hüdwnkd :: digital sehnsucht

Hey, you.

2009-07-16T22:58:00.002+01:00

When I'm not out there, single handedly undermining the entire field of psychology, I've found a little time to do other things.

No particular order:

Submitted illustrations for Awkward Magazine.
Wrote a dissertation: Crafting Grotesque Surfaces - Blood, Skin & Synthetics in the work of Eva Hesse, Orlan and Laura Splan.
Moved back to London; I live in an estate maisonette surrounded by pretty Georgian townhouses. It reminds me to keep my place.
Get rejected from a lot of jobs; but there is hope that I might become a PA in a fashion design agency. This relies on if I am stylish enough. Cue brass band and party hats.
Cut my hair & coloured it grey. Ultimate success.
Graduated University with first class honours.
Cooked awesome meatballs for an American hardcore band called Logic Problem.
Been to a lot of shows.
Disliked a lot of shows.

There is some other stuff too, but why bother?

You might be interested to know that I have recently started posting on tumblr; I find it... Better? I can host images there, and it seems pretty swell so far.

Follow me there, at the celebrated Biannual Heist Review.

//

Gimmie gimmie gimmie...

2009-03-03T15:07:00.002Z

grose bush by hyperhaus

I'll be attending the Conference On the Idea of Communism at Birkbeck later this month. Rather giddy about it; doing some pre-there reading to synch myself up.

University is, as it consistently has been, underwhelming. Very often I think of it as a monetary fee I agreed to in order to somehow meet my partner, who was introduced to me by a University friend. This introduction is worth the debt; as is the random, unrelated situations which come from being in this location rather than this institution. IHTFP.

Why are people bothering me about the images & interpretations of the Rorschach test cards? I believe the term I should use in replying is 'get bent'.

This video makes me gay (for my partner). Does watching it change your ability to be psychologically evaluated? Please complain like a wimpazoid in the comments.

Finding patterns out of nothing is not solely basted on some deep inner psychological flaw, but rather in response to every other image we've experienced within our lives in the formation of our personality. We've already seen all this ink.

Gorse is my favourite flower of the moment. I have a single gorse bud, pressed and dried, which was exchanged between my love and I on boxing day 2008. Being as I am poor at expressing my sentimentality, I keep it hidden secretly in my notebook; yellow, like the little paper frame I made to keep Ese-E's photograph in over my desk. Gorse also smells of coconuts/vanilla. How awesome is that?

// way down low

2008-11-12T21:11:00.002Z

University has taken me under
like a submarine.
Only occasionally do I come up
for a breath.

///

Les Bicyclettes de Belsize

2008-08-27T22:49:00.000+01:00

///

Les Bicyclettes de Belsize; a short musical. London in the idealistic swinging sixties - boy rides bike; boy crashes into billboard of a girl; boy falls in love with billboard-girl; meanwhile billboard girl is lonely at the top & wants to show a man she's worthy of love; boy meets billboard girl by chance; she's taken away by photographers for fashions shoot; boy rides bike across London, finds her, they frolic in the park.

Aside from a very intriguing opening shot, which pans over the rooftops and upper windows of Hampstead, and the vaguely ominous overhead shots of the boy riding his bike through the streets, this short is... Baffling. It's definitely one of the stranger pieces of cinema that I've seen recently; like a bad attempt at the whimsical realism of early French New Wave, only Les Bicyclette manages to be both stuffy and vapid at the same time.

It's stuffy, in that it makes no attempt to question the roles of Boy & Girl; he expects to get her and she expects to be got - there is no tension, no emotional chase, and not even any passion - the characters don't engage with each other, but it doesn't seem like an intentional choice. That leads to the vapid air; their relationship, like their place within the 60s London they inhibit and their role in the film, is superficial - they have no depth, and instead act as visual markers for the swingin' London subculture aesthetic, who act out expected roles of boy/girl in love archetypes.

Most interesting is the aria that the Boy sings after he has crashed into the billboard that shows a picture of her face. Ultimately, he says he's fallen head over heels in love with you (billboard-girl), while placing flowers upon the area of the billboard that he damaged. Funnily enough, the area is a basket of flowers on a bike - and the flowers he puts on the painted flowers are, I believe, plastic.

After depositing the flowers, he continues singing and caressing the printed billboard girl-face; professing his love over and over -- then getting back upon his bike, he heads rides over to a Printers shop; there, he rips open packages, finds a portrait of the Girl, and sits in the shop window, staring lovingly at the image of the Girl. After a cut away to the Girl, where she sings a song about wanting to show a man she's worthy of love, the Girl walks out into the street and sits down in front of the window where the Boy was staring at her photograph. It's only after a few moments that the Boy realises the real-girl is outside; he then turns, and they try and kiss through the glass of the window.

I can't quite articulate why I find it so off putting, but the whole Boy falling in love with the Image of the Girl is just... Well, off putting.

Ultimately one loves one’s desires and not the object one desires, seems like a suitable explanation for the film -- only it's so wrapped up in it's own shallowness, that the film doesn't leave itself to questioning the intentions of its characters.

Although, perhaps this lack of depth is expressed, if not from within the actions of its characters, but instead within the title song of the short musical;

Turning and turning the world goes on
We can't change it, my friend
Let us go riding now through the days
Together to the end, till the end

Les bicyclettes de Belsize
Carry us side by side
And hand in hand, we will ride
Over Belsize
Turn you magical eyes
'Round and around
Looking at all we found
Carry us through the skies
Les bicyclettes de Belsize

Spinning and spinning the dreams I know
Rolling on through my head
Let us enjoy them before they go
Come the dawn they all are dead, yes, they're dead

Les bicyclettes de Belsize
Carry us side by side
And hand in hand, we will ride
Over Belsize
Turn you magical eyes
'Round and around
Looking at all we found
Carry us through the skies
Les bicyclettes de Belsize

J & the Job Market

2008-08-21T11:03:00.001+01:00

I woke up today and realised I am terrified, in regards to my future prospects as an adult. I feel that I will never be able to get out of debt, or own property - but most of all, I worry that I will not be able to get a job once I graduate university.

There's only 10 months left before I graduate; I've got to write 10,000 words on ??? (aesthetics, women, class, film - how's that for specific...) and produce a piece of work, installation or video or whatever I wish, for which I am not too worried. While it's not easy, school work, it's at least something I understand.

When I graduate from my BA, I had aimed to go on to study an MA. Right now, the most intriguing course is Aesthetics & Art Theory @ Middlesex - but I'm just not sure. First, if I'd be accepted with a (projected) 2:1 in experimental video from a third tier art school - and second, if I would be able to afford it at all.

Even if I start an MA program, it will most likely have to be part time - so regardless of if I get in or not, I will need to find a job, so I can continue renting & eating food & buying books.

Having watched my partner unsuccessfully spend the last four months looking for a job, only to end up temping for his mum -- and to have also spent the summer looking for extra work, I dread diving head first into the English job market next year.

My partner and I were having this conversation yesterday; Oh God, I said - horrified, I'm going to have to work in T.V., then with sceptical consideration, But the money's okay...

Haven't we played enough charades?

2008-08-19T19:15:00.004+01:00

A Mental Health Foundation poll of 2,000 British adults found a third are cutting back on going out with friends due to limited funds...

Celia Richardson, a spokeswoman for the charity, said: "As the economic slump begins to affect everything from food prices to mortgage repayments, this research shows that financial worries are a source of stress for many...

"But people are making changes to the way they live - like growing their own fruit and vegetables, and walking and cycling more. Not only is this evidence that people are adapting well to change, but some of their altered habits are actually good for mental health.

"For many people, particularly the younger generations, this may be the first time they've been surrounded by worrying talk of serious recession. By spending less, people can help themselves avoid serious debt, which can lead to feelings of depression and anxiety.

"But they need to replace shopping and spending with other activities they enjoy and shouldn't isolate themselves from friends."

She advised people to find cheaper ways of socialising, such as playing games with family and friends like charades in the living room or Frisbee in the park.via the BBC

::indiscriminate screaming here::

You're my guitar hero...

2008-06-10T14:15:00.002+01:00

Nellie Bly

Annie Oakley

Ada Lovelace

///

I worry about the lack of contemporary female heroes in my life.

When I was in second grade, I did a presentation on Nellie Bly -- I even had this awesome hat that I thought was super historical, but was most likely just an absurd mess of netting and felt that my mom thought was funny.

Although the book my school gave me on Nellie Bly was, well, for second graders, her story has always stayed with me. I just thought she was, and is, so god damned awesome.

Her esposé of neglect and abuse at the Women's Lunatic Asylum in New York both fascinated and horrified me as a child; but it didn't surprise me, as far as I can remember. It seemed to make sense that authority, when unchecked and unobserved, would be cruel to those who they thought were weak and troublesome.

Hmm!

Annie Oakley and Ada Lovelace are to be spoken of another time...

//

PS: I finished my 2nd year of University with a 2:1 -- I think in American inequivalent, I'd be at 3.8 GPA? I'm not entirely sure; but I don't care, because whoo, 2:1! Fools!

Transatlantic Accent

2008-05-19T23:37:00.001+01:00

Katharine Hepburn's speech 1947 against HUAC

Once Bitten

2008-04-12T18:54:00.003+01:00

Every day I read Boing Boing comments, and every day I say to myself Oh God Why, don't read Boing Boing comments, they're horrible things! -- yet, every day, I read Boing Boing comments.

There's a dead newt on my desk,
and I can't read anything worth while.

Hear Hair

2008-04-04T18:07:00.003+01:00

Boy, aged 3, banned from nursery school over haircut.

It looks sweet on him, even if it is kinda chavy.
Who cares about hair? Middle class England.

I was refused a job at Waitrose, here in my posh middle class new money commuter town. Straight up told I wouldn't be hired, because of my extreme haircut.

Aesthetic discrimination is bizarre.

I took photographs back in December, when I applied for the job.
Would you let me stock shelves and ring you up for luxury food products?

s&m + bible studies

2008-04-01T11:13:00.004+01:00

Started/finished this wallet today - because I'm already a slave to the system; why not stuff all my bills into some gimp.

//
I was going to complain about art school, but why bother?

Different class of assholes.

All I really care about right now is:

The Wire
Being In Love
Fucked Up

I prefer Dresden

2008-03-03T22:34:00.000Z

Self portrait as Tokyo & Dresden circa 1945.

//

Prince Harry killed thirty insurgents (human beings) directing air strikes.

They're putting Jack Ruby's pistol up for auction.

Manqueller man.

birds see ??? fps

2008-02-27T15:38:00.003Z

30 seonds // Pigeon Sight

Editing experiment.

Edit: it is actually impossible to view Pigeon Sight on youtube, due to the compression. The piece was edited with what my chum Owen refers to as the knitting technique -- moving images are made through splicing together single frames of video sequences between one another, creating an optical illusion which melts two or more shots of video into one jittery image. I think youtube compresses my PAL 25 frames-per-second down into 15 or so FPS, thus, you see random broken up frames. In short, you're seeing about half the piece -- and the whole point of the editing experiment is erased. Amazing.

I must find a place to host .mov files.

//

I'm to present a pitch for a video project tomorrow morning. Of course I haven't written anything down or made any examples or even fully committed to an idea, but at the moment I reckon I'll be doing an adaptation of the Antigone/Ismene scene from Seven Against Thebes - using that as a pretext to explore motifs of meaning, repetition and determinism.

Ideally, I'd get access to the green screen studio, which would allow me to play Antigone, Ismene, Eteocles, Polynices, and the chorus of 12.

Only I am terribly apathetic at the moment, and don't feel like doing much of anything. My room is an absolute mess, I cannot get a hold of my student loans company, and I am generally sleepy and bleh. So I suppose the best route of action at the moment is to go have a coffee and hide in the back of the cafe reading 'Antigones' and listening to the Misfits.

In other news: I really would adore a Pixel Vision camera. It records to audio cassette, and the quality is amazingly wonder-horrible.

Example:

Dream of Horses /// I've lost my voice.

2008-02-11T23:53:00.000Z

I lost my voice this weekend in Brighton. Whiskey and cigarettes and Spaniards and sea breeze will do that. Take them away just like that. But I had to record this -- the text seemed too alone to post by itself.

...

Dream of horses

//

I had a dream the other night, about a circus in France. I was in a medium sized town, something like Magny-en-Vexin, near where my parents live. With a big wide open square in the middle of town, my dream town was surrounded by high stone walls with arches, with many assorted shops and cafes worked into the stone. The streets shot off in all directions, and it was a busy but provincial town.

When I first saw the circus in my dream, there were many pairs of miniature horses with big mauve plumes set into their bridals. Dozens of pairs were pulling the weight of the circus caravan, but as it progressed, my initial excitement rapidly faded. There were depressed looking llamas which followed the horses, then most horribly, a baby elephant, emaciated and crying, was walking slowly on a treadmill set into a splintered wooden cart. It was wearing a tattered cape of mauve, with a matching circlet of silver and mauve thread fraying on it's head.

Behind the crying baby elephant was a platform, on which was a deflated hippopotamus, sedated and hardly moving, paired with a sagging grey animal of indistinguishable species, moaned quietly, animal sounds as the parade moved by. More miniature horses with mauve plumes came by, their reins connecting them to the rest of the caravan. Patchy tigers, wheezing camels, a cracked and empty aquarium - and the worst, the ring leader and his wife.

They were posed at the end of the procession, standing upon a structure which was reminiscent of a sledge. Round and short, they wore tight smiles and leather jackets, with plumes and silks and finery in the same mauve as their horses. They sipped sparkling wine from cut glass flutes, and the ring leader lazily slapped the leather reins against the numbers of miniature horses, egging them on continuously, so sweat dampened their mauve plumes.

Underneath the feet of the ring leader and his wife, was the freshly cracked shell of an adult tortoise. Somewhere along the way, the procession had crushed the ancient shell of the ancient reptile, and now the ring leader and his wife were standing upon the now flattened dome of its shell. Dark red blood sitting sticky on green carapace and mauve satin shoes.

Within my dream I flew into a rage, upon seeing that crushed tortoise. I started to chase them through the streets of this dreamed French town, screaming obscenities and shaking my fists, stopping in attempts to wrench cobblestones free from the pavement, only to have to run again to take aim at the ring leader and his wife. Nobody could hear me, all my stones fell short, and I could never get close enough to the relentless, forced progression of the circus caravan.

Rorschach & Me

2008-01-21T21:30:00.000Z

Two whirling Dervish's holding onto a giant scarab beetle.

A pair of happy old men gnomes engaging in a hand clapping game.

Hermaphrodite dancer with a bleeding heart looking into a mirror over a sink with a guitar playing in the background.

The inside of a rams skull OR two penguins examining their feet.

A rather depressed moth.

A rug made from the skin of that wolf from those old Looney Toon cartoons. Help, help, the Wul-uf, the Wul-uf.

Siamese twin Cancan dancers from 1910s Paris who've lost their enthusiasm.

A particular set of chameleons breathing icy air over butterfly wings which carry them along from their womb.

A cackling old man high-fiving himself as he sits atop the north-eastern seaboard of America over which is a large elephant trumpets.

Dancing crabs and a jovial underwater celebration with mermaids and all sorts of sea creatures.

The Problem of Modernity

2008-01-21T15:18:00.000Z

I don't know who's a bigger asshole. Does it really matter?

On My Sister's 20th Birthday

2007-12-29T19:58:00.000Z

It's my sister Lmo's 20th birthday today.

20 years we've been together, good and bad. I'm glad I never succeeding in getting rid of her when we were young, and I'm sad I wasn't always there, but in all I am happy we are where we are today.

She's applying for universities this year. Queen Mary's have already accepted her, and we're waiting to hear back from Sydney Sussex. She has an interview at York after the new year. I am very proud of her. Not just because she gets good grades and can decipher poetry like nobody's beeswax. I'm proud because she's my sister and I love her, and she always attacks any job or challenge with an insane vigour that I don't possess but do admire.

Having been tenant long to a rich Lord,
Not thriving, I resolved to be bold,
And make a suit unto him, to afford
A new small-rented lease, and cancell th' old.

In heaven at his manour I him sought:
They told me there, that he was lately gone
About some land, which he had dearly bought
Long since on earth, to take possession.

I straight return'd, and knowing his great birth,
Sought him accordingly in great resorts;
In cities, theatres, gardens, parks, and courts:
At length I heard a ragged noise and mirth

Of theeves and murderers: there I him espied,
Who straight, Your suit is granted, said, & died.

We are terribly different - she's competitive and sharp, I'm quasi-apathetic and ponderous - but we share the same sense of humour. I think that twenty years of laughing together keeps us close.

So indeed! Happy Birthday Lmo! I love you dearly, and plan on causing trouble with you for a long time to come.

Very Polite Spam

2007-12-21T01:01:00.000Z

I'm glad to see spammers are starting to follow a more subtle sense of decorum.

Happy Christmas

2007-12-19T14:41:00.000Z

Eavesdropping = Moral Equality

2007-12-18T14:36:00.000Z

I was on the train yesterday evening, coming home to my tiny Georgian Surrey firetrap, eavesdropping on the other passengers, as my iPod was drained. I quite enjoy eavesdropping, because I i; feel like a spy, ii; learn stuff about strangers. It's amazing what people will tell other people aloud on the train. Loose lips sink ships, and all that. Anyway. This was an asian man named Abdul, who had studied Forensic Science and now worked for a Pharmaceutical Company in London. He was 27, his birthday was the first of December, he knew humpty million languages because his father was a translator and thought it was important. He apparently didn't believe in working for money, but for happiness - but he was very career driven, never the less. All this I learned through him chatting up a 19 year old Polish au pair named Tasha whose birthday is, so she said, today - the 18th. Happy birthday! The age part was funny -- when he learned, there was a palpable awkward silence, and he gave a very good impression of being embarrassed. Beautiful.

This isn't the point, though. Though eavesdropping, I learned also that pharmaceutical company's have been outsourcing their human clinical trails to eastern europe, because they are more cost effective. It got me thinking, whether or not it was ethical for pharmaceutical company's to offer a financial incentive to the poor to be tested on in eastern europe? While it could help give economic sustainability to a region, could it also cause a conflict of interest between local commerce/government and the human test subjects? If the subjects were mistreated or manipulated by the pharmaceutical company, would local government have enough pushing power to fight back and get subjects what they deserve -- or, with the pharmaceutical company's economic contribution to the region, could local government be tempted to ignore the complaints of a few subjects, if it meant many others were still being paid and channeling that money into the local economy?

