… was created for Freeband, a Dutch research program in which a.o. Philips and Delft University participate. The video tries to show a glimpse of the future they want to see, a future where you are ’surrounded by “intelligent” electronic equipment that can provide almost all of your information and communication needs on demand: an ambient intelligent environment.’

“Sa-weet!” I thought, as I clicked play.

The Ambient Life - have a gander at your future.

I’m jiving along with the peacefully groovy music, ready to pine for a future that isn’t yet here, but gradually, minute by minute, I become more and more alarmed.

When I think about the benefits and possibilities for ambient technologies, I think about weaving them into a world that is safer, more equitable, and more sustainable (if I’m going to envision the future, I’m going to really go for it). I’m waiting for that critical mass at which point our crazy world shifts, hopefully faster than ‘gradually’, to a path that is less insane than the one we are on now.

But this video, this imagined future, projects along our current path with nightmarish force. Security and safety, to the point of exclusion and isolation (I’m almost more interested in what isn’t shown, what kind of world this ambient life is built upon) seem to be primary concerns, and the incident at 2:27 really should have been re-thought, if not for the wtf of it, for the unexplained circumstances and unemotional reactions (I mean, calm and cool under stress is a great quality, but to achieve this level of detachment you need either brainwashing or drugs in the water).

I don’t want this future.

Am I being ridiculous, or do you see it too?

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Wakalixes is a simple, elegant theme with completely customizable colors. Seriously. Give it a whirl and see for yourself.

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1. Actually, there are two problems, the bigger one being data lock-in. Currently, there is no way to export your data from Tumblr, which might cause me to drop it in the future if they don’t address this issue. For the time being, the photos are dumped to my drive just in case.

August and September slow-poked by, and then suddenly slipped into fast-forward, an indistinguishable blur of packing, farewell parties, goodbyes, beer, and tears. The hyper-speed followed us to Vancouver even though we had a 36-hour Friday, and I barely remember the first days in the city, mostly due to excitement, beer¹, and jet-lag. We saw the city on foot, slowly rambling through the characteristics of the downtown neighborhoods; Yaletown, Gastown, the West End, and all the in between parts. I ate burritos everyday, and pizza every night - pizza without corn or octopus or mayo - supplemented at times with falafel, bar food, and diner breakfasts. And then I went to the public library - seven floors of awesome, not to mention you can check out *50* items at a time (what?).

A week and a half in, I’m in love with Vancouver. I feel like I’m home.

A view of Vancouver from my office.

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1. The subject of beer, Canadian beer, and the concussively awesome import store down the street, is fodder for another post entirely.

I ate a lobster. I ate a lobster while it was still alive.

I was out to dinner with a group of engineers at a local Japanese restaurant. The menu had been chosen ahead of time, a typical course meal paired with two hours of an all-you-can-drink free-for-all. Across the way was a group of businessmen flanked by several hostesses hired as entertainment. The girls were dressed in bright silks and running the guys through a number of party games while giggling and pouring drinks. One of the engineers suggested that I could be a hostess too. I shook my head demurely and downed a beer. What the hell?

The first several dishes were standard fare; pickled vegetables, sashimi, dumplings of various sizes and fillings. Before each new round, I’d ask the guys what was next.

“Lobster,” they said.
“Awesome,” I thought.

Ten minutes later the lobster was brought out on a bed of ice. Perhaps there was some decorative foliage. I can’t remember the details because as soon as the chef placed the dish on the table, my jaw hit the floor. The lobster was alive, tail neatly sliced open to expose the meat inside, while the front of the creature moved around and made noises.

I’m generally good at keeping a poker-face when presented with challenging food situations. I’ve eaten pig guts, fish guts, crab “brain”¹, and a number of other dishes without blanching. But the lobster was too much.

“It’s alive!”

The guys looked a little uncomfortable, probably wondering if I was going to make a scene. They squirmed in their seats a bit. I drank another beer.

“But it’s alive!!!”

Someone scowled. The girls across the way were getting louder. I contemplated killing the lobster, but realized I didn’t know how. I wanted to call kzi for some advice on administering a swift death, but my keitai was dead. The flaying torture scene from “The Wind Up Bird Chronicle” sprang vividly to mind. I thought about slicing open a man’s leg and pulling out the meat while he watched.

Someone brandished a pair of chopsticks and grabbed a chunk of tail meat. The lobster went, “scccrrrrccccch!”. I gasped. The man on my left laughed nervously and mentioned such a practice was illegal in Australia. I felt sick, and a bit dizzy. I drank more beer. The room was starting to feel really uncomfortable².

