:: regarder of the cries of the world ::

tfw you're staring at your video chat hangout window & wondering if anybody's gonna show up & all you see is yourself.

i'm learning to host large virtual "parties". but as much as i like technology and connecting with my friends in new ways, the various inherent technological challenges certainly can be frustrating.

my ex kamakhai died in july.

years ago, he wrote this: "So after several visits and a whole lot of money, my teeth now feel exactly the same as they did before, which is to say totally normal. Apparently I'll be thanking myself when I'm 40 or something."

i wish he'd had a chance to find out.

people talk about the importance of forgiveness as a method of healing... even when it involves forgiving someone who's severely injured or abused you, raped you, etc.

i used to find this irritating & condescending, particularly since the announcement that i should forgive didn't ever come from a person who had asked what specific actions i still considered unforgiveable.

once i started researching PTSD and healing from trauma, i discovered that there isn't actually any compelling evidence that forgiving a person who severely abused / raped / molested / etc etc is reliably helpful to the healing process. this "you should forgive" thing primarily comes not from science but from religion. but even some christians believe that the bible doesn't obligate you to forgive because the decision to forgive is up to their god.

more on this:

"Pseudo-spirituality has made forgiveness a marker of personal virtue. If you forgive, then you know you are enlightened. Deepak Chopra describes forgiveness as the “recognition that actions that are perceived as hurtful or wrong are the perspective of the small ego mind, not the higher self.” If you perceive an assault on yourself and your body as too wrong to forgive, you are being small-minded.

This attitude ignores that the choice not to forgive can come from a place of strength. It can represent a legitimate response to an offender’s continuing actions and place in society. The absence of forgiveness implies neither desire for revenge nor lack of enlightenment, and assuming otherwise minimizes what forgiveness really means."

http://www.stirjournal.com/2014/09/29/why-i-reject-forgiveness-culture/

i keep trying every new streaming music service i can find... but i wish i could find one that had everything i want.

at this point, only a handful of my friends use last.fm... which makes me sad. it still does the best job of recommending music for me of anything that i've tried and makes it easy to look up a song you enjoyed later... minus having to constantly interact via "like" and "dislike" and "favorite / bookmark" and etc. i wish they'd redesign their website so that people would actually understand that it automatically tracks everything you listen to on a bunch of different websites / apps / music players... nobody gets that.

i didn't understand why tidal got slammed so hard... sure, most people can't tell the difference between lossless music and mp3s, particularly when on bad headphones or cheap speakers or whatever. but for people who can and want to use streaming music, it seems to have a decent selection. i don't think $20/month is a ripoff... i already spend more than $20/month on music anyway.

what i really liked about beats music was the playlists and parts of the design. now that it's apple music, the new playlists seem much more generic vs. curated and i don't like the design changes at all :( it's cool that they are offering a three month free trial and icloud music library would be cool in theory... but bugs that screw with my existing, non-itunes-purchased music still being in there at launch just seems like amateur hour.

the redesign of spotify is essentially unusable on my machine. okay, so my macbook is getting up there in age... but there is still no reason that it should ever take 5 minutes to load an app to begin playing music. i went through all kinds of convoluted things to try to roll it back to the old version and block it from automatically updating and messed around with code and for awhile it worked but then it auto-updated again. i still keep using it for the social integration but it's really slow and buggy now. my spotify recommendations are not very good at all... they're really generic and boring.

i've very actively ignored pandora in favor of last.fm for years and years. i started occasionally using it recently because it's integrated with my car so i can click 'like' or 'dislike'. i still feel the same way about it, though... the recommendations aren't that great, but also, it's just not the way i like to listen to music. i don't like to listen to "sounds exactly like X" for an hour, or even "sounds exactly like X, X, X, and X" for an hour. i get bored. i like more eclectic mixes and randomness.

i still use hype machine, soundcloud, and mixcloud sometimes... and plug.dj.

in my ideal world, i'd have lossless quality audio streaming and an easy way to buy tracks / albums permanently, offline functionality (no way am i running all that data through a limited cellular data plan), social integration, recommendations which don't suck which are preferably curated or based on other people's listening habits vs. an algorithm, and some way to interact with other people through the service. my favorites / likes / ratings would be automatically imported from everywhere.

the guy i wanted badly to sleep with when i was 15 had a bright green mohawk and was 6'5 and sang bass in an angry forceful way.

the woman i wanted badly to sleep with had dark brunette curls that you could put your finger in and a giant nose and was pale and canadian and had freckles and she rolled a joint with three papers and a bit of a cigarette pack rolled up into a filter.

i wonder where they are now and if they ever knew.

i got a new car. i've never had one of those. it's been about 3 years since i said goodbye to the '91 civic.

on friday i am being interviewed for lyft. sidecar won't let me sign up until i get the physical license plates. :/

some people are freaked out by their perception of the safety of this occupation. q got me pepper spray and wants me to carry it. he doesn't understand that i am the sort of person who is opening the glovebox while driving down the freeway and then pepper spray accidentally triggers and sprays me in the eyes and then i try to use the exciting new call-by-voice feature to call for help and instead get an adult entertainment line.

i have seen a million conferences / events about how women should present themselves... physically or professionally... but this is the first i've seen about accepting yourself.
http://www.bodyloveconference.com

bits are cheesy and/or drag on, but it's interesting to see a film examining people's relationship with technology that isn't about how AI becomes evil and tries to destroy humanity or about how technology is destroying humanity...