How I Waste My Precious Time

Every feel like saying this?

“Don’t say another Goddamn word. Up until now, I’ve been polite. If you say anything else - word one - I will kill myself. And when my tainted spirit finds its destination, I will topple the master of that dark place. From my black throne, I will lash together a machine of bone and blood, and fueled by my hatred for you this fear engine will bore a hole between this world and that one.

When it begins, you will hear the sound of children screaming - as though from a great distance. A smoking orb of nothing will grow above your bed, and from it will emerge a thousand starving crows. As I slip through the widening maw in my new form, you will catch only a glimpse of my radiance before you are incinerated. Then, as tears of bubbling pitch stream down my face, my dark work will begin.

I will open one of my six mouths, and I will sing the song that ends the Earth. “

I know, hilarious right? Stolen from Penny-Arcade!

Read this today, it’s connected to the way my point of view has been evolving lately. There’s also a nice bridge here between “the nature of things” part of it all and the “why are we in this predicament” view of society at large.

I’d been thinking mostly about the first half recently: it’s in our nature and an expression of life itself to do unlikely things, to pursue something bound to fail, to create something for no reason, to be (willfully or ignorantly) defiant of the odds. That was starting to be a hopeful point of view too, but as Wil points out it could be responsible for humanity’s stupid pursuit of extinction and catastrophe as if we can’t tell what’s coming.

Well that’s a bummer! Something positive to take from it: at least the remnants of civilization will have the will to push on after the rest of us die off. Of course, it’d be nice to think we could moderate things just a tad so as not to hit the finish line quite so fast.

That last video I linked too said that we were spending over half of all tax revenues on the Military!?! Is that right? Holy fuck! Can’t we just switch most of that money into space travel? The same Military Industrial Complex can build everything with the same wasteful amount of Government money, so we don’t even need to get rid of corruption to do this. At least there’d be a chance that as a side effect human Lunar and Martian Colonies would make it after Earth becomes a little less comfortable to people. Maybe they could teach us how to live in bubble cities?

Found this awesome video on Digg: Story of Stuff. It’s a 10 or 20 minute video about production, the supply chain, and consumption suitable for children’s education but with the truth instead of abstractions and suspiciously missing value judgements that I fear most educational material features.

I didn’t think I needed to sit through it, but it was really charming and unfortunately the topics covered probably aren’t as obvious to most as they should be. Check it out.

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