I can't help but think of things as a formal system. For example, when I think along the lines of "I don't have enough opinions about certain types of things", my reaction is "I should do a blog post with the pretense of '20 things I like'". In particular, stuff along the lines of "my life". Secondarily, "positive" things, rather than a list of annoyances (since really, I can list more than enough about dealing with the DSL connection for any 12 people). And thirdly, things that I am keen to admit to (as opposed to various random internet-based addictions).
[I just realized why I find it annoying when people say the word is "arbitrary" and not "random" for choices that are the result of a random walk. This digression brought to you by the fact that it is 5 characters longer than Twitter allows]
I don't like having to walk down two flights of stairs to do laundry.
I like being within 1 block of at least half a dozen restaurants.
I don't like that the bathroom in my apartment is half a size too small.
I love lamp. Actually, Mr. Burgundy, I rather prefer when it's dark enough to see the stars. Or 75-degree nights with no humidity.
I don't like folding clothes after doing laundry, even without the stairs element.
I like cooking ... when I actually have food and a clean kitchen. And when it is followed by eating.
I don't like buying large amounts of food that will go bad ... or cleaning the various papers on my kitchen table.
I love that you get cold when it's 71 degrees out. - wait, see, that's what I'm saying about gratuitous references to anything under the sun to avoid talking about myself.
I don't like scheduling appointments at businesses I've never been to.
I like cute girls wearing orange.
... and now I read http://royal.pingdom.com/2010/10/22/incredible-growth-of-the-internet-since-2000/ and am more interested in what the book The Internet Chronicles would contain.
Friday, October 22, 2010
Wednesday, August 25, 2010
This world has lost its glory, let's start a brand new story now
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnpaMPmivPE
Once upon a time, sheet music was the canonical form of popular music. Then Elvis happened.
If you look at the Billboard Top 100 charts, you can clearly see the jump in 1956. We have songs like The Poor People of Paris, Lisbon Antigua, and The Wayward Wind atop the charts, any of which could have been from 1946 or 1926. And then there is Hound Dog. And it's impossible to separate the performance from the music; you can either do a cover of it or do a separate version of it. Nobody was ever a cover band of Mozart or Billie Holiday or Cole Porter.
Once upon a time, sheet music was the canonical form of popular music. Then Elvis happened.
If you look at the Billboard Top 100 charts, you can clearly see the jump in 1956. We have songs like The Poor People of Paris, Lisbon Antigua, and The Wayward Wind atop the charts, any of which could have been from 1946 or 1926. And then there is Hound Dog. And it's impossible to separate the performance from the music; you can either do a cover of it or do a separate version of it. Nobody was ever a cover band of Mozart or Billie Holiday or Cole Porter.
Thursday, December 31, 2009
God Sex Money Love Football
These seem to be the most popular results for a search of "what is the most important thing in the world". There's a bit of grouping (I throw family in with love most notably), but that's a pretty good breakdown of the results online.
If I were to really work at it, I could probably get some form of a pentagon of equivalence of these (God is Love and the like). But that would be too clever by half. The more interesting ordering is linearly looking at God Love Football Money Sex, where we go from the heavy to the trivial, the permanent to the ephemeral, the communal to the individual, but also from the painful to the pleasurable or the immaterial to the concrete.
It's probably most peculiar having Football being listed as more weighty than Money. But football and similar contests are by necessity about "us v. them", while money is "me v. the world". Money may bring power, but football can bring glory. And conversely, it's a lot easier to get pleasure out of money than it is football.
If I were to really work at it, I could probably get some form of a pentagon of equivalence of these (God is Love and the like). But that would be too clever by half. The more interesting ordering is linearly looking at God Love Football Money Sex, where we go from the heavy to the trivial, the permanent to the ephemeral, the communal to the individual, but also from the painful to the pleasurable or the immaterial to the concrete.
It's probably most peculiar having Football being listed as more weighty than Money. But football and similar contests are by necessity about "us v. them", while money is "me v. the world". Money may bring power, but football can bring glory. And conversely, it's a lot easier to get pleasure out of money than it is football.
Monday, December 28, 2009
Webrings and Blogrolls
Is the web at large too big and impersonal to support community?
Not a community of people, a community of web sites. The sense of implicit camaraderie that caused the development of one of the popular features of 1990s Geocities pages, the Web Ring. For those that choose not to remember, a web ring was a collection of sites that had a banner on them "This site is part of the Terry Pratchett Web Ring", with a link to the "previous" and "next" sites, and a link to the web ring home page (which had a link to all of the sites). You don't see this type of thing any more (except possibly for irony) and for good reason: It was pretty much a terrible idea all around.