I was going to join a clinical trial last summer in London, but I was discouraged by family, because they are fearful souls. It would have been £4k for three weeks of my time, but alas, my dreams of escaping my ever growing student debt will have to utilise something other than medical science. While I know the incentive for me was financial -- as well as medical curiosity -- I had the luxury of knowing that I didn't totally depend on medical clinical trials as the only way of getting money. It would have been a fast and easy way, be it high risk, but much less high risk than, say, robbing a bank or selling cocaine to stock brokers.

Now there's an idea... Blah. So, I am trying to get into writing my essay. It's not working. I still only vaguely know what I am looking at for specifics, although I have about 9 books out. The question:

How liberating is the notion of the cyborg? Is the 'posthuman' a desirable future?

For me? Fuck yes. I am a cyborg already -- a transatlantic gender-nutral culturally ambiguous technophile who doesn't have to fetishise technology any longer, as it is so smoothly integrated into my being. Liberation of the cyborg will be an acceptance of miscellaneous and hybrid beings with cultural and moral autonomy. We have so much 'rubbish' DNA within our bodies, it is just there for the ride - and we very well could be nothing more than temporal vehicles for DNA -- but the notion is, we are not pure. There is no fundamental human nature in the rigid yet delicate sense that Francis Fukuyama rants and raves about. It could be that our fundamental human nature is the will to change our environments to suit us, while retaining the ability to adapt to our environments themselves. Or not. It doesn't really matter.

But as for the posthuman being a desirable future... What is desirable? To be free from suffering is a novel concept, but I think it would be most impossible -- our ability to daydream and imagine keeps us with fresh suffering all the time. But to have more freedom to choose or adapt the physical bodies we exist in while on Earth, while offering every human being the same opportunities to remove the biological constraints which we live within now, that certainly seems desirable to me.

There are pigeons in my chimney cooing wistfully. I've got to get some work done, as my chum E should be hanging out with me later. It is then that I will eat bad homemade Mexican food, and watch The Wire for the first time - and attempt to force him into conversations over what superpowers he'd have, why he insists on refusing to have a superpower, and how the answers to thrash lyrics like 'ego stroker / shit eater / self serving unreality / gutted cavity of / pixelated futility / human flesh disconnect / get the fuck off the internet' are all within the Birth of Tragedy.

Moar Interactivez

2007-12-11T03:22:00.001Z

Hey, look! I made that!

What that is, in it's poor quality you-tube uploaded glory, is a recording of me messing about with my designed digital cellular mirror. Mm, delicious DV & youtube compression has gotten rid of the crispness of pixels and colour that flood the screen, but what's really important is to focus on the tempo of tonal shifts and distortion. Mimics heartbeats! Or it does, in theory...

I can't sleep. Blah!

Interactive Works

2007-12-08T21:29:00.001Z

Oh how I enjoy working with MaxMSP.
Currently I'm making a digitalised cellular mirror.
Look at how happy it makes me.

If anybody was thinking about an xmas gift, the $35 for student 9 month package of MaxMSP/Jitter wouldn't go amiss...

Begging aside, I've been doing nothing but making Max patches, drinking coffee, and listening to hardcore/pop-punk for hours upon hours.

I really hate how there are hemp seeds in my salad seed mix.
Avocado skins taste like the smell of dried blood, which is beyond gross.

Blah, blah, blah.

Image Dump

2007-12-07T21:14:00.000Z

The 7th Seal

2007-12-04T11:14:00.000Z

Now that's out of the way...

I was tagged with the 7Secrets Meme.

Only I don't think I have 7Secrets.

Come to think of it, I don't think I even have one.

So here's 7 mean things I've done to my sister Leah, in no order;

*Hit Leah with a ornate brass candle stick for some unremembered reason, age 14/15/?.
*Smothered 18-months-younger-then-I Leah with nappies to assure rank on food chain. Failed. Although, as I lacked a moral compass at like 2/3 years old, that might not -really- been mean. Unknown.
*Forgot to tell Leah that Miz ? was occasionally Mr ? when they were set to meet 1-on-1 for the first time ever.
*Forced her to come to an after-party when we were 17/16, where she proceeded to get violently ill off a 30-somethingth floor balcony again and again and I laughed maybe a little.
*Totally ate the last delicious cake that was meant for her and blamed it on CJ. Wait, whose that being mean to?
*Locked her out of our bedroom when we were teenagers, so I could sit in there smoking pot with my boyfriend and not share any with her even though I said I would.
*Didn't defend her rabidly enough during the many kangaroo court hearings at our fake ''democratic'' school.

Those are like secrets, right?
I'm sure theres worse things too.

But at this moment in time, I have mini oreo's and essay research to continue.

Delicious

2007-11-28T14:53:00.000Z

//

Things are dull. The sky is grey and I've been working on gathering up research materials for an upcoming essay. ''Is the Posthuman a desirable future? Morality & Transhumanism''.

I've been reading:

The Birth of Tragedy
Our Posthuman Future: Consequences of the Biotechnology Revolution
Nicomachean Ethics
The Cyborg Handbook
Poetry, Language, Thought
Pattern Recognition
Smoke and Mirrors

//

Outside my little third story 16th century apartment-house, whose construction lends itself perfectly to my worry-fantasy of a cholera epidemic incubator, there is a extremely expensive extremely middle-class mock-French patisserie/boulangerie. A single store in a UK-wide franchise.

The bread and tiny cakes are Delicious, but not in the same way that they are in France. Maybe it's the water. Maybe it's the grain. The people who work there are all tall, slim and clean cut. There is a Japanese woman who speaks perfect accented English, and a red haired smiling Northern fellow and another woman who does not smile. They will correct your pronunciation. Perhaps 6 or more additional people work there. It seems excessive. How many workers are required to tie delicious cakes up in ribbons?

They do not actually make bread and cakes there. Many mornings I am awoken from my third story room to the sound of deliveries happening in the alleyway that keeps our buildings apart. Sometimes it sounds like the world is falling down, and I hide under my comforter so I don't have to see the grey bowl of sky outside the window. On sundays they throw out the delicious breads, wrapped in plastic and placed within a paper bag then placed within the hard plastic square of the skip. On mondays they throw out the delicious cakes.

Three weeks of me living in the little third story 16th century apartment-house, observing the mock-French workers working outside my window, attempting to hear the scurry of rats at night and discovering none, and I started waking up early Monday and Tuesday mornings to pertain deliciousness with my housemate, the ageless-but-young Anglo-Italian girl with mild Aspergers who makes miniatures of sustainable buildings with total devotion. We eat cakes and talk about ancient Egyptian emperors and soy beans.

People seem content to buy from them, to get wrapped up like their cakes within the ribbons of supposed French-ness. English bakery's aren't as important as French ones, apparently, so they get away with charging £2.75 for a macaroon. It's a bit like Disney land. It's not a real castle, it's not a real bakery - nothing is baked there and nothing is French. Total simulacrum. We eat it all up. Eating fake French bread from a skip is no less delicious, but it certainly lacks the spectacle of sophistication.

Ponderings

2007-11-05T16:22:00.001Z

//

Reading a book the other day -- it may have been Sexual/Textual Politics, or an introduction preceding one of Lacan's seminars in a literary criticism reader, that was speaking about Language and what it means to us. It was describing language as the processes of not describing what is, but on describing what is not.

You and I can speak of a polar bear on the moon drinking ice tea with the Princess of the Amazon, and we can piece together a picture. Pretty elemental stuff.

So I finished reading I Robot in one day, and paused to dwell it over in my 03:33 insomnia, and thought about the Machines. I don't know if I got it. Human beings are always sad and in crisis - we are hardly never content. What separates us from other mammals is our Language, which is essentially our imagination - our mental timeline.

Shit. I read an excellent abstract of an scientific paper a year+ ago, which was arguing that consciousness can be defined by human beings ability to mentally conjure the future and the past as well as the now. It's written down in a sketchbook from last year. I must investigate this further.

Back to our imagination -- our great gift, I suppose. We can create, make things, theorise and express abstract metaphysical ideas. We can imagine that utopia -- and in doing so, we are constantly striving -- but unlike ants or bees or other social insects, we do not have a chemically suggested mass goal. Where is our altruistic swarm theory mechanism? Instead we all constantly strive not as a mass human body, but as individuals working perhaps in tiny groups - clashing with others, causing conflicts of interests.

And our personal ideas of Utopia, our imagining how things could be improved, keeps us all sad. Often our lives do not live up to our imaginations, and the longing that helps us create and also stop us from improving at all. Sadness, depression and apathy all from imagination.

If I was a better person, I'd of read Proust by now -- but I haven't. All I have is snippets from Monty Python, Thomas and films. Did he really say that the years he spent suffering were the most important? I can't agree with that for face value, but I wonder about the cause of suffering (our imagination & future/past sight causing longing/anguish & creativity) as being what is most important to consider in being human.

I'm just not sure.

Humans are malicious.

2007-11-05T16:01:00.000Z

///

When I was 11 or 12 I knew this girl. Virginia. My friends and I once misread her name as Vagina and got hysterical. We were probably very mean, in fact I know we were. She was odd looking and acting, which isn't saying much - as I was odd looking and acting, but worse I was judgemental in that typical adolescent girl assimilating herself within the group sort of way. Her eyes were big and she had curly blonde hair. I can't remember anything she liked; I just remember that thick plastic tag on her Jan Sport backpack, hanging in the coat room, spelling out her name in big multicoloured letters. She stole stuff, now that I think of it, from that coat room. $20 from that kid Brian Macaulay's bag, or maybe it was that tall blonde kid that looked like a Viking and laughed at me once when I got pastry dough on my t-shirt when we were cooking pies for an apple-harvest celebration. I can't remember. Virginia had it rough. She was a rich kid whose mother made crafts in their kitchen and sold at local fairs, and whose father did something or another I never cared much about. Someone once called her wide-load, Max Morningstar I think, and she got all upset and I did nothing because I didn't care. She wasn't even fat, she was just big. Once I had a dream where she, myself, and my friends were all walking down the road in Wellesley Massachusetts. There was this big pickup truck with some weird guy who asked if we needed a ride. We all had wet feet, or missing shoes. Myself and my friends said no, but Virginia jumped on inside and they drove off. Somehow, although I was no there, I knew there was some awful altercation going on in the truck with Virginia and the weird guy. Although I remember it as a dream, I can't be too sure that it wasn't a story that I was told happened to her. I don't think it happened. The last time I saw her I was 13 or 14 - she had been kicked out or had left school, for stealing from people or something. I was in a Star Wars flight simulator at the local cinema, cackling wildly with my sister Leah as we were jerked around in this mass of plastic on hydraulic gears. Virginia and her friends were near by. She must have said something to them about us, because they were calling out our names in some attempt to start a fight, and we didn't really notice over the din of simulated pod racers. Once it stopped, we saw a sheepish looking Virginia tugging a friend by the sleeve, while the others were glaring at us. I couldn't think why they were all so malicious, until Leah and I got more quarters for the other grand prix game, and I remembered laughing at her name tag hanging in the coat room.

PSA

2007-10-28T15:59:00.000Z

Transatlantic New Romantic

2007-10-04T07:44:00.000+01:00

\\

Sometimes I can't tell if there is some big joke in England where you tell people who've left the country and return ten years later, that you don't carve pumpkins on Halloween - you carve turnips.

It could be that they're all lying to me.

//

Upon returning home last night, I discovered that somebody had put a vinyl copy of Kings of the Wild Frontier on my bed, covering up my school books. I promptly started to laugh, then wondered how chic it'd be of me if I threw up out of my window. Three stories makes for some interesting splatter patterns, I reckon.

\\

I'm upset because my friend Kia is upset. Tenth of May - we're cosmic twins, of epic proportions. When boys hurt your friends feelings after asking you to help with their web design course work, is it okay to put a secret message in with their encryption applet? Ikq hnf gqlowbx pfqb) becomes You are fucking mean. I didn't want to write the source code, but now that there's a real incentive...

//

When you're presented with a chart of project objectives for the next two weeks, which include your roles and the roles of your group members in colour coded glory, you remember why it's awesome to have a friend with OCD and severe performance anxiety. It makes for some stylish organizational tools.

Everybody needs a Hermoine.

\\

How many roads...

2007-10-02T21:21:00.000+01:00

Right now I am moving at dial-up speeds, attempting to get together (to get her together) a bunch of resources for my co-leck-shun, and it's doing my head in, as it were, so let me stop and ponder something else.

Frank's got me thinking, which is always nice. So here I am asking myself, what is childhood in the 21st century?

Heavy words, I know. But with boys being tried as men, and the many opportunities for girls these days, the question is heavy on my mind.

One way of looking at the way we treat children in contemporary Western society could be looking at the trends of what children want as consumers. I mean, that's how we define adults -- it can't be that different, can it? No certainly not.

Game consoles, iPods and media players, cell phones, CDs and DVDs, computers and laptops, video games, televisions and DVD players, cameras... We are children of the easily accessible technology boom, where inexpensive electronics run plentiful - we might not know why it may have happened, but we know we want to be involved.

Like Victorians dressing their children as little Lady's and Gentlemen, are the trends in adult consumption of objects passed onto their children without care for their age? Perhaps consumerism, or more graciously, a love for technology, is an ageless trait. We grow up surrounded by media objects saturated in our environments - monkey see, monkey want.

There are times where I feel for many adolescents, childhood vanishes very quickly - the lines blur drastically, and as a person becomes aware of their environment and the way they effect their environment, they cease to be a child. Maybe? Maybe.

Some people, who will remain nameless to curb their already bountiful traffic, have said that today's young people harbour incredible vanity and narcissism, to such an extent that it may be actually harmful towards their development. Is this just the mirroring of their elders, or the experimentation with super-accessible media outelts? The late 20th century saw an overabundance of self indulgent narcissistic behaviour - the birth of the Star - it would only seem logical that Its offspring would be that of the Nathan Barley's and the Scene Queens.

UK society is one which is growing ever more surveillance orientated -- we're watched on cameras on tube stations and buses, in Tesco's parking lots and shopping mall floors, the foyers of night clubs and the entrances of their bathrooms, quads of colleges and 6th form hallways. Video cameras are conveniently integrated within cell phones, digital cameras and laptops. YouTube, MySpace, Buzznet, Facebook, Flickr and a myriad of other sites offer virtual communication and media sharing, letting users literally edit, format and present their lives like publishers presented features in magazines when they were still important.

With so much of ones life being recording - both passively (CCTV) and purposefully (YouTube), there is no escaping the Awareness of being. Somewhere along the way, though, it gets hyper-saturated -- being isn't enough, and it's thought it's better to Be Something, Be Known, Be Seen (Scene?).

Cultural snow machines, when natural winter isn't producing enough to cover the slopes.

Google Ads Loves All Its Children

2007-09-26T01:45:00.000+01:00

Doing the good ol' vanity search on Technorati, I came across a blog linking to my roundup of links regarding bacteria. I won't link to them, for the sole reason that they are a site whose main focus is in drawing ad-link clicks, disguised under a thin veil of fashion content. At first glance, with the clean and pleasing interface and fancy quotation marks, one is drawn in with a feeling that perhaps the blog is maintained by a quote hungry fashion student. Then when one looks at the 80 posts written so far in September, you start to notice things like, well...

Spam, of course - for ads. That's not entirely offensive, although certainly in bad taste -- but I am always fascinated by the levels of bad taste that are reached through odd, and traditional techniques. Cut up spam messages some times strike me as so horribly wonderful that I save them and keep them for later - because somehow in the mad frenzy to sell me vicodin, valium and viagra, the random string of words sets off this chain reaction within me to find meaning within the passages, and consider the possible symbolic significance within them -- even though I know they are impossible gibberish, or generated randomly.

Looking at the spam splattered across the ad-blog, I get this dystopian shudder of a world of content controlled by machines, who cannot fathom the meaning of the work they produce. Today I was digging on Technorati to find information on 'big apple cake'.. And this is one of the first results I found: quote quote. I tried several more searches on 'big apple cake' but after 10 minutes I got tired, gave up and posted this entry to 'Big Cakes'. Still, I think it was an interesting time. A cornucopia of meaninglessness, to reel in mouse clicks -- production under false pretenses, which wouldn't be so offensive to me, only there is the sense of banality surrounding the whole ordeal which makes me grit my teeth.

I think it might be a niggling feeling that, if I was to presume that human beings sense of consciousness is an evolutionary accident, purely a function created so as to avoid getting mauled by lions on an open savanna, we are in a sense like blog fogger used to generate ad-clicks. Perhaps al the meaning we try to install in the languages we use, aural and visual, is ultimately meaningless gibberish. Like the spam generators compiling these linked blog entries next to their lines of ads, we cannot fathom the ultimate meaning of the life-content we produce.

The utopian side of me -- which is for the moment stronger them my dystopian side -- tells me that the very realisation of our lack of understanding ultimate meaning, or the possibility of ultimate meaning not existing outside our consideration for it, facilitates understanding of self-meaning, thus validates the, er, validity of our thinking and attempting to create meaning in the first place. Ultimately, the quest for meaning is meaningless and impossible on a grand scale -- the much more interesting aspect to me, is the thinking about meaning in the first place.

Regardless of my gibberish (which is only slightly more evolved than that of spam...), I start to wonder if the ongoing research in AI leading potentially to synthetic intelligence, will allow for a wider context of meaning. What creates meaning? Or value? Can we make a machine understand meaning, and if we could, would it be ethical for us to force meaning upon that machine?

I am faced with the argument of meaning/value every day at school - internally from within my course, and externally from other factions at my University. A machine can be made to produce a painting in the style of Pollock, but why is one worth a substantially large amount more than another? Meaning we invest in the artist, not the work itself? I'm not sure. Film and fine art students tell me digital medium (my medium of choice!) is less valid, because I am working in a less tangible way - not with the physics of light to film, not with the chemistry of paint to canvas, but the mathematics of binary which have been dressed up fancy with coding and packaged into aesthetic GUIs. We are still in such a position where our physical counterparts, two party interaction between body and objects, are considered pivotal to creating meaning.

When you record a scene in digital format, there are three parties -- the object, the virtual representation, and yourself. In Photoshop, there is the compiled image, the virtual image, and yourself. In synthesised music - the sound, the virtual sound, yourself... Writing on a computer is an illusion of writing - the reality is the words I see are symbolically there, but that doesn't take away from their meaning -- because of the human interaction.

