Category: Outside the Box

Non-mainstream thoughts and musings

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The End Is Near

We currently live in trying times.

That’s kind of putting it mildly; we’re actually closer to Biblical End Times than anything else. The populace has been utterly wrecked through misinformation, mismanagement, evil powers, and principalities. We can’t trust anything we see or hear any more. Those who question the narrative are lambasted and labeled as conspirists.

And you know what? Nothing I do will change that. Speaking truth accomplishes nothing when no one is listening.

I have fallen short as a husband, father, and leader. I am struggling with all this insanity with the you-know-what lockdowns, and now the rioting. My workplace is inundated with propaganda and hysteria. They forced us to work from home for a time. Chastising us if we walk down the hallway to go to the bathroom we share with other employees. Constantly cranking up the pressure, despite nobody here even getting the sniffles. We’re constantly told that we’re selfish, that we’re the problem, that we don’t care about people dying, that nothing we do is ever enough. It’s exhausting.

What’s the big deal?

I’m not going to argue deaths and numbers, because frankly, even if I show proof, nobody cares.

Do you know why nobody wants to believe the truth? Because people want to be afraid and angry. The populace gravitates towards fear and control like a moth to a flame. Humans are stupid, panicy animals. If you tell them a virus is going to wipe out mankind (despite tons of evidence it won’t) they will latch on to it like a Pittbull on a toddler. If you tell them they’re victims and should be angry, they will pick up bricks and smash anything in sight, whether it has anything to do with it or not.

Fear is of the enemy. People are driven by it, controlled by it, and always live under a thinly veiled pretense that they’re not afraid. But you show an incomplete and manipulated chart on facebook, and suddenly everyone reveals their true motivation: FEAR.

“Oh my gosh!” they squeal. “We’re all going to die!”

Well, yeah, we all are, eventually, of something.

Funny how all those Darwin fanboys don’t have anything positive to say about a virus that wipes out elderly and sick people, huh? Hmm. Go figure.

So anyway, The End:

Ah, yes. The impending doom of the universe. Almost forgot about that.

The truth is, our time here as individuals is short. The idea that we can live forever, while noble, is complete and utter baloney. We’re not immortal. Our lives are fleeting. And honestly, if you’re wasting your life being fat and unproductive, you shouldn’t be surprised when your life ends prematurely. If you’re spending your time being angry about something, that ultimately won’t prevent you from dying, or even protect you from injustice.

But what should we do, then? What’s the point of anything if we’re all going to die?

Well, that’s the question, isn’t it? Why are we here? What’s our purpose?

Find Your Purpose

If your time here is limited, then you’d better know what you’re doing while you’re here. Your purpose is to glorify God in whatever you do, as the penultimate part of creation. If you’re not doing this, then you’re not fulfilling the reason you were made in the first place. Sorry, but that’s just the way it is.

Just pointing out oppression or lies doesn’t glorify God by itself. Lots of humanitarian organizations do this. You need to move beyond the “I must do something!” mindset and have a “what does God want me to do?” mindset. And you can’t just assume. You have to get on your face, spend time with God, and wait patiently for an answer. Everything else is destined to fail.

It isn’t until you die to self that you can find God. He’s not interested in you doing things your way. In fact, in the grand scheme of things, you don’t matter that much. The world doesn’t revolve around you. When you die, your time here is over, and you will be forgotten. Glorifying God doesn’t mean accomplishing huge things for Him. He doesn’t need you to do anything. What glorifies God? Honoring Him, worshipping Him, putting Him in the proper place in your life. Not relying on self.

Stop feeling sorry for yourself, stop being afraid, and get on your face before God.

Everything else will become evident. Nothing else matters.

You can’t just say “The world is ending!” You have to get to the point where you admit your world will end. And then maybe you will begin to understand the futility of glorifying self.

it’s not that The End Is Near- it’s that Your End Is Near. You aren’t going to live forever. You have to come to grips with this.

PS: I still hate WordPress’ Gutenberg editor.

Sorry, Automattic, but your shortsightedness, callousness, and lack of concern for users pretty much permanently put me off of WordPress as a platform. Sucks, but… it is what it is. If I end up keeping the domain, this site will get converted to a static HTML site. Of course, I’ve tried a WordPress plugin that automatically does it… and guess what? Didn’t work. Sigh.

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Ownership of Things That Aren’t Things

“The things you own, end up owning you.”

But what if those “things” aren’t actual things?

I was reading an interesting gopher phlog (warning: you need a gopher-enabled browser to see it) called “Everything Is Amazing but Nothing is Ours.”

Essentially, it describes how in the early days of computing, users still thought of files as “things” that you could share, move, and delete. Over time, everything has migrated to a “service” where everything is just cell data stored in a database, delivered on demand.