1) Most of the sites were lousy even by 1990s web standards.
2) Because most of the sites were lousy, the good sites wouldn't join, causing the quality to get even worse.
3) Who really wants to look at 57 different Terry Pratchett Fan sites?
4) Not only were the sites lousy, a bunch of them were almost certainly going to be broken links or unrelated pages by the time you looked at it.
With all those caveats (and I could have listed more), the question remains: Did they support community on the web? Did "Joe's world of Klatch" belonging to the prestigious "Top Pratchett Fan Sites" web ring make Joe feel like he was a part of the Pratchett fan site community?
In a scientific sense, it would be hard to tell, since Joe probably has tried to forget about the site for the past 10 years, and now that Geocities is dead it is probably offline entirely. And since there may not have been more than 4 or 5 people that cared about the web ring at any one time, it's hard to say that there ever existed a community in the first place. Maybe Joe felt he was now part of the world of the internet with a real web page , who knows.
Anyhow, we now have something that we didn't have in the 90s, blogs. (Dave Winer aside, blogging didn't really take off until the 00's.) And the thing about blogs is that it's immediately obvious whether they are completely out of date or not, since each pot has a nice timestamp at the top. Blogs can try to be topical, but they generally meander from their ostensible topic somewhat. And blogs can have the aforementioned blog roll. The list of 20 to 500 "blogs we like". Arguably a relic of an earlier era, thse are still present on virtually every major blog-like site, be it Kos or Huffington Post or Matt Drudge or the New York Times' blogs. And while many of these have the soft personal touch that only a faceless corporation can provide, there's definitely some sense of association associated with those.
Not a community of people, a community of web sites. The sense of implicit camaraderie that caused the development of one of the popular features of 1990s Geocities pages, the Web Ring. For those that choose not to remember, a web ring was a collection of sites that had a banner on them "This site is part of the Terry Pratchett Web Ring", with a link to the "previous" and "next" sites, and a link to the web ring home page (which had a link to all of the sites). You don't see this type of thing any more (except possibly for irony) and for good reason: It was pretty much a terrible idea all around.
1) Most of the sites were lousy even by 1990s web standards.
2) Because most of the sites were lousy, the good sites wouldn't join, causing the quality to get even worse.
3) Who really wants to look at 57 different Terry Pratchett Fan sites?
4) Not only were the sites lousy, a bunch of them were almost certainly going to be broken links or unrelated pages by the time you looked at it.
With all those caveats (and I could have listed more), the question remains: Did they support community on the web? Did "Joe's world of Klatch" belonging to the prestigious "Top Pratchett Fan Sites" web ring make Joe feel like he was a part of the Pratchett fan site community?
In a scientific sense, it would be hard to tell, since Joe probably has tried to forget about the site for the past 10 years, and now that Geocities is dead it is probably offline entirely. And since there may not have been more than 4 or 5 people that cared about the web ring at any one time, it's hard to say that there ever existed a community in the first place. Maybe Joe felt he was now part of the world of the internet with a real web page , who knows.
Anyhow, we now have something that we didn't have in the 90s, blogs. (Dave Winer aside, blogging didn't really take off until the 00's.) And the thing about blogs is that it's immediately obvious whether they are completely out of date or not, since each pot has a nice timestamp at the top. Blogs can try to be topical, but they generally meander from their ostensible topic somewhat. And blogs can have the aforementioned blog roll. The list of 20 to 500 "blogs we like". Arguably a relic of an earlier era, thse are still present on virtually every major blog-like site, be it Kos or Huffington Post or Matt Drudge or the New York Times' blogs. And while many of these have the soft personal touch that only a faceless corporation can provide, there's definitely some sense of association associated with those.
Saturday, December 5, 2009
Trying to Essay
( with inspiration from http://www.paulgraham.com/essay.html )
The astute reader may note that this follows a long period of silence here. This derives less from a lack of time compared to a lack of topics to write about. There's nothing happening in my life so thrilling that I feel it obligatory to expound in long form; 140 characters is generally more than plenty for daily occurrences. It avoids the forced literary diarrhea of excessively long and descriptive sentences, filled with a multitude of adjectives and words of more than 8 letters. It is an avoidance of technical exercises in tempo and rhyme and 14-line poems.
