2010 June 27 - A brief synopsis of recent events

I'm now making enough money via Google AdSense to finance a tripod plan upgrade (about $30 USD / month if you can believe that!); this means that most of the ads will go away (all of them eventually). I'll be honest, tripod is not economically competitive with other hosting services (they don't even support PHP yet), but it does have one advantage that is an absolute necessity for me: pretty good anonymity. Also I feel a bit of loyalty towards a reliable service I've been using for over ten years, so it's not an unwilling compromise.

This new indexing system that I'm using absolutely rocks. I finally feel like I've reached the level of visual and functional optimization that I was after all along.. there are still a few tweaks I'd like to make as time allows, and as HTML5 becomes more ubiquitous and hopefully useful; but for now, this just feels right. As for all the deeper pages, well, that is more of a work in progress. The cmap is coming along nicely, I've added quite a few new entries in the last couple of months.

I think it's far more significant to note that neotoy itself as a concept and as a continuum has been reaching all new levels of refinement in my psyche, which is ultimately the only place that it will ever be able to fully come to fruition. The characters especially have continued to evolve in accord with my own personal learning experience. I hope that one day, when I'm actually ready to unleash them upon the world, they will seem so real and individually complex that I will be able to tell the story of neotoy almost exclusively via each character's unique point of view.

In regards to the real world, I'm in the process of learning the most painful lesson of all: how to let go. Admittedly, this is not something that you ever learn completely, but have to face continually throughout life in varying degrees. Specifically for me I struggle routinely with the paradox of living in a world where "change" must be more than just a catchy campaign slogan, in order for there to be a future; and yet there is nothing in this world short of catastrophe that can facilitate the kind of change we need. This is a gross oversimplification I realize, but more or less accurate.

We have reached a point as a civilization where we are all increasingly faced with the realization that we have lost the collective ability to control the infrastructure that determines our quality of life. At this point there is really no option besides letting go of our attachment to an unsustainable way of living, and accepting the fact that the situation has become exceptionally dire. Right now our self-appointed world 'leaders' are in Canada attempting to solve the unsolvable riddle: How do we reconcile unsustainable growth with ever diminishing natural resources?

The tragedy here is not that this puzzle has led to a high-level dialog, but that it has become abundantly clear that we can't implement a solution even if one is found. In truth, as a species we've never tempered our fate with any measure of foresight, we've merely done whatever we wanted at the time and then suffered the soul crushing consequences at a later date. Never has this been more true than it is today. In conclusion, I find it exceedingly difficult to rationalize any investment in our ideologically bankrupt society. Change is coming all right, but not the kind we had in mind..