Pseudomammal tells it like it is.

Heavy indeed

2010-07-12T01:56:14Z

Bonnie and Steve were good friends with my parents for as long as I can remember. I played with their kids when we were all tiny. My dad worked with Steve for many years.

Steve died of cancer a few months before the crash that killed julieclipse. He was an extremely kind-hearted, outgoing man with a good sense of humor about himself and the world. A loving father and husband, a generous boss and co-worker, a talented musician. And then he was gone. I missed the funeral because I was too busy with school and life in Portland.

When she could, Bonnie dragged herself back to work. She told me that one day, shortly thereafter, a customer came in just as she was headed out. They did that thing people moving in opposite directions do sometimes — they each tried to get out of the other's way, but by chance they both stepped to the same side. Then to the other. Then back. Finally they both cracked up. A normal moment of polite human absurdity.

Then, still chuckling, Bonnie glanced up. A friend of her and Steve's was out on the sidewalk, looking in through the window of her office, horrified to see the freshly widowed laughing.

She said she felt awful. Like even this momentary, involuntary distraction from her grief was a betrayal.

I've got a family now. I love them more than I can say. Sometimes, when we're all doing something fun together, I look at Kachi and Rini and catch myself thinking, "I wish Julia could see this." Then I realize how completely absurd that is.

Also, while I'm being sad, I miss Kif. Tail or no, there was a damn fine cat.

Little colored balls

2009-11-07T07:59:15Z

vruba and I made a little game called Khromax. It’s simple and addictive and has pretty moving colors and sounds.

You can play it on that there web site right now. Or, if you have an iPhone or iPod Touch and are willing to part with the outrageous sum of $0.99, you can play the much niftier multi-touch version on those things.

I did most of the programming — unfortunately breaking my proud multi-decade streak of never learning any dialect of C — and Vruba did some graphic design. Also, bikko talked us into a few sensible things like version control and not being too terrified of openGL.

That game again is Khromax, on the web or on your phone. Tell your friends to ask for it by name!

pseudomammal @ 2009-07-11T13:32:00

2009-07-11T20:54:47Z

julieclipse died three years ago today. Three years. A third of the time she and I were friends. A quarter of the time since I met her. A little more than a tenth of my life. The same all-too-brief amount of time that she and I knew we wanted to be together forever. I can't stop counting.

Everywhere I look, life is short and everything changes. She's missing the future, and it bothers me. She'll never know about Obama. Or iPhones. Or the latest cetacean research. Or promising new kinds of birth control, cures for cancer, or vaccines for HIV. Or this really good book I read last week. When good things happen, I'm deprived of her joy. When confusing things happen, I'm deprived of her opinions. Soon my habit of this yearly posting won't make any sense — not because I'm getting over it, but because no one will read LiveJournal anymore. Her digital ghost has no Twitter or Facebook accounts.

Those previous, infinitely better three years, I skipped a number of fairly important things to spend time with her. At the time I felt a little guilty, but now I'm sure glad I did that.

If you were planning to spend any part of today fretting over some minor hassle, may I humbly suggest you skip it. Go hang out with people who mean something to you instead. It's a far better use of your time.

Location, location, location

2009-04-06T17:58:40Z

I live in Portland again.

Fun with rasterization

2008-10-28T22:23:10Z

If you go make yourself a collar at the collar factory — and really, why wouldn’t you? — you’ll find you now get a nifty little illustration of said collar, composited on the fly.

Some day I may get back to using LJ for things other than pimping my latest for-profit project, but, eh.

Information wants to be supplied at a reasonable monthly rate.

2008-08-22T03:39:44Z

vruba and I made a thing.

Draftastic is a "collaborative editor". Like a wiki, only lots of people can edit a page at the same time, and you get to see what everyone else is doing.

There's still some polishing to do, and tons of features we want to add, but we've been using it ourselves for months, and figured there was no reason not to share. I think it's pretty neat.

If you want to co-author a screenplay with someone, or write some steamy group fanfic, or especially if you work for a large organization that maintains a lot of documentation or product copy and doesn't bat an eye at paying gobs of money for software, check it out.

40 down, 960 to go.

2008-07-31T08:26:08Z

And we're off.

I'd keep livejournal up to date on our progress, but I've really got nothing to offer besides one-liners, and there's an optimal medium for those now. So, those of you who want to "follow" the trip can do so on the twitter.

pseudomammal @ 2008-07-11T14:32:00

2008-07-11T21:37:23Z

julieclipse died two years ago today. It never gets better. A little easier, but not one bit better.