I’ve seen this happen in numerous areas, like Android apps. Most of the big services moved from a “pay one price for the app” to a subscription model. Sometimes that works out better for consumers, sometimes it doesn’t. It always works out better for the companies, otherwise they wouldn’t do it. All major software companies are doing this, even with operating systems. You don’t “buy” a copy of Office, you have a subscription. You don’t “own” a copy of Windows or OSX, you pay for a license to use it- which can be revoked by them, at any time, for any reason.

I recently had a discussion with an older coworker (who’s an audiophile) about making recordings of broadcast music onto tapes or CDs. At first, I just said “with Spotify, you can listen to anything you want, wherever you want, whenever you want.” But the more I thought about it, I understand why he does this: it’s because he has a tangible copy in his hands. It’s not dependent on whether he has internet, or the correct DRM-equipped player. He just pops a tape into a deck, and he’s got music. He rips every DVD or CD that goes through his hands. He has a huge catalog of media, all re-recorded by himself, DRM-free.

Shane’s phlog accurately explains how the modern “service” model is better in many ways: it’s easier, faster, more powerful, flexible, and cheaper. But the flip side of that is that you lose “ownership” of your information. When everything becomes a service, then you no longer own anything. Continue reading “Ownership of Things That Aren’t Things”

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Purpose And Anti-Purpose

For the last 10+ years or so, I’ve blogged about things off and on here. My brain ranges between topics freely, like a bird flitting to and fro in a cage. Never settled, always looking for another perch. Not realizing that I’m still not really free to go where I want.

But by spending time thinking about purpose, I’ve seen the duplicity of my brain, and how it sabotages my purpose.

If I say “My purpose is ___” and then that only constitutes 25% of what I do, at best, is it really central to my purpose? No, of course not. So why does my brain refuse to focus on my purpose?

Simply put, it’s my flesh. My worldly nature is in control. And I have allowed it to run amok. If I were of singular focus, I would hardly ever get distracted and waste time with things that didn’t matter. Too much of my energy is spent on ancillary activities, while my central purpose goes neglected.

Just identifying the problem doesn’t solve it, though. And this is the part where most people fail.

So how do you fix something when your problem is the inability to fix things?? Continue reading “Purpose And Anti-Purpose”

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Analog Brain

So, let’s assume that I’ve been toying around with the idea that I want to go all analog. And when I say “all analog” I mean everything. Which of course, made for a fun mental exercise.

If I were to go all analog, what are actual replacements for all the digital things in my life?

Photographs? Recipes? News articles? Contacts? Receipts? Letters? Journals? Writing snippets? Playing music? Recording music? Reading books?

If I were to go completely analog, it would require a bit of work, true. But there are still plenty of analog solutions out there:

  • Lomography sells vintage-style 110 film cameras, and film to go with them
  • Rolodex still sells card catalogs (as do other companies)
  • Index cards and holders are plentiful
  • Letters, paper, and envelopes (and pens) are all still available
  • They make small desktop-style filing cabinets for receipts and things
  • They of course still sell journal notebooks and such
  • For long-form writing, there’s still typewriters around
  • Analog music? Records are making a comeback
  • Need to get a cassette deck too, I think. Tapes are still available
  • Not sure if walkmans are still around, but they should be
  • Calendar/planners still exist
  • Board games and card games too, of course!
  • And for twitchy-games, pinball machines!

I think the biggest challenge to going all analog would be how to convert what you already have into analog format. Could probably print some of it (photographs, index cards, etc.) to get started. The problem is it’s easy to get analog into digital, but very time-consuming to convert digital to analog, by nature of the format. Can’t instantly convert music onto cassettes. Can’t import your calendar into a planner.

Continue reading “Analog Brain”
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Don’t Complain: Minimize

I feel somehow stirred. I just read The Machine Stops by E. M. Forster. A short story written in 1909.

It is scary how much he knew about human nature and the possibilities of technology. Here we are, 110 years later, and so much of it has become true. Everyone lives in beehive-like cells. Their every need is supplied by “The Machine” which they worship. Until the machine breaks down.

I see it as something that precedes and underlays The Matrix, and Brave New World. And 1984 and The Giver. And Harrison Bergeron. And V for Vendetta and Fight Club. And, well, every dystopian story written in the last 100 years.

There is an inherent brokenness that permeates humanity. It is only becoming apparent in the last century or so, but the signs were there long ago… as The Machine Stops so clearly demonstrates.

I find it extremely ironic that the way we complain about technology and dystopia is through the internet. The internet, probably more than anything else, has contributed to the homologation and dumbing down of humanity. I was told a few days ago that I was foolish because it was “bad to judge anything on experience, and that I should defer to experts.”

