Complete Title: “The Impact of an Octopus Can Potentially Change Your Artistic Trajectory”

It hasn’t happened to me, mind you, but it could. It could happen to any one of us. Think about it! And where will we be then? I don’t think life continues on normally after a celphlapod assaults you.

Feel free to try these yourself.

Search: Fox

Google: FOX Broadcasting Company – FOX Television Shows www.fox.com/

Google: 5 Lovable Animals You Didn’t Know Are Secretly Terrifying … www.cracked.com/…/5-lovable-animals-you-didnt-know-are-secretly…

Google: Steiff 1542/35 Curled Up Ringel Fuzzy Red Fox 1977 35cm KFS … www.ebay.com/itm/Steiff…Fuzzy-Red-Fox…-/150716495372

Google: What the hell does this even mean? – Yahoo! Answers answers.yahoo.com › … › Education & Reference › Quotations

Google: Well That Was Close! – YouTube www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGhKw5rew1Q

Google: miserable at my best gummychocolates.tumblr.com/

Google: Loren Feldman – Google+ – Aww is everybody crying about google … https://plus.google.com/117245298692605482770/…/KMsENb2ke9…

Google: Hunter S. Thompson Quotes (Author of Fear and Loathing in Las … www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/5237.Hunter_S_Thompson

Google: He SaId:-”I love yOu” I rEpLiEd “WhAt A cOiNcIdEnCe.!! I love … www.facebook.com/…cOiNcIdEnCe…Too-/202517949818580?…

Google: Did you mean: Love? Seriously, Google. IT was just looking for a fox.  

Google: Logitech CEO: Google TV ‘cost us dearly,’ no Revue replacement … www.theverge.com/…/logitech-ceo-google-tv-cost-us-dearly-no-revu…

Google: The Dark Knight – Wikiquote en.wikiquote.org/wiki/The_Dark_Knight

Google: Showing results for I loved Batman, to, Google. But… I gotta go?Search instead for I loved Batman, too, Google. But… I gotta go Search Results 1. Blades of Glory (2007) – Memorable quotes www.imdb.com/title/tt0445934/quotes

Google: wedding – alanahines – Google Sites sites.google.com/site/alanahines/wedding

Google: Google Maps Mania: Good Night Google Maps! googlemapsmania.blogspot.com/2006/…/good-night-google-maps.ht…

Google: Your search – … – did not match any documents. Suggestions: • Try different keywords.

“…this new view of the network as the computer is a binary view, problematic because as software engineers still tend to do, the solution takes the user into account second and not first. A user-first outlook for most software demands of it that it be a desktop-cloud hybrid—with good reason. And a desktop-cloud hybrid won’t suck the OS in the browser, it will suck the browser into all the apps that a user has.

Steve Jobs via Techcrunch in 2011:

“You know, if the hardware is the brain and the sinew of our products, the software in them is their soul,” Jobs said on Monday. Apple is now more clearly than ever betting that will not be web software, but native software backed invisibly by the web. Google’s position is decidedly less clear. With the existence of Chrome OS and Android, they’re currently betting on both. That dichotomy screams anything but “it just works.”

Nailed it.

Aside from the obvious reasons to do this, there is merit in it. Video games now often outsell films on their first day of sale. For not only this reason, they have become significant culturally. If you want to truly understand a culture from a particular time period, look to their pulp fiction. Video games are the pulp fiction of our day and should be preserved by libraries for that value. Also, it would really be aw3s0m3.

I think there must be a basic equation (and mine may not be it) spelled out something along the lines of:

Energy consumed – Energy output = Health

I think this deserves a little bit more thought, but I can see the parallels to economic concepts of utility and budget, where rather than talking of utility, we’re talking about health. The point is that there is solid balance available to us relating these three terms, and this is most easily explained through the example of my newly outfitted bike and also primitive human behavior. Back in the day we had to forage and hunt for food. I don’t think that the evolution of our physical bodies has changed much in the intervening 100,000 years (or so) and neither our metabolisms. Having to work to get food is pretty much how we’re built. And in that somewhat ideal evolutionary scenario it is a good thing that someone spend as much energy as it takes to get them the food that they need to get up the next day and find the food. ¹

The problem with going to the grocery store in your car is that you aren’t expending that much energy. And you are also polluting the environment that makes that food that your are buying. The shipping of the food to your grocery store is also polluting the environment that makes the food that you are buying. (And let’s note here that pollution, referred to as a negative externality by economists is not helping your health any.) This sort of recursive thinking goes on and on. And then, you didn’t grow the food, till the fields, pick the crop, etc. You didn’t expend any energy (proportionately) getting the food. But since you did get the food and ate the food, and then sat at a desk for eight hours, a lot of the energy (i.e. calories) seems to be collecting on you.² So you go to the gym. You burn fuel (not your own) and pollute the environment to burn off calories that wouldn’t be there if you were working to get the food! And again, this sort of recursive thinking goes on and on, and can seem a bit depressing.

