a travel of the awesome

Serial Superheroes

faboo — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 01:35:06 GMT

Somebody's been watching those gritty cable prison dramas. They won't let me watch those, but they allow me to view cartoons. Considering I hold the world record on comically-oversized-mallet-related-murders, does that seem like an intelligent policy to you? Or an even remotely sane one?

-- Alexandra Erin and Quinn Isley, Star Harbor Nights

when I feel like doing nothing else....

faboo — Wed, 09 May 2007 04:21:19 GMT

Leaving Elle
© faboo for great avocado

Do you remember
i was twelve maybe eight
and we went down behind
the hollowed homes
of those who'd found our little hill

down between
the river and the woods
and you showed me a face
that we would only see
When seven a m wasn't too early

when we'd stayed up all night
Not long later we breathed in coffee
and made morning night
and you smiled while we laughed
and stroked my hair when we cried

You remember how
you held her hand
while i held her open
to fill with all the things
that would come spilling out

I never found out if
she forgave me
but of that of you
i'd no need to ask
With sifted bottle caps

with sifted teeth
i dressed my self
and of that we hardly spoke
but you touched my cheek
drank my gasps and returned with sighs

Barely six years later then
you stood so finally silent
as i sifted and weighed the warrants
of everything that i owned
And so this letter

now that i've discovered
just how much like me
you've slowly grown
when i'd thought i'd learned so much
from you

surrealism

faboo — Wed, 02 May 2007 03:48:04 GMT

Sudra
© faboo

A belly full of asprin
pulls me down the aisle;
a bottle of conditioner whispers,
"I am unclean with the filth
of the dead."

My fingers fumble over
lipstick, eyeliner, blush
as they sing their colors.
"Eighty-fortyseven, thirty-twentysix,
forty-ninetytwo."

The sun rises.

A woman on a box of Strawberry Breeze confides,
"I slept with the photographer."
My feet shuffle in their sleep
and clockwork men shout at patrons
from the ramparts of my ears.

I start for a woman who intimates,
"Sometimes, I touch myself there."
I am uncertain if her face
is on a box.

this is about the job I had in college. see, most chain stores like to inventory all of their stores at the same time. we'd have these huge clumps of cvs, A&E, or (as in this case) eckerd. I'd wake up somewhere between 4am and 5am to be at a store that started at 7am (often after inventorying another store the night before). there was one early morning store where I literally slept through an entire aisle of product, only waking up when I realized I was writing in the counts for the final eight feet of shelf.

now, for some reason, during my last string of eckerds, I ended up counting the feminine hygiene aisle for nearly every store. either I'd be assigned it, or it'd simply be the next undone aisle. I don't know if you've ever taken a good look at the pictures they put on douche boxes (and if you haven't, I don't recommend it), but the facial expressions on the women in the pictures are bizarre; entirely unlike how any ordinary person would look at you.

at some point after seeing enough of these boxes, the absurdity of these women started to get to me. I started imagining them saying things as I scanned and counted their boxes; somewhere in the middle between thinking "I bet she'd say...." and hearing actual voices. as well as the two in the poem, they said other really fucked up things like, "I've never had an orgasm," and "the clitoris is a liberal myth."

I am glad I don't have that job anymore.

but this I like

faboo — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 07:43:15 GMT

copyright faboo (bitches)

acrid wet and pallid sweat
a step in now a stumble down
the pulse in flesh concealing mesh
and every beat a leaking heat

this prison no apple
a healing cage to grapple

blistered feet from daemon sleet
whispers black beneath the stack
these needles annealing and paper peeling
drip a drop cascades don't stop

the gun in radiation
grinning steel dilation

a choke a cough the gag a tongue to slough
the final fever the last true believer
grinning and awake the finally at stake
but and now are here the weak and wear

a simple loss a tremble dies
a failing scream of what if I

manhattan air is good for my allergies.

faboo — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 07:19:55 GMT

Leaves
by me.

As I breathe this again a new pollution,
a hue best forgotten
surfaces in the sea -
I am not prepared. And my eyes whisper
a word my lips take time to curse.
A sigh to chill my pulse;
I know no-one and am fortunate.

