(several times here, in fact), are the days of our lives. The only ones we get.

I’m starting the 2010 edition feeling depressed, honestly depressed for the first time in a long time. Not angry, not helpless, not stressed, just your basic depression.

I feel like I want to lay on my back all day with a pillow over my face and do it all again tomorrow and the next day.

I’m trying hard to fight it off, because I have a lot to do and I start the semester’s teaching next week.

do I realize just how much of my life I’ve wasted in various kinds of emotional collapse. What if I’d been less sentimental in general, had spent less time prostrate on beds with pillows over my head?

Days, weeks, months being heartsick, or depressed, or angry, essentially dysfunctional, unproductive, even regressive.

If I’d been a stoic, I’d have also been more prolific.

But I guess that’s what happens. You are who you are, you can’t get the time back, and at those actual moments, it was all I could do to simply survive.

So here it is. I’m not linking to it yet and it’s barely more than a skeleton at this point, but it’s official. This will be Leapdragon 2010.

For the first time ever, I’ve done what I always swore I wouldn’t and switched over to a database-driven CMS, namely Drupal. Why did I always refuse? I don’t know. The love of plain text files that can be grepped and awked about with basic Unix tools. Greymatter was ideal for me in that regard.

So why switch now? Because I’ve grown fond of Drupal and because I can’t be bothered with anything that requires more work than that. I’m moving on in life, I suppose.

I have bigger and flashier (or maybe just different) things to worry about than cooking up the perfectly idiosyncratic webhome. I need something quick, dirty, and scalable that I can develop in a couple hours, not a couple weeks, and that will more or less take care of itself.

—

Anyway, welcome to 2010.

humanity. Not at its prospects for survival or for its endless wars, but at it. Humans just aren’t that great. In fact, they’re arrogant, presumptuous, ignorant, idiotic, misinformed, narcissistic, amoral, selfish, self-defeating, hypocritical, violent, destructive, consumptive, and generally not nice things.

Too bad we had to happen. The planet would have been a nice place, otherwise.

species faces is the fact that it vastly overestimates the systemic-computational facilities of its individual members—i.e., it thinks that people are smarter than they are, that they can “think for themselves” on the one hand and “understand the consequences of their actions” on the other.

In truth, few, if any humans can do either. Some of the highest I.Q. individuals I’ve ever met have had immense difficulty thinking or understanding systemically or in multi-stage/multi-interdependency process-comprehensive terms, so much so that they fight aggressively for positions that (it will only be clear to them much, much later, and even then they won’t see the genealogical relationship between my position on a previous occasion and theirs at some later one) are ultimately unjustifiable, paradoxical, or tautological.

The fact that even with retrospective explication and archaeology they can’t be helped to grasp or understand the multiple nexus of causality that the genealogy ultimately comprises—or would do, if they were able to grasp it—shows just how helpless human kind is in the face of our massive and ruthlessly manyfaceted universe and the forces that constitute it.

Our only hope, basically, is cyborgism and “enhanced thought” technologies. Computers and networks are a first, incredibly primitive step, but they have to be brought into the centrality of consciousness (rather than made to work as its deaf, dumb appendages) before they will help us to transcend the limits of our unsophisticated conscious thought processes.