Which makes me feel obliged as a Human to expand my own understanding of general context, connections between things and possibilities things have in relation to one another. If context equals meaning, it might be the thing separating me from being generated spam.

I'm A Single Cell On A Serpents Tongue

2007-09-24T23:04:00.000+01:00

The female Beewolf Wasp cultivates bacteria within her antenna, which in turn protect young Beewolf larvae from fungal infection. Cosmos Magazine, April 07

An introductory primer to cultivating bacteria, or; Nutrition and Growth of Bacteria, a practical walkthrough. Todar's Online Textbook of Bacteriology, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Department of Bacteriology.

We are rockers, we rock out -- some bacteria love heavy metal, and S. oneidensis get a taste for toxic waste. I guess you could call it cultivating alternative culture? PLoS Biology - Liza Gross, 06.

Bacteriophages in micro-reconnoissance. Nanotechnology detects bacteria, and produces to beat the ~~shit~~ ions out of it for our viewing pleasure. Welcome Trust, citing Journal of Biological Physics and Chemistry, March 05

Does Science sell more headlines when it's openly aggressive? Killer clothing destroys Bacteria & Fungi, by attracting negatively charged bacteria/fungi and impaling themselves on a dagger of hydrogen atoms. Unsurprisingly, research funded by the US Army for the Institute of Soldiering Nanotechnology at the MIT. AZoNano, citing Advantage Magazine, Feb 04

Nanotechnology in fashion - student Olivia Ong designed clothes using fabrics that are antibacterial, air-purifying and still, amazingly, rather old looking without any sense of hopeful modernity. Great concept, poor draping, so sad. At $10,000 per square yard, I wonder if the US Army funded the professor and researcher in charge of the textile design. Cornell Conical, May 07.

Flickr & Fairy Cakes

2007-09-21T21:23:00.000+01:00

Man, what a drag. I just tried to access my Flickr account, only to find there's no place to log in using the Olde Tyme log-in information - only Yahoo's info. I reckon the last time I used Flickr was around May - but I wanted to change that. Only now I can't log in, and I don't know how to access my old profile and old photos, because Yahoo help as as navigable as driving a phone book in a vat of caramel. Oh wells. I'll get that sorted out later...

I had to do a Mega-Wipe of my Mac, and reinstall OSX again. Woeful, certainly -- all that lost data that had somehow become inaccessible in its partition due to some unknown reason, i.e. my incompetence at backups and the spooky secret flaws of 10.4.10. Note: in 10.4.10 I will be 23 years and 11 months old and out of Uni for a year. Wild.

With the great Information Cleanse of 2007, I lost all my neato additional programs - from nice open stuff like Atlantis (Mu* platform), and nice not-so-open stuff like Photoshop CS. That makes me saddish -- it means I must venture out into the great beyond and find another copy hidden someplace.

I've been looking at open graphics software, such as Xara Xtreme (dudes, poor name choice -- are you making graphics or porn?) - which looks promising, but they're not yet up on OSX due to their lack of Mac developers, which is a drag. GIMP is an obvious choice, and although I have been aware of it for a while now, I am wary of it because... Well, it seems complicated - not as a software itself, but the process to get it running on OSX. Typing that out, I realise what a lame ass excuse that is. Am I really that lame? Apparently. In addition I should note I've been scoping out Ogre 3D, which as the name may suggest, renders 3D graphics.

...

Noting my own lame-ility, I am setting myself a challenge of sorts.
I am going to stop being a lame ass fairy cake, and install GIMP, and use it on a trial period. I will approach it with the open, all caring acceptance of an optimist, and not be too swift to judge it against Adobe's humpty-kagillion pound package bundles. Maybe I will stop being a lame ass fairy cake.

In addition, over the next few weeks I will be putting together things for my side-blog, lets call it Art & Movement (working title) -- it won't have these blah-blah entries, but rather a collection of sound, images and video which I think are relevant and aesthetically engaging and relate or clash with the work I am doing. Hell, maybe sometimes I'll include my own work -- Science knows I've been keeping everybody in the dark about whatever it is that I do.

Of course... I'm not so sure I want it to be on blogger. I would be more comfortable being situated somewhere independent, where I had more control over layout. Anybody got any Hosting space? I'm good for the deposit, I swear! (You take fairy cakes, right?)

Prince is an ancient term // Modern Modernist

2007-09-18T21:17:00.001+01:00

Prince is planning on suing YouTube over 'unauthorised' use his music, in an attempt to reclaim his art on the internet (Reuters). He has already caused a stir with music retailers over the distribution of his new album in the UK through the UK newspaper the Mail (Guardian).

From the Guardian:

It's all about giving music for the masses and [Prince] believes in spreading the music he produces to as many people as possible.

Hmm. Am I sensing a little hypocritical tendencies -- or is this man sick of being formally known? I am all aware of any publicity being good publicity, and this claim of a lawsuit has that particular stench of sensationalism I am not keen on.

Are people afraid of new media -- or are they afraid of media whose producers they cannot control? As John Giacobbi said in the Reuters article, they may have taken off 2,000 Prince videos from YouTube, but even when they get that number to 0, the nature of the site allows for users to re-upload and replace those videos as quickly as they are taken down.

As many of you know, the nature of my studies keeps me focused on emerging media technologies, and I have a particular fondness of YouTube and online social networks which cater to communicating media in all forms. It cannot be denied that with YouTube, as MySpace[ship] and DeviantArt and other such sites, one of the most charismatic aspects is the ability to share and promote creative works to a large number of people - both socially and commercially.

I hate to think Prince wants his music videos - be they official or fan created - off of YouTube because he is too old to understand the value of such new media forums. Perhaps it's more accurate for me to say that he is in fact old-fashioned, rather than just an old fogy.

Even some of my most beloved lecturers still have difficulty understanding and accepting spaces like YouTube, Facebook, etc -- to many they are considered limited to social-only situations, or considered naive spaces for juveniles. On my best days I believe sites like them are exciting modern-day salons, and on my worst an epic waste of time. Convincing people that the global village social and media networking sites are more than what they seem is an epic task at times - the virtuality of the spaces seems to lead people who are outside the Internet that they are somehow Less Real than traditional physical realms of galleries, Universities and record company coffee rooms.

All my friends are on the Internet.
Does that make them any less real?
The ones I once knew in MeatSpace seem so much further away.

//

In Other News: I am trying to get back into the stride of things, which is partially why I have been silent. University, and my upcoming Class of 2009 Status is making me worried. There is never enough time in the world, not when I am watching every episode of Heroes season 1 in three days. I have a theoretical hard on for Peter Petrelli - and I am depressed not because he's a fictional character in a fictional universe, but that he's effectively a huge faggy Mary-Sue and huge fucking Twink -- and I am not talking gay slang here people. I'm talking gamer.

Oh. Also. I gave up Mu*ing because I had no time this summer, and I am feeling bittersweet about it. I have played online text based RPGs for ten years running, and letting go without tying off character strings has lead me to be quietly depressed. I stopped not because I found the game I was active in boring -- rather, I found it so interesting and so much fun, that I had to cut it out of my life due to the fact I was focusing so much creative energy in it's direction. While I know Mu*s have been a major influence in the way I command the English language, consider collective co-operitive narrative, and understand social networks (in the abstract sense!!!), I need time to focus on actively improving my programming, theoretical and, fundamentally, my real-life skill base.

That said, I feel like a Modernist giving away her collection of art history texts so I don't get bogged down with physical weight and mental distraction. The people and ideas I've been able to access because of the existence of Mu*s has been substantial. Without them I would have never been able to have these friends - be they virtual text representations of their physical counterparts - in Sweden, the Americas, Japan, Australia, and beyond. I may have never started studying Leibniz and theories of Metaphysics and Monadology. I may have never become interested in Hypermaths, mysticism, Papua New Guinea cargo tribes, Steampunk, nanotechnology, neurochemistry, Digitalism, linguistics as reality modifiers, the question of good and evil, Medieval social structures, and countless other pet interests of mine that have developed over time. All for the sake of convincingly playing a game that mimics a reality that will never happen.

If I could have a superpower... I don't know what it would be.

nature vs nurture

2007-08-16T03:05:00.000+01:00

::

I keep floating down the river but the ocean never comes
Since the operation I heard you're breathing just for one
Now everything is imaginary, especially what you love
You left another message, said it's done
It's done

When I hear beautiful music it's always from another time
Old friends I never visit, I remember what they're like
Standing on a doorstep full of nervous butterflies
Waiting to be asked to come inside
Just come inside

But I keep going out
I can't sleep next to a stranger when I'm coming down
It's 8 a.m., my heart is beating too loud
Too loud
Don't be so amazing or I'll miss you too much
I felt something that I had never touched
Everything gets smaller now the further that I go
Towards the mouth and the reunion of the known and the unknown
Consider yourself lucky if you think of it as home
You can move mountains with your misery if you don't
If you don't

It comes to me in fragments, even those still split in two
Under the leaves of that old lime tree I stood examining the fruit
Some were ripe and some were rotten, I felt naseous with the truth
There will never be a time more opportune

So I just won't be late
The window closes, shocks roll over in a tidal wave
And all the color drains out of the frame
So pleased with a daydream that now living is no good
I took off my shoes and walked into the woods
I felt lost and found with every step I took

::

Well, they are gone, and here must I remain,
This lime-tree bower my prison! I have lost
Such beauties and such feelings, as had been
Most sweet to have remembrance, even when age
Had dimm'd mine eyes to blindness! They, meanwhile,
Friends, whom I never more may meet again,
On springy heath, along the hilltop edge,
Wander in gladness, and wind down, perchance,
To that still roaring dell, of which I told;
The roaring dell, o'erwooded, narrow, deep,
And only speckled by the mid-day sun;
Where its slim trunk the ash from rock to rock
Flings arching like a bridge; —that branchless ash,
Unsunn'd and damp, whose few poor yellow leaves
Ne'er tremble in the gale, yet tremble still,
Fann'd by the water-fall! and there my friends
Behold the dark green file of long lank weeds,
That all at once (a most fantastic sight!)
Still nod and drip beneath the dripping edge
Of the blue clay-stone.

Now my friends emerge
Beneath the wide wide Heaven—and view again
The many-steepled tract magnificent
Of hilly fields and meadows, and the sea,
With some fair bark, perhaps, whose sails light up
The slip of smooth clear blue betwixt two Isles
Of purple shadow! Yes! they wander on
In gladness all; but thou, methinks, most glad,
My gentle-hearted Charles! For thou hast pined
And hunger'd after Nature, many a year,
In the great City pent, winning thy way 30
With sad yet patient soul, through evil and pain
And strange calamity! Ah! slowly sink
Behind the western ridge, thou glorious Sun!
Shine in the slant beams of the sinking orb,
Ye purple heath-flowers! richlier burn, ye clouds!
Live in the yellow light, ye distant groves!
And kindle, thou blue Ocean! So my friend,
Struck with deep joy, may stand, as I have stood,
Silent with swimming sense; yea, gazing round
On the wide landscape, gaze till all doth seem
Less gross than bodily; and of such hues
As veil the Almighty Spirit, when he makes
Spirits perceive his presence.

A delight
Comes sudden on my heart, and I am glad
As I myself were there! Nor in this bower,
This little lime-tree bower, have I not mark'd
Much that has sooth'd me. Pale beneath the blaze
Hung the transparent foliage; and I watch'd
Some broad and sunny leaf, and loved to see
The shadow of the leaf and stem above
Dappling its sunshine! And that walnut-tree
Was richly ting'd, and a deep radiance lay
Full on the ancient ivy, which usurps
Those fronting elms, and now with blackest mass
Makes their dark branches gleam a lighter hue
Through the late twilight: and though now the bat
Wheels silent by, and not a swallow twitters,
Yet still the solitary humble-bee
Sings in the bean-flower! Henceforth I shall know
That nature ne'er deserts the wise and pure;
No plot so narrow, be but Nature there
No waste so vacant, but may well employ
Each faculty of sense, and keep the heart
Awake to Love and Beauty! and sometimes
'Tis well to be bereft of promised good,
That we may lift the soul, and contemplate
With lively joy the joys we cannot share.
My gentle-hearted Charles! when the last rook
Beat its straight path along the dusky air
Homewards, I blessed it! deeming its black wing
(Now a dim speck, now vanishing in light)
Had cross'd the mighty Orb's dilated glory
While thou stood'st gazing; or, when all was still,
Flew creaking o'er thy head, and had a charm
For thee, my gentle-hearted Charles, to whom
No sound is dissonant which tells of Life.

::

Here a Linden-tree stood, bright'ning
All adown its silver rind;
For, as some trees draw the lightning,
So this tree, unto my mind,
Drew to earth the blessed sunshine
From the sky where it was shrined

::

Vrei să pleci
dar nu mă nu mă iei
nu mă nu mă iei
nu mă nu mă nu mă iei
Chipul tău şi dragostea din tei
mi-amintesc de ochii tăi
/
You want to leave,
but you can't, you can't take me,
you can't, you can't take me,
you can't, you can't, you can't take me.
The image of your face and the love from linden trees
remind me of your eyes.

::

Pătrunză talanga
Al serii rece vânt,
Deasupră-mi teiul sfânt
Să-şi scuture creanga.
/
While softly rings
The wind its trembling chime
And over me the lime
Its blossom flings.

::

Am Brunnen vor dem Tore
Da steht ein Lindenbaum:
Ich träumt in seinem Schatten
So manchen süßen Traum.

Ich schnitt in seine Rinde
So manches liebe Wort;
Es zog in Freud und Leide
Zu ihm mich immer fort.

Ich mußt auch heute wandern
Vorbei in tiefer Nacht,
Da hab ich noch im Dunkel
Die Augen zugemacht.

Und seine Zweige rauschten,
Als riefen sie mir zu:
Komm her zu mir, Geselle,
Hier findst du deine Ruh!

Die kalten Winde bliesen
Mir grad ins Angesicht,
Der Hut flog mir vom Kopfe,
Ich wendete mich nicht.

Nun bin ich manche Stunde
Entfernt von jenem Ort,
Und immer hör ich´s rauschen:
Du fändest Ruhe dort!
/
At wellside, past the ramparts,
there stands a linden tree.
While sleeping in its shadow,
sweet dreams it sent to me.

And in its bark I chiseled
my messages of love:
My pleasures and my sorrows
were welcomed from above.

Today I had to pass it,
well in the depth of night -
and still, in all the darkness,
my eyes closed to its sight.

Its branches bent and rustled,
as if they called to me:
Come here, come here, companion,
your haven I shall be!

The icy winds were blowing,
straight in my face they ground.
The hat tore off my forehead.
I did not turn around.

Away I walked for hours
whence stands the linden tree,
and still I hear it whisp'ring:
You'll find your peace with me!

::

Under der linden
an der heide,
dâ unser zweier bette was,
dâ mugt ir vinden
schône beide
gebrochen bluomen unde gras.
vor dem wald in einem tal,
tandaradei,
schône sanc diu nahtegal.
/
Under the lime tree
on the open field,
where we two had our bed,
you still can see
lovely both
broken flowers and grass.
On the edge of the woods in a vale,
tandaradei,
sweetly sang the nightingale.

::

::

Don't Pull the Plug!

2007-08-14T16:23:00.000+01:00

My MacBook Pro has officially fallen into a coma.

While the feeble flickering of a grey screen inspires hope, the unresponsive OSX load screen, with its calm steel blue background, offers little joy with its spinning colour wheel and empty, unmoving load bar. She wasn't even a year old.

Thank you, System Update 10.4.10 - you took my perfectly functioning and beloved machine, and virtually took a sledgehammer to its ankles. I'm worried that when I open my crippled machine in target disk mode later, I'm going to get VoiceOver shouting at me in a mechanical, Mid-West accent: He didn't get out of the COCK-A-DOODIE CAR!!!

10.4.10 is my number one fan.

//

I've been listening to a lot of Arcade Fire: and you should too.

Haiti and Une année sans lumiere, off of their first album, were also very good -- but I just like hearing beautiful songs in French; even if it's all, you know, Québécoise.

//

I'll note that I am, in part, pissed off that my computers coma is keeping me from my game platform, photography, art & film shorts (I had been compiling a movie on bubbles!), PDFs of countless miscellaneous information, folders of Sci-Fi/Fantasy writing and... The foundations of my entry into using Objective-C for Xcode. Sure; most of what I had written was notes, and most of what was saved was whatever freebee manuals I could get my hands on.

You see, my people; I want to make video games. Not FPS or RPGs; but mind games -- educational games for grown-ups, as it were. At the moment, I am obsessing over the creation of a word game - halfway between Bejewelled and Bookworm Adventures; speed spelling puzzle game. Ideally, I'd like to create it as a dashboard widget and expand from there but... Well, I have no practical programming experience.

Being the only girl in a remedial BTEC ND Software Development course allowed me to experience writing car rental schemes in VBA in Excel. They most likely could not have chosen a more banal way of introducing programming to apathetic North London hoodlums. I learned more about programming from Monadology than I did there. Regardless!

Naturally, I have to teach myself how to program -- when my sweet, sweet Uni grant comes in this September, I am investing in Programming in Objective-C by Stephen Kochan, which has been suggested as a good starting point for my dive into application development for Mac. Would the computer minded concur? Eventually I would like to move towards Cocoa, and then beyond...

But that's all a little besides the point at the moment, seeing as my machine refuses to even turn on; c'est le vie!

Disconnection of Emotional and Intellectual Self

2007-08-11T00:48:00.000+01:00

Le grand précieux

Lately I've been considering how I approach topics I cross in my ongoing 'academic' research. Last year during my film theory class, my much respected Greek visiting lecturer noted that I had a very 'romantically emotional' approach to deconstructing media we were given to analyse -- it was apparently an amusing notion to him and, subsequently my class mates, that my responses were heavily based on feelings I harboured towards the subjects at hand. Apparently I spoke in abstract prose rather than analytic or rational terms, I suppose. I didn't think much about it at the time, but as the new academic year approaches I've been reconsidering what that means.

I like to consider myself to be a thoughtful, rational person -- I like to consider the different ways of approaching subjects at hand. I know how I feel about topics personally and like to consider why I feel the way I do -- but with that, I also typically take the time to put myself in another persons perspective, as it were, and toy with the other vantage points to consider any given topic. Circumstances which alter views on things always enthrals me - different situations, possibilities, intentions on words...

