danielbeck.net: Blog feed

Marketing is hard

I think I would pay money for a version of Hacker News with all the thinly disguised self-aggrandizing ‘hay guys look at my startup I started’ posts filtered out.

This post was syndicated from http://danielbeck.net/blog/1335.html

Everything you need to know about how creative I’ve felt lately

Number of photos taken in first half of 2011: 1279 Number of photos taken in second half of 2011: 612

This post was syndicated from http://danielbeck.net/blog/1334.html

File under “Buyer’s Remorse”

Note to self:

If by chance you discover during the first truly cold night of the winter that one of your water pipes has frozen solid, make sure you accurately remember which direction on the faucet handle is “off,” and turn it in that direction before you go to sleep. Otherwise the next morning when the pipe thaws out you will wind up flooding the kitchen and basement.

Hypothetically speaking.

Further note to self: next time you buy a house, wait until winter so you can calculate ahead of time which under-insulated windows will need to be replaced. Last night there was a five degree temperature difference standing in the middle of the kitchen compared to standing near the window ten feet away. That’s not good.

I know we went through this phase with the last house too; I remember helplessly watching water drip out of every windowsill in the place the first time there was enough snow for the ice dams to start forming. We fixed that, we can fix this too. Every house has its quirks; after a while you either solve them or learn to live with them, and I know once we get through that phase I’m going to love this place.

The in-the-meantime part is not much fun to go through, though.

Also, winter sucks. Just for the record. In case you hadn’t heard that from me before.

This post was syndicated from http://danielbeck.net/blog/1333.html

Know your audience

So Stellan is playing with a teapot-shaped knick-knack he found on his grandmother’s table, making imaginary tea for his mom. As you do.

And after a bit he looks over at me and politely asks, “do you want some tea, daddy?”

“Oh, no thanks, I don’t really like tea,” I say, because I enjoy being difficult. “How about some coffee instead?”

“I don’t have any coffee,” he says, gravely, shaking his head.

“…”

“But I have some beer! Here you go!”

This post was syndicated from http://danielbeck.net/blog/1331.html

Last night I discovered

Last night I discovered that you can dip a fudgesicle in a mug of hot chocolate.

Emily: “You know, I was a lot more highbrow before I met you.”

This post was syndicated from http://danielbeck.net/blog/1329.html

Agenda for the week

Busy busy busy…

Saturday: 1. House party. 2. Spin fire. 3. Eat fire. 4. Carry Stellan on shoulders while he spins glow poi. 4a. Shield face with free hand.

Sunday: 1. Hurricane Irene. 2. Day two of houseparty, which turns into slumber party due to road closures. (Sadly, pillow fights fail to ensue.)

Monday: New life first: ride in an ambulance. (We’re fine. Emily’s car is not.)

Tuesday: Withdraw six figures from bank account, preferably in the form of one of those oversized novelty checks. Spend remainder of day (and the check) with lawyers. Close on new house.

Wednesday: 8:00 AM, begin demolishing bathroom in new house. 10:45 AM: have a small part of my face cut off. (Wednesday’s two planned agenda items are unrelated.)

Thursday: My 40th birthday. Emily and I will not be available on Thursday.

Friday: Thus far, no plans. This is probably just as well.

This post was syndicated from http://danielbeck.net/blog/1327.html

Get ready to BLADE RUN

Breaking news: the trailer for the upcoming Blade Runner sequel and/or prequel has been leaked online.

VO: He was hired to eliminate the replicants…

(slow-mo shot of Harrison Ford drawing revolver from trenchcoat)

VO: This was not called “killing”. This was called “retiring”.

(slow-mo shot of Rutger Hauer dying in the rain)

VO: But what he wasn’t ready for…

(close up of Harrison Ford’s furrowed brow)

VO: …is the NEXT generation of replicants!

(record scratch noise. CGI baby pulls down sunglasses on bridge of nose, smirks, raises eyebrow)

Baby Replicant: Heh. You were expecting Darryl Hannah?

(“Walking on Sunshine” covered by Smash Mouth starts playing, montage of babies getting into trouble: spilling chocolate sauce, slapping an ostrich, trying on adult clothing, etc)

VO: Now THIS Blade Runner…

(Baby squirts toothpaste tube at Harrison Ford, who squints and spits)

VO: Is in for a “retirement”…

(Baby Girl Replicant holds up hand) Baby Girl Replicant: Talk to the bioengineered expiry-enforced hand!

VO: … he’ll never forget!

(shot of Harrison Ford covered in flour, shaking both fists and shouting at the ceiling)

Harrison Ford: BABY REPLICAAAANNNNTS!!!!

