A Brief for the Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

You're in a car with a beautiful boy, and he won't tell you that he loves you, but he loves you. And you feel like you've done something terrible, like robbed a liquor store, or swallowed pills, or shoveled yourself a grave in the dirt, and you're tired. You're in a car with a beautiful boy, and you're trying not to tell him that you love him, and you're trying to choke down the feeling, and you're trembling, but he reaches over and he touches you, like a prayer for which no words exist, and you feel your heart taking root in your body, like you've discovered something you didn't even have a name for.

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PICO-8 - I'm sort of surprised I never got into the PICO-8. It's a kind of fictional virtual console for 8-bit games... but one that really encouraged homebrew and community, and that "everyone can write a little game" that was a hallmark of the BASIC/magazine type-in days.

I'm particularly taken by this game, 8 Legs to Love -
I don't know what the CPU limitations are on a PICO-8, but the physics behind the dangling parts of web are beautiful

No finite human being has ever won a fight against time. We just get the limited time we get, and the limited control over it that we get.
And if you spend your life fighting the truth of this situation, all that happens is that you feel more rushed and overwhelmed and impatient - until one day time decisively wins the fight, as it was always destined to do. (In other words: you die.)

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Two shots of Dean from a random iPhone SE I messed with a while back...

Dear friend,

We recollect you, which if a frugal phrase, has sumptuous meanings.

E - Dickinson -

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I don't build much but on FB I follow some Lego groups (most notably "Lego Showoff")

I've learned some new stuff - like the term MOC (for My Own Creation) and also some new websites - maybe even cooler than when I found out there's a whole used Lego marketplace where you can order specific pieces, I discoved that the Rebrickable Alternate Builds page is brilliant - what can people do with the same single set?

That is much closer to the experience I had as a kid, where there was a lot of piece constraint (and not as many specialty pieces - just enough to make things look a BIT less blocky)

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Thermonator, the Flame-Throwing Robot Dog, Can Now Be Yours for $9,420. Oh goodie.

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This brings me to my second point. Democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason. I may be opposed to abortion for religious reasons, but if I seek to pass a law banning the practice, I cannot simply point to the teachings of my church or evoke God's will. I have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths, including those with no faith at all.

Is Stress Contagious? Studies Say Yes Well, fek. Gat Out of Hell - , a kind of DLC-ish thing for Saints Row... I played this game for like the third time through this weekend

(heh looking at some notes maybe it was the only game I played all the way through in 2017 as well?) It's like $4 on Steam or PS4 store and is just such a good side story. Light on the "big scenes" but heavy on the generous and fun physics and movement empowerment - and its take on the environment hell is actually pretty funny, a few notches better than GTA 5's sense of parody.

And I love the central image of the player (either Gat in his gang jacket or Kinzie in a tanktop and jeans) with burning angel wings, soaring over and around the metropolitan hellscape...

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I'm such a hypocrite - like if I'm "heads down" on something I have a hard time not showing my annoyance when someone else asks for my attention for something.

But when I'm on my own and know I should be barrelling through a task, I welcome ANY little distraction and sidequest.

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On my devblog, thinking back to my earliest training in Scrum: the duck calls, "you suck and that makes me sad", roadkill burgers, and the metaphor of "The Chicken and the Pig"