Pandances

Forums

2010-06-24T16:48:00.000-07:00

Its like being an rapist, a burglar. I'm waiting, sitting, sifting. First I just look. Praying for an opportunity, I look, pass over the newest posts, the freshest statements. The new ideas, the questions, the rants and the flames. There's angry people on the internet, people who are just positive that someone else is very, very wrong.

Me, I'm a step above that. I weigh opinions evenly, so long as they're written with near perfect grammar. I allow space for both sides of a debate, look for compromise, because this isn't trolling or ranting, this is the search for perfection.

So I wander, like a burglar, through each thread, casing the joint, discovering the ins and outs of their arguments, peeling meaning from their intent, and their intent from their words the way you'd peel clothes from a lover. I'm poised to strike, starving for it.

The hunger's real, the pressure for that discourse, discourse as treatment, as salvation, as competition. I'll lay down words, letter by letter, phrase by phrase, looking to tear right to the heart of things, to lay their secret meanings out to the crowd, to explain just what's been argued, and why they agreed. Where the bias is, that I see. Where the lies hide, the hypocrisy, the just understated rhythms of the words.

Because me, I'm a dive bomber, a hawk, a dragon, starving for that perfect statement, that bit of connection where I put the innards of what they've said, lain bare, right back on the table, and I tell them that they're wrong. They're wrong, and they couldn't even tell, because they're sitting in a universe of conformation bias and bile.

The hunger's there, the pressure's building. Someone, somewhere, is wrong on the internet. I just haven't decided who, yet.

You deserve bad kids.

2010-06-21T10:04:00.000-07:00

There's a gap in social security. A giant hole, which Gen X, and Gen Y, have grown up vaguely aware of. Children have learned in school that the money is running out. They're used to the idea that though they see social security deductions on their paychecks, they'll never actually see social security. They've come to terms, and accepted, because what else is there to do?

Well, we could be mad, and we still might be. We could be furious, ranting, screaming children. We could break things, we could riot. There's really no use in that, and we've been taught, well enough, to remain civil. Because our homes are nice. Unless they're not, in which case we politely decline to notice. Our families are of course intact. Unless they're not...

And beyond being well taught, well trained, well educated little drones, the number doesn't make sense. Its ridiculous. It makes me giggle.

What's the number?

$54,232,674,000,000 Fifty Four Trillion Dollars.
We owe that. Us. Americans. Right now. The nation will produce about 14 trillion worth of goods this year, but its ok. We're de-leveraging. Paying it off. The number's falling. That's really just the first of a series of punches, lined up for us by the jokes of our parents.

Here's another number:
$109,214,000,000,000 One Hundred Nine Trillion Dollars
A hundred million millions, and that is what social security cannot cover. Yet.

The joke, then, is the idea that social security will end. That the smaller generation of children will vote against their aging parents on social security reform. That we wont shoulder the three hundred fifty thousand per Millennial.

Waste

2010-06-06T19:47:00.000-07:00

Some days, its streaming, steaming, storming from your fingertips, a sluice like rain rushing off the shingles, into gutters, down, onto streets, right off the curb, pattering, pattering, slamming down the trunklines, roaring as they meet, a thousand synapses fire and meaning pour down toward my fingers. My feet rap staccato, nervous twitches, but those aren't the words, not related.

Even my breath comes in broken gasps, heaving. and then, suddenly, its gone. Everything, wasted.

There's power in a blank page, a potential, much the same as a brick suspended. The second time, the third, that power is tinged with dissapointment, more and more.

Moral? Save often.

Calm

2010-05-19T15:29:00.001-07:00

It certainly isn't the cacophony of panic, though it may be punctuated by such. Its the before, and often the after, because you're certainly panicking about something. And if you've become prone to such panics, it may well not be because you're facing it, the yelping, screaming mind and the feeling of death. You said you were going to, and that were enough, just an agoraphobic making the declaration that he'll walk outside today. Get his newspaper. All day, then, he has little flashes of the panic around his calm, punctuating and describing it in such a shape that it can be slotted into the word.

