My apartment is a spaceship.
I man the helm and set the course,
as boosters below my hardwood floors
send permeating shockwaves through the soles of my feet.
The walls shake
and light beams through the incongrous cracks
caused by this basement rumbling.
My mind ignites like rocket fuel
as I set imaginative sites on divine destinations.
We fly,
apartment and I.
We are but an instant away.
One serendipidous thought from the source.
Nay, not the source,
The dream.
The ceiling physically and figuratively barriers a beauty on the tip of my tongue yet to be articulated.
Well my bucket is empty,
a clear glass vase.
Metaphors of emptiness
could go on for days.
My task now is to fill it,
to fill it once more,
Of all the thoughts, memories…
the feelings that happened before.
I’ll embark on a journey.
Inward, you see.
But my velocity will be faster
than any physical speed.
For the Universe, really,
it’s whatever we think.
And I can conjure a tale,
before you can wink.
Time is relative,
related to those who perceive.
Time for bed now.
Goodnight.
Dreams launch upon the eve.
Emojis
Oh! Jeez.
Christ
Almighty
Bless me.
Gonna sneeze.
These li’l things
We place in texts
Instead of words
Make speaking a breeze.
But what do they mean?
I mean, what do they say?
That verbs are bad
And pics, the bee’s knees?
‘Cause I like to talk.
I respect my speech.
Rather write my prose.
Than paint decrees.
I’ve had it with clip art.
Don’t rob me of thought.
Articulation, Joe Emoji.
Resemble language? Let’s not.
Record for playing the “Because you added [@netflix movie]” pop-up modal upon selecting something to stream: 173 consecutive “+ My List(s).”
— Mike Del Rosso (@DelODell) August 15, 2014
Ron Spector has spent many sleepless nights in his living room. They amount to countless hours of scouring the Internet, streaming supergiant Nahtflix.com’s archives, to accomplish a feat that no one, especially Nahtflix, saw coming. His record for adding Nahtflix streaming movies to his personal queue, or “Un List,” in one sitting is 173. Yet, what’s more impressive about Spector’s acumen at the point-select interface is the frequency in which he enacts such marathon selection sessions.
“Some weeks I’ll sleep a total of seven hours,” the 33-year-old software engineer said. “I’ll run straight for 36 hours at a time. I’ll take quick power naps, lasting 5-10-15 minutes. Then I’ll launch a series of selection sessions. I can usually break 100 in under a minute. Up around 150, I usually run into dead ends, where I can’t select any new ‘net flicks. I’ll take a deep breath, jump out of the window (system operationally speaking) and select another movie from the main browsing section. I’ve logged up around 40 individual selection sessions in an hour—all snatching at least 50 movies apiece.”
His goal is to acquire every movie Nahtflix has to offer online, in his personal queue. He’s also tracking the patterns by which new sets of movies result from each preceding single selection.
“I want to study the living and dying of movie contracts on this popular entertainment website,” he said. “As you see new releases sprouting up, I also want to keep track of the movies that fall off the map. I think, from the observation of this living, breathing, cybernetic organism, we can determine an algorithm that defines a universal explanation for the natural growth and decay of life.”
Nahtflix officials, however, are not backing Spector’s online campaign at discovery. Chairman Ricardo del Flixo issued a statement Tuesday calling for imposed limits to cap high-volume members’ personal queues.
“Supersaturated ‘Un List(s)’ would lead to unlawful transparency of our assets,” del Flixo wrote in his 370-page motion, that also included an official request for a Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) search and seizure of Spector’s hard drives and any cloud services that he’s had access to since the inception of Nahtflix, Inc. back in 2008.
The real question is will Spector achieve his goal before Nahtflix, Inc. can legally stop him? The mega-website must wait for Federal Courts to pore over written affidavits of online, business and financial experts to determine whether Spector should cease and desist all interaction of any kind with Nahtflix.com. If they find cause for alarm, both parties could testify in front of the Senate.
