Originally published at The Blog Of Michael John Bertrand. You can comment here or there.

I am truly sorry for this folks, but I am afraid there will be no Friday Science Whatever this week, because there sincerely has been no science stories that I find interesting thing to share this week.

I am boggled that this is even possible, but I look at my folder, and my websites, and absolutely nothing strikes me as worth mentioning. It has, apparently, been a bit of a slow news week in terms of science and discovery. Either that, or I am just being too fussy because the heat is making me grumpy.

But either way, this is not going to be your usual Friday.

The closest bit to science news that I have on hand is this rather well executed bit of science fiction satire about Life in the future :

Now I warned you it was satire, and hence, it’s a tad on the dark side, but funny in it own dark way, and just plausible enough to be considered legitimate science fiction. And well done, too. I am always intrigued by what can be done with just voice and graphics, no “live video”, so to speak, and I would say that the person who did this, Tom Scott, has done a great job of using writing and simple, iconic graphics to create an all too plausible corporate dystopia.

(Seriously, Windows Dictionary? You don’t have the word “dystopia” in you? The closest match you could come up with is “dystrophy”? Seriously? Sheesh. )

Of course, like with all science fiction, questions are left unanswered. Like, if there is no money in it for them, why is the big bad corporation bringing you back in the first place? I am guessing that some kind of government mandate would have to be involved. Something that legally compels the Life corporation to revive everyone who dies with a backup, but which does not guarantee that you will enjoy it or have anything like a decent virtual existence at all.

The real issue, thought, to me anyhow, is one of identity. Who says that pattern of electrical activity in some computer somewhere is really me, just because they were in some sense based on me? Even if my entire brain has been simulated down to the lowliest quark, is that really me?

My gut reaction is, no, it is not. That is very clearly not me. I am me. That program is something else. To me, the clincher is that, presumably, the computers could run a simulation of me without me dying at all, and then which one of us is the real me?

I might be biased, but I would say it is the meat and gristle version of me that was born from my mother and father’s genetic data and walked around being a live human being for all those years before I met my end. The one that had all those experiences, memories, opinions, idea, and so on for the computer to scan in the first place.

And to be fair, I was here first!

But then you have to ask, well, what exactly am I, me, Michael John Bertrand, in the first place? Certainly I do not consider myself to be this sack of meat and bone and adipose tissue that is the current host of my consciousness. If I lost an arm in an accident, or if I lost all my excess fat and hence lost enough mass to make an entire other person, I would not consider myself to be a whole different person. I would just be MJB, reduced, but still here.

So if all I am, deep down, is a pattern of electrical activity running in a glob of fatty tissue we call a brain, what is the big deal whether it is running in a brain or a computer? I am no mystic, I do not insist that there must be “something more”, something magical and special that no computer could reproduce. I am, in that sense, a materialist. We are just stuff, matter, substance. We no more have a soul than our computers do.

We are just extremely complicated and marvelously adaptable and potent biological machines. We are special… amazingly special. Just being alive makes us special, far different from all the other matter in the universe. We are living matter, matter that increases order within itself, matter with mobility and reproduction and opinions.

And being sentient, we know it.

But that specialness is a function of the same rules and processes that apply to everything else. We have no special set of rules that apply to only us and that safeguard our uniqueness against the uniformity of the universe. We are a part of it, and it of us. We are inseparable.

So I cannot claim that the version of me running on a computer is not the real me simply because it lacks that certain special something that makes us human. Given sufficient computer power, everything about me, the person, could be reproduced and simulated to all meaningful degrees of fidelity.

Yet identity insists on uniqueness. There simply cannot be more than one of me. One of the fundamental truths of conscious existence is that we are here, in our bodies, right now, and nowhere else. We cannot imagine being in two places at once. That other thing cannot be us. The mind simply balks at the very concept. No matter how accurate the reproduction, that thing over there is not us. It’s someone else. We are, at best, close relatives.

And speaking of relatives, perhaps I will be repeating this conversation some day when the young people are badgering me to upload my brain into the WetWeb and I keep insisting that I do not want some simulated version of me hanging around after I’m dead claiming to be me.

Perhaps I will die without ever availing myself of the new miracle of technology. After all, I can be hellaciously stubborn sometimes.

Or maybe I will have a deathbed conversion, figuring a simulated me around is better than nothing at all. I am devious too.

If a future virtual me is ever reading this, hey, good going, you lived long enough to live forever! Don’t feel bad about caving in at the last minute.

We always kind of knew we would, didn’t we?

Originally published at The Blog Of Michael John Bertrand. You can comment here or there.

Another scratch on the wall
Of my self-made cell
Keeping track of the days
In my personal hell

So yeah, I am in a great mood.

This is getting to be my lifestyle now. I am always in this exact mood when I do my writing, because I am always coming out of sleeping all afternoon and into the evening. And it is never happy good wonder sleep, that elusive and wonderful sleep where, as legend has it, you actually feel less tired than when you went to sleep when you wake up.

No, it is always that hot sweaty confusing dream laden sleep that feels like I am going through some kind of intense drug trip every time and leaves me feeling depressed and confused and hopeless and heavy and lumpy and disgusting and unworthy, and like I want to just crawl into a hole and disappear.

And so I end up writing about the same stupid pointless crap day after day, a thousand words of futility at a time, banging the same old tired dusty drum because it is marginally better than doing nothing.

It makes me wish I could do something really meaningful. Like this guy did.

Hey, it’s the World’s Meatiest Sandwich. That has to count for something, right?

Actually, now that I think about it, that is pretty stupid. I mean, the thing is a foot tall. So unless you can unhinge your jaw like a snake, there is no way you can take a bite out of the thing. Arguably, that is therefore no longer a sandwich. It is a vertical smorgasbord with the bread inconveniently placed on the top and bottom. You could only eat it by putting a slice of it on a plate sideways, and then it is just basically a plate full of meat with a few garnishes. Stupid.

