Thankful, sad, hopeful, tired, full,
listening to magpies and hoping the
mulberry survives the frosts.

A few days ago I was sitting in a rather dark basement with my brother, stoned. I saw a spider crawl along the wall close to my brother, so I walked/crawled up to the wall to get a good look at it. Yep, definetly a spider. I mumbled/said to my brother something about there's a spider he should kill it.
"There's no spider." He seemed somewhat annoyed.
I repeated a bit more enthusiastically that there was, indeed, a spider and that he should kill it. A few seconds later the critter crawled behind the desk and I would never see it again.

The thing is, now I have no idea if there was a spider or not. My brother was sitting at an angle where the desk would block his view of the spider and I'm pretty sure he didn't even look anyways. Whether or not there was a spider, it is impossible to tell. There would be absolutely no difference in my mind if there was a spider or there wasn't a spider; the outcome would be the same. This raises a lot of questions about other aspects of reality.
If we had both seen the spider, would it have been there? If no one saw it, would it have been there? It doesn't make any difference either way, in both cases. Is it any more likely that the spider would have been there if everyone in the world agreed it was there than if it were just me that saw it? I can only see the world with my mind, so anything I perceive is about as real as it can possibly be... the whole "world" as I perceive it only exists in my mind and the filters that make sense of it, if I were to die it would be gone. You can say that you will still exist if I die, but to me you wouldn't and that's all the matters. I don't even know what "you" are, some text, possibly some light my brain interprits as a picture... but even then you only exist through me, through my senses, so without me there is no you.

Also, in the news today, stereotype confirmed!

"African-American children were spanked significantly more frequently than those from white and Mexican-American families" - CNN

It's not racist if it's true, right?

The 1000 new nodes added in the first two weeks of this month (node IDs from 1995800 to 1996799) break down by type as listed below.

510     Users
169     Write-ups
159     Nodes
116     Deleted nodes and write-ups
45      Other

Concerning nodes and write-ups, I believe that posting a new node that has a unique title creates both a node and a writeup under it. If that is true, we can interpret the numbers for nodes and write-ups to mean that of the 169 new write-ups, ten were put under existing nodes and 159 were created as nodes in themselves.

It's interesting to note that we got so many new users relative to new writeups.