VO: This summer….

(shot of Baby Replicants driving a taxi)

VO: Get ready to BLADE RUN!

Baby Replicant: I thought you said you knew how to drive this thing!

Wizened Asian Man: I should have made you some better eyes!

(taxi turns corner, knocks over fruit stand, chickens fly out in a panic)

Baby Replicants: WHOOOOOOAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!

VO: Blade Runner Kids! Coming soon to theatres everywhere!

(CGI graphic appears on screen: “In Disney Digital 3-D”)

I did not write this, but it was too goddamn hilarious not to share.

This post was syndicated from http://danielbeck.net/blog/1312.html

Early morning contemplations

Every morning since Spiritfire my eyes have just popped open automatically at 6 am.

Doesn’t seem to matter whether I go to sleep late or early, I’m just automatically waking up within a few minutes of six every single day. It’s a little spooky how precise it is.

Stellan and Emily don’t usually wake up until an hour later, and I’ve been kind of enjoying the dawn quiet time: I make some coffee — yes I’m drinking coffee again but it’s only half-caf and only two cups a day so I’m still at about 10% of the caffeine consumption that led me to quit and anyway um where was I oh yeah I make some coffee, feel slightly guilty about it but then remember that I like coffee and despite my best efforts just don’t like tea at all so shut up inner guilt voice and quit bothering me. Maybe sit on the deck for a little while and listen to the birds, stretch, spin some poi. Or maybe do some aimless websurfing, sometimes get a little head start on work or read a chapter or two of whatever book I’m currently reading, whatever. I’m the farthest thing there is from a morning person, but I’ve been enjoying the little bit of me time.

This morning’s me time consisted of trying to figure out how to get dog vomit out of the carpet, when the dog has been mostly eating raspberries out of the back yard, which partially digested berries have left a nice cheery purple circle in the middle of the hallway of the house we’re trying to sell.

Tomorrow I’m going to try to sleep in instead.

This post was syndicated from http://danielbeck.net/blog/1311.html

Spiritfire part 2 (with bonus disclaimers)

This is going to sound to some of those reading this entirely commonplace and normal (not least because you were, um, there), and to others this’ll sound like totally freaky hippie-dippie woowoo stuff. Fair warning.

To the first group, apologies if this all reads like I’m belaboring the point; this is just how I’m processing it (and trying to ensure that I’ll remember it). To the second group, well, yeah, ok, there it is. Hi.

It’s really tempting to just not talk about this, or to only talk about it to the people who already understand it, but I’m reaching a point in my life where I’m tired of compartmentalizing.

So hey was that enough disclaimers for everyone? I’ve been writing and unwriting this for three days now; can you tell?

Here goes: on the third night of the fire circle I briefly and accidentally fell into what I’m going to label as an ecstatic trance state. The following night, after some instruction, I was able to repeat the experience, sustain it, deepen it, and with practice enter it more or less at will.

(For the record, I was not on drugs: the idea seems, at best, redundant. I have not joined a cult or found religion: it’s certainly possible, almost expected, to interpret this stuff through a spiritual framework, and I’m sure that that enriches and deepens the experience. But I don’t think it’s a prerequisite; you could just as well interpret it from a purely biological point of view, as a consequence of (mild) sleep deprivation and endorphins, or a self-induced seizure or something like that. That seems awfully reductive now that I see it in print though.)

I ought to define my terms here. It’s not easy to define “ecstatic trance state”. If you’ve seen it you know what it looks like. If you haven’t… I’m going to try to start by describing how it happened for me and see if that gets me anywhere. If nothing else it’ll help me remember what it was like, which is the main reason I’m writing this down in the first place.

The first, accidental, time was hours into the night. The drums still had a lot of energy — we hadn’t reached the 4 am slowdown, but we weren’t yet in the pre-dawn ramp-up either. There were a fair number of people dancing, and there were lots of different sounds shifting in and out as I moved around the circle: the drums at their end, a bell over here, a rattle over there, across from the drums one or two voices quietly interleaving a chant in their little zone. I had been dancing for a long time, long enough that I was no longer caring what people might think of what I looked like, no longer cared about the sweat dripping down my face, I was just moving because it felt good to move in that way through those sounds. I had my glasses off because they kept slipping down in the sweat, and because I kept being distracted by eye contact (to which removing the ability to see other peoples’ eyes is a tidy solution).

