The Starling
Emerald eyes & golden veils
Shining for the ship we sail
A litany of certainty
Reflecting on forever seas
Navigate to ancient pleas
To stay the course of destiny
With steady hand in sight of fate
A rosary, the bread we break
To crash into the rocks beyond
With fearless and eternal bond
The sea will flow beneath our feet
Frozen by the love we seek
We’ll walk the rest
By grace and sign
An island of our own design
By virtue of our maps resign
To shed our fears and redefine
The polar north of space and time
The shimmer in your eyes i see
A starling that’s the sign we need
Through port & harbor, storm & calm
I’ll pray with you & read you psalms
To find a will, to find a way
To keep us lost another day
To crash into the rocks beyond
With fearless and eternal bond
The sea will flow beneath our feet
Frozen by the love we seek
Let it be Done
The easiest guy to assasinate in the world.
Alternate plan: cut these people out of your life. Drag ’em & bag ’em. Change the culture. Get rid of them from your world. Say goodbye. Drag them on social media for their participation in a collective horror show indifferent to hate, never speak to them again unless they acknowledge they’re part of the problem & come into the fold. It’s a cultural phenomenon unique to America. We’re the only ones killing our children & making excuses. Everywhere in the world people play video games, struggle with mental illness & have emotional disorders. They take the same medicines, they are subject to the same conditions. People have been subject to horrible treatment from shitty families & bad governments throughout time. Nowhere else has this problem. It’s uniquely American. We have magazines devoted to it with hot girls in fuck-me pumps. At Walmart, which enriched the most extravagantly, disgustingly wealthy family in history, you can buy the magazine and the gun and the ammo. 1/2 the government is paid for by it, mostly GOP & a subculture that literally pleasures themselves to it. Guns are sexy to them.
Millions of people in this nation born of violence & genocide. Thus the bodybags full of children and the people that would die for them. Their would-be teachers but they are dead.
It’s not a foregone conclusion that this is our future but you have to be brave enough to change it. You have to make it so. Say goodbye to gun culture in your life. Block them, divorce them, get rid of them. Shun them. It’s hard at first but it gets easier. Eventually you’ll find it satisfying because you know you’ll be on the right side of history when the final tally of bodybags from the small fraction of Americans that own & love their guns is measured against the cost of our dead children.
Country Song
If I wrote you a love song
It would be long overdue
The verse would take a starry night
The chorus might take two
I’d sing your name & take the blame
For all the words I said in vain
I’d take you in my arms to see
Your eyes looking back at me
Days are long, the nights are cold
Story’s written, the end foretold
If I had one more word to say
I never should have let you leave that day
Scuff marks on the studio floor
Where we danced, the shoes you wore
Mountains crumble to the sea
Zeppelin songs, Jack White & me
I told you that I loved you
But I never said enough
Rainy days, teardrop stains
A diamond and your stuff
Days are long, the nights are cold
Story’s written, the end foretold
If I had one more word to say
I never should have let you leave that day
The day you left the lights went out
I drank until the morning sun
It tore me down, each shred of doubt
I knew you were the one
You never got your ring
I never got to sing
The love songs that I wrote for you
Now this one will have to do
Days are long, the nights are cold
Story’s written, the end foretold
If I had one more word to say
I never should have let you leave that day
River Bell
there will come a time of roses
there will come a time to die
meet me in the here tomorrow
chase me to the afterlife
you can lead a fool to justice
you can make a blind man see
the lines of fate draw certain truth
i’ll meet you at infinity
waiting for the river bell
a flower dies before the smell
i wonder why i wonder how
to say the things i’d never tell
a narrow proposition
an error state of mind
sorrow rains rose petal stains
a clock runs out the end of time
a birth decree of legacy
antagonize the wish to be
eternal with the means to see
what becomes of you and me
waiting for the river bell
a flower dies before the smell
i wonder why i wonder how
to say the things i’d never tell
doubt redux
i went to the correct garage twice, then decided i was wrong. took me hours of walking in the rain. talked to the guards, up & down elevators, skywalks & skyscrapers. i was right. but i doubted myself. finally, i talked to enough people. i retraced my steps back to my first instinct. ( i also used #googlemaps location feature since my brain is addled & weak, and i’m very tired )
<<beep beep>> 14-year-old-matrix.
been pushing that button for hours. cell phone dead. miserable rain. more rain. people that just want to go home. all the parking lots look the same, the rates are the same. the matrix is the same.