Wow, you know, taking it out on others really does make you feel a little better. I totally see why mean people do this all the time. Good thing I am a nice guy, or this could get addictive.

Plus, you know, I mean what I say. That sandwich is stupid. So there.

Or take this guy, Nick Hanauer, and “the idea TED didn’t consider worth spreading”.

Apparently, this guy thinks that the idea that the middle class are the real job creators, not the rich, is his alone, and the fact that his talk was ultimately rejected by the TED conference was rank censorship of an idea just too radical and earthshaking for even the famously open minds at TED to handle, and so they rejected it out of close minded fear and desire to maintain the status quo.

Give me a break, dude. I have not watched your talk ( I feel like if I did watch it, somehow he would win) but from what was said by TED head curator…

“Our policy is to post only talks that are truly special. And we try to steer clear of talks that are bound to descend into the same dismal partisan head-butting people can find every day elsewhere in the media.”

… it sounds to me like your speech was simply too partisan and polemic for the rarefied air of the TED conference’s Olympian point of view.

And you know what? I am totally cool with that.

Full disclosure : I love TED. It is an outstanding forum for truly good, interesting, world shaping, significant ideas. It is a center for the encouragement and dissemination of truly excellent thinking, and that is something I can get behind one million percent. I am all about the quality of thought. Better thinking leads to better solutions, and better solutions lead to better tomorrows.

And as a lover of TED, I am quite happy that they keep partisan politics out of it. And I am hardly apolitical. Odds are, I would agree with a lot of what this dude said. But not all denial of access is censorship. Sometimes it is just plain selectivity. If someone sent a badly written, poorly spelled, childishly scrawled and obscene racist diatribe to the New York Times and they declined to print it, that would not be because they cowered in fear before the power of the ideas contained therein and feared the wrath of their all-controlling masters.

It would be because it sucked. Think about it, Nick Hanauer.

There has to be a place beyond the thrust and parry of politics, above the day to day concerns that keep us from seeing the big picture, someplace where there are no teams, no sides, no cliques, no groups, just people and the quality of their ideas.

TED is such a place, and I love it.

Like how about this idea : just plain canceling the massive personal debt that came from the 2008 crash.

That is what Iceland is doing, and it is working great. Its banks have written down (or forgiven, canceled, erased) debt equal to 13 percent of the nation’s GDP, and it has worked wonders for their economy, which has bounced back amazingly well given the crippling blow dealt it in 2008.

Now the economist lackeys of the banks and the corporations and the powers that be say that this would never work, that by canceling debt, you are taking money out of the economy, destroying wealth, and that can only lead to utter ruin and disaster.

After all, when you worship wealth, what could be more sacrilegious than making it go away?

But the thing is, that already happened. That is what the whole 2008 crisis was about : a bunch of high finance charlatans convinced the world that trillions of dollars of value existed where it did not, and because everyone was eager to unload the worthless assets to bigger dogs than then, the scam lasted just long enough for the world economy to truly believe that money existed before they woke up one morning to find it all had disappeared.

All personal debt forgiveness does is make it so that the average person on the street does not have to suffer because of that high level con job, and hence, suddenly relieved of massive debt, the people’s consumer confidence skyrockets, they spend more freely, and the economy bounces back.

Ta da! And they said it could not be done.

What they meant was, it could not be done without the people who caused it suffering.

And they were right.

Originally published at The Blog Of Michael John Bertrand. You can comment here or there.

One cell at a time.

Or least I hope to hell that is what is going on. I sincerely hope that all this time spent in deep and potent sleep is leading up to something. That it’s a painful process, but a process nonetheless, one that will lead to a brighter happier stronger shinier me.

It certainly feels like I am moving heavy furniture inside myself these days. The prep work is over, the small stuff has been thrown out or moved, and now the big stuff can be tackled because there is room to move things around now.

And I am eager to do so. In fact, I wish I could just get it all done at once in one enormous effort, and then deal with the consequences after. But no, as tempting as the idea of burning the house down rather than cleaning it might be sometimes, the truth is, these things have to happen slowly and gradually in order to maintain stability and not drive oneself crazy in the name of sanity.

So as tempting as it can be to just release my grip and fling myself into the void, I am too damn sensible to actually do it. Instead, I will slowly and painfully make my way down the mountain via the smart and wise method of finding toeholds and handholds and suffer all the way down.

Sometimes it sucks to be sensible, ya know that?

For one thing, it means that even if the crazy solution is the best one, you will never recognize it, or if you do, you will never have the guts to actually do it. You will instead cling to what seems smart and sensible and safe to do, all the while patting yourself on the back for not doing crazy irrational things like some people do. You know, those irrational types who cannot control their emotions and just do whatever foolish thing their hearts tell them to do.

Yeah, well, if we’re so smart, me and I, how come we are not happy? Could living a more spontaneous and emotion based existence really be all that much worse? Impulsive people can be happy people too. How long can you go on thinking you are better off than them because you are so sensible and clever when you are miserably depressed and the “stupid” people are happier and more productive and fulfilled?

I think of myself as a rational pragmatist, and if that is true, then I am forced to admit that the evidence clearly shows that my current methodology is producing extremely poor results.

And I am all about the results. Right? Results are all that matters. Not doctrine or dogma or form or aesthetics or any other irrelevant distractions. Just results. It works, or it does not.

Well, my life sure as fuck does not work right now, not on any parameter above mere subsistence.