Be good to the people you love while you can.

Drive less.

I wouldn't exactly say it's a "calling", but it's good work if you can get it

2008-03-16T00:08:10Z

Some notable stars of my friends list (though not nearly enough of you) have recently posted to let everyone know to what, in the most shallow sense, they've been up. Since I occasionally like to use this journal for its intended purpose — just to throw off my enemies, mind you — I shall now do the same.

To be sure, stuff still happens to me. I've still got schemes a-plenty, things I'm excited about, and there's still lots of grief and bitter, bitter rage to go around. But those things are news for another post. The tedious minutiae of my day-to-day existence — my own personal rat race — is this:

I have a piece of paper which authorizes me to think about biology in a semi-professional capacity. Half-way to being a real scientist, essentially. For having been allowed to earn this document, I owe some people a great deal of money. To keep the student loan mafia at bay, and to cover the comparatively small costs of living and being sometimes entertained, I get up in the morning, walk to a random coffee shop, position myself carefully so my laptop screen is facing a wall, and make web sites. Web sites where people can buy lovingly hand-crafted collars and matching cuffs with their sweetheart's name on them, or only the finest vibrators, nipple clamps, and floggers, literally by the dozen.

I always wanted to make the world a better place. I'd like to think, in some small, perverted way, I already am.

Newfangled photomagraphical mumbo-jumbo

2008-01-28T01:15:12Z

In case you were wondering, I'm on the Flickr now.

I'll probably use it to post more than stupid cat pictures.

If you're lucky.

For that special occasion

2007-09-29T05:32:04Z

As I believe d_mcetiquette would tell you, it's always nice to send a card.

Basically everything I remember from Hum 110

2007-08-01T04:23:40Z

pseudomammal @ 2007-07-11T13:32:00

2007-07-11T20:42:31Z

I feel like today should be special somehow, but it's not for me. I miss her as much as you can possibly miss a person every damn day; I haven't been holding any extra heartache in reserve for the anniversary.

Been there, done that, did in fact get the t-shirt.

2007-05-20T22:27:01Z

If, five years ago, you'd told me I would one day willingly run – much less run – in a "12K", I would have laughed at you.

It was actually a lot of fun.

Even if my mom did beat me.

PSA

2007-05-12T21:38:51Z

Telomeres are repeated non-coding buffer sequences at the ends of eukaryotic chromosomes that protect against erosion by incomplete replication and differentiate the legitimate chromosomal ends from accidental breaks in need of repair.^*

Hey! Stop!

Did your eyes start to glaze over there? Maybe you translated most of that as "generic science" and called it good, or maybe you skipped the whole block of text (and were about to write off this post entirely). I may be Nerdy McNerdsalot, but I do this too. Most often with math or physics. Sometimes with art.

I took Calculus for the first time at Reed. I wouldn't say I know calculus now, nor can I recall ever learning it, but I did get at least one very important lesson out of the class. Professor Roberts – it would not be inaccurate for you to picture Gandalf in corduroy slacks here – would occasionally pause in the middle of filling the blackboard with some proof or other and say:

A lot of you probably stopped paying attention a while ago. Not because you're bored or lazy, but because that's the natural tendency when confronted with anything that looks hard to understand.
That's your brain trying to save you some time, but it's wrong. You can understand this. It's a lot of math all at once, but it's still just math. When you catch yourself not really thinking about an equation and just going yadda-yadda-lots-of-numbers, stop and force yourself to try to read it. You'll often be surprised by how much you actually know.

I got through his class, and many others in various subjects, by taking this advice to heart. It's easy and natural to gloss over anything complex. In some ways, it actually gets easier the more you know (about anything) – you can think, I'm smart, I can learn things, so I could understand this, but it would be hard. I'll skim it now and comprehend it later. And then somehow you never get around to the comprehension. Roberts says screw that. Don't let your brain condescend to itself.

Give the paragraph at the top another chance. If you're uncertain about any of the terms, chances are they mean basically what you think they mean. If you've ever been to school, read a biology or popular science book, or seen a movie in the last ten years, you probably know plenty about DNA, even if it doesn't seem like it.

(If that all made perfect sense the first time (hi Bodger), go look up an introduction to a topic that confuses you.)

We're all smarter than we think.

^* Actual sentence from my thesis. Not a contrived example.

Identifying marks

2007-01-01T00:56:12Z

Got some ink installed today.

Not that you can tell, but that's my left arm, just below the sleeve on a standard issue witty t-shirt. The design is Julieclipse's personal logo. It was done by Aaron Goodrich, an extremely agreeable chap working at Infinity Tattoo.