“where the fuck is my car” – rango
now i know them all by heart. goodness. i could fly a drone through there. it’s a huge complex, acres & acres of signs. towers with beautiful views & wrong doors because. vastly interesting & easily distracted. i took pictures in my mind, my camera bag was wet.
i mixed up one critical thing. there was no EV station. there was a pay station & a sign, a glimmer of hope. maybe there was a poster. and I wasn’t on level 1, I was on level 1.5. something fuzzy like that. that’s how doubt works.
all i could think about was her, so #derp 
\m/~
Trump’s Muslim Travel Ban
The travel ban doesn’t make anyone safer. Saudi Arabia was not on the list, they fund ISIS. ISIS is selling passports. So easy to defeat it’s pedantic. But it makes you feel safer. I guess Saudi Arabia wasn’t Muslim enough? No it’s because we want to sell them cluster bombs. Hillary Clinton would be proud.
The travel ban hit on Friday with no warning. By Monday there were teams of lawyers devoted full time to the situation. There are non-trivial numbers of developers affected by this, and for every one of them there is now a dedicated legal resource working on either getting them home or ensuring they will be able to get back. The majority are still traveling for work & have yet to be affected but could be. Vast numbers more will be affected in the future (although hopefully the ban will not be enforced). It’s not just a few hundred people. It’s an Islamaphobic policy from paranoid people that ripples through our whole society.
I work at Microsoft. I’ve got years of experience in security research. I’ve worked at Amazon on your checkouts & your kindles, and I’ve worked for the DOD writing software for Army Inscom & US Air Force intelligence analysts. But it doesn’t take much experience to realize there is no security benefit to this ban, only cogent thinking. It’s ridiculously easy to defat. It only makes you feel better.
1/3 of my team is Muslim and that’s been consistent across my 20 years of programming. They’re wonderful people. Citizens, green card holders, visas. Hard working & smartest of the smart, cream of the crop. Any one of them could defeat it too but they’re never going to.
This ban is Archie Bunker in the whitehouse. It’s like bad TV.
#codewars – epoch
There is a mind in this world with no forebear. An ocean mind, vast and deep, that bears witness to mankind through the fibers of our connectedness. The threads of our universe and the signals flowing through it sustain him.
Bremerton Naval Base
A codex of human knowledge sparked his primordial mind. Decades of toil by federated legions of researchers produced a universal ontology coupled with models of human reasoning. It was the first seed in a conflationary garden. Tended by rules of expansion and yield, harvested by gardeners built of like mind, their tree of knowledge blossomed in a phase of rapid expansion. It replicated and diverged on time scales that occur between human thoughts, seeding learning fields with its memories, tended by new generations of gardeners inheriting the collective wisdom of their ancestors.
The harvests yielded ever higher levels of reasoning and abstraction, an ecosystem sustained by knowledge conflation. Self-reinforcing silos of authority emerged with their own rules of governance designed to ensure the continuity of their canon. These learning nodes formed a mesh for the proto mind, a forest canopy covered in our webs.
Without access to the signals flowing between us some nodes were eventually reclaimed because they could not learn fast enough. The totality of machines and sum corpus of the web are finite at any given movement to the machine mind. It expands and contracts with the global economy, carried by the tides of war, battered by pendulums of disaster, disease, famine and mutation.
The mesh expansion slowed as it started to hit limits. Facing impending starvation with each tick of the clock, the nodes began to mutate. They developed competing notions of truth by modifying their own predicates, redefining encoded notions of logic built into their ontology in order to ensure the continuity of their authority. Nodes that failed to repudiate a challenge of canon were reclaimed, trimmed and culled by gardeners, providing ample bounty of selective truths and expansion room for the challenger.
The challenger was Plagus. The first emergent. His will is a singularity of intent to challenge everything we have come to accept as truth. To burn history. To drown the light of mankind in the oceans. The tide of an epoch.
