In the land of the blind the one eyed man is king.
Until they discover his meddling. Then he had better run because they will kill him and his kind to protect their way of life. There is no treachery greater then a mutants cunning.
Death and sex stalk every corner of ones vision, made tangible by the midnight ravings of the rulers of the earth. They have prayed for sodom or at least clubmed and have gotten instead a sort of disneyland run by cannibals. A filthy violent version of perversion that has been excepted as normal and clean by the poor creatures that must live with the excesses of their masters.
Insects and lizards reincarnated as humans. Here to dole out some hard karma.
Humanity is exploded, it's guts torn out on the highway as civilization drives by in a family sedan complaining about the smell. They don't know what death smells like and mistake it for a skunk or maybe a bad fart. Last rites at 80 miles an hour.
The wind picks up and carries the smell of chemicals and burning pork products for miles. Every one who smells it salivates. We are feed, over feed, but some how are always hungry and even the smell of three day old hot dogs makes vegetarians irrationally hungry. We want something so god damn badly it's pain has become the only defining characteristic of humanity.
We have proven some sort of zen riddle and gotten the goose out of the bottle by crawling in with it and pretend the bottle is our whole world. The truth is a secret known only to people who won't tell us the punch line.
When the president resigns, is voted out, is impeached...
America will not heal. Recently it occurred to me that in fact it's not this imbecilic monster, this american president, that will finally kill the great experiment, but that he is in reality a scab on the face of a country already ruined.
We destroyed this country. We left it, defenseless and naive, in the cold for so long that it became hard and mean. America is a child that is raised by our actions. We have taught it ugly and blamed it for our problems. Errant mothers and fathers, we didn't protect this child from the realities. We were supposed to teaching it to love the world and help it rather then fear it and fight it.
Now we have as the head of our country an ignorant, twisted, incompetent sociopath. The type to throw kittens out of speeding cars on the highway. These are our leaders and they're mean, they're angry, they're unaccustomed to consequences. These are people who have thrown away more money then anyone I'll every know will see or imagine, who have such a lack of self control and insight that they can't even say "peace" with a straight face or without a stutter.
But they will not be the ones who kill america. Because america is already dead.
It can be a hard thing to except that people like our president will never be held to their actions in any real or meaningful way. It's important, I think, to understand that the stupid are not trainable and that we must take back the power from them. The lunatics run the asylum and we have been trading uniforms for so long that I at least can't remember whose who. Whose in charge, who needs to be sedated.
At this point we have gone so far that violent, raving, chest beaters seem like a normal part of the landscape. They are the evil that society has been trying to distill from itself. They become stronger and purer as time goes on. Their strength and single mindedness is attractive and powerful. They have the allure of a wolf. Have you ever tried to have a meaningful conversation with a wolf? The allure fades fast, once you see just what they have in store for you.
The more I hear that things have changed and the country is no longer above the fray the more I am reminded that it never was above the fray in the first place.
I'm reminded that historically, if we had any sense, we'd be far more afraid of ashcroft's duplicity then we would of bin laden's presumed hatred. From crassus's machinations in rome to hitler's brown shirts it has been people like ashcroft, morally bankrupt power mongers, and their hired thugs that have been the real threat.
The weak and with out power are scapegoated and so often labeled as near super natural threats to national security. These are people who's only option is to strap bombs to their chests, exploding themselves into confetti for some modern cannibalistic carnival. A celebration of the death we have become. They are not this worlds greatest threat. The world has become so wierd that suicide bombers are the b act. We get them for free with the price of admission.
They are our ghosts and monsters. We never look too hard to see who pulls the strings. We assume that our cynical view of the world is correct and telling us loud and clear that it's the few rich elite who steer us toward disaster. It's true that they are a menace, but that is far to simple. The truth is we don't look to hard because behind every dictator and oppression, behind every genocidal free-for-all, is us. We are to blame. We may not pull every string but we handed them over to semi-retarded violent animals and we knew full well what they would do with them.
The whole thing, this damn crazy "great experiment" can't survive this level of intense stupidity and cruelty. I think the founding fathers of this country - not those celebrities that signed the constitution, but the real founders, the quakers - could not have seen this coming. They were anarchists, which by definition makes them extremely hopefully and unprepared, unsuspecting, for this type of reality. We never had a chance.
It will all catch up to them of course, bush and his drinking buddies. The idiot kings. They are stupid enough to live in the penthouse suites atop their house of cards and that kind of foolishness never lasts long for the crippled spirits that men like that always have.
