Categories
life uncategorized

When i am dead

When i am dead, i wish to be burned to a crisp, and have my dirty ashes scattered by close friends wherever they please.

It is my wish that whatever organs are desperately, vitally needed by someone else in their direst hour be given to them, free of charge, with the condition that such license to use and/or modify shall be taken up by them also, and that no derivative works shall result in profit. After all, i am an open source, Creative Commons person.

My stuff shall be dispersed however my few close friends see fit, with the understanding that of course my dear love Holly should have pretty well everything to start with, shared mainly with anything my dad & uncle  might want (so you better ask them all real nice if you want my Cure CDs). However, Tony D. is not to have anything until he sobers the hell up. There’s no point in giving anything to a man who’s only going to exchange it for crappy booze or some other escapist bullshit. On the other hand, his wonderful daughter Abby is welcome to just about anything she chooses.

I want my unfinished work to be wrapped up somehow. I don’t care how, so long as i become extremely famous and fabulously wealthy after death. Just don’t screw it up like you do everything else. This is Important Shit.

A grave marker will be permitted if anyone wants to bury my ashes, as long as the epitaph is funny as hell. My suggestions:

  • “I probably shouldn’t have done that.”
  • “Whew! Good thing that’s over.”
  • “Oops!”
  • “Not here, and not there either.”
  • “Thankfully gone, decidedly forgotten.”

If you have something better, go for it.

No serious religion shall stake a claim on any part of my death, including but not limited to any services performed to mark my exit. No rites or stupid ceremonies are to be performed, with the lone exception being that my homies will be permitted to spill some on the curb for me. No spiritual messages are to be given, and no priest of any faith shall officiate. It is to be wholly remembered that i was a devout agnostic, who leaned heavily toward atheism. Anyone caught claiming that i somehow had a soul that lived on after death shall be haunted by my fictitious ghost forever, or until they come to the conclusion that i am not haunting them at all, whichever comes first. I lived through enough horse shit; i don’t need to deal with more of it once i am dead and gone forever. My passing should be viewed as permanent. There is to be no prayer of any kind, except in jest. Silent meditation is permitted, but please: no god shit, and no afterlife crap.

Two religions which are permitted practices and/or short rites are the Church of the SubGenius and the P.O.E.E. (disciples of Eris, goddess of confusion – i think), and they should mock the whole goddamn thing, if they even bother to show up. I also do not mind Buddhism all that much.

No flowers, please. Take your money and donate it to a non-religious charity that does work with AIDS patients or research, breast cancer (again, patients or research), homelessness, runaways, asthma, the environment, civil and/or human rights, putting an end to consumerism, humanitarian efforts, nuclear disarmament, or anything related to promoting atheism or agnosticism or the like.

On the other hand, any services performed to mark my escape from this terrible veil of lies should have a darkly humorous bent, and anyone eulogizing me must include at least one tasteless joke at my expense, or (more preferably) the expense of others. Weirdness should be encouraged at any cost. Attempts should be made at gallows humor. Thou shalt have joy, and laughter, damn it. Death is nothing serious. Be wholly glad i am gone!

Categories
uncategorized

When i am dead

Originally published at jeremyjarratt.com. You can comment here or there.

When i am dead, i wish to be burned to a crisp, and have my dirty ashes scattered by close friends wherever they please.

It is my wish that whatever organs are desperately, vitally needed by someone else in their direst hour be given to them, free of charge, with the condition that such license to use and/or modify shall be taken up by them also, and that no derivative works shall result in profit. After all, i am an open source, Creative Commons person.

My stuff shall be dispersed however my few close friends see fit, with the understanding that of course my dear love Holly should have pretty well everything to start with, shared mainly with anything my dad & uncle might want (so you better ask them all real nice if you want my Cure CDs). However, Tony D. is not to have anything until he sobers the hell up. There’s no point in giving anything to a man who’s only going to exchange it for crappy booze or some other escapist bullshit. On the other hand, his wonderful daughter Abby is welcome to just about anything she chooses.

I want my unfinished work to be wrapped up somehow. I don’t care how, so long as i become extremely famous and fabulously wealthy after death. Just don’t screw it up like you do everything else. This is Important Shit.

A grave marker will be permitted if anyone wants to bury my ashes, as long as the epitaph is funny as hell. My suggestions:

  • “I probably shouldn’t have done that.”
  • “Whew! Good thing that’s over.”
  • “Oops!”
  • “Not here, and not there either.”
  • “Thankfully gone, decidedly forgotten.”

If you have something better, go for it.

