appetite, and since I rarely cook I don't eat much meat.  I've got a pretty healthy level of body-fat now, and while losing a little of it wouldn't hurt me, I'm definitely not built to function with too little reserves.  Plus, I hate the feeling of being calorie-shy; if I get under by more than 500 calories on a given day, I feel like I've been squished by a steam-roller!  

So yeah, I bet I'll be thanking goodness for trail mix before too long!

But who cares, really?  It's summer!  

::summerdance::

This made my EVERYTHING:

…Sometimes culture is just the best, innit?  Layers and layers and layers…::shudderlove::

Yes, those are warm-ups.

Yes, I know people whose warm-ups look much like this.  (Mine look sort of like this too, but only if you take it apart into components and do it at half speed and three-quarters as far. ;)

I've been rededicating myself to my martial studies this past month — with good results; I'm sore in places I can't describe again! — both for obvious reasons and as part of the NYE project, which connection I hope I'll explain in another video soon.

Anyway, the moral of the video is that if you love something and do it well, even the warm-ups will be badass!

(You think I'm joking, but I'm not…)

You know you're part of a subculture when you sometimes check the popular RSS feeds and want to run for your tinfoil hat:

This morning in the news we find two very broken systems:

1.  "Copyright" "Enforcement":  The fact that neither YouTube's complex "takedown" system nor the DMCA (federal law) as practiced could stop Lionsgate (a film distributor) from forcibly removing this completely legal film TWICE is a pure example of how very broken the current system is.  Even after a lawyer is hired to step in, and even though this particular video had already been explicitly declared a shining example of Fair Use by the U.S. court system, it's obvious that without months of dogged effort and some luck, it would have remained offline.  

And of course, no-one ever made mention of how, maybe, the creator of this content should have received some compensation for being unfairly prosecuted, for having his hard work taken offline unfairly for many weeks, or for the many hours of time (and lawyer time!) he had to pay to iron things out.

Share a song with your friend, though, and the middlemen who distribute it (not the artists who made it) want a couple grand to "cover their losses".

It also shows how massively and basically biased our current system is against content-creators (i.e. people).  Have you ever heard of the DMCA or other copyright laws being used unfairly against a movie studio, or the recording industry conglomerate for example?  

2.  Entertainment in general:  All of that is one event, but seen in light of the overarching fact that we live in a society where three full films were made idolizing a pretty-faced male stalker and his mindlessly "in love" female victim, to the tune of billions in profit for corporations and rich people, while one 6-min free piece of art calling bullshit on the idea was banned from public view. 

WTF HUMANITY?!  I mean, 

Anyway, if you've never seen "Edward vs. Buffy", you definitely should, especially now that it's back online!

http://youtu.be/RZwM3GvaTRM

Wolfgang Goethe once said, "Colours are light's suffering and joy."

Running across this quote made me so happy — and happy's been hard today; just adjustment in circumstances I suspect — because it shows such a brilliant perspective ability, and one that transcends science without disagreeing with it.  It's unlikely that Goethe, who died in the early 1800's, knew about photons; but he understood how like us they are.

We see light and color and we say flippantly, "Ah, that's photons bouncing off things — you know, each other; everything.  How they bounce, and how we perceive the result is why we see color."

And then we say, thinking that it's a separate issue, "My, colors certainly evoke some strong emotional, instinctual and intellectual responses in us, don't they?"  

I read Goethe's quote and I think, "It's not an inconceivable point of view from which people are the sizes of photons.  What would the results of our bouncing around, off each other and everything, look like from there?  We hit each other and we make suffering, we bounce off a place or an object and we make joy; if we had to give a name to what a being that's the same relative size to us as we are to a photon would perceive when they watched what they could see of our suffering and our joy, what would we call it?

What else but color?

(Fun related thoughts:  "Gods" perceive human goings-on as color paintings, just as we perceive photon goings-on.  Maybe they can only understand our emotions that well, too — being big doesn't necessarily give you the ability to see with granularity at a tiny scale.  (How good is God's microscope?)  Maybe we are the gods of photons.  Suffering and Joy should be color names, as should other emotions.  Oddly, I bet people could generally agree on Joy, but I bet Suffering would be a battle to decide.  Buddha would like that everyone's Joy is similar — they are experiencing or expressing Oneness — but that each person's Suffering is different, since it's based on any of a zillion possible psychological illusions, and not a reality.)

Oooo, if you haven't messed with Google Ngram, you shooooould!  Instant pretty graphs of the occurrence of any words and phrases in tons of books over time?  YES PLEASE!

Here, for example, you can see that the phrase "in the beginning" was used a lot in 1800 and has been in steady decline ever since, while "in the end" has been on the rise during the same time-period; and the phrase "in the middle" has remained steady and qualitatively in-between the other two.  

Have you ever seen anything so squee-worthy??  I'm not sure I have.  I may need to sit down a minute, actually.  Whoo…

(YES, okay, I heard about the Ngram corpus lookup feature of Google Books and immediately headed over and devised a goofy philosophically-meta search for it.  Because that is me, and data that speaks to me gets me hot.)

Gods, makers are awesome.

What's this? Could this be a God's Eye Nebula hand-stitched tapestry?

There's another amazing tapestry (and, I've been personally assured, eventually some kits for making such nerdy wonders oneself!) at the artist's page: Geeky Pretty Things by AydnwyldeDesign on Etsy.

::Happy sigh at Internet::