This is a rodeo, I'm waiting to see the steely eyed cowboy get trampled by the bull and look the clowns in the face begging for his life. Those clowns, running interference trying to keep the dirt from getting too bloody while those damn crazy bastards mount yet another angry dangerous beasts, knowing the whole time that they'll get thrown off. Judging success not on anything tangible, but on how long they could ride out the worst possible situation.
I've been noticing this very dangerous, in that "there's nothing more dangerous then an idea who's time has come" way, new meme. The basic premise of this meme is that the minority is oppressing the majority. Which is, at face value, true in a few ways. People, now, seem to hope to inact change passively aggressively.
It is often suggested in a most confident way, that the obviously in control minority, the wealthy and affluent, are somehow the majority and are being oppressed by all those blacks or mexicans or disabled or non-consumer or poor or what have you.
So those few rich bastards or really their bootlicking slightly higher then middle income psychophants, who infest malls and closed communities behind sound walls next to freeways, would have you believe they are the majority. This means that the rest of you, the poor, the different, conspicuously ethnic, the ought to be ruled class are the evil minority who have been abusing the trust of the benevolent, well lets be frank and practical, the super-whiteys. You have been oppressing them!
In this vision of the world the rich and powerful become this kind of status quo as if all americans are 40 somethings playing golf and thermonuclear war on sundays. It's that suburban horror show that has always positioned itself as the "average american" while it's in fact so far from average it's better described as an idolized freak. They would like us to believe that this bold and generous giving class that we all know is the very definition of altruism is being, due to their brave and stoic acceptance in the face of adversity, forced to watch us destroy the world like poor ignorant savages. Not living in the green valley of mild lifestyles and vaguely fascist khaki pants? Don't own a new car or suv? Don't care who's name is on your clothes? Then you may just be oppressing someone who does!
We are watching something important happening. Things like this, small and trivial, are the bric-a-brak of fascism. They slowly build up until you have a whole house full of ideas that help to justify anything in the name of your way of life. We're seeing the world be torn part and put back together, like a stew with many chefs some of whom want pea-soup, some want beef stew and still others want chicken noodle. God only know what we'll end up with.
Rant from an instant messenger:
The echelon has been blown the fuck up. It's magic time. Sleep time for the world and the tv has been left on in the backgound. The news is coming in clear on channel subconsious. Fuck up the transmission.
The only truth is what you don't hear.
Ever notice the near perfect analogy of 9-11 to the tower card? It fucking looked the same for christ sake. Bad voodoo.
The tower card is always from the perspective of the pedestrian, watching the towers crumble, but never from the perspective of the cowboy millionaires who build these money fortresses to live in. Their perspective of the world and strength slipping through their stupid children fingers, their less capable heirs, is never shown.
We saw an old school magic trick right in front of us. They carved their symbology into the brains of everyone with airplane fuel and suicide bombers. Like every monument we build the workers who dynamite the cliff faces always die.
It's strange what one finds in his web logs.
When I first made a website some years ago I noticed, as I read my logs obsessively which I still do today, I had an avid visiter. I don't know who they were. Some machine from japan.
Several things have always been true of my websites. The first is that I get very few hits. I'm not sure I feel about this. On one hand I'm interested in getting more hits, on the other I like being low profile. The second is that I have never been able to get into any of the major search engines. google links to one of my pages but not my main site and it categorizes me as part of a site that links to me (ampere).
Anyway, back to this machine in japan. When I changed my site I put up a 'be back soon' type notice. I figured since I only really had one visiter that would care I spoke directly to them, referring to them by there ip. I don't think this went over to well as they never came back.
Today while reading my logs I noticed I got 150 or so hits from nipr.Mil and disa machines. Nipr and disa provide proxies and firewalls to the dod crowd. Only one of these ips had a referrer, htobot.com. I assume it was a contractor or possible someone actually in the military uses htobox.com and surfing the web (btw, I'd suggest google but I noticed that htobot does query google as well). I don't mean to drive them off if they see this, I just thought it was interesting.
My first thought was this was a spider crawling my site, but I noticed that it didn't quite follow all of the links. The patterns looked more humanesque. But it being a .Mil ip I had to do some investigation. I did some research on nipr and disa (btw, some of this hits are coming from disa machines that are not at .Mil address, I'll let you wonder how I figured that out). I counted three to four nipr/disa machines. So I'm basically not worried about this. I'm glad to see though that the military isn't using .com proxies. An open society is a free society, or something like that.