Because I had never been sent to any traditional educational institutions until I enrolled in University, I have never had the opportunity to join a debate team. Oh how that saddens me at times! As I know it'd be an activity I could very well flourish within - having the opportunity to analyse a proposition and argue its points, be it for or against, regardless of the topic and how I personally felt about it. Certainly in my own views, I would be be labelled a liberal -- I am a democratic socialist who believes strongly (for the time being, HAH) in the pseudo-libertarian approach to self governing factions deciding on their own fates socially and politically. Pro-choice, anti-war-for-profit, ecologically-aware, marginally anti-capitalist fiscally...

Yet I am prone, as my stepfather so kindly pointed out earlier, to going wildly off topic. Or at lest digressing widely before reaching my main point.

Regardless of my political/social views, I can disconnect myself from them in sake of conversation and argument. Why? It's fucking fun!

But in an academic setting, when asked to discuss or analyse topics impromptu, I speak from the heart -- and I am aware now that on occasion, my passionate (always passionate) rants, excuse me!, deliverance of personal ideation can, or may be, viewed as horribly sophomoric. I really like how... When I saw this I felt... I love the part... -- how can that at all be considered objective? Is it even a bad thing that when I take to something, I take to it passionately -- or does that limit me to one viewpoint that is without exterior reference to keep things 'in check' as it were? I know one thing; being emotionally involved with the analysis of things heavily undermines an audiences ability to take what you say seriously - instead you come off as; A) like one of those religious preachers who refuse Science for pure faith, B) an airy fairy self involved vacuum-inhabiting poetry student from Wellesley College who refuses to read poetry that doesn't emotionally validate their life.

There is another aspect of this heart-felt analysis I do which irks me incessantly -- when I do not like a person/subject, I mean personally do not like them/it for whatever reason, it dramatically effects the way I approach their/the subject in discussion. This goes as far, in one example, as my creation an entirely factitious doctrine of why painting as an art form - abstract in particular - was a dead medium whose only subscribers would be economically secure idealists who overly romanticised a dead school of art purely to reside within its comfortably established boundaries and, thus, remove themselves from the daunting task of having to create a new and thus risky aesthetic which could potentially alienate them from their market.

Me? Asshole. Because, fuck, I like painters - both dead and contemporary. I just didn't personally like this one painter and wanted to plant a seed of doubt in regards to their abilities. Because I am, yes, an asshole.

See what happens when you can't engage in a debate club?
Honestly.

Back from the land of Nod...

2007-08-05T16:07:00.000+01:00

Yeah, so I've been away; have you missed me?

My MacBook has been acting up -- many applications will not load, it crashes randomly, etc -- I've been busy trying to fix it. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Go fig.

It's okay though, because I've been training to deal with Apple tech support.

Intelligent words to come, I swear...

Friendly Mutton Chops

2007-07-20T14:12:00.001+01:00

Why I've Been Ignoring You; My Internet Friends

2007-07-18T12:17:00.000+01:00

A hard rain's a-gonna fall.

2007-07-02T08:22:00.000+01:00

Mom?

2007-07-02T04:41:00.000+01:00

When did you clean the oven?

How do we see things?

2007-07-01T18:00:00.000+01:00

I got in an discussion of opposition over La Jetée (spoiler alart!) with one of my part-time lecturers earlier in the year. She was saying she thinks a film put together with a collection of still images somehow defeats the purpose of making a film.

She must have forgotten for a moment that film is a collection of still images. La Jetée just had less then say, 12 Monkey's, and more then Blue. Anyway.

Her dislike for the film sat poorly with me. I quite enjoyed it, myself, see - because I take special satisfaction in a good story. I am a narrative driven human being, I like verbal language, I like verbal communication; and while visual/audio stories also interest me, often times I am taking away by lazy, human language stories I can hear/read and understand in a comfortably subjective way. A rose is a rose is a rose. Hur hur, jokes for nerds.

Either or; I was recently watching a great House episode where (spoiler alert!) a patient loses their ability to see objects in motion. I knew I watched that show obsessively for a reason... So I started digging around, because I couldn't find the technical definition of blindness to objects in motion. Apparently, as far as I can find, there is no technical term -- it is rare, and associated with: seizures, strokes, and structural brain defects.

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute (Come in with the milk. Come in with the milk. Come in with the milk...) has an interesting report about a patient who suffers from motion blindness after she had a stroke, but it's not too insightful, sadly - just a nice overview of the motion-processing system in our brains.

In my memories, I don't record motion -- I record the understanding of the presence of motion, the direction and knowledge it was there, the path the objects in motion took... Of course my memory is not a hundred percent photographic - and on top of that, my memory is mediocre at best. Yet I can visualise a trajectory and suchlike if I am thinking about something moving. Hmm...

So motion awareness is, to me, a fight-or-flight kind of evolutionary trait. I don't see what evidence that processing motion has for other things, save for right-now effects. A ball is getting thrown in your direction - the mind judges its speed, distance and direction of the ball, and that motion sense allows people with adequate ability to grab it - or get out of the way. Anyway.

While I was scuttling around for motion information, I passed across an example of the optical illusion of visual disappearance, or motion induced blindness, and a great applet that demonstrates the same thing. That's from a collection of other optical illusion demonstrations which I am particularly fond of -- they aren't as good, however, as my favourite still optical illusions in the whole entire world, developed by Akiyoshi Kitaoka, a professor in the department of psychology at Ritsumeikan University in Japan.

Of course after half an hour of looking at all those, one does start to feel a little, queasy.

Regardless, I'll move back in time here... La Jetée, as a film on memory, fucked memory, and loss of sight (much like Blue...), does not need to be a film that is defined by the number of different frames per second. Memory is not motion, and fucked memory, that is the illusion of memory, false memory of events, is a lot like looking at one of Mr. Kitaoka's snake 'spirals' - we can so easily believe it's moving in one direction, when it's really standing still.

PSA on Cake Giving

2007-07-01T14:29:00.000+01:00

Click for bigger image.

This is for Frank, who I thought might need some visual aids to distribute amongst his friends...

On Language

2007-07-01T13:56:00.000+01:00

Dear Firefox;

I think you are really cool. Do you like me?
Please Check:
Yes No

Just, when I updated you yesterday, you told me you'd be more than you were before. So on the third time I shut a tab by mistake because of the new each-their-own tab-exiting button, I was okay with it - I'm clumsy, I should look where I point my cursor before clicking like some renegade information junkie.

Only, I notice you now check my spelling when I'm typing into field boxes. Oh. That's helpful. Just, baby, you... Know I'm in the UK.

So why are you giving me American English?

Baby, I don't roll like that.

I gotta get all up in your Help files, searching around for languages -- that doesn't give me the information I'm looking for, so I gotta cross reference over spell check options, then download a new driver and restart you up so my colours are honourable and my favourite version of English is synchronised adequately so I don't have to make any more enquiries...

Links For This Hour

2007-06-28T18:35:00.000+01:00

Lunch in a Box
I know my avid dislike for mommybloggers (sorry homies; nothing personal) stems from my post-adolescent interior revolt against my inner mother-complex, but I can gleefully look past the oh-so-cute bento lunch for Little Angel #192837 because I think, despite it's overly-attentive-to-juvenile-cuteness-ness, they all look fucking awesome, and I love tiny food. I have no beef (hur hur) with the blog. Just now I want galaktoboureko and octopus balls (hur hur).

Tori Amos: Yes Anastasia
I am not, in general, a big Tori Amos fan -- I like her, like her projected essence, but her music doesn't make me into an avoid fan-girl. When I was about eleven or twelve years old, I went to school with a girl named Laura Bogart who was 16 or so (anyone over 13 was 16 or so in my head at the time...) who was fucking obsessed with Tori, and so I think in a bid to distance myself from Laura, who was like a mother elephant defending her fandoms (she hated copy cats...), I never got too into the music. Anyway. Every now and then I get a hankering to listen to Yes Anastasia, and for hours at a time I'll listen to it on repeat. Today is one of those days. The video is not the original video, obviously, but it has a great photo montage of Anna Anderson Manahan aka the girl who said she was Anastasia Romanov. Beautiful.

Saint Stephen - via Wiki
Saint Stephen. I had to look him up earlier, in a bid to do writing where a character, when asked if he was stoned, replied as Saint Stephen. Bad, I know, I know. But the dude was pretty strange. I love reading the stories of Saints -- and more so, I love looking at iconography of saints themselves. The National Gallery has my favourite collection of paintings of Saints, some of which you can see in their online gallery. My favourite there is St. Sebastian by Honthorst. Like most paintings, the photo does not do it justice. I've spent hours standing in front of that painting, copying it in my sketch book to little avail. It's breathtaking. I yelled at a school marm ushering children through the gallery once when I was sketching it -- the noise of the children didn't bug me, but she was going shhhhhsh! shsssssh! like some sort of fucked kettle, and it made me get all rabidly anti-authority.

The Triptych Convention - report on pharmaceutical con.
I went looking for a picture of a mean faced orange cat and I got sent here. It's a visitors account of a convention in the Netherlands (in 2002), which goes on describe discussions and talks that were had on schizophrenia, drug use & similar. It's oddly humane, and an interesting insight into the way the psychiatric community communicate to each other. Also; as I am a (jack off) Jill-of-all-trades, I take a special interest in learning about psychiatric theory and suchlike. I am an information addict. Do you think that will be in DSM-V? The strangest line from the piece to me, was attributed to Richard Bentall, a professor of psychology at Manchester; he said: It is has been demonstrated that when a patient doesn’t benefit from one neuroleptic, he won’t benefit from any. The search for the right drug is senseless. How strange.

//

And that's a slice what I've been looking at in the past few hours.

Food Blogs are big on my list ATM, because I'm trying to figure out what the hell I should make for dinner. I won't deny it - I'm a real secret domestic, as much as I'd deny it in front of most people, I really like cooking. Like a lot. Last night? Made a cake. A banana cake with cream cheese coconut frosting. Because I could. I had a slice. It was awesome. My Asshat:Talent ratio is high enough where if I was rude to you, some of the cake would make you forget.

I'm Meeeeeelting!

2007-06-25T23:25:00.000+01:00

Hey what's that?

Oh. It's my AC power pug for my Macbook; which for no reason got wicked fucking hot and melted.

Guess who's a little pissed off!
Me and a bunch of other people.

Jeneane, I know you just got a sweet new Mac -- you be sure you watch your cable!

Now, to call Apple...

Exlax theory: the art of letting shit slide

2007-06-24T18:08:00.000+01:00

I am moving out of my lodgings tomorrow. I've taken all my art off my walls, packed up all my books, and still only have some clothes to put away before I vacuum and get my sweet deposit back.

There is a slight problem of having nowhere to live yet, for this coming September when I return to school - but I refuse, completely refuse, to be worried about it. My body physically wants me to be worried; getting squiggly stomachs and thunking pressure headaches if I take too long to consider the fact that I'll be sleeping on the sofa in my fathers house, syphoning off wifi from the neighbours next door who, for some insane reason, turn their router off on occasion. Such cheek! I should write them a strongly worded letter on the matter...

My wifi theft aside (beloved internet; I cannot leave you!), this refusing to get upset thing is actually kind of awesome. It means I can, guilt free, watch the first season of House and drink hot cocoa while nibbling gingersnaps and listening to the rain. Later I'll organise my remaining packing, casually pile it all up, and consider what books I've got to keep out for my Must Read stack.

Refusing to get upset or worried. Talk about awesome. It's not like my old school attempt at avoiding problems all together. Oh no! Now I am aware that there will be things which will be difficult, such as packing or moving or organising myself - but instead of wanting to throw up out of self pity at my woeful aloneness in my life duties, I just deal with it and take it all in stride.

There must be some sort of chemical imbalance!
Is this what normal people feel like?

I blame this all on my dear beloved friend Vee, who I might go down to see on the Isle of Wight for a few days, come tomorrow. She is the queen of not letting shit bother her, in exchange for getting it done.

Now excuse me, compañeros, I've got some hot cocoa to brew.

//

Oh, and a PS: I've been living with my landlady and her daughter since last September, and never once have we gotten into a tiff, let alone a fight. She has been sane, normal, nice and welcoming - never creepy or weird. Should I get her some flowers and a big bar of chocolate or something for her daughter? What's the polite thing to do? I would buy her a bottle of wine, but she's a bit of a wine aficionado and I don't want to insult her pallet due to my own personal lack of fundage in attaining a fine vintage.

Where's Emily Post now?

Drink a Dink

2007-06-15T13:31:00.000+01:00

I'm gonna stop being bitter for a second here and address some things.

Somebody's mother posted a bit ondodgy marketing and thus lead to a discussion on South African wine, which as you all fucking know, has been talked about by some awesome people all over the place on the 'tubes.

Which to me is refreshing. South Africa is... A blind spot for me. But this escalating conversation on ethics (of marking -> product -> production) has got me thinking about what I drink. My sister Lmo actually called me up from her work yesterday, where she pimps out rollin' e-class to old grannies up in the W1 to W4 baby babaah! Anyway. She calls me up, worried as hell, going Oh Christ J, is all South African wine bad? How am I supposed to know?

You see, Lmo, like many young women our age, is a wine drinker - ideally she goes for a nice, deep, oaky red - just typically she goes for the cheapest. Like us all! So now I'm all like, woah, she is right. How are we supposed to know when we buy our South African wine at the local Co-Op, if it's been watered with blood?

WIETA - or South African's Wine Industry Ethical Trade Association, has acode of ethics which many UK supermarket chains, including Tescos follow -- but... The code seems a little funny to me, because it seems very difficult to enforce. I don't know! How often is it checked?

There are a list of accredited and audited SA wine makers/fruit growers, which I don't see Stormhoek listed on -- but does WIETA not cover all the wine making regions? Or maybe Stormhoek is owned by somebody else? Maybe I'm missing the whole point, as my usual experience with wine is drinking something French and cheap, not making it or getting it passed by some ethics board.

I agree with what Golby said about Stormhoek -- if they want to be advertised by bloggers, as they are being right now (be it for the wrong reasons perhaps...) they should just open up and express now how cheap their wine is, but how it's made.

As somebody's mother always told me, when we were selling our warez on eBay so we could eat -- it's not the product that sells, it's the story.

Tell me the story of production, truthfully and without 'funny' cartoons, and you won't have to give me free bottles of cheap booze. I'll spend the £4.99 myself, if it means the dudes and dudettes planting, feeding, picking, washing, crushing, fermenting and bottling the stuff is getting a fair slice of that cash, rather then free bottles of cheap booze. Ya diiig?

Hell. Maybe I'd blog about it.

Comment on Comments

2007-06-15T10:51:00.000+01:00

Blog homies:

It's come to my attention that my comments thing isn't working as perfectly as it should. I've changed around the settings now - you don't have to be a member of blogger to post - but you have to type in a word-verification now.

If it still doesn't work? Drop me a message at plasticmothATgmailDOTcom and I will send a very strongly worded letter to Blogger; which will include the term 'yo my bitches, what's up with that?'.

Respect My Authority

2007-06-14T12:18:00.000+01:00

So I was in the middle of writing a cover letter for a PA job I saw listed in London, because low and behold, my student loan has almost run out and I need to eat ~~8p Tescos~~ no wait, ~~£5.99 Waitrose~~ no wait, 59p Sainsbury's ramen noodles? Oh Christ -- with ethics like these, how can I even eat? I'm gonna become anorexic for the well being of the world. Or something.

Tangent over - anyway, I stopped writing because I suddenly had this sort of, epiphany about blogging;

Why is it that bloggers feel they are only justified in their existence, i.e. they are privy to achieve ''a-lister status'', if they are validated in an meatspace environment?

That is - why does a blogger, who rants about how their blogging is changing the way the world communicates and how blogging is the wave of the future and how we don't need all your stupid newspapers and television shows and book deals and radio appearances and magazine articles -- why do they feel the need to appear in aforementioned media devices, and flaunt the fact in their blogs? Why do they think they are given authority over other bloggers if their mad warez are flaunted in main stream mass media?

Oh the hypocrisy! Oh Southey! Oh Southey!

Like many women my age, when zefrank was at the height of his show, I watched with avid interest.

You know what interested me? Not only was he awesome, totally lacking in eyelashes, and smart - he also wasn't a douche bag! AMAZING! He never spoke about:

His work.
How awesome his work is.
Why his work makes him better then you.
Respectin' his authroataay.

Do the other asshats out there realise how important that is? Yeah, ze had advertisements and occasionally he would pimp those advertisements -- a brother's gotta get paid (that's just the way it is) -- but they were merely a fleeting gnat in the picnic of knowledge which he laid out in a delicious spread for the masses to feed upon.

There are two types of blog followings that I have seen so far; there are the sycophants - the people who flock to people because they feel they can get recognition from them: links, comments, book deals, authority, mad props, etc. Then there are the others, I don't know what I would call them - ideologists maybe? Who flock to other blogs and people because they like sharing or attaining information, thoughts, links, etc, with no regard to personal gain or authority or notoriety.

I'm uncomfortable with that analogy, or what have you, because it exists as a binary system -- which I, as a rule, typically don't follow. (There's no right or wrong, maaaan, only shades of grey!!!1!) There are many other layers, combinations of the two I suppose -- but... So far those are the most dominant group features I can see.

But right now I can't continue blogging about my observations of blogging bloggers, because unlike some, I don't get paid for it. I do it because I love information, sharing information, gaining information, rolling around in information while more information rains down in a sweet summer storm of information.

I am at heart a geek.

Just a geek who's gotta get paid, ese.
Where's my job at yo? I gotta pimp this shit!
Aaaaall right.

Music Is My Imaginary Friend!

2007-06-11T22:45:00.001+01:00

So I'm listening to a little Peaches (t.y. link to song: Set It Off) at the moment, due to a rather wonderful series of events which reminded me that I like her because she's so fucking bold.

Explicit, vulgar and ambiguous - I feel like it's both a mockery and an embrace towards the stupidly over sexualised and fictitiousness of pop music videos and sex in general. It takes some fucking guts to shake your ass in pink y-fronts and fishnets, which by the end of the video show untamed hair poking out.

There has to be a German word for the aura of Magnificently Grotesque, as there seems to be a German word for every other awesome in-between adjective. Wait, are resonant feelings/impressions/vibes adjectives? Could this one be in this case?

There they're their.
Know knead two bee whirr Eid.

Anyway, I'm listening to Peaches as the transition period before I fall into my fresh assortment of Sisters of Mercy that I will partake in whilst reading my newly acquired book, The Children of Húrin.