No serious religion shall stake a claim on any part of my death, including but not limited to any services performed to mark my exit. No rites or stupid ceremonies are to be performed, with the lone exception being that my homies will be permitted to spill some on the curb for me. No spiritual messages are to be given, and no priest of any faith shall officiate. It is to be wholly remembered that i was a devout agnostic, who leaned heavily toward atheism. Anyone caught claiming that i somehow had a soul that lived on after death shall be haunted by my fictitious ghost forever, or until they come to the conclusion that i am not haunting them at all, whichever comes first. I lived through enough horse shit; i don’t need to deal with more of it once i am dead and gone forever. My passing should be viewed as permanent. There is to be no prayer of any kind, except in jest. Silent meditation is permitted, but please: no god shit, and no afterlife crap.

Two religions which are permitted practices and/or short rites are the Church of the SubGenius and the P.O.E.E. (disciples of Eris, goddess of confusion – i think), and they should mock the whole goddamn thing, if they even bother to show up. I also do not mind Buddhism all that much.

No flowers, please. Take your money and donate it to a non-religious charity that does work with AIDS patients or research, breast cancer (again, patients or research), homelessness, runaways, asthma, the environment, civil and/or human rights, putting an end to consumerism, humanitarian efforts, nuclear disarmament, or anything related to promoting atheism or agnosticism or the like.

On the other hand, any services performed to mark my escape from this terrible veil of lies should have a darkly humorous bent, and anyone eulogizing me must include at least one tasteless joke at my expense, or (more preferably) the expense of others. Weirdness should be encouraged at any cost. Attempts should be made at gallows humor. Thou shalt have joy, and laughter, damn it. Death is nothing serious. Be wholly glad i am gone!

Categories
current events uncategorized

Space Void!

Great. Just great. Now there’s a hole in the universe.

Categories
uncategorized

WWII is so rife with ironies great and bad

i was reading about the new Bryan Singer movie about the July 20 Plot against Hitler, and i found this out: a November 1943 allied bombing destroyed a truckload of new winter uniforms which were to be personally inspected by Hitler. Axel von dem Bussche was to have demonstrated them for Hitler, with two live grenades in the pockets for the purpose of a suicide-bomb assassination, on the very next day.

Oops!

Categories
life uncategorized

Today Our Ceiling Fell In

So today, Holly goes “you should take a lookit this ceiling in here” and i knew it was gonna be something bad. There’s been an open seam running parallel to the wall right above the sofa, underneath the upstairs bedroom closet. This afternoon, it had suddenly open and torn itself roughly perpendicular, in an ‘L’ shape. I immediately called our landslumlord (the guy who refused to fix the downstairs electrical tangle-box, and who doesn’t seem to care much that people who wear sandals over here get their feet cut open because the front door has an entire pane of glass completely shattered and glass is always falling out of it all over everywhere; it’s a good thing Speck hasn’t eaten any – yet), and left a message that he better get someone over here soon, because it’s GOING to fall in.

Why is it that these things always, always, always happen directly above the sofa?

Later that day…

Holly and i go out for supplies. We pull back in to see a van in the driveway. Then, a white-haired figure coming out of our house. It’s our landslumlord. I ask what brings him over, wondering if he got my message, but also wondering just what the hell he was doing in our place. He’s coughing his lungs out and looks bad. He’s also dumping god knows what into the neighbor’s trash can. He tells us that the ceiling had fallen out. We’re like ZOMG WTFH!?!! and he’s telling us that yes, it actually did fall. He tells us to open as many windows as we can, that someone would be out to fix it tomorrow (today now), and hightails it out of there.

So we’re like ZOMFG WTF! and we open the door to see… pure, pure white. A thick powdery haze is everywhere! We’re breathing plaster.

Everything in the downstairs floor was covered in white powder. Everything. The worst, of course, was in the living room, where my PC and the laptop were. And the furniture, and the TV, etc.

We cleaned up as much as we could, and let it air out (none of the windows open, or the ones that do don’t have screens, so we open the doors and i prop a box fan on a chair and point two more to it, directing the coke-like haze to leave at once. It’s approximately breathable again.

Incidentally, we’re pretty sure that it hadn’t crashed down before he arrived. Holly has a giant teddy bear that we keep in a chair. When we got in, the bear was on the floor and wasn’t nearly as dusted up as the chair it had been propped up on. We think he was fucking around with the ceiling and it crashed in on top of him.

Here’s what we have now. I can’t find our Olympus, so these were taken with the laptop’s webcam. Click on the pictures for a larger view.

Approximately what we saw when we arrived on the scene (haze added in GIMP 2.0):
ceiling, with an approximation of the powdery haze we had to breathe (done in GIMP)

And here’s what it looks like right now:
ceiling, with giant hole

Close-up:
ceiling, closeup

Incidentally, a black PS2 controller:
detail of PS2 controller... that's a BLACK controller

The black shop-vac that he left for us:
the shop-vac that he left for us... also formerly black in color

How am i feeling? I HAS RILLY ANGRY!1!!!
a little bit upset

Categories
life local uncategorized

well, there goes that.