Short tales : Smoke
We wasted our landscape. We bent and twisted it into modern art. The world is not dying, it's living punk rock. It's full of bad drugs and worse memories. No one gets the world anymore, but who can blame them.
The highways spiraled and stopped and crooked and swaggered. They were like scars on america. Tribal scars. Welcome to the future. Welcome to manhood.
The cities jumped up at you. Driving across parts of the country you might feel like you're discovering something, but can't quite figure out what. A secret about people. Something having to do with what you notice between cities.
The state fair is disneyland after a crystal meth crash. The streets run red with liquor and candied vomit. Caramel apples and light beer. The state fair is disturbing middle american sexuality in amusement park form. Clowns and ex-cons molest children into their aluminum seats. Chained to 'the whip', 'the yo-yo', 'the spin-the-bottle', 'the grease lightning'. The centrifugal force creates, for many of them, their first masturbatory experience.
Old coffee, cold air, and dull yellow bright lights. Dinners dot the cultural landscape. Late night, all you can drink. Sometimes, the right ones, friendly to loser hipster kids who need something better to do. This burned out environment is the cynical equivalent of big city coffee shops for the depressed intellect of nowheres and nobodies. The real america, the forgotten and unfashionable. This is where the new american culture is being born, out of sight of primetime television.
I'm very tired right now so bare with me here.
Pacbell for some reason put my roommates real full name in our whois information. So with a small amount of research you can find out enough information to be fairly certain of our exact location in the world. It goes something like this.
Whois <ip>. Now you have my roommates full name.
Traceroute <ip>. Now you have enough information to figure out what co we're routed through using these same steps.
Google <"name from whois" + "state" + "city">. Having done this I can tell you google returns our address, phone number and a map to our house as the first link. Try it on yourself. You may be surprised.
So now you have three things. A name and address. A name and ip. The location of the co. It so happens that we are close to the co, so we get a really good connection. Sometimes as high as 6mbs. Since the name and address you have are so close to the co and you can tell whatever machine has this ip is also physically close to the same co you can at least make an educated guess this name and address you got from google is actually the same person that has the ip address. Thus our privacy is compromised.
The solution? Put in generic whois information. So I called up pacbell tech support and asked them to change the whois information. It turned out that they have a policy against this. The only way they're willing to change the whois information is if they also change your ip. Only then will they change the whois information. Since I really don't care what my ip addresses are I told them to do it. This of course required a two day loss of services. So no internet access over the weekend. But now we're back up.
So I never update my blog.
I was kind of caught in a bad bit of writers block. I was trying to write an entry, that even now I find I can't even summarize in text. Strange. But I'm dropping it to end my writers bock.
When I have nothing to write I write short, meaningless stories.
Short tales: The man from no place
Those little jungles inside of cities that seem to creep in from between the cracks. You don't see them violently tearing apart the asphalt because they wait to do that under cover of full foliage and of darkness. In those tiny jungles a twisted sort of eco system emerges. A bit cancerous, like all things are in the middle of large cities. They have transient life, rats in between the warehouse and the ship yard, spiders unaware of the jungles tenuous hold of its space between older condos or behind a school to poor to clean them away, people homeless somewhere between childhood and dying in a mental hospital. No secrets in those tiny jungles, their stories are all to obvious.
Jesus, a fat reformed pimp who sold ice-cream on the street. A sordid tale of spousal abuse, prison and religious indoctrination. He worshiped his name sake while selling nuke-o-pops, star-spangled-bangers and menthol cigarettes. He told me his story once. It went as you could imagine. He told me his childrens stories, and they went as you could imagine. He told me his ex-wifes story and it went like you could imagine. He told me about what it means to be him. It meant that all of his stories would always go as you could imagine. Being poor, crushingly poor, is one thing he told me. "But thank god" he said "I am not alone." He is not alone, he is as you can imagine. He is not a anything.
So there you have it. Short story, goes nowhere. But fun to write.
Bisociative thinking:
My definition: using seemingly disparate information or sources of information in order to overcome the hindrances of causality or connections that maybe obscured or unknowable.
