Moving For The Sake Of Motion

I made it back from Canada, and have decided that it is just an amazing place to go party. I spent the whole weekend just doing whatever I/We felt like doing and really just being completely wreckless. I was able to go to another Warped Tour and hang out with all the guys from MAH for the second time this week. I spent a load of dough but it was worth it to add just one more wild thing that went on this weekend. Although the ride home left much to be desired, the trip as a whole was without a doubt succesful, and is a highlight of the summer without a doubt. Pictures of the trip can be found in either Adam O'neill or P-thom's facebooks.

After getting back from Canada we went to Rhode Island pretty soon after and I have just gotten back from that. It was a good time even though the weather wasn't too great for a beach trip. All the drinking that has gone on this week has just been out of control and it's only Friday. But hey, summer is coming to an end and I want to make the most of it. Speaking of summer coming to an end I believe Sutton and Roland went to school today to start football training. It'll be a while before I see those guys again but man after that Canada trip I can't even imagine what will go on the next time we hang out. Those guys are just wreckless and I love it.

So, if you haven't noticed yet, this blog is really my way of letting people know about all the interesting, thought-provoking, or intriguing things that I find on a daily basis. I suppose on a greater level it's a way for me to recount the things I've done and discuss how I feel about them too, but I do like sharing a lot of cool things. So I stubled across this website this week called We Feel Fine (http://www.wefeelfine.org) and it's basically a datebase of human emotion categorized by gender, age, or other characteristics. It's a really cool site and somewhat hard to explain so I'd have to recommend you check it out. I think that the idea behind the site is very innovative and really helps people connect on atleast a small level, and sometimes even a small connection to someone you don't know can make a big difference. This is the site's description of their purpose for the site.

"We Feel Fine is an exploration of human emotion on a global scale.

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings, increasing by 15,000 - 20,000 new feelings per day. Using a series of playful interfaces, the feelings can be searched and sorted across a number of demographic slices, offering responses to specific questions like: do Europeans feel sad more often than Americans? Do women feel fat more often than men? Does rainy weather affect how we feel? What are the most representative feelings of female New Yorkers in their 20s? What do people feel right now in Baghdad? What were people feeling on Valentine's Day? Which are the happiest cities in the world? The saddest? And so on.

The interface to this data is a self-organizing particle system, where each particle represents a single feeling posted by a single individual. The particles' properties – color, size, shape, opacity – indicate the nature of the feeling inside, and any particle can be clicked to reveal the full sentence or photograph it contains. The particles careen wildly around the screen until asked to self-organize along any number of axes, expressing various pictures of human emotion. We Feel Fine paints these pictures in six formal movements titled: Madness, Murmurs, Montage, Mobs, Metrics, and Mounds.

At its core, We Feel Fine is an artwork authored by everyone. It will grow and change as we grow and change, reflecting what's on our blogs, what's in our hearts, what's in our minds. We hope it makes the world seem a little smaller, and we hope it helps people see beauty in the everyday ups and downs of life." - Jonathon Harris

Also, as I was writing this post I came across a new Dear Hunter video of them live in concert. The quality of the video is really good and the video is of their entire set. So if you have yet to see The Dear Hunter live in concert definately check this out. Erick Serna on guitar has a rediculous solo at around 20 minutes and his guitar work is part of the reason their live show is just so amazing.