This, of course, raises more questions, like “Why doesn’t Nahtflix just cancel Spector’s account?” or “Or why don’t they set a cap on his queue alone?”
Those answers are simple: the company can’t. This case has already reached a national stage and, at this point, the publicity alone would send Nahtflix stocks plummeting, within hours of it hitting news sites.
Or so says Fox News Financial Analyst Frank Steamhed.
“Discrimination like this, by Nahtflix, on one of its members would be like the meteor that smashed into Earth and killed all the dinosaurs,” said Steamhed, a former hedge fund manager turned TV shock jock of stock talk. “No, they need to handle this in the courts and seek legality of their claims. The fact is, from a practical standpoint, no sanctions have been preset by the FCC to regulate such abnormal activity of a single user to his respective online service. At the very least, Ron Spector is testing Nahtflix’s ability to provide its service, whether he means to or not.”
Still, Spector maintains that he’s merely acquiring data for his human experiment.
However the empiric validity of Spector’s cause, the clock winds down to next Monday, when it will be wise yet imperfect judges who decide the fate of his unexplored science.
Courts, Wednesday, said they’d be willing to allow a temporary hold on Spector’s Nahtflix account pending trial. Spector, thus, has three days to complete his master ‘Un List’ before an indefinite halt on his account occurs.
“I estimate that I’ve logged only 5-10 percent of Nahtflix’s total offerings. And I’ve been at this for nearly six months, before the company caught wind of the abnormal activity by one user and then waged this legal battle against him.”
So Spector has taken to the Internet community and they have responded in electronic droves.
“I’ve developed a map that outlines the entire structure of the Nahtflix library,” Spector, a former hacker said. “I’ve shared it online and we’ve been able to assign different sections to willing extractors. This has certainly expedited the process.”
Regardless, courts could rule that all online behavior of this kind cease and desist for the entire Nahtflix nation of online users. With pedigree data of a person so interwined with everyday Internet usage nowadays, the FBI would have no trouble isolating those who would ignore this decree from the high court.
Penalties have been reported to include up to $10,000 in fines and one year in a federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison.
Ever vigilant over the long dark weekend, Spector and his band of loyal surfers point-select-search through the night. Spector has published a website for those who wish to join, in the 11th hour of this race between big business and discovery.
Visit www.findalltheflix.net for more information.
The key to being a good journalist is self-loathing. I’m talking about the realization that what you have now, what you know, what you essentially are to the very core of your soul is not enough and will never be enough, without the accompaniment of some outside entity.
This zeitgeist is a ghost you chase throughout your career. You find traces of it in the stories you report on, but their faint scent is fleeting and some days even a bloodhound couldn’t help you on the hunt. So you loathe the status quo and keep moving, changing, adapting, learning, growing, devolving, degenerating, rebuilding, reassessing, reaffirming that you can muster the chutzpah to paddle into another wave of the socioeconomic surge.
That is the wild goose chase that gets you out of bed in the morning. The mythical carrot—a mirage of an intelligible Truth—that motivates you to put one foot in front of the other on the neverending path. Much like the most interesting man in the world stays thirsty, my friends, you’re driven by an unquenchable curiosity.
Recursion, as a concept, is hard to define because to adequately articulate its intelligible identity, you have to break the golden rule of dictionaries: never use the word in its own definition.
Mathematically, physically, logically this is the very nature of a recursive process, function, organic sequence.
Anyway, this urge to define the indefinable resulted in this post. Let’s begin at the source of all linguistic definition…
adjective
It’s especially used in computer programming to define an infinite set of objects in one finite statement. Stated more concisely, a recursive definition is defined in terms of itself. If you break down a complex problem into smaller parts, you can solve the simpler parts and then combine their results.
You know the function, as a whole, itself. So any instances of it in smaller parts of the same problem cancel out and you’re left with the remainder that shows itself plain as day. In other words, you can isolate the inconsistencies. The variable randomness or designed change.