I will grow old with a beautiful woman
to whom I will say it over and over.
And when I let it play on my tongue
I will think how the word is strangely cheapened
when it is for others.
And yet I will forever remember
the one ear that never heard it.

And I will whisper her name
in sleep where I try to dream.
Punctuate my steps with her syllables;
dress my smile in her phonemes.
All while I shake the hollows
to empty my skull of yours.

Call this a first pass (which it is), so the word choices aren't (necessarily) what I'm talking about. Part of what I mean is that I hate that still have this poem to write, but also that I can't seem to phrase this idea in a way that I like.

The point here is that there are things we (well, at least some of us, anyway) keep forever, and, though they may rot and lose importance while we do, these memories and events and people still influence how we feel and what we do, though we do our best to forget them.

And I feel I will forever fail to say it with eloquence.

on idiotic phrases

faboo — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 03:52:24 GMT

I demand an end to the use of the phrase "slippery slope." Responding to an argument with "it's a slipper slope" is about the most hollow, insipid, and stupid ad hominen attack outside of calling someone a nazi. Basically you're saying "Oh, I'd agree with you - but I think you're too stupid not to start doing all kinds of crazy shit just because I said 'you're right' once." Why not just call them a fag, spit in their face, and be done with it? At least then you're being honest, and don't need to think up some kind of dodgy rhetoric.

ps. google ads think I'm in Jersey. wtfit?

Wack-ass Shit I Just Overheard on the Street, Part One

faboo — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 03:21:51 GMT

"... and I was told by a pimp^*, when I was in my twenties, that the paradigm of a black woman - and there is a paradigm - the paradigm of a black woman... is money."

As my co-worker Al said today, some things you overhear sound like the speaker's trying out for a (very strange) sitcom. I don't even know what that comment was supposed to mean.

^*Any sentence that begins with "I was told by a pimp" can't be going anyplace good.

leftist programming paradigms

faboo — Mon, 12 Mar 2007 10:29:01 GMT

what does "everything" mean?

I'm pretty sure if you asked them, most Ruby people would say, that in Ruby, "everything" is an object. but that's not entirely true. Proc (and the other function-y classes) contains parts that are entirely opaque, meaning that, in ruby, code is not an object (though it can be wrapped in one).

I'm pretty sure that Lisp is the only language where "everything" means "fucking everything" (Smalltalk may have me here, but I am woefully uneducated in Smalltalk), where (with the notable exception of compiled functions) "everything" is a Lisp object (a list, a symbol, blah blah blah).

I've got to wonder if there's merit to having fucking everything be an object (or a function, or whathaveyou). at the very least you gain the ability to transform entire programs, at any point in their execution, to a different format (such as YAML), as well as a _very_ detailed view of the program's state at any time you like.

there are very weird consequences to making everything an object (at least they seem weird). thinking about everything objectively means entire functions must be represented by an object, which means their associated routine has to be as well. for a lot of language constructs, that's not too far fetched. function calls, variable definitions, class definitions - all of that's pretty easy to swallow. but you also need to model flow control as objects. you need a reasonable way to represent selection, loops, and whatever strange things you include.

and if you do all of that, are actually helping anyone?

a grammar

faboo — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 02:52:24 GMT

program     :    program declaration
            |    declaration


declaration :    Symbol Symbol ':' valueList
            |    Symbol Symbol '(' paramList ')' statement
            |    Symbol '`' Operator '`' '(' paramList ')' statement


statement   :    value ';'
            |    Return value ';'
            |    Return ';'
            |    flow
            |    '{' statements '}'


statements  :    statements statement
            |    statement


valueList   :    valueList ',' value
            |    value
            |    {- empty -}


paramList   :    paramList ',' param
            |    param
            |    {- empty -}


param       :    Symbol
            |    Symbol Symbol


value       :    declaration
            |    '`' Operator '`' '(' valueList ')'
            |    value Operator value
            |    Operator value
            |    Symbol '(' valueList ')'
            |    value '`' Symbol '`' value
            |    '`' Symbol '`' value
            |    '[' valueList ']'
            |    Symbol
            |    Operator
            |    Character
            |    String
            |    Integer
            |    '(' value ')'


flow        :    selection


selection   :    If '(' value ')' statement elsif


elsif       :    Elsif '(' value ')' statement elsif
            |    any


any         :    Any statement else
            |    else


else        :    Else statement
            |    {- empty -}

this has got some notable issues, the most glaring of which is the ability to have function parameters that don't have types but no way to declare variables with no particular type or functions whose return type isn't declared.