SO by those sensible and rational and oh so reasonable grounds alone, I should be wide open to the idea that my methodology is deeply flawed, my basic assumptions are incorrect, and large quantities of error and useless data have corrupted the entire experiment. This leaves no choice but to star the experiment over from scratch, incorporating lessons learned from the failures (and successes) of the first one.

Unfortunately, there is no reset button on life, no just starting the game over again with the idea that you will do a lot better this time because you will make smarter choices and avoid the mistakes you made the first time through.

There are no do-overs in life. No margin for error either. And I am not good in situations where there is no margin for error.

I mean, one little mistake can mean so much. Like this, for example :

To be honest, it was probably both.

Um, whoops. What a difference a single letter can make, huh? Makes me wonder if the proofreader fell asleep at the switch, or if the writer was thinking about something else, or if they made the fetal error of trusting the spell checker to do their proofreading for them.

Spell checkers only flag non-words, not the WRONG words, people!

Makes me want to read the original, though. “And this band has Orinoco Jones on lead vocals, Tim McBluth on lead guitar, Boby Smith on bass, and Eric Lyday on drugs. ”

It would look like it was the first time a band actually included their dealer as part of the band. A touching tribute to someone who means so much to them, but probably a tad inappropriate.

And hey, I might have had a lousy day, but at least I did not have the cool looking rocks I picked up on the beach explode in my pockets.

That is what happened to a 43 year old Orange Country woman. Her kids picked up some perfectly harmless looking rocks on the beach, and she stuck them in a pocket and went home, and then they… ignited.

Here is what they looked like :

There they sit. Quietly. Patiently. Waiting.

I do not see what the kids saw in the big one on top. That just looks gross and ugly to me. But the little green one on the bottom is COOL! It’s like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Green! It looks like it could be a hunk of something that fell from space.

And given what happened to their mother later, maybe that is not so silly an idea. The woman is severely burned, with second and third degree burns between her right hip and her right knee, as well as second degree burns on her right hand.

I am assuming those are from when she was frantically trying to get the rocks out of her pocket, or trying to slap out the flames.

Gee, and I always thought amateur geology would boring.

I feel bad for the woman, and especially bad for the kids. Those kids probably feel horrible about what the rocks they picked up did to their mother. And what a bizarre occurrence. What could seem more harmless than rocks on a beach?

I hope she recovers fully and everyone puts the whole weird thing behind them.

I mean wow. Fortean happens.

Originally published at The Blog Of Michael John Bertrand. You can comment here or there.

I should probably be talking about therapy, or my life, or whatever, but then again, I also have fun stuff from the browser to share, so what the heck, I will do both.

Right about now, I feel like this cat :

Grumpy Kitty shows off his ET impression

Because, as you probably can guess, I am not feeling that great because of bad sleep. I am wondering if I need to just plain avoid afternoon naps. Those seem to be the ones that really brutalize me. I don’t know if it is a circadian rhythm thing, or it is because that is when it is hottest out, or what, but those sleeps are the worst in terms of how I will feel waking up.

I wonder if some party music would help.

Well if it's going to be THAT kind of party...

Hmmm. Or maybe not.

Bravo to the person who was willing to be seen in public with that CD. Even if it was just to snap a picture of it in the music store with your cell phone. If they actually bought it and brought it home, bravo sir. I cannot imagine the kind of looks you get from the dude at the counter with the piercing and the Hipster glasses when you have to get that particular items rung up.

“Um, it’s for a friend. Well, not a close friend, an acquaintance. Someone I know from work. But not very well. I think he’s Jewish. I mean, we all are. We are, in fact, Rabbis who run a deli and do some accounting on the side. In Israel. In town for a… look, just ring it up, OK?”

It is really wearing me down that it seems like I am destined to spend at least some of the time feeling like this every single day. In the beginning, it was easy to pat myself on the back for keeping the proper philosophical “hey, shit happens, the sun can’t shine every day” attitude. But when that rain just keeps falling and falling and falling, you lose your chipper attitude and just want it to STOP.

I feel like I have not gotten any decent sleep in at least a week. It is always the brutally intense stuff, or nothing. Plus my nose is running all the time, leading to clogging, leading to filled sinuses, leading to sinus headaches, and that is no fun at all.

So that explains why I am failing to be entirely upbeat.

Oh well, at least it is only part of the day. All this morning I felt quite hale and hearty. Maybe I am just sleeping like normal people, the ones who need a cup or two of coffee to get started in the morning and who always wake up feeling like crap. I don’t know. I can’t tell.

If that is true, then my sympathies, coffee people. I had no idea how bad you had it. Most of my life, I have been a slow but happy riser. I did not exactly bounce out of bed smiling, ready to take on the day and meet it with a big happy grin, but I never woke up grumpy.

But lately, waking up with a headache and dehydration and disorientation and a runny nose and so forth and so on, the only reason I am not grumpy is that I am alone, and grumpiness requires a target.

Maybe I should talk to my imaginary friends.

Pumba, not in front of the kids!

Wow, I knew there was a reason I loved that movie so much. Well, honestly, there are tons of reasons. But it’s nice to have still one more.

After all, Simba not only turns out well, he becomes King of the Lions, and roars on Pride Rock, and everything. All after being raised in part by a same sex couple.

At least, I always assumed they were one. They do seem awfully close and it is not like they have other members of their species to turn to when the nights are lonely and cold.

Of course, the fact that one of them is voiced by Nathan Lane probably does not hurt either.

Then again, maybe I am just not approaching life the right way.

On the road of life, I am totally that guy

Or worse, I am the one driving perpendicular to the traffic, always changing lanes and risking T-bone accidents and mayhem, just because I want to know what is on the side of the road more than I want to get where everyone else is going.

And the commuter can be pretty pissed off at you for messing with the flow of traffic.

Oh, fun site to share with you, a bit of current events satire done well : God Hates Shrimp.

