• I was bitten by April Fools twice today. The second time because I was too exhausted to remember that it was April Fools.
• A life without hope is not wasted or a pity any more than a life without religion is.
• A good friend of mine once told me that if you listen to what people say carefully, they will give themselves away at some point. Like most wisdom phrased in an open-ended way, I’ve seen lots of confirmation of this and little contradiction.
• I think a fair number of people like to dominate others with their words. Being on the receiving end of that kind of thing is really exhausting. I think it’s fairly obviously just people playing out their psychodramas in an environment where you can’t just club and be clubbed.
• State-granted monopolies on culture, art, and media in general stifle creativity, limit freedom, and exist to protect one power against another. In this society it’s almost always used to protect the established power against the new one. Standard Lessig, now apply it to those organizations we may otherwise support. That pinched-face discomfort you are feeling is cognitive dissonance between your stated preferences and your desire to defend your principles.

Personally, before I did this test, I was certain that LightTPD would win the race. Obviously, large software which is perceived bloated not necessarily is.
mod_php, LightTPD, FastCGI — What’s Fastest

Put that on a Times Square ticker.

Of course, this only applies to your own irony/hypocrisy, not that ascribed to you from others—i.e. the irony of a locally famous activist at a hip-hop show nodding along with everyone else isn’t actually irony or hypocrisy because he hasn’t staked out a position either above everyone else or opposed to hip-hop (broadly defined). It’s a difference between others’ expectation and your reality, not your words and actions.

The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loth to disappoint them.

That’s the lead-in to this oft-butchered misquote:

[A foolish] consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds[, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.] Emerson

In other words, Emerson is saying that people who refuse to admit they were wrong because they don’t want to appear inconsistent (literally “unpredictable” in Emerson, though I think adding “dishonest” or “wishy-washy” to the possible-parses list isn’t that far a stretch) are haunted weaklings and cowards.

Anyways, I came to the conclusion that hope and fear are flip sides of the same coin: they are both irrational emotional investments in the future. Hope, for it’s part, is irrational positivity applied to your predictions. Fear, for it’s part, is irrational negativity applied to your predictions. Ultimately, neither one is really worth it, and both are let-downs. The things you fear are never as bad as you have built them up in your mind. So too, the things you hope for are never as good.

I would not be surprised if this is because (to me at least) both are forced. I have to make myself afraid, just as I have to make myself hopeful, as I don’t feel I am naturally either at this point. Of course, this makes the fear and hope that much more square-peg-in-round-hole, and wastes a lot of my energy. Which in turn becomes an excuse for not doing anything to fix the issues underlying the emotions in the first place.

And that’s naturally slap-worthy stupid.

Oh yes, and at some point, I must create and use an IlludiumPu236SpaceModulator abstract base class. Perhaps on Monday.

Tomorrow, after my death, some men may decide to establish Fascism, and the others may be so cowardly or so slack as to let them do so. Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism is a Humanism

So what will be your answer?

This is what we forgot on 9/11.