At one point I felt a small involuntary shiver in one leg as I put my foot down. Rather than suppressing that feeling, I decided to try encouraging it. The sensation spread up my leg and pretty soon my whole body was shaking. Not out of control, I was in no danger of falling down and could still navigate around the circle, but most of the motions my body was making were definitely involuntary. The closest analogue would be the kind of shivering you get during hypothermia or a very bad fever. There was a very specific physical sensation associated with it that I’m finding it impossible to describe, and I suspect it would be too personal to be useful to anyone else anyway.

It felt really good. I know that sounds strange. But it felt really quite amazingly good.

It lasted just long enough for a short train of thought, a combination of “holy crap I think I just fell into a trance state” and then realizing that I had a big sloppy grin on my face and starting to wonder what I must look like and that of course snapped me out of it almost immediately, with a tiny afterthought of “No, don’t go…!” I straightened up and opened my eyes and discovered that there was someone right there waiting for me, who had spotted what I was experiencing and stepped up to be there in case I needed help. At the time I was in no state to recognize faces, I had no idea who it was (I spent a good part of the next day asking around so I could find and thank her), all I could feel (and still feel) was a huge wave of gratitude, that someone had seen and recognized and understood. It would have been very very lonely to come out of that state and feel alone in the crowd. Instead I felt safe and warm and loved and protected.

The next afternoon Lillith Avalon held a sort-of-impromptu workshop on trance (someone had asked about it during the homecoming meeting, Lillith had some answers, Brighid talked her into turning it into a workshop, and there you go.) Lillith had a lot of very good, very specific advice — I won’t even attempt to describe it all but if anyone’s interested I can try to summarize the parts that worked for me… Anyway, armed with that knowledge, I set out the next night to try again, to see if I could repeat the experience or if it had just been a fluke.

It wasn’t a fluke.

I’m skipping past the part where I overslept and missed the opening ceremony but Kate came and woke me — thank you, Kate — and so I arrived a little rushed and discombobulated and with my shirt on inside-out, which fact I failed to notice until sunrise (which itself is a darn good clue to how uncharacteristically relaxed I was about my self-presentation here), and ended up spending the first few hours trying to find my way into the circle but sort of gently bouncing off of it: picking up my drum and then putting it down again, walking the circle but feeling it as more of a trudge, trying to dance but not finding my groove. So that happened for a while. Fine.

But eventually I got to the point where I was ready, and the environment felt right, and so I followed Lillith’s instructions for a while and then tried mimicking the physical sensation I’d felt the night before and with honestly very little fuss I was in it again, it was happening to me, and since I was expecting it this time I didn’t immediately shock myself out of it again. I tried — I want to be less vague but there just aren’t words — I tried going a little deeper into it and instead ended up going much much much deeper. I could still stay upright on my own, was still moving around the circle, was still dimly aware of where I was in relation to the fire and the drums and the people around me, but the voluntary motions were at this point vastly outnumbered by the involuntary ones. Someone — I still don’t know who — gently took my left hand. A rattle started gently shaking in front of me. With those two anchors I felt safe enough to go deeper still, let my body take further control of itself, and we kept going around. I remember trying to express my gratitude to the people helping me: that emerged as a sort of vague flapping of my free hand from my forehead to my chest. I have no idea whether that gesture was intelligible or not. We kept going. Someone took my other hand; I was supported on all sides. We kept going.

I really have no clue how to explain this part. There was a lot of paradox. I wasn’t controlling my body, really, except that I could still keep moving in the direction I wanted to go (my guides were supporting me, not carrying me). It was a totally inward-directed experience, except that I was still responding directly and viscerally to the sounds and movements around me. I knew if I started thinking or analyzing it it would evaporate, but I could still think to the extent of wanting to express gratitude to those helping me, or notice how various parts of the music were expressing themselves in my body. It was all-consuming but at the same time I knew I could end it at any time, just stand up straight and walk out of it.

Eventually — I have no sense of how long this lasted — I found myself at the edge of the circle (Did I go there? Was I brought there? I do not know) and decided to sit down, and then decided to lie down on my back. (I love the way Amy later described this to me: “You were going around… you were going around… you were going around… aaaaand you went down.”) Someone rested a hand gently on my chest, and that became a fulcrum point around which the rest of my body still moved — I was still very much in it, but it was calmer, quieter now. I could easily have just drifted off to sleep right there.

