bustermcleod: @andypixel 22,598 pictures to be exact. I've gone through 1/10th so far.

bustermcleod: Sadly, making all the naked McLeod Residence photo booth pictures friends only.

bustermcleod: Watching the Jonestown documentary as reward for finishing finance stuff.

tantek posted a photo:

tantek posted a photo:

tantek posted a photo:

Last year I had a convergence moment where a bunch of different areas of research and curiosity (self-help, psychology, game theory, neurobiology, social networking, and goal-making) all came together.  I realized that there were things in common between these different topics and that spurred me on to look into a bunch of different self-altering exercises like going on meditation retreats, half-marathons, juice fasts, landmark forums, and scientology centers.  I found a common thread between them all, a philosophy about life that led to higher highs and lower lows.  About living in the moment, vulnerably, with good intentions, while gathering momentum, and with big gambling. 

Yesterday, I had another similar moment of convergence that builds on the same idea.  It's a bit more subtle, and includes a different set of ideas (things like diet, body language, etiquette, emotions, facial expressions, yoga, fashion, and habit-forming).  It's an everyday routine sort of convergence, it's a game in the present moment.  Whimsy, play, surprise, and style.  It's all the big ideas without the big story.  It's aesthetics, and mindset, and experience.  I went out and bought 3 books: The Definitive Book of Body Language, The Modern Gentleman: A Guide to Essential Manners, Savvy and Vice, and The Vice Guide to Sex, Drugs and Rock and Roll.  They're reference materials for something that I can just see in my periphery.  A new attitude.  Or maybe, just one step further than the attitude I already had.  In essence, it's not about what's done, but about the way it's done.  "The way you do any thing is the way you do everything."  Etc.

I want it to come together and get expressed somehow, in my way.  Make a mashed potato monument in its name.  Not let it slip away, as these moments sometimes do (I have a lot of them at the gym, and they're usually gone by the time I get home, once my heart rate settles back down to normal levels). 

I bought this book yesterday that has a guide to finding yourself. I've got mixed feelings about finding oneself, mostly because I don't know exactly what it means, but if someone asked me if I've found myself, I'd probably say yes. What would you say?

Today’s release brings a lot of new features that people have been requesting and talking about for a long time:

Subscribe to People (aka Friends, Bookmarks, Contacts, etc)

If you’re logged in, every person’s profile page now has a “Subscribe to this person’s recent activity” link in the right sidebar, and this link (when clicked) will let you keep track of all of their entries, comments, and goal adoption/completion milestones from the site itself or via RSS or even via the web services. Previously, the only way to keep track of your friends was to invite them all to a team or individually subscribe to each of their RSS feeds. After you have a few subscriptions, check out the Recent Activity page (linked from your profile page and the Zeitgeist page) and you’ll see all of their activity aggregated into one big happy list.

At the moment subscriptions are private, meaning that only you can see who you’re subscribed to (though you can see how many people are subscribed to you), but we’re curious to hear any thoughts on this… do people care if this information is public or private? Play around with it for a while and let us know what you think.

43 Things Suggests

Along the lines of Google Suggests, this feature lets you start typing into the “add a goal” box on our homepage and it’ll show you a dropdown of all the goals that begin with those letters/words, sorted by popularity.

We’ve been having tons of fun the last few days seeing all of the goals that start with “travel to”, “be a better”, “build”, “meet a”, “meet b”, “meet c”, etc… and some of the more disturbing ones like “eat a”. With almost 90,000 goals, it’s difficult to find a verb that someone doesn’t want to enact… it’s really quite crazy if you think about it.

Multiple Profile Images

Before today, you could only have one picture of yourself to represent all of the multifaceted corners of your personality. We’ve upped that to 10 now, and have created a gallery page that displays them all, with optional captions.

Invite people to a goal by their username

We haven’t really publicized this on the site yet, but you can now invite people to do something with you as a team even if you don’t know their email address. More info on this on the ideas site.

Bubbles!

And with this I think we can say that our latest release code-named Bubbles is officially complete. Momentum is building here at the Co-op… there are two or three other exciting projects that are on their way, which we’ll be announcing here soon enough.

