hyperpeople

This is why we remember the dead: so we can bring to mind how important each moment of life is. We all walk around assuming we will live forever.

We will not.

**

Open to love at every moment. True, pure love is always responded to in kind - to the degree and form possible in the recipient.

How had I done this? I can trace it to two things: I stopped using the dryer. For some obscure reason, dryers in Australia are always electric. Which I can imagine my father rolling his eyes at - because it's just so hilariously inefficient. Also, I powered down my lovely dual-core server, choosing instead to create virtualized servers, which are running on my quad-core telly, which, because it's (sometimes) recording TV shows, is always turned on.

I reckon that these two simple changes cut my electricity usage by 25%. No big deal to stop using the dryer (except for the bedclothes). Things actually dry faster in Sydney sun than they do in the dryer. Of course, we've had two weeks of consistently cloudy, rainy, chilly weather here in Sydney, so I have been using the dryer a bit these days. But the sun will return - this is Australia, after all - and I can dry my clothes in the sun again. And that server is staying turned off.

So simple. But so profound. I reckon that if I really worked at it - replacing my refrigerator and washing machine with highly efficient models - I could get that number down to nearly 50% of my earlier usage. That's remarkable. But I reckon it possible.

Current Location:	Home
Current Mood:	satisfied
Current Music:	Koyaanisqatsi

He was a complete, utter, unabashed freak. He stole pot from where I kept it stored in my freezer. And although he probably thinks I never knew, I did. I just never cared. He was a wonderful, bubbly, chaotic pain in the ass.


He was also the very first person to create a VRML world that anyone cared about, Daniel's Room, a scene from the Children's tour through the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington DC. It was that model - and the response that it engendered in the SIGGRAPH 1994 audiences who experienced it - which got VRML going, got SGI on board, got the whole bloody thing up and running.


A bit later in the year, Scott whacked out the model for the Cybersamhain (and wrote some of the ritual, too -- check it out for his cheeky approach to things spiritual), which Erik Davis would go on to immortalize in the infamous Technopagans article in WIRED. That model has always been intended to sit at the absolute, universal {0,0,0} of the collective online virtual world, its axis mundi.


That was his work. That was his genius.


He left San Francisco around the same time I moved down to Los Angeles; he moved to Florida - which he never really liked - and lost a leg to the brittle diabetes which shaped his life, and which, in the end, killed him. That he lived into his mid-40s is shocking: he had to be revived on two separate occasions when I knew him (his tales of heading out on the astral currents as he passed over were both hilarious and petrifying). He wasn't long for the world, knew he wasn't long for the world, but still did the best he could with the kooky and rather mystical-psychic set of skills the universe had handed him.


I learned of his passing on Sunday morning, through an email. Later in the day - and on Monday - I smelled incense burning in the neighborhood. Memory and scent came together, and I realized that this was the incense that Scott and Four always kept burning at their flat on 15th Street. It's come back as a reminder of him, and of those wonderful terrible years when I was becoming something utterly different than what I had ever thought I would be. A transformation due, in no small part, to his work.

Vale, Scott. I know (heh) we'll be seeing each other again. (And yes, you can imagine his silly cackle of assent as I wrote those words.)

Sorry Day
Originally uploaded by mpesce

And for this I am very, very sorry.

The futures prediction markets use the "wisdom of crowds" in order to ascertain the likelihood of some future event. In this case, who the Democratic Presidential nominee will be.

As you can see from the chart, at no point prior to this one, has Obama ever been more likely to win the nomination than Hillary Clinton. But now, the momentum - that began as a "whisper in Springfield" has become a roar like an oncoming F-5 tornado.

Whee!

- Luke 12:2-3