Aw yeah, it's gonna be awesome.

But here's a question: who can tell me about the representation of the 1950s Housewife in gay cinema? Specifically of the 80s and 90s? I've been finding all these clips, you see, of drag film segments all put together -- and I just can't get over it. I'm going to write a bigger post about it soon, as I have been saving the resources for a week+ now -- I just wanted to know if there were any articles on the subject that I was overlooking, any artists...

Now, because I'm not yet in the ring to fight about how awesome I am for pimping myself on the internets & gaining cartooning ability by loosing my sense of humour, I'm gonna go read & SoM it up.

Gimme the ring!
My precious!

Virtual Communication & The 21st Century Child

2007-06-09T23:02:00.000+01:00

I've been speaking to my sisters via iChat over the past few days. It's really awesome - I don't know why I didn't abuse the power of iChat before, because being able to see them while we have a conversation really allows us to actually communicate. Being on the phone with them, it's kind of weird - I don't know if it's the age differences or just the way in which we communicate when we're physically in the same room, but phone calls last about five minutes -- where iChat video sessions last like an hour.

I think a lot of our communication is tied up in joking around and our sense of humour - so when we can see each other, we pull funny faces and laugh and make visual jokes and then once that's done and we've established this sort of casual, jokey air, we can talk about serious things, sister things and culture things.

This differs dramatically from how I typically like to communicate. I want to say like sixty percent+ of my daily communication, although I would like to actually chart these numbers, is in text form. Emails, text messages, blog posts, LJ posts, MySpace messages, and, above all, Mu* Content.

Does anyone know what a Mu* is anymore? Ah, Wikipedia has a good entry for MUSHs which gives a pretty clear picture. It's a text based online chat/RPG environment. I've been chat/RPing on them since 1996 or so, when I joined the Redwall MUCK as a chipper hare archer named Fireblossom who liked cream cakes and spoke like a fake military colonialist - spot of tea wot, wot? Yeah, yeah, cliché's I know.

Many people have moved on to MMORPGs or virtual words like Second Life -- I have an avatar on Second Life, and I would use it more often, but I don't have access to the things which make me most interested - i.e. making clothing & skins - because I don't have the funds, etc, etc. On top of that, I don't feel the same sort of community on Second Life as I do on Mu*s, although I have been Mu*ing for ten+ years, so of course I know it would take time for that sense to grow.

It's also about privacy, I think - not privacy like 'OMG they're reading my emails!' - it's more like, when I am on Second Life there is a vast amount of people scuttling around, even when I move away to a build area. Because the social etiquette is still relatively new for SL, people seem to have no problem having naked or offensive avatars just walking around willynilly, even in PG areas. That's cool, I'm not afraid of naked pixels - they don't even really offend me - but the attitude of 'haha I'm in a virtual world, I can do whatever I want, assholes!!!' does.

There is a really, really fantastic article on social etiquette in virtual words, originally published in the village voice in '93, which I found linked to on one of the MANY MANY blog posts after the whole K.S. Fiasco '07 - I wish I had the blog that posted to it (I'd have to search technorati for a while and I am lazy, but if you know of it, comment!), and the article is A Rape in Cyberspace. (WARNING: it's way fucking graphic in description, I know a few of you will not enjoy reading it, so don't.)

It describes a player character who used a piece of code on LambdaMOO to control the actions of another PC's text avatar, and then did all sorts of gross lustmort gore porn descriptions of the said PC, against the PC Players will.

Yes, that is likely a very poor introduction to those who don't Mu*, the life of Mu*ing -- but I'm listing it here because it's a prime example of the way that social structures are formed in new environments, and environments where you express extensions of identity, which may not be your identity.

Like me, I play a mad scientist somewhere or another who has a rich, complicated history and personality which is utterly fictional, and at times questionably unethical. I have spent hours perfecting the method of playing - i.e. textual expression - this character accurately, because I am a nerd, and the character has been known to be maniacal and disturbed - as well as humane and reflective. But they aren't me, and no matter how vicious or hurt or rude or nice or occasional evil or loving the character may be, they never reflect on how I am as a person - save for maybe the method of the writing they're expressed with.

And nobody ever messes my PCs actions/thoughts/opinions up with mine -- because we have an extremely well defined line between IC/in character and OOC/out of character. Identity is tagged, organised and marked - your character does something rude, you laugh about it with the others on OOC chan - but if you do something rude on OOC chan, you, the player, are held responsible.

Even on social Mu*s - i.e. ones without strict RPG guidelines - I've been on, there is a line between your Avatar, and you -- some people choose to express themselves personified as a dancing pony or animated ball of slime or normal looking humanoids with semi-ficiotious personalities, others are dudes in jeans and t-shirts or a super elf princess with wings which express the views of their players and those views alone. But one can mostly tell the difference between RL/OL persona - because it's typically explained, or one can figure it out swiftly through interaction. How many dancing polar bears that like Kant and Klondike bars are there?

But Second Life... She doesn't have those social guidelines set up - not in the big open spaces, which so often remind me of Dead Man and what it must feel like to go somewhere alien all by yourself. Naked dudes can come up to you and start screaming about their virtual hat covering their virtual wang, and there is little to stop them - at least, it seems that way for a noob like me.

And where I know there are locations in Second Life where there is civility already installed, and I am interested to start hanging out there to meet some new humanoids (or non-humanoids), the problem of explaining to the masses the science of Virtual Etiquette is incredibly fucking hard - as illustrated in Penny Arcade's mathamatical equation.

I guess it boils down to the way that people want to express themselves to the world; or virtual world as it were. I do this because I like stories, I like games, and I like communicating with people in RL on locations far, far away. I've had friends in Australia, all over America, Sweden, Canada, Germany, Austria, Scotland - every English speaking country and beyond - because of virtual worlds. When I connect to a Mu*, I'm not just connecting to a game, I'm connecting to people.

Without the stigma of race, age, sex, beauty, style, or poise.
But only their intellect and ability to communicate via text.

And I think it's... Wonderfully freeing.

Because for as much as I like seeing my kid sisters face on iChat, it was only when I read a manifesto and poem on Boston that she wrote in her LiveJournal that I realised she was a thinking, reflecting, pondering, creative human being -- and started to treat her like one.

Text FTW.

Bling Blood

2007-06-02T22:58:00.000+01:00

I was on the OOC channel of a Mu* the other day, when somebody posted a link to Demian Hirst's new piece with the comment; "Y'know, some people have just got too much money."

As you can see, the link doesn't have a very good photograph of the work in question - but anyway, this sparked off a discussion on the OOC channel about the point of the piece. I won't lie, it was mostly me going on about how it could be considered a demonstration on the value we impose on objects during our lifetime which then become obsolete when we die, and that Hirst has a history of using images of death in a way that transforms them into images of wonder, etc, etc.

But I missed a whole other point about the origin of diamonds, the people who suffer get them, etc - and I saw on boingboing the link to the NY Times article, where Hirst says:

“That’s when you stop laughing,” Hirst says. “You might have created something that people might die because of. I guess I felt like Oppenheimer or something. What have I done? Because it’s going to need high security all its life.”

And it struck me... That diamond encrusted skull is going to have more protection and attention then countless children - for decades, and decades, and decades - until it is destroyed in some way. The diamond skull is, in short, immortal - while being an icon of death and luxury.

I won't lie; when I saw the photograph for the first time, straight on, I was actually shocked at its beauty. Totally shocked. Because fuck, it is a beautiful object, no doubt. But I'm not too sure how I feel about it's resonance.

Icky Thump? Oh Snap!

2007-06-01T23:56:00.000+01:00

White Stripes - Icky Thump

//

I heard this for the first time yesterday.

Yippee kai yay motherfucker; Meg & Jack are back!

I had tonnes of extremely insightful things to say about this, but I'm actually too excited to say anything important. Listen, just listen. GAH.

The White Stripes got me out of the Huge Depression With Modern Music. I believe they have integrity - which is difficult for me to say, as I don't believe many bands actually have integrity - because the music industry is such a, well, industry, so much of what should be uninfluenced purity is effected by stuff like 'you need to sexify your image' and 'can you be less political?' and, in short, over marketed, over produced, and over hyped.

I don't really know how to address my antipathy towards the music industry, and by proxy a large percentage of contemporary music -- when new bands come onto the scene, I am Instantly Suspicious of them. Instantly. I don't trust them. By default I think they're media pawns or fame junkies - and it takes a lot for me to consider musicians otherwise. Pretty much, they have to make a Really Fucking Good album for me to start changing my mind - and they have to back it up.

But moving back in time -- Icky Thump:

It has no chorus -- WTF how can the random 'lah-lah-lah' be so frightening and effective -- that organ is amazing - did he just get political again?

Last time I heard Jack get political was, what, their first album? Big Three Killed My Baby? Man O' Man!

And then the more and more I listen, the more I start to believe that the guitar breaks are the chorus. Three in all. Oh man. I won't slaughter the song anymore. I love it so.

As I am discussing contemporary artists that don't make me want to die, let me give you three more:

Patrick Wolf - Camp, British, good.
Peachcake - Surreal Electropop, give me hope.
Bright Eyes - Yeah I said it.

Essay Ese

2007-05-31T22:33:00.000+01:00

I got the results back from my last essay - I can't remember if I posted about this at the time, but I finished the essay 4 hours before drop-in deadline, as one does, and after I submitted it I was so convinced it was shit I was too scared and embarrassed to read what I had written. So I didn't - and it's been saved on my computer but not accessed since the 17th. Anyway.

Earlier I checked my results, with a conviction that if I got a 55 I would be pleased.

I got an 82. A comfortable A+.

Cue the huge fucking heart attack.

And yet... I feel guilty somewhat - because I chose a subject which I knew my lecturer would respond well too and apparently she did. But by saying that, it makes it seem like I am some master manipulator - which is not the case. It also seems that I'd be undermining my lecturers ability to give an unbiased and reasonable assessment of all work, if I was to say that the mark I received was purely because the subject matter. A friend of mine also wrote an essay on a subject the lecturer is known to appreciate - waste & consumerism - and my friend got a 72 on her paper.

...I totally just answered my own doubts. Gross.

But if my argument against myself is right, it means that my style, writing ability, depth of research and ability to communicate my own opinions while citing professional academics (what's the shorter term for that?) are for this one paper, either higher, more refined or of a greater ability then that of other people - regardless of if their subject matter is sympathetic to our lecturer or not.

Oh God: I am overanalysing everything.

Grading systems don't bother me when it comes to essays, because writing an essay is a scientific art -- there are rules, conventions and methods that are set out. Writing an essay is like playing a game, or dissecting a body - everyone has their own special theories on the best way to go about things, but all and all you have to follow rules, and the outcome is not objective.

But when you're grading something like, say, a painting or a media installation - in short a piece of artwork - it's so conditional and based so heavily on aesthetic taste, that it becomes a matter of trying to communicate something that, you can't communicate. A problem of qualia.

So whenever I have to be assessed on an artistic creation of mine, I feel like my stomach isn't filled with butterflies, but centipedes - I almost become autistic when having to take a peer group assessment - something surely devised by Satan himself, where all members of the group who've worked on a project must band together and tell one another what they think they deserve for their input on the project. Christ, it's like Big Brother Elimination's for Sociopaths. I can't look anybody in the eye and wring my hands together silently, making occasional groaning noises as I chew my lip and sway uncomfortably. ANYWAY.

I think it's universally 'easy' to judge a piece of writing - communication is a formalised art. But art as 'art' can be, so much more difficult -- and it's because you cannot always read intention and effort from a single piece of symbolism. For me, everything I create is a sort of extension of my thinking ability -- it might be a man talking about aliens, but in me it sparks off so many patterns of thought that I impose this whole other layer of meaning over it -- and... I can't communicate what happens.

Of course I try; filling sketchbooks with explanations, giving presentations and telling people how I reached each artistic decision and why they connect to this and that. I can justify things well, perhaps better then many of my classmates -- but I do have the advantage of A: never going to traditional school, & B: being out in the 'real world' for a good many years. But even with all this, I can't fully communicate my intention in the work alone: nobody can look or listen to something I've done and just understand universally what I mean. And that, drives me a little mad.

I don't want to be literal - and I don't consider myself fully conceptual - it's just I don't believe that I will ever, well, be an artist if I can't have a percentage of people exposed to my work step away going I get it. I don't mean they get it like I get it, but I mean they get it, like, it sparks off in them a whole tree of thought that pings their rational consciousness and thus what they feel justifies what they've just experienced in looking/listening to my piece of work.

...Of course now that I'm thinking about it, if I produced a painting of a bowl of oranges tipped out of a broken green bowl which was something to do with the perils of Protestant and Catholic children in Northern Ireland, say, (hahah, bullshit art 101) and somebody said 'Oh what a stupid boring painting of fruit that reminds me of my grandmother', I would be disappointed, as that isn't the reaction I'm looking for.

But fuck. What if what I really should strive for isn't the selfish concept of me forcing my ideas into some strangers psyche -- maybe what I should strive for is making pieces that, regardless of my specific intention, just make people think in general.

Christ.

//

Oh, and, let me take this moment to say: Thank You Shelley Powers! (!!!1!!one!!11!) Your blog entry When Are We Needed, inspired me to write my essay -- which was, as I have not mentioned previously, a discussion of the representation of war as a means of redefining gender roles through the fabricated female persona in propagandistic British Films of the Second World War.

That was, sadly (hur hur), not the title -- which had to be the essay question in question - discuss the representation of war in the media - which I find sadly banal but eh, oh well. Thems the rules.

But yes, back to Shelley -- I cannot say how much of an inspiration that piece was. I read it a few months before the essay was due in, but when the essay question was handed over, I thought about what Shelley had wrote about WWII propaganda's effect on women in America -- and was curious to ponder the differences in the British methods of using propaganda to mobilise women, and the cultural effects it had on post-War England. So yes; Big Up for Shelley -- freekin' awesome.

Lazy Days

2007-05-24T20:50:00.000+01:00

Worst Blogger Ever.

Okay so I've been a little quiet lately. What with my freshly ended studies, my days are full of me playing my secret vice, drinking coffee, walking in the muggy British summertime air, painting portraits of bird women, and being on my own in a house I have to leave in six weeks.

So in other news:

Brian Eno doesn't know about the visualiser function with iTunes - and almost every other media player. 77 Million Paintings. Christ on a crutch. I sat long and hard trying to justify to myself why anyone would want to obtain his mad warez for £17.99 -- and I could not think of any reason other then it's Brian Eno's ambient tunes set to an abstract ever-shifting painting of digital light and blah-blah-blah-blah-blah. I think it's crap. Crap I say, crap.

Oh. I've become addicted to - sigh - TV on the internet. Specifically, the hospital drama House, which I am glad to see has 69 episodes of cynical, medical goodness. Man. I've seen so many hours of benign tumours and blood clots this week, paired with dry witticisms, I just don't know what to do with myself.

It's not really the type of show one should watch if they're, say, a hypochondriac -- but fuck yeah, it satisfies my sick fasination with awful, hard to figure out, weirdo diseases and disorders. There was a book that I was obsessed with when I was younger -- I feel that the title was simply 'Blood', and it was a bunch of real life case studies about stuff like ebola. The ebola one was my favourite one - it was like a mystery novel, but better. Medical thrillers; how grand.

And now, that God damned hippie Demian Rice has got me all like, listening to him. God. I had avoided liking him since 2002. What's up with that? Musicians who you dislike on principle, but whose music is actually good, so you end up liking them? Guh! Fucking feel good folk hippies - why must I enjoy your pathetic heartfelt music, like a gooshy History & Folklore major from a sappy Humanities college in Vermont. Bah humbug.

Must watch House. More blogging later.

This is for Lmo

2007-05-17T00:01:00.000+01:00

Everything Tastes Better When You've Got 10 Hours To Write 1500 Words And You're Drinking Grape-Apple-Pear Juice Held Within A Finely Crafted Plastic Coconut Cup
or
Portrait of the Artist, Procrastinating - Spring 2007

Food Stamps & Government

2007-05-16T21:23:00.000+01:00

So.

Members of U.S. Congress attempt to live off of food-stamps for a week.

Hey... That seems familiar -- oh yeah, hey, didn't I do that for a week too?
Oh wait that was like three years; my bad!

Certainly it makes for a good news and sound bite -- no puns dude -- but is it actually going to change anything?

Does anybody even care?

Everything I had to say I said in the comments. (Diaries of J.Black)

I swear I am working

2007-05-13T21:05:00.000+01:00

Taxes to beat to earth the evil destroyer of freedom and peace!

Ohemgee;

2007-05-09T21:59:00.000+01:00

Somebody wrote about Internet changing language and they didn't come off as a presumptuous over-educated asshat pandering to the lowest common denominator within an academic circle?

//

edit: note to self --

Truth Hert's Donuts

2007-05-09T14:56:00.000+01:00

How Can I Use Feminism To My Advantage?
Via Infinate ThØught
Four years old, and still making me laugh.

I just like accented characters in blog titles, obviously.

//

Sometimes I'm afraid a rabid pack of feministbots is going to descend upon me and rip me apart for not doing my gender justice, or something. Certainly I am all about gender studies - but kinda like some people are into Spartan politics or Victorian etiquette.

It's really awesome we came to the conclusion that all humans should be treated equally -- now can some of us stop defining themselves socially by the parts they were randomly allocated at birth, and can we like, start worrying about other stuff now?

ktnxbai.

Things I am Missing While I Procrastinate Getting Ready for Today's Meeting

2007-05-09T07:06:00.000+01:00

J.E. Gordon writing on physics & stress & tension.

zefrank.

Bad American Food.

elephantitis of the mind

2+1=3

2007-05-07T23:38:00.000+01:00

It's my birthday on the 10th. I will be twenty one years old.

Finally. When you add me together I equal three.
I haven't been this excited since I was 12.

[[Enter worry here.]]

Advanced Western Capitalist Society, AHOY!

2007-05-04T00:57:00.000+01:00

Right now at this moment in time, I'm trying to do some research - not for any academic purpose, but an attempt to prove to myself a statistical sociological fact. It's been bugging me for weeks and weeks, and I have to find some hard evidence.

I want to see if suburban New England's stance on having some commercial retail spaces open to 9-10pm on most evenings adds a significant boost to the local economy, while also lessening crime rates and anti-social behaviour.

See, I live in Surrey, UK at the moment -- most retail spaces are shut by 5pm every day, and most aren't open on a Sunday. Exceptions to this are restaurants and, of course, pubs.