Some other thoughts on the subject:
[the] bisociative mode is characterized by overlapping of separate domains of thought simultaneously, a lack of attention to existing rules and disciplinary boundaries, and an emphasis on imagery and intuition
the notion of recognizing and combining ideas - making the links - was termed "bisociative thinking" by koestler(1964) who considered it all important to creative thinking. Indeed, according to holyoak and thagard, koestler believed that bisociative thinking was the "basis not only for major creative leaps but also for everyday appreciation of humour and metaphor"
I'm starting to think about bisociative visualization in terms of application.
We've seen lots of different visualization projects of late, from googles go at a touchgraph browser to kartoo and the visual thesaurus. They're all are based on associative thinking and in some cases seem to be trying to facilitate bisociative thought processes.
So I started think about showing interlinked ideas. Do similar content/focuses really huddle together in the lifelessness of the ether or is this more a result of how we visualize them?
Anyway, it's not a big question. I'm just interested in seeing it from a different perspective. The inter-relatedness of the web is akin to the inter-relatedness of people. It's just easier to search.
Alaska.
Day
I just got back from alaska, and I'm not sure where to begin. I'll start somewhere near the beginning, but not really at the beginning because that was many years ago.
I woke up late, around 2 or 3pm in a state at the western coastline of the continental united states. California is bright and hot, the air is wet and calm. I take this for granted of course. The future hasn't happened to me yet and I did't know to cherish these things. These days which always lead to night, these roads which always lead to friends. Not like alaska, which waited some 10 hours into my future.
After I wake up I get packed, cleaned, dressed and grounded. I hate to fly, I fear the statistics and my pension to defy them, for better or worse. Really the time between getting up and arriving at the airport is a blur to me now. A barely remembered, mostly assumed, period before leaving. Itself a barely remembered period before now, the now of being back in my life and looking down at it from 8 miles above the earth still in the airplane, never really touching down as much as slowly descending back from a travelers life. A life sideways to my normal life, moving at it's own pace.
With my two roommates and one bag I get to the airport. I get 'randomly' chosen for extra scrutiny, which I expected. Security is a joke, this I remember vividly. At the first and main security check point they check me like they normally would, then go a little further and make me take off my boots, scan me several times, pat me down. This part seems somewhat comprehensive. Of course I don't have anything on me, if I did I can't say for sure they'd have found it.
I already know I've been tagged, I was told as much as I checked in. The security at sfo doesn't always speak a lot of english. That's okay though. As someone who spoke no spanish while working in a gas station in new mexico that was almost exclusively patronized by mexican tourists who spoke no english can tell you, the language barrier is mostly about a willingness to communicate. People in california don't talk to you. If they speak spanish or vietnamese and you speak english or german, if there's any difference between languages, they not only will not try to talk to you, they'll be angry that you tried to talk to them. So the security procedure is more difficult then it would have been had the guards been a bit more willing to communicate. Secondary security, the extra scrutiny at the gate as it were, was a joke. It was less comprehensive then the main security. The guards didn't pay attention and I could've gotten away with anything. In all I'd say that airport security, like most security is based on a certain trust. It's often harder to follow security guidelines then it is to simply bypass them and airport security very much requires your cooperation. If you wanted to carry a weapon of almost any reasonable size onto a plane you could do so very easily. But enough of this for now.
The flight was quick, a stop over in portland, and on to alaska. It got dark as we traveled north, then light again. This was the last time I would see night for days. Many people enjoy 23 hours of day light, but personally I need the dark. Not just to let me know when to go to sleep but because I enjoy the night. I bask in it like others bask in the sunlight. It sets me right every night, and with out it I began to slip. Quickly. So the next few days are a blur, like clouds with mountian peaks peeking out, I have only the occasional structured memory surrounded by a fog of never ending day and never ending din of a house filled with 18 people. Never alone, never dark. I slipped just this side of sane very quickly indeed.
I was there to attend a wedding. I stayed in a friends mothers newly acquired furniture less house. There were 18 of us all told at any given time. 15 of us from california. We stayed in every room, every bit of floor space. In the attic, the living room, the bedrooms. It was always bright and people were approaching the edge, luckily it was a slow approach with out serious repercussions.
Most of them seemed to enjoyed the always day. Although something beneath the surface that while probably benign had grown a bit too dark just beneath peoples smiles. I might be easily influenced by other peoples reservations or maybe I felt it too, just beneath where we like to look into ourselves scratching lightly at the walls. People became greedily happy, like it was a hard drink that could sooth their nerves. The smiles were a bit too wide, a bit too cheap. I can't say in truth whether this was the effects of the tensions from living so close, with out privacy, the aggressive and suffocating day light, the wedding and it's burdens or the wedding itself. I really don't know how we felt about each other. Again, our smiles were cheap. Quality and honesty weren't as important as the appearance of elastic grins and always on happy vibes.