I just laughed. Of course, he was talking about liberals in the FOSS community, but it’s symptomatic of everything in society. This is exactly what The Machine Stops illustrates: people who despise actual experience, and defer to experts (who in turn learn from other “experts”). Ultimately, there is a disconnection from human interaction except for the very unregulated act of intercourse…. which is of course no longer for procreation, only for entertainment.

Modern culture is an erosion of the very core of what humanity is. Is it pushing away everything that makes us human, and embracing everything that does not.

And as for “The Machine,” it is alive and well in the world today. We serve it constantly. I don’t think it’s become autonomous yet, but it wouldn’t take much for it to happen (thank you, Ghost In the Shell). And of course it doesn’t control every physical aspect of our lives yet (though in some places it does). But mental control is just as strong- if they control us mentally, then it doesn’t matter if they control us phsyically. We will do the machine’s bidding.

Mental Bandwidth

So for me, my push back against The Machine and the idea of mind control- which I assure you is alive and well in entities like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Apple- is to break from the digital input into my brain. I suppose I could do away with the internet all together, but in the underground, it is still useful in some ways.

When I think of digital input, I think the idea of mental bandwidth is a real thing. That’s part of why the internet, back in its inception, was so popular: it was text only. It required no more brainpower than writing a letter, or reading a book. There was limited bandwidth, so it was unusual for people to waste it with frivolous things like graphic header images and moving pictures. None of that was required for the transference of ideas. It was pure, not necessarily in intent, but in form. If you couldn’t explain your idea and communicate with the standard ASCII character set, then nobody paid you any attention. There were much fewer regulations. Much less surveillance. No advertising.

We weren’t constantly force-fed a steady diet of high-bandwidth information (of which only about 2% is useful). And that’s not to say there weren’t trolls, but they were quickly dismissed. Nobody took you seriously if you couldn’t articulate ideas.

Now, none of that is required. Nobody needs to have ideas; only cute snapshots or memes, or copy-and-paste snippets of nothingness. And in a high-bandwidth world, everyone’s senses are so overwhelmed with useless information, they never get to think about what’s actually important.

But you know… we shouldn’t complain. Can’t buck against the goads.

I’ve written about Digital Minimalism before. Numerous times.

Complaining won’t change anything. But limiting my mental bandwidth can, very definitely, improve my own life and mental capacity for things that matter.

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Have Computers Ruined Music?

After watching Rick Beato’s video “How Computers Ruined Rock Music” I had to sit down and think about music, and how it impacts me. Beato obviously knows what he’s talking about, and is good at producing tracks. But does the idea that “rock music was ruined by computers” ring true?

Well, sort of.

If you expand the idea of “computers” to technology in general, then no, it hasn’t ruined rock music. Without some of the technology we have now, things like the Digitech Whammy wouldn’t exist (and neither would Rage Against The Machine’s iconic sound). There wouldn’t be John Mayer’s “Bigger Than My Body.” We wouldn’t have affordable synthesizers and amplifiers and effects. Technology has come up with some amazing tools for making music, which have greatly impacted rock-n-roll for the better.

But on the production side, I think Beato is very much correct: Perfection is the enemy of Good. He goes into great detail explaining why editing songs so that every part is perfectly on beat and in tune ruins the “feel” of the song. He’s absolutely right.

Music performance, as an art form, is being over-produced into oblivion by the Photoshop generation.

Continue reading “Have Computers Ruined Music?”
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Coming Out Of The Clouds

Doing more thinking about minimalism (surprise!).

I was looking at cloud storage alternatives out there, and was thinking about the ones I’ve used in the past. Evernote, Google Drive, Dropbox, and now (self-hosted) ownCloud.
(Edit: How could I forget the ill-fated Ubuntu One? It was gone too soon.)

Back in the day, we had what were called “file servers.” They weren’t cloud servers, or blades, or fairy-dusted unicorn farts (or whatever the Cloud claims to be now). They were old computers sitting in a closet, running Windows 98 (or NT 4 if you were swanky) with a simple folder share. You backed up your stuff to that, nothing else. Every once in a blue moon, you would make a backup of that backup, for good measure.

But the idea of “cloud computing” is just file servers, on the internet, served over bloated www API’s. They just transfer documents back and forth. The nicer ones have revision history, or built-in note tools and such. But in the end, they’re pretty much just file servers. You’d still need end-to-end encryption, but that does you no good if the cloud providers are compromised- and they often are.

So I got to thinking, “do I really need the cloud at all?”

And of course, the answer is, no.

We, as consumers, have bought into the idea that we need all this cloud stuff, and I understand the frontend packaging is slick. But it’s just not really necessary for me.

Could I use a file server? Sure. On the internet? Yeah, I could make a secure FTP site, or something to that effect. SSH or whatever. Doesn’t have to be a web interface, doesn’t need a slick front end, and doesn’t need a monthly fee. Just a good old-fashioned secure VPN would be good enough.