I haven’t talked to him yet, but i’m all but certain that my landlord just sold the house that we’re living in. The one we just moved into. The one we had our hearts set on buying. What this really means is anybody’s guess.

See, he just showed the place last week. And just today, the listing i had bookmarked is gone; in its place, a dialogue box pops up advising that it’s been “taken off the market.”

We’ll see. I really, really, really don’t want to move all over again.

Categories
current events internets uncategorized

X-Day X: a no-show for Xists (again)

Well, that’s weird, “Bob”… Something weird didn’t happen yesterday….

Categories
internets uncategorized

¡¡noʎ dı1ɟ

.pı1 ɹnoʎ dı1ɟ 11ıʍ ʇɐɥʇ ǝbɐd ssɐ-1ooɔ ɐ s,ǝɹǝɥ

Categories
internets uncategorized web design

IE6 users

I am aware of a problem with viewing this site through the narrow and unrefined lens of IE6. I have a fix for it in mind and will implement it as soon as we are done moving and settled in.

For now, why not get the juicy taste of the Twenty First Century in your mouth with a shiny new web browser? They’re Box Modelicious!

Firefox | Opera | IE7 | Safari

Categories
uncategorized

pc issues

So i just did a fresh, clean install of XP (MCE) and my pc still won’t boot half the time. It powers up, but doesn’t boot. It usually takes 2-4 tries. It won’t restart, either, it just hangs, every time, after XP is down and it’s still powered on. The screen is janky and just about anything makes it go all crazy, even after i uninstalled and reinstalled the driver.

I thought for a bit about building my own PC, scavenging what i can from this one, but too much is integrated into my mobo and i really don’t know what, exactly, i can scavenge, since i don’t know which bits are fried. Also, i can find a good mobo for cheap, but i have found that i have pretty demanding specs – when you’re thinking about committing to a project like that, you really think long and hard about future-proofing as much as you can afford to. If i’m going to build my own rig, i want it to be capable of swapping out for bigger, better, badder parts and whatnot.

So i’m going to wait a little while and use this thing as much as it will allow me to, and then take it into the shop and plunk down as much as they want to just fix it.

Categories
current events uncategorized

RIP RAW

Farewell, Robert Anton Wilson. You were there when we needed you, and left behind an arsenal of hilarious and unsettling tools with which to battle the enemies of free thought. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Hail Eris; all hail Discordia. Praise Dobbs. Ramen.

Categories
life uncategorized

Downtime

PC is down. No idea why but i’ve been running AVG for the past three days in safe mode. (It boots up to safe mode just fine, when it boots at all; but half the time it won’t boot up at all, and when it does boot into normal mode, the screen looks like it’s been through a shredder.)

No ETA on a fix. My apologies to everyone to whom I owe some help or technical solutions. I’m working on it.

Personally, I haven’t been feeling very well either, but I won’t go into that here.

BTW, I don’t have access to any contacts right now, so if you need to get hold of me, give me a ring.

Categories
life memories uncategorized

Thirty-five (is not alive)

I’m not sure, but I’ve become really disdainful of my own birthday over the past few years. All I want are for people to forget about it. Who cares? I don’t need no stinkin’ holiday! This year, I worked on my birthday, and thankfully had plenty of non-birthday-ness. At any rate, I had a good enough time, and blew far more money on myself than, in hindsight, I should have. Maybe it’s just that I want my birthday all to myself? Maybe I just don’t want to share? Maybe I’m just godless and don’t believe in no magical Jesuses and my increasingly heathen ways* are finally starting to affect more than just my outward worldview, but my inward self-image as well.

Maybe I just resent my childhood? Or is it my adulthood, which i most certainly detest, and with profound conviction? Maybe the mere passage of my increasingly limited time is not cause for celebration or merest remembrance to me.

Or maybe it’s just that much more special when only a couple of really close friends remember?

And maybe I need counseling for my crippling social phobia.

Having said that… your birthday is a special and magical day to me, gentle reader, and I do mean that. And, regardless, thanks to those good people who did remember. Please don’t do it again until further notice.

 

* ironically, less amoral and illicit

Categories
creative internets uncategorized web design

Big Urgent Garbage Hunt

The B.U.G. hunt is on! See if you can find all the problems with my new layoutI’ve already identified the ugly 3rd-tier dropdown menu thing on the navbar at the top, but I haven’t had much time yet to test everything out. fixed Later tonight I’ll tweak it and try to get it to behave itself a little better. Please post your comments here (be sure to include your OS/browser). And thanks!