Here I want to applaud the skill and efficiency and gentleness and grace with which the Spiritfire people take care of each other. At exactly the right time and in exactly the right way Jeanette came over and checked in with me, made sure I was not in any kind of pain or trouble. (Again, I love the way she put it afterwards: “You came up, like,” [two thumbs up gesture] “and I knew you were good”). Gwen and Noah led me to the well to recover, brought me water, suggested I go eat something, and a little while later Gwen followed to make sure I’d made it to the food table safely. Later in the night Wheeler checked my pulse and checked my pupils, made sure I wasn’t tripping out or having a heart attack or whatever, and generally handled what could in lesser hands have been an awkward or even confrontational moment with dignity and respect and true seva. Thank you. Thank all of you. That safety net is essential.

I spent the rest of the night basically playing with trance as if it were a shiny new toy — sometimes just momentarily dipping a metaphorical toe into it, checking to see if it was still accessible; other times going a little deeper or a little longer, or seeing how long I could ride right on the edge, feeling it but not entering it… Can I do it standing in one spot? Yes. Can I do it sitting? Yes, that too. (That turned out to be really powerful: I was sitting crosslegged, my spine vibrating up and down, my arms rose by themselves into a spread, prayerful gesture. I don’t think I’d be able to start out that way — lots of movement and shifting sounds seem to be the easiest way in, for me — but as a variation it was really quite incredible.)

It turns out that once you have the knack it is not complicated or difficult at all. At one point I was at the food table comparing notes with another trance person — I feel like I’ve suddenly discovered a whole new set of connections to a different subset of the people there: I kind of knew most of the drummers, the people who focus on dance are hard to miss, etc., but now here’s this less visible trancer clique coming out of the woodwork to answer and to ask questions — anyway, we’re sitting there munching on trail mix and talking about it, and I say something like “so I did this” and demonstrated by arching my back a little bit the way it had felt during the trance and realized that I’d accidentally started to trigger the real thing.

Just as surprising was how easy it is to move out of it. There was no grogginess or disorientation or other lingering aftereffects; no period of having to put yourself back together again: I could trance for a while, pause for a drink of water, trance some more, then go play something complicated on the djembe for a while, then go back out and trance again. There was absolutely no “crash” or hangover the next day; at end of circle I went to sleep and woke up naturally about three hours later feeling just fine, not even wanting my morning hit of caffeine: I ate an egg, had a peanut butter sandwich, helped empty the drum storage tent for breakdown, went to go break down my own camp, all in a fine, easy, relaxed mood. Not even the muscle soreness or exhaustion you’d expect in someone of my age and lack of regular exercise who’d spent a good part of the night alternately dancing like mad, drumming hard, and flopping around like a fish.

So there it is. Daniel’s Very First Trance Experience. I don’t really have a concluding paragraph here, and I’m tempted to start sinking back into disclaimers and apologies (everyone seems to do it differently, you see some people in trance bawling their eyes out while mine seemed to go to a very happy place; I’m a newbie, a novice, I don’t really know what I’m talking about; past performance not a guarantee of future results; YMMV, HTH, HAND.) It’s also tempting to now reinterpret everything about the structure of the fire circle as a tool for generating this kind of mental state, which I think is both true and not true: it is that — I think I could list every aspect of the physical layout of the circle and describe how it contributes to that — but it’s not just that — no more than it’s just a drum cirle, or just a dance, or just an all-night party, or just a gathering of like-minded friends… or just whatever new aspect I haven’t yet discovered.

But that’s for next year.

This post was syndicated from http://danielbeck.net/blog/1310.html

Spiritfire, part one

So… Spiritfire.

In past years my experience of the fire circle has mostly been one of working up the courage. Working up the courage to show up, first of all. Working up the courage to sit down for each meal with a table full of strangers. Working up the courage to play my drum with them. And later, to play audibly. And still later to sit in the front row instead of hiding in the back. Maybe throw a little solo phrase in there once in a while. Even, eventually, stepping out of my relative comfort zone of drumming, and starting to join in the dance and the chant — participating, as deeply as I knew how, but all from the perspective of feeling like an outsider trying to find his way in.

Knowing all the while that that perspective was entirely self-imposed — but knowing that isn’t the same as knowing it, you know?

This time — my fourth time in five years — it seems I managed to burn through all that fear and discomfort by having what could charitably be described as a panic attack the night before the event, and (let’s be honest) on the drive to it. But then I arrived, and there’s Steve to welcome me before I’ve even parked the car, and there’s Brighthawk with her omnipresent ear-to-ear grin simultaneously playing a balophon and directing traffic, and there’s Brighid by the welcome tent and there’s John and Lisa strolling by and this is all in the first five minutes and I finally clue in that this is not a table full of strangers I’m sitting down at. These are close friends I’ve known for years and who I’ve shared life-changing experiences with, and even the ones here I don’t know are, I’ll go ahead and own the cliché, they’re the ones I don’t know yet. There’s literally nothing here to be afraid of.