At this point, about half the engineers were scowling. The others were urging me to try the fleshy life-essence of the lobster squirming around on the table. And so, to avoid further tension, to get it over with, to satisfy a totally morbid curiosity, I picked up my chopsticks and went for it. The lobster went, “scccrrrrccccch,” and I grimaced.

I ate a lobster while it was still alive.

It was good. Fresh, succulent, and tasty. I felt barbaric. Perhaps this will serve as a cautionary tale to current and future travelers to Japan. I try to stay away from making value judgements, especially as a stranger in a strange land, but I can’t condone this practice, despite what science might say about lobster sensitivities. I mean, come on! It was alive! I don’t eat foie gras either, and generally stick to vegetables and sometimes fish. Dead fish.

Addendum

Once we finished with the tail, the lobster was whisked off and made into soup. The night went on without any additional untoward entrees. We played bingo and prizes were handed out, some clearly chosen with a specific recipient in mind. Mine? A box of chocolate cocks, with a few breasts mixed in. Yes, you read that right. Chocolate cocks.

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1. I use the word brain lightly… greenish-goo would be more accurate. In Japanese it’s called kanimiso (蟹味噌), which can be unpleasantly misleading to a neophyte gaijin. Be careful when you order, because you might not get that soup you were expecting.
2. If you’ve been in Japan long enough, you start to get a feel for the extremely large variety of situations that make Japanese people uncomfortable. Things that I would normally brush off are cause of great concern and anxiety. Like showing up at the wrong time for something. I’ve seen people almost fall down the stairs in embarrassment because they futzed up the time and arrived a couple hours early. Their desire to disappear into the smallness of infinity can be blindingly palpable. Once you experience it, you try to avoid such complications at all costs.

My mom always told me that you wake up one day and you *just know*. You know that the cycles of love-hate are no longer dialectic but circular, the horse has been beaten, the pigs are flying… whatever metaphor floats your boat. Okay, so we didn’t exactly rub the sleep from our eyes and reach for the suitcase, but close enough. Not to mention I really can’t stand Japanese beer.

And since beer (and whiskey) is the elixir of life, we’ve decided to head to Canada, land of beer, beer, and something called hockey, which must be a sport fishermen play. And while I’m excited about the beer, I’m worried about retrofitting my computer to the telegraph system used by the citizens, not to mention learning the language.

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Mal loved the camera from day one.

We turned the heaters on and sweated out the first couple of days, making sure she had sufficient heat and warm sleeping spots. We moved our blankets into the office and slept on the floor. She would curl up on our chests, in my hair, or by our sides and sleep the sleep of babies. She also pooped a lot, and the apartment soon had strategically placed toilet paper rolls in every room. Laundry was done twice a day, and floors washed every other day.

After the first week the heaters were put away and Mal began to wander the apartment on her own. She would sleep at our feet while we worked at the computer, and learned that the refrigerator held all the goodies. Her meals were prepared with care, supplemented with baby greens, boiled eggs, and tomatoes. Some days it seemed she ate better than we did. A nabe pot² was filled with water for her to splash around in, and the blankets were returned to the bedroom.

Seriously, she loved the camera. Every time I had it out, she’d come running.

Her feathers started to come in, and the fluff out, which filled our apartment with impossible tufts of light down. We purchased a vacuum cleaner since the detritus couldn’t be swept, and Mal began sleeping in our bed (on top of numerous towels). Eventually she was big enough to jump up on her own, always happy with the accomplishment and chirping with joy. She could sense when it was bedtime, clued in by the pre-bed rituals of face washing and teeth brushing, and sometimes would beat us to bed. A couple of times she hid in the sheets, causing a few frantic minutes of searching before giving away her position with a little chirrup. She never liked to be alone, so trips to the bathroom had to be done with the door open so she could follow. Her voice started to change, and she started taking baths in the tub, instead of the stew pot.

The feathers have arrived!

She grew big, and a bit fat, thanks to our doting and attention. Her roundness caused her to sprawl when she sat on the floor, legs splayed out behind her, wings loose and relaxed. Baths became more frequent once we deciphered her actions, the bobbing and dipping while running in circles, indicating a desire for some tub action. We bought toys and knick-knacks to hold her interest while we were away (the toilet room³ doubled as a duck playpen). We talked to her and she talked to us, and I like to imagine she understood. Her cuteness gave way to a sleeker look, though you could still see mischief in her eyes.

Mal back at the farm, taking a dip in the pond.