Erik Benson added an entry regarding improve my memory:

Crossword puzzles. Crosswords are supposed to be useful in exercising the memory, or so I hear. So, I’ve started doing online crossword puzzles which are actually pretty cool, since you can get immediate verification of answers and count the number of cheated letters you get in the end. I can then track how much cheating I need to do in order to complete the puzzle each day.

Drugs. Gingko is an easy-to-acquire drug that has been known to improve short-term and long-term memory. That should help counteract (hopefully) all of the chemicals that I currently take that reduce short-term and long-term memory.

What other tricks are there? Looking in particular for things that don’t require me to try to actually memorize anything cause that’s tough.

I’ve been thinking about self-explanatory objects. What would it take to write a book that not only was a book, but taught the reader how to read the book, and even before that was able to inform the person that the thing in their hands was a book that could be read. Is it possible to create a real time capsule that you can send out into space and expect the first intelligent being to be able to interact with it in the intended way? Okay, that’s a little ambitious, but is it possible to write a book and send it out into the bookstores and expect the first intelligent being that walks into the store to be able to interact with the book in the intended way? Every piece of art or literature has at least three pieces: the content itself, the language and context of the content, and the simple message that there is a language and a content to find in the object. If you’re missing any one of those three things, an alien that picked up your book would have trouble understanding what it was that they were holding. Even if they knew English, and could read the words on the pages, if they didn’t know that it was a book that should be read they’d be out of luck. Sometimes I feel this way. That you all are aliens. No, I’m not the alien.

Another take. Icebergs, ice cubes, potatoes. How much of a painting relies on things not in the painting itself? How much of the painting is submerged below the surface of the time period that it was painted, the history of the painter, the culture the painter grew up in, the manner in which the painter painted it, the initial audience and reception of the painting, etc? If you cut the umbilical cord of all paintings, packing them into a space ship and shipping them to another dimension where people were identical in all things except context and history, would they sort the paintings into the same order of greatness and mediocrity that we have sorted them into here?

Which things are more dependant on context than others: books, songs, paintings, photographs, jokes, buildings, fashions, wigs, automobiles, ethics, politics, the meaning of life, pizza toppings. And, does it matter? Should I keep seeking the beauty and complexity of context or should I shun it and try to find and make objects that can live outside that life support system?

How differently does a music novice treat Beethoven’s 9th versus a classical music aficionado? Is that gap somehow a measurement of the displacement of context involved in the art piece? Submerge the art into both minds, and measure the difference of appreciation. You think there’s more involved and I would agree but this is an over-simplification. There are some things that become worse the more you know about the context. Lots of movies that fall apart, lots of bands that are really overly manufactured and marketed, lots of books that have pulp disguised as meat. But, take the absolute value of context’s effect, positive or negative, as the degree to which something is rooted in the story around it. Some things are all story/context and are really just empty vessels for shipping interesting context to the hungry in little bite size pieces. Everything you see just because everyone else has seen it, everything you take part in just because you want to relate to the other people who have taken part in it.

Has someone studied context? Not to find out what the context of something is, but to study the phenomenon of context itself. Why we enjoy it, why we build things that attract it, why we do things to support it. What is it called? What are the forces that are involved and what controls their ebb and flow? Almost everything relies on context—the way we dress, the way we design our living and working spaces, the things we find interesting and the things we read and talk about, the way we perceive ourselves and the way we want to perceive ourselves. And yet you can’t cash it it. You can’t eat it or drink it or wrap it around you and stay warm at night. And in the end you leave it behind and it finds someone/something else to feed it.

I’m giving Nervousness and Ad Farm up for adoption. Already, I’ve been amazed at the number of people (way more qualified than myself) that have offered to take on these large projects. It gives me hope that they will live on for a while yet. It’s really interesting too, from an experiment perspective: is it possible to pass on a project of this scope?

I’ve asked my friends to keep me accountable and help me resist the temptation to begin more websites, as these are let go. I’ve noticed that the impulse to create websites is not a noble characteristic in myself, but more akin to a nervous habit, like eating a gallon of Spumoni Ice Cream, or a flask kept in one’s desk drawer. Time for a change in habits. Time for the 12 step program to get off the internet.