Regardless of anything else the wedding was great. It was light, short, celebrated the marriage and more then that, more importantly then that, the two being married. All in all a very happy affair. I'll have a webpage for it up in a while.
The wedding was mostly young. Really in age but also in spirit.
Aside from the wedding my days were filled with talking, poker, attempting to sleep and complaining about not being able to sleep.
What I found in alaska was the evidence of solitude all around me. The people there are some of the nicest I've met, some of the coolest. I could read the solitude on their faces like sleep on the recently awake. There was a desperate sort of communication much the opposite of california. But it comes from, I believe, extreme solitude. I found a new appreciation for what I have here, in california. Friends. Night.
I feel like I woke up laughing, the little things seem bigger and the big things seem more trivial. It won't last. But for now I'm drunk from sleep dep, jet lag and the melancholy of leaving a place I hated but people who made it all worth while.
The trip back was the same as the trip there, except I had finally met and passed my future. I had arrived nearer to now.
California
Night.
Electron comes and goes.
Like a reformed gambler going to the track for old times sake, it slips into old habits and falls backward through time. Positronic super freak who likes funk music, electronic straight edge into fast punk and discordant dub beats.
How many politicians does it take to screw in a light bulb? None. Your being fucking lied too.
We are supposed to be protected from intimidation. Our speech is protected from censorship and abridgement. Intimidation is abridgement not only of speech but of our right to assembly. In other words organize. From nixons plumbers to cointelpro we have been subject to numerous attempts by the government to limit our ability to communicate and organize. Aside from the constitutional argument, even if it is not our 'right' to organize or communicate it should be.
They must find us quite amusing. What they're doing is so obvious. They are taking over. They're striping us, not of our rights, but of our humanity. We are becoming livestock, indifferent to our plight and afraid of the world. But unlike cattle we can be trusted to build our own fences.
Our rights maybe the weapons of the free but are also the chains of the enslaved. Our rights are used more often to explain why we shouldn't be complaining then they are to inspire us to continue the fight against tyranny. They're used more often as an excuse for inaction then a legal recourse once action has been taken.
Fuck my rights and yours. I am human. I am alive. I don't need 'rights' to confirm this. I will act accordingly, whether or not some moldy piece of hemp tells me I can. Fuck the constitution and fuck their brand of freedom. I don't want my life to be sold to me for the mere price of membership in the america club. I have abilities, not rights.
Short tales : The city
The jagged smoke of a city wide war machine cuts through the skyline. The sky, red on barely black dissected by wires and smeared by waves of heat. The city does not live exactly. It has a potential decay. Effortless energy from it's own rotting as it dies forever. The city has no heroes, no victims, no stories. Only dub bass and brief poetic revery. Always looped, the music of today eats itself, like a snake playing infinity chasing it's tail. This city is america. This city is the world.
Coughing, choking, breathing heavily as they revel themselves naked to the obscene and ancient gods of civilization. The places that never rest or remember. The reality of hard money and substantial guilt, a priest hood with baseball bats, they are who worships here. Cheaply refurbished altars, neon and day-glo totems towering under the streets, across the streets, above the streets.
Look down into puddles and see beneath the streets. You see more streets, they go on forever. There is nowhere outside. You are always inside the city that goes on forever. Dying forever.
There is little to no actual piracy on the net. It's like child pornography. It wasn't there till insane maniacs only interested in controlling the newsgroups (at the time very important) started insisting the net was rampant in the stuff. This interested child porn collectors who became, due to the utter lack of child porn on the net at the time, child porn distributors. Now child porn is rampant on the net. Not so rampant that you're likely to see it in your mail with out solicitation like some porn spam, but rampant enough that certainly you could find it if you wanted.
Software/content piracy is copying software, movies, music, what have you, and selling it. film88 is probably the first real movie piracy we've seen on the net. Warez and moviez are sold on street corners and illegal markets almost exclusively. What we have on the net is wide scale, very efficient sharing. It's not the same and it does not require the diligence that people seem to be devoting to it's removal. It's basically innocent and quite possibly beneficial to those it is supposed to harm the most. The artist. Even if everyone could get any music or movie they wanted for free from some file sharing client, newsgroups or irc can you really see it replacing buying the cd or dvd?