(Things are bound to be a little on the messy side for a few days while I convert this thing over to the new theme.)

EDIT: Yikes! Single posts & pages are also totally unstyled! fixed

Categories
internets web design

Know Where You Laid Each Part

One thing about PHP is that it can get pretty complicated. CSS can get complicated enough on its own, with one class referencing any element on the page, pointing here and there. But when you combine the two… you’ve got something pointing to something which points to something that’s pointing at a thing which references anything you choose. See how crazy this stuff can get?

What I’ve been doing the past couple of days is turning my CSS files into dynamic style sheets, renaming them with .php extensions and serving them up, after preprocessing, as CSS. Doing this allows me to use a thing called a sniffer which looks at the User Agent string browsers send when doing HTTP requests to servers, which allows me to see to what I’m delivering content, $Browser on $Platform (e.g., Safari browser on Mac OS X), so that I can send either PNG images or GIFs. The only real reason for doing this is just because PNGs can be semi-transparent, except that all but the very latest Internet Explorer beta have serious problems reading semi-transparency (called “alpha” transparency).

This is something of a specialty of mine. For those who know me online, my old site was one of the first wave of sites to use semi-transparent backgrounds.

Like I said, this is complicated stuff. So now I’ve got a sniffer going “if $browser equals ‘IE’ on Win, set $imgExt to ‘.gif’, otherwise set $imgExt to ‘.png'”. And then I’m making a PNG and a GIF for every background that I want to see through. Meanwhile, all three subthemes have got several places where they reference $imgFileXX.$imgExt for different backgrounds.

So I’m pointing, and I’m pointing, and I’m pointing, referencing this variable to get to that variable to get to an image file to put in an element. Up until this very moment, I was doing all this without a particularly coherent strategy. That changes. Now. Because I only just now realized that I had been rearranging things trying to come up with reasonable alternative GIF images to send to Infernal Exploiter versions less than 7, and I’ve turned around at noticed that I have left one hell of a wreck in my wake. I now have way too many unused background images (failed experiments), and have tossed the variables standing in for the filenames like so much salad, resulting in a chaotic mess for all the good browsers out there who actually know how to deal with PNG images!

Guess you’d have to be there.

So tomorrow, I’m going to sit and think and make a god damned chart, so I can have a set pattern across all subthemes (e.g., Image5 is for alternate comments, Image10 is for the post background).

As they say, hindsight is 20/20.

Oh, btw, I’ve named the first three subthemes “Leather” (brown and tan spaceship interior), “Saturn” (white, black, and dark teal; very clean and high-contrast), and “transmothra 3.0” (black, smoky indigo, and blue) (this last being a bit of an homage to the final version of my very nicely done old site, thankyouverymuch).

Now that I’ve said all that… it’s probably going to be another week before this thing is actually ready enough to be unveiled. It’ll be worth the wait, I promise.

Sigh.

Categories
internets life uncategorized

Lightning Strikes

I had my network card fried by lightning earlier tonight. Right when we’re about to enter the brokest week evar, I had to run out and spend $16 on a new card. At least I’m back online now.

Categories
current events media memories

Robert Anton Wilson

Robert Anton Wilson, extraordinary thinker and writer of such classics as the Illuminatus! Trilogy and Cosmic Trigger, is not doing so well these days. He’s currently under hospice care at home with his family. Unfortunately, he is not as well off as you or I would like to believe. You can PayPal his account at [email protected] to help with his financial burden.

Categories
family life Speck uncategorized

How to dismantle an atomic bomb?

Holyfuckingshit! 7am, Holly vomits. Blood sugar way low. Run around getting shit to test & raise her blood sugar.

Minutes, and i mean mere minutes later, the dog starts puking up what smells like really nauseating, pungent poo, with pieces of dog food and plastic and things I never saw him ate and cannot identify. And again. And again. And again. Lather, rinse repeat. Ad, no pun intended, nauseum. And diarrhea. And more and more vomiting.

I feel like a fucking atom bomb was dropped on my head. Battle stations! Brace for impact! Emergency power!

My fingers are sore and my stomache is hurting, I’m exhausted and I’m stressed out and I’m sure my blood pressure’s high; I feel like i’m falling apart. And I’m the only one here who’s in good shape these days!

Categories
media uncategorized

I had no idea: Iggy Pop vs. Rev. Cool’s Peanut Butter

I had no idea: the famous Iggy Pop peanut butter incident was provoked by Dayton’s own Rev. Cool (from WYSO)!

Categories
current events uncategorized

Dwarf Planet Named After Eris

Hail Eris!