faboo — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 07:15:21 GMT

I so want CSS to let me do L^aT_eX-like things, and CSS is so not L^aT_eX.

relatedly (and strangely), the strikeout tag is deprecated, but b and i aren't. that seems very contradictory.

faboo — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 00:57:35 GMT

Places not to live:
Texas
Indiana
Kansas
Missouri

more poetry

faboo — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 23:08:26 GMT

The Expediency of Expectation
copyright faboo and shit, yo

Little girls, do this that I say:
Cultivate an interest in pink,
and subtle hues
of blue and green.
Learn the names of every princess
to walk the earth
or grace a page.
Collect dolls and dresses and dishes and dainty teacups.
Have tea parties and sing pop songs,
and never wear the same tights twice.

Little boys, do this that I say:
Cover yellow steel dump trucks
in neatly applied superman stickers
and plow them through the sandbox.
Learn to fly every tuesday afternoon
with nothing but your pajamas
and Dad's welding goggles.
Capture insects and indians and igloos and incriminous robbers.
Hang ten off the coffee table
and never take greenbeans sitting down.

and then

At the age of ten wrap all that shit up
and get rid of it.
Light your barbies on fire.
Drown your gi joes in acetone.
Listen to that cool-jazz bullshit that your Dad puts on after dinner.
Take your dresses and your bermuda shorts
and bury them in the closet under those teddy bears you don't play with anymore.
Demand t-shirts in primary colors
l-l bean backpacks and
low-top cross-trainers.
Be an exemplary model of a young-person:
reserved but outspoken and filled
with wonder.
Become a new definition.
Become yourself.

the only issue I really have with this is the stanza. apparently, it's too subtle. in case you missed it, the only sincere lines of the poem are the last two. this seemed to pass right by my poetry class, which I found quite confusing.

also, my prof's major critique was to drop the end punctuation, which I thought rather odd, being that dropping the punctuation renders it unreadable.

faboo — Sat, 03 Feb 2007 04:23:39 GMT

The back of the Cheetos back reads:

What's in a serving?

For totally twisted
fun, count out
7 cheetos_brand
twisted puffs
snacks - that's just the
right amount of twisted
snacks for one!

Right guys. I eat cheese puffs because I'm a health-nut. That's why I wash them down beer, obviously.

damn you microsoft

faboo — Wed, 17 Jan 2007 06:57:03 GMT

It compiles!

IPC is for what again?

faboo — Sat, 13 Jan 2007 06:46:45 GMT

so apparently, the version of linux+glibc I'm running on this box doesn't support sharing POSIX semaphores across processes¹. I wonder how many resource control situations involve a single thread, and if they actually significally out-weigh multi-threaded situations. linux supports SystemV semaphores which don't apparently have this limitation, but they're more complex and, uh, no POSIX :)

After vague amounts of research, it appears that the Native POSIX Thread Library does indeed pack multiple threads in one process, partially to address just this limitation. Yet another reason to rebuild this machine....

¹Linux doesn't have "threads" per se, so limitations on multi-processing effectively limits multi-threading as well. I understand there's been some fooling around with multiple library-threads in a single process.

faboo — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 04:10:45 GMT

Ladies and Gentlement we have TEETH

faboo — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 02:24:45 GMT

people who write run-on sentences confuse the holy-living-fuck out of me. do then not read what they write? do they not know what punctuation is for?

relatedly, my 'k' keeps coming off. apparently I give a little twist of the finger when I press it and it pops off. and unsurprisingly, there's a whole lot of crumbs under there.

unrelatedly, babies are insane. Liam is been fighting going to sleep for like three hours. however, at this rate he'll fall asleep around 10pm and not wake up until morning.