Occurrences of this phenomenon in nature include the nautilus shell you may find lying in the sand on a beach. The shell builds upon itself in an outward spiraling growth that never closes the circle and only ends when the cells are no longer capable of regenerating.
I’m pretty sure it’s how you psychologically incept someone too. Although, existentially, it’s just a way to rise above the self and see the world from a vantage point separated from the self. Like a less dramatic out-of-body experience.
Let’s put the concept to action…
Imagine only being able to go back or forth your entire life. And then suddenly, you’re aware of these two directions. And in becoming aware of this limited duality, you imagine that maybe there’s another direction—a third path. So you apply the same skill you learned going forward or back, yet you shift your thinking into the possibility of this newly perceived, newly imagined reality.
Now tread sideways.
Long ago, I chose a single path for myself. Point A would lead to Point B. From there, Point C would logically follow. The strategy resembled man’s rudimentary understanding of time, which many posited to take a linear course. That we all followed a single, unbroken thread. This, of course, never panned out and for a while I could not figure why. If I could not change how the chaos of reality (i.e. the world outside of my control) functioned, then I would evolve my thinking.
I adopted a multi-point plan. I would pursue many paths at once, always leaving my options open. When in the moment—in the present, yet mindful of the future and knowledgeable of the past—I would select which point made the most sense then. Stepping upon those impromptu stones, a new array of possibilities would present themselves. At the next chance to make a choice, I selected the firmest situated stone, at this point further into the future.
Sometimes I’d make missteps, but those provided the silver lining of a learning opportunity. The next time I’d see a similar stone before me, I’d know not to lean so heavily upon it.
This is the nature of the Universe, or our perceivable reality. We’re not granted one set path that lies before us, ready to walk. There are infinite routes, which we alter at each fork. They are based in the information available and our intuition of best possible outcomes, from the actions we take at these pivotal junctures.
Unrequited love—unknown by the one loving—was an ugly thing. The beloved rejected his attention like some fine-tuned immune system would attack unwanted alien pathogens, falling victim to the ferocity of a white-blooded, billion-cell offensive.
The inevitable emotional scarring numbed his once vibrant ability to shower affection. Warm light waves that freely flowed from the ends of his every extremity decayed. His extremities retracted, in fact, withered under the disuse of inactivity. A jade film colored everything apathetic.
Although the human heart (figuratively speaking) is far more resilient than any biological system. It can rebuild, regenerate, revive, resurrect. And a forgotten and dead soul blossomed again, like some Lazarus-like lilac.
From the ashes, he burned brighter than that white-hot daisy wheel in the sky. He propelled from the fiery plume of a rocket 10 stories taller than the Empire State Building. Its divine impetus inspired an original explosion unlike light, in only that its speed exceeded it.
So don’t fret young, sunken soul. Be patient. Conserve. Self-preserve. Angle your gaze outward and open your heart. Dust off those ever so tender electrodes.
True love ignited that day, from a single spark.
Facebook is for the Family Man… or Woman. Sorry, ladies. “Family Man” is an age-old expression that just sounds better than “Family Woman.” Yet, I assure you. You come first in every other aspect of my life.
LinkedIn, indifferent to personal conquests, chronicles the scope of someone’s professional career. Think of Résumé 2.0.
Twitter is where I want to be. It wears down an identity against the whetstone cacophony of tweets, some good, some bad, but mostly forgettable fireflies.
Fireflies, a.k.a. lightning bugs, are Mark Twain’s metaphor for the uniquely human expression of verbal and written language.
The Great American Author once said, “The difference between the right word and the almost-right word is the difference between lightning and a lightning bug.”
Most tweets extract the everyday molasses of non-happening that fill our incongruous expanse of time.
Wading through that gooey minutia, sometimes we trap the elusive lightning in opportune bottles, before the fleeting, syrup-sweetening instances fizzle into the ether.
Our Mason jar memories capture those chance occurrences—some would call serendipitous occasions, those with faith might say “divine interventions”—that crystallize the stories articulating our lives. In short, an…
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