It's All the Shame To Me

“I’ll just list ways you can accomplish this [radical revision] when you are working on a poem. Dig up some old ones and see what happens (it’s best to use old ones to start, as you are no longer emotionally attached to them): 1) If someone tells you you have too much in your poem, add more. 2) If someone tells you you have too little in your poem, take out more. 3) Take the last line and make it the first. Rewrite from there, keeping whatever works in what’s already there. 4) Expand your poem: add subordinate clauses using who, when, until, if, while, before, after, as, since, whenever, where, etc. Also use coordinating conjunctions: and/and/and; or/or/or; but/but/but (think of it as a list that keeps going). So, for example: “The man, who once loved me, who once told me___________, and __________, and ____________, and ______________…” so you’re pushing the syntax and the comfort of the line/sentence. Actual listing - must make a qualitative progression (light to dark, big to small, for example); can’t be random. Push the list, see what you come up with. Repetition - repeat what you just said. Maybe repeat it again. Contradiction - say the opposite of what you just said. 5) Compress your poem: Negation: use the word ‘not.’ When you do this you get both the thing named and its absence. You can also use other words that negate - ‘un’; ‘never’; 'less’; 'without.’ Neologisms: (what I like to refer to as kennings - used in Anglo Saxon poetry): put words together to create a heightened adjective, a metaphor: 'the shutmouth mother,’ 'the sorrowfence.’ Possessives: use possessives: 'how the sun’s poultice draws on my inflammation’ (Plath) or 'the wind’s rebuke’ and 'the leaves’ exhalation’ (Brigit Pegeen Kelly). Shift the parts of speech: Use a noun as a verb or vice versa. Use an adjective as a verb, etc. Cut and paste: radically rearrange your poem. Find new combinations! EXERCISE: Go over your poem and underline any lines you feel jump out with lots of energy. Pick three of those lines. Make one the first line of a new poem, one a middle line, and one the last line. Now, using some of the above strategies (minimum 3), write a new poem.”

I have this idea for a video game called Are You Out There? where two players control two different alien civilizations and the goal of the game is to invent spaceflight and then manage to find one another in a ginormous universe. You can try to leave signs for each other to find, or send out probes and radio waves, or colonize many systems so you're a bigger target, but its hard because the universe is really big.

at the orgy doing it Newton's Cradle style

Fancy smart cars track you. Pings to satellites for gps. Your paired smartphone streaming music

The reason Flock cameras became a flashpoint is because they are vocal about being a third party selling your location, and they are building easy to search collections of data. Could a subpoena surface cell phone pings and a spotty web of cameras to general show where you drove? Yes, but that takes effort and a legal paper trail. This is a net catching all who pass, allowing the data to build patterns, where the patterns become the source of legal action, instead of searching for information relating an existing legal matter

not just fancy cars but almost all newer models:

Guy: Yeah I’m, I’m just gonna put this out into the world: I need you to drive, like you got in your car on purpose. Drive like you’ve got somewhere to be, because I do, and I’m behind you! I don’t know how I always get stuck behind the person that’s like. *impression* “That cloud kinda looks like.....looks like a rabbit!”  “I do believe....that meadow is full of daffodils!”

I've been thinking about this video non-stop for months, but do you know what just occurred to me? This is actually a great example of mindfulness, expression, and self-modulation.