OMG, your phone has a silence mode. Also an off button!

It touches several things that I happen to have been talking about with people recently: the distinction between the pursuit of “shallow” and “deep” pleasure (experiencing and remembering selves respectively); moving to California; what sort of vacations are good; how much money one needs to be happy.

To live a life you remember fondly, apparently you must make sure there is change, significant moments, and a happy ending. Hedonism is not enough.

I like his point about a two week vacation where the first week was relaxing and great and the second week was much the same. Experientially, that was a great vacation. Twice as good as just going one week. But recalled as a story by your memory, you might as well have gone just one week.

I think this tension is in part what Reason (with a capital R) tries to diminish. It strikes me that reason argues for the experiencing side of the equation, while feelings argue for the remembering side.

We bought a Garmin handheld GPS device and Japanese maps (in English) for it. Hopefully by entering interesting points of interest beforehand, we can basically have a self-guided tours all over the place.

Suggestions for things to do or places to go are welcome!

Although the Tranny Roadshow is done entirely by transpeople, it is not exclusively for transpeople. It is a raucous evening of entertainment, open and accessible to people of all backgrounds. Most of us are experienced performers, and while our goals do include challenging people and making them think, our most important goals are to entertain them, make them laugh, and make them dance.

I’ve not yet been, but come January 14th, he’s bringing it to Jamaica Plain.

One neat thing it does is frequently switch between different narrative and visual styles. It’s a bit slow at times, but I like it.

Here’s a typical clip. Visit the site for the full thing.

I can well imagine an atheist’s last words: “White, white! L-L-Love! My God!”–and the deathbed leap of faith. Whereas the agnostic, if he stays true to his reasonable self, if he stays beholden to dry, yeastless factuality, might try to explain the warm light bathing him by saying, “Possibly a f-f-failing oxygenation of the b-b-brain,” and, to the very end, lack imagination and miss the better story.

Guh, this ad creeps me out. I don’t like the interesting, unique, and personal brides being processed into fembots.

The room contained a few dozen living human bodies, each one a big sack of guts and fluids so highly compressed that it will squirt for a few yards when pierced. Each one is built around an armature of 206 bones connected to each other by notoriously fault-prone joints that are given to obnoxious creaking, grinding, and popping noises when they are in other than pristine condition. This structure is draped with throbbing steak, inflated with clenching air sacks, and pierced by a Gordian sewer filled with burbling acid and compressed gas and asquirt with vile enzymes and solvents produced by the many dark, gamy nuggets of genetically programmed meat strung along its length. Slugs of dissolving food are forced down this sloppy labyrinth by serialized convulsions, decaying into gas, liquid, and solid matter which must all be regularly vented to the outside world lest the owner go toxic and drop dead. Spherical, gel-packed cameras swivel in mucus-greased ball joints. Infinite phalanxes of cilia beat back invading particles, encapsulate them in goo for later disposal. In each body a centrally located muscle flails away at an eternal, circulating torrent of pressurized gravy.