Its a calm of rushing feelings, of jitter, that lights upon valleys and spikes into the ether. It drives one to the hiding places, the comfort objects, closets, beds, teddy bears. Things get done late, or not at all, because the only time things are safe is while the blanket covers all parts of the body, bound in a cocoon where the air grows foul, where movement is strictly restricted. This is the calm before the storm, or better, the stillness at the apex of a jump, with the mind swung out over nothing, without foundation, but still for an instant yet, before it lets go. And out there, at the far end of the pendulum swing, the panic roils like an oil slick sea, builds inside. The comforts of closets and covers invite from the other side, if you simply hold on a minute more. You can leap, here, or swing back over, into the embrace of pretending it isn't there.

And perhaps you won't panic, anymore, once you're well away from the stew.
And perhaps you should just have eaten the stew, and been done with it.

Panic

2010-05-13T13:15:00.000-07:00

You gasp, you struggle, but its like the air is too thin. The room's only dimly lit, and everyone's either too loud or too quiet to quite understand. They're agitated, or ignorant, and either way, you're afraid.

Its the feeling of the insane, curled like a fetus, greasy strips of hair hanging down your shoulders, that everything is sliding sixty degrees to the south, the air, light, and clarity have slid down the slope and into some dark hole.

Holes open up around you, your vision narrows, and all along, there's an ill rock in the pit of your stomach, forcing your last meal to press hard against the sides, to bubble and froth like ice cubes dropped in a half filled glass.

Butterflies, they call it, until you've half your mind on not throwing up all over yourself, half your mind holding on for dear life, wishing it had a joint or an inhaler or enough tranquilizer to down an elephant, trying to shut up the other half, which is screaming, over and over, that the walls are closing in, there's no way out, and it'd be better off dead.

You're breathing hard, gasping through your nose, and even though the lights are out, and there must be a million megawatt spotlight shining directly on your back, you're certainly sweating like the room's become a sauna, sweating in all the regular places: your feet, your face, your palms, your belly. Even though the lights are out, and you've driven so far to the flight side of things that you could dig yourself out of a concrete cell, even though you can't eve see anything but the rims of your glasses, anymore, the conversation continues around you, banal and dry and utterly unaware.

The world just teetered on the brink, stepped off the edge and swung out into oblivion, and everyone around you continues like the foundation's still sound, so you reply to a question, first lamely, and then with more zest, struggling to force the froth back down. You'll later lie, and say you're fine, because how do you articulate that there's nothing beneath you but a yawning abyss, and your brain's been cut out to make space for a pack of yelping pups during the thunderstorm?

On stocks, and HFT

2010-05-12T05:52:00.000-07:00

Since the recent market explosion, a topic well discussed in financial circles has busted into the attention of the popular blogs: The High Frequency Traders. These are people, backed by massive banks of computers..or, rather, computers backed by quants backed by investors with piles of more than at least a hundred million dollars, running trades on tiny changes in the prices of stocks: They notice stocks in a market on the rise, which is to say, a rise in demand for the stocks, at which point they swoop in, buy massive quantities of these stocks, and resell to the slower buyers.

As an aside, its interesting to note that here is one of the only places where technology is creating middlemen, rather than cutting them out, as, generally, technology and the internet work together to form new markets, places like ebay, amazon, zappos, and innumerable other online trading places which have jumped in between wholesalers and retailers, and by claiming the profits of both groups, while passing savings on to the consumer, captured great shares of the markets.

What HFT claim is their redeeming value, is that they add liquidity to the market, which is to say, make it easy for a buyer to buy stocks. They do. If the market were composed only of buy and hold longterm traders* then days, weeks, even months could pass between lodging an order and finding someone willing to sell their shares of the stock. So, conceptually, traders have a place in the market, as in any market, if only to create the fluidity and the jobs.

