KODA

It’s 11:50pm of the last night of spring break, and for some reason I have the urge to write here.

I feel like I need to make up for lost time. I’ve let things collect dust here for the past term, so it seems strange to be trying it again on the eve of the next wave of school. Yet right now, I want to. That’s all I’d like to say. I know am rarely interested in reading other peoples’ apologies for not writing on their blogs. So I’ll try to keep things topical from here on out.

Tomorrow will bring Popular Culture and Intro to Operating Systems, in the lovely city of bridges. I am very much looking forward to it, even though it feels a bit deadening to go back to school after merely a week’s break. Even so, it seems every time I get a break I see the alternative — diddling — which makes me wish for the linear deadlines of the school year. I’m kind of concerned that this is what it’s coming to: preferring force-fed work instead of real projects. It’s hard to be both productive and self-motivated.

Yesterday, I discovered that the graffiti I found about a month ago has been painted over. Frankly I’m not surprised, but it’s hard to understand how people can take such unique art and slap a dull brown paint over it. It wasn’t even out in the open — you had to look to find it. How much culture and honest self-expression is lost to this “cleaning?”
That image was one of the most personal and raw statements I’ve seen for quite some time, and it is really too bad it had to be painted over. How fascinating that it’s expression should be further emphasized by it’s very destruction.

	Firefox	75.6 %
	Safari	9.7 %
	MS Internet Explorer	5.8 %

Sorry to those 5.8% (!) who are using IE, things will be looking pretty ugly here from here on out since your browser does not know how to display standards-compliant web pages properly…

For the other 94.2% of you out there, I think your taste in web browsers is damn cool.

http://browsershots.org/website/1152960/

Have you ever watched a movie or an animation with the sound off, and felt like you could hear the movement? Kind of like your mind is assembling sounds for the motion? Have you ever been staring at some cheezy animated gifs and thought you could hear the visual rhythm?

Have you ever stared at someone’s mouth in the distance and tried to read their lips? When doing so, did it feel like you could hear bits of what they were saying?

Perhaps our senses truly are not as separate as they would at first seem.

I hereby vow to try to figure out the difference between it’s and its, you’re and your, and they’re and their. I shall hereby try to speak english as a well-formed language, rather than a generic statement for what happens when you put letters together.

For pandas has shown me the light.

Lately I’ve begun recognizing my assumption that everything I look at, everything I perceive, has a backside that I can’t see. A side that is hidden from me because of my current perspective.

I see books on tables nearby, realize that the side facing down is completely hidden from my view. While in my mind I percieve things in this room as objects, and my mind can fill their forms in, what I am really viewing is a but 2D shadow of their existence. Just “the tip of the iceberg,” with far more of the surface hidden from my vantage point.

Yet, even as I move around and view the room from another angle, this backside is still there, and there is just as much unseen to me as there was before. And there always will be. It is like this backside of non-perception is dependent upon my very context of perception: I move, and it moves with me. The backside of things is a natural antithesis to the frontside that is accessible to my vision.

This little poem sprang into my mind one night a few years ago, just out of the blue. Just three words, three orders, and reversed. But is it more than just wordplay? I continue to ponder what it means… and how it can have meaning.

Is it not true that often, the most you can ask from someone for them to be a “good person” is the concerted effort to be a good person?

And if that is the case, does that not simply become the concerted effort to a concerted effort be a good person? The concerted effort to a concerted effort to a concerted effort to be a good person?

Where did the good person go? Where did the original goal lose it’s meaning? Is this not the fallacy of this kind of self-referential definition? But then, is it not enough to simply try one’s best?

…for an attractive PHP gallery app has begun. Polishing up the theme and design for the blog here has gone so well that I think I’m going to call it mostly complete for now. I also took some time today to write up a custom 404 (and other) error handler for chromakode.com. I’m not sure if the devil truly is in the details… it sure is fun to dive into a little detail every now and then.

It’s time to start filling in the other sections of this site. I’ve been hoping to tackle an art gallery next, but it seems that every open source gallery system I check out turns out looking less than my hopes. I don’t know if I’ve becomed spoiled over at deviantART, but the demos and interfaces I’ve seen all seem to be based around the same clunky forum-ish page layout. Thumbnails are painfully small, the user interfaces are cluttered, distracting, and based on ugly web forms. And if you’re looking for a serious gallery layout, the standard white is about the worst color to choose for a background – dark gray and black can bring out so much more color in your images!

日本語を勉強します。OMG! 名前は片仮名で書きました！

(I am studying Japanese. OMG! The name was written in Katakana!)

Yeah, I know it’s been a lot of fluff posts lately… I’m sorry, but I haven’t found the time to do (or write about) anything particularly interesting on the technical side. However, there are (and always will be) lots of interesting ramblings to share… so here’s some more.

Today I got to see the first video in my Japanese Culture class. It’s a neat little course, and so every other Friday I will be able to enjoy a bit more of this fascinating culture. The movie we watched today was pretty awesome… a samurai story exploring gender and social power and the ethics around them (in historic Japan). So anyway, it’s a real drawn out story about a Samurai’s son who is ordered to marry the lord’s mistress (who bore the lord a child), and they fall in love only to find that due to circumstances the lord wishes that he have her back. So of course, the father and son can’t let that happen. But long story short, we sit through 1:30 of pretty cerebral (and completely fight-free) tension, only to run out of time right before the real samurai style ass-kicking begins. You can look at the IMDB page… and yes, that movie poster seems to be showing the fight scene that will surely be bugging me all week.