On top of that, my ownCloud server runs on a database, which is slow. Can’t run it on cheap old hardware. I just need a simple computer with a big hard drive. And apps? Don’t really need them, other than whatever I used to create the document with.

Anyway, there’s plenty of stuff I can simplify on my end. One of my (long standing) projects is to go through all the old backups I have and delete all the digital crap I don’t need. Save what I can use, delete the rest. Pretend it never existed- imaginary housefire style.

(I once read minimalist decluttering described as an “imaginary house fire” where when people would ask “what happened to item X?” they would just respond “Oh, we lost that in the fire.” That blog post has since been lost to the obscurity of the “not-on-google’s-first-results-page” web.)

More to come. Work is progressing slowly on my static website and gopherhole, but that will happen sooner than later.

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Friday Musings

I’m coming up on my birthday this weekend. I’ll be 45. I know it’s just a number, but I know there’s things I have to work through.

I know I need to simplify my life… I’ve been writing for years on minimlism, but I need to put more of it into practice. I moved the G4 Mac to my coffee table today. I’m thinking I might still give the iMac to Andy… there’s not much it can do that my laptop can’t. And in the case that the laptop dies, I can just get another one. That’s just less stuff I have to work with. I could just use a decent monitor with my laptop (any laptop) instead.

Minimalism. What does it really mean? I slimmed down my phone, removed as much junk as I could. I’m scaling back my website so I don’t have to worry about constantly fixing it, or updating it from hackers. I just want stuff to work. I want to find the Rambler a better home(sort of, I still like it). I would like to take that money and put it into playing music and furthering my ministry. Lord knows, there’s plenty of music gear I could use. But even that: how much is enough?

And what is my ministry? What exactly is it that God wants me to do? Do I even know?? Should I consider myself qualified? No- I’m not qualified. But God will work through my weakness. I need to remember that. Even when I fail- sometimes daily- God wants me to seek him and believe in his salvation for me. If I don’t really believe in his work on the cross, can I really understand his love for me? Can I really know his heart, if I can’t accept his gift freely?

Freedom- freedom from things, freedom from fear, religion, from condemnation, and shame. Freedom from guilt- not guilt from my sin, but from feeling guilty for being who I am.

I think I really do have a worship pastor’s heart, but only God can make that happen in my life. And I haven’t been very faithful. Not in my heart, not in my actions, not in my mind. Not in my body. In fact, I’m a pretty horrible person by God’s standards, so it’s really hard for me to understand his love for me in spite of that.

I need to pray for God to show me his love for me the way he sees me, not the way I see myself.

I think I like journaling with mostly text. The Gopher server project is coming along nicely, and I expect to have it up and running shortly. I might need a better keyboard if I get back into writing, though. This one is better than nothing, but it kind of sucks.

Okay. Will post more soon.
(This post was composed in RedNotebook, and copy-and-pasted into WordPress.)

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Digital Minimalism

As funny as it seems, there is an entire movement that exists to resist advancement and innovation in technology. There have been books written about it, movies made about it, and who knows what else. It’s called “Neo-Luddism” though I don’t necessarily subscribe to it. However, there are several reasons for resisting technology and wanting to go back to the way things used to be:

  1. The new thing isn’t really better than the old one, it’s just more expensive
  2. The new thing does one thing better, but everything else worse
  3. The new thing requires you to upgrade other things you didn’t want to upgrade
  4. The new thing requires more personal sacrifice than you’re willing to give

There are examples of this in every aspect of the marketplace now. Even when buying a car, the car is “connected” and wants to pair with your phone, your personal information, and possibly share that with the manufacturer- and you can’t turn that off. And when the marketplace only has vehicles with these “features” you don’t really get a choice. As I’ve said before, freedom is choice, and when you’re only offered choices you don’t want, you’re not really free.

This is the driving force behind Digital Minimalism: choice and freedom.

Continue reading “Digital Minimalism”
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New Directions

I feel like God is drawing me into wanting to do music ministry full time. I don’t know what that will look like yet.

I don’t know if that’s something I need to go back to school for, and I’m not really thrilled about that. It would be exciting, but at the same time… I don’t feel like I could do it with my current job.

I really like my current job, but I know it is not my life’s calling. I would much rather teach music and lead worship for a living. But how can I do that? I can’t just quit my job. Not yet, at least.

What would that (going back into music ministry) look like? How could I (understanding it’s not me) make that happen? Why is God showing me this? Why is God giving me a desire to make worship my career, after so many years of me saying “I will never do professional music ministry again”? Can I do that without sacrificing my heart? I want to be pure in motivation. I never want to make money worshipping. But I would love to be able to do that all the time.

Continue reading “New Directions”