The color is a little messed up on account of blood. I'll have a better picture when it heals.

I don't care how good the strawberries are, I still hate tigers.

2006-08-05T00:06:31Z

One afternoon when I was very little—say, four years old—I remember lying on the living room floor playing with legos. My mother was playing her harpsichord on the other side of the room. Some baroque piece I'd heard a thousand times before. The lego set was a little horse-drawn catapult that I marched around the carpet. At one point I rolled it under the couch, pretending the lego people were hiding from something, and suddenly I was incredibly sad. Nothing had changed, nothing was wrong, but something about the combination of the legos and the music made me freeze. I was painfully aware that the song would end, and afternoon would become evening, and I'd have to put the legos away, and even if I did it all the next day it wouldn't be today anymore. I didn't cry or tell mom, but I lay there for a long time feeling unbearably empty. It's my first memory of any acute emotion that didn't have some obvious physical or social cause. It left a lasting impression, but I didn't really get it until years later (but years ago now) when, in a totally unrelated conversation, julieclipse explained it for me:

Julieclipse: When I was young, I was terrified of wet paint.
Julieclipse: I mean truly scared.
Julieclipse: I think (mom would remember for sure.. heh..) I used to insist we detour all the way around the other sides of malls and things to avoid wet paint. There was one particular Sesame Street skit that had paint -everywhere- and spurting all over the place and muppets of some sort dancing and singing and I could barely watch it...
Julieclipse: Heh.. I used to be afraid of balloons too. 'Cause of the sound they made when they popped, of course. I'd forgotten about the paint thing until just now..
Julieclipse: Y'know, when I think back to some of the deepest feelings I can remember from my childhood, most of them (except for the balloons.. that was just fear of loud noise..) were about the irrevocable passage of time.
Julieclipse: Which sounds kind of profound for a toddler/preschooler.. but.. I think that's partly what the wet paint was.. if you paint something you change it, and you can't really change it back, there's a premanence to paint..
Julieclipse: If it's still wet, it can get on other stuff and change that too.. if it's dry, it seems like it's always been that way. Maybe I'm overinterpreting.
Julieclipse: But like, if I'd be playing with my mom's toes or something while she was reading and she moved her foot, I'd feel this profound sense of loss. I'd try to get her to move it back, but generally she didn't..

I knew just what she meant. The "irrevocable passage of time" was one of our private catchphrases after that, but it was usually a joke. "We're out of milk?" "Damn the irrevocable passage of time!"

Had we been more enlightened (instead of just precocious) kids, the lesson might've been something like change is the only constant, or attachment is suffering. Linearity happens, get over it, right? This too shall pass. But enlightenment is easier for people without agendas. We compensated for temporality with ambition. If the world is going to insist on changing, at least try to make it change for the better. Ever since Julia put the right words to what young Nick was feeling, the real message has been perfectly clear to me: time sucks.

pseudomammal @ 2006-07-25T22:03:00

2006-07-26T06:01:53Z

The staples came out yesterday. No skin grafts required. In a few weeks the only way you'll be able to tell something happened is if you knew me before. Still very sad. Still very confused. Still very angry.

I'm not doing well. I'm writing here because I no longer have my best friend to confide in. It's not for you, and you're under no obligation to read it. Really.

My days have been following a predictable pattern of crushing despair in the mornings and late evenings, interspersed with a numb sort of calm during the day, as I read and wander the beach with vruba and d_mcetiquette. The numb is objectively better, but as soon as the despair kicks back in then having felt anything else, even temporarily, seems like a terrible betrayal. I hate myself for ~enjoying anything. I've never been so sad, but I do not believe I'm physically capable of feeling sad enough to do her justice.

The only thing I've gained, in exchange for everything I've lost, is the grim certainty that nothing this terrible will ever happen to me again. I'd occasionally try to imagine the worst thing I could possibly think of happening to me, and this was it. (I guess I thought imagining it would somehow make it more unlikely.) Now ... more bad things could happen. I could lose other people I care about, which might make me even sadder, but as individual events they would not be this bad. No one can give me back my love or the ideal future that seemed almost guaranteed, so no one can take them away a second time.

I find myself angry at almost everyone, though no one deserves it. I'm angry at anyone who tries to take care of or comfort me, because those were things Julia did for me, and no one else knows how. I'm angry at the people who knew both of us, but carefully avoid saying anything about her around me. I know why they're doing it, but I'd rather hear that they noticed/remember/miss her. Sparing my feelings is pointless now. You can't remind me of a thing I can't forget.