And he does, you know. As the site show, the Bible quite explicitly says that you are not to eat any kind of shellfish, for it is unclean to you. Therefore, anyone who eats shrimp, clams, oysters, lobsters, or any other sea creature that has no fins is a filthy degenerate sinner.

Of course, it also condemns pork. Both of these admonitions have nothing to do with holiness and everything to do with keeping your followers alive and healthy. Both shellfish and pork can kill you dead if not cooked and cleaned properly, and in the days before refrigeration, it was probably best to just stay away from such hazardous cuisine entirely.

In the modern world, these admonitions make absolutely no sense. Pork and shellfish are perfectly safe to eat as long as you cook them well and, in the case of shellfish, know which months are safe for their harvesting. And no raw clams! They are not an aphrodisiac and you are playing Russian Roulette, but with a far slower and more painful and humiliating death.

And on that happy note, we end today’s blogging. If these shadows have offended, fuck you.

Originally published at The Blog Of Michael John Bertrand. You can comment here or there.

Another day, another long slow Tartarus of deep and troubled sleep with brief intervals of confused and crumbling consciousness to punctuate an otherwise endless morass of mystical meanderings through the magnificence and filth of the overflowing, overburdened, overactive, overwhelming, overbearing, under-expressed avenues of my taut and tortured mind.

I should have been a poet.

And this trip through the underwhelming thrill ride of my inner mind was made bonus sucky because my friend William was visiting (hello dear!), and I really wanted to spend more time with him, but this feast or famine sleep schedule of mine (far more feast than famine lately) has demands of its own, and so the poor dear spent 20 hours in this apartment in order to spend at most 3 hours in my company. Sad.

And he says it is fine, but I still feel terribly guilty about it. I hate feeling like I have disappointed people or let them down. That makes sense, because I absolutely hate it when people disappoint me or let me down, and so by the simple algebra of empathic projection, I especially hate to be the source of those feelings in someone else.

So that is going to bother me for a while, but I will get over it eventually. After all, we all make mistakes and have regrets, and you cannot go through life dwelling on them, stuck looking backwards while moving forwards in time.

That is no way to live, never looking in the direction you are actually going.

Sometimes I think you should live each day of your life as if you are a new player for the same character in the RPG of your life. You still have all the same stats and resources and so on, but you are a brand new person who comes to the challenges of playing that character fresh and ready to tackle the next part of the quest with vigor and enthusiasm.

I get so tired of being the same humdrum old person every day. I think that is part of why coming out of sleep into the real world is so jarring for me. Part of me simply does not want to come back to reality. Leave the dream realm with its unlimited expression of self and broad and creative reality? Coalesce my enormous churning crackling whirlwind of mind into the tiny confines of this all too human life again? Get stuck being this one limited and frankly kind of pathetic person again? How depressing. Do not make me go back in that box!

Come to think of it, maybe that has a lot to do with why I sleep so much in the first place. I get to shed my burdensome and confining singular identity, with its narrow ledge of possibilities and heavy weight of physical existence, and instead be a multi-probable cloud of energies and influences and emotions freed of the lead dead onus of physical existence.

In a way, the dream world is the perfect rationalist slash idealist environment. No physical limitations, just mind, spirit, and imagination.

But not being a rationalist/idealist myself, I recognize that being all mind with no physical reality to ground you can be nightmarishly horrible. No stability, no consistency, no reliability, just the coruscating chaos of the subjective world. That is, in fact, my definition of Hell : to be locked forever within the dirty waters of my own mind, without any solid land to stand on, doomed to tread water until I drown.

And drown I would, and from thence on, I would be nothing but a lunatic madman bashing his head agaisnt the wall of his cell just to have something to feel for a change.

I have felt this intense fear of going completely insane for a long long time. I remember being frightened by my own weird moods and how reality seemed to shift around me in invisible but important ways even when I was an elementary school student. How a sift inside me, maybe some brain chemistry shift or something, could change the entire flavour, the entire feel, of the universe around me. And how am I supposed to know which of these seemingly random frequencies of reception represents true reality? Subjectively, they all seem real at the time.

Perhaps that is what makes me such a philosopher. I cannot trust my direct perceptions of reality because they change so much. My mood filters my perceptions too much to trust them. If your entire opinion of the nature of the universe can turn on a dime any moment, what is a poor boy to do?

Sit still and try to deduce that which remains regardless of the shift in the tide, I suppose. Seek out the most durable and reliable truths, and anchor your boat to those shores. But always be ready to weigh anchor and set sail should your current island prove unreliable.

No point in sinking along with Atlantis if you can just float away, right?

Bur why are my inner seas so restless? Why must my mind be such spinning nebula of vibrating chaos? What keeps the cauldron of my cerebellum constantly churning and burning and yearning? Why, to put it bluntly, am I so fucked up inside?

All this chaos and motion and stormy creativity must serve some kind of purpose. There must be something great and terrible lurking in my mind’s shadow that would emerge if the merry go round ever came to a complete and total stop.

And that must never ever happen. So the whole thing spins on every axis, and things combine and are broken apart and combine again like primitive proteins in the primordial goop, and somewhere in there is little old me, with a self ten times smaller than the massive metamorphic mind it dwells in, just trying to keep my head above water for another day.

And I guess that is roughly what it is like to be me.

I think maybe I need to go read my new narrative again. It is not sinking in yet.

Originally published at The Blog Of Michael John Bertrand. You can comment here or there.

It is grey and raining hard out right now, and that seems to have infected my mood with similar gloom. I feel achy and irritable and bored. And sleepy, even though I slept between 9 am and 2 pm already. Perhaps I am heading into one of my hyper sleepy periods. I hope not.

