If you don't like comparing Trump to Hitler, maybe you can just compare Trump to Ferdinand Marcos?

Bernie-or-busters have been posting this quote from HST lately:

I really like the idea of Private Joker getting twisted by Nam, Watergate, and Reagan and becoming a government scientist working for the CIA involved with MKUltra.

ﾐA彡 and I finished "Stranger Things" last night, and one of the things that arrested me in the last episode was a song by Moby:

So I've been in a weird mood all weekend. Maybe it has something to do with the recent solar flare and the incoming coronal mass ejection. Maybe I'm not getting enough sleep. Or maybe too much sleep. Probably, I'm not getting enough exercise.

Now, bear in mind, there are decent scripts lurking in vendor/plugins/mephisto_converters that will do a reasonable conversion from either Wordpress→Mephisto or Typo→Mephisto. The problem that comes up, however, is the dichotomy between categories and tags. While I was still using Wordpress (which only offers categories and does not offer tags), I was basically using categories as tags. I never really did get into the whole semantic partitioning between categories vs. tags and find that tags alone satisfy my organizational mindset (meaning, complete chaos, but I digress.

The video is awesome.

I found all of this rather confusing, since I’m pretty sure I downloaded the same version of Mephisto to my local machine as well as to my Dreamhost account. But I got things running on my local machine with no problem, but had to struggle for a couple of days to get it to work on Dreamhost (with Ruby 1.8.5 and Rails 1.2.3 as of this writing.)

How much of your destiny is truly predetermined? How much of it is self-fulfilling prophecy? (There are technical terms for these things, I think, except I can’t remember them. Confirmation bias? Forer effect?)

Or perhaps in Slytherin
You’ll make your real friends,
These cunning folk use any means
To achieve their ends.

My brain is on fire.

I stumbled upon this book entitled Cultivating Stillness in the Eastern Religions section of Borders and immediately felt peace descend upon me before I even opened it up. It is a Taoist text, but with a little more mysticism about it.

I guess I need to start entertaining the possibility that I may very well be going insane.

I don't know if it is purely psychosomatic, or if there is some quasiobjective reality to my sensation of flux. Like the axis of the earth has shifted ever so slightly, causing the wind to subtly change.

Escapades in the middle of nowhere.