Well, duh. Right? I could have figured that out three years ago and saved myself a lot of time. That’d be three years worth, I guess.

But actually a lot more, because it’s not just on the mountain that this applies. That’s something for me to work on.

[This was the easy part to write. The hard stuff I’m still working on.]

This post was syndicated from http://danielbeck.net/blog/1309.html

It seems I have work to do

So I decided last night that the best way to prepare for Spiritfire would be to lie awake in bed for hours reviewing in detail every even slightly awkward or embarrassing interaction that has ever happened to me at Spiritfire.

Fortunately the important part of the event starts late at night and lasts until dawn, so in a way lying awake all night really can be construed as “preparation”.

But still. This is not how normal people prepare for things they do for fun.

This post was syndicated from http://danielbeck.net/blog/1308.html

On the end of the world

Part of me wants to mock them too.

Some guy came along and told them the world was going to end yesterday, and they believed it.

I mean, come on, right?

And the making-fun-of-these-people seems to be quite the thing: the one-liners are flying around twitter and facebook, websites replaced their homepages with “CLOSED FOR RAPTURE” notices; everyone’s having a lot of fun with it.

But some of these people actually believed the world was going to end yesterday. They prepared for it. Some of them quit their jobs, sold their houses.

How much do you have to want to get away for your life, what troubles do you have to have, to make you so ready for an escape from it that believing the guy on the radio predicting the end is nigh — his second try, incidentally: he first predicted it’d all end in 1994 — how bad does it have to be before the rapture starts to feel like a viable alternative?

What did they do, when the minute approached? Did they try to find a nice vantage point, a beautiful last view from which to ascend? Were they happy? Were they afraid? At the last minute did belief dissolve into wild hope? Or was it the other way around?

This post was syndicated from http://danielbeck.net/blog/1304.html

Net Neutrality

It’s kind of disheartening watching the net neutrality decisions being made, given that neither the people making the decisions nor most of the people reporting on those decisions appear to have the faintest goddamn idea what they’re talking about.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a news article about net neutrality that didn’t contain at least one baldfaced lie about what neutrality actually is.

Representative Lee Terry, a Nebraska Republican, said during the debate that supporters of the F.C.C.’s order wanted “to give the F.C.C. power over business plans,” by restricting the ability of broadband service companies to offer tiered service, for which customers pay based on the amount of Internet bandwidth they use. Just as a customer at a fast-food restaurant pays more for a large Coke than for a small one, Mr. Terry said, Internet companies should be free to charge customers more if they consume a greater amount of bandwidth because of heavy use of features like streaming video.

That’s great, except for the fact that that’s not what tiered service means. It’s already legal to charge people more if they use more bandwidth. (My ISP has done it for years.) That has literally nothing at all to do with net neutrality.

“Tiered service” is completely different: allowing tiered service would mean ISPs would gain the right to effectively make some parts of the internet go faster by slowing down or completely blocking other parts of the internet.

Right now a packet of information is a packet of information, and they all get treated equally. That, in a nutshell, is the definition of net neutrality: the carrier has to be neutral in its handling of the information it carries. Allowing “tiered service” would mean that ISPs could decide to put some packets through faster, and others more slowly or not at all, based on, well, whatever they decide.

So ISPs could block bittorrent or streaming video, or they could favor their own services while making competitors’ services run unusably badly, or they could charge more for access to some websites than to others (or simply block some altogether if they choose.)

To compare it to telephone service: what Terry is describing would be like charging more for a ten-minute call than for a one-minute call; or charging more for a long-distance call than for a local call. What tiered service would allow is completely different: with tiered service they could charge more for a call from Alice than for a call from Bob, and prevent you from talking to Charlie at all.

It’s infuriating to see Rep. Terry putting out such a baldfaced lie. But it’s much much more infuriating to see the New York Times report it as just another he-said-she-said, and apparently not bother to do the tiniest bit of fact checking.

This post was syndicated from http://danielbeck.net/blog/1303.html

Understatement

“Suspicions of a possible breach were raised when two workers suffered skin burns after wading into water 10,000 times more radioactive than levels normally found in water in or around a reactor”

Oh gee do you think?

This post was syndicated from http://danielbeck.net/blog/1301.html

Object doesn’t support this property or method

Internet Explorer just gave me a javascript error message that was informative, and whose reported line number corresponded to the actual location of the error. What parallel universe did I wake up in this morning?

This post was syndicated from http://danielbeck.net/blog/1300.html