October 17ths

10/17/1997, Friday            

Book: Thought Contagion. Interesting theories on mimetics. My theory is that memes can only form where there is sufficient uncontested conformity, or where collective thought is totally subverted. How does this tie in with morphic resonance theory?            

[10/17/2024: There was another book, Virus of the Mind about essentially the same thing. “The Trojan Horse method of [brainwashing] works by getting you to pay attention to one meme, then sneaking in a whole bundle of others along with it. If you’re an intelligent educated person you may be thinking, you must have to be pretty gullible to fall for that….A Trojan Horse can take advantage of your instinctive buttons, pushing them to get your attention and then sneaking in another agenda.” Rupert Sheldrake’s morphic resonance theory applies but he steers clear of politics, even though his theories attract it. Is politics a morphic field that shapes reality like it shapes organisms?]        '

[10/17/2025: Explore my LLM in progress on the topic. Start with Reports>Briefing Doc, then formulate your own prompts. The theem is how fascism is always possible through memes. It's time to get smart how they can insidiously infect the entire world].

10/17/2011, Sunday

What I really like about October is the subtle fragrance of prairie grass.

10/17/2015
            
“I heard this sick piece by the Bad Plus on their “Rite of Spring” album called “Adoration of the Earth”. —or as said by a young 14-year old budding musician, who later realizes this was an orchestral piece written in 1913 by Stravinsky, which begins a chain reaction of influences. There are so many things we don’t know that can create new cultural experiences. 

10/17/2021

On loneliness and isolation: William Shatner expressed this a few days ago when he was talking about the “ugliness” of space—the absence of life, but in a spiritual sense, there’s life in dark matter, or we want to have spiritual experiences through psychedelics and space travel or combination of the two. Manned Mars missions probably will require long periods of meditation, but how could they when always at the ready of controlling the spacecraft? This is why psychedelics and short trips to the edge of the atmosphere keep a sense of play in it without the thought of the imminence of death at the razor edge of risk.

Songday: Razor’s Edge (I like it when you can use the seventh in the melody)        

Razor's Edge (10-17-2021) by meta4s

10/17/2024

I’ve gotten so much from exploration of world music, but it’s always been an esoteric genre. With the use of AI by younger musicians, I can’t imagine that world music (or folk for that matter) will be an “influence” because there’s nothing being “inhaled”. The word “influence” has now been redefined, as well as “folk ideas” in the form of various memes and slogans as if it was 1934.

***

I’ve started another website to redirect leebarry.net. I dread designing websites, which is ironic because I loved it back in the 90s when everyone wanted to decorate web pages as if it was a form of interior decorating, choosing “paint” colors, textures, etc. We used to use our first digital cameras to take pictures to use as backgrounds. I like the blog format because it’s inherently diaristic, requiring a modicum of tweaks.