In all the endless tinkering and suggestions for "improving" E2, please remember that it is far easier to break something than it is to fix it. E2 is not just a pile of code and text that can be tweaked until it somehow, miraculously, starts to generate 100 new writeups a day of stunning quality. E2 is a collection of people and an archive of years of work and ideas, and you have as much of a duty to its past as you do to its present and future. By all means take your radical idea and start a new "E3" site somewhere, and may it thrive. But please take care that you don't confuse your own need for internal change with a need to change external things. E2 lives and dies on its content, and if you've stopped producing content and only started worrying endlessly about form and structure, you are not helping the site.

To put it another way: STOP WRITING CODE. START WRITING NODES.

"Even when you were at your most miserable and losing at a poker table, you were happier then your happiest at work"
- my friend Ricky

I'm on /CHATTEROFF. I'm in a strange mood and more likely than usual to get into stupid fights. If you want to talk, send me a /msg.

It's worth noting that ever since I turned off the catbox, I've felt more like writing. Compulsive writers (that's me) just need an outlet, or we get all blocked up and unhealthy and unhappy. The catbox is an outlet, but a non-productive one, so I'm letting the pressure build up again and hopefully it will find another way out.

I have to have it turned off because if it's there, I'll look at it.

YES I AM UNSTABLE, YES I AM HAPPY THIS WAY

"May not the habit in scientific pursuits of believing nothing till it is proved, influence your mind too much in other things which cannot be proved in the same way, & which if true are likely to be above our comprehension."

- Emma Darwin, in a letter to her husband Charles

I like to write, and read, all kinds of things, but I have a particular love for poetry. If you think you've got a good poem on here, and you feel it deserves a C! or at the very least an upvote, /msg me a link. Poetry can sometimes get a hard time here.

I DOWNVOTE RECIPES

And one day we will die
and our ashes will fly
from the aeroplane over the sea

But for now we are young
let us lay in the sun
and count every beautiful thing we can see

...

What a beautiful face
I have found in this place
that is circling all round the sun

And when we meet on a cloud
I'll be laughing out loud
I'll be laughing with everyone I see -

Can't believe how strange it is to be anything at all

from In The Aeroplane Over The Sea by Neutral Milk Hotel

it all started off as a game and now it's gotten so serious and i'm sorry and i do wish it was still a game but i don't know how to go back and i'm scared but i'm excited too and oh oh oh can you remember that silly-serious silent white light from so long ago, that's what i wish for you, and me, and me, and me

I am not objective and I am not sorry.

This whole tower of knowledge is built on shifting sand.

4 years, 124 days, 4 hours, 33 minutes, 1 second.
That is how long it takes to come full circle.

Take a spin once a day to keep the gods of chance happy. Get some Easter Eggs and go /FIREBALL someone in the catbox. Don't keep spinning. Addiction leads to destroyed lives.

Science, like humanity itself, is a wonderful servant but a terrible master. When talking to irrational New Age types, I am sometimes perceived as a dogmatic scientist. When talking to over-rational scientific materialists, I tend to come across like a fuzzy New Ager. No one likes me in those kinds of discussions, because what I always argue for is balance, and so few people have any idea what that really is. They tend to think that balance means surrendering their own point of view. Actually, balance in its fullest sense encompasses all points of view and integrates every possible way of thinking about the world. All perceptions and thoughts and feelings and expressions have value in their own relative frame, and all that exists are relative frames. Yes, this leads to "moral relativity". No, that does not mean the same thing as amorality.

The thing to wonder is: what fulcrum does all this mass of concepts and perceptions balance around? What is the still centre that allows integration? A star, for example, has such a thing as a centre of gravity. Gravity pulls the star into shape around this notional point, but the point does not actually exist. There is nothing remarkable at that point, and that is the point. What is your awareness? Where is it located? All of you has collected around a point that cannot be found, but that you yourself know a priori to exist.

The value of science to the non-scientist, apart from the technology it gives us, is in its ability to give us metaphors and concepts we can use in our daily lives and in our quest for further self-integration. If you intuitively know what I mean, then don't let scientific materialists bully you out of speaking about what they consider to be their domain. In 99% of cases, while they think you don't understand what they're talking about, they also don't understand what you're talking about. The difference is that they think that what they don't understand (or what "isn't science") has no meaning. The definition of "meaning" is the problem. Science and economics have tried to convert "meaning" into measurables and have won a vast victory over the entrenched institutional religions in whose context science had to fight for conceptual space. However, as we all know, the successful revolution can very quickly become the oppressive regime, and "meaning" must not become entirely limited to that which is measurable or communicable, or there will be no null point for the whole of human discourse to center and integrate itself around.

At the heart of the human experience, and at the heart of our awareness, I believe that there must be something incommunicable, utterly subjective, intuitively recognized, and vital to all of the perceptions and conceptions that surround it. You can call it the human singularity if you like. At a certain point all the words and concepts you struggle with in your philosophies begin to merge and disintegrate, and arguments begin going in circles as meaning itself begins to be up for grabs. Eventually, if you know what's good for you, you'll just sit down and shut up, and maybe look at the sky for a while. What you're looking for is always where and what you already are. If you find yourself lost in concepts and always arguing, you're blind to the huge inner movements, the swell of billions of years pulsing inside you, seeking expression. Our words are like surf on an internal sea whose size we don't allow ourselves to perceive fully, for good reason, but whose existence we must acknowledge. In the end, it's not as scary as it first seems, because there at the bottom of the sea, full fathom five, pearls for eyes, peering silently through the waters, it's you. Only you.

Bookmarks below are mostly for future noding. Many of them are nodeshells. If you post a writeup in any of them and let me know, I'll probably C! it.