Semi-Yearly Rambling Back-Pat and Oratory Test (SYRBPOT)

Seems every 6 months or so I end up in a chair like this one... on a site like this one, pouring out the chunky gelatin of my random associations. Much of the time it's based on existential what-not, and spurred by the pervasive darkness of the winters in Canada (An Ode to Dayelight and its Positive Effectes Uponne the Humors), but today, it's sunny. The sun was actually rising as I drove to work at a God-awful hour.

I am what you might call a troglodyte. Perhaps that is whence my ennui stems. I get up before dawn, and avoid the negative effects of sunlight exposure by avoiding the positive effects of sunlight exposure. Not always a problem, but the sunshine vitamin doesn't just get spontaneously created! (In my head, I did a side-jaunt into chemical cycles and briefly compared myself -- and indirectly all of you -- to the dying plant I moved to the window as a last attempt to keep it alive. Sorry.) After a day of hard work, toiling in the software defect mines, I head back home, often in the dark, or at least late enough that by the time I get home and wash off all the Work Day, I don't want to go anywhere or do anything else. All of my hobbies are too expensive anyway.

I did decide that I would learn to play the guitar, however. But I can't afford to buy a guitar. You know what satisfies the need? I'm building a guitar out of cheap parts. Someone did that to start the whole thing, so why can't I? The body is furnished by a dollar-store box (Paradoxically costing me $3)... the neck will be fashioned from a 1x3 poplar board which I intend to acquire tomorrow ($14). I've designed the whole thing in SketchUp, and prototyped the neck for sizing and such using corrugated plastic from a sign used in a charity golf tournament. I've even found some ideas for a stain that I can use, incorporating vinegar, steel wool and rusted nails to achieve a nice blue. I was also thinking of an odd experiment for inside the box, but that might be for Mk. II.

It kinda makes me wonder if I want to learn to play the guitar at all... or if it's just the act of building something that gives me the satisfaction from this. We'll see when I totally procrastinate and don't actually learn to play. Anyone want to buy a totally one-of-a-kind box guitar? (Well you can't. If nothing else, it will go on the wall.)

Uh... where was I going with this? Oh yes. SYRBPOT. Good go, me. Totally racking up the trophies. Get the power up. Win the game. Also, I hadn't written a speech that would be totally inappropriate to deliver in front of a crowd in a while. My title would seem to indicate that it's semi-yearly, but I don't know. How you all holding up? Sleeping? Questions so far?

Have I ever really discussed what draws me to this site, and to conspiracy discussions in general? I have made no secret of the fact that I work as a software tester. I break things professionally, and do it rather well (Good go, me.)... but it's not as much a skill (well, not entirely a skill) as a personality trait that allows me to be successful in this area. In my youth, I would take things apart to figure out how they worked, then put them back together to make them better. I learned to make associations across the entire breadth of my experience to gain better insight to the situation at hand. It's how bus routes related to customer management software... how the leaves on a tree relate to the movement of gears in a watch... how raising a child might lead one to hate Blackberry phones. As I sprint headlong through life (avoiding the sun where possible), I take on a lot of roles, and all of them have some impact on how I test software, and how I understand the world. The cause and effect of most things become fairly clear if you just squint and tilt your head to the side. And a lot of the time, the cause is the same: It seemed like the right way to do it at the time.

Circling back to my interest in conspiracies... a lot of the time, the causes we are told were causes, and the effects we are told were effects are immensely simplified from the true stories. Or just taken out of context. Or just based on one reporter's completely skewed idea of how the world works, and then peddled out to consumer news sources, each of which puts its spin on the idea... until you get completely incomprehensible cause and effect... which is what a lot of MSM seems to be. Whatever you do, never admit that your initial knee-jerk "breaking the story" was wrong. Conspiracy discussions allow you to discount all that, and spitball alternatives. Pyramids could be explained like so... but they could also be explained in 8 other equally plausible ways. Science may say the universe started like this... but it also says it didn't. Our affairs may have been watched keenly and closely by intelligences greater than man's and yet as mortal as his own... or we may be the highest form of life the universe has yet randomly spit out.

That's also why I hate the act of debunking. It doesn't necessarily lead to increased knowledge on a subject... just to more entrenched preconceptions. Rather than debunk, let's explore the more fanciful side-tracks, and see what more we can learn about a subject. Maybe an idea is out to lunch.... but maybe there's a tender heart of bacon in amongst the crazy.

Everyone loves bacon, right?

I enjoyed it. Nothing more to add. I'm not really sure what an appropriate reply to this would look like. But nevertheless I enjoyed it and decided I would let you know.

a reply to: 3n19m470

Well, thank ya kindly!