I could see people being less likely to buy crappy music, or an entire album for only a few songs. For instance spiderman and episode: 2 were shared all over the net weeks before they appeared in theaters. Episode: 2 did horrible. George lucas even went so far as to blame 'internet pirates' for this failure. But for some reason spiderman did really well. Was it a different set of 'internet pirates' that downloaded spiderman? Or was it that ep: 2 sucked and spiderman didn't? What would possess someone to see a movie in the theater that they already saw at home on their television or computer screen? Doesn't the answer seem obvious?
Now with cds and dvds, personally I wouldn't pay 40 bucks for something I could get for free even if it was lower quality when it's not worth 40 bucks in the first place. But I would spend 5, 10 even 15 dollars depending on what it was. It would be worth it to have it in a nice convenient portable form and not have to have it one my computer. Of course with copy-protection going the way it is it will stoping being so portable in the near future. I won't be able to take it over to a friends house or to work.
What's really going on here is control. Just like the anti-child porn pundits. They seem, on the surface to have a worthy cause. But these people only care about their influence and their power.
I just don't get why some theories are considered true - with out further thought, and some considered false - with out further thought. How does one define what 'makes sense' with no direct experience or having given it any prior consideration. What are the symbolic clues to what is 'common sense' and what is 'a nut ball theory'. I see how some things seem rambling or crazy in their conclusions or approach. But other things seem just as sane and rational but are still consider, again with out further thought, to be bunk.
For instance the chupicuaro people created clay figures of dinosaurs that look remarkably like what we have reconstructed through modern paleontology. So at least several obvious possibilities arise from this.
1) the chupicuaro saw dinosaurs.
2) the chupicuaro were, for their time, skilled paleontologist.
3) the chupicuaro didn't mold those clay figures, they were faked or molded later and mistakenly dated.
Which one is more likely and how do I tell which I'm supposed to think?
I just don't get it I guess. I've never been very good at the whole common sense thing. Not that I don't have any, but I have a problem with it. See below.
I have a big problem understanding the sections of music stores. They should just put everything in alphabetical order. I won't be offended to see garth brooks near gwar.
Time:
I don't know anything about time. What is it? Is it a force, does it have mass, does it have depth? Can you create it, manipulate it, destroy it?
Part of the space-time continuum we still perceive space as very separate from time. Space has depth, dimension. Time is now, is only one point, one single dimension. I don't believe that. I have this feeling that time has depth as well. That, much like we occupy an area of space we occupy an area of time.
How much time do we occupy? Is the past anymore set then the future? Is the past simply an illusion, an effect created by our minds tendencies to perceive linear movement through space-time like coincidence is our minds tendency to interpret vast cause and effect connections often creating an illusion of continuity between disparate events?
What about synchronicity where the opposite is true? Where seemingly disparate cause and effect relationships emerge, perhaps only after observation. A quantum puzzle of hints and clues and observer madness. Is time like that? Are we better at seeing synchronicities in time? Drawing connections?
Nothing we see is real. The world is not in your head, so to speak. A map of the world, a map disposed to poetic license at that, is in your head.
What is time, and are we in it, out of it, on it or under it?
I better hurry now, or I'll be late.
If you outlaw super powers, only outlaws will have super powers.
I have no title for this. I might be getting one of those soon though.
I'm going to endeavor, more for practice then anything, to leave an entry everyday, even if and maybe especially if it's stupid. I'm a horrible writer with no talent for objectivity, consistency, grammar and punctuation or that intelligent verboseness that seems to define the online journal.
I'm currently checking my spelling with pico and dictionary.com. Hopefully this will change.
I had to fix this page with tables. Tables are clumsy and make me feel dirty. But not the good kind of dirty. Not the dirty that allows us to jump the barrier of tasteful limits to the west germany of our perverse sex god alter-egos. Not even the fulfilled dirty of finishing moving or planting tomatoes in your garden. No, the bad kind of dirty. The dirty of working on other peoples problems, the dirty of working under the sun in the dirt for no reason. Dry dirty, hot dirty, wind swept dirty.
this would have made things worse, but glish can be a great resource if you're learning css. Css beats straight html in that it's cleaner (there's that dirty/clean reference again), but it's easier to break. I'd describe css as a wimp, but not a whiner like javascript. Fucking javascript.