It would be most inconvenient to have a Big Nap Attack right now, because I have plans for today. First to go to this month’s BCSFA meeting, then to entertain my friend William afterwards. He will be at the meeting too, and will come back here to Nerdvana with us afterwards.

At least, that is the plan. Right now, I kind of feel like just crawling into bed and lapsing into a light coma for as while. Of course, I also kind of feel like stomping around in a circle while screaming, so you can’t take these transient whims too seriously.

There would probably be a primitive bonfire in the middle of the circle. I am not sure. I am new to this whole Maurice Sendak vibe.

And to just doing what I feel like doing in general, really. Pop culture spouts a lot of “follow your heart” garbage, and for all I know that might honestly be the best way to approach long time life planning, but in terms of what to do in the next five minutes, I am here to tell ya it just plain is not that easy. My hive is alive on overdrive pretty much all the time, and if I tried to follow every urge and impulse my mental megaplex puts out, the only question would be whether I died of exhaustion before they dragged me off to the loonie bin, or after.

Or at least, that is how it seems to me right now. Perhaps people who follow their whims all the time thereby discharge a lot of their excess impulses and so their mental vestibule is not clogged with a long long line of impulses who got checked at the door by the doormen of internal censorship.

I am certainly open to the idea that my life is just not working out for me how it is, and I would be well served by considering other ways to go about things.

I am still pondering trying to make the move to permanent diability status. I think the fact that I have been on “short term” disability for over a decade alone should be a broad enough hint to the System that I am not going to be getting a whole lot better any time soon.

If i succeeded in getting my status “upgraded”, I would get around $100/month more in cashola, which could help make life a whole lot easier for me, plus I would be able to get that golden ticket known as the Disability Transit Pass, which gives you unlimited travel on the bus and Skytrain for the whole year for like eighty bucks or so.

With something like that, it would be a lot easier to become a more active and outgoing person. I could wander the GVRD at will, attending various events and meeting new people and who knows, maybe actually finding something useful or at least interesting to do with my so called life.

In order to get the ball rolling, I apparently have to call up my social assistance office and make an appointment with my social worker and she (or he, but honestly, probably she) will do it all on the computer or some such thing.

I guess this is the paperless future, and I am all for that, honestly, especially if it saves me the humiliation of having to fill out a massive form and then tote that around to various agencies and beg them to fill out huge portions of it as well.

Doctors do not want to fill out forms for patients. They don’t like paperwork period. That is what secretaries and receptionists are for, after all. They get real grumpy when you turn from a patient for whom conversation and a hastily jotted prescriptions are enough into one that actually makes them have to sit down and do grunt work.

And when you are a shy and timid person who has a tendency to sort of fold in the face of authority anyhow, facing a grumpy doctor can be a major deal breaker right off the start.

But I have this horrible feeling that what will happen is that I will make the appointment, go see my worker, she will ask a bunch of questions and type a whole whack of stuff into the computer, and everything will seem golden…. until she presses “Print”, then hands me the massive printout and tells me to go get THAT filled out by various agencies. Psych!

Paperless future my ass. That will only happen when all the doctors use computers too, and have you seen how old most of them are? Not going to happen.

Then again, my doctor is pretty young, and seems at least familiar with the existence of those “calm pew tar” thingies, so perhaps it will not be an issue.

I will try to work up the energy to make the phone call on Tuesday. (Tomorrow is a stat holiday here in Canada, Victoria Day, when we all get together and watch Victor Victoria). And when I say “the energy” I really mean “the nerve”.

Being timid really makes life more complicated in so many, many ways.

And yet, in different circumstances, I am so bold as to be downright brassy. I guess everybody has their areas of confidence and of lack of confidence. Put me in an argument, or in a situation where I am called upon to stand up for a friend, and you will see a very NOT timid side of me emerge.

In the right circumstances, I fight like a fire breathing dragon, ready to burn down anything that gets in my way in my fight for what is right.

I just wish I could do that for myself.

Originally published at The Blog Of Michael John Bertrand. You can comment here or there.

Well, here it is, my 39th birthday. That is thirty nine trips around the solar systems on this big beautiful ball of mud we call Earth, and that is a hella of a lot of tickets spent on the exact same corny old carnival ride.

And as I feel the big four zero coming up, and it feels like the sand in my hourglass gets heavier and heavier and more eager to slide down to the bottom and make be disappear by the minute, my darkest thoughts follow me like the shadow of a bird in flight follows it no matter how high or how fast it flies.

Age old issues of worth and value and license to live grow stronger every day, It is a fell and nasty thing indeed to feel ashamed to even be alive, and to have that shame grow larger with every heartbeat until the cold within its shadow penetrates the very bones of your heart, and it becomes harder and harder to remember that you are alive and that somewhere out there, the sun still shines.

So in these dark moments, instead of giving in to the wretched despair that has been my soft and poisonous refuge for so very long, I will try to tell my story a different way this time,

We are our own narratives, after all. As a writer I am more aware of this than most. So here is the first draft of an entirely new story of me.

I was born on May 19, 1973 in Prince Country General Hospital in the safe and sleepy little town of Summerside, Prince Edward Island. I was, by all accounts, a healthy baby, quiet and content. I did not cry as much as other babies. I waited till I had a good reason.

I do not remember the house that received me when my mother brought me home that first time. I barely remember moving in to 135 Belmont Street, the house that would be my home and refuge for the next twenty years and more of my life.

I was a sweet-natured, gentle, sensitive boy with a friendly, outgoing spirit. I loved animals, especially our many cats, books, video games, and Spider-Man And His Amazing Friends. I had parents who nurtured my eager mind, a babysitter who was both tough and gentle enough to handle a precocious and stubborn little redheaded charmer like myself, and older siblings who put up with the constant outflow of questions that my eager little mind produced.