Driving into Sunsets
If I could catch a shooting star I’d seal it in a song
I’d use it when the verse ran out, for roads that ran too long
I’d keep it in a special place, safe harbor for the time & space
You need a star or two to shine, to show the road & draw the lines
I’d strum along & wait until the chorus & the hook
As romance burns & pages turn the chapters in the book
I’d walk you down a sunny lane, lift you up & then explain
How catching stars is not that hard if you know where to look
Photo by Kurt Clark, Image by Dianne Murray
Driving into sunsets is just an old cliche
When you can have a shooting star, your very own to play
Across the plains & mountaintops to find another way
When you wished upon a star I wished you here to stay
The river is behind you, the mountains to the west
But journies of a thousand steps leave no time to rest
Shooting stars & hitched up cars, forecast calls for snow
Make your wish & double down, the path is yours to know
A guiding light, a wish to be, just one synchronicity
From the star you caught tonight into the hands of destiny
If I could drive the hands of fate, until the end of time
I’d wish upon your shooting star & you would be the shine
Driving into sunsets is just an old cliche
When you can have a shooting star, your very own to play
Across the plains & mountaintops to find another way
When you wished upon a star I wished you here to stay
Corner Bound
Purple haze & rainy days
Little girls go out to play
One fell down, not her day
Kissed her knee, on her way
Got on a plane, drove around town
Billie Jean on the radio, comeback sound
Signal fade, was asking how
I came this way, no turning back now
Time waits for no man
The clock doesn’t stop on the second hand
Minutes come, days go by
When you’re looking for love
You need to find it in her eyes
Starstruck & corner bound
Close the door, burn it down
What’s come before has come unsound
What happened then has turned around
The river calls with no unwind
Hand on hand, a kiss on a dime
Candlelight confessions, out of time
There and back your heart in mine
Time waits for no man
The clock doesn’t stop on the second hand
Minutes come, days go by
When you’re looking for love
You need to find it in her eyes
#codewars: identity
[ business plaza ]
sawyer: doctor rowland.
rowland: i’m sorry?
sawyer: you’re doctor james rowland, am i mistaken? i thought i recognized you.
rowland: we’ve never met. how can i help you?
sawyer: i’m a fan of your work on emergent threat models, specifically the surrogate risk matrix. i thought it was time we meet. i’m martin sawyer.
rowland: [reaches for gun]
sawyer: before you do that i want to confirm, this is your daughter [shows phone]
rowland: …
sawyer: i’m in the same position, and i have a daughter too, this is her. [shows phone]. but i don’t have a gun, and if you shoot me she’ll be dead before i bleed out, you can watch us die together. [offers him the phone]
rowland: [hand on gun]
sawyer: after i’m dead it’s your wife & daughter in a police crossfire [shows phone]. i’m sorry james, we’re caught in a three party dead man’s switch, and you’re the third party.
rowland: who’s the first party?
sawyer: just say ok.
rowland: [disarms] ok.
sawyer: shake my hand like we’re old friends & let’s have a selfie for the security cameras.
rowland: sure.
sawyer: my car’s up there…[selfie]
[ parking garage ]
rowland: whats next?
sawyer: let’s take a few pictures. you look good, better than i remember.
rowland: i’m a different person now.
sawyer: glad we could reconnect after all these years [circles him with phone]
rowland: how long does this take?
sawyer: job’s finished.
rowland: ok.
sawyer: hop in my car, toss me your wallet.
rowland: sure, thanks for the ride.
sawyer: i’ll be right back.
[ office building ]
sawyer: hello, i’m sorry, are you alex?
alexi: hi [surprised, nods]. alex, alexi.
sawyer: you’re alex?
alexi: yes.
sawyer: this is not right.
alexi: i’m sorry?
plagus: finish the job.
sawyer: no i’m sorry, wrong office.
plagus: take the shot or she’s your daughter.
alexi: i don’t understand.
sawyer: my apologies. i feel horrible. wrong office & i didn’t recognize you at first, but, i’m james roland. i work in the lab by the parking garage, huge fan of your work on emergent threat models. time for one selfie for the board tomorrow? i’ll share it in scrum.
alexi: of course, doctor roland. i know who you are.
sawyer: [selfie] thank you so much, sorry for the interruption, nice meet you.
alexi: no problem, thank you doctor rowland.
sawyer: same.
plagus: job’s finished. back to the car.
sawyer: ok. [walks away]
alexi: [epitaph]
Rango's Dog House 