Where to draw the line? On the moving frontier of our technical capability. Computers, in the grand scheme, are not so expensive as to be prohibitive to the smart trader, nor is the programming excessively difficult to attain. In fact, a large gripe is that the HFT have been seeking the edges of markets: selling at higher and higher prices until buyer's orders dry up, and then dropping down below the edge of what people are willing to pay. People feel cheated, for when they plug in a stop order for CheeseCo at $23.40, and CheeseCo is selling at $23.10, they expect to pay somewhere between, as CheeseCo prices rise...and they often find themselves paying $23.40, or $23.38. Backtrack for a moment. Someone's decided that they're not willing to pay more than $23.40, entered that into a computer, and left it to buy their stocks (or, really, for this to make any sense, a great deal of people have done so) Another computer has discovered the movement to buy CheeseCo, bought a great deal of it, and is now selling small portions of it at rising prices...seeking the highest point where people are willing to buy. Haggling, in other words.

"I'll give it one you for $23.29"
"Deal"
"And I'll give it one you for $23.30"
"Deal"
"And I'll give it one you for $23.33"
"Deal"
"And I'll give one to you for $23.41"
"Screw that"
"Ok, I'll give one to you for $23.39"
"Deal"

People have decided they're not going to pay more than $23.40, and their machines refuse to do so. Other machines find what they are willing to pay, and charge that...and people turn around and feel cheated. Cheated because the price rose, when there was a mass movement to buy Cheeseco. Cheated because they bought at the price, or just under the price, they said they'd buy at, rather than lower.

Why is it that haggling at the grocer is acceptable, but haggling in the market is not? Because its too fast for people? People planned it beforehand, decided on a price, and were not persuaded or manipulated out of it. If I paid more than I wanted to at the market, my mother would encourage me to not make the deal. I'd encourage anyone else to set their stop orders at what they wanted to pay, and be glad that the HFT machines aren't nearly as persuasive, don't even try to be persuasive, as street vendors.

*note that I do not say investors, a title which should be reserved for persons who fund companies: that is to say, the initial buyer of a stock, as any subsequent trade of a stock does not affect the company. If I buy a google stock on the market, I'm betting on google, but not helping google. If I, instead, buy shares from google, I'm investing.

what goes on when I'm not home

2010-05-10T20:16:00.001-07:00

When I left the room, years ago, there were wooden-bone dinosaurs, three of them. There were tiny cities, of lego and k-nex, there were bears, in plenty, a snuffeluffagus, and a musical wind up sheep. When I left the room, years ago, these toys had six hours to effect a hasty civilization, organize a dance, bombard the opposing village (lego and k-nex are not compatible). They rarely made it to the upper reaches of the closet, where board game armies and venture capital investors waited, stacked away in boxes. Things were different, back when the longest chance they had for freedom was an eighteen hour sleep over.

Bears would work in pairs, hurling throw pillows twice their size over the edge of the loft, until a sizeable landing pad had been created. Then, with a running leap, they'd hurl their fuzzy selves over the edge, to collide with big, meaty slaps against the floor, the bed, the chairs, the radiator.
Picking themselves up, bears across the room surveyed the damage: a few bruises, quite a lot of mussed fur. The landing pad had survived quite intact, of course. Next time, they'd stick the landing, they'd promise one another. They'd shake their heads, growl, wipe the fur out of their eyes (and back into their eyes), and survey their domain. They were the natural lords of the territory, watching tiny structures emerge from the lego pile, or great skeletal piles from the k-nex, nothing they couldn't rush upon in a moment of frustration, tear down, and demand tribute from, and so they sat on great pillows, ate great meals of dustmites, captured from under the bed at great expense.

Later, newer, trickier things entered the room. When the bears catapulted down, they were met by yards of fishing line, hooked and weighted by the lego swarms. The k-nex wrapped their structures in tight clothing skins, and defended against onslaught behind their walls, beneath the desk, consulted intrawebs and wrapped themselves in how-to knowledge and built catapults, scorpions, trebuche. Dwarven cities arose, networked to other civilizations across the globe, while the legos waged brutal war against the ferocious bears.

While the K-nex were well defended behind their massive walls, the lego built fortresses of their own, simple block cubes atop piles of books, or hanging from webs of floss stretched between bunks. Their commanders wore massive mustaches, and screamed obscenities while wielding spears or swords. They catapaulted men across the field, armed with tidbits and string, to force the bears back down, barbarians still.