School was never a problem. My bright mind made short work of schoolwork. And sometimes I had friends. There was Kevin and Trevor, who introduced me to KISS and Judas Priest and Metallica, an influence that would persist throughout the rest of my life. I still love the heavy metal. I also used my budding comedy talents to make up dirty lyrics for the songs we sang in music class.

Then there was Philip Oatway and Troy Little, two people who sat with me in homeroom in junior high and who shared my nerdish interest in things like comic books, science fiction television, and Voltron. We shared good conversation, trips to the local Mom and Pop grocery store for gross looking candies with which to menace the girls in our class, and the secret of who it was that fed a Gummi bear into the pencil sharpener to see if it would survive. (It didn’t. Neither did the pencil sharpener.)

Then I started hanging out with Jason Heisler and Michael Coupland, and got into punk rock (DK RULES!), skater punk (a little), Dungeons and Dragons (so long, any chance of not turning out to be a big ol nerd) and even very weakly dabbling in the occult. (Not my idea. I was a skeptic even back then. )

Then I went to college, the University of Prince Edward Island, and found it to be a great place where they had thing thing called philosophy, where they actually valued people who sat around thinking about things. Imagine that!

I also discovered my nerdiest, and hence most wonderful, group of friends ever. Myself, Hal Keller, Michael Dorsey, Chris Smith, Michael Lamoreaux, and a mysterious entity known only as “Bino”, we hung out chatting and playing cards in a library cafeteria call The Pit, and called ourselves the Pit Crew, and braved schoolwork, stress, and the seductive dangers of the Pit Chili together.

We also started hanging out a couple of times a week at each other’s homes, playing oddly ruthless board games for such a jolly group of friends. Even omega males need an outlet for their competitive bloodthirst sometimes, I suppose.

Then, after leaving college, I bummed around my hometown for a while more. Living with your parents as an adult is never very fun, but on the other hand, I was getting really good at Nintendo.

Then an opportunity to follow Internet love to the opposite coast in Portland, Oregon, and like the foolhardy star-chaser I was, I took it. I moved in with two gay guys named Brian, and discovered just was a cool, laid back, and artsy town Portland really is.

It was only after moving there that I came out to my parents. Via email. Not my proudest moment.

When that ended, I moved in with David Ihnen and Dhugal, two great friends who were nice enough to give room and board to a stranded Canadian out of the goodness of their hearts.

Then, after drifting back home to Summerside for a while, lightning struck again,and I followed love all the way to the Silicon Valley in California. And when that ended, who did I end up living with again? Why, David and Dhugal again, plus an awesome guy named Ross Archer, and eventually, a big lovable White German Shepherd named Zane.

And when my time there ended, I drifted up the coast to the Vancouver area, and that is where I have been ever since.

First I lived in a tiny bachelor suite, then I moved into my friend Steve’s almost as tiny apartment with him and kept our cat Tabico (part tabby, part calico) company.

But then Steve moved in with his girlfriend, and I got booted out of there, and ended up living with a way cool guy named Eamon Jones for a while. He worked in the movie biz making bloody special effects for horror movies, and was bemused by his failure to shock me with his art.

After Eamon, I moved in with my friend David and a crazy guy from Quebec. Literally crazy. There is a big difference from “Man, you so crazy!” and “No, seriously, you are literally insane. ” And the first one is a heck of a lot more fun.

Then, after a few more bounces, I moved in with a nutty hoarder with a zillion pets. The place was full of cats and rats and even a couple of house bunnies, and I loved having so many cute fuzzy critters around to love. The atmosphere was rather toxic, though (mostly ammonia) and I was glad to move out of there and into the place where I live now, and have lived for six years or more.

That is with my buddies Julian and Joe, two funky cool gay nerds like me, and we have an apartment jam packed with books, DVDs, and nerdly memorabilia.

That is the story so far, and of course, this story is far from over. Heck, if i am lucky, it is not even half way over.

I wonder what the other half will be like?

Originally published at The Blog Of Michael John Bertrand. You can comment here or there.

It’s a well-established scientific fact : it’s my 39th birthday tomorrow! It will be the official start of the last year in which I vaguely deserve to be alive, so I better make the most of it.

And you know what that means, don’t you?

That’s right kids… MORE SCIENCE!

We have a butteload (much bigger that a buttload) of great science news to share with you today, so let’s do like the bunnies do and hop to it.

And as always, we start with the magic words that open the distinctly rational vaults of science to our eager, tingling minds : SCIENCE IS FUCKING AWESOME!

Ya gotta work blue just to get the kids’ attention these days, I tells ya.

We have a number of nifty user interface stories today, so let;s count them off.

First up, we have this way cool interface dreamed up by the dream masters at MIT, a 3D mouse that works by levitating a metal sphere.

It’s called the ZeroN, and you just have to see this.

That is so stylish it makes me wanna cry. And it works both ways, too. You can control a computer with it, or it can be controlled via the computer.

And admittedly, making a metal sphere move around like the Invisible Man is messing with you would be pretty damn cool, although I am not seeing any practical applications for that side of it.

But I am very impressed by its various uses as a 3D mouse, especially one where the pointing device stays where you put it in 3D space. I can see this becoming a very hot accessory for the 3D modeler who only thought he had everything. Imagine, working on 3D objects in 3D!

And that astronomy bit was pretty darn impressive too. Custom solar systems!

But we all know that the hottest user interfaces these days are the ones for the brain. Cybernetics is a real honest to goodness science these days, and we are increasingly using our brains as input devices.

Like this idea called Brainput which monitors your brain to see if you are becoming stressed out via overwork and if you are, it takes over some of the work for you.