Eventually she was old enough to return to the farm, to become a duck with people friends, having forgotten she was born a chicken. It was incredibly hard to take her back, heart wrenching to leave her in new surroundings without the cushy trappings of apartment life. She is now more duck and less human, but recognizes the boy and I and comes running when we visit (the boy sees her everyday, I see her about once a week). She tugs on our sleeves hoping to get some tomato, ruffles our hair, and gives me duck kisses⁴. She is a bizarre creature, but one that is loved dearly.

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1. For the first four months or so we thought she was a he, and the pronoun change took some adjustment.
2. I would like to emphasize that it was *only* the pot, the heating apparatus remained in the cupboard.
3. In Japan, there is one room for the toilet, and another for the bath and shower. If you ask a Japanese person for directions to the bathroom, you will undoubtedly wind up in room without a toilet.
4. Little duck nibbles on my lips… it sounds gross but it’s really cute.

But I digress.

I am writing this not out of a need to validate my phobias, but in an attempt to derail a current web trend in the form of OBNOXIOUSLY LARGE feed buttons. I’m talking the 128 x 128 sized behemoths, stuck on the page like a discarded dinosaur lozenge. Please stop doing this; your pages make me sick and I can’t surf the ‘net with my butt in the air. This isn’t McDonalds, we aren’t supersizing our feeds, and I don’t care what Fitt’s law² states, you should keep your rss feed buttons to a reasonable size. Please.

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1. Weebie-jeebies is, as it sounds, a slight variation on ‘heebie jeebies’ but with the nuance of wobbliness and vertigo.
2. If we want to carry that one to it’s logical conclusion, just start throwing this bad boy on your site.

Fourth grade was the year of creativity and fibbing. In fourth grade Ms. Morey¹ told us, week in and week out, the drinking fountains would shoot cold lemonade in the summer and hot chocolate in the winter. Despite the fact that this never once happened, I believed her every time. She arranged the desks in crazy shapes, lived in a treehouse, liked to ski, and most important of all, Ms. Morey taught us how to mosey.

Not surprisingly (and probably not coincidentally), during my fourth grade year I became a prolific playwright. It was Ms. Morey’s patience and humor that tied everything together, creating the kind of environment in which even shy kids get a bit theatrical². I became a verbal goof-ball, thrilled with the ability to fill pages upon pages with words. When I painstakingly transposed the first chapter of “The Magicians Nephew” into a script, it was Ms. Morey who allowed me to - and I say this in the most humble meaning of the word - produce the thing, using the storage room as a practice space and my classmates as guinea pigs. She sat through the stilted dialogue and mind-bending scene slaughter wrought upon old C.S. Lewis, as well as plays about golden toilets and fractured renditions of Casey at the Bat. I expanded beyond plays, writing an epic tale chronicling the nine lives of a tree, penning short stories about sibling rivalry, and I even scribbled down a number of haiku about nature. And throughout it all, weaving its way into each day, pervasive enough to create a Pavlovian response, was the mosey.

In order to keep the hallways free of clutter³, classes traveled in single file lines. Most teachers clipped along at a brisk pace while the line of students trailed behind, crumpling and stretching like an accordion. Sudden stops resulted in more blobbish formations, since the kids at the back of the line - the ones either looking out the window or picking their noses - were too preoccupied to know when to stop walking and generally didn’t until they ran into the back of the teacher. Ms. Morey, on the other hand, had us mosey. Moseying was fun because you weren’t running to catch up, you were slowing down to stay balanced.

Moseying is the antidote to tunnel vision, a way of decoupling from the throttle. It counteracts in all the right places and might even be responsible for a good hair day or two. Moseying slows things down in a world that keeps getting faster and reminds you to stop and taste the drinking fountains⁴ because, in the end, Ms. Morey just might be right.

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1. I remember Ms. Morey fondly, and she definitely left an indelible mark on me. Years later, on a visit to the States, I unknowingly sat across the aisle from her on a flight to North Carolina. Upon de-boarding I caught a glimpse of her face and was too surprised to say anything. It’s one of the few things I regret to this day; not saying anything, that is.
2. I think this was also my busiest year as a budding thespian. In addition to acting in my own plays, I was a tree in a local fairytale production, and was Doc (yes, the dwarf Doc) in the school play.
3. The clutter of small, squirmy children with runny noses and squeaky voices
4. A modern neologism to substitute for all that Victorian rose-smelling.

ii.

iii.

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Along the same lines, I think bunnyhero should put his Snakes On A… design on a t-shirt as well.

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