Piece by Piece

faboo — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 04:22:01 GMT

Piece by Piece
© faboo yo

piece by piece
by truck

my toothpaste, my shaving cream
my couch.
my father's copy of Steele's book,
the rare second edition
that isn't an unnerving shade of green,
well thumbed by two generations
of Scotsmen so divorced
from anything British that only one of them
drinks.

assembled wires
and cables.
their attendant electronics:
a VCR four or ten
times larger than the occupied
space inside it,
a CRT quickly fading now
for nearly ten years,

my guitar.

boxes, taped and folded shut
full of vitamins, minerals, protein
suppliments
unopened and tasteless-
ly projecting the maternal politics of eating.
oppose:
coffee maker after coffee mug
after coffee maker after travel mug
and half again opened bags of grounds.

comes piece by piece
drop by drop

by truck

The Amoeba and the Flea

faboo — Sun, 10 Dec 2006 12:39:01 GMT

The Amoeba and the Flea
© faboo

He came with a squib, with a squub, with a plum.
To introduce he said,
I am Amoeba, I've no close friends.
Who might help break my bread?

Well I am Flea¹, the first in class,
They say I'll swim the furthest.
I come from genus Diaptomus,
But you can call me Earnest.

The oddest pair to talk that day,
All who saw them remarked to say,
So Strange, those two, to chat that way.

Well, tides, they came, both in and out.
The Undertow was waltzed,
The Fish was trotted, and cakes consumed.
They danced to drown their faults.

The oddest pair to talk that day,
All who saw them remarked to say,
So Strange, those two, to chat that way.

And so it came, time enough to crave:
Earnest heard him salivate.
He turned to see a giant maw,
But then it was too late.

The oddest pair to talk that day,
All who saw them remarked to say,
So Strange, those two, to chat that way.

¹ Apparently, there are fresh-water fleas. Who knew?

Edit: this is supposed to have an alternating tetra-meter/tri-meter (except with refrain which is straight tetra-meter). however, I'm having trouble hearing the meter(s), so if you can spot any bits that sound funny, I'd appreciate hearing about it :)

faboo — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 21:33:11 GMT

"thru" is not a word.

and while I'm at it, commas don't go everywhere one might hazard to breathe. and commas are not conjunctions for the love of crap.

ahem.

apparently, I'm what some people call "language conscious."

faboo — Sat, 09 Dec 2006 21:01:23 GMT

is it weird to read your own poetry and wonder, "what the fuck was I on?"

sometimes, the cat seems depressed.
a forlorn look, like a nudist getting dressed.
most the time she sleeps and then
eats and throws it up and chokes it down again.
you have to watch (quietly) all day
and sometimes night for her to take note and stay
to stare at the spot in our abode
that reminds how a maybe-life can forbode.
she muffs down on her couch depression.
she puts on that egyptian expression
but then it bends and furrows.
she tries to forget all she'll miss the coming morrows.

going to the bathroom must release endorphins

faboo — Fri, 08 Dec 2006 17:23:29 GMT

<Oh, I'm so... sleepy. Maybe I'll just roll over... and, oh, I'm sleepy. I'm... POOPING! Look Papa, I POOPED! How, is it dark in here? I found a new noise today! Look! I can roll over! What's over here? Wanna see how fast I can kick my legs? I'm REALLY fast! Hey, can we get a dog? I can roll really good, see? Hey, Papa, I wanna jump, can we jump? Let me warm up with some leg kicks! Why's it smell funny in here?>

-- Liam

So, it's my birthday

faboo — Wed, 29 Nov 2006 00:35:49 GMT

so, apparently it's my birthday tomorrow.

in light of this information, I'd like to celebrate my continued existance.

anybody feel like joining me at the Toad 8pm on Wednesday?

Note to self

faboo — Tue, 21 Nov 2006 07:13:42 GMT

just because you have to a assume that memoization might happen, doesn't mean you can assume that memoization will happen.

import Data.IORef

stored = newIORef 0

get = do
    state <- stored
    state <- readIORef state
    return state

set s = do
    state <- stored
    writeIORef state s

wontWork = do
    number <- get
    putStrLn (show number)
    set (number + 1)
    
    newNumber <- get
    putStrLn (show newNumber)

faboo — Sun, 22 Oct 2006 15:49:09 GMT

it is, strangely, infinitely easier to pay the electric bill online than the internet bill.

I say "infinitely" because I haven't actually figured out how to pay the internet bill online.

the electric bill took me about thirty seconds.