I am intrigued by what the subjective experience of such an interface might be like. Ideally it could keep a worker in “the zone” where they are at maximum stress free output all the time, and that could be extremely rewarding, even euphoric.

But I have to address the obvious question : if the computer can do some of the work, why is a human being doing said work in the first place? Why not let the computer do all it can, all the time, and free up the human for higher level tasks?

More salient, I think, would be a system that learns what tasks stress the user out the most, and what aspects of said tasks, and readjusts workflow and interface approach accordingly in order to make the work as low stress for the worker as possible.

Doesn’t that sound nice?

But the real progress in cybernetics was made this week when several severely paralyzed people were able to control robotic arms purely with their thoughts.

So not only is it the dream of cybernetics made real, it is also a heartwarming tale of how some old people who had be crippled terribly by strokes were able, for a little while at least, to do something themselves for a change.

These are people who cannot even speak or move from the neck down, much like Stephen Hawking. Although we might want to think twice before giving him access to one of these robotic arms. With his genius, he could probably use it to take over the world.

Now these robot arms are not exactly portable unless you are Optimus Prime. (And in that case, all your arms are robot arms, so what do you need some clunky human device for?)

No, these are big robot arms like the ones used in car factories. So nobody will be taking one home to help with the washing up just yet.

But this is a very big step in that direction. With advances in brain imaging and lightweight, user-friendly sensing devices, we finally have the necessary hardware to make brain interfacing technology a reality.

And normally, that would be exciting enough for one week. But that would not be this week, because I have a story I am even more excited about this week.

Turns out that in the USA, their FDA has just approved an over the counter, 20 minute, no lab AIDS test.

Yes, in the future, finding out your HIV status could be almost as painless and simple as finding out whether or not you are pregnant.

This could have huge social implications. The article seems to assume that these tests will primarily be used by people who want to test their own HIV status alone at home, in private, discreetly, and that is probably mostly true.

But the future I see for a technology like this is one where it allows for greater sexual freedom, because instead of everyone having to strap latest armor over their genitals because they can’t afford to trust their bedmates, people could simply test themselves in front of their prospective partners and then have at it with a will and without a condom.

In fact, you could even have sex clubs where being tested is required before entry, thus ensuring that everyone inside the club is HIV free, and can do whatever they please.

And all it would require is a poke with a needle and a 20 minute wait. Sounds reasonable.

And I am sure that in the future, the technology will be refined to make it faster, and have it cover every STD in the book.

Of course, being STD free does not mean you do not have to worry about pregnancy. So I suppose this would be less of a big deal for straight people.

But for us fags, the Seventies are back again, baby!

Originally published at The Blog Of Michael John Bertrand. You can comment here or there.

Here we are on another Thursday night, browser heavy with share-worthy content for you lovely people to enjoy as we roll into the weekend.

Fun fact : this Saturday is my 39th birthday!

And now, for the goodies. First off, here is a fun themed clip compilation called Three Point Landing.

Yes, heroes always make three point landings like that. Why? Because it looks really fucking cool, that’s why. Especially the landing, tiny pause, then slowly get to your feet looking pissed.

That shit always looks kickass, cliche as it is. I am not entirely sure why. The Desmond Morris fan in me suspects it comes from our semi-arboreal past, when we were only partly ground dwellers and used our agility and dexterity to travel via tree to avoid predators.

Imagine how impressive the alpha primate would be if he swung into your midst, landed, and glared at everyone. You would immediately know the shit had hit the fan, would you not? You would stop what you were doing and be very still, hoping like hell it was not you that was in trouble.

And well, what are superheroes (and regular heroes) but alpha humans who show up to punish the misbehaving members of our human tribe, protect the weak and the innocent from them, and put everything right again with their awesome alpha power?

When you look at it that way, having a superhero team called Alpha Flight makes sense, doesn’t it?

We're dominant! But in a really good way.

Next up, while I am not normally a fan of putting clothes on animals (they don’t need them, they don’t like them, and don’t think they do not know how stupid they look) (especially cats), occasionally someone will come up with an animal costume that is just too brilliant or adorable for me to ignore.

And in that category, this one hits it clear out of the Astrodome.

That is seriously the most brilliant dog costume ever. One dog dressed as two doggy pirates carrying a treasure chest. Whoever even conceived of this costume was a genius, let alone whoever actually designed it and constructed it.

Probably the same person, but still.

And the dog even looks happy in it. I would not have posted the pic if the dog had looked miserable.

Granted, dogs look happy most of the time. That is one of their most winning attributes and one of the main reasons they appeal to us human beings so much : they are filled to the brim with unbridled enthusiasm and optimism. You hardly ever see a dog looking depressed or worried or bored. And when you do, it takes so little to make them all happy and waggy and smiling again that it gratifies us.

That is especially good for those of us who tend toward the negative and gloomy end of the scale. We need that kind of sunshine in our lives to remind us that it is not all that bad.

I am still a cat person, mind you. But dogs can be pretty great.

Speaking of things which are pretty great, those awesome comedy nerds over at Splitsider have done all of us who worship the Al a favour by putting together a comprehensive list of every single Weird Al music video ever made.

Sure, you could go and find each of these videos by yourself, without their help. But why bother when they have done it for you? As a huge Al fan, I am impressed with their ability to know exactly what sort of thing appeals to comedy nerds just like me.

I mean, what an awesome resource! They even showed their mad comedy nerd cred by putting the list in chronological order. That makes so much sense that I have to love it.

Looking over the list, I am reminded of how disappointed I am that all of Al’s videos from 2006 on are mostly animated. It should be a winning combo for yours truly, because I love both Al and animation.

But the animated videos are just not as good at Al’s live action videos from his heyday. Al made his videos with the same skill and precision that he used it making his songs. Compared to something like the genius shot-for-shot parodies like the video for Smells Like Nirvana, these animated videos, with their ugly art, shaky animation, and overall sloppy production values, just look like crap.