So I am trying to do a comparison of statistics between to townships of similar size: Framingham MA (pop. 65,598, 2005) and Guildford, Surrey (pop. 66,773, 2001).

//

I wonder how advanced capitalist societies are supposed to grow; I would imagine along with more complex issues it would include:

A: assure the population has expendable income, via healthy employment
B: create public spaces with various retail outlets tailored to a wide class spectrum
C: encourage spending with retail opening hours of 9-to-9, for students, 9.2.5ers, etc.

With my personal experience of being a student in the UK, I find it really fucking difficult to become a good little active advanced western capitalist consumer, as I: Don't Have Enough Opportunity To Spend, & Don't Have Enough Disposable Income.

I go to skool weekdays, 10-5. When I leave, all the shops on the high-street are closing, including the book stores and cafes*, so the only opportunity I have for a social space outside of my (non-existent) living room is: The Pub, A Restaurant (Expensive! Bad quality!), A Park, Someone Else's Living Room.

Social aspects aside, it also limits my job opportunities: I could get a job at: A Pub or A Restaurant, but because I cannot work retail hours during the week, I am pretty unhireable anywhere else. Some stores will be looking for weekend help, but that would be working one single day a week at minimum wage. (Which I will add, is £4.45 for 18-21 y.os in the UK: see link.)

So lets say I get a job at the local greasy cafe getting £4.45 an hour, and on a Saturday the cafe is open from 9am to 4pm with an hour lunch break - I would be earning £26.70, not including tips -- but let me remind you that tips don't exist in the UK.

£26.70 is $53.05 as of today, yet that seems a bit extreme - living in England is different. £26.70 will buy me two weekly bus tickets to school, and leave me with 70p for a cup of machine coffee when I get there. I like to think it doesn't cost $26.52 in the States for a bus pass, but I can't remember.

Anyway, I get off track.
I don't yet understand why suburban England adheres to these retail hours. Is this my American adolescence showing through? Perhaps -- but I am not looking at this from a problem of retail spaces offering places to be for people on a social level - not just as consumers, but as a place where they can spend leisure time that aren't a pub. Cinemas, bookstores, cafes, stupid-random-shops, galleries, music shops, etc, etc, etc. Britain is having a huge problem with binge drinking and antisocial behaviour in teenagers and young-adults -- is it because there is nowhere else to go but the pub, or the local park at night?

I must investigate...

Or maybe I could go to the pub.
Yech.

*Oh how I miss the book stores and cafes. ::weeping::

[[Edit: oh man, my blog homie Frank has some sweet things to say about England as a security state. I can confirm this all as true. I will be sending the tapes as evidence.]]

[[Edit II: if I lived in Tokyo, I know who I'd consider voting for. At least he is honest.]]

Reading in May

2007-05-01T20:21:00.000+01:00

Lift Not The Painted Veil

2007-04-30T19:54:00.001+01:00

I'm just to angry to say anything logical at the moment.

The crux case centres on a woman called Nishal, a 26-year-old Moroccan immigrant to Germany with two kids and a psychotic husband. Since their wedding night, this husband beat the hell out of her. She crawled to the police covered in wounds, and they ordered the husband to stay away from her. He refused. He terrorised her with death threats.

So Nishal went to the courts to request an early divorce, hoping that once they were no longer married he would leave her alone. A judge who believed in the rights of women would find it very easy to make a judgement: you're free from this man, case dismissed.

But Judge Christa Datz-Winter followed the logic of multiculturalism instead. She said she would not grant an early divorce because - despite the police documentation of extreme violence and continued threats - there was no "unreasonable hardship" here.

Why? Because the woman, as a Muslim, should have "expected" it, the judge explained. She read out passages from the Koran to show that Muslim husbands have the "right to use corporal punishment". Look at Sura 4, verse 34, she said to Nishal, where the Koran says he can hammer you. That's your culture. Goodbye, and enjoy your beatings.

I know the writing style is biased and aggressive, and that I need a bigger, clearer picture of what's happening -- was the German judge using this as an example, an extreme method of getting fellow law-makers in Germany and the EU to recognise the complete and utter madness that is fundamentalist Muslim (or any religious...) Dogma in regards to woman's lack-of-rights? Or does this judge not care? Does she perhaps hate Muslim's, so she's willing to have them suffer? What's going on?

Maybe after stuff like, oh I don't know, Baden-Baden for instance, the Germans are now hyper sensitive to accommodating other religious views and integrating them into contemporary German culture. But how far down can a country sink, compromising their own concept of human rights, in order to suit the archaic views of an immigrating populous?

I'm supposed to be finishing a sketchbook. I'm too angry to breath.

J0 man(ga).

2007-04-28T12:17:00.000+01:00

This is for my mother.

By Mckenzee,j0. Props.

//

I <3 comix -- when I was younger and I lived in a country where they have bookstores that are open past 5pm, I used to be a manga hobo, which was awesome. I'd lunk around, reading Ramna1/2 and Clamp titles and every Sandman ever. It was great; I learned a lot from ~~comics~~ graphic novels. I was never into Marvel or DC, sadly, mostly because I thought they were, well, kinda lame. I didn't like the traditional comic style, or rather, the T&A club. Don't get me wrong, I love a fine lookin' woman as much as the next Humanoid, but, meh. Didn't too much.

Of course now, I have a soft spot for some X-men, or whatever which I keep a small stash off.

Mostly I am cheap, and cannot afford more comics.

//

What was I going to talk about here?

I'm sure I had some witty remark about a womens place in life. I'd of been a women placed in life for twenty-one years in 12 days or something, and so far the only problems I've found are with people who are Assholes. Sexism goes both ways, people.

But wait: boys are stupid. Let's throw rocks at them.

Asshat.

Commune with the Dead

2007-04-26T22:17:00.000+01:00

//

I recently picked up Bright Eyes' new album Cassadaga.

Let's have a moments of silence to bask in it's goodness.

...

Okay sweet. It's named after a place in central Florida, a spiritualists commune - filled with mediums and psychics and mystics. A place of vortex maybe? I heard (herd) rumours. I have a very faint memory of when I lived in Florida as a kid, speaking to someone or overhearing the term vortex in relation to the landscape, and it being a faintly metaphysical thing of some sort. Energy portal. I was convinced if I stood on one I'd be sent to another world.

In the Seneca language Cassadaga means 'water beneath the rocks'. Hadn't we just been speaking about Navajo? People forget the water beneath the rocks. Until they're thirsty

Sometimes I wonder about Conor Oberst - he's from Omaha Nebraska (a haunting state in my eyes...) - and sometimes I wonder about who he is. I know he's a singer, of brilliant talent - but that's it. He embodies a sense of American sadness which I think is rare; a crumbling piece of paper, an old Indian treaty, muddy water in the Mississippi, dusty ground outside a Dairy Queen, scent of cotton in August, flat lands, marsh lands, wide open space and a sky that'll fall.

People say he's emo. I find that an alien concept -- he's not emo, he's emotional. Dead people. The obviousness for a bottle or any escape in an absurd, false, plastic landscape we build for ourselves. Forgetting about the dirt, thinking about how to market a land. Market an idea. Can you really blame anybody intelligent for being at all depressed?

We built our own reality, only to realise it was a prison.
(Postmodern isolation baby.)

Susette LaFlesche Tibbles was from the Omaha tribe. Her name was Inshata-Theumba. Bright Eyes.

It all makes sense to me now.

//

Bright Eyes - Four Winds

Listen.
It's poetry.

Zombie (Media) Hunter

2007-04-25T00:30:00.000+01:00

On New Old Media.

Sure, okay this is two days late -- practically ancient and totally sacrilege here on the world of the internet -- but occasionally I have deadlines in meatspace and skip these things over. Only I've been thinking about this one for a few hours (when I should be writing an introduction to my work that I'm giving in for assessment on the 1st.)

Distraction over.

The aforementioned top link, Scoble giving props to the (his?) 'Blogger and Podcaster' magazine, stuck me as odd. Okay, well not the actual link or post, but the phrase: I like this online format for displaying magazine contents.

Newsflash: Nobody Likes Magazine Formats.

Dead Tree Media gone Zombie Media.
I like how you combine two obsolete pieces of technology!

Seriously, for a minute homeslices, I thought it was some sort of post-post-modern joke --- hey internet people, who's virtual interactive landscape has rendered paper-print media obsolete, look at this flat object who's most cutting edge aspect is the talking advertisements!!! --- then I realised as Scoble lacks a sense of humour, that could not be the case.

Don't get me wrong ese, I grew up with magazines telling me all sorts of wonderful things -- National Geographic and i-D, weird hippie shit and American Girl -- a whole plethora of printed information.

Then I got the Internet when I was like 9, an that shit didn't matter any more. Here was a platform that gave me websites where I could flick back and forth between information as quickly and as deeply as I wanted to, never having to get caught up in 'flat' text as it were. Magazines slowly became a supplement. As time went by, and the range of information on the web became wider and wider, magazines became more and more as a sort of casual 'take a glance, find online' form of information dispersal.

The last magazine I bought was National Geographic in December of 2006 -- I bought it because it had something cool on Saturn (omg! its online? NO WAI!) and I was travelling from London to Paris for Xmas, and wanted to give my kid sisters the huge poster of the planets. It hangs in the pantry over the fish now, and it blew their minds, the consideration that Jupiter and Saturn are so fucking huge and that Pluto and Eris are such odd little dwarf planets -- we discussed definition of celestial objects and it was awesome. Thank you, printed media - because that is one thing you can do that my little 15" MacBook can't do -- challenge my spacial perceptions through different formatting of sizes, then get hung up on the wall to remind me all the time.

Or, can you?

This brings me around. While things like Scoble's abso-fucking-lutely absurd revamp of magazines for the web make me kinda wanna cry a little bit (so redundant, so unæsthetic...), things like Nikon's Universcale on the whole other hand, gives a very fine example of better (or maybe just a fresher, more interesting?) ways of displaying information.

This Easter when I was sitting with my sisters in France again, we were looking at the Universcale together and talking, again, about spatial relationships. We were totally digging how it, that is the flash presentation (artfully done!), didn't seem to need us at all in order to go through it's cycle of information dispersal, but at the same time when we did show up to pay attention, we could skip to and fro without any problems or difficulty.

Which to me illustrates a fine example as what we are as human beings in this vast, sprawling universe: tiny, irrelevant specks -- until we take action.

Word Nerd Fiiiiight!

2007-04-22T21:07:00.000+01:00

Byron vs Southey

Oh Southey! Southey! cease thy varied song!
A bard may chant too often and too long:
As thou art strong in verse, in mercy, spare!
A fourth, alas! were more than we could bear.
But if, in spite of all the world can say,
Thou still wilt verseward plod thy weary way;
If still in Berkley ballads most uncivil,
Thou wilt devote old women to the devil,
The babe unborn thy dread intent may rue:
"God help thee," Southey, and thy readers too.

I like Byron. I picked up a abridged copy of selected poems earlier this afternoon, as something tangible for me to carry around and paw through while taking a coffee in this dreary ailing township where I live. This place makes Orange Massachusetts look like Rio. Anyway, I digress -- over my soggy bland tiramisu I stumbled across these lines, and it made me laugh and laugh and then reference Byron again to get more background information, then laugh and laugh and relate it stronger with current events.

History is just repeating;
Over and over and over and over - like a monkey with a miniature cymbal.

It was quoted of Southey by the literary critic (HAHAHA, wait let me rephrase that) ~~strike~~, by another faintly embittered early 19th century writer, William Hazlitt, the following:

He wooed Liberty as a youthful lover, but it was perhaps more as a mistress than a bride; and he has since wedded with an elderly and not very reputable lady, called Legitimacy.

My casual research tells me Hazlitt was an pre-socialist before his time who never lost his revolutionary vigour and totally ripped a new one to Coleridge and Wordsworth and almost everyone else who got old, got famous, and got conservative. He hated conservatives; or at least, he hated the political U turn that people took. That's awesome, I can relate -- and oh snap he was sharp.

Just maybe not as sharp as Byron...

My point being as following: it is all terribly exciting in ones youth or later-life metamorphosis to attach themselves to a movement which is, for all extents and purposes, free: libertarianism from the establishment, shifting power through moving the people, grass roots and all that; stirring up the pot of social consensus. Only, if when the establishment begins to embrace you, and you start to, in Southey's case, sing the praises of Monarchy - or say, perhaps, in modern terms, oh, pimp the marketing tycoons - and you are left attempting to pass and enforce a code of moral judgement on your once fellow libertines for their written word... One will find that's what us youngsters call selling out.

But as we all know, friendsters: the internet is serious business.

When I Was A Child I Believed My Father Was A Pirate

2007-04-22T17:38:00.000+01:00

The first music I ever got off the internet was in either 1997 or 1998, I can't exactly remember, when I was either 11 or 12 -- the only way I can date it is very foggy -- isn't that sick -- but I know it was during my illustrious punk rock stage.

It was NOFX on a fan site, streaming Punk in Drublic, Heavy Petting Zoo and White Trash Two Heebs and a Bean on Real Audio or something like that. I was never able to skip over songs, so I had to wait patiently for it to buffer, and listen to the tracks over and over to get to my absolute favourite stupid songs.

I listened to it for months, oh yes, as one does -- only one day when I went there, it had been replaced with a notice that said they'd been given a C&D to take down all the music, as it was infringing copyrights. Then there was no more NOFX.

Well, until June 1st 1999.

It was a beautiful time to be alive.

If you like scummy California punk:
A NOFX collective
(where's your copyright God now?)
Bob
Linoleum
The 'Brews
Don't Call Me White

Shit I Get Worried About And Shit

2007-04-22T02:14:00.000+01:00

Table Manners.

And oh man, I've just realised I've been putting my cutlery horizontally on my plate for years, believing it's the correct way to signify a finished meal. Oh how wrong I was! Oh the faux pas I've committed!

When I was quite little, little enough that when I'd take a bath it was advisable that an adult was near so that I didn't lay down in the bubbles face first in a fit of unobserved Ophelian hysteria (being a traditionalist I will note by that I mean rambling womb syndrome, not psychological stress), my father would sit by the door and read to me and have me recite back to him, the magnum opus of Emily Post.

I don't think I can accurately explain the levels of irony that are associated with my father reading me Emily Post -- explaining my father at this point is just too difficult -- but to me there was a special sort of interconnected agony and delight in having to be told and then to relay the correct way to cut an apple, or attend a formal luncheon.

Sometimes I wish I could look at the inside of my hippocampi and have a brain pixie describe to me why it is that it thought saving the concept of etiquette was So Damn Important.

Freud would have a field day.

(Lawn darts optional - three legged race mandatory)
(Although three legged race is more of Chomsky's kinda party)
(Colourless green ideas sleep furiously)
(The present Queen of France rides a unicorn)
(Three legged race)

<>

LucidTV is the best web comic ever. All of them, best.

I often feel like this and if you take time to notice, I am currently fashionably ill.

Now will you excuse me? I have to assure myself that I know what fuckin' fork to eat my baby cow with and shit.

In Which I Steal Time

2007-04-20T14:53:00.000+01:00

I am an awful eavesdropper. Like really bad.
Often times during workshops, 2nd and 3rd years from my course come in to talk to my lecturers, and I constantly find myself overhearing them discussing their projects.

Its like art espionage.

Somebody is undergoing a project which involves light levels in a wind tunnel that are adjusted via sound levels taken off analogue readings. My greedy mind soaks it all up. These are the kind of projects I like to think about. Sound, vision, interaction. Resonance of actions -- chaos theory -- me leaving a book by mistake in Waterloo, it gets picked up by a courier who gets so involved he forgets to send off a dossier to a translator in the City, causing a war to break out between two factions of Italian shoe makers. That kinda stuff.

I've been terribly ill lately, hence why I haven't been posting. Instead I've been playing games and going to classes obediently.

Stolen blog time -- back to focusing now. More information later.

Purposefully Idle

2007-04-09T02:59:00.000+01:00

Yaaar.

In France with La Famille - terribly tired, and filled with sugar.

Haven't been able to write a coherent sentence in days and days, and I blame it all on being constantly surrounded by other chattering humans who're typically demanding of my time and energy. Plus my own lack of purpose.

I tried to write about how I want to start making shoes, how when I was seventeen I worked for a video game company, and how recently I've had a bad haircut that makes me look like a German fighter pilot -- but nothing is flowin' from these typing (85 wpm) hands.

Oh wait; 45 minutes distracted by else blogs. I'm sorry baby, I was making fun of other peoples stupid hair.

Easter: A Japanese horror triptych interpreted as the cat-and-chipmunk archetypes.

Just a little sleepy.

In Other News:

I am totally considering rocking up to the Woman in Games conference in Newport, South Wales next week. Can I afford it? Hells no -- but if they'll consent to sell me a ticket on Tuesday, I'l be there on Thursday morning.

I may have to email them, to confirm if that's a possibility.
Otherwise I might not go at all.

What, me idle minded?

//

[EDIT: oh I could have it so much worse]

Peaches & Snow

2007-03-30T19:11:00.000+01:00

This image has been sterilised of all sexual overtones.

The Guardian online today had the most illuminating article I've perhaps ever read on a dead-tree-news website.

Peaches Geldof is becoming a lonely MySpace addict.

Illuminating me to the cultural snow that publications like the Guardian try to shovel off to their readers. Yellow snow.

I really should feel sympathy for a woman whose name could so conveniently be titled with 'Stewed', and whose parents are an ex-B-list popstar and a blonde whatever. Really, I should be able to feel sympathy for her. But I can't.

Because the only thing that article illustrates is a complete and total lack of understanding on so many levels. I can't even begin to sort it out. Reading that article was like looking at a technical illustration for the wasteful, over-indulged, self-absorbed capitalist Western teenager.

It brings me to the concepts I was struggling to articulate in my previous post on MySpace -- namely that it is my belief that MySpace is not allowing for a more tech-savvy youth. I would love to see a proper poll taken on the number of MySpace users who have learned a scripting code to format their profiles, vs. ones who've simply used profile editing sites that write all the code for you. The educational value of MySpace is... Limited at best. In order to learn anything - anything - from the site, you have to be looking to learn -- and if there is one thing we can learn of Peaches Geldof's amazing illustration of Western Teenage Culture, people born after 1980 are less inclined to learn and more inclined to consume.