Times changed, and the K-nex found themselves in possession of new and stronger processors, better strategical simulations, more t-shirts strewn across the floor. They maintained their dominance, and their isolation, while the lego discovered the ruins of their first mainframe.
They found it in bits, pieces. An alien technology, but strangely similar to what they knew. There were slots for things, and when things fit, they often worked. So they hung new wires in their webs, a motherboard, a floppy drive, an hdd, the guts stretched out along their cords. The first one hadn't worked, but with the second wireless antennae, they found themselves the net.

Still, I came home, either thumping up the stairs, which gave everything but the bears (who'd taken to hiding under the bed anyway) ample time to escape, or, more worrisome, clambering in through the window, off the porch. They'd have to build small, things they could tear down at a moment's notice, little networks that could be reduced to piles from the cry of a spotter...and then I left.

Now the K-nex hive towers above the desk, anchoring its center of gravity against both the ceiling and the floor, the corner and the fan, an entire nation secreted behind towels, blankets, shirts and sheets. The legos, though, have spread out, developed. Their suspended platform villages have become towers, their generals: explorers. They've plumbed the heights of the closet, where once they'd only encountered the depths. Top-hats, steamships, and thimbles have added venture capital to their economy, and they've hired cannons and cavalry from other camps, mercenary armies from across the globe. They've built a steel plane, and folded many sheets of paper, refashioned their hooks into harpoons, cutting edges, and make ready. Their target? Not the bears of old, who tyrannized barbaric tribes, but the insect aliens across the room, the hive with the stronger net connection, the hardware of the future.

Performances

2010-05-09T11:39:00.000-07:00

Beyond the very most rudimentary, writing is a performance art, a process of producing something for someone else to observe. Of course, there are exceptions to the rule, the personal note, the diary, but in the vast majority of our efforts, when we put pen to paper, crayon to wall, or fingers to keys, we mean for someone else to observe it.
And since someone else is observing it, we assume something of the writer's been passed forward through the words, though men have been identified as abjectly dishonest in the past. Text, though, is about the writer, as much as it is the subject.

And when its the internet, and the scribblings are for posterity, one had best present himself not as a mad king scrawling insane proclamations to the ghostly chorus of his tower vestibule, but as someone with a disposition for the production of well reasoned pieces of brilliance. If he can't do that, he might at the very least use his lexicon of overwrought adjectives to conceal the fact.

Writing, at its most bleak, is simply a tool to be deployed to push some bit of information against the gulf between two minds, and pass it there into a shared understanding. Colorful words, but not a colorful task. Beyond that, there is the meaning, or mismeaning of things, the form of language occupying the voluminous space above what is necessary for survival.

That writing is art, that most of human enterprise is art, should carry with it a statement of warning: People see what is there, and what isn't there.

A Safe, Secure Place

2010-05-08T19:00:00.000-07:00

After the first crescendo of facebook's growth, when Zuckerberg ran out of ivy league snobs ad ivy league wanna-bees to cajole into joining the network by mass of similar persons, facebook marketed itself as a secure place to do such things as store photos, talk with children, or reconnect with old friends, to a few shades of the demographic who were much older than the collage kids originally manipulated into the net.

I do not lie, it did this. It claimed to be a private place, safe on the internet for storing such things as images of impressionable children (A euphemism, perhaps, to ensure this specific line of text fails to deviate from my mother's version of appropriate. Use your imagination.) Locations, private data, and it successfully pulled in a great many of the adults who grew up in a nation where the government didn't tap phones and scan the post for watchwords, people who were concerned about what employers might think, and who wondered who was watching, not because they slavered for attention, but because they'd taken the horror stories to heart.

Because facebook once really stood for these ideas...or really appeared to, originally concerned persons joined facebook, and facebook grew to be a friendly meme in the public consciousness. But facebook is a firm, and interested in leveraging what it has into profit, and the masses of user information which it owns isn't nearly so profitable while its private...