I mean, check this shit out! The aformentioned Smells Like Nirvana :

Pure genius. More comedy per second that the Simpsons.

And now, the incoherent and poorly laid out video for Virus Alert :

And that was by the guy who did Retarded Animal Babies, work I have enjoyed in the past. But like we learned from the Samurai Jack version of Clone Wars, good thing plus good thing does not always equal good thing. In fact, sometimes it leads to crap.

And speaking of crap (oy, what a segue), I dare you to check out the home page for Bathroom Sprayers.

And we ain’t talking something to make getting those stubborn stains off the mirror a breeze.

No, we are talking about the bidet kind of sprayer. The kind you use in lieu of toilet paper. The kind all those sophisticated types in Europe use.

The kind you use to squirt poop off your butthole.

Now I have a certain fascination, not entirely juvenile, with things regarding our deepest and most primal taboos, the ones concerning the proper handling of our eliminatory functions.

And I can totally see how the bidet might have a lot of advantages over toilet paper. It is certainly easier on the environment (save trees from a gruesome fate!), probably more sanitary, and it probably feels kind of nice too. Like a shower for your butt.

But taboo runs mighty deep, and I am pretty sure that even if I had the world’s most luxurious, temperature-controlled, ph-balanced, laser-guided bidet in the world, I would still feel absolutely compelled to wipe myself when it was done.

And that kind of defeats the purpose, doesn’t it?

Originally published at The Blog Of Michael John Bertrand. You can comment here or there.

Holy crap, this super intense dreaming shit is getting hardcore.

I just spent another day mostly asleep and the dream level was maxed the whole damn time.

It really feels like I just came back from somewhere far far away. Or worse, that I just went to sleep in one life and woke up in another, and I am not totally sure which one is real.

In popular culture, we have a lot of wonderful things to say about dreams. Follows your dreams, don’t be afraid to dream, a dream is a wish your heart makes…

Well my dreams scare the shit out of me. So forgive me if I do not feel the same.

And it is not like they are nightmares. Usually they are quite pleasant, in a neutral sort of way. So no big orgies or hot sexual encounters or wild wish fulfillment trips where I am rich and powerful and a superhero or anything.

Honestly, most of them seem somewhat like I am living another person’s life. Perhaps that is one of the things that frightens me. It feels so much like I am someone totally different in these dreams that I feel like my dreams make me unsure of who I really am.

And the other lives seems so real at the time, although when I wake up and think about what happened, there are always a lot of things that are pretty weird about the dream world that you would thing would tip me off at the time that I was dreaming.

But that is that lucid dreaming stuff, and I can barely manage lucid waking.

But the usual themes are always there. Constant motion is one of them, generally in the form of searching for something, like, for instance, the way back home. I have a lot of dreams, as I have mentioned before, where I get lost and as I try to get back to where I was, I just get more and more lost, usually with things getting “curiouser and curiouser” as I go along.

But without the cute dresses or charmingly whimsical animals. Dammit.

It is usually not very scary, being lost like that. I am usually quite confident that I will find my way back sooner or later, and meanwhile, I suspect that I am kind of enjoying the challenge, and the sidelines that I encounter.

Sometimes, though, there is no being lost aspect at all. That is happening a lot more lately. Sometimes, I am just slightly adrift in somebody else’s life, usually a quiet pleasant one with plenty of people they are close to in their lives. I consider this progress. I think my mind is trying to dream up the things I have missed out on in my life, like all the personal connections that people usually get through their families, their friends, their jobs, and their romantic relationships.

I see this as part of my mind’s attempt to heal itself, and I applaud it.

In fact, I am beginning to wonder if I have been “blaming” the wrong factors for these bouts of heavy dreaming. I have blamed caffeine, weird weather, sleep apnea, and sinus malfunction, and probably a lot more things besides.

But maybe it is all much simpler than that. Maybe I have these days upon days of dreaming simply because my therapy is causing a lot of deep emotions to rise to the surface and be processed again, and my brain simply needs to do a hell of a lot of dreaming, and hence a hell of lot of time sleeping, in order to deal with all the changes going on in there.

I suppose that means that if I spent more time consciously thinking about and dealing with these things while I was awake, I would have more peaceful and less disturbing sleep.

But I am way too lazy and self-indulgent to do something while awake that will happen automatically in my sleep without me having to lift a metaphysical finger.

That might cut in to my valuable wasting my life on video games and Internet chat time!

So on the plus side, while I would rather be awake, I am glad that things are getting done while I am sleep, even if waking up from all that dreaming can be dreadfully disorienting and downright scary when I can’t even remember who I am, where I am, what day or year it is, or whether or not any of this is real at all.

Perhaps part of me just does not want to come back. Certainly I want to escape the life I lead right now (no offense to the people in it) and in my dreams, I do just that. I get to be someone else, someone who increasingly has it better than I do, even if they are just as poor. Someone who has close connections with lots of people, someone who has a close knit family, and most importantly, someone who has that sense of security that I have longed for my entire life without even realizing it.

A long time ago, I was emotionally abandoned by my family, and withdrew into myself as a result. And for a long long time, the very concept of being able to feel secure in the warmth of relationships with others was so far from my mind that it might as well have been written in an alien language deep under the surface of Mars.

As a result, I think I was more distant with people than I realized. You can pay a hell of price for being a nonjoiner. I did not trust the world enough to risk committing to connection with others. I have always gone very slowly and cautiously in my relationships, such as they were, and not a lot of people have the sort of perception and patience needed to wait around for someone to finish coming out of their shell for them.

And I need to work on that.

Thanks dreams! Keep up the good work.