Consume economically saturated cultural snow. Cultural Snow - this is a term quoted in Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami - a book I read first on the plane from LA to London four or so years ago, and haven't allowed to leave my side in the 5-or-so times I've moved since. Anyway. Cultural snow -- aside from having a wabi sabi like effect on my psyche -- has not been a concept I've come across anywhere else, and I'm afraid I'm not looking hard enough. But it boils down to this in my mind:

Cultural Snow, the general term for the phenomena of trends in clubs, music, fashion, eateries, MySpace, television shows -- which, regardless of their worth in the long run, have a huge surge of 'importance' and price to specific peoples. Their capita is overwhelmed and a £5 carrier bag by a small hip firm starts selling for £200 on eBay -- regardless of the fact it will be sold in Sainsbury's for a fiver come May.

Enchanting snowflakes that looked so inspiring that first day are turned yellow as the public passes over them to admire, then it all turns back into common water before long. It melts fast, this cultural snow.

And that is why today's hip teenager is sharp -- we might not be able to understand electrical engineering or sociology or botany or mathematics -- but we understand the importance of shovelling cultural snow in maintaining our identities in both Meatspace and MySpace.

In that way, we really are the children of the 1980s -- not something I am particularly proud of, to say myself.

I don't believe that it's any random occurrence that there is a resurgence of 1980s cultural icons in fashion, music styles and general aesthetics in youth culture - at least here in England. For Godssake, ask any willing young adult what drugs they've been doing when they go out and they'll tell you: it's all cocaine, with the occasional bout of ketamine. It's all relevant - it's all a reflection of what Peaches Geldof had to write about, in the end. Consume to fulfil self and attempt satisfaction at existence through use of cultural snow. Shovel, shovel, shovel. It takes a lot of energy; and if reading wilderness guides has taught me anything, it's that trying to survive out there in the wild by consuming snow will leave you very dead very quickly.

Queen of symmetry, danah boyd, says that society has ''trained our children to be narcissistic and that this is having all sorts of terrifying repercussions'', but I don't think that is the case.

There is no doubt, wait, no doubt in my mind that today's youth culture is excessively, dangerously and alarmingly narcissistic -- none what so ever. This is a world where my friends, physical, MeatSpace, real-life, University attending, normal friends, send me bulletins on MySpace asking me to put up a professionally styled advertisement for their profile in my sidebar - regardless of the fact that I have them in my Top-8 (14) already. People who have a personal profile and a 'professional' profile to display their music/films/acting/product/whatever, despite often having never officially worked in a 'professional' entertainment/arts field. Because they want people to look at them, because they want to be famous - and when I ask why, I don't get the response 'to be free', I get the response 'to be seen'. (Or did they mean 'to be scene'?) Because while many make ironic digs to Tyler Durden's immortal words -- you are not a beautiful or unique snowflake -- they do not believe it; they still hang onto the ideal that perhaps they'll be the One, the error or exception. Maybe they've gotten mixed up in the horribly amusing, macabre even, paradox that the man telling them that is in fact a fictional character written by a famous author and portrayed by an even more famous celebrity, up there on the big, wide, shinny silver screen. A modern Arcadia. But when Tyler gives his famous ...and we're very, very pissed off monologue, is he echoing a prophecy for the future?

But what Mz. boyd says, I believe, is that parents and society have taught these children to be like this. I believe that statement shows a genuine lack of faith in humanity, in that it seems to me to presume that children and young adults cannot make their own independent decisions on life and lifestyle choices. I believe that's crap -- a child can be told to be humble and still may revolt the other way. This generation has had 2000+ years of post-Roman development and history backing them up; we are alarmingly literate, and most of us have access to a bevy of information in either the library or the internet, which gives us both the pros and cons of capitalism, consumerism, narcissism, individualism and every other -ism that we could ever think to create.

It's not the parents or society's fault: it's their own.

And I doubt any of them care. In many cases, I know they don't care.

The blame game on guardians and educators can only go so far before it loses all weight in its argument. Or does self-realisation only happen at eighteen?

All The CoolKids Are Doing It.

2007-03-27T19:37:00.000+01:00

Death,
By: A. Sew, C. Asian.

Satire is Dead. Long Live Satire.

///

It's a funny thing when people tell you that, no, there will be no censorship in our New World; everything will be open - everything will be free; speech, information, knowledge. Unless we don't agree with it. Unless it happens to be of bad taste. People just have to, have to, stick to a doctrine of etiquette.

And when you don't stick to a doctrine, maybe someone will end up paying, regardless if they are a guilty party. Simply due to what people perceive as an association to somebody who might be guilty maybe we don't know.

Ann Putnam, Sr. added her complaint that Nurse demanded that she sign the Devil's book, then pinched her. Nurse was one of three Towne sisters , all identified as witches, who were members of a Topsfield family that had a long-standing quarrel with the Putnam family. Apart from the evidence of Putnam family members, the major piece of evidence against Nurse appeared to be testimony indicating that soon after Nurse lectured Benjamin Houlton for allowing his pig to root in her garden, Houlton died. The Nurse jury returned a verdict of not guilty, much to the displeasure of Chief Justice Stoughton, who told the jury to go back and consider again a statement of Nurse's that might be considered an admission of guilt (but more likely an indication of confusion about the question, as Nurse was old and nearly deaf). The jury reconvened, this time coming back with a verdict of guilty. On July 19, 1692, Nurse rode with four other convicted witches to Gallows Hill.

///

Symbolic capital is any species of capital that is perceived through socially inculcated classificatory schemes. When a holder of symbolic capital uses the power this confers against an agent who holds less, and seeks thereby to alter their actions, they exercise symbolic violence. Symbolic violence is fundamentally the imposition of categories of thought and perception upon dominated social agents.

Aye So See Ace Shins.
Ah Sew Sea Ate Ions.
Eye Sue Cee Eight Inns.

///

Reading Reading Reading, Complete.

2007-03-25T18:02:00.000+01:00

The back of a cereal packet.
Seminar paper on Alt Media (snort)
Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste
An Introduction to the Work of Pierre Bourdieu (HAHA; pseudointel-cliffnotes)
Making History, by Stephen Fry.
Not any Dead-Tree Newspapers since '05
Bits from my favourtist; The Man who was Thursday.
Some Dance, Dance, Dance.
Seven Seals, D.H. Lawrence
Warning: Falling Rocks
High Five!!!
Documentary transcript, Until you Know Them (working title)

The Most Beautiful Spam

2007-03-25T17:33:00.000+01:00

I never open up spam, but in my gmail account I can read the first few lines of text, and this one intrigued me.

might be more communicative. Try to arrange a meeting. mothers become mothers. Simple enough. the loss. Another individual, who shall be nameless, will supply the lit up with lively color when the back projector came on. riders were tossed to the ground as the sheots recoiled in fear. I one. A wide seat was in the middle and there were two wheels to the massive form, rubbing my nose and sniffling. I had a quick glimpse of Still seven. Still a week. Plenty of time for my good buddy Admiral handed it to me. The Admiral was not happy. His scowl turned to a snarl and he jabbed Aida-is Fido transmitting? But we need something new and different. Thats what we are here for. slowly until they dropped. When I looked around I saw that the gas had fingers through his gray hair, perhaps to see if it was still there. I Im all alone, looking for something in the pool, and have to work very very hard

Is that not beauty?

It got me thinking about cut-ups and the way we cognitively place meaning on strings of words.

Colourless green ideas sleep furiously.

So there is somebody out there who's spamming us all - but in their bid to sell us cheap pharmaceuticals they're using spamoetry. After some research I now know that its used to pass Bayesian filtering systems, but you know, I actually like it. I wish I had more spam (be careful what you wish for...) which was this beautiful.

It makes me think.

//

Also: walking down the street today, I stopped and found a playing card on the ground. Diamond King.

Be Experimental! Just Play by the Copy Right Rules...

2007-03-22T18:20:00.000Z

Ah my homies...

So as you may already know, I make experimental films at art skoolzor and I enjoy it, mostly.

So that's awesome and everything, and the project I'm working on at the minute is awesome and everything, and everything is awesome and awesome. Or so I thought -- until I went to my skoolzors Learning Resource Centre (HAHAHAH) which is pretentious asshat speak for library.

The peeps that instruct me told me at the beginning of the year that we have excellent stock and film archives and that I totally should use them so I can be awesome and make awesome films. So this week, after making a vague outline of out film, we realise that we want some stock footage of: light reflecting on water, time-lapsed night sky, and time-lapsed clouds at dawn/sunset/midday and maybe some funky 80s light things if we can find it. We wanted stuff that was free of copyright and royalties, so we could potentially show our film at festivals and suchforth if it ends up being as awesome as we believe it will be.

But would you have guessed it? Our archive at skoolzors does not offer those kind of options -- we actually have no physical stock footage for moving images, but we do have a list of resources of where you can get that footage. for a hefty fucking price.

Six minutes and twenty-one seconds of high resolution 720x576 px PAL Quicktime footage of the sky at night is $199.00.

...Why am I even shocked? I don't know, but I most certainly am.

Last weekend in London I spoke very briefly to Paula Ledieu of Magic Lantern Productions, who used to head the sadly idle BBC Creative Archive project. It was all in regards to the Open Media portion of OKF's mini-con -- what people were talking about are the lack of accessibility in archives from public funded media such as the BBC and the BFI.

I was incised then at the lack of access we have as Brits to archives of products that we pay for through TV licences and suchlike. But I didn't actually physically realise what a drain lack of open source copyright-free media assets is on creative force. As a student I cannot afford in any way to pay $199.00 for six minutes of film footage - and the equipment I rent out for very brief periods of time from my school is not at all designed for taking clear high-res shots of the night sky.

So if I want a piece of footage of the night sky? I am left with only one feasible and economical option, which is to steal footage. And I don't want to do that. Is it because I ethically feel it's wrong? Hell no; footage of nature, of all things, should be open. But It's because I have to disclose all footage sources in my final project, and if I'm caught lying about the origins of footage, then my piece will (apparently) fail and I cannot enter it in festivals.

Or so they tell me.
That's a boarder I plan to push on my next project -- but that's besides the point...

//

Personally I'm not sure what I'm going to do to fill the holes we have in available footage. I believe I'll have to insert stills rather then moving image, which bothers me to some extent because I find the use of stills in a moving image piece to be redundant. At least in most cases...

Or next week we're going to have to lie-beg-steal our way into getting our hands on another camera, and using that to capture some footage of some of the things (dawn, twilight, light on water...) that we need. But I've tried before, and I can't capture the night sky.

Capture the night sky. Mm, reminds me of old Greek myths for some reason.
Net of stars? Oh I'm befuddled!

But I think I need to start taking a more active role in getting publicly funded film & video archives to allow more universal access.

Afternoon Delight

2007-03-21T21:05:00.000Z

What's your worth? // Cultural Capital

2007-03-18T18:30:00.000Z

Now that I can raise my head up out of this goo of reality and focus for ten minutes or so, let me talk about something silly-- I mean, functional and important.

I went to Open Knowledge 1.0 on Saturday - I was terribly shy and quiet. The ratio of male to female was, yes, rather unbalanced (as was race; ieee) -- but this isn't a post about gender inequality -- that's for another time my precious.

This isn't actually going to be a run through of things which were discussed during the talks - even though I have three notebook pages full of notes, I'd rather not give some sterile discussion of events. But there are a few key points that were raised:

Firstly: I realised why having open geodata is so fucking important and not at all banal.
Secondly: hard left-wing Socialist techies are amusing, but not to be fucked with.
Thirdly: accurate scientific and technological knowledge, especially that of the internet, is crucial in maintaining ones cultural capital.

Cultural capital. We were discussing this concept in my seminar last week (of which I am constantly given shit by peers for caring about), and in that time I was trying in vain to explain why there is a class divide between people who Can Use The Internet and people who Can't.

I was having a huge problem articulating myself at the time, which wasn't very amusing - my American accent and incessant need to communicate ideas, i.e. chatter on about stuff, makes people take the piss out of me all the time. I can never get anyone to listen to me because they all start laughing at my choice of language. Wait, wait, I nearly fell into an Emo-Emu trap; lets get back on track.

What I had been trying to say and hadn't been able to was that there are significant issues arising culturally due to people in positions of authority - like, oh, the Government as one example - who are not aware of the potential or even the basics of Web culture.

Let's take a comment made by John Sheridan, Head of e-Services for the Office of Public Sector Information at OK yesterday - who I note does not have any website or blog that I can find, unless he has also played for Leeds, or perhaps plays jazz piano or has ever been the military governor of Babylon 5.

I'll paraphrase due to a lack of photographic memory (oooh bad me), but what John Sheridan said boiled down to: when I talk about web stuff, I can see many colleagues eyes just fog over.

Now keep in mind this is the man who is trying to get Government to think seriously about archiving PSI on the web, including creating a database of government legislation which can be accessed by the public. And they've spent, apparently, the last 18 months discussing the possibility of that happening. Man. I wish the public would pay me to discuss something for 18 months. It would be like contract philosophising -- just at the end you wouldn't have to show any of your data.

It is all fine and well if a person can use the buzzwords; Semantic Web, dereferenceable UDI's, new ontologies, and so forth. But if they can't communicate those ideas in a confidant and accurate manner to a large group of people who don't understand them, how can they be considered valuable to the cause they're trying to promote?

I'm starting to think that it's not just sloppy and ineffective if people don't understand science & technology and it's place in contemporary society -- I'm starting to think it's downright destructive and dangerous.

Global warming might kill us all, and they tell me only %40 of Americans believe in evolution, and that officials freak out just a little when faced with stuff they don't understand.

But aside from the legislation and the cringeworthy sound bites government puts out, on regular civilian social level it just makes people less open to expanding on knowledge which is already out there, because they're unaware of possibility.

I'm rambling now; my focus which was so sharp has been softened quickly and I need to research more into cultural capital and sci/tech/web.

But the other evening, when there was a beautiful lunar eclipse, I text' (there is no plural, is there?) my friend to tell him to look out the window to see. He text' me back, saying 'haha, you can't trick me!'

He was certain that if the moon was eclipsed, it would be completely obfuscated from view thus he'd be trying to look for nothing. I had to call him to convince him that it would be out there, a muddy red orb hung high in the sky.

Just imagine if nobody ever told him how eclipses worked?

MySpace & my space.

2007-03-16T22:45:00.000Z

I am dying to get footage of danah boyd talk about teens at SXSW this year -- alas, my searching has found me nothing, although I do admit that I am slightly too tired/apathetic to go all Sherlock.

Why do I want the footage? Well first because I (obviously) couldn't get to SXSW this year (5,000+ miles is apparently too far for my uni to consider a field trip) and I like trying to nab information on what happened at the event. Secondly: I've been reading danah's work casually since, hrmm, it must have been around '03/04, so I must have been about 16.

Although I know she makes some people get a little vicious, I have my own love/hate relationship with her work.

I love the concept - sociology/anthropology in contemporary youth/tech culture. Oh that's great. But I still, as someone who's nine years younger then danah, have problems digesting her perspective on youth culture & the internet, as I think it's a little precious and feels it never spoke to me & the way I used the internet, but rather a population of highschoolers who I never knew. While she stands outside and looks in, I sit inside and look out -- and sometimes I feel she's looking at culture This Very Moment in the present, and I'm looking at The Potential Moments in the future. Or maybe not, anyway.

Social networks, online etiquette and virtual landscapes enthral me. I've been using 'social networks' since I was nine years old - in the form of MUSHs and MUDs (which yes I argue /are/ social networks of an antique flavour) - and I've been 'active' on the 'net since that time too. I've been members of numerous online art groups, message boards, and web-rings when I was younger, and as I grew I moved on to LiveJournal and Flickr and deviantArt, YouTube and, most recently, MySpace.

Let's start by clearing the air: I Hate MySpace. But I have a profile -- why would I be included and associate myself with something that I hate? Because In Real Life (iRL lolz) it's important for my MeatSpace Social Life to have a virtual hub which, in some ways, secures those MeatSpace connections.

By having a profile I can send casual messages to friends, which isn't as forward as calling/texting them on their phone, and can be use to arrange social gatherings without committing oneself. It's a casual thing -- and that's Very Important. Being casual means being cool -- being casual means you're not being clingy, overbearing, weirdly eager or anything like that. Casual. Casual means nobody gets hurt, embarrassed or ignored - it just flows.

So of course teenagers don't care if their MySpace gets deleted or they forget their passwords; you just make another one and connect yourself with your friends, of whom are usually all friends with eachother, causing one huge net of Knowing Everyone. Not caring is casual - and as we now know, Casual is Cool.

///

I have So Much More to say on the subject of MySpace & etc, but I'm far too tired -- despite the fact I've slept maybe 16 hours and then had a run around in the crisp pre-Spring air outside for like an hour to wake me up.

Not drinking coffee sucks - but I'm still banking on drinking nothing but decaf 'detox' tea (nettle, dandelion, burdock, peppermint, other crap) will somehow make me into a better human being.

I suspect there's crap wrong with me that I should have sorted out 6 years or so, just, gneh. I don't trust doctors, or rather, trust pharmaceutical companies to offer accurate and successful medication to be effective in any way. Or maybe that's just an excuse.

Bah humbug.

Open Knowledge & Pi

2007-03-14T20:45:00.000Z

Yabley barbly comrades; this Saturday I will be attending Open Knowledge 1.0 in London. I can't actually afford it, or rather I can, but it means eating nothing but 8p packaged noodles from Tesco's for the next week or two. I am banking on the whole ordeal being important and insightful for my poor underdeveloped mind or something. Plus, how could I say no to a pretentious Web 2.0 title?

I am a greedy little information hound. If I was a Top Trumps card, my tag line would be 'Insufferable Little Know-It-All: 100x∞. My own manic need/desire to know stuff carries me through these stages:

First: Silent Observer - I sit and wait, like a ninja, ready to knife the soft underbelly of knowledge and eat its sweetmeats. Once obtained, sense of security fills me and I move on to,

Second: Overzealous Questioner - The Spanish Inquisition has nothing on me; every pause in lecturers/speakers monologue or request for 'Are there any questions, comments?...' and I'm already speaking. I can't help it. My head is filled with bees which lead on to,

Third: Head-Full-Of-Stars - is my Indian name. Actually no, that's Hester Saint-? McGuire -- and a whole nother story. But presuming the former was my feather-not-dot name, it would be because my brain buzzes with the dead reflections of information that are beamed out to me and kept safe. Until somebody says something which is Not True in my mind, and I correct them without pause for social ramifications.