Variety is the spice of life. It’s awfully nice that we can have mangoes in Kentucky and oranges in Maine and I’m not sure that I have a problem with that. This is not a back-to-basics argument in the hippy sense. This is a back-to-common-sense argument of looking at yourself as an individual that consumes food and needs to expend energy in ways that industrialized (or should I say informationalized) jobs don’t. At some point, we, as a society, saw it as convenient that we should drive to work and drive to the grocery store; everything laid out before us. But then, the calories available in even an apple started to increase due to technology and yet the fuel efficiency of our vehicles has not improved congruently and before we know it, there’s a tug on our health as well as our GDP and problems with the environment.

Now let me say that I like my computer, my air conditioning, and my apartment. Again, I’m not advocating a back-to-basics attitude (the commune or the collective farm or otherwise). I’m advocating a focus on the Energy output aspect of this equation. There’s an awful lot that we as individuals really can do to help with the environment, and the bonus is that there really is a payoff for you. We tend to think of these crazy, huge environmental and government problems as beyond our control, an yet, this is easily within our means to personally repair, all the while reaping benefits. It’s the American way! What benefits me, is good for everybody. We just have to slightly adjust our attitude toward what is “beneficial for me,” from convenience to health. Not hard, I think. We’re halfway there; we just need to think in terms of the equation above in order to reasonably measure the cost and benefits of our actions.

In what way will people underestimate you as president? [Long pause] Because I tend to be a pretty courteous person and I don’t lose my temper, I think people underestimate my willingness to mix it up. I don’t know if they’ll continue to underestimate that after this campaign, but I think you’ll still get columns saying, “He’s too cool, he’s too soft.” [Laughs] That’s OK, actually. You like being underestimated in that way. Yeah. No point in having them see you coming.

I don’t think McCain subscribes to that point of view.

Moreover, the Flash plugin has historically been a resource hog. When I was doing more Flash development a few years ago, some fellow developers and I figured out that we could actually get the fan in a Pentium machine to turn on by running certain Flash scripts. What that means is Flash is eating up resources on the CPU at a ridiculous rate and heating up the chip. For Apple’s iPhone that would translate into both heat and lowered battery life. My bet, is that they want people to get used to the idea that the iPhone has great battery life and doesn’t heat up in your pocket. Then, when they do introduce Flash, consumers will more likely be aware of who is the correct party to blame when playing Desktop Tower Defense kills their iPhone.

I don’t really understand this criticism on several levels. The first problem is the idea that it’s a problem that 2% of Lulu’s titles are really supporting the other 98%. Perhaps you aren’t aware of how publishing companies, music labels and movie studios operate. They look for what they think will be hits, fund them, and hope that some of them make money. Most of them don’t. Most bands don’t get re-signed after a sophomore album. Lots of movies don’t make money. Thousands of (published) books never sell more than a few thousand copies before they go out-of-print—and some of those still win Pen/Faulkner and Pulitzer awards. The only thing that Lulu has done is turn the filtering process of what is successful over to audiences—the market decides. This puts the responsibility of marketing squarely on the shoulders of authors.

I don’t see anything wrong with that. Real creative work is 5% inspiration and 95% perspiration. So yeah, authors who are apathetic or uninterested in taking their work to the next level aren’t going to do well, but then, they never were, and you can’t blame Lulu for that. As for how the 2% are getting screwed by Lulu because they’re not switching to a POD or a “real” publisher; again, I just don’t see the problem. You keep the rights to the book. Market your work. Put it in the hands of reviewers, sell it, have a copy on you at all times. Use Lulu to organically build a fan base. Then, take your numbers to a small publisher and show them that if they opt-in on your next book, you come with a built-in audience. Lulu’s not going to stop you. But as opposed to traditional publishers, the onus to market your work is on you. And you know, if you talk to a lot of published authors you’ll find out that it’s not as if there was ever a guarantee that traditional publishers were ever going to do that good a job of marketing your book. Author’s will (even with traditional publishing) always have a responsibility to curate and sell their work (provided you care about having a career as such).