But if clear thinking begets clear writing, and clear writing conveys meaning, then unclear, meandering writing is certainly the sign of a mind trying less to be clear as it is looking for a therapeutic release of thought. The goal is less to present a coherent thought, but a picture of sorts, with sentences providing brush strokes towards the final result, a mosaic that portrays a general sense of feeling. And if art can exist for art's sake, then so too can there be writing for writing's sake, writing that strives to convey emotion or confusion, writing that is deliberately obtuse.
I say this in the context of a recent century where many of the literary greats prided themselves on such obtuseness. Joyce's later works are notorious for such, and later authors such as Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace are even more in such a line. Henry Miller may be less difficult, but is just as meandering, and makes up for it in obscenity.
Anyhow, maybe I should work random anecdotes from my life into 500-word treatises; maybe I should spend that doing circumlocution of interesting work happenstance; maybe I should just post more book reviews and constrained poems. None of those sound terribly exciting, but they might be better than the alternative.
The astute reader may note that this follows a long period of silence here. This derives less from a lack of time compared to a lack of topics to write about. There's nothing happening in my life so thrilling that I feel it obligatory to expound in long form; 140 characters is generally more than plenty for daily occurrences. It avoids the forced literary diarrhea of excessively long and descriptive sentences, filled with a multitude of adjectives and words of more than 8 letters. It is an avoidance of technical exercises in tempo and rhyme and 14-line poems.
But if clear thinking begets clear writing, and clear writing conveys meaning, then unclear, meandering writing is certainly the sign of a mind trying less to be clear as it is looking for a therapeutic release of thought. The goal is less to present a coherent thought, but a picture of sorts, with sentences providing brush strokes towards the final result, a mosaic that portrays a general sense of feeling. And if art can exist for art's sake, then so too can there be writing for writing's sake, writing that strives to convey emotion or confusion, writing that is deliberately obtuse.
I say this in the context of a recent century where many of the literary greats prided themselves on such obtuseness. Joyce's later works are notorious for such, and later authors such as Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace are even more in such a line. Henry Miller may be less difficult, but is just as meandering, and makes up for it in obscenity.
Anyhow, maybe I should work random anecdotes from my life into 500-word treatises; maybe I should spend that doing circumlocution of interesting work happenstance; maybe I should just post more book reviews and constrained poems. None of those sound terribly exciting, but they might be better than the alternative.
Sunday, March 22, 2009
Pore Jade is Daid
Pore Jade is daid
Pore Jade Goody is daid
All gather 'round her cawfin now and cry
She had a heart of gold
And she wasn't very old
Oh why did such a feller have to die?
Two things:
1) I'm apparently the first person to make that pun on the internet.
2) I guess it's fitting that someone who was a celebrity because of being a celebrity and always went for television coverage has the same coverage in death as she did in life.
Pore Jade Goody is daid
All gather 'round her cawfin now and cry
She had a heart of gold
And she wasn't very old
Oh why did such a feller have to die?
Two things:
1) I'm apparently the first person to make that pun on the internet.
2) I guess it's fitting that someone who was a celebrity because of being a celebrity and always went for television coverage has the same coverage in death as she did in life.
Friday, September 19, 2008
The Garden Weasel
Or, how you know the economy is in trouble:
I saw a live commercial for Maytag on Jay Leno, and for Samsung on Jimmy Kimmel. Letterman's on re-runs, so it doesn't count.
I don't believe I've ever seen a live commercial in my life on a show of this sort, excluding Intel's sponsorship of Conan in San Francisco (which was always counterbalanced by a larger sign for Sam Wo Noodles as a joke). Of course, I've seen them on re-runs of old-timey (think 1950s Flintstones tobacco ads) TV. The first episode of the Larry Sanders Show was also about the host's reticence to do such an ad for the "Garden Weasel".
Seriously, watch it.
I saw a live commercial for Maytag on Jay Leno, and for Samsung on Jimmy Kimmel. Letterman's on re-runs, so it doesn't count.
I don't believe I've ever seen a live commercial in my life on a show of this sort, excluding Intel's sponsorship of Conan in San Francisco (which was always counterbalanced by a larger sign for Sam Wo Noodles as a joke). Of course, I've seen them on re-runs of old-timey (think 1950s Flintstones tobacco ads) TV. The first episode of the Larry Sanders Show was also about the host's reticence to do such an ad for the "Garden Weasel".
Seriously, watch it.
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