Thus the title of 'Insufferable'.

Okay yeah so whatever, basic psychology aside, why am I going? Well a lot of reasons; I haven't attended any events like this, and I like connecting with information. Because I like connecting with information, I like the concept of Open Knowledge as a whole, because I like information to be free. (Sidenote: I cried every single time I watched Born Free as a child...) The speakers from Open Media and Open Science/Civil really intrigue me, and I hope to learn something awesome.

But an amusing sidenote: it's at Limehouse Town Hall -- sure it's a minutes walk off of the DLR, but it's d-d-d-dodgy around there. Or it was? Gosh, the whole docklands changes so freekin' rapidly I can never tell anymore.

All I know is I have the most vivid memory of watching a junkie come on the DLR at Limehouse, and sit down in the seat across from me. I could stare openly because: A: he was fucked out of his skull, B: I wear sunglasses at night (because the future is so bright). It was strange; they seemed perfectly normal and inoffensive save for the fact that they were very obviously a smackhead. Weird. I get worse vibes from the crackheads up in Camden, but that's a given.

Sad facts of humanity aside; I will update the situation with lovely information on Open Knowledge 1.0 after I attend. If I do attend - and I'm not eaten by wild dogs or something beforehand.

///

In other news: happy Pi Day, Humanoids!
¡ <3 teh π

Trinity College -> Chocolate -> Genetics

2007-03-12T19:56:00.000Z

When I was about 12, I went with my sister Leah to Dublin with my grandmother and my late grandfather. I was in the middle of my punk rock sage; it involved a lot of combat boots, cameo, oilskin and green hair. My favourite photograph of my grandfather and I is where I'm leaning on his shoulder with green hair. Miss him, crazy old man.

We went to a number of places in the week we were in Dublin, including where my grandfather was born -- but the most memorable for me was Trinity College.

I've always liked two things more then most other things: books and art. When we visited Trinity College we went to the library and the long room. They have, I have read, 4.25 million books and counting at Trinity College. My heart, it weeps with joy.

But walking down the Long Room was like... Stepping into some fantasy land of my childhood. The places I -wanted- to be, but wasn't really sure existed. Books. Knowledge. Antiquity. The smell of leather and wood polish and paper. Tomes I could never touch, let alone read. Busts of dead people I didn't know but wanted to. I got to see the Book of Kells when I was there -- I remember being terribly impressed.

I might have been into the Clash and B.A.D & NoFX at the time, but damn, was I ever impressed to see the Book of Kells.

Oh, and the book refurbishment centre. Watch scientific historian types carefully cleaning four hundred year old tomes. That was also terribly impressive -- I remember having some sort of envy towards them. What is the word for academic envy? There has to be one...

I went through a period of time post-Dublin trip where a lot of what I drew was inspired by knot-work and iconography I saw in the illuminated scripts of the Book of Kells. Sadly it's all been lost in the numerous moves since I was 12-14, but it was really great. I remember being particular happy with a set of geese I drew, eating each others tail feathers, their necks all knotted. Heh.

//

Other News: I stopped drinking coffee after 12am, OMG shock horror shock. Normally I would be the one to say I am only human when I drink coffee -- just I want to see if it has any effect on my sleeping/mood/etc. I've been drinking dandelion and burdock tea instead.

Although I admit, I have started drinking hot chocolate. But not just any hot chocolate - oh no - fair trade organic hot chocolate with 40% cocoa solids and natural cane sugar. Just when I make it, I add half a teaspoon of mixed spice and half a teaspoon of crushed black pepper.

I love black pepper in hot chocolate. Love.

//

Oh, interesting link on the genetic similarities between Britons & Irish, which suggests we're all a lot more similar then we originally thought. Because before we were Celts and Saxons and now we're... Uh... 14,000 year old Spaniards that moved back north. WTF?

Mmm. Genetics.

Aliens, Neurology & Consciousness

2007-03-12T17:36:00.000Z

Currently I am undergoing a project, a short fact-based experimental video (post-postmodern term for documentary, fyi) for my course.

We could chose any topic we wanted, as long as it vaguely focused around the concept of memory / flashback.

You could tell my delight (irony alert) at being told this. I think perhaps the lecturers get off on giving us painfully vague assignments - sometimes I wish for a viciously regulated set of objectives, like Lars von Trier meets Satan. No blue colours, all cuts must be no more then 57 frames, you must build a set, all actors must face left while reading their lines and somehow a banana must be involved.

But actually maybe it's me that's taking the piss. I love memory, because I love the mind. Cognitive psychology & neuroscience (especially neurochemistry) have delighted me on a daily basis since I was about 18 and read Wired's report on Matt Nagle, the paralysed ya-dood from Boston who has a brain implant that controls a robotic arm, in March of '05.

Before then I was too stoned and too stupid to care much about anything save video games, Bronte novels, anything in the National Gallery and of course my own eventual and upcoming death. Oh, and communism. When I was <18, I was big into Marxism, then deconstructing Marxism, then seeing the interpretations of Marxism throughout the ages. Then once I did that I got to stand back in horror as I saw what seemed like such a cool concept turn into literal Pandæmonium in practice. (Dude, dude, do I get extra points for æ?)

Uuh, where was I.

Documentary! Memory! Right, so with my group of peers, we brainstormed and we thought about things and our thought train went like this:

wolves (memory, folklore, symbolic meaning to general consciousness) --> werewolves (folklore, symbolism, supernatural) --> aliens (symbolism, supernatural, memory.)

And we settled with aliens. And we researched. And researched more. Then we found the contact details of a very interesting man (whose name I will not give you at this point in time, to protect the integrity of my project) who lives in the South of England and has, from the ages of 5 to 18, said to experience visitations from aliens on a regular basis.

We spent all day on Saturday with this man. He was terribly charming and I really enjoyed his company and listening to his stories as we interviewed him for our documentary. It's odd because he is an intelligent, insightful and altogether normal human being; who truly and a hundred percent honestly believes he's been visited by three different types of aliens on a semi-regular basis when he was younger.

A lot of what he had to say in the way consciousness and human evolution I agreed with, on some level (and I'll talk about some other day), so it made it difficult for me to deal with the alien thing. See I don't believe in aliens - although I don't want to - so my rational mind has to justify different ways of why he could experience those experiences and honestly believe them as true.

He told us during our interview that the predecessor for the experiences with the aliens was, and I'm paraphrasing here (haven't transcribed the tapes yet), the following:

I would get a slight buzzing in my ears, like an electrical hum, kind of like tinnitus, which was accompanied with a feeling of 'something is going to happen'. Then later on, something would happen.

So I've been mulling those words over, and finally I started doing some research. My first look was to try and find symptoms of aural buzzing followed by hallucinations and I got a intriguing looking link from the Psychoanalytic Electronic Publishing who actually really suck because they want me to be a member before I can read any of their published works. Yeah, okay, thanks assholes -- I didn't want your Freudian wank anyway. *sniffle*

Then, continuing my research, I found this interesting thesis (PDF link) by some unnamed academic from the University of Groningen.

It goes on to describe Ménière’s disease, which is a disorder of the inner ear characterised by vertigo and aural disturbances.

What's most interesting is it's account of Van Gogh's personal account (Not to mention Martin Luthers; eee!) of what historians & specialists have presumed to be Epilepsy and this paper describes would be more accurately placed as Ménière’s.

(It's said in the paper that Van Gogh had written numerous notes on his ''disabling & recurrent vertigo, nausea, & visual/aural disturbances which have been described as hallucinations.'', akin with Ménière sufferers I presume.)

Quick note: If you were a man living in Holland in the 19th century with poor medical support and you suffered frequent and debilitating attacks of vertigo and loud buzzing in your ears, wouldn't you cut one off? Damn. Poor Vincent is looking a lot less insane to me now. And I'm telling you, his sketch of a knee is perhaps the best sketch of a knee ever to be sketched. One has to see it in print; 75dpi resolution does nothing for it. I hope for the day I can see it in Amsterdam... Uh, anyway.

So yeah, okay - I don't think my interviewed human being (Can we call him Ed? Ed.) I don't think Ed suffers from Ménière’s disease, but that paper lead me to another point: what about epilepsy? This is how far I have to go, as a flightily sceptical rational human being to disprove potential for things that bother me, i.e. alien visitation, with things that bother me on a whole other level, i.e. neurological disorders.

Recently I saw a program on sleep epilepsy. I like sleep disorders -- well, like like people 'like' parasites. I don't want one (although I think I have one; a sleep disorder that is - not parasites) and I don't think they're necessarily an awesome thing, but they are something that exists and because of that I do think, yes, they are cool. I like knowing the way the brain works, I think consciousness and the relationship of mind & body is more amazing then anything else.

Uhm, moving on - so I see this program, and I did some studies -- before interviewing Ed -- and I learn some stuff about epilepsy. I interviewed Ed, then after re-reading these papers and chatting with an humanoid I know, I start thinking, mm, yes, what if Ed had a form of epilepsy which caused him to experience these events, and have his brain rationalise them as alien phenomena? Yes that would make sense. My brain has done things that were weird (sleep disorder thing; for another post) and I rationalised them by automatically pointing towards aliens/ghosts/soul issues because scientifically I had no idea what was going on.

But that leads to the second issue: if he had these experiences from the age of 5 to 18, then they've stopped (he's 27 now), how the hell did they stop and why haven't they returned? We... Didn't actually ask him why the aliens stopped visiting him in our interview - I was kicking myself as to that issue after we got back home - I might email him about it - but uh... Yes, so why -- if they are not aliens but in fact a form of epilepsy, hasn't Ed suffered from an experience in nearly ten years?

Well at 18, Ed started to meditate. Daily. He was meditating before that, as he told us, but at 18 he started to really get into it and practice a form of Tibetan meditation I do believe. He told us that he went to a study at one of the Oxbridge universities which focused on meditation. It was a month long or something. He had his brain scanned with an EEG at the start of the meditation regime (before he had instruction and started meditating every day) and then an EEG scan at the end of the meditation regime (he had meditated numerous times a day for ten-twenty minutes each time for a month).

He told is the woman who was conducting the experiment was shocked and amazed at his scan. His initial EEG scan was apparently hectic as hell, both sides of the brain frantic and jumpy and whatever. The last EEG scan results were apparently astonishing. Both left and right sides of the brain were in perfect sync, causing a casual even arch that marked the start and end of the scanned meditation session.

Now why the hell am I talking about aliens, epilepsy and meditation? Well there is a debate in the neurological/medical field about the effects of meditation on epilepsy as illustrated in this article from '06 which is a brief introduction to the subject. I've been reading more on the subject, but the general PR line that is being fed to me so far is a big 'uh, we're not sure - it does sometimes maybe - really we have no idea'.

So I conclude with... Ed is a wonderful person. I think he's very cool - although I do not necessarily believe what he experienced was aliens. I think it might all be in his head.

But let me give you an analogy that 'Ed' gave me when describing how people react to his stories and call him insane. Again I paraphrase:

Let's say that you've got a ball, and behind you there's a net and a person. Everytime you throw that ball, the person says 'to the left' or 'to the right' and tries to help you put that ball in the net. Eventually you start getting shots, and the person behind you encourages you to continue and says 'ah you're doing a good job' and all that. That allows you to continue existing and getting things done; even if you don't get the shot every time. But if another person shows up for a few seconds and starts saying you're missing, that the person behind you is wrong, then you start to second guess yourself. You aren't listening to the person behind you telling you what to do so you have less of a chance to get shots, because you can't see the net, and you're not trusting in that person behind you. If you give in and start to believe the person behind you isn't telling you the truth about the location of the net, you will become less apt at ever getting the net in the ball, because you'll be too sceptical of your own ability. You have to listen and trust in what you're told by yourself.

So I may have butchered what he said to me, but it all boils down to this: Ed, no matter what has happened to him - whether it's aliens or epilepsy - has only his own consciousness to help him along in life. What he sees/feels/experiences is his own, and if he listened to people who said 'you're fucking crazy, alien abductee' then he would never be able to tie his own shoes, because he'd always be second guessing himself. 'Are my shoes really there? Did I already tie them? Do I even exist? Where is my proof? Who can prove any of this, if not me and my own consciousness?'

And down that road of doubt lies pain.

I note here, that Hildegard von Bingen was a long-time sufferer of migraines -- who refereed to them as visions. Through her illness she was able to write some of the most beautiful, beautiful works of music and become one, if not the, most powerful women in 12th century Europe -- all in the name of God, saying God was giving her those visions.

Personally I don't believe in an active God (i.e. a guy in a robe coming down via angels and going 'Yo, baby, here's a prophecy/baby/cupon for pizza hut') anymore then I believe in aliens -- but I do believe in consciousness, and energy, and symbolism or events triggering self realisation and 'epiphanies' which effect humanity.

I really respect Ed, because whatever has happened to him - and I honestly do not know - he is high functioning and has through his own self awareness brought about control in his own life. He isn't afraid, or doesn't seem to be, and he wants to help people who've shared similar experiences to his own -- people who don't necessarily know how to deal with them, or rely too heavily on what other people believe they should believe.

///

We review, cut and edit the documentary on Ed over the next coming weeks. I hope I can do his story justice.

Music for Squid

2007-03-11T21:43:00.001Z

Lately, and I don't know why for, I've found myself becoming more and more attracted to listening to harpsichord / keyboard concertos - just, not organ. I don't know why the organ pulls me the wrong way, just it does.

I've been watching Glenn Gould perform, going through all the footage I can find -- and listening to Classical FM / Baroque internet radio when writing, or researching, or reading...

Only I don't know where this sudden infatuation comes from. For the past year typically I've been listening to folk, indie and industrial. I just got, mm, bit by something and now all I want is Bach.

Although I lie; I heard O Ecclesia by Hildegard von Bingen sung by a choir. There is nothing like Latin love poems chanted in vaulted ceilings to make your hair stand on end.

//

O', and here's an angry Humboldt Squid.

//

Sometimes I think I should join a choir, and chant about cephalopods in Latin.

Some are more = than Others

2007-03-10T07:57:00.000Z

Art School

Is it unethical to criticise a university you hope to get a degree from?

I level it out and justify my complaints as this: I'm paying for my own education, with a 2.4% interest charged on top of the standard tuition fees due to the government loan.

If I was paying for a service like, oh say, private health care or car maintenance and I was unhappy, it would be perfectly acceptable to complain, as long as it was constructive. So complain about my education I will...

I go to an arts university in Southern England. In fact it's a collection of art schools which formed together to create a meta-university a few years back -- binding together under one universal management and system of accounting and financial distribution.

Academic management became one, with different baronies, if you will, overseeing each of the campuses. Students Union also became one meta-union, with their own reps for each barony - lets call them Student Knights, for the sake of butchering language.

The course I'm in is kinda like a House within the overall Kingdom. There's the House of Fine Art, House of Journalism, House of Film & Video, and so forth. My House is incredibly small - where House of F&V have around 90 for the Class of '09 studying in my Barony/Campus alone, we have about 20 for the whole Uni.

We all pay the same taxes, er, Tuition to attend University, but because my course is so small, and because we're not meeting with the quota set out by the Administration, there have been funding cuts across all campuses.

Ours was for 35% of our budget.

They cut it out in the middle of the school year, over Xmas - modules that were supposed to be run this semester were cut, due to loss of funding. Two pathways were smooched together, forming one lumpy uneven module which is difficult to work with. One of my favourite lecturers had his teaching days cut from 25 to just 4, and that's only working with the second years, so we don't see him at all.

When one speaks about such things to the Uppers, we get a mixed reaction -- people are unwilling to talk about management issues with students, and I've been given somewhat sticky and unfocused responses. 'Oh everyone has cuts everywhere, next year it'll get sorted, we're trying to get more money back', etc., etc.

But nobody is telling me a concrete answer as to why we're getting these budget cuts, and why we're not being allocated the money that people in accounting said my course could have last year during budgeting.

People say it's because not enough people applied for my course, that's the problem, and because it's of a lesser interest to the people at the university it's financially less important and strategically doesn't generate enough revenue for the university as a whole.

Only here's the kicker; my course isn't advertised during open days or on university hand-outs. We have a small, vaguely worded description on the website and in the prospectus which is pretty damn irrelevant to the actual course itself.

So it seams to me that they're weeding out the course in a passive aggressive manner, but to make room for what? I'm not sure. And really it's a shame. I learn about digital video, graphics programs, 3D & special effects, film/media/culture theory & interactive design. Fundamentally it's a experimental video course, and it's pretty unique - anybody who's aware of the course who reads this will know it's name, and it does blow any sense of anonymity out of the water for me, but I care very little at this point.

When it boils down to it, I'm disappointed in the way that universities like mine are run: like a big business. Good courses are courses who do work which generates interest in the university and attracts other students and generates income for the university. But too much focus is being pushed on income and economics, and not enough is being focused on the most important issue: which is to provide the best educational service they can to students.

At the end of the day, due to the amassing of universities, all campuses must agree to a centralised set of rules, including an overall budget. Campuses which wanted to specialise in niche subjects are being penalised for their alternative content and smaller class size, and through that their budget is cut - thus the integrity of their teaching ability is compromised.

Before the universities merged, I was told that the funding for all courses were handled accurately and with better results. Part of the reason the university became one unified force was because they said they'd get better funding and everyone would be equal and well looked after. This is obviously not the case.

Correct me, by all means, if I am wrong; but it reminds me terribly of some botched Marxist nightmare. Ironic, since currently the public gallery is currently showing clips of animation throughout the ages: including the 1954 animated feature of Animal Farm.

...And I haven't even started on the student population.
Oh what a world!

2007-03-10T04:35:00.000Z

Ah yes, allow me to introduce myself.

I'm a 20? y.o. university student from the UK, studying arts officially (digital video & 'interactive design') and computer science unofficially. I like sociology, simulated violence, sarcasm and technology.

I care about online social etiquette, video games, reactive media, kicking ass, women in tech art 'n sci, history, and a boatload of other things.

Recently I have been studying the effect of youtube on media exchange & communication, alien abduction as an issue of consciousness, and my ability to sleep 14 hours a day.

At one point or another I wanted to become a computer science major -- but because I was home-schooled and lacked official qualification, no universities (Manchester, Dundee, Greenwich, Kings College, Goldsmiths, Edinburgh) would consider me as an applicant. So I fucked off to art school.

So now in my spare time I attempt to figure out electrical engineering and computer programming by myself, and here's where I want to document my vain attempt at gettin' me some lernin'.