Rocky World

"I've been thinking of her in this rocky world"

Haven't written a song lyric in well over a year now. Instrumental music is the quickest way I know of to get to that place where I am happy with what I am doing. Where is that place? It's where there is ambiguity of meaning but clarity of feeling. To do this with lyrics would require something different than I have spent the last 6 or so years of my life developing.

So I just follow @BobDylanSays, and hope I'll be able to quit my job someday and work on music full time...

This is why the Economist is good

Rather than cover the 'climategate' email saga with a sensationalist page-view increasing tone, the Economist does what they do best. Actually look at the emails and put them in context...

http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14960149

The Library of Babel

http://jubal.westnet.com/hyperdiscordia/library_of_babel.html

Excerpt:
'When it was announced that the Library contained all books, the first reaction was unbounded joy. All men felt themselves the possessors of an intact and secret treasure. There was no personal problem, no world problem, whose eloquent solution did not exist - somewhere in some hexagon. The universe was justified; the universe suddenly became congruent with the unlimited width and breadth of humankind's hope. At that period there was much talk of The Vindications - books of apologiae and prophecies that would vindicate for all time the actions of every person in the universe and that held wondrous arcana for men's futures. Thousands of greedy individuals abandoned their sweet native hexagons and rushed downstairs, upstairs, spurred by the vain desire to find their Vindication. These pilgrims squabbled in the narrow corridors, muttered dark imprecations, strangled one another on the divine staircases, threw deceiving volumes down ventilation shafts, were themselves hurled to their deaths by men of distant regions. Others went insane... The Vindications do exist (I have seen two of them, which refer to persons in the future, persons perhaps not imaginary), but those who went in quest of them failed to recall that the chance of a man's finding his own Vindication, or some perfidious version of his own, can be calculated to be zero.'

Loss of Will

Conscious
Unconscious
Absurd
Loss
Nothing
Useless
Excession
Despair
Medicate
Paralyzed

Excerpt from a letter

Weizsackers book 'The World-View of Physics' is still keeping me very busy. It has again brought home to me quite clearly how wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge. If in fact the frontiers of knowledge are being pushed further and further back (and that is bound to be the case), then God is being pushed back with them, and is therefore continually in retreat. We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don't know; God wants us to realize his presence, not in unsolved problems but in those that are solved. That is true of the relationship between God and scientific knowledge, but it is also true of the wider human problems of death, suffering, and guilt. It is now possible to find, even for these questions, human answers that take no account whatever of God. In point of fact, people deal with these questions without God (it has always been so), and it is simply not true to say that only Christianity has the answers to them.

As to the idea of 'solving' problems, it may be that the Christian answers are just as unconvincing - or convincing - as any others. Here again, God is no stop-gap; he must be recognized at the centre of life, not when we are at the end of our resources; it is his will to be recognized in life, and not only when death comes; in health and vigour, and not only in suffering; in our activities, and not only in sin.

The ground for this lies in the revelation of God in Jesus Christ. He is the centre of life, and he certainly didn't 'come' to answer our unsolved problems. From the centre of life certain questions, and their answers, are seen to be wholly irrelevant. In Christ there are no 'Christian problems'. - Enough of this; I've just been disturbed again.

Excerpt from a letter from Dietrich Bonhoeffer to his friend Eberhard Bethge
(29 May 1944)

Bonhoeffer

We must learn to regard people less in the light of what they do or omit to do, and more in the light of what they suffer.

just so there is no confusion

Zombies only shwa.

Galacticon

Creating music moves with snails paces when you aren't doing it all the time. I can't believe it was ~4 months ago we first tracked these songs. Since then James and I have enjoyed a few odd nights and weekends mixing, tracking, retracking, writing. Matt rescued the drum tracks from the depths of beat-up equipment issues. (Really he gave us hope to even finish what we did!).

I absolutely loved getting to be creative after the fact with readings, screaming (much thanks jordan!), and general awesome noise making.

We originally had a full album planned, but these are the songs that made it through the haze otherwise known as real life.

Go download the new Heliocentric EP at http://heliocentricmusic.com

Trains, Planes, Sea Monsters

I just bought train tickets to London. I'm interested to see how they are going to solve this 'trains going underwater very quickly' problem as the journey is only supposed to take 4.5 hours!

In our time

"...In our time nobody is content to stop with faith but wants go to further. In those old days it was different, then faith was a task for a whole lifetime, because it was assumed that dexterity in faith was not acquired in a few days or weeks.
When the tried oldster drew near his last hour, having fought the good fight and kept the faith, his heart was still young enough not to have forgotten that fear and trembling which chastened the youth, which the man indeed held in check, but which no man quite outgrows... except as he might succeed at the earliest opportunity in going further. Where these revered figures arrived, that is the point where everybody in our day begins to go further."

-Søren Kierkegaard