Really, though, this story is only marginally related to facebook, where nothing is private, anymore. Its more concerned with why the vast majority of facebook users simply don't care. They don't care that their lives are recorded, and ignore it if they do, because this isn't a trend started by facebook, or by facebook's predecessors, but by terrorists.

Not Al-Qaeda, either...they merely provided the terror. These are the terrorists who took that terror, spread it around, maintained it for months, and years, so that for many of us, our youth was framed by it. By Guantanamo, by orange level terror alert days, by The War on Terror, wiretaps, the NSA, the TSA.

We're a population used to losing privacy, who allow that its better than the occasional exploding Muslim. At first, because the nation was supposed to be a safe place, and now? Simply because we're used to it. Nothing is private, the youth will say, without quite realizing what that means. We never had the chance to know.

America, home of the brave. Indeed.

Thinking about thinking (about thinking)

2010-05-07T18:33:00.000-07:00

The hardest part of ideas is holding onto the slippery things. They're not things which you can easily grasp, and when you put them down, they tend to dissolve, particles sifting across the table as though repelled by one another. And you? You've been distracted, by the next composite, little humunculi piled atop one another, something distinct built from a thousand smaller aspects.

That's the thing about ideas, the thing which makes them so hard to hold on to: the thing is that there's nothing really there. Not so much as ice slippery from the melt. There's nothing there at all, nothing but a collection of smaller concepts, things that shrink down past the point where they are distinguishable from one another.

Ideas are, obviously, insubstantial. The philosophers will speak on the aspect of will, the wonder of the recursive nature of our minds. We can think about thinking...about thinking. And when we're thinking about thinking, aren't we also thinking about thinking about thinking? Or do we have to be thinking about thinking about thinking before we're thinking about thinking about thinking about thinking?

That's a structure, right there, and can you hold it in your mind for any duration, before other humunculi, not so much as lumps of silver or paste, come hurdling through that fragile house of cards composed of little more than mist...and now, what were you thinking about before the image of gleeful imps poking imaginary cloud-cards with sticks, hurdling about?

The trouble with ideas isn't that they're good or bad, rediculous or dull...the trouble with ideas is that one bowls down the previous before the first has had the chance to stand up and justify itself, recursive little thing that it is. And the trouble with people? The trouble with people is that they're so often unwilling to let an idea stand up, pull its coattails, straighten its tie, reposition its monocle, and speak for itself..let alone speak for the ones who are themselves mute, or soft spoken.

Hampster isn't Dead Yet!

2010-05-06T19:14:00.000-07:00

I have to apologize for not posting more often. I'm just so busy, you understand. I have all these ideas for things I mean to post, blogs and updates, things about my life. Its just, I can't find the time to work writing into my schedule. I haven't moved on, just been overwhelmed with the day to day minutia. Blogging is on my list of things to do, and I'd hate for you guys to feel I've abandoned you. I'll be back, I'm sure.

This would be the First Post

2010-05-06T10:07:00.000-07:00

Years ago, I jumped aboard the Myspace thing. I had a few friends there, and a great deal more people who might have been peripherally related to me claimed to be my friends there. The point of the Myspace, I quickly realized, was pictures, and being a homely lad without a camera (or even a cell phone) I felt rather like odd man out.

But it was Myspace. Not their space, and I did what I could. I posted some images I'd created, or had stolen from my brother, the artist, who used my computer to doodle in MSPaint. I wrote, and published some of that. I was in middle school, and Facebook would soon be on the rise.

Facebook was very obviously not MySpace. Not even my space. Facebook was facebook's space, facebook's layout, and if at first I had some level of customization at my fingertips, after two or three 'new Facebooks' I found myself with just the same layout as everyone else. That's something I railed against, the change from myspace, where I learnt a degree of html, breaking into the background of the site and laying it out how I wanted, jarring and incoherent as that may have been. I wanted to do things to facebook. Still do, really. My profile could display that app, and this app, or...I couldn't imagine, anymore, trained as I am.

So, looking for an outlet, both literary and creativistically, and very likely argumentative, I've run here (I googled Blog. Little surprise google's blog service was the first one, no?).
I'm sure to maybe post more things here. And they might be neat. Or banal.