Kosmic Karma Waves & update

I keep a kind of random, desultory diary on a place called HuSi, “Hulver’s Site”. This is where I put more personal stuff and things I deem “not in keeping with the spirit of Wetmachine”, however nebulously defined that concept may be.

Recently I posted a diary entry on Husi, a reminiscence from nearly thirty years ago, that includes some of my own kosmik karmik philosophy. Or if not philosophy, at least data points. The story, which is true, is mildly pornographic, so if you don’t like that kind of thing, don’t click the link. Anyway I like it, so maybe you will too.

In the “update” department, I hope to soon undertake a few improvements to this site. I’ll post a few more chapters from “The Pains,” and I’ll make it easier to find, read, and order my books. There will be better, and easier to find, information about each of the primary wetmachiners, (me, Harold, Howard and Gary) and perhaps some more “Web 2.0” style goodness. If you have any suggestions or requests, please pass them on, either in the comments or in mail to “mail” at this website.

Footnote to Bishop Berkeley

In the spring of 1997 I spent a week as a parent chaperon with my son’s 7th grade class at an ecology-themed camp in Sharon, Massachusetts. There I met this guy, who was a 7th grade math teacher, but more interestingly, the illustrator of the graphic novel version of Paul Auster’s City of Glass.

Now, as you may know, Auster writes austere post-modern metafictional stories about the nature of reality and our inability to use language to apprehend or transmit it.

Anyway, I got along really well with Karasik and we spent a lot of time walking in the woods together, talking philosophy and deep bullshit, when the students were in class. On the last afternoon that we were to spend together, we found ourselves silently sitting side by side on a fallen tree in the woods. Neither of us spoke for a long while. It was a beautiful day with not a cloud in the sky and not the least bit of wind. Then, somewhere nearby, a tree fell over, crashing to the ground with an incongruous roar. Soon afterwards all was again silent.

Karasik and I looked at each other.

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An obstacle to human progress

So I decided to ego surf the google usenet archives the other day and was kind of taken aback to see that the first entry for “John Sundman” was this little nugget from comp.ai.philosophy:

John Sundman

People like “John Sundman” are obstacles to the progress of human knowledge and

deserve to be put out of their misery

It was a comment I hadn’t seen before in response to this story I wrote for Salon about artifical intelligence, or more precisely, about how certain AI types could stand to, y’know, lighten up a little! (Why, the nerve of me!). God, seeing that comment cracked me up, I must thay.

I was tempted to try to make some kind of extrapolation from that comment to Godwin’s Law, but I’m somehow not really all that motivated. So in closing I guess it’s only fair that I should remind you that you’ve just wasted half a minute of your life with an obstacle to human progress. Now, I want you to go off and think about that before you make any more foolish mistakes today.