I'm furious with everyone who tells me I have to keep going. They all give me one of two reasons. Either "people need me", to which I want to scream that they can't possibly need me as much as I need her, and if I didn't get to keep her, why the hell should they get to keep me? Or "it's what she'd want", which ... of course it's what she'd fucking want. It's what I'd want for her in my place. Of course she'd want me to keep going. Of course she'd want me to be happy again someday. But she'd also understand if it was impossible. She knew how hard it would be for me to live without her. She'd forgive me if I couldn't do it. I don't have to guess at this, I know. We talked about it. I have the logs.

I'm angry at the way her story about the future has inspired people, which makes no sense at all. I'm glad for it too, but I'm angry because being an environmentalist was just one of a million things she did, and reducing her life to a feel-good story about reminding us all to take care of the planet feels cheap and disrespectful.

Hell, I'm angry at anyone and everyone who's alive when she's not, most especially myself.

Sleep is not going well. I can't seem to stay unconscious for very long, no matter how exhausted I am, and when I do sleep I dream about people dying. The accident was over in a flash; the actual impact that killed her was, as measured by the speed of consciousness, instantaneous, and the entire incident—from thinking we were perfectly safe and always would be, to realizing something was horribly wrong, to knowing she was dead and I was not—took all of ten seconds at most. The deaths in my dreams take much longer. Friends and family have terrible diseases, or face other slow dangers. Things I feel I should be able to fix or prevent, but I can't seem to do it fast enough to save them.

Last night I dreamed that I was back on the roadtrip, the day before the crash. We were parked in a little mall we stopped at for lunch. She was wearing her white sundress, which I don't think she actually wore on the trip, but I have a lot of memories where she was, and she always looked radiant in it. I knew what was coming, and told her we couldn't keep driving or she'd die. That we had to stop and wait to protect her. I couldn't tell if she didn't believe me or just couldn't respond, but she only stared at me. I knew I was dreaming, but I thought if I just held on to it then it might take over as my new reality, and I could go on from there. I held her and cried and begged her not to let me wake up. Then I woke up.

My Julieclipse

2006-07-14T01:06:21Z

I lost my best friend Tuesday night.

Julieclipse was the most amazing person I've ever known. I thought that nine years ago when we first met, and I've just become more convinced of it every day since. She was brilliant. She was creative, kind, and good to me in ways I'll never even understand. She was absolutely beautiful. She was a million wonderful things, and words will never really do her justice, but I'll keep trying. She cared—really, truly cared—about me, and you, and every living being on the planet. She worried that she wasn't doing enough—recycling, volunteer work, donating, letter writing, arguing—even as she did far more than most. She held my hand and cried the whole way through An Inconvenient Truth. She went out of her way, but she never hated anyone else for not doing the same—she just kept setting an example.

We were driving along I-70 on our way to visit her family before heading to Knoxville so she could start gradschool. After days and thousands of miles of driving, we were just two hours from people and a place we loved. An SUV stopped suddenly in a construction zone. The semi in front of us managed to stop, but tapped the SUV. (The SUV fled the scene.) I slamned on the brakes, angling toward the median, and barely avoided hitting the back of the semi. The pickup behind us failed to stop and hit us from behind, pushing us into the semi. Julia was killed instantly. I looked over and knew she was already gone even as I was screaming her name.

For those of you wondering how I'm doing, I've got some staples in my head, and I might need skin grafts, but I'll recover. I will not, however, be okay. Not for a very long time, if ever. Living without her is already the hardest thing I've ever done, and it's only just started. I told her every day how much I loved her, and now it doesnt' seem like enough. If it had to happen, I wish, more than anything in the world, that it had been me instead of her.

My father recovered what he could from the towed wreckage this morning. Miraculously, her laptop surived. It was still asleep. When I opened it, a text file was on the screen. Earlier the day of the crash, while we were traveling along in sun and high spirits, she wrote the following:

In 2060, we will look back on the present era as a vast transition, a bottleneck between the past and present. The population will stabilize around 10 billion and begin to drop slowly. The developing world will then be the developed world, and with this development will come a worldwide reduction in hunger, disease, illiteracy and intolerance. With a better understanding of nutrition and the application of permaculture techniques on a broad, but locally based scale, everyone will eat well. A scientific research colony on Mars will highlight the riches we enjoy here on Earth while helping humanity take the first step in spreading wonderful life to the lifeless parts of universe, to one day creating ecosystems instead of destroying them. The forces of social progress will continue – the rights of women and people with different colored skin will be brought as far again as they have been in the past fifty years, or more. Queer rights will be at least as universal as women's rights are now, and we will in earnest begin extending some rights to other social, intelligent creatures. Animal rights will be granted a tremendous boon when natural animal tissue cultures can be grown in isolation. "Vat meat" will be cheaper and less resource-intensive than the present system. When people do not rely on factory farms or even death to eat meat, the justifications for the present system will be stripped away. Partisanship and in-group/out-group variation will always exist, and the world would be sad without diversity and stupid without disagreement ... yet separate groups will find ways to work together on the issues that most can agree with: clean air and water, health and education, the importance of community and family. Cities, towns, villages, and lonely farmland alike will be structured to support people. Walking and biking (and unicycling, rollerskating, skateboarding, skipping, hang-gliding, and dancing) to work will be a joy, a time to see your friends and the beauty around you, without any fearing for your life. The presently large and growing homeschooling, unschooling, and alternative education movement will come of age and begin working with the public education system to create free schooling that works, access to knowledge and mentors and tools that is an integrated, productive, voluntary part of society instead of institutionalization that segregates and silences its often-unwilling subjects. With the empowerment of children will come the empowerment of their parents and teachers and the minimization of bureaucracy. Radio/computer/communications technology will remain fairly decentralized, uncensored, and accessible to amateurs and hackers and everyone else. Electric cars will be used for some public transportation, and emergency response, and perhaps the occasional road trip, but the days of a daily automotive commute will be a peculiar quirk of history. Global shipping will be by means of advanced LTA (Lighter Than Air) technology, safe, stately, silent, fuel-efficient blimps. The oceans and forests will fall quiet again and the native inhabitants of the ocaen will be able to find their mates and prey. All lighting will be by means of smart LEDs, designed to reduce glare and eliminate wasteful spillover. Every child will know what stars look like; every child will know what silence sounds like. Productive gardens and native habitat will be everywhere, on rooftops and balconies, in houses and shared public spaces, outside of stores, lining walkways, and hanging in the air. We will honor warriors and lament wars. "Public breastfeeding" will be simply "breastfeeding". Economics will become a science; the philosophy behind applied economics will shift away from growth and the idea that markets are self-evidently moral; markets will be treated as powerful but neutral tools that can be used to shape the world towards agreed-upon issues. Most people, even Americans, will be bilingual (or more), speaking from birth an increasingly global language as well as a local native language. Cradle to Cradle design won; our technological resources will be recaptured with an efficiency asymptotically approaching 100%; it will become cheap and easy to recover our waste from an earlier, more thoughtless era and the landfills will be emptied and filtered clean. With increasingly efficient technology and the leveling off and then decreasing population and global development, misguided "growth" and further appropriation of resources will not be necessary - we will have "enough", and then we will have "more than enough"

That's as far as she got. She didn't write it for anyone. It was just for herself, to help stay motivated. In fact, she'd be embarrassed if she could see me posting it. But I think it's beautiful, like the girl who wrote it. I think it's worth working toward. Feel free to spread it far and wide.

If you want to help honor her memory, just take a few small steps toward the future she wanted for everyone. Plant a tree. Install a fluorescent (or even better, LED) lightbulb. Buy a subscription to Grist, or some carbon offset credits. Talk to your friends. Talk about why a world that produces people like Julieclipse—even if we don't get to keep them for nearly long enough—is definitely a world worth saving.

I miss you, Julia.

Narrative

2006-06-21T03:59:54Z

A picture story for vruba

(Sorry about the phonecam quality.)

pseudomammal @ 2006-05-15T16:09:00

2006-05-15T23:12:40Z

pseudomammal @ 2006-04-28T15:02:00

2006-04-28T22:02:54Z

It's done.

Filmed on location

2006-03-14T12:04:34Z

If you're a fan of vruba or PBS, here's 77 megs you definitely won't regret downloading.

I knows it when I sees it

2006-02-15T09:44:31Z

For some strange reason, I signed up for "Visual Concepts" (Reed's introductory Studio Arts class) this semester. I can't draw, but I've always wanted to learn.

So, here's a Pacific Northwesty sunset, courtesy of me, julieclipse's wacom, and the trial version of Alias Sketchbook Pro.

Cheaper than cable

2006-02-10T07:38:28Z

My new tripod + vruba's camera and mad image manipulation skillz + The Secret House's kitchen whiteboard = good times.

Before anyone says it, yes, I'm aware some of the fireworks look suspiciously like sperm. I'm very, very sorry.