stories listed under miscellaneous weirdness are random thoughts that are somehow connected to what i'm currently thinking about or working on. douglas coupland did a good job explaining the basic idea behind them in microserfs (beginning of 2^nd chapter):

Then Susan went on to say that Surrealism was exciting back whenever it happened, because society had just discovered the subconscious, and this was the first way people had found to express the way the human subconscious works.

Susan then said that the BIG issue nowadays is that on TV and in magazines, the images we see, while they appear surreal, "really aren't surrealistic, because they're just random, and there's no subconsciousness underneath to generate the images."

So this got me into thinking . . . what if machines do have a subconscious of their own? What if machines right now are like human babies, which have brains but no way of expressing themselves except screaming (crashing)? What would a machine's subconscious look like? How does it feed off what we give it? If machines could talk to us, what would they say?

So I stare at my MultiSync and my PowerBook and wonder . . . "What's going through their heads?"

To this end, I'm creating a file of random words that pop into my head, and am feeding these words into a desktop file labeled SUBCONSCIOUS.

and i am feeding my surreal, random phrases into this web site called ERRANTVILLE. just to collect them. maybe one day some computer program will make something of it.