RENDERING CONTEXT

3:07 pm

Win 98,000:

It is impossible, in full daylight, to keep my eyes fully open. The sun gleefully provides much, much more illumination than is necessary for me to view objects. If I force myself to walk around with both eyes all the way open, I start to feel light headed, and everything gets fuzzy. Squinting is the way to go at this point. Attractive, yet functional. How I wish I had worn my contact lenses today. Then I could employ "sunglasses", optical filters to reduce the amount of sunlight streaming into my pupils.

Oop. Phone's ringing. I have a phone on my desk, that might imply some responsibility to answer it. How important could it be? Well... not very. If anyone is going to tell me anything important work related, they're going to be in the office. If anyone wants to change the specification on this project, I don't want to hear about it.

It's that time of day when I don't really want to start on a new lump of project, but the lump I had started this morning has pretty much been tweaked as much as it usefully can be, today. What do I do? Slack off and listen to Front 242 MP3s. No illegal stuff going on, I own this album. Somewhere. On some sort of media or other. Hey! Does that mean I can buy a tape of a song and then be entitled to have a CD-quality MP3 from somewhere?

I was pretty upset by the existence of kit cars last week, but when I discovered that all those HKS-Sport- Asian-pride-put-nine-headlights-and-6-mufflers-on-my-car guys weren't really trying to make their cars perform better... I lost all faith in car people. At least I know what to call those guys now. Rice Boys.

Foot! More email. I can't decide whether it's worse to not know if your email works or not, or to receive email from people who don't really have anything to say. Small talk in person is bad enough. Small talk echoed to an international mailing list is inexcusable. Perhaps people can claim ignorance. Maybe email clients should print a message like trn did when you posted to usenet. "THIS MESSAGE WILL COST THE INTERNET THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS TO COPY AND TRANSMIT, YEARRRGH!". There! That's what your message means to the internet!

What does email mean to me? Less than an error message, but more than compiler warnings. Or maybe it's the other way around. Less than bread but more than cake? Less than music but more than speech? Not quite as meaningful as a pear, but more meaningful than (insert famous painter name here); I don't see profound meaning in anything, actually.

As an example: you might think that when something evokes an emotional response, it is profound. No, no, no. Titanic, Armageddon, The BEatles, dead flowers. shit.

The problem with trying to talk about the truth is that words can't really communicate in a true manner. It's not necessary to know the meaning of a word to use it. You can say wrong things while really thinking, even trying to say, the right one. So with that in mind, I think I can stop trying to say anything true.

Eh. That might be where the isolation comes in. If I'm not trying to communicate with anyone, I can say things in a way that means the correct thing when I hear it. If I think that I might be saying something to someone, I start trying to communicate, and stop trying to think. I do have to remind myself that other people are not really interested in things that you have to think of. It makes more sense to just think to yourself when you have something to think of. Well, talking out loud sometimes helps. Especially if there's no one around to interrupt you or misunderstand you.

Sit down. Point at your temples with both hands, fingers quivering about 4 inches from your head. Loudly chant "THINK! THINK! THINK!". This will help you concentrate.

1:33 am

1) When you start trying to communicate with art, it stops being an expression of yourself, and starts being an attempt to make something that will be interpreted by someone else in a certain way. You are almost certainly wrong.

2) Paper soaks up blood really well, gets it off your hands.